Top 5 November 2015: Cooling Off but Heating Up

I feel like a broken record, but November came and went in the blink of an eye.  The final leg of Leadership Trek was completed the first weekend, followed by a lot of time in Kombo closing the grant and working on a couple of media projects.  I'm also thrilled to report that the cold season has rolled in and I'm happily sleeping under not one, but two blankets these days, which brings me a degree of joy I cannot adequately express in words.

5) Let's Lead

As I've mentioned the last couple of months, I was one of three female PCVs in charge of a project called Student Leadership Trek. After several visits back and forth to all the schools, preparing our funding paperwork and gathering supplies, after writing our curriculum and recruiting 15 other PCVs to trek and teach with us, the weekend for the actual event finally arrived.  The first weekend of November, the three of us separated, accompanied by our respective teams, and taught at two schools.  On Saturday, my team biked to

Acrostic poetry lesson

Tahir, where students and teachers alike were ready bright and early for our arrival.  We began the day with a short assembly and motivational activity called The Human Knot.  After breakfast, students began their rotation through the four stations of English, Art, Sports, and a special role model session where boys and girls separated and listened as a a stand-out member of the community spoke to them about their struggles toward success.  The day was long, but everyone applied themselves in order to make it work. The writing, while difficult for most, was enjoyed by a few talented young people, the art class proved to be the favorite of the day, and despite the heat of the afternoon sun, kickball was also a hit.  Sunday, we repeated the entire program at Kaiaf, a school about 15 kilometers away, and after closing ceremonies that evening, we all dispersed back to our villages Monday morning.

The food bowls for students and teachers cooked by local women. 

Who says you can't play in a skirt?

Blowing paint bubbles

While it was strange to see the product of so much time and effort flash by in just two short days, I'm so grateful for the opportunity to have organized such an incredible program.  It's too easy to focus on the imperfections in our work, and this trek was certainly chock full of them, but at the end of the day, the smiles spread across the faces of the kids was enough to make me put the flaws aside and just be thankful for the experience.

4) Ready, Set, Write!

Instead of going back to my village of Sare Ngai at the close of Leadership Trek, I had to head into Kombo to tie up the loose ends of our grant and write an article on one very special teacher we worked with at one of the schools. For the following three days, I attended a media workshop, where nine volunteers were split into groups of three to cover a topic of our choosing.  Each group had one volunteer focused on a specific medium: photography, videography, and writing.  My group decided to focus on transportation in The Gambia.  It was a lot of work to swing in just two days, but every group managed to get it done with flair. (See my article HERE) After the training, I prepared myself to return to my hut, and to my little Deanna, who is growing like a weed and learning to babble, coo and crawl!

3) Patch That: A Gambian How-To

In preparation for painting the world map on the wall of one of the classrooms in my local school, we had to first fix all the cracks and holes. Well...perhaps fix isn't quite the right word.  After using three bags of cement to completely redo the floors which were full of huge potholes, we had only a small amount to use for the walls. To best utilize the materials we had, the school Ustas, or Koranic teacher Pa Omar Barrow, taught me how to fill the holes of the classroom.  Please envision the two of us, propped up on tiny plastic chairs, shoving scraps of t-shirts, old socks, school uniforms too tattered to mend, and other random finds into the deep crevices of the wall.  Of course, the entire wall was hollow, so the clothes were easily swallowed up without so much as filling even one hole.  He sighed, frustrated.  New plan.  I got a packet of old gauze from the "medical kit" in the office and, carefully folding and rolling it into a dense ball, created plugs for the gaping holes.  Eschewing the idea of a perfect patch, I then threw globs of cement on top and Voila! a new wall!  A few hours later, Ustas and I mixed up some chunks of white paint with water and salt, and proceeded to whitewash the entire room.

The blue square: home to future world map!

He gets all the kudos as I was much too scared to mix up the paint (it gets scalding hot, shakes, and bubbles in the bucket) and, at 6'2", he was able to crawl on tables and chairs to reach the high spots.  I couldn't have done it without him, and I look forward to keeping the project going and finishing before next semester closes.




2) Giving Thanks

Since I passed on going to Kombo last year and instead helped to make a small feast in Basse, I decided to treat myself and go to the city and eat real turkey at the country director's house.  In exchange for the delicious meat, we each brought a side dish to round out the meal (I made green bean casserole) and together, about 50 of us indulged in a huge holiday spread.

While I missed my family and the intoxicating smell of my Aunt's kitchen, it was nice to have a few familiar things that make it feel like Thanksgiving.  We also used the day to show our gratitude for our surrogate families here with a special facebook post.  (See HERE)  I hope you all had a wonderful time with family and friends and I am quite excited for next year's Thanksgiving, where I plan to eat at least one piece of pie an hour until I collapse.

