The Smiling Coast of Africa

Good Night and Good Luck

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:28:00 +0000

Two years. Two years filled with never ending days that flew by in a blur. Its crazy to think that it is over. Its been amazing and frustrating, and usually just amazingly frustrating. As a result I am drained, mentally and physically fatigued from a culmination of two years in a very harsh environment and culture. It is mentally exhausting to live here and emotionally I am so looking forward to going home and not having to analyze every comment or action and constantly be on guard against sexual harassment and abuse. I am tired of thinking the worst of people as a means of self preservation.

It has been challenging, but I definitely would do it again if only to have the experience and understanding of myself and the way this part of the world works that i have now. For all most every moment when I wanted to pull my hair out and scream at someone, I can recall and even more vivid memory of moments spent with my favorite children, joking around with friends, being taught how to cook or farm or the community turning out in full force for a celebration. People ask me to sum up my experience in a word or a phrase, but that is impossible. The journey is filled with unexpected twists and turns, but I have passed them and now I can look back and say I've done it. I will always have these memories and valuable life experiences to fall back on wherever life takes me. I had no idea what was in store for me when I got on that plane two years ago bound for West Africa, nor could I have ever begun to imagine. Now I am in the reverse position, anxiously awaiting the next chapter of my life back home, almost equally as nervous about the unknowns but perhaps a little more confident in my ability to tackle them. This experience has changed my life and taught me innumerable lessons and for that I am deeply thankful to these people and this place and also to myself for finding the courage to let go and jump.

But there is no way I could have done it on my own and for that I want to send out a huge thank you to my friends and family, both in American and here in The Gambia, for the encouraging words, open ears and sound advice. The support has been amazing and I couldn't imagine getting through this journey without it. My service has been so shaped by the amazing friends I have made within the PC community. This journey would have been much harder without them. I want to thank them and I hope we will all continue to keep in touch once we are stateside and flung to our own destinies.

To all of you, your amazing and I'm lucky to have you in my life. God bless and catch you State side!

So long Njongon....

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:24:00 +0000

The last weeks flashed into the last days. Days faded into hours, stolen moments - hugs, laughter, tears. I tried to suck all I could out of it, conscious that I would never be back here, never be this person again.

I lingered on the mat in late into the nights, staring at the stars until the mosquito's and exhaustion finally drove us indoors. I drank over 6 cups of strong, syrupy green tea in one day as cherished last conversations with friends and favorite old men. I allowed myself to be dressed up as an ebadou (the practice of covering ones head and body) Barbie for the day, memorizing the shouts of delight and the gleam in Haddy Bah's eyes as she remarked how beautiful I looked with my head covered so modestly, just as Allah intends. I watched with amusement as 10 year old Jean patiently but hopelessly tried to teach his small cousin Paul to crawl, using a mobile to coerce him across the mat. I sat in the stifling hot computer lab teaching Mariama, a grade nine student to use the computer, because she actually asked and so few students show that much initiative. I was shocked, filled with pride and my hope restored as I watched her master double clicking in less then 2 minutes her first time ever touching a computer, a task that most of my adult computer students had yet to master after 7 weeks of classes. I listened to my students and colleagues as they gave speeches thanking me for being friendly, for remembering their names and taking an interest in their classes and their lives. I handed out certificates to my very proud computer students - teachers who were very excited to show their newly acquired status symbol to the villagers and their home people. I listened as they sang songs to bid me farewell, prayed for my long life and health and the hope that I would have a very nice husband and many, many children. I clung to the children, despite their dirty faces mud covered clothes, I kissed them, tickled them and pulled their hair for the last times.

I broke down and cried as I saw Pa come over, his eyes red and welling with tears. He came to shake my hand goodbye and do his terribly adorable half hug, but I broke about 4 different cultural norms as I flung my arms around his neck, sobbing and completely unable to be stoic in the face of a crying old man. Wanting so much to express my sincere thanks and love to this man who welcomed me into his home, protected and sheltered me, imparted so much wisdom and brought so much joy and laughter to my life here. He disappeared before he could loose to much more face, as men are never supposed to cry here, just saying "go, go, I am going to the bush." and I collapsed into Ansel and YaBoi, as we cried our farewells Ansel laughed at us all for being so dramatic and urging me into the car assuring me she would see me before I got on the plane. I kissed Baby Paul and climbed into the car listening to Pauline's wails. Wailing is in general a very disturbing experience and is even more disorienting and heart wrenching when it is your friend's cries directed towards you. I stopped to give last hugs and farewells to the smiling faces of Jabou and Corr Kunda and climbed into the car drove away. As Njongon descended into a whirl of red dust behind me, I stopped and took a deep intake of air.

Just breathe.

To Walk Majestically....

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:10:00 +0000

My headmaster approached us with the sheepish but entitled look he gets on his face when he wants something done. He handed us the thick expensive paper from the Regional Education Office, with the official government seal and all. We, he said, had been identified to serve as chaperons and coaches for the first annual, insh'allah, Miss 22nd July Scholarship Pageant. My counterpart for the girls club and I looked at each other, looked at the paper and looked back at my headmaster in silence, all while trying to keep our mouths from gaping open in shock. You want us, us, to chaperone and train girls for a beauty pageant?!

Don't you know we are feminists? Don't you know that beauty pageants are evil and that they exploit a girl's looks and sexuality to feed into some sort of twisted fantasy invented by men? Don't you know you know that girls should be valued for their brains and their abilities rather then the circumference of their hips or the symmetry of their face?

We nervously glanced at each other. "We don't think we are really the best people for this, we don't really agree with beauty pageants, shouldn't the girls be focusing on their exams, shouldn't we support them in that way?" I spoke up, speaking for both of us since it is more acceptable for me, the outsider, to question the administration. "No, you will do fine. This is a government mandate. Choose two girls and train them. Make sure they win!" he said as he quickly walked away, grateful that he had delegated the responsibility and it was no longer his to worry about.

So that is how I found myself in the very absurd situation of serving as a pageant coach for two adolescent African girls in a country that is still struggling to discern the difference between authentic gender empowerment and mere tokenism to satisfy international donors. Since Haddy (my counterpart and very good friend) and I didn't seem to have much choice in the matter, we decided we should try the best we could with the girls and try and keep their intelligence and commitment to making a difference in the community at the forefront and just keep the beauty aspect in the background. With the help of other teachers in the school we chose two girls from grade 7 and 8 to represent the school at the regional competition. Haddy trained them on how to walk gracefully (or majestically as Gambians like to say), speak loudly and clearly with chins up instead of eyes instead of eyes cast down in the customary pose of girls here and helped them write a platform speech on a topic of importance to their community as well as drilling them on facts of Gambian history and government, post coup since that is the only history that really matters anyway. I was away for most of the training but was delighted to come back and see Haddy taking charge and really being devoted to seeing the girls succeed. I helped coach them as well, but I was much more an assistant to Haddy than anything. Which is how it should be, these girls need Haddy, a successful and empowered Gambian woman, to be their mentor and role model far more than they need me.

After about two weeks of training we were off to the regional capital to compete against other junior secondary school age girls. The whole day was basically a calamity of the typical mismanagement, lack of leadership and cluelessness that too often characterize government offices in this country. In short, the competition was supposed to start at 9 am but didn't start till 4pm, their was no MC so they coerced Haddy into doing it for them, and half the girls that showed up weren't told what to bring or how to prepare. Luckily, my bestest bud Rachel was a judge so we kept each other company and tried to laugh amidst the chaos and chalk it up to one more crazy experience. At one point the two of us were sitting in front of a gigantic plate of rice trying to eat lunch while about 50 high school boys ran all around us trying to take chairs and tables outside, all while shouting at the top of their lungs. Benachin (common Gambian rice dish) in the midst of chaos.

The regional competition went well when it finally started, our two girls did excellent and were easily the most well prepared and demonstrated the best speaking skills. The other 30 or so girls in their category did well too but it was very apparent that they were nervous and often couldn't even complete, or sometimes start their speeches. It is incredibly difficult for an adolescent to get up in front of hundreds of peers and speak on a subject, even more so when your entire life you have had it drilled in to you that you should be seen and not heard, you should never look someone in the eyes and you are more valuable for work and child bearing then for what you have to say. In addition to their speeches and answering questions about the government, the girls had to display two or three "looks", this being a beauty pageant after all. One of the "looks" was a traditional outfit to celebrate their tribe or ethnicity. This aspect was actually kind of cool and some of the girls had beautiful traditional fabrics and jewelery they borrowed from anuties or grandmothers. For the other "looks" the girls could wear whatever they wanted which sometime lead to nice respectful kompletes and normal fancy African dresses but also sometimes lead to painted on gold lame hooker clothes. This last "look" is sadly an all to common occurrence, especially among young girls, as they desperately try to look Western and dress grown up with little or no knowledge of actual fashion trends. This annoying proclivity to skintight pants and hoochy skirts quickly caused the potentially empowering scholarship competition to descend into sexual exploitation and a wife finding event for creepy male teachers and village men. As much as I rolled my eyes at the whole idea of a beauty pageant in general and especially a beauty pageant in a less then open, Muslim country, it was a good learning oppurtunity and I gave me another oppurtunity to witness the unnerving clash of cultures present in much of world as the youth start to challenge the accepted norms and traditions of their societies. This was no more apparent that day then when I glanced over to see about twenty devout men observing the evening call to prayer to the tune of Britney's eternally classy tune "Toxic".

Throughout the entire prep period for the regional and national competitions I was consistenly proud and more in love then ever with my girls club counterpart Haddy. She totally stepped it up and took a real interest in helping the girls succeed and be the best they could be. Whether she was kicking ass as MC, pageant coach or keeping the brains aspect at the forefront for the girls. It was great to see the girls depending on her and her rising to meet their needs and being an excellent role model all around. It was a great moment in our work and friendship together to be sitting next to each other and both of us erupting into cheers and brimming with pride when Ely and Mamie got first and second at the regional competition and then when Ely made it into the top 10 at the national competition.

At the national level competition it was a whole different ball game then at our rinky dink regional. They put us up in a really nice hotel that most Gambians never get to experience because it caters exclusively to tourists and is ridiculously expensive. There were girls from all over the country and there was a notable division between the girls from the provinces and those from the capital city and surrounding areas. The girls from the city are just so much more exposed here, they take for granted their televisions, qualified teachers, schools with actual books and equipment, parents with salaries, education officials who are actually held accountable for the support the give their schools and having an ease with the English language simply because they actually hear it spoken outside the walls of the school. And as one can easily guess, with these relative privileges comes a bit of snobbery and backbiting directed at "uncivilized" girls from bush. I guess it wouldn't truly be a beauty pageant without a little cat fighting and low blows but still discouraging to see a girl with all the privileges her nation can afford her looking down on a girl who is actually living a much more realistic Gambian life because she happens to live a mere 50 k up river.

To somewhat even the playing field all the girls were trained for two weeks by this great Liberian boss lady teaching the girls how to walk gracefully like a lady. All the girls were provided fancy shoes and fancy dresses, tons of meat and soda to eat and excursions to see cultural or historical sites around that capital area when they weren't training. All in all the girls really enjoyed and were very excited about the free clothes and fancy hairdos. The actual competition portion of the two weeks was intense, dreadfully long and lasted into the wee hours of the morning. All the girls from our region did great and you could really see how much they had grown and how much confidence they had gained through all the training in the past couple weeks compared to their performances at the regional competition. But one of my students and member of my Girls Club qualified for the finals so it was all worth it in the end!

The final mega competition was insane. I don't even want to know how much money went into it. I couldn't afford a $40 ticket to get in to watch Ely. So ever resourceful I pulled a super ghetto move and watched from the balcony of my counterparts hotel room. The whole week Ely had been making us nervous cause she didn't really seem that into it and we were worried she wasn't prepared and would embarrass herself on national TV. She is a bit of a book worm anyway and not all that into beauty queen stuff and fancy clothes anyway so I just figured she was tired and wanted to go home to her family. But boy, that kid had it all figured out, she was just being modest and coy. Her speech on HIV/AIDS was perfect, her English perfect. She sang beautifully and answered her questions on the government and history of The Gambia correctly too. When the winners were finally announced at 6am Haddy called me to tell me to wake me from my half sleep to go out on the balcony. I heard them announce third and second and I felt my heart drop. But then they said her name and I was jumping up and down on the balcony like a crazy person hugging the chicken pocked student I was taking care of, so proud, so happy for Ely.

Turns out she had it all together the whole time, she just doesn't like making a big thing of herself. I thought surely Ely couldn't go from ninth place in the preliminaries to first in the finals despite the great job she had done. But she did. She got first in the entire nation for the middle school students. Her prize is absolutely free education thru university, a monthly stipend and a science lab for her school. Her parents never have to worry about whether they can afford the really good senior secondary school she will no doubtedly get in thanks to her brainy dedication to her studies. She even gets to meet the prez! Our little school in the provinces will be on national radio and TV, the teachers will gain prestige and maybe now more people will be willing to come teach in the provinces. Maybe this helps proove the girls in the bush aren't as backward and dumb as everyone wanted to believe. The little Manjago (very small Christian minority from Guinea Bissau) from the bush took it all! And as for Haddy and me, these two feminists couldn't be prouder of our beauty queen.

*pics of the event on Flickr link

The Best Job You'll Ever Love

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:35:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 09:26:00 +0000

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!

"Slap me if I do this in America, please."

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:53:00 +0000

So recently myself and some friends who are also about to leave here have begun to notice annoying behaviors and personality traits about ourselves that we have picked up here that are just not going to fly in America. Here, these behaviors don't make me rude or inconsiderate, or even seem unsophsiticated. They are actually considered polite or appropriate and then for the others at least everyone does them so at least they aren't considered abnormal.

