Life and Death in The Gambia

Well I didn’t expect it, but my first personal experience with death here has been the passing of my kitten, Boo. I had kept her inside my house to be on the safe side but it was to no avail. She had been getting thinner and thinner for a few weeks and while I was a little concerned I didn’t think it was anything too serious. Then she became really lethargic, and on her last day she ate an unusually large amount; she had hardly been touching her food before that. That night she began crying and twitching and I knew right away that this was it. It was very sad to watch because I couldn’t do anything for her besides give her my bed and talk to her. I slept on the floor (where the ants live!) since she was biting and clawing me, kind of dangerous since I didn’t actually know what was wrong with her. In the morning I found her in the backyard, long gone. I collected a shovel from my neighbor Esa who was really concerned that I was standing in the middle of his compound asking for tools while crying but he dutifully handed one over after I had drawn a picture of it on the ground so he would know what in the world I was talking about. (They call a shovel a ‘pail’ here which is very confusing since you feel like you’re asking for a bucket when you actually want an instrument with which to dig.) One of my best friends here, a twelve year old named Makalo, ran into me on the way home and immediately wanted to come over and help me, which is why he’s one of my best friends here. He collected a couple of the other boys that study at my house, and along with a couple of my sisters, and my brother’s wife and baby, we dug a grave in my postage stamp sized back yard and buried little Boo. Everyone was very solemn and it was a nice way to put our kitten to rest. And then came…’How Gambians Deal With Grief’:

1. ‘Stop Crying!’ : Lol, I thought they just said this to little kids and to babies, but no, apparently when you are bereaved you also get this command barked at you. We’re not big on ‘expressing our emotions’ in The Gambia unless those emotions happen to be gaiety or frustration. Screaming with laughter and fighting in public are both pretty common but shed a few tears because you’re sad and you get a lot of nervous looks. Now I already knew that you aren’t supposed to cry when a) the doctor is aggressively scrubbing your open wound in order to dress it b) You slam your finger in car door c) your brother beats you with a branch he pulled off of a tree d) you are a fussy baby, but I thought I’d get a pass for a dead kitten. Um, no. The kids put up with tears streaming down my face for about twenty minutes and after that they would demand that I stop crying because it would ‘make me sick’. The bottom line? There’s no crying in Africa. We’ve got big problems and your weeping isn’t helping.

2. ‘Here’s a better one.’ Now this isn’t unique to Africans but it definitely falls into their cultural behavior so I’m including it. About ten minutes after Esa had given me the shovel he showed up at my door saying, ‘I’ve got a better one, go with Lamin (his five year old son)’. Of course I assumed he was referring to a better ‘pail’, but no, when I got there I was promptly handed a tiny, tiny kitten whose head was about twice the size of its body. Well I was still crying and this kid was holding this kitten and my nice African neighbors were a little unnerved by the American falling apart over a pet, so I took it. I didn’t want another kitten but at that moment I wasn’t in any position to say so. I took the kitten and went back home, ready to start digging, so I set her in a pile of laundry to be dealt with later. Well that was a week ago and as I type this ‘Butut (the smallest denomination of Gambian currency) is (hopefully) being bottle fed by my little sister Kaddy while I am in Kombo. I say it’s not unique to Africans because I’m sure all the pet owners amongst you are familiar with the ‘Your pet died? I’m so sorry. What are you going to get next?’ conversation. What is unique to Africans is that they do this with children as well, or ‘instead of’ I suppose since they don’t generally have pets. If a woman’s child dies she is usually given another child belonging to a sister, aunt, close friend, etc. I don’t think it happens right away but it definitely happens within a fairly short period of time. And while my reflex is to say, ‘No, I don’t want another kitten (child), the reality is that if you are preoccupied trying to feed and care for this new little bundle of joy you are spending a lot less time holed up in the back of your house crying on your bed.

