Monday, April 7, 2014

A stick in the water will never be a crocodile. -Gambian Proverb

I wrote the following article for the gender and development newsletter and people here really seemed to enjoy it, so I thought I'd share.


     While in village a few weeks ago something strange, amazing and somewhat offensive happened to me. I was chatting away with a group of men when out of the corner of my eye I saw a man raising his hand to his mouth in a drinking gesture. I had never seen this man before; he was clearly just passing through the village. It was a hot day per usual and he looked very thirsty. However, as I was clearly in the middle of something, and he clearly wasn’t signaling for me to bring him water, I ignored him. After about a minute, he moved into my line of sight again and continued making the “bring me water” gesture. I was astounded. While I see men make this gesture to women all day long, no one had ever made it to me. Normally, when I see women forced to immediately abandon whatever it is they are doing to bring a man water, I am offended, but only in a passive, cultural-difference sort of way. My toubab mind thinks, “You have feet, you walked all the way to this compound, get your own water.” However, now I was faced with a genuine predicament. This man was gesturing for me to bring him water. Even while being offended and mildly perturbed, I also felt a sense of pride and accomplishment. After two years of trying to belong, had I finally made it? Does being ordered around just like all the other women in my village mean I am finally culturally integrated?

     As outsiders, I feel we are often toeing the line of being ourselves and being culturally appropriate, suppressing outbursts concerning certain cultural differences so as to not lose the respect of our community members. But then there are times where we can use our role as outsiders as an opportunity for sharing and teaching. A host country national once described PCVs to me as genderless or even a third gender. I feel that this is an apt description. While I am a woman, I am very different from all the women around me. And while I mostly work with men, I’m not one of them either. I’m something in-between: a third gender. As a member of the third gender, I can talk about things to both genders; things neither gender can talk about with one another. This is a unique and powerful role.
So, did I use this power position to teach that man about how we do things a bit differently in America? I’d like to say I did, but I didn’t. I simply ignored him until he caught the eye of another woman and had her bring him water instead. I’ve thought about that missed opportunity many times in the weeks since it happened. Sometimes I think we work so hard to fit in that we become afraid to step outside of the more traditional gender roles at our sites. Now, towards the end of my service, I know I will never truly fit in; I will always stand out. That being said, I think we can all share pieces of our culture with our community members, even if it makes us stand out just that much more. Whether it be talking to my moms about the fact that I am not married but not a virgin, or telling the teachers at the school that some men in America stay home and take care of the kids while their wives go to work. Or simply telling that man, “You have feet, you walked all the way to this compound, get your own water.”

My mom and my aunts Bev and Monie also contributed the following article to the newsletter at the end of their wonderful visit.  It was well received and definitely worth a share.

     Could our bra-burning mothers who started demanding equal pay for equal work in the 70s have envisioned their grand-daughters as agents of change in the 21st century on another continent with something as simple as a water tap? We can take it all for granted as American women in 2013. But here we are in Changai marveling at the idea of taps for water seeding a women`s liberation movement in West Africa.

     Drawing water is a back-breaking, central part of every woman's day in Mariama's village. In her compound, three wives and a pre-teen helper head out before sunrise and make several trips to the well about 400 meters away with a variety of empty containers: the ubiquitous Gambian wash buckets along with recycled cooking oil containers we've seen put to a variety of uses from one end of the Gambia to the other. When repeated use has worn holes in the bottom of the bidongs, their useful lives are extended with plastic bags stuffed into the holes. The women from each compound appear to have assigned water times but they also rely on a complex scheme to fairly allocate the labor and its fruit. There are women of all ages gathered at the well. Three women on one rope, they work in rhythm to smoothly lower and raise the bucket more than 100 meters roundtrip…more than 15 times just for Mariama's compound of 10 people. Mariama's moms graciously allow each of us to join a team for a pull but freely laugh at our ham-handedness and un-calloused palms. There's camaraderie and cheerfulness in the air belying the brute force required to provide something so basic...household water.