But in America, that is just not going to be the case. So I am asking, pleading in fact, for your help in the coming months as I readjust to life in the good ol' US of A. If I break any aspect of my plan....give me a good natured slap or at least remind me what country I am in.

My 10 point plan for not being a mang civilized (Mandink-lish for "You are not civilized")

Remeber that in America a limp handshake = creepy/rude/weak
Stop using the present progressive tense at all times. (Ex: Are you having?)
Stop hissing at people to catch their attention or to flag down a taxi
Stop sucking my teeth to show disapproval or disagreement
Avoid beating/saying rude things to children
Spitting. Don't do it.
Think very hard before asking for inappropriate gifts or favors from friends, or complete strangers for that matter.
Find an alternative activity for the time I currently spend staring at walls and/or livestock
Try not to respond "it's true" or "fine, fine" to every statement made by another person
Greeting extensivly aka asking "how are you?" more than 3 times in a 2 minute span
*Say please and thank you

Dear Mr. Excellent President of America

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 12:37:00 +0000

Mr. Excellent President of America, *

It is my honorable pleasure to write you one letter. I am asking after your health and that of your family. I thank God. Excuse me, for my writing is not good. Mr. President, I greet you very well. I am greeting your family, your good wife and your parents.

My name is Alexi-Wali Saine. I am of the race of Serrer. I am Senegalese. I am a farmer and I have 70 years. About 34 years I am here in The Gambia. I am in a bad place. It is true that I am poor, dear president. I want to build a house in Dakar but I am not able to yet in my life. I have nothing here but I am greeting God that I have my life and my health. I want to return to Senegal but I cannot. My dear president, with your grand experience, I am wanting your help.

For me, thank you in advance dear president. You are my friend, long time you are president until now. I am always hearing you on the radio. I know that America is a great country and I know that you are a great man. I keep you in my heart all these years, you are my friend till death. Thank you.

Yours, Alexi Wali Saine

*Translated from the French, to the Wolof, to the English. So in the end, maybe its just the gist of what he actually wrote.
-------

The above is a genuine letter from my host father to President Bush. He is a huge fan. I'm talking huge. Whenever they mention the US on the radio, inevitably he conversation turns to questions about American politics and the great things, in PaSaine's view, that our great President has done for the world. It is hard to get Pa to pinpoint exactly what these great things are but they seem to fall into the realm of he is christian, he is fight against the Arabs (which are not a much loved people here) and he came to Africa once. Pa's deep love and deference for my President inspired him to write him a fan letter of sorts and also to ask him for help. Cause, hey, it couldn't hurt. Pa was amazed that I knew the address of the White House and that people can actually send letters to their elected officials and expect them to actually be read, at least by someone.

Most Gambians tend to go with Clinton as the favorite American political figure, but Pa sticks by Bush. The majority of Gambians that I have talked to can back up their stance and are amazingly informed about world and US politics, much more so then the average American. I have found this trait in many countries that I have visited. People care deeply who gets elected and how they govern. They cannot vote in our elections, they have no say in what happens but the decisions that Americans make when they go to the voting boothes (or sadly don't go) effects millions of people around the world. And that is why Gambians, Indians, Koreans and Brazilians can summarize American foreign policy with accuracy and clarity that would shame the majority of even the most educated Americans. They pour over my Newsweeks and love asking questions of a "real live American". And they absolutely cannot fathom why I don't know some of the answers to their questions. They cannot fathom why an American would not vote.

So vote, be informed and think about how that vote affects not only you but millions of people around the world. Is that vote going to make us friends or enemies? Is is going to widen the gap between the haves and have nots? Or bring the world closer together by giving everyone a fair chance?

Think about it and take advantage of the freedoms we to easily take for granted - fair elections.

These Little Lights of Mine

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:51:00 +0000

I nervously glanced around the room, my headmaster and about five other teachers had crowded into the newly refurbished computer lab. Everything was installed. Finally. Solar panels, batteries, charge controller, inverter. The entire lab had been rewired with new plugs and a change over switch (to take the wiring back to a generator if the need arises) and the light were installed in the beautifully crafted ceiling overhead. I focused back on the eager faces and summoned the courage to finally do what I have been working so hard for the past year to be able to do. I turned on a computer.

And there was silence. Beautiful silence. I never envisioned I would be so happy to hear absolutely nothing. But this nothing meant the absence of the deafening hum of the generator and the smell of spent gasoline coming pouring in the windows. We had power and it was silent, and clean and replenishable for free.

The silence lasted all of 30 seconds. As the Windows '98 (yes, I am not kidding) screen came on the room erupted into shouts and cheers of santa yalla (Wolof for "thanks be to God"), bilai wulai tuali (Arabic and means essentially, "Oh my God, I swear it's true") and "We have the power!" I turned to look at the beaming face of my headmaster, thankful I had not blown up anything this time. (I had previously blown up a monitor and inadvertally a charge controller. Althuogh I still maintain that that one was not my fault.) He slapped me on the back and said "Well done, well done. When can you start class?" which for a Gambian is very high praise. The moment was short, no more than 5 minutes at the most. The teachers filtered out, back to their duties of emparting knowledge and beating in discipline, still exclaiming the wonderful things toubabs can do. I watched them go, to tired to try to explain that toubabs certainly could not do everything.

And then I was alone, me and the machines. I stared around the room at the cheerful yellow walls, new secure windows and glowing computer screens. I had spent the better part of my service working towards this day. Pouring over manuels trying to teach myself things I had always just blindly accepted, listening intently to far smarter people then I explain the intracacies of solar electricity, writing grant proposals, praying that someone would fund us, revising budget projections, freaking out over the dropping dollar, thanking God when a private funder seemed to fall right in our laps, never ending meetings with the village PTA and school development committee to ensure they understood the project and were committed to helping, haggling with endless numbers of shop owners with my headmaster to get quality goods at a fair price, hiring and then arguing with a constultant, monitoring the installation, cleaning over 100 pieces of computer equipment to find just eight complete computers that actually function....all leading up to this one little action. Pressing a button and hearing nothing but silence.

It was a great day and a great feeling. I still can't believe that the solar power system is here, it's ours and it's working. I go in everyday with a small knot in my stomach, fearful that something will have gone wrong or something has been whisked away in the night. Each day I am relieved to find that lab just as I left it and each day I start to trust myself and this huge leap I have taken a little more.

We still have a long road ahead of us until this computer lab is fully functioning. The metal cages need to be built to prevent theft, we need to meet with the village and PTA a couple more times to update them on progress and maintenance requirments. Currently, four computer are working perfectly with four more likely to be fixable in the near future. This is just a consequence of having to piece together parts to computers (most of which are quiet old), get them switched from German to English language and the challence of getting them all synchronized when only three have a CD-ROM and only one has a flash drive. I will never again complain about computers in America. All of this puzzle like work is definilty slow going but we are getting there. The German NGO that donated the computers is luckily in coutnry for another month and their computer specialist has been helping me out a lot with installing proper software so that's been a great help.

The end result of all this trial and error piecing together is that one corner of out lab is quicking turning into a tech nerds "island of misfit toys." Eventually I will have to figure out what to do with all this useless equipment. I hear from the PC grapevine that almost all labs in this country (and I'm sure elsewhere) have a similiar problem - old, broken equipment that has no purpose but also nowhere to go. It is great for people to send computers that they no longer use to developing countries - it is 100% needed. We just have to be sure to only send equipment that is in working condition and will be for the forseeable future. I get the impression that all this tech junk is a problem the world over - hopefully there will be a solution to this soon if their isn't already.

While I wait for that fantastic teach-junk-recycling revolution to happen, I will be here in village concentrating on getting the eight computers the solar power system was designed to support up and running and then getting down to teaching the student and teachers of my school some basic computer skills and how to take care of the lab and solar equipment.

Task#1: Getting the students to stop calling the monitor a telly.

Mom and Dad do The Gambia

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 14:03:00 +0000

I have been looking forward to my parents coming to visit me here in The Gambia pretty much since my second month of service. Every time I would talk to them, I would struggle to put this experience, this life I am living, into words and time and time again I fell short of adequately describing this life to the people I loved the most. I desperately wanted them to hear the call to prayer each morning, feel the warmth radiate from the smiles and greetings of my fellow villagers and see the incredible odds my friends and colleagues here are up against. I couldn't make them understand the complexities of my life here no matter how many pictures I took, no matter how many descriptions of projects I gave, no matter how many times I complained about being called toubab. To understand all these things and really get a taste for what my life if like here, they had to come and experience it for themselves. And they did. I am so thankful that they did.

They were only hear for eight days which made it a whirlwind trip of a trip to my village, a visit to an eco-lodge and boat trip down the Gambia River with some fellow PCVs and family, and then back down to the city and a sort day trip to see some beautiful and undisturbed beaches. I forced them to hit the ground running and we went straight from the airport to my village after they had been on a plan for about 20 hours. Despite my insistence on pushing them to experience as much as possible, they were absolute troopers. They were always willing to try whatever was thrown at them with a smile, whether it was drinking liter upon liter of palm wine with PaSaine or complete lack of water at our last hotel, which ironically enough was in the city and the only one that was actually supposed to have hot water.

We started in my village and everyone was as equally happy to meet my parents as they were to meet the people I have been living with for the past year and half. We toured my schools, rested under the mango tree, ate way to much fancy food that Ansel prepared with true dedication, visited the women's garden, laughed as women danced in their honor, chatted with my teachers, snapped pictures of the kids in my neighborhood, and they even semi-mastered the art of bucket baths.

After village it was off to explore the interior of the country with a wild sept-place ride to Janjanbureh. The lived through the 15 minute bush taxi ride to my village but I didn't want to put them through that pain for the 5 hour trip to the island so we took a 7 seater station wagon instead. We only had to switch cars 3 times before we found one that ran properly and then were off, it ended up spewing diesel fumes for the entire 3 1/2 hour ride but you can't really get to picky about your transport options here. We arrived on Janjanbureh (the island) and went to the camp on the far end where were to spend the next two days in peaceful relaxation. The camp was beautiful and a great started point from which to take out day long boat trip down the Gambia River. Rachel's parents were there at the same time so we got to share the day with them and also Carson, Dan and Jim who came along for the ride. We saw hippos, crocs, and lots of monkeys and birds. It was a great day! After getting in touch with the limited biodiversity of The Gambia we headed back down to the city, which we used as a base to explore another nature reserve (Abuko), the markets (you can't go to Africa and not go to a market) and a day trip to the beautiful beaches of Kartong.

It was a great trip and went by way to fast. I loved having my parents here and playing tour guide but it was also a little weird at the same time. Weird because they are so obviously part of my American life. I would constantly stare at them when they were here with awe that it was actually my mother who was holding my host sisters baby or that was actually my father towering bravely as he wound his way through a packed fish market. It was great to introduce them to my counterparts and friends and village and hear them praise me for my dedication and work, praise that is never forthcoming in this culture. It was nice to see their faces light up with recognition and sometimes dread. "Oh this is Jainaba, the little girl you always talk about" or "This is Barra! You walk through here by yourself!" I am happy that they can finally really understand a slice of this life changing experience in my life, happy that we can now laugh together about the absurdity of getting a simple ride to the next village or the recall the unbelievable brightness of the stars in an unpolluted night sky.

I am happy and also proud of them, of who they are and how far they have come. Proud that I have parents that will travel half way across the world for me, braving cold showers, questionable water and food and a week without a good beer or steak. And I am so very thankful to have people in my life who support me through daily struggles and big accomplishments - even if those things take me a world away from them.

Five months.....

The hilarity of Pa Saine

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:50:00 +0000

My host father is probably my favorite person in The Gambia. He is a wonderful mix of friendliness, exuberance, piety, protective father, comedy act, fashion statement, inquisitiveness, wisdom, tolerance, and honesty. I often sit with him at night and we just chat and enjoy the radio and the night sky. Sometimes the chats are serious and thought provoking for both me and him and sometimes they are just filled with riddles and funny stories. He usually likes to talk about things that he sees me knowing lots about because I am white - like flying airplanes and what it is like in space, how to fix his government or why they seem to be so many more women then men in the world. But sometimes he also likes to impart his wisdom on me and will recall what it was like to grow up in Senegal, or the traditions of the Sereer and the ways in which Muslims and Christians are the same and should really just get along. I always come away from chats feeling enlightened or just able to look at the topic in a new and interesting way.

As far as the most popular bar scene question in America - "so....what do you do?", which incidentally is a really rude question to ask here, Pa doesn't do much. Most of his days consist of waking up, eating some millet, sitting in his chair, eating lunch, laying on his mat, checking on his donkeys with occasional trips to the bantaba to chat with other old village men or mixing of some traditional herbal remedies if he wants to have a really crazy day. Pa has official senior citizen status here as all his children are grown with good jobs and can thus support him and his wife. Pa used to work very hard farming, but now he just gets to sit and enjoy life and do funny things for all of our amusement.

