Yesterday was one of the most amazing and memorable days of my life! I felt like I was in a dream, watching an idealized version of what I’ve always wanted America to be, coming true before my eyes. And I could barely believe it was happening even as I watched it unfold, because even though I had an ideal of America in my mind, I never dared to believe that it could really come true. I know Obama’s election won’t solve most of the problems in America, and I know the shine of his victory will soon wear off as he has to buckle down to face the enormous problems our country now faces. And in terms of policy, I doubt McCain as president would have been that different, in the end. But to me, Obama and his path to the White House, embodies everything that is great about America. And even though it is so difficult for a president to make any real change in America, Obama, in his very being and in his very campaign has already permanently changed America for the better. It really feels like the dawn of a new era for America, and it feels like an era that I want to be a part of!
Watching the elections from The Gambia was a unique way to see history happen. Being in The Gambia has made me realize just how important this election is not just for America, but for the world, and how Obama's message of hope and possibility is a message that is inspiring people everywhere. Obama's election has already changed the world by permanently changing what is possible in the world. I can't help but feel pride when I tell young Gambian children that the president of my country is a half-African man who reached the most powerful position in the world through his own hard work, talent, perseverance and optimism, and that he was chosen by the American people to lead because he was judged the most worthy candidate. I can't help but feel joy at the thought that those children's view of what they are capable of achieving in life has been permanently widened. I can't help but feel more hopeful for the future.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Thought Vomit
I know it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything on this blog, but it isn’t just because I’ve been too busy or too lazy to write. I’ve been meaning to write for a long time now, but for some reason I could never bring myself to sit down and start writing. It’s not because I’ve been unhappy or have nothing to say, and for a long time I didn’t know what it was exactly. But just recently I realized what it was which has prevented me from writing: life has become ordinary again. And for the same reason that I don’t feel the need to write a blog about my daily life in the States, about my day at the office or my hellish commute to work, I don’t feel the need to write about my life here anymore. I know that my life here would still seem interesting to somebody back home, just because my life is so different. But to me, it doesn’t seem different anymore. Donkey carts, shirtless women, sweating 24 hours a day, heat rash, the frustrations and rewards of working and living with Gambians, the long, empty hours of the afternoon have become ordinary.
In a way it’s funny, because I had partially joined the Peace Corps to escape the daily grind of American life. But now I see that any life can become slightly dull and routine after enough time. At the same time, though, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m bored or unhappy with my life here. On the contrary, I feel a deep satisfaction that I have managed to adjust so much in just one year’s time that things that seemed completely overwhelming and foreign when I first came here, now seem so ordinary that I forget to notice them. I feel proud that I can speak comfortably in a language I had never heard just a year ago, that I now feel comfortable living among people I understood nothing about such a short time ago. And I also realize that even though life has become routine here, and I’m not experiencing life at the same intensity I was when I first came here, I have permanently widened my vision of the world because I have lived in two extreme situations and experienced them both as “normal”.
One thing that finally sparked me to write this was reading a National Geographic from September, 1964 about the Peace Corps. In it, one woman talks about her experience in the Peace Corps in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and how the strange becomes the familiar:
“How did it happen, then, that the days just began to roll on, blending one into the other? It wasn’t that new experiences and interesting things ceased happening, but that the strange became familiar so quickly, and the unexpected became part of the daily routine—even in Africa.” –Ruth Dygert
I read an article recently that talked about how our understanding of what is “normal” begins to expand when we are children. The first time you sleep over at a friend’s or neighbor’s house when you are a kid, you are suddenly made aware that people outside of your family do things completely differently than you. When your friend’s mom brings you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you think, “This isn’t right. PB&J is supposed to be on Orowheat bread with Smuckers grape jelly and Peter Pan chunky peanut butter. This is on white bread with the crusts cut off and some weird jelly and creamy peanut butter. You suddenly realize that what you always thought was the “right” way, is just one way among many possibilities. To your friend, his mom’s PB&J sandwich is the “right” way just as much as your mom’s is the right way to you. In a way, I feel like what I’ve gone through in the past year is a similar experience on a bigger scale. I no longer consider things I took for granted before as the “right” way. Now I see that the way I learned to do things is just one way, not necessarily the best way. And I can offer a different perspective to people here. I don’t have to tell them that I know how to make the best PB&J sandwich in the world, but I can show them a different way of making it that maybe they never thought of before.
That said, it doesn’t mean that I can completely embrace everything about Gambian culture. In fact, there are a lot of things that still drive me crazy even though I try to keep an open mind and a non-judgmental perspective. It’s a constant internal battle. And it changes from day to day. Some days I just think whatever and go with the flow. Other days, I think I don’t have to like the way things are done here. One thing that I have a hard time coping with is the philosophy of “God wills it”. It seems to serve as an excuse for a lack of hard work, self-help or drive a lot of time. It’s basically an attitude of there’s no point in trying since it’s up to fate anyway. At the same time, I understand that this attitude is also a great coping mechanism in a place where people have few opportunities and often very difficult lives. If you believe that your suffering is God’s will, it makes the burden much easier to carry. In terms of development, though, it makes things very difficult to progress. In a way, trying to better yourself or your situation is seen as trying to contradict God’s will, a sign of ultimate arrogance. The result is that the situation never improves. And when foreigners come in to give away their money and supplies, it is not seen as a stepping stone to a better life, but simply more of God providing for them and who will again provide for them. An NGO provides a fence and well for the women’s garden, the women use the garden until animals start getting in through the fence and eating all their food. Instead of trying to fix the fence or raise the money to rebuild the fence, they simply stop using the garden until someone else comes along and offers to pay for another fence for them.
Another aspect of Gambian culture that I struggle with constantly is my role as a white woman here. Gambia is still a very traditional and paternalistic society. Girls get married off as early as 14, and it is completely acceptable for a man to have as many as four wives. Women’s work and men’s work is very clearly divided. Women take care of the children, cook, clean, work in the gardens and rice fields, take care of the sheep and goats, buy and sell at the market. Men work in the fields growing peanuts, corn and millet, take care of the cows, build and repair things and sit around a lot drinking attaya. I, as an unmarried, educated working woman do not fit in any way into the Gambian mold. Traditions are changing slowly here. It is more and more common to see girls finishing high school and more and more women are entering the work place. But at the village level, very little has changed and very little will change as long as other aspects of traditional life remain the same. In fact, at the village level, life has changed very little over the past centuries. The main difference is that now a few of the wealthier people have cell phones, people wear hand-me-down Western clothes and think 50 Cent is some kind of American king.
In some ways I feel lucky to live in a place that time has seemed to forget. How else could I experience a reality so different from the one I grew up with? And there are some very charming aspects of life here that I know I will miss when I go home. I will miss the slow, relaxed pace of life, the incredibly strong family and community ties, the night sky. But at other times, it is incredibly frustrating and saddening to see how little has changed here, and how little choice people have in their lives. On the surface, life can often seem idyllic, there are always happy children running around playing games, women laughing while they work and men chatting under a mango tree drinking attaya. But there is a level of underlying suffering and anger here that you see once you scratch the surface. Almost every Gambian I have gotten the chance to know reveals some of this to me. Almost every Gambian family has lost a child, a loss that I can’t even begin to comprehend. I found out that my host mother lost 4 out of her 6 children. My neighbor lost his wife and infant son, my friend at the office where I work has lost 2 children, one in high school and one small child. And it can be very frustrating to think about how little has changed here when you think that Peace Corps has been in The Gambia for 40 years, and that The Gambia receives the most aid per capita of any country in Africa. And it can be doubly frustrating when you see the corruption and dishonesty that prevents that aid from benefiting the people it is supposed to go to. Like when you see the beans and oil that the World Food Programme donates to Gambian schools for free lunches for school children being sold in the market, or school children being charged for the meals when it is supposed to be free.
