The 'Moringa in Every Compound' Campaign!

Moringa is a leafy tree that is rich in nutrients, it is often called the ‘Miracle Tree’ due to its medicinal uses and the effects it has on ailments attributed to malnutrition. Its equivalent leafy green in America would probably be kale. Most Gambians know about Moringa,‘Nebadyo / Never Die’ in local language, but there is not very much of it growing in The Gambia and there is hardly any in my village. This is peculiar because the ‘Never Die’ name comes from the fact that the tree grows very quickly and easily. I planted a seedling in my backyard when I came back to The Gambia last May and one year later the height of the trunk exceeds my house’s roofline. Once people know you have a tree you get lots of requests for leaves and seeds. Many of the traditional leaf sauces that are served over rice can be made from Moringa. It’s chock full of vitamins so it’s an excellent choice. With this in mind I developed a plan to get Moringa planted in Jappineh. Approach #1 was to work with the health center since the usage of Moringa directly affects the overall health of the community. The staff at the health center were on board so we created a small nursery, advised local families on proper care of the trees, pretty basic stuff like ‘keep it fenced so the goats don’t eat it’, and then out planted about 20 trees before the rains came. All was well and good but I felt somewhat frustrated with the health worker I had teamed up with so when the next rainy season approached I decided to try something new, ‘The Moringa Nursery Competition!’. The idea was that I would involve school children in creating the nursery and in doing the out planting, thereby creating a stronger base for sustainability down the line.

Planting Moringa with students

Things started out well. I developed a timeline, decided on the process of selecting competitors, chose prizes and created our graph on which we would measure the growth of our trees. I did a presentation to our seventh and eighth graders outlining the plan. There was a buzz. People were excited! Only seventh and eighth graders were eligible and interested parties could drop their names into a box from which ten would be randomly selected the next week. Kids were tearing pages out of their notebooks on the spot, clamoring to be included. That week the box filled up, it appeared that almost every student in grades seven and eight had entered. The day of the drawing a group of students gathered, not a small group but not a very big one either. We pulled ten names with bated breath. I should have made my small speech about competition and the benefits of the Moringa tree at the beginning rather than saving it for the end because the moment the last name was called the crowd vanished. Hmm. When the day of the first meeting arrived five of the ten selected competitors showed up. ‘Where are the others?’ I asked, clearly perplexed. Being chosen had been a big event and now only half show up? ‘She went home’, ‘I don’t know’, the responses were vague. Well that’s alright, better five excited contestants than ten ambivalent ones.

Jappineh School

We planted our pre-soaked seeds into nursery bags and the students nodded absent mindedly as I started talking about the benefits of Moringa. Okay team, we will meet once a week to measure our plants and graph the results. In eight weeks winners will be declared based on the final height of their seedlings. Everyone wandered off, everyone except for Lamin Darbo. I hadn’t known Lamin before that day. There are over five hundred students at the school. I don’t know them all and Lamin had never crossed my path. During the time we prepped the bags I noticed that Lamin was taking more time to finish the job than the others. I let him go at his own pace and then one of the other kids offered to help him finish up at the end. He appeared sort of scatter brained but he was trying so we just let him be. Well Lamin turned our Moringa competition into a one man show. He was totally committed. The other four contestants ambled in and out over next eight weeks, letting the majority of the seeds go to waste. Lamin however was in that nursery daily, fetching water, weeding and just taking generally fantastic care of his plants. He was about attentive as everyone else when I tried to tell him about the benefits of Moringa but he was on a mission to have the tallest seedlings. And he did tenfold most of the time. We had a nail biter development at about week three though. One of the flakiest students who barely ever showed up to water had one seedling that took off in spite of the lack of care. I don’t know if someone else’s watering was inadvertently hitting this seedling or if it was just an anomaly but one week this student moved into first place, pushing Lamin into second. It was an outrage, unacceptable, she never watered! It was also when I pointed out to Lamin that sometimes you just get lucky. But luck doesn’t last, commitment will persevere. And thankfully it did. The next week Lamin was back on top and he remained there all the way up to the end. On the day winners were announced Lamin’s class cheered for him enthusiastically. I learned later that in school Lamin was less than dedicated and that his success in the competition came as a big surprise to everyone. It was heartwarming.

First place winner: Lamin Darbo! I know he doesn't look happy but he is.
This is typical 'Gambian Picture Face'. It has something to do with portraying
yourself as a warrior.



Second place winner: Lamin Sarr!



Third place winner: Mai Drammeh!





Lamin's seedlings are in the forefront, the weedy mess behind his are everyone else's.



...and I'm back!

Hello and welcome to my biannual blog! That appears to be my updating schedule so let’s call a duck a duck, or a crocodile a crocodile considering the environment, shall we? The big news this month? I have finished my Peace Corps service! That would probably have more impact if I had been updating you on my progress thus far but I haven’t so you’ll just have to trust that it was filled with rewarding work, frustrating stumbling blocks and a lot of donkeys. Sidenote: A common joke in The Gambia is to refer to a difficult person as a ‘donkey’. I’ve had plenty of experience with both the two legged and the four legged variety. You know what is cute? A baby donkey. Let’s see one to keep this post moving in a positive direction!





Many of you saw the library project that I posted on facebook and it was indeed a success. With the support of Friends of Gambian Schools, a development organization in the UK, who gave us funds to renovate a crumbling old storeroom into an appropriate space for a library, African Oyster Trust, also based in the UK, who arranged for fantastic books to be delivered to the village, our own Jappineh Doll Studio, who raised money for bookshelves, flooring and paint, along with Peace Corps who enabled me to live in the village and take on the project, we were able to develop a wonderful place to read and learn.







Plastering the walls



A community member painting

the solar system



Jappineh School



Organizing our books



Students enjoying their library books!



