Inshallah

nsh’allah.  God willing.  Or in Malinke, Nin Allah sonta.  If God accepts.  Small phrases packed with significance in Senegal.  I first learned this word in a high school Spanish class during a lesson about the subjunctive mood, and how the word “ojalá” that is used to express hope and volition had been taken from the Ararabic “Inshallah” during the period of conviviencia, when the Moorish Arabs lived in (and greatly influenced) Spain in the 1400s.  Native English speakers tend to really struggle with the subjunctive, and I remember an explanation offered that Hispanic cultures don’t see everything that is hoped for as certain to happen, thus the need for a parallel way of expressing what one hopes will happen versus what will happen.  I’m not sure if I buy this logic entirely, but it brings up a question I find fascinating: does language influence how one sees the world, or does how one sees the world influence language?

In Senegal, the word Inshallah has allowed me to express a new way of understanding the world, and more distinctly, my ability to control my world.  It first made its way into my day to day parlance as a funny way of saying “hopefully” during English conversation with fellow volunteers.  Little by little, I came to understand that Inshallah is not just a group of letters that can be exchanged for an English adverb.  It reflects your place and limited power in this world of uncertainty. 

During my first month at site, one particular interaction made this all clear to me.  I had gone into Kedougou, the regional capital, for a planning meeting and to do some-officey work that just isn’t possible in my hut.  I wanted to make it back in one day because we were undergoing what is known as the “five-week challenge”, where Peace Corps challenges new volunteers to go the first five weeks without staying the night at the regional house.  A team from the district health center at my site was also going into Kedougou, and it was my goal to get everything done in time to make it back with them and avoid the headache of public transportation.  It didn’t happen, and at that point, I realized I probably wouldn’t be able to make it in time to take a public car back to site either.  When talking to the nurse who had called me to let me know the team was leaving, I ended the conversation with “A demain,” letting him know I would have to see him the next day.  He replied, almost as if correcting me, “A demain, Inshallah.”  I distinctly remember scoffing to myself, thinking, “No, I will be back tomorrow.”  God, it turns out, did not accept.  That night I came down with a violent stomach virus and was in no shape to travel the next day.  As I lay in bed, miserably fading in and out of consciousness, I remembered my exchange with Daoda and realized how little control I have over my daily life here in Africa.

Who is to say what will happen, ever?  The car to Kedougou may or may not come (and may or may not fill up in a timeframe that gets you there with anything resembling timeliness—a friend of mine waited 12 hours for a car to fill up and leave once), the rain may stop up everything, the cell phone network might go down for months, the road might get washed away.  The person you hire to do a survey may turn out not to be all that literate, another may come down with Typhoid, another may get in a motorcycle accident and another may just decide not to do the work.  So much of life and work is waiting and hoping that God will just will something to go your way.

The mindset of Inshallah can make things quite difficult for a Peace Corps volunteer in the health sector trying to work on behavior change.  If you think that you will get sick no matter what if God wills that you get sick, you may be less likely to sleep under a mosquito net.  But how to get people to feel like they can be in control of their lives (and their health) when in so many ways they are not?  It’s not like they want to be malnourished.  Malinke does not have a subjunctive mood, but often things are expressed in ways that, when carefully examined, might show a lesser notion of human control than we see in English.  There is no way to really express that you “hope” something will happen.  The two ways that have been suggested to either say “nxamira” (I think) or “nxasikha” (I don’t trust).   

It is an exercise in humility to actively attempt to understand Inshallah.   As an American, I naturally assume that I can do whatever I want to, whenever I want to.  But this is not the human experience  many places, where the resources do not exist to counteract what happens naturally, or according to what is understood to be God’s will.  This disparity is not lost on the Senegalese.  For a while, I thought I had found a tricky way to counter requests to be taken to America by saying, “Nin Allah sonta.”  I was humbled in a different way when someone responded, “If you accept, God has accepted.” 

For now, I just try to ease myself into the mindset of Inshallah.  It’s less stressful if you have the expectation from the get go that things probably will not go the way you think or hope they will.  Everyone else is experiencing the same difficulties and inconveniences, so you just have to ride the wave and maybe dare to hope that God’s will and your own match up.