But I rant. Life is good. Things are good. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else right now and I wouldn't trade this experience for anything.
In a way it’s funny, because I had partially joined the Peace Corps to escape the daily grind of American life. But now I see that any life can become slightly dull and routine after enough time. At the same time, though, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m bored or unhappy with my life here. On the contrary, I feel a deep satisfaction that I have managed to adjust so much in just one year’s time that things that seemed completely overwhelming and foreign when I first came here, now seem so ordinary that I forget to notice them. I feel proud that I can speak comfortably in a language I had never heard just a year ago, that I now feel comfortable living among people I understood nothing about such a short time ago. And I also realize that even though life has become routine here, and I’m not experiencing life at the same intensity I was when I first came here, I have permanently widened my vision of the world because I have lived in two extreme situations and experienced them both as “normal”.
One thing that finally sparked me to write this was reading a National Geographic from September, 1964 about the Peace Corps. In it, one woman talks about her experience in the Peace Corps in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and how the strange becomes the familiar:
“How did it happen, then, that the days just began to roll on, blending one into the other? It wasn’t that new experiences and interesting things ceased happening, but that the strange became familiar so quickly, and the unexpected became part of the daily routine—even in Africa.” –Ruth Dygert
I read an article recently that talked about how our understanding of what is “normal” begins to expand when we are children. The first time you sleep over at a friend’s or neighbor’s house when you are a kid, you are suddenly made aware that people outside of your family do things completely differently than you. When your friend’s mom brings you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you think, “This isn’t right. PB&J is supposed to be on Orowheat bread with Smuckers grape jelly and Peter Pan chunky peanut butter. This is on white bread with the crusts cut off and some weird jelly and creamy peanut butter. You suddenly realize that what you always thought was the “right” way, is just one way among many possibilities. To your friend, his mom’s PB&J sandwich is the “right” way just as much as your mom’s is the right way to you. In a way, I feel like what I’ve gone through in the past year is a similar experience on a bigger scale. I no longer consider things I took for granted before as the “right” way. Now I see that the way I learned to do things is just one way, not necessarily the best way. And I can offer a different perspective to people here. I don’t have to tell them that I know how to make the best PB&J sandwich in the world, but I can show them a different way of making it that maybe they never thought of before.
That said, it doesn’t mean that I can completely embrace everything about Gambian culture. In fact, there are a lot of things that still drive me crazy even though I try to keep an open mind and a non-judgmental perspective. It’s a constant internal battle. And it changes from day to day. Some days I just think whatever and go with the flow. Other days, I think I don’t have to like the way things are done here. One thing that I have a hard time coping with is the philosophy of “God wills it”. It seems to serve as an excuse for a lack of hard work, self-help or drive a lot of time. It’s basically an attitude of there’s no point in trying since it’s up to fate anyway. At the same time, I understand that this attitude is also a great coping mechanism in a place where people have few opportunities and often very difficult lives. If you believe that your suffering is God’s will, it makes the burden much easier to carry. In terms of development, though, it makes things very difficult to progress. In a way, trying to better yourself or your situation is seen as trying to contradict God’s will, a sign of ultimate arrogance. The result is that the situation never improves. And when foreigners come in to give away their money and supplies, it is not seen as a stepping stone to a better life, but simply more of God providing for them and who will again provide for them. An NGO provides a fence and well for the women’s garden, the women use the garden until animals start getting in through the fence and eating all their food. Instead of trying to fix the fence or raise the money to rebuild the fence, they simply stop using the garden until someone else comes along and offers to pay for another fence for them.
Another aspect of Gambian culture that I struggle with constantly is my role as a white woman here. Gambia is still a very traditional and paternalistic society. Girls get married off as early as 14, and it is completely acceptable for a man to have as many as four wives. Women’s work and men’s work is very clearly divided. Women take care of the children, cook, clean, work in the gardens and rice fields, take care of the sheep and goats, buy and sell at the market. Men work in the fields growing peanuts, corn and millet, take care of the cows, build and repair things and sit around a lot drinking attaya. I, as an unmarried, educated working woman do not fit in any way into the Gambian mold. Traditions are changing slowly here. It is more and more common to see girls finishing high school and more and more women are entering the work place. But at the village level, very little has changed and very little will change as long as other aspects of traditional life remain the same. In fact, at the village level, life has changed very little over the past centuries. The main difference is that now a few of the wealthier people have cell phones, people wear hand-me-down Western clothes and think 50 Cent is some kind of American king.
In some ways I feel lucky to live in a place that time has seemed to forget. How else could I experience a reality so different from the one I grew up with? And there are some very charming aspects of life here that I know I will miss when I go home. I will miss the slow, relaxed pace of life, the incredibly strong family and community ties, the night sky. But at other times, it is incredibly frustrating and saddening to see how little has changed here, and how little choice people have in their lives. On the surface, life can often seem idyllic, there are always happy children running around playing games, women laughing while they work and men chatting under a mango tree drinking attaya. But there is a level of underlying suffering and anger here that you see once you scratch the surface. Almost every Gambian I have gotten the chance to know reveals some of this to me. Almost every Gambian family has lost a child, a loss that I can’t even begin to comprehend. I found out that my host mother lost 4 out of her 6 children. My neighbor lost his wife and infant son, my friend at the office where I work has lost 2 children, one in high school and one small child. And it can be very frustrating to think about how little has changed here when you think that Peace Corps has been in The Gambia for 40 years, and that The Gambia receives the most aid per capita of any country in Africa. And it can be doubly frustrating when you see the corruption and dishonesty that prevents that aid from benefiting the people it is supposed to go to. Like when you see the beans and oil that the World Food Programme donates to Gambian schools for free lunches for school children being sold in the market, or school children being charged for the meals when it is supposed to be free.
But I rant. Life is good. Things are good. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else right now and I wouldn't trade this experience for anything.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Successes & Failures
In the past two months I've had a couple of successes and failures. I guess that both are bound to happen when you start trying to get something done.
Failures:
1) The Global Awareness Club that I tried to get started at the high school crashed and burned. The first week 30 kids showed up, the 2nd week 5, the 3rd week 0. I waited in the classroom for an hour until it became obvious that nobody was coming. It was pretty disheartening because I was really excited about getting the group going and I thought the first two meetings went fairly well. I realize now that there were a lot of things that I didn't understand going in to it and that I should have done differently. For one, I think the students had a hard time understanding my English since the English they are used to hearing is in an African accent with its own set of vocabulary. Second, the meetings were held on Saturday mornings at the headmaster's suggestion, but I realize now that no student is going to want to come to school on a Saturday morning. Third, my expectations of what the students were capable of and how much work they would be willing to do was unrealistic. I assumed that students in Grade 10 and 11 could at least read a newspaper article and write a simple paragraph for comprehension. I later found out that is not true.
I'm thinking of trying again and using a new approach. The headmaster at the school says that this time he'll find another teacher to help support me. The failure of the first time still stings, so its hard to get as enthusiastic as before. But last week I went to observe another high school club led by three Peace Corps Volunteers and it was so amazing to see the students debating about current events and thinking critically about issues. They were smart, engaged, articulate and confident. So I think I will give it another go, but this time I'm going to take it slow.