Funny/Memorable Things Pa Saine has done/said:

1. walks around the compound in his boxers searching for cellphone network
2. repeats "jerejef Haddy" (thank you Haddy) for everything I do or say, sometimes even as a morning greeting. I attribute it to his good natured laziness.
3. insists I take shots of vodka or brandy with him during the cold season so my body "stays strong"
4. spends 2 hours translating a dream interpretation book written by a sheik in Guinea-Conakry from French to Wolof to English. Then helps me find an auspicious day on which to bear children.
5. teaches me how to make herbal remedies from plants in the bush and calls it my marabout (mystical Islamic holy men who do traditional medicine) training
6. sent me home to America with a bag full of leaves and strict instructions for how to make medicine for my grandfather's bad lungs
7. gave me two mango seeds to plant in my back yard with the instructions that I should name each seed after a man I want to marry. Which ever seed grows the tallest and the fastest is the man I should choose.
8. "Which is better, fire or water...." and other crazy either/or questions
9. The "How much this cost in America" game
10. Sound advice - it is better to marry an ugly man who is poor because you will be the only one to love him. If your man is pretty and rich you will always have to fight jealous people. This was his reasoning on why my friend Rachel should marry Pa instead of her current rich, pretty toubab husband.
11. has in depth discussions with me on his thoughts of taking a second wife because "YaBoi is tired." Despite his being Catholic and his plan to have her live in a new compound in Senegal which would not really help ease YaBoi's workload. In the end, he decided new wives cost to much money.
12. Explanations of Muslim holidays, tinted with Catholic guilt and judgement, to be sure I understand what is going on at all times. Ex: "They think it's Ismail but it's Isaac, it's Issac! Ismail is a bastard!" on Tobaski and Muslims (mis)interpretations of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice of his first son.
13. watching him "heal" various villagers and their aliments with his leaves from the bush
14. his cell phone calls in broken English to wish me well and check up on me when I have been gone to long.
15. conversations about the possibility of people living on the moon and Mars one day. "What, there is not water there?! That is not good, we must take it!"

Kukujang Mariama Full of Grace

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 08:58:00 +0000

My host family here in The Gambia is Catholic. Usually when one says something like that here, it is just code for "oh you can drink alcohol with your people" but my family is actually very devout and doesn't really drink all that much except for the occasional palm wine for guests or quick sip of brandy on a chilly night.

This is a pretty unique aspect of my experience here because the country is 95% Muslim. My family is the only Christian compound in my village of about 1500 people despite their being a Catholic mission school and church in the village. The story goes that in the 50's a toubab priest used to live in the village and converted the majority of people to Catholicism. He died in the 70's and pretty much everyone proceeded to convert back to Islam, that is except my host father and his family. My host father emigrated to The Gambia from Senegal, where he was born into a Muslim family but was raised by a Catholic priest. PaSaine's own father decided that he admired the Christan faith, but that since he was a rather "big man" in the village, he could not convert himself without alienating the his community so he chose one of his 6 sons to be raised a Christian instead. Since the decision to be a Christan came from PaSaine's father, everyone in his family respects his faith and they get on very well. When my father was old enough to go out on his own, he took a Christian wife from his community in Senegal and moved to The Gambia in search of more fertile farming land. He stopped in Njongon, a mere 15 K over the border from Senegal and the first village inside of Gambia that had a Catholic church.

Over the years the village has grown and changed, the land is not so fertile anymore and many of the young people have moved to the city to find any easier life than that of their parents. The mission school is thriving and draws students from over 10 villages in the area because it is better run than most government schools and is seen as having better teachers and more resources. "Christians give to Christians" is a sort of Gambian truism and I am told many people initially converted to Christianity so that they could get all the aid that comes with it. The church is small but active although the priest, now a Nigerian, no longer lives in the village but in a larger town about 10 K away and the majority of parishioners come from another nearby village inhabited mostly by Manjagos, a tribe from Guinea Bissau. But PaSaine and his family remain strong and steadfast to their faith and to the success of their parish despite all the changes.

So with that background in mind, I can now expound upon the real motivation behind this entry - the annual Gambian Christian pilgrimage to the village of Kukujang Mariama, the only all Christian village in the country. The village itself is deep in the bush but because of the influx of money in the form of schools, skills centers and health centers, the village is growing and has a huge, beautiful church that is the envy of all. The pilgrimage is held the first weekend of every December to celebrate the advent season and is in its 20th year and as a way for Christians from all over the country to get together for fellowship.

Last year I didn't go to the pilgrimage, much to the disappointment of my family and the many Christian teachers that work at my school. Everything in The Gambia was still so new and disorienting and I was trying to get a handle on living in village and making connections with people I decided to sit it out. But this year, I figured when else does one have the chance to go on a pilgrimage in Africa so with two of my fellow PCVs, Jim and Dan, in toe, we boarded the bus in Banjul one chilly December morning with about 150 others from my parish we set out for the pilgrimage - singing, jumping and drumming all the way.

After a long and bumpy bus ride through the bush we finally arrived at Kukujang Mariama, just in time for the mornings mass. The grounds resembled a county fair with buses lined up, tents joined together to provide much needed shade for the worshippers, tons of people, food vendors, trinket sellers and children selling some very cool commemorative t-shirts. I estimate that there were close to 2 or 3000 people, all the Catholic hierarchy, and even the minister of tourism! The day included a very long mass, a break for lunch, afternoon prayers and singing and lots of food, laughing and greeting old friends and new friends. I was surprised how many people I actually knew - when the Christian community makes up less than 5% of a population and you live with Christians and work in a mission school you end up meetings about half of them.

All in all the day was full and it was great to see this minority thriving in their faith despite the odds against them. It was a great way to start everyone off on the right foot for the Christmas season. My sister Ansel was so excited for the day to come and had been counting down the days since August. She seemed delighted to have me and my friends there to share the custom with and kept coming up and hugging me throughout the day. Even though she was tired at the end of the day from being responsible for organizing the transportation and the lunch for close to 200 people from our parish, she seemed completely rejuvenated by the experience and just glowed and was decidedly, filled with grace.

Its that magical time of the year....

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:07:00 +0000

It came yesterday, enveloping the village and turning the surrounding fields into tiny whirlwinds of sandstorms. The coos is harvested and the groundnuts will be all unearthed in due time. The air is warm and dry, blowing south as the Sahara takes over our narrow strip of the Sahel for the next couple of months. The Harmattan, strong and viscous, devouring every live plant in site has come to The Gambia. It came fast, as it always does. I woke in the morning a little bit cooler than usual and biked to Mbollet Ba, the next village over, to work with the teachers with their phonics lessons for the day. As I pulled into the school yard the days first gust of strong wind was taking over the dirt football pitch and rending my entire sense of vision useless. The gusts were so powerful throughout the day that the headmaster dispersed the students right after school, forgoing the usual 2:00 prayer held on that same football pitch that is required of all students at this school before they can head home for the day. The children were glad to be released to escape the punishing sandstorm that had been invading their classrooms all day due to the schools utter lack of protection in the form of either a tree or stone fence. It's just dirt and dry dead grass for as long as you can see. The day stood in sharp contrast to the previous days stagnant heat. As I biked the two kilometers home, I cursed the headwind and the dust that was now nestled in every crevice of my clothes and body, but was thankful for the breeze to ease the oppressive sun and the cool nights and morning that I had to look forward too and that were the happy bonus to the dusty Harmattan days.

Having now experienced every season The Gambia has to offer, and some of them twice, I have decided that the cold season and its very frigid temps of 65 degrees at night, is my favorite. The dust is just a small price to pay for the luxury of not sweating profusely, even in your sleep. And with the cold comes lovely things that make me appreciate and cherish my moments here. Things like school in full swing, preparing food for big programs with the teachers at school, joking and laughing with my teachers at school, scout drumming, having all the teachers come together for a workshop as I try to teach them new methods and having them actually listening, Inter-kunda sports tournaments, Tobaski, Christmas, nights huddled around the fire with my family listening to Pa tell crazy stories, small boying kids to bring me limes, groundnuts, and cashews from the bush, early mornings spent shivering as I drink my ritual cup of tea, visiting the women's garden and watching the kids try the new methods they have learned in class, seeing a teacher or a student genuinely excited to learn and try something new and utter lack of bugs. I love all these aspects of my life here and maybe the anticipation of experiencing all these things again is what pulled me back after my brief sojourn in America and gives me the motivation to finish out my time here.

How Africa has cured my materialism...or not

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:32:00 +0000

Toubabadoo (aka The Promised Land) is here, its all around me. Family, authentic Mexican, wool sweaters, microbrew beer, hot showers, bear hugs, petable kittens, spray on salad dressing, Dancing with the Stars, cheezy family movies, real coffee, pretty dresses that show my knees, fried food at the airport, loud music, marathon running brothers, even louder groups of people, pumpkins and hay rides, soy chai lattes, greeting cards that sing television and movie theme songs when you open them, cool fall breezes, reunions with high school friends, being there for a best friend's wedding, warm beds and slippers, organic vegetable chips with a red, white and blue motif - what more could you ask for?

I'm not going to try and pretend that I haven't been dreaming about the above things and many more for a very long time. I have missed the comforts of my life in America and have thought about them a lot in the long hours of unelectrified nights. Being home and having things at my fingertips has been great. Ever since I found out I was coming home, I have been trying to mentally prepare so as not to freak out from culture shock. But the more I thought about not freaking out the more I found myself looking forward to having all these things that I was so used to at one time in my life. Then I would stop myself and think "no, you are PCV for crying out loud! You're supposed to be one with the people and suffering for human kind" and other uber idealistic things that are only really true in promotional videos. The more I really think about it the more I find myself shrinking from the my old super idealistic self. I don't have to suffer to prove that I care about others. I don't have to feel guilty about having more than someone else, as long as I am willing to share a little of what I have. Suffering for no reason doesn't necessarily prove that you are tough and strong, sometimes it just proves that you are a little bit crazy.

A very wise man names Timothy once said that "the love of money is the root of all evil." The key word there is love not money. Money can do very good things. Money buys medicine and schools books, rebuilds roofs that have blown off and provides money for a well that can give an entire village clean drinking water. As long as we use our money for things that matter, it is good. It's when we start worshipping money and thinking that if we just have to have that phone that acts as a computer, music player and DVD all in one when really just a normal phone would do because no one actually watches a movie on a 1.5 inch screen. Instead of buying that overly complicated phone for $200 extra bucks we could just buy the normal one that really meets all our needs, and put the $200 extra to something worth while that will enrich not only our lives but the lives of others as well. I'm as guilty of it is anyone else. I buy things all the time that I don't need or necessarily really want all that much. I've got about 20 pair of shoes and I think about 4 pairs of the exact same pants.

Ever since starting this little endeavor, or just actively saying I was going to do it, I always get looks or comments (not just from people in America, Gambians too) that are filled with a weird combo of pity, compassion and respect for choosing to live this lifestyle and do this work when I could be back in America and making a respectable amount of money. I usually just shrug my shoulders and try and brush it off because these looks and these thoughts make me uncomfortable. The truth is I don't really feel like I deserve it. Now that I have spent a good chunk of time over here, I also think it is unfair to claim that I am suffering at all. It is true that I don't have electricity of running water and that I live in a very poor country, but I don't feel like I am suffering on a day to day basis. I always have enough to eat, am surrounded by kind and funny people that I care about. I eat meals with my family, so I never have to cook or do dishes and my laundry is done by a woman in a neighboring compound who always washes and irons them perfectly and I pay her a good chunk in local terms so she can buy nice things for her kids and send them to school. I watch DVD's in my family's compound, call friends on my mobile and if I want American food I can go into the city and America/Europe awaits - clubs and bars included. All the comforts of the industrialized world are here, in this tiny strip of land on the West African coast. Its just that these things that make life "easy" are expensive and totally out of reach for the average uneducated farmer, which makes up a considerable portion of the population, but totally in reach for me and my fellow expats and an growing section of the population that has gotten an education and our moving out of extreme poverty. But whether Gambians can afford the luxury's of city life of not, literally everyone is aware of what is out there to get and definitely wants to get them. Just because people are in a lower income bracket does not make them less materialistic. They are people like everyone and want nice things for themselves and their loved ones. The powerful marketing campaigns work just as well on them as they do for the rest of us. I regularly see my friends here save money for months so they can buy they or their kids fancy outfits made out of the latest trendy fabric for a big holiday or event. Just like people do in America.

I feel like going back to America during my service has actually helped me a lot. I feel rejuvenated now that I have seen my family and friends and reconnected with them. It has helped me realize that my life here in TG is not really all that far removed from my life in America. Things in America aren't as shocking as I thought they would be just a little weird at times. There are an abundance of choices all around. We can choose from 47 different types of chips, when one type would probably suit us all just fine. But I still totally chose the organic vegetable chips with sea salt that cost about 4 dollars to much. My mom kept loosing me in our gigantic grocery store as I would wonder down the isles, staring in awe at all the different types of food and products. I knew going in that grocery stores are often the biggest encounter with culture shock, but I felt I had to just dive in and get it over with it. And it worked, the second time back wasn't nearly as disorienting. So it's the little things, the things we forget about when we sit in mud huts in the middle of Ramadan and dream about home, that send your brain off on long "what if" tangents. So even though I know in my head that having all these choices is a bit ridiculous, I still like having the choices.

But for the most part being home around people I love isn't shocking or strange, it just feels like home. Like I am home for a weekend visit from DC, instead of home for a couple weeks from half a world, and what feels like half a century, away. People ask me what is like to live over in The Gambia, and most of the time I am at a lost to describe it. Most of the time I just end up shrugging my shoulders and saying "it is a lot like here, just different." That statement neither does justice to the wonderful attributes that Gambians and Gambian communities posses nor does it satisfy the person asking the questions. In fact it is probably infuriating. And in fact, America and Gambia are not the same. It is true that in many ways, they are worlds apart. It is just that sometimes I forget that because I can very easily slip back into my comfortable life style in America, but for right now I am also equally comfortable in my life in The Gambia - and for right now that is home. And coming to grips with Gambia feeling like home and that being my life now doesn't totally freak me out. Which is good. My good friend Carson, in his infinite wisdom, tried to calm my fears a couple days before I left The Gambia to take a trip home to the States for a couple weeks to see family. "Don't worry", he said, "it'll be okay, you are comfortable here and you are comfortable there, it won't be that bad of culture shock." Turns out Carson, The Boy Genius, is right again as usual.

