The end of the beginning

A couple of days ago was the end of my three month challenge. During the three month challenge we are supposed to stay in village for the whole time. I did not exactly do that because I traveled to the Kombo area a few times, for Christmas, and for taking money out of the bank. As for life in village, it is much better. The first couple of months were extremely difficult because I did not know how I fit into my community and my family. I could not speak to them, and I got flustered trying to respond to people asking me to buy attaya (a tea), sugar, bread, barbed wire, or anything else.

In the past few weeks I have started to feel more comfortable with my family. I will probably never be one of the them in the family because I will always be seen as the toubab (white person) who has money. And for the most part it is true, I have a lot more money than them and the dollar can go further here. I can buy a candy for a nickel and two pounds of potato for under a dollar. While I may never be part of the family, I can now feel accepted by the community and I am starting to feel that way. The women joke with me (a sign they like me), and the small kids will run up to grab my hand or hug my legs, which makes me feel more at home.

The first couple of months were hard and I questioned myself how I was going to live this way for two years, but now I do not question myself as much. I still have my bad days where I wonder if I am wasting my time here, but while I may not accomplish that much work project- wise, I am starting to see how the cultural exchange will be invaluable. I am learning how people think, view their lives and their challenges. In a sense it makes me appreciate America that much more. People here feel if they work harder there will be no economic reward for their extra effort. They lack motivation. It seems to a certain extent that people have accepted their fate. I have to admit it is sometimes difficult for me to see how they can improve their lives.

My questions have now turned to how I can help these people and what is the best way to do it. Motivating them to work and believe that together they can make their lives better will be my biggest struggle. People are not taught to think critically or analyze what is good or bad. Therefore, I will try to get the people to look at their lives carefully and see how they can make it better. I will probably work more with people individually like how to do orchard and cashew planting, and beekeeping. Working with communities or groups is more difficult because organizing people in a group is extremely difficult, and communal ownership creates problems when something breaks. Usually it never gets fixed. I also need to figure out if I want to apply for grants and funding because while it can give the community a leg up, it does not necessarily help them in the long run. Many times the projects fail because people do not have a sense of ownership, and will wait for someone else like an NGO to fix it. Also when an NGO gives a community something such as a garden, it prevents the people from trying to analyze and solve problems on their own. My debate currently will be to figure out how to help them. I really want to help them help themselves.

Views of my house

The entrance to my house. A fellow Peace Corps Volunteer is brewing attaya - Gambian tea
The back of my house. If I go through my backdoor I will reach my garden.

My side window, water filter,and food supplies trunk. Unfortunately I have to keep the window closed becuase the dusty storms are terrible.

Me and my pit latrine. It is more difficult to squat than I expected. I have trouble balancing. Therefore I need a counterweight so I do not fall backwards. The top of the pit latrine works extremely well.

My favorite person

Binta

In village my favorite person is probably my mother's youngest child, Binta. She is just learning how to walk and cannot talk except for the word mom in pulaar, Da. She likes to give me high fives and will come running up to me sometimes and grab my legs if I am sitting down.

Binta's first steps.

TV Dinners

In the States, one of my parents strictest rules was no TV during dinner. Who would have thought I would travel halfway accross the world to break it. Coming to Africa I never expected to watch TV, but my compound owns a TV, and my host brother owns a solar panel so he can charge the battery to run the TV.

Notice the TV in the middle of the picture with the battery sitting in front of it.

I have to say it is a surreal feeling when I realize I am watching TV in the open air in the middle of my family compound in Africa - on a 10/11 inch black and white screen. We only get one or two channels which most of the time are in english or french (the villagers do not understand either). We watch TV about 3 nights a week starting before dinner. Most of the village kids come to watch and sit around the TV on benches, stools, or rice bags.When dinner is ready we huddle around the food bowl with the TV in the background. No one watches while they eat, but meals in gambia are always quick, so afterwards everyone goes back to watching. I usually go to bed.

The kids watch TV during the day sometimes and I think they can watch just as much as kids in America. One day I am positive they watched at least 6 hours during the day and then they pulled out the TV that night. One of the programs they watch is about animals from around the world, and they are amazed when dolphins jump out of the water or gorillas fight. Even the women peek in sometimes to watch a bit.