2) My garden was a little bit of a success and failure. After dealing with rats eating all my plants to stubs, caterpillar invasions, disease, and extreme heat I managed to keep my garden alive and for awhile it actually looked pretty healthy. But in the end, I'll I harvested after 5 months of work were 5 eggplants and 6 rats. My host family ate the rats (I would have tried it, but I wasn't around when they ate them) so they ended up getting some extra protein and that turned out the biggest output of my garden. It was a good learning experience, though, and my first attempt at gardening so I know next year will be a lot better. I never really expected to have a beautiful garden anyway; I just thought that it would be good for me to try gardening on my own before I try to tell other people what to do. And as it turns out, most of what I learned was from Gambians who knew how to do things much better than me in this harsh climate.
Successes:
1) I helped organize a training on a special kind of compost called bokashi. It's a labor intensive compost, but its cheap to make and really strong. Together with Malick, one of the field workers I work with at AVISU, we had a full day training where we trained 10 community members and 8 AVISU staff. I was nervous beforehand, but everything went really smoothly and everybody seemed to absorb the information and enjoy themselves. We even had a couple of breaks for singing and dancing. And at the end of the day we had a big pile of compost to leave at the community garden. Bokashi compost won't save the Gambia, but if nothing else one of my counterparts was empowered to lead a training, the community members felt involved and valued, and the AVISU staff were motivated and interacted as peers with one of the community groups.
2) We are finally entering a new era at AVISU with a new director and new management staff arriving soon. I am very excited about the new direction of the organization and that some of my suggestions for improving the organization are being implemented. I spend most of my time working at the office, so its really rewarding to see things moving in a positive direction.
3) I have helped create 5 tree nurseries, 4 in community gardens and 1 at the upper basic school totalling over 1000 trees. It was difficult to get the ball rolling, but now that things have started my work is done and I can just sit and watch the results. I'm hoping next year to try the same thing at a much bigger scale.
Failures:
1) The Global Awareness Club that I tried to get started at the high school crashed and burned. The first week 30 kids showed up, the 2nd week 5, the 3rd week 0. I waited in the classroom for an hour until it became obvious that nobody was coming. It was pretty disheartening because I was really excited about getting the group going and I thought the first two meetings went fairly well. I realize now that there were a lot of things that I didn't understand going in to it and that I should have done differently. For one, I think the students had a hard time understanding my English since the English they are used to hearing is in an African accent with its own set of vocabulary. Second, the meetings were held on Saturday mornings at the headmaster's suggestion, but I realize now that no student is going to want to come to school on a Saturday morning. Third, my expectations of what the students were capable of and how much work they would be willing to do was unrealistic. I assumed that students in Grade 10 and 11 could at least read a newspaper article and write a simple paragraph for comprehension. I later found out that is not true.
I'm thinking of trying again and using a new approach. The headmaster at the school says that this time he'll find another teacher to help support me. The failure of the first time still stings, so its hard to get as enthusiastic as before. But last week I went to observe another high school club led by three Peace Corps Volunteers and it was so amazing to see the students debating about current events and thinking critically about issues. They were smart, engaged, articulate and confident. So I think I will give it another go, but this time I'm going to take it slow.
2) My garden was a little bit of a success and failure. After dealing with rats eating all my plants to stubs, caterpillar invasions, disease, and extreme heat I managed to keep my garden alive and for awhile it actually looked pretty healthy. But in the end, I'll I harvested after 5 months of work were 5 eggplants and 6 rats. My host family ate the rats (I would have tried it, but I wasn't around when they ate them) so they ended up getting some extra protein and that turned out the biggest output of my garden. It was a good learning experience, though, and my first attempt at gardening so I know next year will be a lot better. I never really expected to have a beautiful garden anyway; I just thought that it would be good for me to try gardening on my own before I try to tell other people what to do. And as it turns out, most of what I learned was from Gambians who knew how to do things much better than me in this harsh climate.
Successes:
1) I helped organize a training on a special kind of compost called bokashi. It's a labor intensive compost, but its cheap to make and really strong. Together with Malick, one of the field workers I work with at AVISU, we had a full day training where we trained 10 community members and 8 AVISU staff. I was nervous beforehand, but everything went really smoothly and everybody seemed to absorb the information and enjoy themselves. We even had a couple of breaks for singing and dancing. And at the end of the day we had a big pile of compost to leave at the community garden. Bokashi compost won't save the Gambia, but if nothing else one of my counterparts was empowered to lead a training, the community members felt involved and valued, and the AVISU staff were motivated and interacted as peers with one of the community groups.
2) We are finally entering a new era at AVISU with a new director and new management staff arriving soon. I am very excited about the new direction of the organization and that some of my suggestions for improving the organization are being implemented. I spend most of my time working at the office, so its really rewarding to see things moving in a positive direction.
3) I have helped create 5 tree nurseries, 4 in community gardens and 1 at the upper basic school totalling over 1000 trees. It was difficult to get the ball rolling, but now that things have started my work is done and I can just sit and watch the results. I'm hoping next year to try the same thing at a much bigger scale.
Monday, June 2, 2008
The Coming Food Crisis
In the media they often mention that the coming food crisis will affect the entire world, but that the worst impacts will be felt in Africa and Asia and especially in those developing countries that depend largely on imports for staple foods such as rice. The Gambia fits that profile perfectly: it is an African country, poor even by African standards; it is small and has little industry. The main livelihood is still subsistence agriculture but not enough food is produced to support the Gambian population (1.6 million). In fact, in 2007 the Gambia produced less than half of the food that was consumed. That means the country depends largely on food imports, especially of rice, the staple food and also the food commodity hardest hit by price rises. Add to this the fact that the agricultural production of the Gambia is actually declining due to desertification, deforestation, topsoil loss, and the detrimental effects of Gambia’s main crop, peanuts, to the soil, along with a rapidly growing population (due to immigration from neighboring war-torn countries, large families and declining death rates). Finally, last year’s harvest was very poor because of the lack of rain and so people have less money in hand and will be running out of the food they have stored even sooner than usual. All of this is set to collide with the coming of the annual hungry season, from June to September, when last year’s harvest begins to run out and the new harvest has yet to come in.Roots of the Current Crisis
What is causing the global food crisis? It is a confluence of many factors that have led to this current crisis, all of which have been building for sometime, but which until now went largely ignored. Biofuels, the diverting of corn to ethanol, has largely been blamed for creating higher prices for staple foods, but in reality it is only a small piece of the puzzle. Many of the other factors are more difficult to face, because, for one, they have been building for many years right in front of our eyes and we did nothing about it, and two, there are no easy solutions on how to address the problems. One of the biggest contributing factors to the rise in global food prices is the rise of the middle class in China in India, which has led to a sharp increase in the demand for what was previously considered a luxury item: meat. China’s meat demand has risen to 50kg per capita from 20kg in 1980.[1] The production of meat requires large amounts of animal feed which are made from the staple grains on which the poorest people in the world rely. The production of 1 kg of quality animal protein requires around 6 kg of plant protein.
