I want to share the most profound moment I had in Dakar, Senegal during our humanitarian project: The West Africa Initiative. I will never listen to the Dire Strait's "Money for Nothing" the same way again.

We arrived on Christmas Eve, after a hard day's work. We began our day with fitness, followed by a Captain's Clean of the ship which stretched past lunch, and followed by port furling all of the Topsails and Jibs. We docked in late afternoon, unplanned, but for the best because the hard work reaped the reward of being able to sleep in Christmas Day and have a relaxing brunch. This was the calm before the storm.

Not a storm in the negative sense, but mainly to explain the physical exertion and emotional exhaustion that we all experienced the last week of December 2007.

The 26th and 27th we met the SYTO Senegal students we were worked and laughed with. These two days can be summarized as an exchange of ideas -- the differences of cultures. Canada's abundance, and less defined identity. Senegal's poverty, but strong identity -- one it is fighting to maintain in its recent movement towards modernization.

We met Senita near the end of the week, because she had arranged the construction of drums for some of us on board. She is an American, who moved to Senegal in the late 90s -- her reason: safety for her children. It is not a common perception that it is safer abroad, but it is one of those situations where if you cross a barrier, one realizes a lot of their ideas of a place and lifestyle were based on fear and lack of knowledge. Sticking with the purpose of this article though, Senita told me of how Dakar was slipping into the mindset that many cities take: government selling off all public space to private businesses. A shift so much the other way that quality of life is pushed aside.

Soulaimane Diallo, a SYTO Senegal student and in charge of their documentary team, made a point of saying in many discussions and interviews with him that he would rather ease off from this move towards modernization and maintain that "strong sense of community", -- that culture that relies on cooperation in gathering the natural resources necessary for life from the Earth. We both agreed that having so much abundance undercuts the base of a society -- the identity -- as it tends to have a characteristic of being overwhelming. We are no freer, because our relative position does not change (a concept discussed in the BBC documentary, Affluenza). Therefore, Soulaimane was saying that he would rather have a strong identity -- one not muddled by advertising campaigns and frivolity. One of six principles of African culture presented by Professor Ndongo was: "know who you are before people tell you who you are."

The next two days -- the 28th and 29th -- involved visiting people in their homes in the Colobane region. I was in a group with Conrad and Lamon, a SYTO Senegal student, whose translation was very important in having successful interviews. In two days, we visited twelve households, and found that sanitation practices were better than we thought going in. We think the problems are more convoluted than direct sanitation habits, such as hand washing. Every household we visited said there was at least weekly garbage collection, yet the streets were littered. Our last interviewee said that the region has much difficulty with illness when it rains, because of mosquitoes carrying Malaria, and the lack of drainage to prevent habitable conditions for mosquitoes.

During our day off, I saw the "Door of No Return" on Goree Island. It was very influential seeing the door, which so many slaves went through to the Americas. The surreal church the slaves were forced to build during their time on the island really put me in touch with history, which is my favourite area of study.

My moment of amazement at how cool it was to be in Africa happened when Ms. Marcos and I ate lunch at Lamon's house. There were at least ten people in the house at all times -- family from all generations, and friends -- passing casually in and out. After an hour of awkward "conversation" (language barrier) we were led to a room off the back courtyard, which is where the food was prepared. We were seated on the floor beside a bed, around the traditional Senegalese dish of Geba Jin -- rice, fish, and vegetables, which is eaten communally with each person eating from their side of the dish and sharing the fish in the centre. We ate with Lamon, his best friend, and two friends visiting from Touba, a city of religious significance. A religious leader had died two days before and the ceremony happening there was of utmost importance.

As we were waiting for a glass of water -- a mistake, as we would experience the next few days -- the Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" was playing on the radio. In Senegal, rap is most popular, and the music on the radio is commonly within the culture, but this song playing showed to me the influence that North American culture has on the world. We have noticed it throughout Europe, and it is a more blatant recognition in cultures that are quite different from our own.