I don't have the answers right now to how to balance my life in the States and my life in The Gambia, and I don't know if I will ever have the answers. All I know is that I feel at home and have family and friends that I love very much in both places. Whether I am in The Gambia or I am in the States I feel like I spend a lot of my time answers questions. (Which is good and what I signed up for, so keep them coming!) Gambians want to know the price of sugar in the US or who takes care of the cows if the US has no Fulas (a nomadic herding tribe), if Americans have jobs or if the government just gives money away and how many cars each person has. Americans want to know what Gambians eat, what the houses look like, where the water comes from and if Gambians can read. Both groups are equally interested in how people marry, how they spend time with friends and what family life is like. I definitely don't have everything figured out and probably never will. But what I do know is that these two groups of people that I love so much are a lot similar then any of them realize. Whether they live in thatched roof mud huts with not electricity or if they live in huge homes when their biggest decision of the day is paper or plastic (really, people the answer should always be canvas :)) - the most important things in their lives are their family and their friends. I don't want to sound too Kumbaya - but it's true.

I think I might have come full circle on this little tangent, which just proves that the topic is infuriatingly complicated and also really personal. Not everyone is going to agree with me, I am not even sure I agree with me all the time. And that is fine, it doesn't make either one of us bad or good - just different. And different is also good, the world would be very boring indeed if we were all the same and all agreed with each other. Everyone finds their path and organizes life as they see fit. I am just grateful for the chance to observe people doing it in very different settings and learn a bit and figure it all out for myself as I go along. And I am also very grateful and thank God more and more that I was lucky enough to be born at the latitude and longitude that I was and that helped enable me to fly home from halfway around the world to be there for my family and see my friends. It was an amazing and very quick two weeks.

Lazy Saturday

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 14:25:00 +0000

It was a typical Saturday. I had woken up with the first prayer call and groggily ate my P&B sandwich and drank as much water as possible, as quickly as possible so I could crawl back into bed till a more reasonable hour. I firmly believe that people are not meant to rise before the sun (with the sun, fine, but not before), and that belief holds true even if I am living in West Africa and observing Ramadan along with the rest of the village. I'll wake up to eat, in order to alleviate later pain, but I don't have to be happy about it.
I finally roused myself, with the aid of the always helpful roosters and the women pounding coos, around 9:00 and set about to be productive. I did some laundry then took some fabric to the tailor to get some wrap skirts made. Three skirts for $1.10, not bad. The tailor's compound (Corr Kunda (Corr is their surname and Kunda means kingdom in mandinka but is what everyone uses to call name their compound) is one of my favorite families. The compound is huge, with about 8 adults and close to 20 children ranging in age from 6 months to 20 years. Corr Kunda has an open door policy, a large chunk of the children are nieces and nephews that have been shipped off to go to school in this village or have just been inherited through the crazy complicated familial relations here. Despite the chaos that comes with close to 30 people living in close proximity, Corr Kunda radiates warmth and love. The women of the compound are a jovial bunch and get along amazingly well for co-wives, sister-in-laws and daughters who all have to share resources and work to make this large family function. The warmth of the women is reflected in their children and each time I approach the compound, or even come within 50 yards of it, I am greeting by a dozen little voices calling my name and greetings in a variety of languages. Sereer for the smallest ones, Wolof for the over fives and English for the school going kids. As I near the compound Ous and Ebrima, two little boys age 2 and 4, run to tackle my legs followed closely by Sainabou, a little girl age 3 or 4, who is a little slower because her legs are so chubby follows. Jainaba, age 8 and de facto mom most days, usually sweeps down to scoop them up before they reach the road and chastises them for getting to near the dangerous path of fast moving cars. Of all my greeters, I am only 100% sure who the mother of Ebrima is, she is Ami - rival wife to my good friend Jabou (who is Jainaba's mother). Ami is only just now warming up to me and only because Ebrima is so fond of me. She and Jabou share the only visible animosity in the compound, and for good reason, being a co-wife isn't easy!
Following the morning greetings at the entrance of the compound and the ongoing joke that little Ous is ugly but I should take him to America anyway, I enter in the compound and go and sit to chat with Jabou and her daughter who are busy doing laundry and roasting groundnuts for a Ramadan gift. After chatting for awhile, Jabou rises and says she is going to the garden and jokes that I should come help. I call her on her joke and say I will come and try to be useful. She asks again to clarify and make sure I hearing her Wolof or that I am not delusional with the fasting and the heat and what not. I confirm again that I will come and she just laughs and shakes her head, then we are off!
We wind our way through the village, stopping to greet and chat with a couple people. We walk slow as Jabou has to stop every once in awhile to kneel before men or older women in the villages as she greets them, as is Sereer custom. I mumble my greetings as well, feeling awkward that my sweet, strong friend is keeling before men. But Jabou doesn't even think about it, she's been doing it since she was old enough to walk and all the other women do it too, so what is there to think about?
We continue on our way and are joined by other woman as we wind through the village compounds. We chat on the way and all the women are very amused that Jabou has brought her toubab. Possessive form. The women warn me that the work will be painful. I nod in agreement, knowing from experience that I won't get to share in their pain. They will let me try the work a couple times but then will pronounce it to hard for me and they will take over as I stand by helplessly observing.
The chatting turns to why America is sweeter than Gambia. "The work is not heavy there. There is no sickness, no mosquitos. Everyone has money. The sun is not hot." I nod in agreement with some statements and correct the misguided ones, conceding that American mosquitos are nice since they don't carry malaria. We all grow quite after that statement. We are at the end of the rains and malaria is attacking people in droves. Hospitals are filled, medicines is gone and the old and young are dying. We turn the conversation to happier things and MaamJoof says she has 4 children in America, 2 boys and 2 girls. I say she must miss to see them. She just smiles a bewildered smile and shakes her head, "they are in America!" The final prize.
By this time we reach the gardens on the outskirts of the village. A Caterpillar has come through and felled the trees and bush for a new track of land for the upcoming dry season's gardens. The white man's machine has done work in a day that would have taken the women of the village months with their machetes. They marvel at the work machines can do as they surround a couple of the largest trees. Fifty women vigorously chop at the massive tree. Young, old, ancient, babies on their backs, machetes glistening in the hot sun, they chop. The mood is light though the work is heavy. They joke and chat and gossip. They let me try and then we all laugh at my inability to accurately wield a machete. I am no match for the tree so I allow the work to be handed off to more able hands. They seem to enjoy that I try. I chat with the women I know and greet the women I don't.
We are so different, these women and I. Neither one of us has any of the skills of the other. I see these 50 women surrounding a tree, collectively working at a task that will benefit them all. I am filled with conflicting thoughts and emotions. I admire their community, their hard work, their connectedness. But I am saddened that these strong women have to kneel before men, work all day in the hot sun during the fast while the men sit at home. I am angry that they will never read books to their children or have the confidence to say no to their husbands when they are tired of having babies. They pity me too. They are ashamed and shocked at my inability to cook, do laundry by hand, or gut a fish. They love that I love their children but can't understand why, in the name of Allah, that I don't have my own. At my age! We go about life so differently, but we somehow find common ground. These women know their world is changing. They want a different life for their daughters, if not for themselves. Maybe they welcome me into their homes and their lives because they know I am a vehicle, a teacher, a way to help get their children the new life. I don't know if I deserve all that credit. I often feel I learn far more here than I teach. These women remind me to value hard labor, community, support, friendship through bad times and even worse times when you can't feed your kids. Their life is so hard, but they accept it and make the most of it. My life is so easy by comparison. But easy or hard, the lives are interconnected. I can't erase the difficulties from their lives, nor they mine, but together we can get through them by reminding each other in subtle, unspoken ways that there is always another way to approach a task, a problem, the world. And maybe that other way is what we were looking for all along. We just have to be still and listen.

Keeping up with the Saines

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:12:00 +0000

Rachel has recently wrote some awesome entries on her blog about her recent adventures with me and the crazy inhabitants of Saine Kunda in Njongon. Basically everything she says is how I feel about life and challenges here. It is cool to see an outside perspective on my family life too. PaSaine is truly a character and Rachel's post gives good insight into some of his craziness. For those of you who are family and know my Uncle Gunnar Zorn, PaSaine is the Gambian version of Uncle Gun. Priceless.

So check out her blog, it is linked on the left at Rachel and Carson and the entry headline is Wed Aug 29th titled "some updates, stories and a fabulous old man named Pa".

I'll try and not be to terribly lazy with my updates. So I will give a quick rundown of my happenings this summer and what I am getting ready for this coming school term. This summer I got a good chance to take a big step back from work and kinda of just be. I did a couple summer projects to keep me busy and connected to my work but most of my time was spend helping out with the training of the new Ed PCV's, visiting friends to do fun work like paint libraries and make teaching aids and plan workshops and trainings. I also continued to help out once a week at my the Stay Green Foundation training the staff in computers and generally hanging out and eating delicious benachin. I got the chance to head out to one of their villages to see some of their on the ground work and was very impressed with what they are doing out int he communities with farmers setting up orchards, woodlots, gardens and doing environmental education trainings. In addition to this stuff I also took some time out to head up to Dakar for a couple days and also visit some volunteers. But mostly it was a lot of down time in my village, hanging with my family, having some much needed me time and relaxing. The big news of the summer was that we officially got full funding for the Solar Power Project for the schools computer lab!!!!!!!!!!! In fact at one point we had too much money because at about the same time we had funding from two separate organizations. Too much funding is a rare problem and I was a little overwhelmed with it at first but we decided to go with the group who has some other projects in The Gambia and that would be around for the monitoring and evaluation of the project. It was definitely a lot of answered prayers and is a huge lift off my shoulders. A large part of my focus this fall and winter will be purchasing and installing the equipment and training the relevant people to maintain the system. But half the battle is done and I am definitely excited and motivated to make this project a success for this school and these kids.

At the beginning of the summer the idleness was definitely welcome but now that it is getting towards the end of the summer I am definitely ready to get back into action and for the school year to start up again. A huge plus factor to hanging out with the fam all summer and doing some farming (that's right, I used a donkey drawn plow to sow groundnuts...who would have ever thought?) was that my wolof has gotten lots better and I generally feel more connected with my family and with the families and children in my neighborhood. I got to spend some awesome days hanging out with the kids and coloring, reading books or just generally being silly. I got to tutor some of them on simple ABC type stuff and also begged and pleaded until the stepfather of one of the little boys let him enroll in nursery school for this coming year. The little boy, Ammadou, is seven and starting a little bit late but at least he is finally going instead of being stuck at home and going to be the resident small boy and go to the shop a million times a day. Speaking of school, we finally start on Monday, only two weeks later then originally planned, so not to bad considering how stuff rolls here. Ramadan is starting this Thursday too, so Ramadan tummy grumbles and the craziness at the beginning of the school year should be a fun combo. At least it certainly won't be boring. I am fasting this year for the whole month, as opposed to my 2 week attempt last year, so I will be in the same boat as everyone else with lack of energy and motivation and just really desperately wanting a sip of water.

Plans for the coming fall, other then dreading my decision to go without food and water for the day are:

continuing with read alouds during library class, trying to get the class teachers doing some instead of just me. Teachers here are really uncomfortable with being silly and playing with kids so it might be a challenge but reading aloud is just so useful....
getting the community going on the Computer lab renovation, their contribution to the Solar Power Project, so that the space will be safe for electronics. Right now, the roof is separated from the walls by about two feet. This allows for a lovely breeze but also lets in rain, dust, birds, insects....we've got a whole ecosystem in there.
workshops for the teachers of my two schools
helping out a fellow PCV with a basketball female empowerment clinic program for some upcountry communities
Girls Club fun and maybe a sleepover in Kerewan with Rachel's girls
Stay Green Foundation computer training
figuring out life plans for after PC (scary that its only like 10 months away)
whatever else comes across my plate.....

So that is basically what is going on over here in the TG. I also posted pics from our swearing in BBQ for the latest batch of Ed volunteers. Mostly just some pics of fellow PCVs and I trying to have a semi-normal American day. We succeeded, we even had quac!

Love and Peace! Miss ya all!

YaBoi and the Rains.

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 17:34:00 +0000

The rains are a month late. YaBoi, my host mother, remarks on it everyday. Every evening as we sit on the mat in the middle of the compound, relaxing, listening to the radio, looking at the stars. She points to the stars and just mutters to herself..."Taw bi neekut fi wala mungee now, mungee now, The rain is not here but it is coming, it is coming." The power of positive thinking I suppose. Maybe she figures if she believes hard enough, the rains will listen to her plea and come ease the anxieties of thousands of farmers. Maybe she is just making conversation with me and knows that I understand these Wolof words, if not much else. For the rainy season she is growing the tiny red peppers that all women in my village plant in abundance every June. Since the rains have not come, she goes to the garden everyday and waters her plants by hand. Heavy work that is usually done by nature.