Baby Alex

Ok not baby Alex, but Baby Pateh (my African name). Last week I had a baby named after me. In The Gambia every child is named after a family member or friend which could explain why there are so few names in The Gambia. Seven days after a baby is born, the parents hold a naming ceremony, a big party, for the child. People dress up, eat meat, and sometimes listen to music if the family has more money.

I showed up to one last week in the morning around 11am. I almost missed it because I thought the ceremony was the following day. After I sat around for an hour, the family decided everyone had shown up. I went into the room where a man shaves the baby's head. In this case he only shaved a little hair in the front and a little in the back ( it depends on the family, but some shave the whole head). Usually only women watch the baby's head being shaved. Then I went outside and sat with all the men on mats and chairs to pray for the baby. After prayers the father decided the name of the baby to be Pateh after me. Even though I have heard they sometimes name the baby after people with more money so they get presents, I was honored. The men passed out Kola nuts, a bitter nut which gambians like, and the prayers were over.

Baby Pateh and his parents.

Since the father picks the name of the child, the mother sometimes picks a separate name for the child. In that case the child has two names. My father is called Mamadou, his mother's name, which is used by my family, but in the next village people call him Habli, his father's name. Depending on the region of the country the mother's or father's name is preferred.


Next everyone sat around drinking attaya and talking while the women cooked the meal. Right after prayers we were served coos and sour milk with sugar (which I now really like). I remember the first time I had sour milk in training village I almost vomited, but I have grown to like it. Sour milk is milk left to stand for at least a day. It is chunky and on the fourth day goes bad. In the evening we ate the main meal. Depending on the wealth of the family they kill a chicken, goat or ram. In this case they slaughtered a goat. The goat tasted really good since I never get meat in village. As it got dark I rode my bike home.

Resurrecting a Library

Even though I am an environment volunter, many of us choose to work in the local schools especially during the first three months because teachers speak English, and we can work in the garden or help teach classes. I went to help at a school in the next village (my village has no school). At first I went to help in the lower basic school (grades 1-6) because it was something different than sitting in my village all day long. There I have been learning more about Gambian culture and the local community through their teachers.

One problem was that I did not really know what to do when I went. The garden master did not need encouragement because he has a great garden of carrots, green onions, eggplant, cabbage, and tomatoes. A few children are assigned to a bed and they are in charge of watering, weeding, and planting. The school sells the vegetables to earn a little extra income and puts the vegetables in the lunch food bowls. I suggested I could teach in the classrooms, which the headmaster said was good, but he did not give me any instruction as to what I should teach or which grades. He just said "go". The kids also do not speak english well. So far I have not taught a class, but I plan to in a couple of weeks, about deforestation in the Gambia.

After inquiring about their library I figured out what I wanted to do. Now my project and reason for going to the school is to resurrect the library. Their library was a big dusty cobweb room filled with books stacked on tables at one end of the room. The rest of the room was empty except for an old chalkboard with some numbers and a date from 2005. The room looked like it had not been used in months. I started by going through the books. Most of them are targeted for beginners which is good, and they had some basic math books which look promising. They also had two boxes of which on top were written "Geography Discard." The books are all written before 1975 and have titles such as Surveys for town and Country Planning and Intro to Geomorphology. I am sure a library in England decided they no longer wanted these books and decided to donate them, a worthy decision, but why the books ended up in a primary school in the Gambia I do not know. I asked the teacher in charge of the library about the books and he said they were important because the teachers could read them. Current volunteers said schools will always ask for more books because they can show off how many they have. It is a source of pride. The usefulness and how much they are used are usually not considered.

