Working for Peanuts...literally.

I recall as a child my father vehemently opposing us talking to him from any other room then the one he was in.  Oh, how I loathed it.  I’d be in the living room, not more than ten paces (child paces that is) from the kitchen and he would refuse to listen to anything I said until I got up and walked those ten child paces into the kitchen.  Now, like most things that were incomprehensible to me as a child, I understand all too well.  I’ll be walking to the garden from my house and I’ll hear a faint noise from an unknown direction.  Could be a bird or just the wind, regardless, that barely audible sound couldn’t be meant for my ears.  Then, someone who is closer to me will tell me to answer to this indistinguishable sound.  If I ever do find the source of this far off utterance, I will have no idea who it is coming from as they are far out of normal eyesight range.  I’m not talking ten or even twenty child paces away.  If we were in my childhood, they would not only not be in my kitchen; they wouldn’t be in the kitchen next door either.  They’d be in the kitchen down the block and around the corner.  Now upon first arriving here, I would try to respond to these marathon-distance shout-outs, but being that I wasn’t born with supersonic hearing (like all Gambians as far as I can tell), I quickly tired of even trying.  

In addition to not being able to hold a normal conversation a mile away from my fellow conversant, I also never know who is trying to converse with me.  Turns out you can spot a “toubab” (white person) from a mile away and being that I’m the only toubab in at least a ten mile radius, it’s a pretty safe bet as to who I am.  My job in interpreting which villager is yelling at me about how hot it is from the next village over is considerably more difficult.  I now have a new rule that if the person is more than ten adult paces away from me, rooms or no rooms, they will not receive a response until they walk into my “kitchen”.

I’m actually constantly amazed at the lengths one will go, or not go for that matter, to avoid moving here.  This is something I can understand given that even while lying completely naked and motionless on my floor, I’ll be sweating buckets.  But, people here can take it to the extreme.  The aforementioned long-distance shouting is one example. Another would be how nearly every day after lunch any of my three moms while sitting literally within easy reaching distance of the bucket of drinking water will shout for any of her children to bring her water.  Sometimes it will take a solid ten minutes of shouting at the top of her lungs to even get the child’s attention.  Then another five minutes for the child to run the half-mile back to the house.

Speaking of child labor… I’m really thinking of adopting it as a practice when I have children of my own.  I’ll only have to wait for about two years or so until they start walking and then I’ll have myself some full-time, round-the-clock employees.  If I deprive then of all forms of entertainment, the work will even seem like a fun little game they play with all the other little slave-laborers.  “How many pieces of wood can you chop with this axe whose blade is barely connected to the handle, little four-year old Mohammed?”  “I don’t know, but I bet I can beat you three year old Mohammed!”  “Ha, ha, ha.  YAY!  Let’s do some more work!  Where’s the machete?”

As a thanks for all this fun, free labor my mom will shout encouraging words like, “If I find you there not working, I’m going to beat you!” And “Today is the day you die.”  Ah, to be a young African child.  If this experience has taught me nothing else, I now know how bland my childhood was, what with all the playgrounds and swings, birthday parties and ice cream cake, cold water!?!  Man, oh man, did I miss out.  Luckily, I’ve now been here long enough that they think of me as one of their children as well.  I might be the weird, fair-skinned one that likes to stare at pieces of paper with scribbles all over it for hours on end, but I’m their weird, fair-skinned child.  Now, if my moms see me sitting and doing nothing (always), they shove a bucket full of peanuts to shell in my face.  They don’t trust me with anything like chopping-wood; I’m not nearly as skilled as all the little Mohammeds.  Finally, the childhood I never had. 

Unless you change direction, you’re apt to end up where you’re headed. –Chinese Proverb

              Now that the final countdown has begun (finally), I suppose it’s about time I update my blog.  It’s only been one year, since my last entry.  There’s an expression in Wollof, “Ndanka, ndanka mooy jaapa doomi golo”, “slowly, slowly, you catch the baby monkey.”  Also known as, patience is a virtue.  Many Gambians would call this a proverb and I suppose with this particular one I can get on board.  However, they also have many expressions that are not proverbs by any stretch of the imagination.  A proverb by definition is “a saying that effectively expresses some commonplace truth or useful thought” (Merriam Webster).  The key phrase in that definition is “effectively expresses”.  I was effectively expressing how ineffective many Gambian “proverbs” were at expressing their meaning to my friend Bala, when he expressed this little proverb to me as an example of how effectively expressive Gambian proverbs are; “ If a squirrel knows the secrets of the crocodile, who told him?”  Now because effective proverbs require no further information beyond what is given in the proverb to express a commonplace truth or useful thought, you probably don’t need any more information about what this one means.  However, if you could not quickly arrive at the meaning of this little gem, I’ll fill you in.  Obviously, it was the monitor lizard who told the squirrel the secrets of the crocodile because he can live in the water and on land AND what’s more, the moral of this proverb is “don’t gossip (or back bite, as the Brits would say) because gossiping is bad”.  Wow, I know.  Feel free to share that wise and ancient Gambian proverb at dinner parties and any other appropriate occasions.  I personally think it is more of a riddle than a proverb, but all Gambians would strongly disagree.