YaBoi is tired. It is hard to tell how old she is exactly. Like most people here, she has no idea when she was born and isn't even able to make an estimate. She has had nine children, six have survived and those children are doing well. They are fulfilling the desire that all mothers have for their children - to work hard and have an easier life than their parents before them. She does know that she was born in Senegal though and as a child the rains came in April. Here it is July and she is fetching hundreds of buckets from the well by hand to water the peppers each day. All of this in addition to her normal household tasks of cooking, sweeping, farming, fetching firewood, fetching water for the house, and the countless other tasks in a day that women here do without a peep of complaint. Even PaSaine has noticed that she is tired. He doesn't offer to fetch is own bath water, but still he notices. And that counts for something in a culture where most men wouldn't.

So YaBoi will go on being tired and go on worrying about the rain. Sometimes in the middle of the night the wind rushes in from the coast, rustling the trees and rousing YaBoi from her bed. Every night, she is sure that the gusts of wind signal the long anticipated rain. She rushes from her bed and eagerly puts buckets out to catch the rain water that will surely spill from the rooftops. She secured windows and doors. She covers the firewood. She is always disappointed when she wakes in the morning to find no water in her buckets, her wood bone dry. Yet with every midnight gust, she repeats the same rituals and she waits.

Another night in mid July, sitting out on the mat. Joking, listening, thinking. YaBoi looks at me, and me at Awa, one of my sisters. We are listening to the leaves rustle in the trees. I look at the clouds moving over my stars, the stars I have come to Africa to stare at every night. I say quietly, almost a whisper for fear the ancestors will laugh at this naive toubab who thinks she can predict the weather, "Tey ci gudi, dinna taw, Tonight, it will rain." YaBoi turns to me and chuckles, exchanging knowing glances with Awa. "Iyo" she responds in Sereer "inshalla". Yes, God willing.

That night I hear YaBoi awake with the wind, as she has many nights before. But tonight, the rains come. The next day, we go to the farm.

24, the 4th, and 1 year....

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 13:54:00 +0000

One year ago this week I was on a plane for 22 hours straight and arrived in The Gambia on my 23rd birthday. It was a weird way to spend ones birthday and even weirder to think that a year has gone by since then. If I look back on who I was that week and who I am this week, I think that a lot about how I think has changed, maybe for the better, maybe for the worse - hard to tell at this point. I am still the same person fundamentally but I have learned so much during my first year. I have been exposed to a lot of stuff that has drastically changed how I look or think about situations. How I approach a task, a person or life in general. While not all the changes that I have gone through in this past year may prove to be beneficial for me...at least I am going through them and will hopefully come out a more rounded person. And I don't want to make it seem like, those who knew me a year ago would see a radically different Becca today. I don't think that's true. It just small things. I am a little more wary of things people say, a little less trusting of things taken at face value. I'm a little bit better at staring at stars for a few hours. A little less freaked out if I only accomplish one task in a day. Still terribly freaked out by chickens but goats and donkeys are no big thing. I now understand at a deeper level those lovely buzzwords and what it means to say that "culture matters" or "cultural understanding is important" but I also understand that sometimes no matter how much you want to you can't change some cultural things that make the projects you are working on easier to do - you have to go the long way around them and sometimes that means lots of frustration and sometimes it means failure, but it does not mean that change can't happen someday. Ndanka, ndanka (Slowly, slowly) as we say here.

Some days I feel that all this change is happening really fast and other days I feel like the same old me, still confused about a lot of stuff in life and about life here in TG but willing to still try to figure it out as I go. I guess that is the thing about change, it tends to sneak up on you and before you know it you hear words or opinions coming out of your mouth that you couldn't have fathomed yourself saying a couple months ago. In all I think all this is good for me and it is giving me something to back up some of my opinions. And I'm sure to the delight of my family, maybe moving my views a little bit back to the center. It is a touch hard for "east-coast liberal innocent idealism" in the face of sometimes unmotivated and self-serving people (like people everywhere but yea...) and the knowledge that no one here is actually starving like they would have you believe in the media despite TG being listed as the 163 out of 177 countries on the UN poverty list. So yea, maybe I am just burnt out from the school year or maybe I am getting a bit jaded but my worldview is definitely getting a little more complex.

So for better or for worse, a year later in the Gambia and I am turning 24. I acknowledge that 24 is not old but with my sisters going to middle school next year a little cousins that are perpetually 12 in my mind going to college, friends from high school and college getting married and having babies....for the first time in my life I think I feel a little old. It prob doesn't help that Gambians constantly tease me about being soo old that I will never find a husband at this point or be able to have the 10 kids that Allah wants me to have. It has also occurred to me that at 24 I should prob be getting serious and you know, getting an actual paying job or something. But like my brother has told me "you are not ambitious or so much goal oriented, you are experience oriented" and I guess that is true and I am okay with a life like that.

<---The height of Gambian fashion....Dan in his American flag chaya and Colleen in her clown suit kaftan.

In honor of the Fourth of July the lovely Julbrew Brewery, The Gambia's only source of beer, is throwing PCVs and all you can drink party because we are such dedicated customers :). It should be a fun time and definitely a little ridiculous but we will all try our past to do our nation proud while not being terribly obnoxious in the process. On a more serious note about the 4th, a year ago my mom and I were sitting on the deck enjoying some lovely mid-Atlantic summer sun and leafing through the little book that PC gives to families to help them cope with their departing loved one. Mom came upon a passage that said something like "don't be alarmed if your loved one expresses critical views of American upon their return to country". My mom just chuckled and said "oh great, how much more critical could you get." After a year in country, contrary to that little books warning I think I love my country and have more respect for it then I did a year ago. I love that I am from a nation and a culture that encourages me to develop my mind and question things around me regardless of my gender or age, I am proud to be from a country that respected my rights as a child and now as a woman. Things in America is far from perfect, but we get to shout that from the roof tops any way we want and as often as we want! I am just thankful that I can speak my opinions and hold those in power accountable with out fear or anxiety. So as of right now I like America a whole lot.

Happy 4th! Enjoy the fireworks and America! Love you all!

Cashew nut and mango heaven!

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 13:50:00 +0000

Supposedly the hot/dry season has came and went and we are due to get rain in a couple weeks or so. It seems like the hot/dry season completely skips my tiny village of Njongon that is about 14 k from the coast. I don't know actual temperatures during the day because I don't have any means to measure it but my best guess is that is has been about 95 F in the sun, 90 in the shade - but that is dry heat which is lovely. At night it gets down to a frigid temp of probably 80 F that believe it or not sends me indoors to keep warm. My entire sense of temperature is completely skewed now.

For obvious reasons, I am loving the mild temps of my coastal village. Just 20 k inland, temps are soaring well above 110 F and I have heard even 130 F way up in Basse, the city furthest upcountry. Even though we don't get the brutal heat that most people are suffering through right now, we get all the great perks like buckets full of cashew fruit and nuts and mangoes. My compound, and village in general, is overflowing with mangoes and cashews from all the trees we are lucky enough to still have. The worst effects of deforestation have not really come to Njongon yet and we still have a fair amount of tree cover and orchards. After a potentially disastrous allergy scare I have determined that while I can never eat cashew fruit (look like miniature apples but with a tart flavor and juice that sucks the rest of moisture out of you mouth, weird but tasty) again I am not in fact allergic to mangoes. I can eat fully ripe ones just not any young ones or my face swells up and I get a gnarly rash. So now that I have figured out the trick to enjoying the mangoes and not getting sick, I eat about 4 a day.

Another current favorite past times is collecting cashew nuts. It always feels like a very typical "down home on the farm" activity when I do it, but then again I do live in a tiny African village. Its great fun to go out into the orchards and collect as many as you can carry and then bring them back to the compound and burn them over and open flame. Burning the outer shell releases the gas that is inside and also poisonous, so as I've been reminded many times..."Burn outside the compound or you'll kill the chickens!" After the shells are burnt, you crack them open to reveal the nut inside, dry the nuts in the sun and then enjoy a tasty and nutritious treat! The only downside is that the whole process takes awhile so now in true Gambian fashion, I send a small boy to the bush and have him burn them for me.

Aside from eating massive amounts of cashews and mangoes, I am super busy with the end of the school term. I helped out another PCV with a workshop for teachers on alternative discipline techniques that went well and I've also been hard at work trying to drum up funds for the school's solar panels. We are trying to get the grant proposal out to as many people as possible in the hopes that we will be able to raise enough money. Hopefully, it will all come together and I can see at least the money come through within my service time if not the actual system. Next week is a big week as my school is having the official "Speech and Prize Giving Ceremony" for the grade nine students that are graduating from our basic cycle school and going on to senior secondary school or just life, as compulsory education ends here after grade nine. Gambians absolutely love their programs (Gambian English for any special event, essentially a party) and the day is sure to be filled with lots of elaborate speeches, certificates for everything imaginable, food, music and fun. It will also be a bit sad as it I will have to say goodbye to a lot of grade nine students that have participated in my Girl's Club and that I have gotten quite attached to. Also my host sister Njemmeh is graduating so once she leaves the compound will officially be childless (it's a good thing every other compound in the village is overflowing with kids so I don't have to worry about getting lonely any time soon. I've definitly collected my own little broad of minerature friends and it is great to come back to village and be greated by lots of little hands and smiling faces!). In addition to the graduation ceremony, next week also is the big week when the new group of Education Trainees get into country! It is crazy to think that almost a year ago I was in their shoes. Some days it seems like so long ago and that I have come so far and then other days I realize that I am still so far from understanding everything here and really knowing what is going on. I am excited to meet the new group and help out with their training! But like all happy things, sad things seem to creep in as well and with the arrival of the new group I will also have to say goodbye to a lot of really good friends, leaders and sources of inspiration in the exiting education group. Happy and sad, can't have one without the other but each makes the other all the more poignant.

Fun Language Tidbit of the Day: I learned to speak Wolof, but my village is a Serrer village and most people speak Serrer to each other unless they are talking to an outsider and they often mix Wolof and Serrer together which, along with my laziness, may be one of the reason why my Wolof skills are not so hot. Anyway, one day I had a grade 4 class for library and I was reading them a picture book. They were being very well behaved even though they can't understand all the English in the book. Until, I got to the word "shoes". I forget what the story was about but it had the words "shoes" several times and every time I said the word the class would erupt into nervous giggles and uncomfortable glances. I had no idea what was so funny and went the rest of the period completely ignorant because none of the grade 4 students would fess up to what was so funny. Later, with the help of another teacher, I learned exactly what they found so funny. Turns out "shoes" in Serrer means anus. Nice. At least that is one English word that they'll never forget.

That's all for now! Be bineen yoon ci jama! (Till next time, in peace!)

Words are strange and hard, but a definte plus....

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Sat, 19 May 2007 16:28:00 +0000

"Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you." - Harold Bloom

Living without electricity and because of my own semi-introvert nature, I've been reading a lot of books while I am here. On a lot of days I come home from school and just need a couple hours to decompress after the craziness that is the Gambian school day and feel American for a bit. A lot of times I just need peace and quiet to get the droan of 60 third graders repeating "Big A, Small A, Big B, Small B..." out of my head. Much like in America, my release is immersing myself in a book and just letting everything else that is on my mind melt away. I read a lot at home, but here I just have so much more time to read because there is no electricity and often nothing else to do if you just need some me time. And while I have gotten a lot better since being here about "just being", I still can't sit around and stare at the goats for hours on end like my host dad, I need an activity. My host family here has caught on to the fact that I like to read and always poke fun at me and how much I like to read - basically they call me a dork. Reading for pleasure is still a foreign concept for most people here, no matter how educated they may be. A few people do it but not any where near on the scale that people read in other areas of the world. Reading is largely viewed as a chore, something that you are forced to do in school, and something that you need to get through the more complicated tasks of life but not something that is enjoyable and certainly not a way to spend ones free time. As a result, lots of my Gambian friends think I the way I spend my time is strange. I don't want people to think that I just sit in my hut and read all day, I don't. The majority of my free time is spent chatting with teachers at school, playing various board games, learning tie and dye, gardening, chatting with my host family, playing with or tutoring neighborhood kids, doing yoga, collecting cashews nuts or mangoes, making teaching aids for school or more chatting. But also reading. Plus it is nice intellectual stimulation and gets me away from the less then thrilling Wolof converstaions that I am capable of such as "Yanngi toog, waaw manngi toog." (You are sitting, yes I am sitting.)

I think the reason most Gambians that I encounter don't enjoy reading is for the simple reason that reading is viewed as work, not play. When children learn to "read" in the schools here they are not really taught to read. They are taught to memorize the way specific words look and then repeat them. People call this reading, even though it is not. A student can "read" if they have seen the word before but if they encounter a word that they have never seen before or do not see often, they have no clue. Most people have no grasp of the concept that individual letters have sounds that are blended together to form words. They just think sounds exist that represent a whole word. The lack of phonics instruction is one of the major challenges facing the education system here and it is just a vicious cycle of illiteracy. If the teachers can't read properly how can they teach the students to read? And if the students get promoted all the way through school and can not really read, who will be the teachers for the next generation except the very students who couldn't read in the first place? Ahhh, the challenges of education in a developing country, or any country for that matter. A lot of American schools have huge issues with authentic literacy. I can see some of the problems and gaps in the system but as of now I have no solutions. Hopefully someday....

