Matt Berg’s Thunderbird summer internship has brought him back home. He was born in Cameroon and from 1984 to 1992 he lived in Dakar, Senegal—where he is now interning with the Digital Freedom Initiative (DFI) through this August. The DFI was formed through a partnership between the U.S. government, USAID, the Peace Corps and the Freedom Corps in 2003 to help promote the economic growth of entrepreneurs and small businesses in developing countries via information and communication technologies. 

As part of his journey to find the right career path in international development, Matt has accepted this position and is chronicling his African adventure online. Below are excerpts from his personal blog—from what he’s already accomplishing through his internship to the people he’s met along the way—as well as a link to read more and view photos he’s taken.

Working on “Project Leuk*”

When I came to Dakar, I was assigned to work at DFI’s CyberLouma, a computer center downtown in Dakar’s Sandaga market. While the CyberLouma’s intended mission is to provide business services to local merchants, it currently only succeeds in providing Internet access along with basic computer training. After spending some time talking with merchants in Sandaga our team began to notice that many merchants, while running successful shops, involved very little accounting into their business practices…we came up with the idea of creating our own open source Web-based application [Leuk] which we’ll use to offer a basic accounting service from the CyberLouma to the merchants in Sandaga…If this model proves to be effective, it could hold very exciting developmental implications for other software applications in developing countries.

* Leuk " is Wolof (the language spoken by most Senegalese) for rabbit which is analogous to wisdom in Senegalese culture.

Overcoming Cultural Stereotypes

When you immerse yourself into a different culture, even when you think you begin to understand things, sometimes things happen that make you realize you really don’t. Take cold water for example. Today, to my complete disbelief, I discovered that the guard at my work place and our neighboring guards believed that drinking cold water gave you a belly. So as a result, they’ve sworn off drinking cold water to help get rid of the small guts they’ve developed over the years.

To me this is just a poignant example of how much our cultures (and not necessarily lack of education) affect our belief systems. While I still think the notion of water being the source of my, ahem, belly is completely crazy, it shows just far off the page we could potentially be even on the “givens” when trying to understand each other. It makes me wonder how many of my beliefs I am “crazy” for thinking.

Things Matt has learned so far:

• You can’t buy firewood or salt at night here (bad luck).
• I should never, ever take for granted having a washing machine.
• When drying clothes, turn your shirts inside so the dust from the clothes lines only marks the inside.
• I’ll be lucky if my laptop survives the dust for another 2 months.
• I have far more crap than I need.

To learn more about Matt’s African internship, check out his blog.