3. They have a week long funeral. Okay, maybe not for a kitten, but for the passing of a person pack your bags, you’re going to be spending a significant amount of time praying away from home. Boo passed away two days after the chief’s daughter, my mother’s niece, died in a nearby village. It was a very sad event. She was only thirty three with a seven year old child. She worked at the hospital and had apparently had some health issues. One morning she collapsed in her compound when everyone was out and died later that day in the hospital. People traveled from far and wide to extend their condolences and my mother was gone well over a week for the funeral. I wasn’t there and I have yet to attend one of the funerals held in the village so I don’t know the details but there seems to be a lot of Quoran reading going on. I don’t know what’s keeping me from attending. It’s the same thing that keeps me away from the mosque. It feels intrusive somehow, like it’s a step over the line of what is okay for me to be included in as a guest and what is too personal for an outsider. This of course is dumb and I am repeatedly invited to go to the latter, the mosque, yet interestingly not the former, funerals, which seems like the more accessible between the two, but I still feel a little uneasy. I’ll go when it’s more personal and not much of a choice anymore I suppose.

Okay, so that’s the ‘death’ portion of this entry. I was going to do ‘life’ next but honestly I’m getting a little sleepy and a lot sloppy so I’m going to go with the bulleted list instead.

• 
  School corner: We’re in the third, which is the last, term of the school year. The 9th grade students are studying for their national exams and I’m helping them by making board games that give them an opportunity to read questions the way they will be written on the exam and to review their factual knowledge. They love them and are always asking me when we can play. I’m still working with the younger kids on phonics and reading skills. It astounds me how engaged they remain when they struggle so much with basic literacy. Good for them. I would have given up a long time ago which is evident in the amount of Mandinka I am able to speak, or not speak, as the case may be.
• 
  Health corner: As I type this I have NO infections of any kind! Clap for me! (That’s what we say when a kid answers a question correctly at school.) I’ve actually been lucky in terms of my health. I have almost constant skin infections, some small, some not so small, but I’ve never been ‘sick’ which is pretty impressive considering the ‘food/water/environment/developing country’ situation. Hopefully this will remain a true statement for the next year and a half.
• 
  Movie situation: So I was pretty sure that when I got back home I would be cloistered in my house for at least two months catching up on all the movies I missed while I was gone. Not necessarily so! They sell these DVDs in Kombo that have up to fifteen movies of varying quality on a disc. Sure, sometimes you have to put up with a thumb in the corner of the screen but it’s worth it if I can take a break from being ‘culturally appropriate’ and sit on a couch drinking Cokes and watching ‘Precious’ in the Peace Corps transit house on a Sunday afternoon. Yay for breaking copyright laws!

Small Girls Moving Goats

The Who’s Who of who’s wearing a shirt and who’s not.

Who’s wearing a shirt?

· Women who do not have children
· Girls over the age of about seven (except in the rice field. I swear, the rice field resembles Showtime at one o’clock in the morning sometimes.)
· About half of the boys and most of the men at any given time.

Who’s not wearing a shirt?

· Women with children. Once a woman has a child she is no longer required to wear a shirt in her compound. No woman would ever walk around outside the compound without a shirt on but in her compound the shirts drop. She will however pull her breast all the way out and leave it there to feed her baby anywhere she goes. You should see the looks of disbelief I get when I explain that public breast-feeding is controversial in the States. Apparently once you have a child no one cares whether or not you wear a shirt (in your compound) any longer. People whose children have long ago been weaned walk around their compounds shirtless and continue to do so into old age. Actually I think the ‘no shirt’ thing is falling out of favor a little bit since it really is only the older generation who does it regularly. At first it was a little uncomfortable but like with most things you get used to it and then you hardly even notice. Well I guess you notice but it’s not a big deal. It would however be scandalous for a non-African woman to take her shirt off in front of others, child or no child, so I guess I’m out of luck. Darn.

· Young boys who think it’s too hot, sometimes. (My brother insisted that his 8 year old nephew put on a shirt while riding his bike because ‘the air is disturbing to the skin’. What?)

· Young men whom I suspect are trying to impress the ladies. It’s working. You should see the shape they are in from all that farm work.

Boys in Jappineh
There are a few bikes in the village;
this kid is riding one of the better ones.

A guaranteed way to make you feel like a greedy consumerist who perpetuates inequality:

Have a conversation with your ten year old neighbor that involves explaining how it is not unusual for each person in a family in the U.S. to own their own vehicle. The idea that a family (extended) would own a vehicle is impressive, the concept that individuals own them borders on insulting. It is not often that I feel real guilt over the unequal distribution of wealth in the world, chalk this up to one of those times.

The Dangerous Lives of Gambians.