Another contributing, and uncomfortable, factor to the current food crisis is the fact that over the past decades, a global system has developed where the industrialized countries dump their excess food commodities on the developing world at very low prices, so low that they undercut the prices of locally grown food stuffs. Over the years, these developing countries have come to rely on the industrialized world for cheap food, and their tastes have changed so that even when the price of these previously cheap commodities like rice and corn goes up, people still prefer it to the cheaper local foods. Unfortunately for the developing world, the era of cheap food is over. The gradual reform and liberalization of agricultural subsidies in the US and Europe has reduced the overproduction of grains. This is largely seen as a good thing, as the former system distorted global prices and undercut developing countries food commodities which could not compete with the subsidized behemoths of the West and created the current system of dependency we see today. And the global demand for staple grains will continue to grow, so prices will never go back to their cheapest levels. But even if the cuts in subsidies in the West and higher prices for food commodities could be good in the long run, with more potential for small-scale farmers to profit, in the short-run it will be a very painful adjustment, especially for the world’s poorest, who spend 50-80% of their income on food already.
The global surge in oil prices has also led to an indirect increase in food prices. Higher oil prices means higher transportation costs, getting food from one place to another, and the higher costs are passed on to the consumer. The surge in oil prices is also not likely to abate. If anything, the predictions are that oil prices will continue to increase as demand continues to grow and oil becomes more difficult and expensive to extract.
Our increasing global population is also an uncomfortable truth that is contributing to the current crisis and has been ignored for too long. Every year we add 73 million new people to the Earth. Improvements in the intensity of production can only shoulder the increases in population for so long, and we are beginning to feel the effects now. The UN predicts that there will be over 9 billion people by mid-century, from 6 billion at the beginning of the century. We have to seriously begin considering how many people the world can really support and what we are willing to do about it.
And of course, there is global climate change. This last one is impossible to prove directly, but nonetheless, there is little way to deny anymore that climate change is real and that we are feeling the effects already. The Australian farm industry has been hard hit over the past few years because of drought, which is one contributing factor to the price hikes. And last year in West Africa, floods in some areas and sporadic rains in others led to poor harvests, exacerbating the food crisis in the region. Unfortunately, the negative effects of climate change will only continue to get worse, and it was predicted that it will most negatively impact the developing world.
What does all this mean? It means that The Gambia is set to be one of the hardest hit by the coming crisis. According to the Economist, the price of rice rose 141% between January and April. Last year the price of rice went up just 16%.[2] The price of a 50 kg bag of rice has already risen to D850 ($42.50) from D600 ($30.00) just months ago. Typically one bag of rice can feed a small family for one month. With a GDP of $356/year[3] this is already putting a serious strain on people. $356 per year averages out to $29.67 per month which means that the price of a bag of rice now exceeds average monthly income substantially. And of course GDP figures do not reflect the true reality of the poor because the poorest people in The Gambia already survive on much less; the numbers are skewed by the small but wealthy elite.
In a global sense, it means that the poorest people will struggle the most. It means that recent gains made in development could be easily reversed. According to Bob Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, food inflation could push at least 100 million people into poverty, wiping out all the gains the poorest billion have made in the last decade of economic growth.[4] It means that Gambians have to adapt to the new reality of higher food prices, because food prices will not be going down significantly in the future.
Adapting to the New Reality: Finding Opportunities in Times of Crisis
In a short time, inshallah, the rains will arrive in The Gambia and sowing will begin for this year’s harvest. In that short window of time, farmers have an opportunity to take advantage of higher food prices. If farmers can increase their yields for this season, either through improved farming techniques or increasing their cultivated land size, they stand to increase their profits for the crops they grow. If a farmer can grow enough to support his family for the year and still have some left over to sell at a high price, that farmer and his family could be better off than before. When food prices are high, those who can produce more than they need to eat can profit. And those who are willing to eat what is cheap (millet, pidgeonpeas, groundnuts) and sell what is expensive (rice, maize) can also thrive. Ironically, in the developing world, usually the foods that are the cheapest are also more nutritious than their staple alternatives, so promoting the consumption of cheaper foods also promotes better nutrition. When the pressure for food money really starts to build, the first things that will go will be vegetables and animal proteins which will mean a diet heavy in starch and carbohydrates. It fills the belly but does not provide all that the body needs. That means we need to promote alternative sources of nutrition that are cheap and easy to grow such as vegetables, beans, moringa and sweet potatoes. And it also means encouraging alternative income sources, such as beekeeping, poultry-production, fruit-tree orchards, timber lots, craftwork, etc.
Unfortunately, there are some major barriers to making this work. First of all, food production in The Gambia falls far short of reaching the demand in the country, so food imports will have to remain a part of the mix, at least for the near future. Second, the main crops grown in the Gambia are groundnuts and millet. Groundnuts, known as peanuts in the West, are an important part of the Gambian diet but are not a staple food and are mainly grown as a cash crop, though it fetches very low prices. Millet is a staple food and a traditional food but is viewed as inferior to rice, although it is more nutritious, and if it all possible, people prefer to buy rice. Buying rice is also a sign of status and so people are likely to sacrifice a lot in order to maintain that status symbol at the risk of their own health. Third, the level of mechanization in farming techniques is still at a very low level in The Gambia; almost everything is still done by hand and oxen. That means that the potential for rapidly increasing production levels is low because of a lack of infrastructure, equipment, knowledge and cultural acceptance. Even if the capital necessary to bring in equipment and infrastructure were available, it would take some years for the people to be able to adopt the dramatically different methods of farming and it would require overcoming cultural barriers to change. For many poor, rural and uneducated Gambians, farming is the only thing that they know, and for somebody from the outside, whether a foreign NGO worker or an educated, city-dwelling Gambian, to come in and try to change the way they’ve always done things and the way their ancestors always did things will be met with strong resistance. Fourth, there are other cultural barriers to changing methods of food production, such as gender roles. Traditionally, it is the men that cultivate the cash crops, such as peanuts and millet (although the women contribute labor), and take care of the cattle. It is the women that cultivate rice and grow vegetables in community gardens. Because the growing of rice is seen as “women’s work” and because women already carry such a heavy workload (cooking, cleaning, child rearing, selling in the market) it will be difficult to dramatically increase the amount of food they can grow. Men have slowly become more involved in rice cultivation, especially with the introduction of upland varieties such as Nerica that are not grown in marshland like the traditional rice varieties, but of course challenging the gender roles of any culture always takes time. And lastly, when the food and money runs out, the poorest people will be forced to sell everything they have, their animals, tools, seeds, land, just to get by – meaning that recovery, even to the substandard level at which they were living before, will be even more difficult.
What Gambians need in order to capitalize on the new reality and increase food security is technical training in how to increase the production levels of their crops, capital to invest in equipment, infrastructure provided by the government, such as roads, transport processing facilities, etc., and diversification of income-generating activities. But something needs to be done immediately to try to ease the crisis for this coming rainy season. The most essential things to do are to encourage farmers to increase their production for this year by educating them on the coming food price hikes and their potential to benefit if they increase their yields and to support them with technical training that will allow them to increase their harvest without having to dramatically expand the land they cultivate or their workloads. This means providing improved varieties of seeds, training on improved pest management, and training on cultivation and harvesting techniques. Different NGO’s have already started this work, but they will only be able to reach a small portion of farmers this year, which means that all we can do is hope that the harvest is especially good this year, and at least, that it is not bad. A poor harvest due to influences outside of human control, on top of an already precarious situation, could spell real disaster.