Semi-related....I have recently started to teach my host sister Ansel to read. Ansel is an amazing and very inspirational Gambian woman. She has her own business, owns land in Senegal where she wants to build a renters compound for alternative income, is fluent in English and is just a very empowered, confidant woman. Despite all this, she is illiterate because she never went to school. Instead she helped her father and mother on the farm in order for the family to have enough money to send the other five children to school. She is semi functionally literate and has some numeracy skills because she is used to handling money and using a cell phone but has trouble with doing math quickly. Ansel is very intelligent and I really think that she will be able to catch on to reading quickly, even in our first couple of lessons I was surprised by how quickly she was grasping things. The key to her success, like in most endeavors, will be her motivation and how bad she wants it. She has always been friends with teachers and with Peace Corps Volunteers and others who could have helped her to learn to read but she was never really motivated. She says that now she is really ready and serious about learning. So hopefully we can make some progress and at least get her to a functional level of literacy so she can keep accurate books for her business, read order forms for supplies and feel comfortable with reading labels and signs and what not. At this point in the endeavour, I am cautiously optimistic about the whole process. I am starting her off with basic phonics - just letter/sound recognition and then moving on to word families and then focusing on words that are relevant to her life and work so she can see quicker results and see how helpful reading will be. But it all really comes down to her motivation and how much effort she is willing to put in it to it. By the time I leave next summer I am hoping to get her feeling comftorable with reading and keeping more organized books for the business, inshalla.

So we met this rasta named Steve....And other Ghana happenings

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 18:58:00 +0000

I have been looking foward to this trip to Ghana for so long that I can't believe it is finally over and I am already back in The Gambia ready to start the last term of the school year. We spent 12 whirlwind days hiking, swimming, riding, drinking, gazing in amazement, eating, laughing, and rowing our way through Ghana. It was an an amazingly packed but fun filled 12 days and while I am not necessarily well rested, I am refreshed and rejuninated and ready to plunge back in PC life here in TG. But first a quick recap of the trip....

Day 1: We arrive in Accra after a long flight that goes from Banjul to Dakar to Freetown, Sierra Leone to Monrovia, Liberia (weird to actually be on the ground in these two countries given the history. Monrovia's airport is really just one big UN camp with lots of helicopters and tents) and then finally touches down in Ghana. Despite the roundabout route, it all pays off in the end cause we get fed after each stop so we arrive in Ghana with bellies full of croisants and serious coffee buzzes. Our good luck in the traveling department starts almost immediatly as we find a hotel, figure out the bus situation and find an amazing Mexican resturant all in the span of about 2 hours. After enjoying a nice mexican dinner, which is a very rare commodity in West Africa we head back to our lovely budget hotel, enjoy some Star beer and get some sleep to prepare for the week ahead.

Day 2: Our bus to Hohoe in the eastern part of the country near Lake Volta doesn't leave until 3:00 so we putz around Accra for the first part of the day, not really having enough time to do anything to cool since the city is so sprawling. We do manage to check out Independence Sqaurewhich is pretty much just a massive amount of brown concrete with a statue and flags but Jim and I do meet some charmingly polite Ghanaian school girls. When they first greeted us we were a little defensive because we are a bit used to be assaulted with outlandish requests and questions but these girls were delightful and set the tone for the rest of the trip as we continued to meet exceedingly polite and friendly Ghanians almost across the board. We chill at the bus station for awhile and eat delicious street food (the variety and tastiness is amazing!) while we plan our attack for getting a seat on the bus. We are so accustomed to the crazy and somewhat desperate rules of public transport in The Gambia that we are suprised but pleased to find that people in Ghana can actually queue half way decently. The only decidedly West African thing about the bus trip to Hohoe was that it took forever and half the bus was filled with an array of plastic furniture (there has just got to be a better way to transport goods then buying half the seats on a bus!). I enjoyed the a good 3 hours of the 5 hour bus trip as it provided our first glimpses of the beautiful, green countryside of Ghana, but not before you got through the sprawling suburbs of Accra. The infrastructure and highway system was almost as beautiful as the countryside after 9 months in The Gambia with its nearly absent level of infrastructure.
After a very long bus ride we arrive in Hohoe, nab a hotel and head to bed early to prepare for a big day of hiking the next day.

Day 3: We wake up early and grab a tros-tros (Ghanaian name for bush taxi, I find it funny that all the WA countries give somewhat silly double names to their bush taxis) to Wli to start our whirlwind tour of eco-tourism in Ghana. We arrive in the very friendly and immaculatly clean village of Wli nestled in the moutains of the Volta Region along the Togo border and head to the tourist office to arrange for a hike. Despite it being Palm Sunday in a very Christian nation, we find a guide to take us on the hour and half hike up to the upper falls. The hike was great, albiet strenous and very steep, and well worth the effort when we got to the top and took in the awesome views and pristine waterfall from a fresh water spring at the summit of the mountain. We spent some time relaxing and swimming in the upper falls, drank the icy water (we did think giardia at first but our hearty stomachs pulled through and none of us got sick), and splashed in the falls. After the lovely isolation of the upper falls we checked out the lower falls that was very crowded with Ghanians enjoying the weekend. The majority of them also happened to be very drunk which lead to groping which lead to slapping and then we headed back to finish the hike. Exhausted after our steep hike, well above see level in very humid weather, we came back to the hotel with high hopes of a shower, beer and food. We had sucess with the beer and food but didn't get water for a while. But being smelly didn't stop us from enjoying the spicy fufu and the multiple varieties of cold beer.

Day 4: After spending the night in Hohoe we set off semi-early to head to do a hike at Mt Adafajato, which is said to be the highest mountain in West Africa. We were all pretty drained from the hike the day before and the mountain didn't really look all that much higher then then the mountain the previous day so we opted for a shorter hike through cocoa and coffee fields to an enchanted waterfall tucked deep inside the understory of a decidious rainforest. The hike was really cool cause it was just the four of us and a guide and the trail was really overgrown because not many people take it so it felt a bit more adventurous and it as just cool to see such a dense, thriving understory. After the hike we spent the majority of the day trying to get transport out of the backwater village where the hike started from. We ended haveing to walk a bit and then found some awesome beans at another tiny village where we managed to find a ride our to the main rode. Unfortunalty that ride, which at the time seemed heaven sent, ended up getting our driver arrested when we got to a police check point because the care was "overloaded". Anyone who has traveled in a developing country knows that there is just no such thing as overloading a vehiclem, so I think the police were just bored and looking to pick on people. The whole arresting fiasco ultimatly led to the cabbie bribeing his way out of an expensive fine with Carson there as moral/financial support but it also led to us finding really cheap transport to our next destination thanks to a rambling drunk man on the side of the street who kept ruining the scams of the other drivers who were trying to give us toubab prices and gave us the real prices and telling us in detail how to get to our next destination the cheapest possible way. We arrive at our next destination very easily and are even lucky and hit a market day and thus avoid a 5k walk. Next up is Tafi Atome Monkey Sanctuary, and we are all excited to check out this site and have fun with the monkeys. Especially Carson.

Day 5: After a night of relaxing at the guest lodge and a glorious rainstorm (you never imagine that you would miss precipitation till you go 6 months without it) we wake with the sun in order to go feed the monkeys while there nearby the village forging for food. It was really cool to just stand there and hold out a bananna and have these little human-like hands and eyes come within inches of your face, staring at you right in the eye and peeling the bananna one peel at a time, till success and the little critter snatches the prized fruit and scampers up to the treetops to enjoy his reward. The consensus at the end of the feeding session was that a) opposable thumbs are kick ass b)monkeys make grown men giggle like school girls and c) science is cool. But we just didn't get to fufill every Westerners fascination of monkeys we also learning a lot too. In all the monkey sanctuary has close to 400 Mono monkeys and the village started the sanctuary in partnership with Peace Corps and other divisions of the Ghanaian government to protect the monkeys from getting hunted for food. Like most West African villagers, the people of Tafi Atome were orginally animist and worshipped the monkeys as protectors of the village and the people. After Chrisitianity was introduced, many people converted but about 30% of the village population remains animist. And if Ghana is anything like Gambia, a lot of animist traditions and beliefs get meshed with the introduced religion to form a hybrid version of Islam or Christianity that is uniquelly West African. After our early morning nature and monkey walk we make the 5k trek out of Tafi Atome to the main road to start our marathon travel day to Cape Coast. Luckily for us public transport in Ghana is a delight and we enjoy the beautiful ride and tasty street food on the way. We make it to Cape Coast just before night fall and navigate our way through gritty and touristy-leechy Cape Coast which is a bit of a rude awakening compared to the peaceful friendliness of the East. Eventually with my uncanny nack for navigating through unknown cities we fend off the bumsters and make our way to the lovely Sammosa Hotel. We arrive dirty, smelly and hungry and collectivly suffer until we finally manage to have a very late but very delicious late dinner.

Day 6: We wake up semi-early and very eagerly head out of the tourist trap of Cape Coast and head north to Kankum National Park to do some more hiking and do the famed canopy walk through the top of the rainforest. After eating some really funky fufu at a road side stand we head up to the park and our pleasantly suprised to see an American like national park with a great informational exhibit and reception area. We set off for the hike through the canopy walk with a small group. I must admit while the canopy walk was cool I was a little underwhelmed but the two adorable biracial East Londoner children who were in our group that kept declaring they are "braver then superman" made the experience. After the canopy walk we headed back to Cape Coast to get transport further down the coast. Rachel and I found a really cool fair trade women's co-op called Global Mama's (www.globalmams.com) (how very hippy-Peace Corpy of us) and did some shopping before grabbing a taxi to Elmina. The taxi ride was really short so we got to check into the hotel and the go tour Elmina Castle that afternoon. Elmina Castle is the biggest former slaving post on the West African coast and was the export point for over 300,000 slaves during it history. We got a very informative tour and got an extensive tour including, the holding rooms, the room of no return and the officers rooms on the upper floors. The overall experience was a very strange mixed up jumble of feelings and reactions from appalled, shame, and sadness to being defensive. I was also a bit suprised to find out that among the 30 or so people in our tour group from all different countries, the four Americans were the most well informed on the history and consequences of slavery. I guess our education system has gotten one thing right. Following the tour we did some exploring of our own and enjoyed the sunset from the top of the castle which was very picturesque. A dance troupe at the resturant below us started warming up for a nightly performance and busted out some of our pathetic African dance moves on the top of Elmina Castle which may have been slightly culturally insensitive but we needed to blow of steam after a heavy experience and let loose. Plus no one could see us so we figured we were safe.

Day 7: After a good and informative day at Elmina we headed to our next destination further down the coast, Princess Town. On the way to Princess Town we made one of the most important discoveries of our 12 day journey. The sell ice cream in a bag for the equivilant of 20 cents! We were appalled that it took us till day 7 to find out this very pertinent information but we tried out best to make up for lost days the rest of the trip. Living in a ridiculously dry and hot area with no electricity causes one to become a glutton for anything below the freezing point. Ice cream (even bad ice cream) no longer becomes a treat it becomes the reward that gets you through a month of sweaty frustration at site...I really can't stress the importance enough in the life of African Peace Corps Volunteers. So after the ice cream in a bag rocks our collective worlds we continue to Princess Town which is a small village on the coast, 18 k in from the main road. There is a really old German slave fort there but it isn't all that important in the grand scheme of hisotry and has gotten a bit rundown. I thought it was delightly rundown compare the pristine whitewashed walls of Elmina. Since PT is off the main road a bit it dosent' get the huge influx of visitors like Elmina or Cape Coast gets so it is more quite a relaxing. Since I am getting tired of writing and you of reading, I am going to give a quick rundown of the 2 days we spend in the village. We meet Joseph and Grace the ultimate caretakeing duo of the fort, explore the pristine beaches (some of the most beautiful I have ever seen), the guys despertly try to prove which one is more evoluntionary fit by trying to crack open coconuts for juice - interestingly the gay boy wins, we eat delicious red-red, sleep at the fort and tell lots of ghost stories over warm Castle stout to make the experience of sleeping in a former slave fort even creepier.
Day 8: Jospeh the forts caretaker helps us arrange a canoe trip up the river with Rasta Steve and we spend the morning paddeling up river in a dugout canoe to a couple of moonshine palm wine stills in the bush. The stills were really cool and very West Virgina like. Carson was super excited to see the stills cause like the Chemistry dork he is, he used to make his own homemade beer back in the States. While at the stills we also get to taste some of the palm liqour straight out of the distiller. It was the 95% proof and to drink it people cut it with water but it still is some of the strongest liquor I have ever had. Rasta Steve insisted that the four of us must finish the cup before we could leave so we pony up and get it done. We also got to taste a drop each of the 95% proof stuff before it got cut with water and even just one drop was enough to take your breath away. And all this boozing at 9 am! Needless to see the dugout canoe ride back was interesting. After our canoe trip we chill at the fort for a bit and rest while we avoid the mid-day sun. Later in the day we head to the beach and brave the walk across the mouth of river at the ocean to the deserted side of the beach and hike to the point and discover even more pristine, empty beaches and marvel at the beautifulness all around us, splash in the waves for a bit and then head back to cook dinner. That night we pull the beds outside and sleep under the stars listening to the waves crash on the rocks below us. Good stuff indeed!

Day 9: The happy troupe becomes one less as Jim leaves to go visit his friend from home who is a Peace Corps Vol in Ghana while myself and the marrieds (which would be weird if they weren't such cool people) head further West down the coast to Axim for some more beach fun. Since we have been staying in budget accomodations the whole trip we have been flying under the radar of the Easter vacationers but when we get to the beach front hotel in Axim that we are treating ourselves to for the Easter weekend, we find that it is all booked up. But like the resourceful PCV's we are we convince the staff to let us squat in the internet cafe of their somewhat fancy beach resort. Super ghetto I admit, but we get to enjoy all the amenities of fancy resort with good food and bumster free beaches and still convince ourselves that we are not sellouts cause we aren't paying full price. We spend two nights at the beach, relaxing and I also manage to break a body board and slice a huge cash in my finger on a massive wave while trying to show Carson my wicked boogie boarding skills and Rach has a near death expierence in the gigantic surf. We also meet a really great woman named Lori who is traveling through West Africa and end up having great, life and career changing converstions with her throughout our stay. And we also have lots of time for books and coffee which makes us all happy.

