The Best Job You'll Ever Love

People join Peace Corps for a whole host of reasons, too many to innumerate here. Some come for adventure, some to save the world, to teach, to cure, to civilize, to feel good about themselves, to find themselves, to loose themselves. Me, I came to learn. Learn about myself and the world around me but mostly to learn about how this huge idea called "development" works on the ground, at the village level where it really matters. I came for some of the other reasons too - this journey is far too complex for just one motivating factor. But at the heart of it, I can here to observe, to learn, to take it all in and hopefully leave with more answers then I came with.

I think the individual reasons we all have for thrusting ourselves into the African bush for two years - for leaving all we've known for days of utter confusion and doubt - colors each of our experiences. Some of us came to experience the culture and to live it, not just watch it. We find ourselves in the daily cooking rotation along with the rest of the compound wives, baby strapped to our back and eyes burning as we strain to see the sauce through the smoke and heat of the flames. Some of us come to help, to teach, to alleviate pain or ignorance. We put our all into our work - often taking on more work then is necessarily healthy. Sometimes, if we are lucky, we suffer through the work alongside a counterpart - both convinced we are working for the good of the country and our people. Sometimes, and sadly it seems to often, we work through endless days doing more than our fair share of the work in a fruitless attempt to set an example to our counterparts as they sit in the shade of a mango tree sipping sweet greet tea through the day as the recount the numerous ways in which "Africa is not easy." We work hard because while we weren't watching our culture slipped in a fairly large dose of work ethic between the hedonism and neuroticism. We work hard and we fume that others do not do the same to help their own country. And we wonder if this place has any hope at all.

Sometimes as a result we completely withdraw and try to make a little slice of America in this tiny strip of sand on the West African coast. We escape to the city and eat crepes, dance at dirty clubs that host clientele with questionable morals and watch movies. Eventually guilt catches up with us and we head back to village again - eager to start work and convincing ourselves that this time it will be different. We'll develop people, not things, we will not once wish was had electricity and we will learn to finally enjoy the bitter sourness of the oranges that are never orange.

For me, I'm a little of each of these scenarios. I often find myself in a strange middle ground with no clear rules or expected behavior. I fetch water and carry it on my head, gossip with village women, casually flick a centipede off my sleeping mat and can drink attaya as I stare away the day with the best of them. But all of these traits that I couldn't imagine myself possessing a year ago will never make me Gambian. The people of the village laugh at their toubab and tell me I'm a real Gambian now because I can speak the language and perform the assigned tasks for my gender, but no matter how many traits and skills I assume no matter how many years I live among them - I will never be one of them. But I am no longer just another toubab tourist here either. I can chat with people and tell jokes using Gambian humor.... "You Cessays, you eat too much! (insert hearty laughter). I know when someone is being rude to me because he would never grab his sister's arm and shout, I teach their children, I cook their food, I understand that a leather amulet on their babies waist is to protect her from evil spirits who might want to enter her in the night causing stomach pains, I eat millet and ground tree leaves and actually like it. I am no longer as American as I was when I came.

I know to much now to go home and forget. Forget that Ida is in grade four for the third time because while she can speak English she can't read, forget that Ammadou has just started nursery school at age eight because his father didn't have the money to send him, forget the Jabou will never know a life other then backbreaking labor with a husband that no longer loves her and has brought another wife into her home as proof. I can't go back and look at all my smiling picture of my friends from village and convince myself..."but they are so happy." My friends know what is out there to get in the world and they want more too, sometimes they just don't know the best way to get it or their cultural obligations stand in the way. I can't just walk away and say they are hopeless and doomed to poverty as a result. Maybe I'm not one of them, but for a couple of months they let me live with them and pretend I was. They made me want to fight all the harder to make this thing called "development" work - not for their GDPs and their leaders - but for them. So Sillah can be paid a proper salary to allow him to continue teaching, a job that he loves. So Mariama can concentrate on school and know at the end of it she will be able to find a job and a husband and not be punished because she is too educated to marry. So Ansel can finally afford the cement to build her renter's compound, something that she has been saving for for five years but always remains just out of reach, and will guarantee financial stability for her family and business.

I came to learn and I certainly have. The process has been fraught with frustrations, confusion, laughter, painful realizations, guilt, hope, more confusion and even more questions but it has been a process I am thankful I have traveled. And as for helping - for saving the world - I've done a little and will hopefully do more in the future. One person can't save the world but we can do our part in small ways to help and maybe someday improve the situation. This process has been defeating at times but I am not ready to give up yet. I'm not ready to totally remove help from these countries, from these people. We, the West/North/Babylon (one of the many slang words Gambians have for the all of the rest of the world that is not Africa), created so many of the problems we blame the "Africans" for - since we created them I feel we have to help clean them up. But to succeed at that instead of just making dependency worse, as we have time and time again, we have to stop treating them like uncivilized "Africans" and start treating them like the equals they are and hold them accountable for their failings as well as their successes.