     We made the trip from Banjul to Changai with Seedou, the water wizard from Kombo. Mariama and her counterpart, Mahmad, have laid the groundwork for his visit by assessing the village's needs, defining the project, and applying for a SPA grant to cover the cost of having piping laid, and taps and a pump installed to provide water on demand at several locations in Changhai. All for a mere $10,000, less than a small used car in America, but enough to transform the daily lives of the women (and girls) in Changai. The water project is explained by Seedou at a village meeting on Sunday morning around 10. People are slow to gather, visiting and gossiping taking precedence until some sort of signal is given to begin. Seedou provides an overview with the assistance of a Pulaar interpreter. The men are sitting close. The younger people, looking disinterested like teens everywhere, sit farther away on a circular stone wall. The women sit even further away in a large group behind Seedou. If they are listening, it is hard to tell. They are busy scolding children as needed and attending to babies bound to the backs of moms. An observer would not guess that the topic was one that will affect their lives most dramatically of all.

     Just when it seemed to us outsiders that the women's input and reactions were irrelevant, a hush fell over the crowd. All eyes turned to an elderly woman sitting quietly behind us. The male leaders have spoken and repeatedly expressed their gratitude to Mariama, but now everyone wants to hear from one of the oldest and most respected members of the village. An elderly woman with a nearly toothless smile clearly has clout that makes her words important as the village plans for the project. Such respect for an older woman's opinions was as foreign a concept to us as the idea that three middle-aged white women traveling to Changai was to them.

     We are left to ponder just how the arrival of water taps in Changai might change the lives of two of the village's newest female members might be. Cathy, named in honor of Mariama's American mother, and Oumou, Mariama's youngest Gambian sister, might grow up believing that water always came from a tap. But will that mean that they will have equal access to an education? Will they be able to pursue a career if they want to? Follow dreams and aspirations that may take them beyond Changai and maybe even beyond the Gambia? Will they be free to choose whom to marry or even whether to marry? That seems as unknowable as the idea of a woman candidate for president might have been for our mothers four decades ago. We will need to wait and see.



Saturday, February 1, 2014

Baby steps...sideways.


Hour 1: New Years Day

                  Slightly hung over, our journey begins with a 7 am phone call to quickly get to the car park because our car has filled and it’s leaving leegi leegi (now now)!

Hours 2-5: Basse Car Park

                  After inhaling some bean sandwiches the size of Carly’s torso, we wait…and wait… and…wait, wasn’t our car full?

Hours 6-7: Really Full, like full full

                  Our car is finally full!  We’ve paid for an extra seat giving us three seats in the middle row of the “sept-place”.  Normally, these cars seat 7 people (hence the name) and the driver: one up front, three in the middle, and three in the hatch-back part of the converted station wagon, which has been outfitted with luxurious seats.  However, this is no normal travel.  This is a “quinze-place”: three up front (not including the driver), four in the middle (in our case only three because we’re assholes), four in the trunk seats, two more behind the trunk seats (the way, way back, if you will) and two on top.  It’s cool though, it’s only like a 17 hour ride.

Hour 8: Border x-ings

                  The people on the top and in the way, way back have to get out and walk across all of the border crossings because clearly it would be unsafe and illegal for that many people to be in one car.  Everyone else gets out of the sardine can and waits for just us three toubabs (remember, the ones with all the room? The assholes) to get our passports stamped.  Africans do not need visas to go from country to country, so had we not been there, they could have been on their merry way much more quickly.  But alas, we are there, so all 12 of them had to wait for the customs officers to painfully slowly write out all the information in our passports and visas.
                  We get back in the car, only to repeat this process 6 more times.  I’m still confused as to why there so many checkpoints as we only crossed two borders.  The whole affair definitely added at least two hours to the journey.  If the rest of the people in the car didn’t hate us at first, they absolutely do now.