As an individual observing this building situation, it's difficult to know what to do. The factors that have led to this crisis are much bigger than any one person and trying to do anything to help feels like bailing out a sinking ship with a spoon. Nothing I do alone can change the global situation, that takes big shifts in world politics and lots of time. But somehow doing something seems better than doing nothing.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Hello, Goodbye!
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I was hoping to write a long blog entry before heading back to site, but I just don't have it in me right now. I just finished a week of in-service training, and it was great! I learned about everything from beekeeping to fruit tree grafting. I even got to harvest my first honey from an African beehive (imagine killer bees, but more aggressive). It was so much fun, and I only got stung twice! The rest of the week I enjoyed going to the beach and hanging out with my Peace Corps buds I hadn't seen in awhile. I'm headed back to site tomorrow. I've been gone from site two weeks and it feels like too long. Time to get back to work!
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Sweating Under the Mango Tree
Here's a couple of entries from my journal, to give you some idea of what my day to day life is like, and how much it varies:
Thursday, March 27, 2008
I really had to write today because today marks my being here 6 months in The Gambia. It's kind of hard to believe that 1/2 a year has passed already since I came here. For so long it seemed like time was moving by so slowly and it made 27 months seem really daunting. But all of a sudden, the last couple of months have gone by quickly and I'm almost 1/4 of the way done.
It's a good feeling to make it to 6 months. It's a pretty big milestone and according to the chart Peace Corps gives us, the hardest part is over now. And it feels that way even though I never felt that being here was that difficult. But now I have a home, a family, I can communicate in Wollof, I have work to do, friends (both Gambian and non-Gambian), a new puppy, and things to look forward to and plan.
The 6 month mark has also gotten me thinking about how far I've come since I got here, compared to when I first got off the plane and had no idea what to expect. The past two days I was in Leba, a small Fula village where my host family is originally from. My host family is actually Fula and speaks Pulaar even though I learned Wollof in training. Everyone but my mother speaks Wollof, but they speak Pulaar with each other so I'm trying to learn Pulaar now also. Anyway, my sister Tabara invited me to go along with her and my other sister Mare to visit their family in Leba. It was an offer I thought I shouldn't let go by, especially since Tabara will be getting married in a couple of weeks and moving to a neighboring village.
It was, I admit, an overwhelming experience, and in fact, reminded me a lot of my first day in training village: not understanding the language, not being able to communicate, being overwhelmed by all the people, the yelling, and babies with ringworm and snot-smeared faces crying. I felt a little like I was Tabara's pet the whole time, because I was always sitting waiting for her to tell me to follow her somewhere, or to tell me to come eat, or sleep, or bath or whatever, because I didn't know when or where to do any of those things and she was the only one besides Mare who spoke Wollof. She was great, though, and never showed that I was a burden on her in anyway. I'm sure it wasn't easy for her having me there, not only because she had to constantly be watching out for me, but because she probably got a lot of flack from other people in the village for bringing me in the first place.
The whole experience made me realize that even though we live here for two years, and supposedly are living as close as possible to the standard of living as the people here, our lives are very removed from what life is actually like here. For one thing, there is no such thing as personal space. The concept is completely foreign here, because from the time you are a baby you are always with other people. Even after just two nights I couldn't wait to get "home" to my personal space. Also, in the village I realized how spoiled I've become by town life. There was no fish or vegetables in their food bowls. Besides what they grew themselves (cere and milk), all they had was rice and a little bit of oil and onion. Everyday really is a struggle just to get food in the food bowl.
There were some big differences between going to Leba and my first day in training village though, that make me realize how far I've come in 6 months. For one thing, even though I can only speak a little Pulaar, I at least speak some Wollof so I could still communicate with some people. Second, not only did the food not bother me, I really, really loved it! I couldn't get enough of the fresh milk and cere (pounded millet). Third, I was there with a Gambian friend, who cared about me and was watching out for me. Fourth, my first thought in training village was "I have to do this for two years?", where as now, I thought "This is only for two days, and then I get to go home." Yes, my site feels like home now and I was really happy to be back today. I took a luxurious bucket bath, put some clean clothes on and went to the office and worked for a couple of hours then spent the rest of the afternoon reading Newsweeks in my house. It was great! Except for the fact that it was so hot that I was dripping sweat. Funnily enough, this will be the most permanent home I have had since graduating high school, and its beginning to feel that way.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
I got sick on Monday and didn't start feeling better until this afternoon. I'm pretty sure I drank some bad water, because I remember drinking some unfiltered water at the office and thinking it tasted funny, almost carbonated. But I've had to drink the same water dozens of times when I ran out of my water and never had a problem, so I didn't think much of it.
A couple hours later it hit me all of a sudden. I was working on one of the office computers with Malick, one of the Agricultural Extensionists, typing a list of the 1st Quarter achievements for the Agriculture sector, and then within one minute I realized that, uh-oh, I need to go the bathroom now and then I need to go home and lay down and be near my latrine.
I had body aches, diarrhea and a low-grade fever that lasted until this morning. Tuesday during the afternoon was the worst because I had to deal with the unbelievable heat on top of being sick. But today I'm feeling better and went back to the office because I had a lot to get done.
I've been really busy at the office lately. Monday, we had a staff meeting, which was long but productive. After that I worked on consolidating the data we collected for a community group assessment that the staff conducted in the 27 communities we work in. I was put in charge of consolidating all the data from the reports in one document, which turned out to be a lot of work. I was supposed to have it done on Tuesday but since I was sick I had to work like mad today to get it done, and I still wasn't feeling that good. We also had our first meeting with the Agriculture staff, which went well once it was started an hour late. I called the meeting and set the agenda, and I'm trying to institutionalize it into a weekly meeting. It's definitely something that is needed and I hope it will help mobilize the Agriculture sector to start performing at a higher level.
I actually put in a full-days work today working from 9:00 to 5:15 with a 15 minute break for lunch, intermittent short breaks whenever the power shut down (at least 10 times a day) and my computer goes off (I've gotten used to saving documents every 10 seconds now) and another short break in the late afternoon when we found a snake in the storage room and everyone in the office was mobilized with sticks to kill it.
It might sound ridiculous that putting in a full days work is such a rare occurrence for me now, which I admit, it is. But you also have to consider the heat. It's getting above 120F in the afternoon now, according to my thermometer (which doesn't go above 120F, and yes I keep it in the shade) and the office has solar-power to run the computers, but there's not even enough extra power to run a fan, let alone AC. We don't even have lights installed since we only work in the day time anyway. The reason the power goes out so much already is because there's not enough juice being generated to power all the computers at once. Whoever is the last in the office in the morning has to warn everybody before they turn their computer on because it will invariably knock out all the other computers momentarily.
And so because it gets so hot, and there's no relief inside the office, everybody pretty much stops working after lunch. So you can appreciate the dedication and super-human strength it took for me to work through the afternoon, not feeling good, periodic power outages, watching a big, supposedly poisonous, snake getting killed, and sitting at the computer with sweat literally dripping off me and soaked through my clothes.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
I really had to write today because today marks my being here 6 months in The Gambia. It's kind of hard to believe that 1/2 a year has passed already since I came here. For so long it seemed like time was moving by so slowly and it made 27 months seem really daunting. But all of a sudden, the last couple of months have gone by quickly and I'm almost 1/4 of the way done.
It's a good feeling to make it to 6 months. It's a pretty big milestone and according to the chart Peace Corps gives us, the hardest part is over now. And it feels that way even though I never felt that being here was that difficult. But now I have a home, a family, I can communicate in Wollof, I have work to do, friends (both Gambian and non-Gambian), a new puppy, and things to look forward to and plan.
