Saturday, January 30, 2010
Jola
I am going to be finishing up Jola classes today. We are on our break right now. I'm pretty excited about how well Jola has gone. Our class goal today is to try and see how long we can have a conversation in Jola without breaking down to using English. They're by no means deep, meaningful conversations but I feel pretty proud of myself right now. We've ben doing so much practice on asking questions about people and their families, etc. - all the basic get to know you stuff- that we got bored with eachothers answers, so in the last couple of days we've been pretending to be celebrities speaking Jola. We've used Britney Spears, Hillary Clinton, Paris Hilton, Angelina Jolie, etc. It's been pretty fun and I think it makes us better because we can't just rattle off the phrases about our families and stuff that we have memorized; we have to actually think about the answers. Usually with a celebrity, you can come up with much more entertaining questions and anwers than you can for yourself, so that adds another layer of fun.
I took a picture of a page from my Jola notebook. It's just a bunch of random vocabulary, but if anyone really wants to see what some jola words are like, you can click on the picture and it should get big enough for you to read.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Pictures
I uploaded a bunch of pictures for you guys. This should pretty much catch you up on what I've taken pics of so far. It spans from Christmas till about now. I should be headed to Salliyaa this weekend, so this may be the last post for a month or so. Enjoy!
A picture of the view for hours on our Christmas Eve hike
Our group at some point in our being lost
At the beginning of our Christmas "cruise"
Note the water being dumped over the side of the boat- that's the deckhand bailing out the water we were taking on
Wildlife along the river
Our drivers loading up the cars to drop us off on our site visit. The driver on top of the back car has on a Santa hat- Merry Christmas!
This is the back of my yard at my house. The dry palm fronds at the bottom are my fence and the trees you can see are a mango tree and an amazing silk cotton that are growing together. I've got a great place.
This is another view from my backyard
Some of us outside of the training center
The view from the front porch of the stodge/ transit house
One of the cars ready to head upcountry to drop people at their permanent sites
Another view of the same car- it was definately the most impressively loaded down
While I've been in the city, I've hung out with a couple that moved to The Gambia about the same time I did and one of their visiting friends. This is from when we went on a hike at a national park right outside of the city. It was really nice and there were a bunch of monkeys.
Jennifer, me and a monkey
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Walking to Class
I'm still in Kombo having Jola class. We've had some issues with the internet, but I think it's up and running for a while at least. Nothing too much going on here so I figured I'd do an in-depth blog on something I do every day- walking from the house to the office.
Class "starts" at 9 every day, which means that class may start between 9:30 and 10 but at least before lunch. The 3 of us in my class always get there around 9 and hang out around the office until class time comes.
I leave the house about 15 minutes before class "starts" so that I am there by a little after 9. I usually walk with Melissa- the other new trainee in my Jola class. We say bye to the guard on the way out of the compound and usually walk about 30 yards out of our way to a shop on our road that sells bread. It costs about 20 cents for a loaf and Melissa and I split one. It's enough for each of us for breakfast and some days I have some for a snack or part of lunch later. Then we walk back down the road- it's just a sand road past several other compounds and cross behind a war memorial cemetary. It has really nice grass (the 2nd nicest grass in the whole country I've heard- 2nd only to the president's house). We go past the cemetary and walk on- behind the store that buys its inventory at a Wal-Mart in Virginia and has it shipped here periodically, behind the Lebonese restaurant, past a big trash pile, past lots of bougenvalia (sp?), and finally we get to our big road crossing. This is where things start to be paved (for at least most of the way).
We cross the road and walk behind a bank- it's a big modern building and we cut down towards the main road beside the bank. Past the bank it starts to be more crowded and urban. Between here and the US Embassy, there are several hardware stores, a couple western style grocery stores, a couple people who set up shop by the road every day selling brooms & buckets, a couple of stationary stores, several ladies who set up stands selling sandwiches (sandwiches are more of a breakfast food here; by about 1pm there really aren't sandwiches anywhere to be found), taxis everywhere- really lots of stuff happening. We walk past the US Embassy on our way. They have these barricades set up so that if you walk between the barricades and the fence, which is really the place you would want to be seeing as it is a bit further away from the cars on the road, men with automatic rifles tell you to go to the other side of the barricade. People learn quickly to walk on the car-side of the barricade. Past the embassy there is only a set of houses, a furniture store and a drug store, plus a wall and some guards, between us and the office. We wave hi to the guards on the way in. We've been coming in every day for long enough they don't ID check us anymore. Sometimes we get lucky and one of the guards even greets us in Jola. Then all that's left to do is wait for class.
