My first week in-country was spent near
the capital in day-long training sessions where we were told about
The Gambia, a really small sorta-rectangle about 30km tall and about
400km long on the far West coastline of Africa, about one-third of
the way south of the continent, with one side on the Atlantic Ocean,
the other three surrounded by the country of Senegal. The Gambia used
to be a British colony, Senegal a French one. This may come as a shock,
but there's a history of tension between the two that continues today
(the border finally re-opened to commercial traffic after a two-month
spat).
|
| Yes, the official name is "The Gambia".
Everyone knows the story as to why there's the "The", but unfortunately
none of the stories match. |
| There's a river that runs through the middle
of the country called, you guessed it, River Gambia. (No, there's no "The".) |
| There's maybe a dozen different ethnic
groups. Official language: English, but most speak three or more of the
other local languages which include Wolof (what I'm learning), Mandinka,
Fula, and a handful of other less-spoken ones. Vocabularies are limited
compared to English, so it's not uncommon for a conversation
to
switch
back and forth between three or more languages to use the right words to
express the desired meaning, even within the same sentence. |
| |
   The next ten weeks were spent in technological
seclusion in "training villages" up-country (i.e. no 'Net. I'm
serious. Imagine for a second life without Google… But wait, there's
more! No electricity and no running water. But that ain't nothin' compared
with NO GOOGLE!!!!) |
| |
 The
goal here is to give us PCT's a chance to learn the culture and one of
the local languages (I'm a Wolof – Naga
Def?) in a setting that is nearly identical to one like where most of us
will be volunteering. To save us from ourselves, an HCN LCH (Host Country
National [aka a Gambian] Language and Cultural Helper – how Peace
Corps LOVES the TLAs…) lives in the village with us to help lubricate
the cultural exchange and teach some language classes. To further smooth
out the transition, my Gambian host family honored me with an nginté --
a Gambian naming ceremony -- where I was given a sweet outfit and the name
of my Toma (namesake, who is my host brother), Abdoulie
Njie, but
everyone calls
me Lie (as in "I cannot tell a Lie"). |
| |
  Distance here is best measured in time.
My training village is maybe 200km (~125mi) away from the capital, but
it took a good 8 hours to get there. The two main roads that parallel the
river are TERRIBLE, and generally it is better to drive on the dirt shoulders
than navigate the connected potholes that remind you that once there was,
in fact, a road there somewhere. Some of the sections are MUCH better than
others, and rumour has it there's a correlation between where those sections
begin and end, the district boundaries, and the voting results of the last
elections. My village is 7km (~5mi) off the main "road", but
it takes 10-15 minutes in a 4x4 to get there. |
| |
 
Village Life is a total trip. Each of
us lives with a host family, in a hut of our own in the family compound.
My family was tiny – My father, his two wives, my brother (Lie, 9,
who is my "Toma" [namesake]), and sister (Haddy, 7). (There's
some other kids in the picture, but as was often the case with people
hanging out in my compound at any given time, I'm not sure whose family
they
belong
to.) Other PCTs lived in huge compounds with a father and up to four
wives (the
maximum
as dictated
by Islam) with as many as couple dozen kids aged 0 to 25. |
| |
  My hut is a single room, maybe 10 feet
x 10 feet. Two doors, one to the front, one to my backyard (and toilet).
Two windows. Small desk and chair. One trunk, and my bags. See picture. |
| |
 Here's
a typical training day in village. This is best read
V…E…R…Y
S….L….O….W….L….Y,
similar to how time passes in village… |
| |
| 8:00am: Battery-powered alarm goes off.
OUCH. Open mosquito net, scan concrete floor for any new ant hills / spiders
/ scorpions / thatched roof detritus / lizard poo that has accumulated
over the night. Open front door to let my host mothers know I'm awake so
they can start my breakfast. Brush teeth using bottled water. Use "broom" of
dried grass to move the night's dirt delivery outside. Hang up soaked sheet
and pillowcase. |
| |
 8:15:
Grab towel, soap, toilet paper (I splurge because I just can't get used
to the local custom of using my left
hand, which IMHO actually makes MUCH more economic and environmental
sense), large cup, and bucket. Walk out to "wanuk" (aka "bathroom" aka "toilet" aka "concrete
slab covering hole in ground"). BE CAREFUL NOT TO STEP ON SCORPIONS!!!
Take off clothes. Lift toilet cover. Squat and use toilet (aim wisely).
Return
wanuk
cover.
