47 degrees' leadership : Dakar

Welcome to the country where young people develop their potential to make a difference under 47 degrees! For AIESEC to provide leadership here, the @ XP delivered has to be the ultimate one:) Unfortunately such an experience has not yet been designed.

Dakar looks like a grown up city, a city that actually grew so fast that the population couldn't follow. Strangers here can't help feeling that citizen woke up one morning surrounded by massive building and roads. How to explain those fancy households left empty as soon as the night comes? Heat? not necessarily. Even in rich neighborhoods inhabitants, which i believe healthy enough to buy splits, will sleep on the floor outside their houses.

In some quarters, the lifestyle has remained pretty much unchanged. This is probably the only city where a civil servant can wake up in the morning, run to the nearby shop to have some toothpaste poured directly on his brush (2 cents), come back to the same shop entirely dressed up to get two perfume sprays under each arm (one "psch" cost about one cent), before heading for the office!

Stars here are "marabouts", those traditional spiritual leaders ruling the country. How do they get so rich and powerful? the recipe is simple: get the title from your parents, all the people that are under your mystical protection will give you a fixed part of their revenue all their life long. The most talented gurus will grant first class entry tickets to heavens to an army of young people, and those lucky dudes will spent their entire lifes begging in the streets to pay those tickets back. Equipped with kinda high-tech loud speakers, they sail through streets and life asking for cents to meet their daily quota.

Worshiped like pop stars, marabouts are the biggest political force in the country, no government is formed without their approval; they can also turn themselves into benefactors, by making loans for the community to initiate micro projects. Little is said about the profit sharing models, but the rule of return of investment is well-known here.

In a society where the unemployment rate is dramatic (48% in urban areas and 40% in rural ones) and the literacy rate low (52%), I paradoxically found the biggest commitment to AIESEC. Because of succession planning problems, AIESEC Senegal has not been in a position to deliver @ experiences at all, but the level of enthusiasm towards AIESEC has to do with Faith. Some don't know why they are in AIESEC, or what they will gain out if it, still they firmly believe AIESEC will do wonders for their life, and for the country as well.

What will happen when they 'll be empowered with sound knowledge, values, attitudes and skills? They'll just be unstoppable.

I'm so excited! And there's no way I can hide it in this sauna:)