‘They are poor but they’re happy’. I’m guilty of saying this and in my defense the Gambians have been known to say it as well. And it’s true; sort of. They never miss an opportunity to greet someone, they are quick with a smile and a laugh, they’ll offer you their bed, no questions asked; everything is fine until it’s not. What happens when they get sick or an accident occurs? Not much. You go to bed and pray that you get better. There are hospitals and clinics throughout the country (we even have a clinic in our village) but the staff is generally far from competent (trained in Gambian schools you know) and the medicine is less than plentiful, to say the least. A small tube of antibiotic cream that you would pick up at Target for $3.99 is a valued commodity here. (This is a mixed blessing since they hand out malaria drugs like candy and generally patients are not tested. You feel fluish? Take this battery of Coloxium and don’t worry about a follow up, you’ll be fine. I don’t know that having access to a lot of medicine under these conditions would actually help them). There are also traditional healers called ‘marabouts’ who do a fair amount of business here. I have a little more confidence in the traditional healers because I’m pretty sure that if you truly believe something will cure you then it often will. And no, I’m not going to tell that to someone suffering from malaria induced seizures, but in a lot of cases I still think it can happen. Having said that, a lot of these ‘marabouts’ are quacks and I get the impression people here are of that opinion as well. I’ve known about this medical situation all along but only recently (probably when I got emotionally attached) did it really sink in that if you have cancer you are going to die (barring a successful visit to the marabout). If you fall out of a tree and suffer from internal bleeding you are going to die (where’d that marabout go?). If you are in a serious car accident you are going to die (not even I think you can psyche yourself out of a crushed lung). I’m both grateful and appalled by the fact that if I develop cancer or fall out of a tree or, god forbid, get into a serious car accident I will be rushed out of here to a place that can care for its people. That is a shocking reality. It goes without saying that every one of these peoples’ lives is as valuable as mine and it’s simply circumstance that allows me to be treated and them to go without. Death isn’t an everyday (or every week) thing here like it is in some developing countries so it’s easy to think ‘this isn’t so bad’. What is bad is that the fourth grade teacher at my school needed to go to the city for a week because it had been forty days since his wife, who was in her twenties, passed away and according to Islamic tradition that is the time when you visit the bereaved and give charity. What is bad is that my favorite education office employee Lamin couldn’t make a meeting because his family was burying his sister that day. What is bad is that I am not surprised anymore when a twelve year old tells me that he is living with his uncle because his father is dead.

I’m so glad that I’m an education volunteer and not a health volunteer. Teaching people to read doesn’t have to cost anything. You can’t treat someone’s malaria for free. And what do people say when villagers inevitably come to them with malnourished babies? You can give people all the nutritional advice you want but if you aren’t placing food in the food bowl how much good does it do? I don’t see a lot of illness here, but honestly I don’t look too hard for it either since I’m a firm believer of only focusing on what you can handle. The world is full of miserable places and in my opinion this isn’t one of them, but it’s close and it wouldn’t take much (conflict in Senegal moving north) to make it into one. A lot of Gambians feel like it already meets the criteria and who am I to argue? If I get sick I’m going home, they already are home.

So what exactly is a ‘Marabout’?

Unbeknownst to me I was posted in a village that has a renowned traditional healer doing business out of it. Well it did have a renowned traditional healer. He’s dead now and his sons have taken over, but no one seems to think that’s cause to stop seeking treatment here. And treatment is sought. On the day that I accidentally stumbled into the marbout’s compound on one of my ‘meet and greet’ strolls I found the son of one of the new marabouts who quickly produced a rather thick photo album with pictures of patients old and new in it. Apparently people come from all over West Africa to see these guys, there were even a few pictures of European patients in it (that is surprising when you take into account that there is no electricity or indoor plumbing.) Now I knew something was up before I saw the album because when I entered the compound there were several people sitting on the ground rocking back and forth, some crying, some not, and frankly that’s not a very Gambian thing to do. (How funny that I was more surprised to see that here than I would be in America.) At first I thought I had just walked into a reaction to some terrible event but then I saw that it was more than one person who was doing it so I realized that it was some sort of hospital. Welcome to the The Gambia’s biggest psychiatric facility, Njii Kunda.