Hours 9-15: Ridin’ dirty…literally

                  At some point we leave what little paved road we once had.  It’s now nighttime, our driver Momodou Alieu, has only narrowly avoided plowing into several cows, dogs, goats, sheep and one woman.  No one else in the car seems nearly as frightened, nor do they seem to taking a notice at all actually.  At one point, we’re probably going about 50 mph (couldn’t tell you exactly because naturally the speedometer is non-functioning) and we come within centimeters of flattening a dog.  Carly lets
out a very loud “OH MY GOOOOOODDDDDD!”, waking up Shawn and everyone else in the car, further fueling the hate fire burning in their hearts.
                  Despite the fact that I had only gotten about three hours of sleep the night before and we’d been traveling all day, I know sleep is not an option for me.  Unlike everyone else in the car, I do not have full faith, or any faith for that matter, that we aren’t going to die.  Carly and Shawn however do manage to pass out, their little heads ping-ponging from the window to my shoulder and back as we drive up, down, in, out and around crater-sized holes far bigger than my hut.  It's pretty impressive.

Hours 16-20: Arrived, kinda sorta

                  We all pass out in the car at the car park.  We don’t even ask the driver if it's cool, we just post up.

Hour 21: GOODMORNING GUINEA!!!!

                  Momodou Alieu drives us to another car park where we have to change cars and carry on.  Despite what you may be thinking, we’ve actually had great luck thus far.  It was probably because Carly brought her travel fairy along and Shawn brought her travel jujus as well.  And by probably, I mean definitely.  It is also at this car park where we become cash money millionaires.  You see, $1 is the equivalent of 7,021 Guinean Franc.  Easy enough, right?   Our new car, one we think is going straight to where we need to go, thus allowing us to skip one leg of the journey, fills immediately.  The morning air is crisp and clean.  We may have only slept a hand full of hours in the last two days, but we’re feeling great!

Hours 22-25: Vous allez ou?

                  We arrive to where we think we should be only to find out no one has any idea where we’re trying to go.  Now this confusion could be due to the fact that none of the three of us speak Fula or French, but in reality it’s because we’re in the wrong place.  We’re lost.  We make some calls and get in touch with a Guinea volunteer who coincidentally is where we are and going to where we need to be.  Alright travel jujus!  She tells us to go to a café and wait and then we can catch a free ride with her back towards where we came from to rectify our mistake.

Hour 26: Wait, rinse, repeat

                  We do a crossword, drink some coffee, play some rummy and just wait.  We’re doing just fine.

Hours 27-29: Repeat

                  Apparently one hour in Guinea means the same as one hour in the Gambia.  Five, it means five.

Hour 30: Thumbs up

                  We’re still having a great time, but we’re beginning to feel uncomfortable asking to use the bathroom at the police station next door.  They were nice about it until like the 30th time and then they start to ask what we can only assume is “what’s your deal?”
                  We decide we can’t wait any longer, because we’ve spent $5 to save $7.  So, we hitch a ride, which takes about 30 seconds.  The day wasn’t a complete waste though, we did finish that crossword.  Oh, and we saved $2.

Hour 31: Back-Tracking

                  Back to where we were supposed to go to catch the last car to our final destination.  Everyone descends upon us at the car park, speaking so many languages we don’t speak.  I don’t know where we are, I can’t tell people where we’re going, everyone’s yelling and I’m so tired!  Shawn senses my frustration and just starts yelling “Who speaks wollof, who speaks wollof?”  Alas our knight in shining armor steps forward in the form of a 12 year old boy from the Gambia.  He helps us find a car AND the world’s most disgusting latrine.  (Side note: it’s a cultural practice here for people to not walk in front of their elders, which is very awkward when the person showing you the way is walking behind you.  There’s a lot of stopping and pointing and “which way…oh…um…here?”)  I will never again think any restroom is gross, ever.  Ever...ever, ever.