Inside the library

The kids have an hour lunch break where they have the opportunity to go into the library. The librarian does not open the room unless I am there. I try to go twice a week. The other days he chooses not to open it. At first the kids were hesistant to come in, but by the second week a bunch of kids came. They look mostly at the pictures instead of reading, but some do read and at least they are exposed to the outside world of knights, planes, and exotic animals. Recently I have decided to work on math. I write problems on the board and the kids solve them. I realized the kids even in grade 5 and 6 still have trouble doing basic addition and subtraction problems. I have seen some interesting counting methods from drawing lines on the board to moving from their hands to their toes to counting on their chest and thighs. I think I want to work on math skills because if the kids stop school, the english they learn will be useless, but math they will use in their everyday lives. I want to start a math competition when I get back. I am hoping it will motivate the kids to study outside of class. As a reward I am going to let them draw with my crayons and markers.

The room is extremely bare. I am going to try to brighten the room up by posting fliers on the walls including maps, pictures of the sun, moon, and earth, and other stuff that would expose the kids to the outside world and stimulate them to learn. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Round 2

Me in my garden

The first three months I have had little work to do. I decided to turn my backyard into a garden. Since a clay wall fell down in my small back yard years ago, the ground is extremely hard. When I arrived in village, I immediately went to work building a compost pit of grass, cow dung, and mango leaves. I then made a small garden bed planting cucumber, tomatoes, bell pepper, carrot, and eggplant. They germinated nicely and I was excited about the potential of giving vegetables to my family to show the benefits of gardening (currently nobody in village has a dry season garden). But I should not have jumped to conclusions because two weeks later, the birds attacked. They ate everything but three small cucumber plants which they continue to nibble on until today so the plants cannot grow. My family told me to put thorny branches and plastic bags, but to no avail, the birds kept coming.

Round 1: Birds win

I did not want to give up so soon because how can I convince the villagers to garden if I give up so easily. For round two, I decided I would try an onion bag to cover the bed. It would give the plants a chance to grow and I did not think the birds would eat older leaves. I planted carrots and transplanted some eggplants from the local school. I thought I had a good plan. I even planted some trees to transplant later into pots. Unfortunately it was not a fool proof plan. As the carrots grew, they grew through the holes in the onion bag. The birds now sit on the onion bag and eat the leaves. I tried stringing cassete tape over the beds, but it did not help. At night the frogs dig around uprooting the carrots. One night I counted over 30 frogs in a bed 1.5m by 1m. Also, my eggplant attracted a small bug that caused them to get sick and even though I used a local pesticide made from tree leaves, it did not work. Also, about 1/3 of my tree seedlings would mysteriously die from morning to night. They were healthy when I woke up and by night they were all shriveled up. I suspect termites.

Round 2: Still undecided - Edge animals

For round three I am planning to put a mosquito net over the beds to stop my biggest problem - the birds.

Election Results

No this is not a post about the American primaries even though I am following the race as much as I can from my small radio in village. The Gambia had area council elections, similar to state legislatures, about a month ago. For the most part it was uneventful with APRC (the ruling party since Jammeh took control in a coup in 1994. He has won three succesive presidential elections) winning 101 or 102 of the 114 seats throughout the country.

The day after the elections I asked someone how the elections went and he said: "They went well. There was no trouble or fighting. " At first, I was surprised by his answer. I expected some excitement when his candidate won or sadness because his candidate lost. The thought of "fighting" due to an election was not the first issue to come to mind. In the States, I am never worried about the outcome leading to armed combat. I temporarily forgot how in most parts of Africa fighting is not only a possiblility, but many times a reality.

My district/ward was more interesting than most parts of the country. The current APRC candidate had an opposition candidate while most APRC candidates run without opposition. The opposition candidate lived in a neighboring village. However, his father, the village's alkaloo (the head of the village), was deposed. (The Alkaloo is a descendent of the founder. When he dies, the village usually meets to decide the successor, but it almost always remains in the family. The villagers can decide to vote out an alkaloo, but it is rare.). I am not sure by who, but a new alkaloo was appointed. The deposed alkaloo was told he could not be alkaloo if his son was running against an APRC candidate. The village is split in alegencies and the police are solving the matter.

My Mom's purple finger after she voted

Most adults in my village voted. They are given a small rock to put in one of the two boxes. Each box has a picture and the name of each candidate because most people are illiterate. [sidenote: I started teaching my mom how to draw 1 to 10 and say them in english]. After they vote they put their left hand in purple ink.