Day 11: We head back to Accra and do some last minute shopping for yobal (traveling gift that is required whenever you return from even a short trip, you have to bring something for the people of your compoud. Its considered really bad form if you don't) for the peeps back in TG, eat delicious Mexican food and crash early. The last day in country we make a mad dash downtown to find some authentic woven Kinteh cloth that is the hallmark of Ghanian Asanti culture since a lot of stalls were closed the previous day because of Easter Monday. We find some fairly quickly and have a good time haggling with the lady. In Ghana, people name their children after the day of the week on which they were born. Apparently the name for females born on Monday is Ajua. It is a joke in Ghana that people born on Mondays are cheap. Now lets put that togather, Ajuas are cheap (says the name out loud, it will help) it matches up with an ethnic sterotype we have in the West. The lady doing the selling is joking with us as we try to get a lower price and says to Rachel: "What are you, Ajua? That price is to low." The three of us stand there with a look of baffled shock and all the sudden Rachel just busts out with "Are you calling me a Jew?" (which she is). The woman looks at us, equally as baffled and starts to apologize. The akward moment is quickly lost in the haggling but the three of us found it quite funny that a Ghanian lady called Rach a cheap Jew. Maybe it was a little "had to be there funny", but oh well. So we buy our Kinteh cloth and happy with our purchases then head to the airport to catch our flight only to find that they sell kinteh cloth at the airport for roughly the same price we paid. We had a more authentic experience though....haha, right?

So that is the very long rundown of the Ghana trip and if you have gotten through this whole post I am impressed. The trip was great, and just the refresher that I need to dive back into work here in Gambia. It was great to see how far Ghana has come and that development in West Africa is possible with good leadership and citizens that take pride in their country. Maybe someday Gambia can be where Ghana is now. Inshalla, inshalla ("God willing" in arabic and the standard response for everything in this very fatalistic culture).

General Updates: Girls Club Sleepover, Wind Turbines and Observations

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 15:33:00 +0000

Greetings again from an increasingly hot and dry Gambia! It has been awhile since I have updated everyone about my work and general goings on in village so I will do my best to give a general overview of what I have been up to for the past couple of months in my work life without being to boring.

Girls Club:
This past weekend, a fellow PCV, Rachel, and I organized a sleepover extravaganza for our Girls Clubs at my school. We has about 60 girls come for a workshop on girls empowerment, with sessions on adjusting to senior secondary school, setting goals, career planning, appropriate relationships and supporting each other and being a good friend. At night we also had a big campfire and I convinced some of my rasta/bumster friends from Barra (the ferry crossing from Banjul town) to come up and drum. So everybody got the chance to dance and sing and wear fancy clothes, eat good food and also learn, meet new friends and hopefully be empowered. As I spend more time in village and working with the girls and also just interacting, I am finding that a majority of my time and energy is spent being somewhat of a gender activist. It is something I feel strongly about and think is really needed here so I am enjoying it even though it comes with a luandry list of annoyances and problems. Those who know me well know that I am noting if not outspoken about my opinions, which can be a fault or a strength at any given moment, so it is hard for me to stand by and listen or watch blatant discrimination based on sex without saying something or trying to provoke thought. I definitly try to do so in a culturally sensitive way and try to just pose questions or scenerios to get people thinking in a different way. There is definilty a women's rights movement going on here but it's power is largly confined to the city. I am lucky to know and be friends with some awesomely empowered Gambian women (the two I am closest to being my host sister Ansel - who operates her own business and owns property all while being illiterate and Haddy Choi - my counterpart for Girls Club and a Maths/Science teacher which is still very rare) so they give me the hope that these girls lives can be different then their mothers lives of endless farming, cooking, cleaning and birthing without any say in the matter.

Computer Lab:
Work with the computer lab has been at a virtual stand still for the past couple months and I didn't realize how long it had been until I went in there to find the place incased in dust when by some untimly will of Allah the school bought fuel. Interestingly, Allah's timing happened to conincide with the delivery of a VCR and DVD player the volunteer before me secured for the school for educational and income generation purposes (think outdoor movies with 500 people gathered around a 19' screen, charge a couple dalasi per head and it comes out to a nice profit for the school). So anyway, I have been unable to do anything with the computer lab because the school can never afford or is never willing to buy fuel to operate the generator. And I refuse to buy fuel on principal, plus it is expensive and our generator is about the opposite of efficient. So despite all these frustrations, I still have hope for the computer lab and have been working on the solar grant, which is finally finished and ready to be stamped and sent. We recently had a British ex-pat visitor to the school who came to give us an estimate on a wind turbine to provide alternative power (as opposed to solar power) and he made it seem like a pretty feasible option since Njongon is so close to the coast and is windy throughout the year. The estimate he gave us also has the total cost working out to less then that of a solar power system, plus this guy lives in Gambia and is the friend of a teacher so he volunteered to help us with the installation and maintence. In light of that visit, I need to edit the grant a bit to include the wind power option. Inshalla (God willing), I will get the grant written and delivered before I leave for Ghana on Friday.

Library:
The library is going well, nothing to drastically different or exciting to report on here. Just endless amounts of encouragment and reminders to the Librarian, my counterpart, Gasu to check in books properly and make sure things are left orderly; books stacked or on shelfs and chairs pushed in at the end of the day. I also am still doing the read alouds for grades 2, 3 and 4 when they come to library class with the goal of having them hear correct English spoken and learn to appreciate books and how they are to be read. Its going well but in the beginning it kind of backfired. After I read them the story I told them to go ahead and look at the books for the rest of the period. More then one child proceeded to open a book and hold it up to the side and present the pictures to those around here, I guess thinking that is how it was done or just playing an innocent game of imitate the teacher. It was cute, but they have since caught on a bit more about how books are to be read. They love the pictures, reading is a bit tough though because they can only read by memorization and have no idea how to go about sounding words out. I am going to try and start doing some phonics training with the teachers at the school in the hopes of lessening that problem but it is really deep seeded so I don't know how sucessful I will be. Can't hurt to try though! We only have one term of school left for the year, and throughout the year a good number of books have been lost to the homes of grade 3 students who thought they were clever by trying to return a book they never borrowed in the first place or have been loved a little to much and thus destroyed. The majority of the books are pretty old and beat up when we get them so its not suprising that they fall apart. I am hoping to get some books from the Book Drive Mama Spotts and Linds and Lauren have headed up back home to replenish. This summer I am hoping to spruce up the library a bit and do some painting of teaching aids on the walls to make it a more pleasant place and more educational.

Stay Green Foundation:
I haven't been to the office in a couple of weeks because of schedulng conflicts but I hope to get back soon. I hooked the NGO up with some Enviornment volunteers who are in a better and more qualified position to help them with their extension work in villages but I hope to still go once a week to continue training the secrataties in computer applications and to help Baboucarr (the Director) with organizational and manegerial stuff.

Teacher Training:
I continue to do informal teacher training at my school, St. Michael's and at a nearby school, Mbollet Ba. Recently I have been doing follow up on the workshop material I presented at the begining of term on integrating games and activities into the classroom. I have been doing observations of teachers in the classroom to see if they are actually implemented some of the ideas. So far nobody, except for one grade 2 teacher who had the kids act out an awesome drama based on an Englsih story they read, have really shown that they are implementing anything. I am only half way through the teachers though so I am holding out hope for the upper grades. It is still good to see how they are teaching and make some one on one suggestions. I observed one teacher and had to sit through a lesson where she was trying to get the kids to do subtration with borrowing. She was calling kids up to the board to solve, which is fine, but then when a student got it wrong she had them move to the side and another student came up to try. When a student finally got it right, the reward was that he or she got to beat the students who got it wrong three time on the hand with a switch! It was rather hard to sit through and hard to get through to the teacher that is not an okay classroom management technique and that perhaps maybe the students are clamoring to participate just so they can beat each other on the hand. That was by far one of the worst classroom displays I have seen, and the majority are not nearly that exciting or horrifying, but are rather just boring. Thankfully there are those grade 2 teachers that come up with a great activity for their students that is fun and educational all at the same time, completly on their own. We just started our spring break, but when third term gets going I want to try and implement a quiz competition of sorts to encourage students to study in a positive way. Hopefully, it will work out as planned, fingers crossed.

So that is the big work picture over the last couple of months. But enough thinking about work for now, I am officially on vacation and am heading for 10 days in Ghana on Friday!

Wonderland at last: Dakar Craziness

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 10:08:00 +0000

A couple weeks ago I head north to Dakar, Senegal to play some good ol' fashioned softball at the West African International Softball Tournament (WAIST). The event is hosted by the large ex-pat community in Dakar and PCV's from Mali, Gambia, Senegal, and Mauritania as well as several teams of ex-pats gathered for a big weekend of American-style fun. We stayed at the homes of ex-pats and it was nice and a little surreal to be back in an American-like house, thinking in American prices and being a tourist again. The weekend was a lot of fun and I got to do a bit of sightseeing in addition to playing softball (Team Gambia A came in 4th!) and meeting other PCV's and people working in the foreign service and at NGO's.

I thought Dakar was an awesome city and I loved being back in the hustle and bustle of a big city. Dakar, and Senegal in general, is a pretty stark change from The Gambia even though the two countries share the same geography and essentially the same culture. French and infrastructure seem to be the two major differences. As soon as we crossed the border into Senegal (a mere 12 k from my village) you immediately notice the smooth, lined roads with electrical lines everywhere as opposed to the Gambian side with it's huge, crater-like potholes in the roads or dirt paths to the side of the original road that drivers have carved out as a better option then destroying their cars on the hopelessly uneven pavement and vast darkness only to be interrupted by dots of light on the horizon from private generators. To be fair, Gambia is gearing up a rural electrification project and slowly paving roads and I am sure rural Senegal is darkness as well. It was a five hour ride to Dakar from the border so I got the chance to see a lot of the countryside of Senegal, which is essentially the same thing I see everyday now that it is the dry season - endless expanses of brown grass with few trees highlighting the dangerous levels that deforestation has reached in this region. Related to the infrastructure disparity, I noticed that Senegal had towns much more frequently with actual concrete buildings, where Gambia just has a lot of small villages and no big regional cities like a Koalack - a city we passed through on the way that rival's Gambia's national capital in size comparison. Seeing how large Koalack alone was, was a bit of a shock since I have been living in such rural conditions for the past 7 months, despite only living 10K from the country's capital.

Koalack has nothing on Dakar though - the population of Dakar alone is more then the entirety of The Gambia! The traffic in Dakar was crazy and it took us almost an house to navigate through the city to our destination along the coast. As disorienting as it was, it was also great to be back in the big city atmosphere I love so much. I don't know what my fascination with cities is - maybe the vibrancy, architecture, sharp contrasts, culture, non-stop pace, diversity - who knows, I just know I thrive being in that environment. I actually enjoyed sitting in the traffic as it let me absorb more of what was going on around me, then having it all whizz by. The city was teeming with people - most trying to hauck their wares off on tourists like me. Dealing with the same sort of interaction almost everyday in The Gambia allowed me to be a lot more patient with them hen I probably would have been and I even got to joke with a few in Wolof - which thoroughly confused them: a white person that can speak Wolof but not French?! Some actually laughed at me when I said I didn't hear French.

While in the city, I got to see a lot of cool colonial architecture, eat delicious non-African food (including french pastry and bread!) and feel a bit more American then I have been had the chance to in recent months. It was a nice break from my reality here and a good re-charge. Even though I loved my time in Dakar, I was glad to return to my village and the peace and quiet. It was also nice to see everyone in village again, as I had been gone the week before traveling to Dakar to attend a workshop for the NGO I work with. It was a nice feeling to be missed by my host-family, kids at school and teachers - it makes me feel like maybe I am actually a part of this community and not always an outsider. I shift between moments of feeling fully included and fully isolated - it's a strange existence, confusing and it's unlikely to be remedied any time soon, if ever. One of the goals of being a PCV is, of course, cultural integration but sometimes cultural and racial (value being placed on you because of the color of your skin) differences seem so vast I think true inclusion s just a naive fantasy. A great goal but not something I will ever achieve because I can't change the privilege that my country of birth and skin color has granted me in this world. Despite this feeling, I still think that what I am doing in the village and in this country as value and is a worthy endeavor. Just slap a sticker on my forehead that says "Idealist", I'm okay with that. Plus, nothing worth doing is ever easy.....right? I am learning a great deal and also teaching a great deal about realities of life in the West and here and how the two worlds collide. An almost nightly ritual in my compound is to play "20 Questions about America/The World" as we sit around the fire and chat. Even though we play this game on almost a daily basis, the answers I give never cease to amaze and shock the listener whether I am insisting that Americans do indeed work for their money or that the Earth rotates around the sun and while it's dark in The Gambia, it is still daytime in America. I don't think the people asking these questions are unintelligent, I just think the misconceptions or misinformation stems from years of speculation and tall takes. On the contrary, the majority of the people I know here are extremely intelligent and I am humbled over and over again by the fact that 7 year-olds can speak three languages fluently (adults usually six) while I still struggle to form coherent sentences in Wolof after 7 months! And my heart is overcome with warmth when my host-father returns from the village bantaba proclaiming to me that today he was a teacher, clasping a scrap of paper with french scribbled on it. Today, he taught the other old men of the village about how HIV/AIDS is transmitted. Hearing him explain the methods of transmission to me in his broken by Gambian English, I almost hugged the man but resisted as that would break about 7 taboos. His recent leap into the non-formal education sector is also great in light of the recent news in from the The Gambia's fearless commander in chief. Google for details, as it is to political to get into here.