1) Just Face It

After all the casseroles and turkey breast, I planned to head back home, as work had me away from village so much this month.  My plan was spoiled, however, by an unexpected infection...in. my. face. There are many great things about life in West Africa; one of the not-so-great things is that skin infection are far too common. I've had many--from my foot, to my arm, in my nose, and now, in my face.  It began innocently enough.  I thought I had somehow bumped my forehead on something and had a smallish boil or goose-egg type thing.  But little by little, this thing swelled and swelled until my right eye was almost entirely swollen shut.  A bit nervous, I had a visit with the PC doctor, who immediately started me on antibiotics, and I now live to tell the tale.  After a few days, no longer resembling the elephant man, and no longer scaring unsuspecting strangers into gasping and and shouting, "Ah! Your face!", I decided it was time to go home.

All in all, November proved another successful month and I'm ready to see where the rest of the year takes me. Much love and holiday spirit to all of you back home.

Transportation Gambian Style

Envision this: You are a Peace Corps volunteer living in a remote bush village. You wake before sunrise to begin your journey into the city.  Loading up your backpack and hoisting your tired body onto your bicycle, you make your way up the deep, sandy path leading to the paved road. Stretching your headlamp over your bike helmet to illuminate the last moments before dawn, you pedal through the sand, cautiously monitoring the world around you for any stray hyenas not yet aware of the morning’s arrival. The air is crisp and cool, and although the heat from your baggage builds and the weight burdens your back, somehow you enjoy it — this precious moment of quiet calm before the storm — the unknown, unpredictable storm that is traveling on public transportation in The Gambia. 

Regardless of whether a volunteer lives north or south of the shallow river that divides the country, whether they live 10 or a mere 3 kilometers from the road, the challenges and joys of using public transport are unavoidable. From gele gele to bus, citizens and travelers alike come together for hours on end, cramped into the closest of quarters, in order to reach the metropolitan region of The Gambia known as the Kombos. Without much space to spread out, passengers quickly become familiar with one another. Babies are handed off to strangers so that their mothers are able to gather luggage and heave themselves into the automobiles. People repeatedly shuffle in and out of their seats, assisting others in safely affixing their sheep and goats to the roof racks of the vehicles. “We become a kind of team when we travel,” said Cameron Hatlevig, a health volunteer residing four kilometers off the main road. “One time I had an old woman take groundnuts out of my hand and actually shell them for me because I let her granddaughter sit on my lap.” 

Though special moments like these do happen, volunteers don’t often think of travel as a pleasant experience. The vehicles are in all states of disrepair. The seats are usually ripped and even missing the necessary hardware to hold them up; the A/C is not only broken, but is, more often than not, actually emitting blasts of scalding hot air . The combined body odors of the passengers make for an overall undesirable aroma, and as one volunteer put it, “People seem to think it’s normal to encourage your small child to pee on the ground even though they’re in a confined public space.”

Lia Killeen, a health volunteer, remembers a late afternoon ride home she took alongside members of her extended family. After hitting a dip in the road, the truck became stuck in a vertical position, women and their wares sprawled in every direction, and goats were thrown into the glass which separated the bed of the truck from the front seats. “The men sent me to get my host father and his horse cart to come and pick up my family and their baggage. When I returned, I walked up to see all the women in their fancy completes (traditional West African fashion), pushing the truck out of the muddy ditch,” she said. “I was impressed.  Their natural reaction wasn’t to complain about the situation, but to laugh it off and just solve the problem.”

Stories like this are common threads stitching the travel experiences of many volunteers together.  Some are lucky to find inspiration and kindness where they least expect it, but others have a vastly different perspective.  One volunteer living on the reputedly inconvenient north bank of the country shared details from her most recent trip to the city. After an estimated nine hours of biking to, waiting for, and riding on a gele gele, Alexandra Hooper was shocked and devastated when a fellow passenger, thought to be asleep, was found dead by relatives upon arriving at her village. They pried her body from the vehicle and collected her baggage as the vehicle doors closed; the seemingly unfazed passengers simply continued on to their final destinations. “I felt that there was a degree of acceptance that I just couldn’t understand,” Hooper explained. “My gut reaction was to check her pulse, console her family members, anything … but the Gambians just knew she had passed, and knew they had to move on.”

Other volunteer experiences don’t fit into either category, but stand out simply as bits of comic relief from the exhaustion of travel. Education volunteer Dan Tanner, having passed through a police checkpoint on the main road a few weeks prior, was recognized by an officer while waiting for his vehicle to be waved through.  Upon entering the gele gele to review the passenger IDs, the officer immediately recalled the volunteer’s fully grown beard, grabbed ahold of it and announced, “Bora ba!” (or “big beard” in the local language of Mandinka), before turning to exit. Tanner and his fellow passengers exchanged confused glances and continued on in a state of amused disbelief. 

Although volunteers travel the same roads with the same population of people, no two experiences are ever the same.  Some have been offered free rides from sympathetic drivers, others have struck up conversations to find they have family in the same city back in America, and still others have made connections with locals that will last far beyond the end of their service.  The adventure of using public transportation in an unfamiliar country and culture is one full of bittersweet moments, but it’s what makes The Peace Corps unique. “I’ve had people give up their seats for me on the bus, share their last piece of watermelon, and trust me to hold their child,” Hatlevig said. “That would never happen back home.”