Class "starts" at 9 every day, which means that class may start between 9:30 and 10 but at least before lunch. The 3 of us in my class always get there around 9 and hang out around the office until class time comes.
I leave the house about 15 minutes before class "starts" so that I am there by a little after 9. I usually walk with Melissa- the other new trainee in my Jola class. We say bye to the guard on the way out of the compound and usually walk about 30 yards out of our way to a shop on our road that sells bread. It costs about 20 cents for a loaf and Melissa and I split one. It's enough for each of us for breakfast and some days I have some for a snack or part of lunch later. Then we walk back down the road- it's just a sand road past several other compounds and cross behind a war memorial cemetary. It has really nice grass (the 2nd nicest grass in the whole country I've heard- 2nd only to the president's house). We go past the cemetary and walk on- behind the store that buys its inventory at a Wal-Mart in Virginia and has it shipped here periodically, behind the Lebonese restaurant, past a big trash pile, past lots of bougenvalia (sp?), and finally we get to our big road crossing. This is where things start to be paved (for at least most of the way).
We cross the road and walk behind a bank- it's a big modern building and we cut down towards the main road beside the bank. Past the bank it starts to be more crowded and urban. Between here and the US Embassy, there are several hardware stores, a couple western style grocery stores, a couple people who set up shop by the road every day selling brooms & buckets, a couple of stationary stores, several ladies who set up stands selling sandwiches (sandwiches are more of a breakfast food here; by about 1pm there really aren't sandwiches anywhere to be found), taxis everywhere- really lots of stuff happening. We walk past the US Embassy on our way. They have these barricades set up so that if you walk between the barricades and the fence, which is really the place you would want to be seeing as it is a bit further away from the cars on the road, men with automatic rifles tell you to go to the other side of the barricade. People learn quickly to walk on the car-side of the barricade. Past the embassy there is only a set of houses, a furniture store and a drug store, plus a wall and some guards, between us and the office. We wave hi to the guards on the way in. We've been coming in every day for long enough they don't ID check us anymore. Sometimes we get lucky and one of the guards even greets us in Jola. Then all that's left to do is wait for class.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Families
I figured I would do an educatoinal blog today on Gambian families and how they are different from those in the US. First of all, polygamy is common in The Gambia. According to the laws of Islam a man may have up to 4 wives and according to the laws of Gambia, there is no limit. My host family in my training village was a polygamous family. Between the language barrier and not being used to the family setup I am still a bit confused about how everyone was related, but from the best I could tell I had 3 host mothers. Children in the family treat all of the mothers as a mother and all of the mothers do their part to keep the household running. Like in my family one of my mothers cooked all the time and another was always washing things, be it kids or clothes- whatever. The kids are all considered brothers and sisters but often when someone is talking about their brother or sister they might specify same mother and same father.
Unless they move to another town to find work, sons tend to live in the family compund their whole lives. Wives move to their husband's family compound. Often, husbands come to the city to find work but their families stay at home in the village. There are a lot of circumstances where the husband (or son for that matter) will move to another country to find good work and send money back to his family. Family members here seem very comitted to the family unit. People with good jobs may suport their whole extended family.
Unless they move to another town to find work, sons tend to live in the family compund their whole lives. Wives move to their husband's family compound. Often, husbands come to the city to find work but their families stay at home in the village. There are a lot of circumstances where the husband (or son for that matter) will move to another country to find good work and send money back to his family. Family members here seem very comitted to the family unit. People with good jobs may suport their whole extended family.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Swear in
I had the good fortune to be placed in training village with some of the greatest bloggers I have ever met. This couple wrote blogs while we were in village and past-posted them once we got back to the city. Their blog is great! Probably the most comprehensive way to catch up with all I missed blogging about is to look at their blog. Since we were in training village together, we've been in the same place almost the whole time until today when they left the city to go to their site, so it is pretty representative of what I have done. Their blog is SandJwalkingamile.blogspot.com- enjoy it! If you want to ask me anything about what is on their blog, just post on here or facebook me.