                After being away for 585 days and then traveling for 4 days, I finally made it back to the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Despite leaving The Gambia on a Wednesday and arriving in Tucson on a Saturday, the travel was still one million times better than traveling around in West Africa, better than mangoes even.  Since I’ve now finally reached my half way point, I decided I wanted to post my book list, but I feel like I should talk about some of the work I’ve done first.  I don’t just read all day, I swear (well at least not all day EVERY day).  Shortly before I left, BeeCause (an adorably named organization to help promote beekeeping) came out to my village for the second of three beekeeping trainings.  We now have six beekeepers in my village, one of whom is a woman!  (YAY, GAD moment!)  Five of our six catcher boxes had bees and we have now built full size boxes in order to transfer the bees.  Upon my return, we will harvest whatever honey we have and then wait until the rains are finished to harvest again.  We might not have any bread or vegetables in my village, but we’re about to have liquid gold.  My counterpart and I have also begun working on a medium scale poultry project.  Because raising laying hens is simply not profitable in my area, we will be sentencing all of our little chicks to death.  I am still a vegetarian, but I think I’m going to have to give chicken slaughtering a go. YOLO! (You Only Live Once, for those of you who, like me,  do not ride the acronym train.)  Here are some other side projects I have going on:

•  Care Group: I teach basic health concepts to 7 women, those women then re-teach that information to the rest of the village.

•   Solar-Water Tap: After about a year, Changai finally has a solar-water tap.  Well, we at least have the money and almost all the materials.  At the time of my trip to the US we were just waiting for the contractor to come hook everything up.  Hopefully there will be running water upon!

•      Reading club: I read with the kids at the school every Friday, just to help them practice.  I’m not very good at it, but I have the books.

•          Tree-guard training: I had one of my favorite people in my village, Mahmoud Khan, help me host a training to teach villagers how to make tree-guards for when they out plant seedlings to protect them from the multitudes of livestock that ruin everything they can.  As it turns out no one wants to learn how to do that, but I now know how to make them, so I consider it a success!

So you see, I do do some work.  And now for my full time job, I read and here are all the books I’ve read in chronological order for the last year and a half:

-          Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly

-          Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

-          Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

-          Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

-          The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

-          Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

-          Are you there Vodka? It’s me Chelsea by Chelsea Handler

-          What is the What by Dave Eggers

-          The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

-          The Race for Timbuktu by Frank T. Kryza

-          Film School by Steve Bowman

-          The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

-          Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

-          The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

-          The Perks of Being a Wall Flower by Stephen Chbosky

-          Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin

-          The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

-          My Horizontal Life by Chelsea Handler

-          Room by Emma Donoghue

-          Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

-          Little Bee by Chris Cleave

-          Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (Reread)

-          Watership Down by Richard Adams (Reread)

-          Imperial Ambitions by Noam Chomsky

-          Turn Right at Machu Picchu by Mark Adams

-          Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver (Reread)

-          Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver

-          The Wild Girl by Jim Fergus

-          A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin

-          The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

-          God’s Middle Finger by Richard Grant

-          Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

-          The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okamura

-          Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

That’s all folks!  I’d like to thank my brother for coming to visit me.  My hut might be made for one, but the two of us made it work just fine for three straight weeks.  I was impressed.  The school now has a beautiful world map.  Thanks Omar Khan.  I was also very lucky to have my mom and my two aunts come out for a visit.  I know that it is no short distance and that it isn’t exactly a destination vacation, so I really appreciate it.  I hope the people of Changai showed them a wonderful time.  They certainly will never forget meeting you guys.  I have just 330 days left and I’m hoping it will be my most productive year yet.  I’ll leave you with a short list of the illnesses I’ve suffered to date; hopefully the list will not get much longer:

-          Giardia: Anywhere from 3 to 6 times, or rather basically constantly for a year and a half.

-          Blister Beetle: It’s gross, google it if you want.

-          Ring Worm: Don’t play with kids.

-          Kidney Infection: Throwing up in a pit latrine is not fun.

-          Cutaneous Larvae Migrans: Look it up on Wikipedia, that’s what the doctor did.

-          Entamoeba Histolytica: It’s gross, I don’t suggest getting it.

Wish me luck.  See you all in year.  If any of the five of you who read this have google glasses by the time I come back, you can just go ahead and remove yourself from my life.  Bye, bye!