‘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!)