Jappineh Basic Cycle School Library

Our school offers pre-kinder through grade nine classes, and everyone is welcome in the library. I developed age appropriate activities for each class and the students really enjoyed them. The pre-k class listened to a read aloud of a book about shapes, followed by doing shape puzzles. The upper grades did library scavenger hunts in which they were given a list of things to find, i.e. a person eating a piece of fruit, and then worked in groups to find pictures of those things in the library books. This sounds really easy but between the language barrier, few students are fluent in English, they all speak local African languages, and the unfamiliarity with doing anything other than sitting quietly and taking notes in class it was a bit of a struggle! Over time everyone’s comfort level went up and there was lots of participation. Students were also given plenty of time to do independent and pair reading so that they had an opportunity to discover all the interesting books our library contains.


I’m really happy with how our library turned out and I enjoyed my time with the students so much. This was by far the most rewarding aspect of my work within the school and I hope that the teachers and administration will maintain it for years to come.





 

























































Where have you been?



Me with neighbors Baa Mulie Janneh and Bunja Gitteh in Jappineh on Koriteh 2012

If you read that title out loud and I hope you're the kind of weirdo that randomly reads things you look at on the Internet out loud then I'll tell you...The Gambia, West Africa! You wouldn't know it since I've been here for 8 months and haven't updated once but trust me, I'm here and I'm still eating a lot of rice. So depending on how well you know me you either thinking 1) Oh that's nice, she's gonna update us on events 2) What?! You went back? 3) I thought you've just been lost in the bush for the last three years 4) Who are you? How do you have my e-mail address/Why are you on my FB feed? If you are a #3 or #4 then you should probably know that I'm here with the Peace Corps and I started my service in 2009 but needed to leave after a year and a half due to an assault (on a 1-10 scale, 1 being something to shrug off, 10 being dead, I'm going to go with a 6.5) Upshot: Guy came into my village house in the middle of the night with impure intentions and a knife, there was a struggle and I ended up in America for a year and a half having surgery after surgery to repair a cut tendon in my hand. I now have a small finger that is stuck in a downward position and a pretty dramatic story so you know...another thread in the tapestry of life.

So anyway here I am continuing to follow my bliss but honestly it wasn't that blissful which is why I haven't been writing. I'm glad I returned. I wanted to come back for several reasons and all of those reasons have been satisfied. My host family and community felt terrible that this happened so it was important for me to show them that I'm fine and everything is okay. I also wanted to come back for me, closure, getting back on the horse, that kind of thing. All of that stuff came to pass and I'm glad for it but while my first stint here was a total honeymoon my return has been sort of a grind. So why am I writing now? It's the New Year people! Thankfully my head finally aligned with my heart and am enjoying my service and being here again. It's probably because I know I'll be finishing this year and time is becoming more valuable. I end my service at the closing of the school year so in July it will be on to a new chapter and I know I'll miss my village a lot. I'm so glad that I can really enjoy the time I have left without a lot of tedium dragging me down.

 

So what am I doing here? Well a bunch of things actually. Here's the run down:

Sewing dolls! While I was back in America I was giving a lot of thought as to what I could do when I came back to Africa to really help the kids in my village in a tangible way. I designed a handmade doll, sewed up a bunch, made the materials such as patterns and instructions so that they could be replicated, then bought books for the school library with money that I earned when I sold that first batch of dolls. (Thanks LANI ladies, the books I got due to your support are in hot demand!)

  

These are the traditional clothes of West Africa. It's how most girls and women dress most of the time and definitely how they dress on holidays. The dolls are completely hand sewn and take three to four days to make.

The Jappineh Doll Studio artists hard at work! I started this project as a girls only endeavor but that boy on the end was not going to be denied an opportunity to learn something and earn some money so I made an exception. I've now got 20 kids sewing!

We are selling the dolls to Peace Corps volunteers, tourists to the city on the coast and to people in England who are involved in Gambian development work. I would love to be able to get them into an American market but at this point shipping is the issue and it wouldn't be financially feasible. We sell the dolls for $20. $8 goes to the person who sewed the doll (that is a lot in rural Africa), $8 to a library fund and $4 are used for supplies.

These are the most popular books we've bought for the library so far:

The 'Aya' books. These are a series of 3 graphic novels centering on the lives of a group of girls living in Côte d'Ivoire (The Ivory Coast), a West African country that is very similar to The Gambia culturally. The girls are smart, funny, full of opinions and misadventures. The books are really wonderful and the teachers as well as the students are waiting in line for their turn to read them. Reading for pleasure is a novel concept here so the delight that people take in these books is really exciting!

We love Hilda the hen! This one of several books beautifully written by Jill Tomlinson from an animal's pov. I was surprised that this was such a winner with the kids since they don't have the same relationship with animals that western kids do. They were clamoring to read a new chapter every night, which is rare. I usually try to stick with books that can be read in a single evening since their attention spans tend to dwindle with chapter books. Not with these, we've read this one and the one about the penguin with great enthusiasm which is fantastic because like I said, longer pieces of text are a challenge. We'd love to read the rest!

A few people have asked if they can send us anything. Books please! Here's our Amazon wish list:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/L9A8RNFXEBAU/ref=topnav_lists_1

The site only allows me to add new books but almost everything we selected is available used.

Things don't stay crisp for very long in this environment so gently used is a great option.

 Books will be delivered to my home in California and then forwarded to us by my family. Thank you!

Next up: We';re planting Moringa trees and that's going to prevent a whole bunch of kids from being malnourished if things go as planned. I'll be back in a month to tell you all about that. The connection here is sloooooow so this is all I can manage tonight. Thanks for reading, be well!

 -Tanya

 

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.