A Patient of the Marabout

It’s a strange feeling when someone proudly shows you an album full of pictures in which people are chained up. Always quick to judge, I was initially horrified. ‘Those people are in chains! This is barbaric! Do people know about this?’ Well yes, people do know about it and I have yet to meet a citizen in this village who has anything negative to say about the marabouts. Now I know some of you are thinking, ‘Of course they aren’t going to say anything negative. These guys are marabouts. They’ll put a curse on any naysayers that will make their children dumb and their donkeys lame. Well yeah, maybe, but all in all I get the feeling that people think the marabouts treat their patients well and help a lot of people. And yeah, those chains are big (and rusty) but those words describe a lot of things in this country. New ‘technology’ (Velcro and nylon) isn’t something accessible to the Gambians. Is chaining someone up any different than strapping them down when they become destructive? And destructive they are. It’s expensive to take your family member to the marabout, typically a couple thousand delasi and some livestock. You aren’t going to do it unless the situation has become unmanageable in one way or another. Violent outbursts usually fall into the ‘unmanageable’ category. So what does a marabout do? Well from what I can gather there are two main types of medicine given. The first is that they write things in Arabic, soak the paper in water and then the patient either drinks the tea that is made from the water or bathes in it. The second is that they collect leaves, bark, etc. from the bush and make tonics. I’m sure there’s a lot of praying over the person and I think that there is some kind of counseling as well. Marabouts need to be trained and they spend years reading the Quoron and studying under older practitioners. There’s no belief that these people have supernatural powers or anything like that but people do speak of ‘strong’ marabouts so there are definitely different levels of competency. Like most traditional things, marabouts are highly revered by the older generation and less so by the younger one. At this point if a problem is serious enough to seek medical attention for I’d say it’s a fifty-fifty proposition over whether to visit the clinic or the marabout. It’s becoming popular to lean toward the western way of doing things but when it comes down to it if someone is ill they may very well go the traditional route, ‘just in case’. I know quite a bit about what goes on at Njii Kunda because I talk to a lot of the patients. It is common for a family member to bring the patient to the village to stay with the marabout and then leave them here for months on end. Sometimes that’s how long they need treatment but most of the time I think it’s really just an issue of not having the fare to leave. I meet plenty of young men hanging out on the main road who say they are waiting on their ‘guys’ to come for them. For some reason a lot of people who visit the marabout speak English, which is why I’m talking to them so often. I’d say that about eighty-five percent of my village speaks exclusively Mandinka, about ten percent speak very broken English and five percent speak excellent English because they are teachers or did particularly well in school. Out of the patients at Njii Kunda I’d say that fifty percent speak pretty decent English. I guess that reflects the fact that educated people are the ones who are going to be able to afford to pay for travel and treatment. Whatever the reason, it’s pretty funny because I’ve stood out on the road more than a few times chatting away for a good ten minutes before realizing that the person had basically lost their mind. But aren’t those always the best people to talk to anyway?

‘Boo has a stranger!’
(Exclaimed by my twelve year old neighbor Lamin Makalo, not pictured. That's Ousman up there.

He's usually impossible but he settled down for this pic.)

Gambians love ‘strangers’. A stranger is anyone who is not native to the village. When I ask about their hospitality to outsiders I usually get some version of ‘We’re all strangers at one point or another so we should treat them as we would like to be treated’. And it’s true, Gambians are very transitory due to extended family ties and poverty. They often travel to far away villages for work and stay with distant relatives for indefinite periods of time. When I say they ‘love’ strangers I am not exaggerating either. It is not unheard of for a Gambian to invite someone that they do not know to stay in their home and share their bed! Their bed people! This can go on for weeks, months, even years. There are worse ways to treat your fellow man I suppose.

Boo’s stranger Charlie:

I crossed paths with Charlie at my friend Alieu’s house. Alieu sells fish in Soma, the market town about twenty minutes away from me that has an internet connection and electricity between the hours of 9 a.m to 1 p.m and 7 p.m. to 1 a.m. This means I can get a cold Coke there AND check my mail so it’s pretty much my favorite place in the world at the moment.

Soma

When I went to Alieu’s house I saw that Charlie was limping. Apparently he was kicked by a donkey! That’s the problem with being a puppy, no common sense. Everyone knows to steer clear of the donkeys. Well Charlie’s leg was broken as a result and it’s not like people rush their dogs to the vet when something like that happens here.

Charlie at Home (Alieu is in the organge shirt and this is his family.)