The 6 month mark has also gotten me thinking about how far I've come since I got here, compared to when I first got off the plane and had no idea what to expect. The past two days I was in Leba, a small Fula village where my host family is originally from. My host family is actually Fula and speaks Pulaar even though I learned Wollof in training. Everyone but my mother speaks Wollof, but they speak Pulaar with each other so I'm trying to learn Pulaar now also. Anyway, my sister Tabara invited me to go along with her and my other sister Mare to visit their family in Leba. It was an offer I thought I shouldn't let go by, especially since Tabara will be getting married in a couple of weeks and moving to a neighboring village.
It was, I admit, an overwhelming experience, and in fact, reminded me a lot of my first day in training village: not understanding the language, not being able to communicate, being overwhelmed by all the people, the yelling, and babies with ringworm and snot-smeared faces crying. I felt a little like I was Tabara's pet the whole time, because I was always sitting waiting for her to tell me to follow her somewhere, or to tell me to come eat, or sleep, or bath or whatever, because I didn't know when or where to do any of those things and she was the only one besides Mare who spoke Wollof. She was great, though, and never showed that I was a burden on her in anyway. I'm sure it wasn't easy for her having me there, not only because she had to constantly be watching out for me, but because she probably got a lot of flack from other people in the village for bringing me in the first place.
The whole experience made me realize that even though we live here for two years, and supposedly are living as close as possible to the standard of living as the people here, our lives are very removed from what life is actually like here. For one thing, there is no such thing as personal space. The concept is completely foreign here, because from the time you are a baby you are always with other people. Even after just two nights I couldn't wait to get "home" to my personal space. Also, in the village I realized how spoiled I've become by town life. There was no fish or vegetables in their food bowls. Besides what they grew themselves (cere and milk), all they had was rice and a little bit of oil and onion. Everyday really is a struggle just to get food in the food bowl.
There were some big differences between going to Leba and my first day in training village though, that make me realize how far I've come in 6 months. For one thing, even though I can only speak a little Pulaar, I at least speak some Wollof so I could still communicate with some people. Second, not only did the food not bother me, I really, really loved it! I couldn't get enough of the fresh milk and cere (pounded millet). Third, I was there with a Gambian friend, who cared about me and was watching out for me. Fourth, my first thought in training village was "I have to do this for two years?", where as now, I thought "This is only for two days, and then I get to go home." Yes, my site feels like home now and I was really happy to be back today. I took a luxurious bucket bath, put some clean clothes on and went to the office and worked for a couple of hours then spent the rest of the afternoon reading Newsweeks in my house. It was great! Except for the fact that it was so hot that I was dripping sweat. Funnily enough, this will be the most permanent home I have had since graduating high school, and its beginning to feel that way.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
I got sick on Monday and didn't start feeling better until this afternoon. I'm pretty sure I drank some bad water, because I remember drinking some unfiltered water at the office and thinking it tasted funny, almost carbonated. But I've had to drink the same water dozens of times when I ran out of my water and never had a problem, so I didn't think much of it.
A couple hours later it hit me all of a sudden. I was working on one of the office computers with Malick, one of the Agricultural Extensionists, typing a list of the 1st Quarter achievements for the Agriculture sector, and then within one minute I realized that, uh-oh, I need to go the bathroom now and then I need to go home and lay down and be near my latrine.
I had body aches, diarrhea and a low-grade fever that lasted until this morning. Tuesday during the afternoon was the worst because I had to deal with the unbelievable heat on top of being sick. But today I'm feeling better and went back to the office because I had a lot to get done.
I've been really busy at the office lately. Monday, we had a staff meeting, which was long but productive. After that I worked on consolidating the data we collected for a community group assessment that the staff conducted in the 27 communities we work in. I was put in charge of consolidating all the data from the reports in one document, which turned out to be a lot of work. I was supposed to have it done on Tuesday but since I was sick I had to work like mad today to get it done, and I still wasn't feeling that good. We also had our first meeting with the Agriculture staff, which went well once it was started an hour late. I called the meeting and set the agenda, and I'm trying to institutionalize it into a weekly meeting. It's definitely something that is needed and I hope it will help mobilize the Agriculture sector to start performing at a higher level.
I actually put in a full-days work today working from 9:00 to 5:15 with a 15 minute break for lunch, intermittent short breaks whenever the power shut down (at least 10 times a day) and my computer goes off (I've gotten used to saving documents every 10 seconds now) and another short break in the late afternoon when we found a snake in the storage room and everyone in the office was mobilized with sticks to kill it.
It might sound ridiculous that putting in a full days work is such a rare occurrence for me now, which I admit, it is. But you also have to consider the heat. It's getting above 120F in the afternoon now, according to my thermometer (which doesn't go above 120F, and yes I keep it in the shade) and the office has solar-power to run the computers, but there's not even enough extra power to run a fan, let alone AC. We don't even have lights installed since we only work in the day time anyway. The reason the power goes out so much already is because there's not enough juice being generated to power all the computers at once. Whoever is the last in the office in the morning has to warn everybody before they turn their computer on because it will invariably knock out all the other computers momentarily.
And so because it gets so hot, and there's no relief inside the office, everybody pretty much stops working after lunch. So you can appreciate the dedication and super-human strength it took for me to work through the afternoon, not feeling good, periodic power outages, watching a big, supposedly poisonous, snake getting killed, and sitting at the computer with sweat literally dripping off me and soaked through my clothes.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Life in the Slow Lane
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I'm starting to feel more comfortable to life here. One of the biggest adjustments I’ve had to make to life here is to learn to take things slow. There are a lot of hours during the day where it gets just too hot to do anything but sit under the shade of a nearby tree. This is supposedly still the cool season, but my thermometer got up to 105F the other day, so I am afraid for the hot season which goes from March to June. And everything just takes longer here. Sweeping my house takes at least an hour, and I have to do it at least a couple times a week because everything just gets so dusty here. I also have to fetch my own water, which means walking to the water pump in the morning, filling up my 3 20L jerrycans (they're actually empty industrial size vegetable oil containers, and they're called badongs here).
It gets so hot during the day now that you really can't do anything between 12:00 - 4:00 every day. That makes it hard for a volunteer to get much done in terms of projects but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t doing anything during the day. They are constantly working just to put food on the table, especially the women. The women are usually up at dawn pounding rice or coos for the day’s meals (which from the few weak attempts I’ve made at pounding, I can testify is very hard work). They spend the day cooking meals outside or in a hot hut over a wood fire, and they fetch water which means going to the nearest water pump and filling up their badongs or wide-rimmed buckets which they then carry on their heads home. Many women also have gardens which they water both morning and evening and some also sell produce in the market. They usually do all this with a baby strapped to their backs. And this leaves them little time for anything else.
Because of all the work that has to be done throughout the day, kids start helping out at a very early age. It’s not uncommon to see a 6 year-old carrying around a 2 year-old. As soon as they are big enough, girls start fetching water, pounding, and cooking. They give the young girls small buckets to carry on their heads and mini pestles for pounding. You never see kids talking back to adults. As soon as they are told to do something by anyone older than them, regardless of who they are, they will do it without complaint. In the Peace Corps, they call this the “small boy system”. If you need some tea from the bitik, you just “small-boy” some kid standing around, give them some money and tell them to go to the bitik (the local shop) for you. The inverse of this system is that it is acceptable for children to ask adults for things, like money. And if a child is a part of your extended family, you are expected to help them with money for education, etc. in anyway that you can. This creates a mutually beneficial system and strong social fabric. Old people are cared for and respected. And even though children have to do a lot of work for their elders, every adult was a child at one point in their life and had to go through the exact same thing.
