Top 5 Gambian Moments: October 2014

October was a busy month.  There was a huge Gambian holiday, a weekend-long training for an upcoming bike trek, a yoga retreat, and Halloween.  All of these things made me feel like I was getting into the swing of things.  Getting used to taking public transport, meeting and forging friendships with more volunteers, and also, having some good old fashioned party time.  But all of this hustling around was spiced with some pretty solid lessons too, and here they are.

5)  Tobaski or Not Tobaski?

Death has been written about for centuries. Blood has been used in literature as a metaphor for all things dramatic--love, power, spirituality, pain-you name it.  It has been worshiped, used as make-up, war paint, even added to elixirs for health benefits.   I've always found interest in the intensity brought forth by these ideas, as I am generally a huge fan of the drama. However, growing up in suburban America where we have little crime and lots of  things like boneless, skinless chicken breast, I've not had to experience watching death first-hand until recently.

I've been looking forward to witnessing the celebration of the Islamic holiday known as Tobaski, which honors the biblical tale of Abram and Isaac, since my arrival in Sare Ngai.  As the story goes, Abram was asked to sacrifice his favorite son in order to show his devotion to God.  Reluctantly, he agreed, but as he rose his blade to slay Isaac, God spoke.  Accepting Abram's willingness to obey as sign of devotion enough, He allowed that Isaac's body be replaced with that of a ram.  So, today, Muslim families keep this tradition and slaughter their own ram as a display of their faith.  My family had one of our rams--one I spent time with daily--at the ready.  (I pretended not to be shocked at the prospect of eating him for dinner.)  Although I was slightly nervous about seeing it all, it ended up not being nearly as scary as I had envisioned.  They held him down, prayed quietly, cut the throat, and watched as the life within the body slipped gently away.  At the risk of sounding disturbed, it was truly beautiful.   As it collected in the sand, the blood was so red, so intense and bright that I suddenly understood why it was always thought to be so magical, because at that moment it really was magical.  The flowing of this thick, bubbling paint gave life to that body, but in one slice, it flowed out, carrying with it all the memories, experiences, smells, tastes and sounds that life ever knew.  Amazing.

Maybe it is a little weird, or maybe it's just really naive, but for me it was an eye-opening moment to witness the life and then the death of a thing.  When I return home and inevitably return to the purchasing of perfectly filleted fish and neatly trimmed tenderloins of pork, I hope to remember to take a moment and acknowledge that these seemingly faceless "ingredients" had real life flowing threw them once upon a time. 

4) "Fatoumata is Botari Number One!"

One of my goals here is to help share some bits of American culture with my family and local co-workers.  Since I love to cook, I figured this would prove an easy way to share, and since America has such a wide breadth of cultures to pull from, maybe they'd also learn a bit about the world, too. Enter: Baba Ganoush.  While vegetables are hard to come by here in The Gambia, one of the things you can usually find is eggplant, so I decided to make this Lebanese dip for my family.  I toasted loaves of bread with olive oil and garlic powder and topped them with homemade Baba Ganoush.  I wasn't sure how they would feel about it, but they ate everything! So, the following week, I decided to go round two and make homemade veggie burgers from chicken peas and leftover eggplant.  It was quite the undertaking, but the results outweighed the struggle.  I brought out one big burger topped with sauteed onions and went back inside.  Moments later, I heard chanting, "Fatoumata is botari number one!"  (Meghan is lunch, number one) from random teenage boys who were over visiting my brother. I laughed and came out to see the excitement these burgers had created.

Soon, I was bombarded with questions about America:  Do we eat this thing everyday?  What's a Lebanon? Why are we eating a Lebanese food in America anyway?  It allowed for some awesome discussions on the melting pot that is the U.S. and some pretty interesting feelings for me, too.  We spend so much time apologizing for our country, it was refreshing to sit and share a piece of my country, a piece of myself, and to remember some of the wonderful things about the place I am so incredibly lucky to have been born.

3) Technical Difficulties

Before leaving for Africa, I was stocking up--on batteries, on blue-tooth speakers, on gadgets I didn't know existed.  When I boarded that plane, I was armed with so many things, I felt confident in remaining informed, entertained and in contact with my people back home. I've only been here for four months now, and last weekend, my external hard drive stopped working completely.  All movies, music, pictures, workouts, and otherwise necessary life things...gone.  Is this devastating? Honestly, kinda.  But really, it has not effected my daily life whatsoever.  This has proved quite the realization for me.  For the first month or so of being here, I was running around like a mad woman looking for charging stations, the right adapter piece, stressing about Is my ~ charged?  Did I forget the cord to my ~? Now, only a few months later, and I'm going entire weeks without so much as turning on my iPhone.  It's such a big shift in such a short amount of time, but, as I sit here writing with my pilfered hotel pen on my crappy notebook paper, I want for nothing.  Somehow, I've accidentally learned to live simply and in real time.  As a human in 2014, that feels pretty rare.  I may fluctuate between these two versions of self forever.  Or even more likely, I'll abandon the simple life altogether once I step back onto American soil.  But for now, I am enjoying the silence, the calm, the lack of blinking lights and low battery beeps and making it a point to put less importance on all of that and focus more on what's right in front of me.

2) Happy Baby, Happy Lady

The third week of October, I attended a yoga retreat in a city called Bwiam for relaxation and exercise with fellow volunteers serving throughout The Gambia.  The weekend itself was so nice; I ate things like smoked almonds from Costco and Indian-spiced lentils made with actual coconut milk. We even had homemade Chai tea (look into it).  The yoga classes, workouts, nature walks and consumption of many many watermelons, which are now in season, were just what the doctor ordered.  I have always been a social person, but the weekend was extra special because of the stark contrast to what has become my daily life here now.  I often find myself "alone" nowadays...not physically, but in language, in thoughts, in my interactions with my family and co-workers, so, to be surrounded for a few days by people who easily understand me and the context of my gestures and sounds proved a much needed escape from these daily challenges.  My appreciation for other people from any and all walks of life continues to deepen the more time I spend here, as I see more and more how the things that divide us are so much smaller and insignificant than the things that bring us together.

1) Halloween Hooplas

I graduated from Ohio University, a school famous for many things... like Matt Lauer, Arsenio Hall, an impressively excessive number of bars within one quarter mile stretch of road, and the best damn Halloween ever.  I loved and hated this holiday at the time, as our campus like quadrupled in size this weekend, but never found any problem with costuming up and getting down with the best of them. Now, it has been some time since graduation, but as Halloween keeps coming, I keep on celebrating in true OU fashion.  Part of me feels a bit guilty at still loving a party as much as I do, but as I go through life, it just keeps being so necessary to indulge in a little shenanigans every so often.  I use to tell a very good friend of mine that he was Peter Pan and that maybe someday, he'd grow up.  They say that you call people out on flaws you see in yourself, and this month, I think I kind of realized that was what I was doing with the Peter Pan accusation.  Because I am Peter Pan too...I don't feel the need to grow up all the way, not yet anyway.  I can be responsible and mature most of the time, but at the present moment, I am happy to dress up as a giant ear of roasted corn, listen to music of questionable integrity, and eat pieces of fruit that have been fermenting in cashew liquor for three hours. Happy Halloween, ya'll.

Me, as grilled corn, Tim, as the fire cooking me, and Scout as Halloween in general, obviously.