The vet works on cows, horses and donkeys primarily. He’d probably be pretty confused if you brought a dog or cat in. People here have a very lackadaisical attitude about their dogs and cats. Dogs are tolerated because they can be useful for hunting small game in the bush, tracking and retrieving. When I say ‘tolerated’ I mean they let them hang around but they take very little to no care of them. They pretty much just wander around the village, their ears being ravaged by flys, the females having litter after litter of puppies of which maybe two percent survive. I guess some people feed them scraps from the food bowl but I’ve never actually seen it. Dogs are considered pests to some degree though so when they wander into compounds people chase them out and it is not unusual for kids to throw rocks at them. My kids know better after seeing my horrified reaction but I’m sure when I’m not around stones are still being thrown. To be fair these dogs are bordering on being wild so it is kind of dangerous to have them around, hence the stones. I just hope that with my influence someone somewhere will see a dog and think, ‘I’m going to flap my arms around and yell ‘Acha’ (That’s what we say to anything we want to move – kids, sheep, etc.) instead of throwing that rock.

Charlie Taking a Nap Next to Fatou

There are far fewer cats around than dogs which I think is strange since cats are much more self sufficient and useful when it comes to eating pests (you should hear the rats in my ceiling, they are so loud!). I’ve seen a total of two cats in my village, ever. That’s probably because the Gambians kill them as they are generally deathly afraid of them. Grown men jump back when they see that I am carrying my tiny kitten; men who spend their weekend hunting crocodiles in the river. Seriously. I have no idea what that's about. I grill them but they never give me a substantial reason. They don't think they are evil or anything like that though. The cats that I do see look a lot less sorry than the dogs. They are on the thin side but that’s about it. See, self-sufficient.

Charlie and Binta Playing on the Mat

So I took Charlie home and he has been spent the last week here. The veterinarian in my village offered to give him antibiotic shots to prevent or fight any infection but that’s pretty much all he can do at this point since the injury is over a week old. The vet said it felt like a simple fracture and Charlie is putting a little more weight on it now so hopefully it will heal on its own with no permanent damage. It’s been nice having him around since I really miss having a dog but I’m ready to take him back to Alieu because a) between Boo and Charlie it’s like the Tooth and Claw Brigade have moved in. I am constantly being bitten and/or scratched and I don’t have a spray bottle to fend them off with. B) Charlie doesn’t reserve his biting just for me, he goes after Boo constantly. It wouldn’t take much for him to accidentally kill her so I’m pulling him off of her thirty times a day. Of course she refuses to just stay up on the bed where she’s safe. My family will be sorry to see Charlie go which is unbelievably cute give how Gambians feel about dogs in general.

They constantly (CONSTANTLY) ask me what the animals are doing and where they are (probably because those questions are among the six things I understand when they talk to me and I can actually answer them correctly for the most part!). My mom is Charlie’s biggest fan which is even more surprising. She even let him sit on the mat! (That’s a big deal.) I know they find the whole pet thing mysterious but everyone is very good-natured about it which is just another example of how ‘live-and-let-live’ these people are (up to a point and concerning certain things, i.e. Don’t try to tell them that a girl should be able to make her own choices about marriage instead of being given away at fourteen for the right price though).

Fo Wati Do! (Until next time!)

My little sister Kaddy Jallow and my neighbor

Bakabiro enjoying a book.

Thanks mom!

Things I didn’t expect to happen:

I feel sort of conflicted about encouraging Gambian children to read. :/

That is a little bit of a problem since one of my goals in coming here is to promote literacy. Now I know this sounds insane and that reading opens the world up to a person and that there is no developing a country without literacy but the fact is that reading for pleasure is not in tune with what makes Gambian culture, well…Gambian culture. I had an inkling that this was going to be the case but it only became really apparent last week when my sixteen year old neighbor Ebrima borrowed a book from me. At first I was delighted; Ebrima is a great kid who lives across the road. His family owns a small shop (bitik) and when he’s not in school or in the bush collecting firewood it’s his responsibility to watch the shop for his brother who is the head of the compound. These shops are the size of closets so it’s a one-person job. There are a lot of these shops throughout the village and they’re all pretty much identical. They sell batteries, cigarettes, bread, tea (very popular) sugar, oil and other incidentals.

A typical bitik

It is customary for shopkeepers to sit out in front of the shops on benches and wait for customers. And sit they do, for hours…and hours, doing absolutely nothing except for greeting passerby and selling to the occasional customer. Well that’s all fine and well for the old man who has been watching his shop for the last thirty years and is perfectly content doing so but it kills me to see a teenager who is first in his class sit there endlessly doing virtually nothing. (Yes I know that is not very culturally sensitive and who knows what’s going on inside that head of his but I stand by the opinion that he’s pretty much just zoning out for hours on end.)