Girls Only

Every Tuesday afternoon I meet with my Girl's Club at school. The club consists of about 30 Grade 7-9 girls. Over the past two years my counterpart and I, and amazingly empowered Gambian woman who is a teacher at my school, have touched on a wide range of topics with the girls from reproductive health, to preventing pregnancy, to planning for their future and making responsible decisions. The highlight of the club, and the reason that at least half of our members are in it, is the annual excursion program. Gambian kids rarely get the opportunity to leave the 10 k radius around their villages so going on trips is a really big deal for them. Last year Rachel's (my good friend and partner in crime) Girl's Club came to my village to have a sleepover and empowerment program so this year my girls and I traveled the 30 k to Kerewan to return the visit at the Kerwan upper basic school. The girls held luncheon sales and raffled off footballs at the school to raise money for the trip and were very excited to wear their crisp new Club uniforms to travel in style in a gele gele rented exclusively for the trip. For many of my girls this was the first time they had been away from their village without a family member, the first time they had seen a large town, the first time to cross a bridge and for some the first time to leave their district.

While planning for the weekend program Rach and I jokingly entitled it "Our Bodies, Ourselves" and that pretty much some up the activities. We had sessions on the impact of gender on the division of labor, mapping their bodies and talking about taking care of themselves during menstruation, eating right and exercising. We also had sessions on the reproductive system, preventing pregnancy and STIs and breaking myths and stereotypes around sex and repro health. We also through some fun stuff in there like relay races, a DJ and dancing at night and of course lots of food with lots of meat - a necessity at any Gambian program.

Of course the weekend couldn't go down without a little drama and we had our fair share of it Friday night when the DJ was at the school for the girls to relax and have fun. Rach and I were pretty against having a DJ from the get go because anytime one comes to a village or town for a program the rif-raf seem to come out of the woodwork to oggle at teenage girls and just generally cause trouble. But the Kerewan girls really wanted to their program to have that extra umf of classiness so they went door to door around their community asking for donations. Rach and I were so impressed at their initiative that we didn't want to crush them by saying no. So against maybe out better judgement, the DJ arrived and ndaga and pseudo-reggae filled the night sky, spilled out of the school grounds and was like a siren to hundreds of boys and men throughout the town that were just sitting on stoops with nothing to do. They arrived in mass at the school and were decidedly pissed that Rach, the night watchmen and I were not letting boys come into the school grounds for the program. Rachel and I wanted to protect the girls, give them a chance to enjoy themselves and the company of each other without men oggling them, shouting at them suggestively or groping them - which is the general run down of how boys/men treat women in this country. So few people stand up for girls rights to be protected here and feel safe. So few people respect a woman's right NOT to be sexually harassed. We wanted to give that to our girls, at least for one night so we stood at the gates and did not let the boys enter explaining that the program was only for girls and that any girl of the town was welcome to come but that boys were not. Well, that did not go over so well. Men, and even 7 year old boys, are not accustomed to women telling them no or that they cannot do something. As a result, throughout the night profanities assailed us, we were spit at, stoned with rocks and just generally harassed. We held out ground till about 12 am then we got tired and left our posts to go hang out with our girls. Boys came in, but they were already jumping over the schools walls before this, but the majority had given up so it was a manageable number and we were able to keep them away from the girls with only one incidence of unwanted ass grabbing. Through it all, our girls were coming to check on us and seemed genuinely surprised that we cared about protecting them so much and were angry that we were being treated so poorly. Sexual harassment is something that most Gambian girls don't even question, male preference and dominance is so ingrained that few people question their right to say no to them.

Despite all the Friday night drama, the weekend was a huge success. I felt so much more prepared and able to really connect with the girls and transfer some useful and relevant information in a way that would be heard, as compared to our program last year. My relationship with my girls is so much stronger and I just feel more comfortable in general teaching and interacting here. The girls are still talking about the weekend and bragging to all their friends at school about what they saw and heard and ate. I feel a great sense of fulfillment listening to them excitedly explain something they learned and seeing their faces light up when they talk about the fun memories with their friends. And really....you haven't lived till you've been stoned protecting a girls right to be free and have fun without the danger of harassment or assault. Rach put it the best....for the rest of our lives we are going to hear horrible stories about injustices perpetrated against women around the world, but we will always have these moments to look back on where we did our part, we stood up for their right to be safe and protected and we taught them to fight for rights and no longer be ashamed.

*See my flickr page for pics!