So, all in all, Gambia continues to be awesome, confusing, challenging, growth-inspiring, fun, and enlightening experience and I'm thankful weekly, if not daily, for my oppurtunity to be here, doing this work, meeting awesome, inspiring people and experiencing life.

Jamma rek/Peace only!

Behind the Tats: Fula Scars

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 08:54:00 +0000

I don't realy know what we were thinking; fresh wounds when the Harmattan winds were blowing down off the Sahara - rendering everything and everyone a red and dusty blur. I don't know that the rainy season would have been better - nothing heals because of the perpetual dampness that settles over the entire region. Wounds just fester until even the tinest knick gets infected. So it's a toss up between which season is more favorable and the season in which you are in always seems the most unforgiving.

Despite this, the five of us converged on Wassu, CRD almost exactly six months to the day that we arrived in country. Our hair-brained scheme seemed simple enough - go to Wassu, track down the woman who will cut our skin open with a bitik (corner shop) razor blades and then shove peanut ash in the fresh wound, bond over shared experiences then continue traveling up country to visit Basse. Simple right? Well, like everything in this country, the process turned out to be a little less bullet proof then we had envisioned - especially since we had no idea what the woman's name was, where her compound was or really how to communicate effectively despite having all three languages represented in our little band of explorers.

Eventually we figured out where the probable location was and managed to get a small-girl to show us the way to the compound. When we arrived we were greeted by two old men who were very excited to see PCV's as they no longer have one in Wassu. The men were extremely helpful and the compound we were looking for was right across the path from theirs. One of the men sent a child into the fields to fetch the woman and later helped us translate as most of the words for requesting scars was out of our vocab range. While we waited for the woman to return from the fields, we sat under the mango tree and nervously chatted while about 30 children stood around staring at us. As we waited, I started to grow more and more nervous about the upcoming scarification and my stomach had begun to swirl thinking about the whole endeavour. I convinced the guys that I should go first so I wouldn't have to watch anyone else been sliced and diced figuring this would make the pain easier.

Shortly, Fatou Cessay, our scarer to be, arrived back at the compound and began to make preperations for the process. It was a little awkward at first, none of us really knowing how to behave in the situation. Eventually Fatou told us to come into her house so we piled into the back of the mud hut and I sat next to her on the straw mattress. We negotiated price and then she said "Let's get started", but in Pulaar, and all of the sudden I found myself sitting in front of her with my shirt off with lines drawn on my back. Brian sat in front of me be my hand squeezer - fufilling our pact during our first week in country to get tattoos together. Since I was going first I tried really hard to be tough [also because I was the only girl and wanted to show the boys up :)] and not scream or make any noises associated with ripping skin and pain. By the third (out of four) cuts I gave up and let out some whimpers because the flimsy blade was starting to become dull and the cutting started to feel more like ripping. Some older PCV's warned me that the pain is pretty bad but I tried to just brush it off. Turns out they were right, it was pretty painful and I was no where near prepared for what it feels like to have your sliced open by flimsy razor's bought for less then a penny at a corner bitik. Just when I was bracing myself for more cuts, the guys announced that I was done. I was overcome with relief then all the sudden, I felt a rough, dirty old rag being drug across my fresh wounds to sop up the blood. Nice. The dirty rag probably rendered the sterilizing of the razors and the latex gloves pretty useless. It turns out that this is only appropriate in this country cause just when you think you've got things figured out and planned for, you are proven wrong and naive for imagining you could actually control your surrondings. After the rag was drug across my back, Fatou emptied some ash from peanut shells that was stored in a hallowed out bull horn (it's true, you can't make stuff like this up) and packed my cuts with the ash, instructing me not to bathe for three days or the ash would wash away. Jim bandaged my back with gauze and tape and I settled down to watch the rest of the guys get their scars.

The whole process was surreal and Fatou was very speedy, scarring five of us in under an hour. Brian and Jim won the prize of more hardcore because Brian has six curved lines on his chest and Jim has three huge gashes across his rib cage that makes it look like a tiger attacked him. After everyone was scarred, and in a fair amount of discomfort, we thanked Fatou profously for sharing her cultural tradition with a bunch of crazy toubabs and each paid her 100D for her trouble (about $2.75) and set off back to the carpark to continue our journey upcountry. Turns out the carparks, bumpy gele-gele rides and waiting for three hours are even less fun when you are in pain and bleeding, but we all survived and lived to tell the tale.

A little background: The scarring is a traditional practice mostly attributed to the Fula (or Pulaar) tribe, a once nomadic tribe of cattle herders who can be found throughout West Africa. Other tribes, such as the Jola and some Sereers (the tribe I live with), do the scarring as well but sometime placement and meaning differ among different groups. The reason for getting the scarring done is sometimes for beautification but it also has traditional medicinal purposes and is related to traditional animist beliefs. It's hard to get a detailed history from people as they either aren't sure or aren't willing to talk about the in-depth traditional aspects with an outsider. One woman I know got three small scars on her chest because she had insomnia and she swears as son as she has it done her sleeping problems went away. Who knows, the power of belief right? I think that if it is done for medicinal purposes their is more ceremony and ritualistic stuff then what we had. Most Fulas that I have seen have the scars on their face, next to their eyes or mouths and a lot of the Sereers in my village have them on their chest of backs.

So all said and done, it was a great/crazy experience. The scars are all healed and look pretty badass and plus I will literally have a little bit of Gambia in me for the rest of my life to help remember this whole adventure. Check out the Flickr accounts for pics!

Stopping to smell the roses (or in my case the wanjo)...

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 15:20:00 +0000

Gambia can be overwhelming to the senses, but not necessarily in a bad way, but in a good way that I want to remember in detail. I have been trying to keep a list of things that I see, hear, smell, feel...so when I am an old lady and looking back on this whole experience I can remember small but essential aspects of my life here.

Touch: this really depends on the season. Right now it is cold season, so despite my knowledge that the temperature can't really be considered "cold", I find myself feeling chilly at night and cuddling around the fire in the middle of our compound with the rest of my family trying to stay warm. During the days, cold season is a God-send and it is such a relief after a long hot season to not sweat profusely all day. The warm Harmattan winds are blowing down off the Sahara, bringing dust but also a nice breeze. Sadly, hot season is quickly returning and is a totally different story. While I have yet to experience the hot, dry season that will start sometime in February, I have heard horror stories about hot stagnate air that just bakes everything till what is lush countryside during the rains is nothing but red dirt. The rainy season is probably best of both worlds because while it is hot and humid, the cooling rains come every afternoon bringing much needed relief. Plus rainy season is mango season so that always deserves extra points. As far as other forms of touching, I don't really have much human interaction, and I miss hugs. It is completly okay for friends of the same gender to touch, and it is very common to see grown men walking down the street hand in hand but Gambians don't tend to hug each other like I would with friends in America. There are definilty some strong taboos against people of the opposite gender touching one another and I almost committed a cardinal sin when I tried to playfully smack my friend Ustas's (an Ustas is an Islamic teacher) head when we were joking around. He jerked his head quickly away and told me, in a friendly and not at all angry way, that I should be careful because unmarried women are not to supposed to touch the heads of men.

Taste: The flavors of The Gambia are intense. It can best be summed up by lots of pepper and oil and lots of sugar followed by even more sugar.

Smell: When I first stepped off the plane in Banjul, my first thought was "it smells like Africa." The smell is hard to pinpoint but I was first introduced to it back on my Semester at Sea travels and have vivid smell memories of driving through Tanzania. The best I can describe it is a mixture of smoke, earth, wood and something sweet and musty at the same time. That doesn't really do it justice so you are just going to have to come to Africa to smell for yourself...

Hear: Prayer call from the village mosque, laughter, women pounding rice and coos, roosters, drums, generators, radio programs, the same Wolof music coming from several surrounding compounds giving a really ghetto surround sound effect, chatting, kids playing, goats, donkeys braying, girls playing their stomping and clapping game, Harmattan winds rustling the trees, cars on the road linking Dakar to Banjul, shouts of joy or anger during football season, Arabic chanting....

See: I see things that are strange and upsetting like: children pulling the heads of live birds, teachers flirting with students, corporal punishment, women doing a disproportional amount of the work while men sit on the bantaba (rest area) drinking attaya, sickly dogs, poor grades, a 14 year old boy dying because of a snake bite, children dying from worms because the family lacks the knowledge of warning signs and money to take them to the clinic...
But also I see things that make me smile and give me hope: children crowding around a book excited to learn and share what they have learned with their friends, older women teaching younger women a trade and business skills, members of the Girls Club excited to learn debating, the whole village turning out to watch a football match, babies being born and naming ceremonies, teachers who are passionate about the job and want to help children, a grade 9 girl coming to my compound and asking what courses she needs to take so she can become a pilot one day, my host brother Ousman getting an aggregate 24 on his high school entrance exam and getting into a good senior secondary school....

I have undoubtedly forgotten many things that I appreciated in the moment but was quickly overlooked as I became busy with some other task. I am sure this list will grow as I spend even more time getting to know the people and culture of The Gambia. I thank God for the experiences I have had my first 6 months in country, all the wonderful people I have met and formed relationships with and the countless things I have already learned and I look forward to all the exciting and unexpected experiences yet to come in the next year and a half!

Prayers, Fancy Clothes and Lots o' Meat = Tobaski

noreply@blogger.com (Becca) — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 11:51:00 +0000

I predicted that Tobaski would be an interesting day, and it was to say the least. The already unique cultural experience was compounded by the exceution of Saddam Huessein within days of the holy Muslim holiday. People were not as up in arms about it as people were in other parts of the world but it was definitly a discussion topic. To describe the day I guess I should start at the beginning, but I don't think I can really do it justice with just words:

My vice principal, Mr. Camera, invited me to celebrate Tobaski with him and his family over two months ago. I laughingly agreed, half thinking that he was joking. But after repeated invitations and the assurance that I would be sleeping in the "woman's quarters", I agreed. I arrived at the compound on the afternoon of the 30th. He took me on a tour of Serekunda market and it was absolutely packed with people buying supplies for the next day's feast. You couldn't even move it was so packed and I lost Mr. Camera, who is a failrly short man, several times as we were weaving through the stalls. Following our harrowing trip to the market we went back to the compound and chatted and relaxed for the rest of the evening. The promised "woman's quarters" were a bit of an exaggeration, city living is a tight squeeze of way to many people living in way to small a place, and turned out to be sharing a bed with his daughter and her young son.

Tobaski day I was awakened at 5:00 am by the now familiar call to prayer, but on this day it seemed extra loud and extra long because of the holiday. I dozed off in bed until the men left in their very ornate holiday clothes for the mosque for Tobaski prayers. I got up to help Jeniaba and Savy start cooking the meal but was told that I was to relax. I sat around feeling useless for about an hour until the men came home and informed me it was time to slaughter the animals. This may be cause for excitement for some people but I had been mentally preparing myself all morning to witness the slaughtering of not one but several animals. Just to give everyone some background, Tobaski is the biggest Muslim holiday outside of Ramadan. Every Muslim male is supposed to slaughter a ram (if he can afford it) in remembrance of Abraham's sacrifice of his son and also give meat away to those less fortunate. Mr. Camera opted for buying three goats instead of one big ram so he could give one goat away for charity. Lucky for me, Mr. C's neighbor was slaughtering a ram so I didn't need to miss out on the "fun" of witnessing it. Everyone was highly amused that I had never seen an animal being killed close up and that the animals in America are killed for us. All the sounds kept checking on me to make sure I was getting the optimal view of the event.

After the ram and the goats were slaughtered (which wasn't as traumatizing as I had envisioned but hearing an animal make gurgling noises as the blood drains out of their throat is less than pleasant), the men proceeded to place the goats, fur and all, right on the fire to roast because this way you don't waste the hide and "it makes the sauce nice." The family I was celebrating with is Ghanaian and burning the animal before butchering it is a tradition from Ghana, the Gamibians that were around were looking at then men like they were crazy. Seeing the goat on the fire and torched was probably worse then seeing the throat cut and the smell of burning fur is pretty gross, especially when it gets in your hair. After the goats were good and charred, then men proceeded to slaughter them and I think there was more guts then actual meat. When the whole kill fest was over the meat was taken to the women to prepare and I went out with Mr. C and his friend Kwame to visit our friend Baboucar, who is the head of the NGO that I work with. The remainder of the day consisted of eating a ridiculous amount of food (I even ate goat and ram meat!) and then visiting a ton of people. I was just a long for the ride so I am not entirely sure of who all the people we visited were but it was quite the array and I got to see a lot of the different small neighborhoods that make up Serrekunda - one of the houses was even a wealthy ex-government official where I chatted with a man who went to Tufts, discussed Indian poverty and watched lots of Muslim men in fancy clothes drinking alcohol, several of whom did not greet me either because I was a woman, a toubab or not dressed all that nice.

After a long day of slaughtering, eating, visiting and chatting we went back to Mr. Camera's house and watched the "unbiased" presidential address to commemorate the New Year. At midnight we went to the center of Serrekunda, called Westfield and waited for the New Year with thousands of other Gamibians and it was no Times Square but it was festive with lots of music and fireworks and impromptu dancing. All in all a very positive and at times, surreal experience. After over a week in the city I am looking forward to getting back to the slower pace of life in village.

Check out Tobaski pics on my flickr page (link on the left!)

Happy 2007!!!!!!!!!!!!!!