Ebrima!

(Is it just me or does he look like a mannequin here?)

So one day when he was sitting out there I asked him if he’d like to borrow a book. Well at first he was confused. His textbooks? I wanted him to read his textbooks? Okay Kaddy, although I’ve got them all pretty much memorized. No Ebrima, a different book, one you haven’t seen before, a book with a story in it. That was met with an enthusiastic ‘Yes!’ so I hurried into my house and selected a Grade 3 book about a dog who takes a bus to his old neighborhood after his family moves. Well Ebrima may be first in his Grade 8 class but that book was exactly at his level, anything more would have been lost on him. And so we read. Ebrima delving into ‘Boss Dog’, me ‘Rebecca’ (which I was rather pleased with by the way). Now Ebrima’s a conscientious kid so he would look up when people greeted him to return the greeting and/or promptly assist them in the shop but it wasn’t immediate, it took a few seconds, because he was enjoying that ‘Boss Dog’ book quite a bit. And therein lies the problem. It is not very Gambian (particularly in the villages) to be engaged in something that would keep you from communicating with another person; ever. I’m not implying that Gambians just sit around all day and chat (although some certainly do) but their work is all manual labor so they are easily approached while doing it. No one is sitting at a computer or reading a report that they need to concentrate on. (This is a little annoying at school since people will just walk into a classroom and the kids need to wait while a five minute greeting takes place between the guest and the teacher.) Their leisure time is no more solitary. They’re not exactly watching TV and could you wait ten minutes until the commercial please? In their down time they are sitting around brewing atya (the popular tea) or lounging about on the bantaba. So there Ebrima and I sat enjoying our books, yet with every new person that passed by who had a mildly quizzical look on their face as to why they weren’t being responded to as enthusiastically as they had been last time they came around, my guilt grew. I was the reason Ebrima was focused more on a fictional German Shepard who boards the uptown because he’s homesick than on the woman who is married to his father’s second wife’s son who tended to him when he had malaria a year and a half ago. Apparently this is what happens when you are dealing with a group of people that speak an unwritten language. They aren’t used to reading and more importantly they aren’t used to other people reading. There are all of these social mores that come into play when someone is reading that we are totally unaware of since we are a culture that reads. Like for instance, it’s considered rude to have an extremely loud conversation (occasional shouting included!) approximately three feet away from the Peace Corps volunteer who is trying valiantly to get through a simple picture book with your ten year old daughter. It is equally rude to start tuning an unbelievably scratchy shortwave radio a stone’s throw (more of a toss really) away. I like these people a lot and I know it’s unintentional. They just have no concept of what it means to sit down and enjoy a book. I’ve heard from a lot of volunteers that the kids have no interest in having stories read out loud to them which is unfortunate. I’ve had fairly good luck personally but I’ve also always made sure to keep the kids really engaged (hand movements, sound effects, etc..) because there is no way they are going to sit there and just enjoy the pictures (forget the words, none of them speak English). My uneasiness isn’t keeping me from making books for the kids or reading with them or doing any of the other things that I do daily to encourage literacy because I think the pros outweigh the cons but it does make me think a little bit more about what ‘development’ means for the people who are subject to it.

I visited the library at the school in Soma (the market town that has internet and cold Coke, otherwise Mecca) and it was great. Clean (and by that I mean there were no termite mounds on the shelves and the books weren’t coated in thick red dust), lots of books, even a ‘librarian’ (we use that term loosely here)! As I was leaving I walked with these three little kids, one of whom had a library book clutched firmly in his hand. When I asked to see his book he proudly showed it to me…it was entirely in German with no pictures and appeared to be some sort of historical account for scholars. Hmm.