Hours 32-35:  Slap-Happy

                  We’re almost there!  Only three more hours on another dirt road!  The sun begins to set, our second sunset in a car and we begin to climb up into the mountains.  There might be baby cockroaches infesting the seat upon which we sit, but who cares, we’re almost there!

Hour 36: Hassan’s House

                  We finally arrive.  After a 2 km walk, a delicious hot meal, and the coldest bucket bath I’ve ever taken, we lay our heads down and sleep like we’ve never slept before.
                  In the morning we awaken and begin our first day of hiking through heaven on earth.  I can’t put into words how incredible this place is, so I won’t even try.  I will say Carly was such an amazing guest.  She slipped right into the skin of a PC Volunteer.  It seems only hours after she arrived, she began having unexplainably weird bug bites, a red-dirt tan, and noxious gas.  We may have had to travel through hell to spend a week in Eden, but she didn’t complain once and it was totally worth it.
                 
 

Saturday, November 2, 2013

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. 

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

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!


Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Hey Boss Lady!


New country, new language, new village, new name.  I am now Mariama Sarr (essentially the Jane Doe of names), I speak Wollof (sort of), and I live in Changai, The Gambia.  I would never want to generalize and lump all the people of West Africa together, but seeing as the people here think all toubabs (white-people) are the same, I’m going to.  The major difference I have noticed between my village here and my village in Mali is that the men gather firewood, not the women.  And that’s pretty much the only difference.  The jokes are the same, the clothes are the same, the food is the same, blah, blah, blah.  It might sound crazy considering there are so many different tribes, but somehow they’ve all managed to morph into one culture.  I would feel a lot worse for making these blanket statements about West Africans if every time I left my site everyone didn’t get me confused with my site-mate FatSo ( I kid you not this is her Gambian name) who is a fairly tall, fairly fair, red-head who speaks a completely different language than I do.  If we’re all the same (and I mean ALL of us, every white-person in the entire world), then they too must all be the same.

Let me revisit the name thing.  Just like in Mali there are very few names for a large number of people.  Fatoumata, Mamadou, Mariama… I’ve pretty much exhausted the list right there.  However, The Gambia does have a few special differences.  The real Jane Doe of names here is Fatoumata Sowe, a.k.a FatSo when abbreviated, a.k.a Stephanie, my nearest volunteer.  Another very common last name is Fatty, as in Mamadou Fatty.  You get pretty accustomed to hearing the same first names and surnames and then you meet someone named Ibraima Garcia and you’re like wtf?!?  There are a handful of Gambians with Hispanic surnames, evidence of Spanish missionaries and all the amazing work they did here.  Well that’s globalization for you all wrapped up into an Arabic first name and Hispanic surname. 

Another amazing thing about The Gambia is the diversity of languages and the ability of local people to speak them.  There are a ton of languages in Mali as well, but they seemed to be a bit more geographically separated.  I think that due to Gambia’s size, all these languages coexist within one small area.  For example, I have two volunteers relatively close to me: FatSo is about 12 km away and Aminata is about 15.  Neither of them speaks Wollof, nor does either of them speak the same language as each other.  In my first few days at site, I went to a pseudo parent/teacher meeting at the school that was being given in Mandinka and translated into Pulaar, neither of which are languages that I’ve learned.  There are also only about 600 people in my village.  The average Gambian must speak at least 3 languages.  I feel like this would be a linguist’s Disneyland…or Target.

Here are a few Gambian-life highlights from my first few weeks:

  • Dancing to club music in a Muslim community is every bit as awkward as it sounds.  The only freak dancing that goes on is between people of the same sex, usually young men.  If you’re still having trouble visualizing this situation, just imagine me getting down to Akon’s “Smack that Ass” with a group of 7-9 year old girls, all of whom are significantly better dancers than me.
  • Went to a cashew training and had to sit through almost a week of trying to keep my composure while various Gambians were saying things like this:
            -“Farmers shouldn’t wash their nuts to get the sticky stuff off.”
            -“I hate it when kids play with my nuts.           
            -“Farmers should inspect their nuts, maybe by hand.”

