When Emotion Becomes Useful: What I Was Searching for in Senegal

From a lifelong ache to committed action: Maxim Laryn shares how two months in Saint Louis changed everything

I have a very particular lifelong ache: children in deep distress.

A child sleeping in the street, in a doorway, on a piece of cardboard, while an entire city moves around him as if he didn’t exist. More than once over the years, I’ve broken down in tears right there on the sidewalk, to the point where my partner had to lead me away.

I never really tried to understand this. Not because I didn’t see it, but because I was afraid of what I would find. I suspected that if I let myself, I would turn my life around completely.

This year, I started wondering whether what I do comes from something real, or whether I’m simply chasing what looks good and pays well, calling it “meaning” after the fact. Finally, I stopped theorizing and went to see for myself.

So, I didn’t go to Senegal only to help. I went to connect with something I had carried inside me for years. Children in deep distress, in fact. And when I read that much of what they suffer from is infectious and preventable, the pharmacist in me stood up as well. It was the one place where those two threads came together.

Two months in Saint Louis. No project, no plan. Just being there and watching what happens.

The first weeks

They’re called talibés, “students”. Boys, some as young as five, sent by their families to Quranic schools called daaras. Most are sent out into the streets every day to beg for a quota of money for their teacher, their “marabout”. If they return with less, they are beaten.

They sleep thirty to a room, packed together on shared mats. Often without running water or electricity. Most own only one set of clothes, and it stays dirty — partly neglect, partly strategy, because a dirtier child brings in more coins.

I felt everything that first week. I remember standing in the infirmary and bursting into tears in front of a boy whose leg wound hadn’t healed in three years. Alagie, who works in the infirmary and whom all the children in Saint Louis know, explained what a wound like that says about the daara the child comes from. No one had looked at it.

Then, in the second week, the intensity faded. And after that, I think very little of the initial emotional storm remained.

I thought about that more than anything else I brought back. I don’t think it means the ache was false. I think you simply can’t stay in that state of intense emotion and be useful at the same time. Something in me decided ─ without asking my permission ─ to stop feeling and start repairing.

Those who do the work

Some members of Maison de la Gare’s team are themselves former talibés. They grew up in the same reality they are now helping other children to escape.

I think that’s also the honest answer to why a child sleeping in a doorway breaks me. I know something of what it is to be small and unsafe and to come from a family that has nothing, and that has never completely left me. Not the same scar, not the same scale at all, but the same root.

When the pharmacist took over

I had no intention of launching a campaign.

My reflex, after years as a pharmacist, is to look for people who already have the knowledge. That’s what I did, and that’s how I was put in touch with Dr. Mané, a specialist at the Regional Hospital of Saint-Louis and a partner of Maison de la Gare’s infirmary. He connected me with several doctors, the health district, and dermatology experts. There are always people who have real expertise and, in my experience, they are almost always willing to help — as long as you ask.

It turned out much of it was already in motion. The health district was preparing to target scabies. An oral medication, Ivermectin, was available. However, no one had yet made the link with the talibé children and their daaras.

Scabies, in a place like that, cannot be treated child by child. A boy is treated, he goes back the same evening, sleeps next to twenty nine untreated companions, and two weeks later he is back at your door. You have to treat all the children in the daara on the same day, with or without symptoms; otherwise, you’re just trying to fill a bottomless well.

So, we stopped treating children one by one, and we built a mass-treatment campaign.

Eight weeks later, it had become a field protocol and a formal collaboration with the health district. We secured Ivermectin, held awareness meetings with religious leaders and health authorities, and broadcast a segment on Radio Carrefour. Sufficient funding was raised in a single weekend, and thirty people were trained and then deployed across five daaras on one morning.

None of this was the work of a single person. It was built with enormous support from many people, mostly Senegalese. I am grateful to each of them.

What touched me the most

Alongside all of this, the daily work of the infirmary never stopped. Wounds, infections, and children who come because there is nowhere else to go.

This was the part that touched me the most. The ache was real. It just needed to become useful.

One afternoon, there were two little boys in the infirmary. One was sitting on the exam table, his bare feet covered in sand. The other, without being asked, began brushing the sand off his friend’s feet, then off the table so it wouldn’t get dirty.

Whatever they had been through, that gesture came directly from a loving place. They haven’t yet lost their childlike innocence, and seeing that warmed my heart.

Then he noticed the blond hairs on my arm, which he clearly found remarkable, and he played with them. The fan moved the hair on my head, and he reached out to smooth it back into place.

It made me smile in the moment.

I still carry those two boys with me.