So guess what was in my bed last night. No seriously, guess. It’s probably the most disgusting thing you can fathom. Maggots. There were maggots on my mattress. Now I don’t have a lot of experience with maggots but these seemed a little more complex than your average ‘taco-got-shoved-behind-toaster’ variety. They had a sort of translucent body with a dark center and they would play dead when you brushed against them with a broom/newspaper/anything within reach at one o’clock in the morning. Why do I have maggots in my bed? Well I’m pretty sure it has something to do with her:

Boo (chewing my cell phone charger)

Meet ‘Boo’. She’s named that because the generic name for cat in Mandinka is ‘Moose’ so I was going to go with ‘Caribou’ but that’s kind of hard for Gambians to say so…Boo it is. I should clarify that I had absolutely no intention of getting a pet during my time here. Tell that to a tiny little kitten meowing relentlessly at two o’clock in the morning in a neighboring compound because she is hungry and being kicked around like an insect on someone’s shoe. Of course when the American goes out to investigate what in the world is going on, they all look at me like, ‘Well?’ My choices seemed limited to a) go back inside and pretend I didn’t hear anything while my sense of decency trickled away into the night or b) rescue the poor thing and buy a twenty cent package of powdered milk to quiet her down. Well the above is a picture of her on my bag so I’ll let you come to your own conclusions on how that little scenario played out. She’s pretty adorable and it is nice having her around but I do stand by my initial opinion that it is distracting to have a pet and it takes away from the amount of time I spend with my village and family. I think that will change as she gets older though, so I don’t regret my decision (like I really had a choice). She’s already graduated from being hand fed with a medicine dropper and crying constantly to eating out of a dish and purring the majority of the time so things are moving in the right direction.

What does all of this have to do with maggots? Well they don’t sell cans of Purina cat food out in the bush so I’ve had to experiment some with what to feed her. She’s too small to hunt for her own food at this point but I do want her to start doing that somewhere down the line since I’m not sure what will happen with her after I leave. They sell this powdered milk in the ‘bitiks’ (tiny little hole-in-the-wall shops within the village) which has been her staple thus far. When that didn’t seem to fill her up as much as it should (read: incessant crying) I started going to a Fulla compound and getting her some fresh milk. The Gambia is populated with five major African tribes: Mandinka, Fulla, Wollof, Pullar and Serahouli. Each tribe has their own language and customs yet they coexist peacefully for the most part. When I say ‘tribe’ it makes me think of pictures in National Geographic in which people are walking around in loincloths with gigantic plugs through their earlobes. It’s not like that at all. Technology wise these people are living like it’s 1852 (except for the cellphones – more on that later) but they have a lot of similarities to Westerners in their day to day activities and a lot of their attitudes.


Here’s my third grade report on The Gambia:


Clothing:

Me with Lamin the Mauratainian shopkeeper (3rd from left)

and a couple of customers.

My neighbors

About 50% of the men wear ‘traditional’ clothing which basically look like pajamas. It’s usually the older men who wear traditional clothing the majority of the time. Younger men fluctuate daily between traditional wear and western wear. On special occasions and Fridays (big prayer day) most people dress traditionally. A lot of the younger men have begun to wear western clothes almost exclusively. Most of it is ‘urban fashion’, i.e. baggy jeans, logo shirts, baseball caps and beanies (hip hop has a huge influence here). They have these piles of western clothes laid out on tarps on the ground at the market which they call the ‘dead toubob pile’ because ‘the only reason a toubob would get rid of stuff this great is if he were dead’.

The opening of our health center

The girls dress much more traditionally. In my village they ALL wear ankle length wrap skirts and matching shirts. Well the skirts start out with matching shirts but since they are doing pretty intensive domestic work throughout the majority of their day they usually trade those in for random printed t-shirts and when I say random I mean RANDOM, think Flaming Lips concert shirts from 1996. Next time you toss an old shirt into a donation pile keep in mind that it could quite possibly end up in a rural African village and be worn by a fourteen-old girl who is the third wife of a guy who lives in Sweden who supports his family by transporting corrugate metal to Africa and has a baby on the way (a fairly common scenario here).

Everyday wear

Well that’s how they dress at all times except ‘program’ nights. ‘Programs’ are held regularly and they are basically makeshift dance clubs. DJs will bring in a generator and these enormous speakers, along with a PA system and CD player. They will fence off an area and then charge people roughly forty cents to come in and dance. This starts at about eleven and night and usually finishes up at about four in the morning. The music is so loud that it literally sounds like the speakers are pushed up against my window and turned to full blast. So anyway on program nights the girls trade in their traditional clothes for fairly trashy 80’s wear! There are a lot of really tight pants and skimpy tops involved. Big belts too and for some reason they enjoy leaving the tags on some of these items. I think it’s supposed to signify that it’s new but I’m not completely sure. I should point out that these girls are all in amazing shape from the daily physical labor they do, so no matter how tacky an item may be, it all looks really good on them. There’s a reason African American girls have a reputation for being able to fill out a pair of jeans and their sisters across the Atlantic are no exception.
Wait…wasn’t I talking about maggots? How did I get onto how Gambian girls look in their stretch jeans? Oh yeah, Fullas and milk. Okay, so anyway yeah, no one’s wearing a loin cloth or anything like that around here. The majority of my village are Mandinkas and they primarily farm for a living. Most of what they grown are sustenance crops (they eat most of what they grow instead of selling/exporting it). There are also a few Fulla compounds on the outskirts of the village. Fullas farm too but their primary source of income stems from cattle. Families can own anywhere from a couple of cows to large herd so they spend most of their time tending to them.