Over our Christmas holiday we got our site assignments. I am posted to a tiny village in the Western Region of The Gambia. I'm not supposed to post the name on here for safety and security reasons, but we'll just call it Salliyaa, which means "Salli's place" in Mandinka. Salliyaa is a Jolla village. Jollas are one of the smaller tribes in the country. I am going to be learning Jolla now. It's the primary language in my village, but luckily over time they have borrowed a lot of words from Mandinka so what I have learned so far was worthwhile. Speaking of that, I passed my language test, ranking as an Intermediate High Mandinka speaker. I was happy to score above what I had to have to swear in.
Our whole training class swore in last Friday. It was only the second time Peace Corps The Gambia has had a group make it through training without anyone quitting the program. Our ceremony was at the American ambassador's residence, right on the beach. It was really nice. It was even televised on Gambian national television. Hopefully I will be able to post some pictures of swear in on the blog before I head to my site. The two days after swear in were spent shopping for things we would need at our new houses. Yesterday I was in one of the markets and a guy came up to me and said he had seen me on TV. It was funny- he did an impression of us making our oath and was talking about our song. I guess people really did watch it. Our musical performance went much better than I had expected. In the practices we usually sounded unenthusiastic and the song didn't sound too good, but I guess for the real thing we were all excited enough that the song didn't sound half bad. The song was in Mandinka and it translated loosely to: Brotherhood and love, Peace Corps has come, Peace group. We all wore matching outfits, which is a big deal here- the people love it. When a group gets matcing outfits for an event, the outfits are called asobees. Lots of people do asobees for weddings, pretty much like bridesmaids' dresses. It was so funny hanging out at the house in the morning before the ceremony with 35 people all dressed in the same fabric walking around.
I'm going to be in the city for another couple of days, probably heading to Salliyaa on Thursday, so I should be able to post another time or 2.
Over our Christmas holiday we got our site assignments. I am posted to a tiny village in the Western Region of The Gambia. I'm not supposed to post the name on here for safety and security reasons, but we'll just call it Salliyaa, which means "Salli's place" in Mandinka. Salliyaa is a Jolla village. Jollas are one of the smaller tribes in the country. I am going to be learning Jolla now. It's the primary language in my village, but luckily over time they have borrowed a lot of words from Mandinka so what I have learned so far was worthwhile. Speaking of that, I passed my language test, ranking as an Intermediate High Mandinka speaker. I was happy to score above what I had to have to swear in.
Our whole training class swore in last Friday. It was only the second time Peace Corps The Gambia has had a group make it through training without anyone quitting the program. Our ceremony was at the American ambassador's residence, right on the beach. It was really nice. It was even televised on Gambian national television. Hopefully I will be able to post some pictures of swear in on the blog before I head to my site. The two days after swear in were spent shopping for things we would need at our new houses. Yesterday I was in one of the markets and a guy came up to me and said he had seen me on TV. It was funny- he did an impression of us making our oath and was talking about our song. I guess people really did watch it. Our musical performance went much better than I had expected. In the practices we usually sounded unenthusiastic and the song didn't sound too good, but I guess for the real thing we were all excited enough that the song didn't sound half bad. The song was in Mandinka and it translated loosely to: Brotherhood and love, Peace Corps has come, Peace group. We all wore matching outfits, which is a big deal here- the people love it. When a group gets matcing outfits for an event, the outfits are called asobees. Lots of people do asobees for weddings, pretty much like bridesmaids' dresses. It was so funny hanging out at the house in the morning before the ceremony with 35 people all dressed in the same fabric walking around.
I'm going to be in the city for another couple of days, probably heading to Salliyaa on Thursday, so I should be able to post another time or 2.