  • Sex-tourism is a huge here, can’t wait for my mom to come visit, she’s exactly the right demographic is she we’re 15 years older and 100 pounds heavier.  The bumsters (young, attractive Gambian “tour guides”) will likely try to woo her with phrases like “Hey boss lady, what is your sweet, sweet name?”

  • Aside from sex-tourism, the only other tourist-y action The Gambia gets are bird-watchers. It is quite likely that there is no other country in the entire world that gets less attractive tourists: Bumster chasers (fat, elderly British women) and bird-watchers (fat-elderly British men).  Awesome.

  • Found a snake in my laundry basket this week and discovered that there are in fact hyenas in my hood, so if this is my last blog post, it’s probably no real great loss, but I hope the 5 of you that read this enjoyed it anyway.

Friday, May 18, 2012

Coup Runnings

COS Prom 2012

Well, I did it!  I am officially a returned Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (or RPCV in PC speak, where one, eats, sleeps, and breathes acronyms) from Mali.  To those of you who saw me off in the states, you’re probably thinking, wow that two years went really, really fast.  You would be wrong.  My first attempt at PC was a huge failure thanks to an unplanned coup and an increasingly violent and dangerous war in the north of Mali only aided by said coup.  The last few weeks has been pretty wild.  Everyone was consolidated shortly after the coup (except Koulikoro region, my region).  I was left at site to dabble in bi-polarity.  It’s not so bad, who wouldn’t want to feel so emotionally volatile that you want to kick puppies and flip off children, who just will not stop standing at your gate and watching you do nothing more than read for hours at a time?  Every few minutes I was going back and forth on whether or not we were going to be evacuated.  I kept working, but I found that devoting myself to language and/or putting up with the subtly annoying things was nearly impossible.  I was running out of money and sanity, so I crossed the river and went to my site-mates site.  We went and camped by the river with two other of our closest volunteers.  We thought we were being so smart to set up our tents before it got dark, which was smart, but that’s where forethought stopped.  We immediately ran to the riverbank and started cocktail hour to dull the pain of not knowing what our immediate futures held.  It got dark, we were relaxed, and then we realized we had only one headlamp for four people (mistake #1).  As we were single-file searching for our tents, being blindly led by our fearless leader Anderson, he spotted the area where our tents had once stood only to discover that they had of course blown away because it was crazy windy and we did nothing to weight them down (mistake #2).  It was a much-needed break from site that did not go off without a hitch.  About a week after that they finally made the decision to evacuate us, which was bitter sweet to say the least.  I think we were all happy to not be living in limbo anymore, but at least I personally was very sad to not serve out my full two years in Mali.  It’s truly a lovely country with the most welcoming people I’ve ever had the chance to meet.  I sincerely hope Peace Corps makes it back there very soon.

We were evacuated to Ghana not too long after the decision was made.  Peace Corps chartered a flight for us from Bamako to Accra, which was just plain ridiculous.  To say people were drowning their sorrows in the duty free would be an absolute understatement.  We arrived safe enough and man is Accra ever humid.  It felt like swimming on land.  We got to the hotel and were all very surprised to discover our digs for the week.  This hotel was bananas.  It was nicer then almost any hotel I’ve ever been to in the states.  I guess that was our consolation prize.  After being told there was no way, no chance at all for any of us to transfer, they presented us with several options.  I had to decide what I wanted to do for the next two years in the matter of a few hours.  I was very stressed on top of the extreme exhaustion I was feeling from the late nights with nearly 200 confused, happy, and sad volunteers deciding their next steps.  Life is pretty wild, I certainly was not expecting to be uprooted so soon, but here I am.  I chose The Gambia pretty much blindly and for basically no real reason at all.  I probably had never heard of it before last week and now I’m here.  You’ve probably never heard of it either.  It’s maybe one of the strangest countries I’ve ever seen.  Google it if you’re curious.  Several others of my friends transferred to Senegal and being literally completely inside Senegal lends itself to some crass, but hilarious jokes.  I’ll leave you to fill in the rest.  It seems like a lovely place so far.  The transit house is a mere five-minute walk from the beach, so that’s not too shabby.  That’s also something I would have never enjoyed in Mali. It is certainly going to be hard not to compare the two, but I’m going to try and think of this as a fresh start and since I am sort of joining the new training class, it is literally a fresh start.  I feel a lot more tired, a lot less nervous, but also a lot less excited this time around.  I’m going to be the newbie for almost a year!  It’s groundhogs day.  Hopefully I learned a thing or two the first time around.  I made some good friends and now I have plenty of places to stay all throughout West Africa (silver lining).  I might have to learn a new language and get used to all new germs, but when I’m old and grey I’ll be able to say I survived a Coup d’État.  