Life has a rhythm here, the rhythm of the land, which is something that I’ve never experienced before and is something that I think is missing from our fast-paced, frantic lives. The only rhythm I was really acquainted with before was the daily rush hour to and from work. Here, you can't help but feel the rhythm each and every day.
Because of all the work that has to be done throughout the day, kids start helping out at a very early age. It’s not uncommon to see a 6 year-old carrying around a 2 year-old. As soon as they are big enough, girls start fetching water, pounding, and cooking. They give the young girls small buckets to carry on their heads and mini pestles for pounding. You never see kids talking back to adults. As soon as they are told to do something by anyone older than them, regardless of who they are, they will do it without complaint. In the Peace Corps, they call this the “small boy system”. If you need some tea from the bitik, you just “small-boy” some kid standing around, give them some money and tell them to go to the bitik (the local shop) for you. The inverse of this system is that it is acceptable for children to ask adults for things, like money. And if a child is a part of your extended family, you are expected to help them with money for education, etc. in anyway that you can. This creates a mutually beneficial system and strong social fabric. Old people are cared for and respected. And even though children have to do a lot of work for their elders, every adult was a child at one point in their life and had to go through the exact same thing.
Life has a rhythm here, the rhythm of the land, which is something that I’ve never experienced before and is something that I think is missing from our fast-paced, frantic lives. The only rhythm I was really acquainted with before was the daily rush hour to and from work. Here, you can't help but feel the rhythm each and every day.
The most important season is the planting season, where the main crops are sorghum, millet, peanuts and corn and begins just before the rains arrive. Then the rainy season sets in around June or July until harvest time in September. This is also called the hungry season because the food stores from the previous year start to run out before the new harvest comes in. At least in The Gambia, there are not famines but most families reduce their meals from 3 a day to 2 a day, and options, like meat or vegetables, become limited or non-existent. After harvesting begins the cold season when women plant their dry season gardens and plant rice in their rice fields for harvesting in January. After the rice harvest begins the hot season where there is little farming to do but it is too hot and dry to do anything anyway. The hot season lasts until May or June when its time to plant before the rains come. This is mixed with the rhythm of Islam, where you have the holy fasting month of Rammadan, the end of Rammadan celebration called Korite, and the biggest celebration is Tabasci which usually falls around Christmas and is a celebration of the story of Abraham where every family is expected to sacrifice a ram if they can. On top of that is the more constant rhythm of the days. You have the four daily calls to prayer at 6:00AM, 2:00PM, 5:00PM and 7:00PM where everybody stops what they are doing and goes to pray. You have the weekly luumo, or market, on Thursdays where people come from all over the region and Senegal. And then you have the endless naming ceremonies, weddings and funerals where huge numbers of people from all over attend.
As for what I’m actually doing here, I’m still trying to figure that out. I don’t have any problem keeping myself entertained, that’s never been a problem for me, and I spend a lot of time just sitting and talking with people, or really just listening since I still don’t speak Wolof that well yet. The day to day things end up taking a lot of my time here. I get up in the morning and make tea and breakfast and spend a little bit of quiet time enjoying the cool morning in my house, then I go work in my garden which is just near my house in the same compound, go back to my house, straighten things up, and head to the office to see what’s happening there.
At the moment, there’s not much for me to do at the office because right when I first arrived here there was a bit of a management crisis so it remains to be seen what my role will be still. But I help out in whatever way I can. We had two groups of visitors from the UK who came from AVISU's parent organization and I helped show them around and see the projects that AVISU is currently working on. I've also helped out with a couple of agricultural trainings for local farmers and gardeners, an agro-enterprise survey, a beekeeping survey, and then just basic computer skills training.
Besides working at the office, I'm also interested in working with the local schools. I’ve met with the headmasters at the lower basic, upper basic and senior secondary schools and discussed various things I could work on with them. I’m planning on starting a current events club at the high school and possibly working with one of the schools on the Peace Corps School Tree Nursery Competition.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Settling In to My New Life
I've been at site for a month now, and it feels good to finally be settling in somewhere. I can finally unpack all my bags, put up pictures, paint and make my house feel like my home. Of course, even though I've unpacked my bags, I still don't have anywhere to put all my things because I haven't been able to buy any furniture except for a bed and 2 chairs so far. So all the things laying on my floor may look disorganized to the untrained eye, but are in fact organized in a very complex master plan of floor space use.
In some ways, the last 4 weeks have been very eventful and in other ways very little has happened. I think it mostly feels eventful because I have been learning and adjusting to so many new things, but in fact I have more free time than I've ever had in my life... and I like it. I stay busy; I've never been one to get bored. First, let me describe my site a little. I live in a town called Kaur that is about halfway up the country on the North Bank. When I say town, I really mean town. Kaur is probably about 4,000-5,000 people, but of course I'm completely guessing because nobody really knows. The town is situated near the Gambia river and used to be a bit of a port town with a peanut factory, cinema and night clubs. But over the past decade or two, the old businesses have shut down and died and many people have moved to the capital region on the coast, called Kombo. Now, Kaur is a big town, but a sleepy town, with wide sandy streets, a daily market and many well-meaning NGOs.
The primary reason that I was placed here is to work with an organization called AVISU, or Agency for Village Support. They are an all Gambian organization, that used to be an offshoot of the UK Village Aid organization, but they are now trying to make it on their own. The thing that I love about AVISU is that it is all Gambian run. Other than two VSO volunteers that are also working at the office (VSO is another volunteer organization like the PeaceCorps), everyone who works there is Gambian. I arrived at site right around the holiday season (Muslim's celebrate Tabasci just a few days before Christmas) so I'm still trying to feel out what my role will be at this point. But I really like the people that work at the office, and since my house is just across the street, I spend most of my free time sitting under the mango tree and drinking ataaya with Solo, the security guard and my guardian angel, and some of the other guys from the office. We listen to Senegalese mbaxal music most of the time, but since I donated some tapes I brought from Goodwill before leaving the States, The Bodyguard and TLC have been thrown into the mix fairly often.
For the most part, life is starting to feel pretty comfortable for me. The language is still a struggle, but I'm improving "ndanka, ndanka" as they say. One of my difficulties with the language is there are three different languages spoken in my village. The part of town I live in is mostly Wollof which is what I am learning now, but there are also some Fulas throughout town. In fact, my host family is a Fula family, and even though everyone but the mother speaks and understands Wollof, when they're speaking to each other, they speak in Pulaar (the Fula language) so I have no idea what they're talking about. The other, and larger, part of my town is Mandinka, and since I don't know more than a few simple greetings in Mandinka, I haven't ventured too much into that part of town. Many people do speak English in Kaur. At the office everyone speaks English, and children learn English in school. Sometimes I wish they didn't speak English, though, because everyday I have to listen to "Toubab, how are you? how are you?" screamed by little children, and sometimes adults, as I walk through town. It can really grate on your nerves, especially when your walking down a sandy road in the heat, your dirty and sweaty, and you're already stressed just trying to adjust to everything. Toubab is what all white people are called here, and it's really not meant as an insult, but shouted at you a 100 times a day, it has the effect of making you feel isolated and even more different than you already feel.
