I am a third year student in the BCL/LLB program at the Faculty of Law at 缅北强奸. I received a Katherine Petcher & Brett Carron Internship Award to help聽me fund a 12-week human rights internship at the Rencontre africaine pour la d茅fense des droits de l鈥檋omme (RADDHO) in Dakar, Senegal, in the summer of 2018.
During my first year of law school, a professor encouraged me to apply to the International Human Rights Internships Program (IHRIP) when I mentioned wanting to gain practical legal skills. Because of my interest in human rights law, in issues touching upon education and children's rights, and thanks to my desire to hone my professional skills, the selection committee matched me with RADDHO. However, because IHRIP does not offer fully funded placements, my award was instrumental in enabling me to seize this unique opportunity.
Before leaving, I had made a list of the different abilities that I would have liked to acquire by the end of my stay in Dakar, ranging from research to linguistic and leadership skills. In retrospect, if it is undeniable that I have developed these skills during my internship, my sense is that the biggest personal gains came simply from living for 12 weeks in West Africa. Having to live in a chaotic city with no street names or numbers, using a bucket of lukewarm water to shower every morning, and being confronted with new 鈥� and sometimes unsettling 鈥� ideas and beliefs, undoubtedly contributed to making my internship a transformative experience.
At RADDHO, I first started researching information about child labour and exploitation in urban Senegal. My supervisor gave me great flexibility in my work, and I informed them that I wanted to learn more about the troubling reality that I immediately witnessed upon my arrival to Dakar. Indeed, minutes after leaving the airport, I was shocked by the staggering number of children (and sometimes toddlers) I saw begging on the sides of the highway and on the smaller streets of the city.
These children, called the 罢补濒颈产茅蝉, are young boys from rural families that are sent by their parents to large cities to learn Islamic teachings in Daara (Koranic Schools). These schools are not under state supervision and the children often end up victims of vast exploitation schemes forcing them to beg for survival. Multiple reasons make of the 罢补濒颈产茅蝉 situation a human rights issue, but I was particularly interested by the insight it provided me on larger issues of education, urbanization and public policy in Senegal.
On a more personal level, my research on the 罢补濒颈产茅蝉 has made me understand the often-heard saying that human rights problems are the unfortunate outcomes of the encounter between tradition and modernity.