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Drunk Goggles and Mad-Hatters

The real beginning has arrived.  We are done with training (pre-service training or PST) and will soon be actually living at our sites.  It’s crazy!  I’m scared and excited and sad to leave all the wonderful people I’ve gotten the chance to get to know little by little over the past two months.  We got sworn in at the US Ambassador’s house.  There were speeches made that I didn’t understand (including one in the language I am now supposed to understand).  I’m thinking the test is rigged because there would probably be very few volunteers here if it weren’t!  We all got dressed to the nines in Malian garb and therefore looked like a Discovery Zone or a Chuck E. Cheese with all our crazy patterns and colors.  We took many a photo and then went to the American Club, which is some pretty incredible irony if you ask me.  We ate pizza and hamburgers, drank beer and went swimming because what else could we possibly do the second after we officially become Peace Corps volunteers in West Africa?  I fell asleep watching Beauty and the Beast in the theater room and had sweet dreams of how different the next two years my life is going to look from that moment forward. 

Saying farewell to the lap of luxury did not end there my friends.  We continued to take full advantage of our new status as PCV’s and go to a swanky hotel (and by swanky I mean, well we’re in one of the poorest countries in the world so you could maybe use your imagination on that one) and then we went out and danced the night away like the crazy American fools we are.  All the groups (or stages as they are called) of volunteers are given a name by their trainers at the end of PST, so we were of course all anxiously awaiting ours.  As it turns out we as a group are a bit bat-shit crazy and incessantly late for very important dates, therefore, naturally, we are now officially the Mad-Hatters.  My name is Fatamata Traoré, I live in Niagadina, Mali and I am a Mad-Hatter.  Thank you very much for tuning in, nice to meet your acquaintance.

I am very fortunate to not have to buy anything for my new site because my precursor left everything I could ever want and more.  The one thing he did not leave is a bed frame.  I thought to myself, I can’t believe this kid slept on the floor for two years especially with all the rats and what not running amok. So now I’m back to putting the puzzle pieces together of this guy’s life.  I start to ponder what would inspire someone to buy a juicer, but not a bed frame.  And then it hits me: fitting modern day furniture and appliances into a round hut is literally like trying to fit a square into a circle.  It’s an absurd waste of space.  Plus, in talking to other volunteers I have discovered that I will be doing a great deal of sleeping outdoors once the unbearable hot season hits and a bed frame will only serve to be an obstacle to moving my mattress outside.  Therefore, I have to purchase not one thing for my new house.  Thanks Josh a.k.a Drissa Traoré, a.k.a my husband according to most everyone in my new village.  Until I return to the Internet and the world of connectivity I bid you farewell.  This is likely going to be the longest 3 months (and by 3 months I mean 2 years) of my life.  


The beautiful rocks in my home-stay village (I know, it looks like AZ right?!?)

Me making tiga dege (peanut butter) with my host family.

My gwa (kind of like a ramada or hangar depending on where you
re from and what language you speak) and one of my 3 papaya trees.

My new home and a beautiful sunrise.  Thanks to the 5 am prayer call, I probably won't miss very many of these.