Another thing that has been difficult for me to get used to is constantly being asked for things. And it has taken me awhile to understand that there is no polite way of asking for things in this culture, it is simply, "Give me". So everyday walking through town I have people say "Toubab, give me your bicycle", "Give me money", "Give me your water bottle", "Give me your sunglasses", "Give me your shoes", "Take me to America". I have to admit, that was probably the thing that I had the hardest time with when I first got to site. From my perspective, I feel like I'm already here giving my time and energy to help these people, and when you hear things like that, you feel like nothing you do will ever be enough to satisfy them. But now, I can see things from their perspective a little more clearly. First of all, asking for things is just part of the culture here, and once I realized that people do this to each other and not just me, it stopped bothering me nearly as much. Second of all, people here have a very rough sense of humor, and they tease each other mercilessly. So when they say "Give me", they don't really expect you to give them anything. They're just poking you to see how you'll react, and if you make a joke out of the whole thing, you gain they're instant respect and friendship. So now when a kid says "Give me money, I say "Aca!" which is what you say to shoo goats and they think this is hilarious. Or I start chasing them, which really catches them off guard, because a lot of kids are actually very afraid of toubabs (apparently our eyes glow red at night). Third of all, and this is on a more somber note, there really are a lot of toubabs and NGOs that come here and hand out money and free things, which is definitely well-intentioned and may help many people. Unfortunately, the downside of this is that many people here think that all white people are just filthy, stinking rich and here to give handouts. It does not encourage a "can do" attitude to say the least.
So, in a nutshell, I'm figuring out how to make things work for myself in my new life. And, mostly, I'm having a really good time. I'm also feeling out what work I want to do for the next 2 years that I'm here. I definitely have plenty of options between working with AVISU, schools, community gardens and individuals. And I'm staying busy. I'm starting a garden at my house, which I've never tried before, but I figure if I'm an Agriculture volunteer, I better start learning something about agriculture. I've been working with the Lower Basic school garden a little making organic pesticides from local materials. I've done a few things with AVISU so far, and I've been spending as much time as I can walking around town getting to know people.
I will be off the grid again for another month until I make it back to Kombo to do banking in February. But please email me or write me if and when you can. It really means so much to me to hear from back home. I hope everyone is well, and know you are in my thoughts!
In some ways, the last 4 weeks have been very eventful and in other ways very little has happened. I think it mostly feels eventful because I have been learning and adjusting to so many new things, but in fact I have more free time than I've ever had in my life... and I like it. I stay busy; I've never been one to get bored. First, let me describe my site a little. I live in a town called Kaur that is about halfway up the country on the North Bank. When I say town, I really mean town. Kaur is probably about 4,000-5,000 people, but of course I'm completely guessing because nobody really knows. The town is situated near the Gambia river and used to be a bit of a port town with a peanut factory, cinema and night clubs. But over the past decade or two, the old businesses have shut down and died and many people have moved to the capital region on the coast, called Kombo. Now, Kaur is a big town, but a sleepy town, with wide sandy streets, a daily market and many well-meaning NGOs.
The primary reason that I was placed here is to work with an organization called AVISU, or Agency for Village Support. They are an all Gambian organization, that used to be an offshoot of the UK Village Aid organization, but they are now trying to make it on their own. The thing that I love about AVISU is that it is all Gambian run. Other than two VSO volunteers that are also working at the office (VSO is another volunteer organization like the PeaceCorps), everyone who works there is Gambian. I arrived at site right around the holiday season (Muslim's celebrate Tabasci just a few days before Christmas) so I'm still trying to feel out what my role will be at this point. But I really like the people that work at the office, and since my house is just across the street, I spend most of my free time sitting under the mango tree and drinking ataaya with Solo, the security guard and my guardian angel, and some of the other guys from the office. We listen to Senegalese mbaxal music most of the time, but since I donated some tapes I brought from Goodwill before leaving the States, The Bodyguard and TLC have been thrown into the mix fairly often.
For the most part, life is starting to feel pretty comfortable for me. The language is still a struggle, but I'm improving "ndanka, ndanka" as they say. One of my difficulties with the language is there are three different languages spoken in my village. The part of town I live in is mostly Wollof which is what I am learning now, but there are also some Fulas throughout town. In fact, my host family is a Fula family, and even though everyone but the mother speaks and understands Wollof, when they're speaking to each other, they speak in Pulaar (the Fula language) so I have no idea what they're talking about. The other, and larger, part of my town is Mandinka, and since I don't know more than a few simple greetings in Mandinka, I haven't ventured too much into that part of town. Many people do speak English in Kaur. At the office everyone speaks English, and children learn English in school. Sometimes I wish they didn't speak English, though, because everyday I have to listen to "Toubab, how are you? how are you?" screamed by little children, and sometimes adults, as I walk through town. It can really grate on your nerves, especially when your walking down a sandy road in the heat, your dirty and sweaty, and you're already stressed just trying to adjust to everything. Toubab is what all white people are called here, and it's really not meant as an insult, but shouted at you a 100 times a day, it has the effect of making you feel isolated and even more different than you already feel.
Another thing that has been difficult for me to get used to is constantly being asked for things. And it has taken me awhile to understand that there is no polite way of asking for things in this culture, it is simply, "Give me". So everyday walking through town I have people say "Toubab, give me your bicycle", "Give me money", "Give me your water bottle", "Give me your sunglasses", "Give me your shoes", "Take me to America". I have to admit, that was probably the thing that I had the hardest time with when I first got to site. From my perspective, I feel like I'm already here giving my time and energy to help these people, and when you hear things like that, you feel like nothing you do will ever be enough to satisfy them. But now, I can see things from their perspective a little more clearly. First of all, asking for things is just part of the culture here, and once I realized that people do this to each other and not just me, it stopped bothering me nearly as much. Second of all, people here have a very rough sense of humor, and they tease each other mercilessly. So when they say "Give me", they don't really expect you to give them anything. They're just poking you to see how you'll react, and if you make a joke out of the whole thing, you gain they're instant respect and friendship. So now when a kid says "Give me money, I say "Aca!" which is what you say to shoo goats and they think this is hilarious. Or I start chasing them, which really catches them off guard, because a lot of kids are actually very afraid of toubabs (apparently our eyes glow red at night). Third of all, and this is on a more somber note, there really are a lot of toubabs and NGOs that come here and hand out money and free things, which is definitely well-intentioned and may help many people. Unfortunately, the downside of this is that many people here think that all white people are just filthy, stinking rich and here to give handouts. It does not encourage a "can do" attitude to say the least.
So, in a nutshell, I'm figuring out how to make things work for myself in my new life. And, mostly, I'm having a really good time. I'm also feeling out what work I want to do for the next 2 years that I'm here. I definitely have plenty of options between working with AVISU, schools, community gardens and individuals. And I'm staying busy. I'm starting a garden at my house, which I've never tried before, but I figure if I'm an Agriculture volunteer, I better start learning something about agriculture. I've been working with the Lower Basic school garden a little making organic pesticides from local materials. I've done a few things with AVISU so far, and I've been spending as much time as I can walking around town getting to know people.
I will be off the grid again for another month until I make it back to Kombo to do banking in February. But please email me or write me if and when you can. It really means so much to me to hear from back home. I hope everyone is well, and know you are in my thoughts!
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