The Kaiaf Crew: Sarah, me, Bakary (our teacher), Casey, and Jacob
All of the Environment Volunteers
All of the new volunteers plus some importsnt people: (L to R) the guy who runs the PC house, our training manager, out country director, the ambassador's wife, the ambassador, our former environment program coordinator and the education program coordinator
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Donkey punch
Just thought that since I have a couple of extra minutes at this computer I would share a funny game a few of us PCTs play. It's called donkey punch. Outside of the city there are donkeys everywhere. They just roam around free so honestly they are everywhere and you never know when you are going to see one. The game is based loosely on the traveling game punch buggy if you know about that.
The rules:
If a donkey is spotted, the first one to see the donkey punches the closest person who is also playing the game.
If a false punch is made certain repercussions apply: If you punch someone for what you thought to be a donkey from far away and it actually turns out to be a horse, the victim gets to punch you twice. If you confuse a goat for a donkey, the victim may punch you 4 times. If you wrongly punch someone, confusing a chicken for a donkey, the victim has the right to beat you mercilessly with a stick.
The game never ends. Once you are playing, you are always playing as long as there is someone with you who is also participating in the game.
The game has no purpose or goal whatsoever, except perhaps violence, stupidity, fun and the perk of realizing how many donkeys are around us every day.
The rules:
If a donkey is spotted, the first one to see the donkey punches the closest person who is also playing the game.
If a false punch is made certain repercussions apply: If you punch someone for what you thought to be a donkey from far away and it actually turns out to be a horse, the victim gets to punch you twice. If you confuse a goat for a donkey, the victim may punch you 4 times. If you wrongly punch someone, confusing a chicken for a donkey, the victim has the right to beat you mercilessly with a stick.
The game never ends. Once you are playing, you are always playing as long as there is someone with you who is also participating in the game.
The game has no purpose or goal whatsoever, except perhaps violence, stupidity, fun and the perk of realizing how many donkeys are around us every day.
Pictures
Sorry everybody- the pictures ended up in reverse order:
This is a monkey at a hotel we stayed at on our environmental sector field trip. These monkeys would even come up to you and steal food off you plate if you turned you back on it for a second.
This is part of my family from training village on Tobaski (a Muslim holiday).
These are the trainees in my training village (Kaiaf). Our families dressed us up for our naming ceremonies. I got my name Sally Barrow that day, but my name has since changed to Salli Sanneh.
This is my bathroom from Kaiaf. Where it is wet is where you bathe and the toilet is on the right.
This is the day we moved in to Kaiaf. In the very front of the line of people is a donkey cart with all of our stuff on it.
This is right before we moved out to our training villages. The cars are getting loaded up while all of us trainees get nervous.
The beach in Komboo. The Gambia is Beautiful!
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Holidays
So I just looked at my last couple of posts and i feel like I have come a long way since then. For starters- the last language lesson: "until later" is actually Fo nyatto. I am a lot better at the language now. Not to say that I am good, but I can respond to some questions and overall feel pretty good about how I am doing in Mandinka so far. I am starting on my second language now. As soon as I get back to my site I am going to start learning Jolla.
The last few weeks have been good. I figure I'll do an update on the holidays. On Christmas Eve, our group of trainees went on a hike. It was called the Death March up until this year when it was decided to call it a nicer name like Marathon March. It was supposed to be a 26 kilometer walk to the river and back to our hotel. Our guide got a bit lost and it ended up being an 11 hour trek through the bush. We didn't ever get to the river, but we did eventually get back to our hotel. The hike ended up much closer to being a marathon than planned. No one knows how far we walked but it can only be assumed that in 10.5 hours of solid walking we probably did walk 20-something miles. It was a long day but it was a great team-building activity and a lot of excersise.
On Christmas, we got the day off. I went on a boat ride on the river in the morning. We got to see the sun rise on the river. Afterwards, I went to a mission church for their Christmas service. It was in part Mandinka and part English. It was cool doing church in a different language.
Betweeen Christmas and New Years I went to visit my permanent site, which I'll post about in anothger post on another day.