A village cow

(Gambians think it's crazy that I take pictures of cows and donkeys. I made the mistake of letting them see me do it once and now they get all excited when they see me approaching a herd. 'Natloo!(picture!), Nataloo!, Nataloo! can be heard far and wide.)

On the ‘tending’ note let me share an example of why I say the men, or at least the boys, are no slouches when it comes to the amount of work they do compared with the girls. During the ‘dry season’ (October – March) there is NO rain ( hence ‘dry’) and there are certainly no natural bodies of water to be found anywhere (except for the river which is pretty far from most settlements/villages). Well the cows need to drink so it’s the boys job to fetch water for them. Um okay, I'm going to stop whining about fetching my measly five buckets of water on laundry day. These boys fetch twenty, TWENTY! , 20-liter containers of water a day for the cows to drink! I can’t even pick one of those up after it has been filled with water. That container is like a shopping basket filled with ten, 2-liters bottles of soda!

The Fullas rarely slaughter their cattle for meat , they are too poor and that would be too indulgent. Instead they sell the milk the cattle produce and trade the animals themselves as a form of currency. I haven’t seen a lot of attention being paid to animal husbandry so I’m not sure how involved they are in the breeding process but calves are born occasionally which increases the family’s wealth. With limited options in the cat food arena, I’m grateful to have some Fullas around who will give me a little bit of milk once in awhile. (Yes I know you are not supposed to give cats cow’s milk but my options are pretty limited here so I’m doing the best I can.) Well Boo seemed to enjoy the milk and it seemed to fill her up more than the powdered variety but guess what happens to milk when you don’t have a refrigerator? It gets pretty chunky pretty fast. Gambians consume two types of milk: ‘fresh’ milk and ‘sour’ milk. Fresh milk is just that, straight from the cow. Sour milk is fresh milk about twenty-four hours after it has left the cow and is a totally valid food choice here. They usually mix into their porridge. It must be an acquired taste though because Boo isn’t having any of it, or maybe I just have to make some porridge for her, she is a Gambian cat after all. Now that she’s getting bigger a milk only diet isn’t cutting it so I have reverted back to the powdered milk (getting that fresh milk from the Fullas was a big production; long walk, lots of greeting, gifts of appreciation since they refused payment for it) and have introduced smoked fish. A main staple of the Gambian diet is fish (the country’s biggest geographical feature is a nice river full of them) and like the milk, it comes in two varieties, fresh and smoked.

Smoked fish

Smoked is very popular because of the whole ‘no refrigerator’ thing. They grind it up and add it to most of their dishes. I should probably point out here that my cat eats better than most Gambians which is something I’m not particularly proud of but I feel sort stuck between a rock and hard place about it. I’ve taken responsibility for the cat and I have the resources to feed her well and keep her healthy. I don’t have the resources to feed the country well and keep it healthy, so I’m doing what is within my ability. People aren’t starving here, there is generally a nice amount of food in the food bowl but it can be somewhat nutritionally wanting (a bunch of white rice and not a whole lot else). My cat on the other hand has been getting approximately one smoked fish a day. All right I’m done justifying my western value system, let’s talk about maggots! One day I got a ‘not-so-smoked’ batch of smoked fish and I think that was the source of my bunk mates. When I went to investigate the bag of fish, your run of the mill, white rice resembling wigglers were in there (eww) and I suspect the things on my mattress were ‘Stage 2’ of the life cycle process. The bag went down the latrine, the guests got swept out and I haven’t seen a trace of them since. So there you have it, how the horrifying discovery of maggots on one’s bed can lead to a discussion on West African fashion and tribal economic systems.

Fo Wati Doo! (Until next time!)