Wednesday, February 3, 2010

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 rudAdd Imagee 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.

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