Take "Bucket
Shower": use cup to pour water over targeted body part, apply soap,
cup redux to rinse. Plan wisely – the bucket is maybe 8 liters, which
is fewer cups than you think (or want).
|
| |
| 8:45: Eat Breakfast. I get tea and biscuits
or, if I'm lucky, day-old stale bread – there's no bakery in my village
and day-old it about as fresh as it gets, the (maybe) two days a week we
can actually get it. |
| |
 9:00-Noon: Language lessons, where I'm
reminded that I'm TERRIBLE at learning a language. The most humiliating
part of my day. |
| |
 13:00:
Food Bowl. This is a big bowl of rice or noodles (if we were lucky) with
chicken and potatoes and maybe a carrot on top. Eat with your
right hand, making balls of rice and tossing them into your mouth. This
takes LOTS of practice to get right. Using your left hand for anything
is a BIG NO-NO (see toilet discussion above). |
| |
 Afternoon: Did I mention it's f******g
hot? Attempt not to move much. Sometimes I have to to survive, like when
I took this horse cart to the market for supplies. |
| |
| 17:45: Finally give in to the barrage of
kids who come to my door screaming "Lie Njie, Frisbee? Frisbee?".
I grab my disc and play a game of Ultimate with most of the kids in the
village. This is my favourite time of the day (and theirs). I taught the
kids how to play the first week so that I'd have people to play with, and
because their football (soccer ball for the Americans) was flat and there
was no patch kit and working pump – you don't need to patch or pump
a Frisbee!. They got REALLY good REALLY fast. |
| |
 19:00:
Take my two buckets to the hand pump, about 10 minute walk from my house.
Watch sunset as I listen to the
incompressible Wolof banter between the girls who are waiting to pump and
the boys who have come to hassle / flirt with them. Pumping both of my
buckets takes about 5 minutes if I pump fast, and always elicits laughter
since pumping is a woman's chore. Sometimes I'm lucky and my brother will
break with tradition and take one of my buckets
home with me (guys aren't supposed to carry water, either) . |
| |
| 19:40: Fill drinking water filter with
2/3 of one bucket. Add 6 drops bleach to kill things I don't want to think
about. |
| |
| 19:45: Bucket Bath number two. The sky
is AMAZING. SO MANY STARS!!! NO AMBIENT LIGHT!!! (It's so sad Gambians
generally avoid looking at them – the story I was told is that they
believe there is a star for each person and if you count the stars and
come across "your" star
you instantly die…) |
| |
| 20:30: Njoganal. This is "supper",
which is a food bowl of leftovers from lunch. I usually pass because I
know in less than an hour is... |
| |
 21:15:
Reer (dinner). Sometimes I eat "cous" with
my family. Not be confused with cous-cous, which is edible. Cous (I think
its pounded millet, but I'm in Education, not Agriculture) is a substance
that looks,
feels, and tastes like dirt. I'm serious. It's an acquired taste,
which I never acquired. What kills me is that it takes hours of hard manual
labor (hand-pounding, hand-sifting, cooking) to produce this stuff. Instead,
I generally get my own food bowl of rice porridge. I LOVE THIS STUFF. Recipe:
Light firewood, boil water, add rice, boil more, add sugar, eat. Can't
get enough of it, and my family is stoked because rice is less valuable
than cous. (The economic metric that is generally cited is a 50kg sack.
It might feed an average family for a month or more and currently costs
650 Dalasis, or at the current rate of $1 = 27.6D, sets you back $23.60,
or about 20% of the standard PCV [Peace Corps Volunteer] monthly stipend.) |
| |
 21:45:
Cards by candlelight with my brother and sister. I taught them War, and
let them play with a deck I brought.
I make them say the numbers out-loud in both Wolof (to teach me) and English
(to teach them). This has surprisingly good results, both for pronunciation
and to quicken their number recognition and comparison skills. Usually
I read while they play because ten weeks of War was just too much (I'd
rather practice Peace). (Side Note: Wolof is base-5, just like your hands,
so
the number 7 is "juróóm naar", or literally "five
two".
This makes things long, as 687 is "juróóm
bena teemeer ak juroom neta
fuka ak juróóm naar", so pretty much everyone just uses
English numbers regardless of what language they speak.) They LOVED when
I played music for them (if they liked the song they would get up and dance,
and Lie and I really liked the chorus of Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer"). |
| |
| 23:00: Blow out the candle, get into bed,
close the mosquito net, lie down, try not to notice the fact that as I
sweat (I only really stop during the bucket baths) the bed is getting more
and more wet. Attempt to ignore the noises of crawling in my hut, the livestock
outside, or the dirt (?) falling from my roof. |
| |
| |
| My transparently feeble attempt at humour
may have masked it, but I *LOVED* village life and often really miss it. |
| |
 |
Especially playing Ultimate Frisbee
with my Toma. |
 |
|
| |
| Peace, |
| +Lie |
July 4, 2005 was my first
official day as a PCT (Peace Corps Trainee). You, like me, might initially
think that
since this is a pretty significant
day in American history that us Peace Corps folks might get to take it
as a holiday. You, like me, would be wrong. I spent it and the following
two days in Philadelphia where I and the other 17 trainees in my Education
group were given a crash-course on the Peace Corps. The mission is three-fold:
(1) help developing nations with selected skillsets (e.g. Education, Health,
or Environment); (2) learn about a foreign culture to later teach others
about it; (3) teach people in foreign lands about American culture. 