For New Years eve, we traveled in to the city (Kombo) on our own as practice for using public transportation. I had to take a 2-3 hour gelly (modified old van with benches in it that fit as many people as possible in) ride. Then I transferred to another gelly for a maybe 30 minute ride where I transferred to a car for a few minute ride to the house where we're staying in. It was really not all that difficult and I met a few Gambians along the way that helped me out getting where I needed to go. Without their help I'm not sure how long it would have taken me to get here, but I'm sure I would have been a lot more stressed when I got here. After getting to Kombo, I walked to the house, sat my stuff down and headed out for lunch. I had a hamburger and french fries. It was DELICIOUS! It is amazing how much my pickiness with food has cleared up in the last couple of months. I have eaten so many things with katsup on them in the last few days no one would believe it and I eat onions now. Not raw ones but I hardly even pick around cooked ones anymore! Like that delicious hamburger I mentioned earlier came with onions and katsup on it. You don't really special order things here so you take what you get and I must say I was more than happy with what came to me.
For New Years night we trainees were not allowed to leave our house, so we had a party here complete with a ball drop. Some of our group wrapped a soccer ball in tinsel and carryout containers and lowered it from the balcony for our countdown. It was really festive!
We had New Years day off to do whatever we wanted. I lazed around the house for a while and went to the beach in the afternoon.
Since then we've been having training classes. I had my last Mandinka language evaluation today. My score will determine whether I can become a volunteer or whether I have to take a few more classes before I get sworn in. I think I did ok. We'll see in a few days after they review our test tapes, but I'm thinking I'll be a volunteer by the end of next week!
The last few weeks have been good. I figure I'll do an update on the holidays. On Christmas Eve, our group of trainees went on a hike. It was called the Death March up until this year when it was decided to call it a nicer name like Marathon March. It was supposed to be a 26 kilometer walk to the river and back to our hotel. Our guide got a bit lost and it ended up being an 11 hour trek through the bush. We didn't ever get to the river, but we did eventually get back to our hotel. The hike ended up much closer to being a marathon than planned. No one knows how far we walked but it can only be assumed that in 10.5 hours of solid walking we probably did walk 20-something miles. It was a long day but it was a great team-building activity and a lot of excersise.
On Christmas, we got the day off. I went on a boat ride on the river in the morning. We got to see the sun rise on the river. Afterwards, I went to a mission church for their Christmas service. It was in part Mandinka and part English. It was cool doing church in a different language.
Betweeen Christmas and New Years I went to visit my permanent site, which I'll post about in anothger post on another day.
For New Years eve, we traveled in to the city (Kombo) on our own as practice for using public transportation. I had to take a 2-3 hour gelly (modified old van with benches in it that fit as many people as possible in) ride. Then I transferred to another gelly for a maybe 30 minute ride where I transferred to a car for a few minute ride to the house where we're staying in. It was really not all that difficult and I met a few Gambians along the way that helped me out getting where I needed to go. Without their help I'm not sure how long it would have taken me to get here, but I'm sure I would have been a lot more stressed when I got here. After getting to Kombo, I walked to the house, sat my stuff down and headed out for lunch. I had a hamburger and french fries. It was DELICIOUS! It is amazing how much my pickiness with food has cleared up in the last couple of months. I have eaten so many things with katsup on them in the last few days no one would believe it and I eat onions now. Not raw ones but I hardly even pick around cooked ones anymore! Like that delicious hamburger I mentioned earlier came with onions and katsup on it. You don't really special order things here so you take what you get and I must say I was more than happy with what came to me.
For New Years night we trainees were not allowed to leave our house, so we had a party here complete with a ball drop. Some of our group wrapped a soccer ball in tinsel and carryout containers and lowered it from the balcony for our countdown. It was really festive!
We had New Years day off to do whatever we wanted. I lazed around the house for a while and went to the beach in the afternoon.
Since then we've been having training classes. I had my last Mandinka language evaluation today. My score will determine whether I can become a volunteer or whether I have to take a few more classes before I get sworn in. I think I did ok. We'll see in a few days after they review our test tapes, but I'm thinking I'll be a volunteer by the end of next week!
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