53%

Today, I was working on editing a report by someone in the education department.  On pretty much every report there is a background section telling about the poverty statistics in The Gambia.  One sentence that is always there is:

“53 percent of the population lives below the US$2 per day.”  (Okay, so sometimes the sentence is more or less grammatically correct but this is it copied from the current report and you get the idea.)

I decided to calculate how I compare to that.  Right now, Peace Corps pays me: 

my stipend

+ they pay me a city supplement because living in the city is way more expensive than anywhere else

+ WFP pays my rent.  

All of this money added up, divided out, and converted to dollars comes to roughly $13.50 per day.

That’s pretty impressive considering the $6 a day I used to get when I lived in village. 

Of my $13.50, $5 goes to rent, which leaves me $8.50/day to live off of.  I am RICH. 

How internet here works

Solving the mystery of how I have internet at my house...

Here, the easiest way to get internet at home is through one of the cell phone companies.  You register with them and get a receiver that looks like this

 This plugs into the USB drive and picks up a cell signal, giving you the internet. The signal isn't all you need.  You still have to pay for it.  To do that, you have to buy credit.  For this, I use the same system that I use for my phones. You buy a card at any neighborhood shop or from people selling them on the street.  They come in different denominations (this one is 100 dalasis- a little under $4. One of the bigger cards you can get.)
There is a portion that you have to scratch off like a lottery ticket to get to your code.  Then you text this code to the mobile provider.





In a couple of seconds, you should get a text back telling you the amount of credit in your account. Then you're free to roam the internet until you've used up all of the memory that the credit entitles you to. Then you're done with internet until you buy more credit.

Back home

I've been back in Gambia for a few weeks now. It’s been great being back. I've really enjoyed being back in my own house. I don't even know why I'm so glad to be back in my smelly, soggy part of the city, but somehow or another I don’t know anywhere else I’d rather be. I’m going to try and be better about writing about this place.

Today’s story- Toubab I lafita denaano? (Foreigner, do you want this baby?)

A few days ago, I was walking home from work and I could hear some kids talking about me from a little ways off.  There were a few kids about 10-12 years old and one of the girls had a baby tied on her back, probably a younger sibling she was supposed to watch.  One of the boys was saying “here comes a toubab.  Ask it to buy this baby.” Then it became a song- “the toubab’s going to buy this baby.” Then I got to the group of kids and I was presented with the baby.  They were going to give it to me at a great price of 1 dalasi (less than a nickel), but I turned them down.  I’m just not equipped for a baby, but I told them maybe later.

Today, I was walking towards the road near my house and I met a totally different group of kids.  These were a little younger and didn’t have the baby they were referring to out on display, but they also asked if I wanted a baby several times.  Weird new trend.

After a long day at the office

I went walking on the beach after work the other day and I thought, you know, living this close to a beach, I kind of forget how cool it is that I can just come out here all the time.  I'm lucky.  I work across the street from the beach in a place where it is not really ever miserable weather for walking on the beach. 

I live in a pretty cool place, I'll admit it.

 There are no tourists now.  Its like there was a ban on tourists after a couple of weeks ago.  I was the only one on the beach besides a group of boys playing soccer and a fisherman who lives there.  The fisherman told me about a possible route that I could start walking part of the way home on the beach.  The route might double the distance home, but its at least twice as pretty.

You're in.

Welcome into the house. This is my living room.

I have a couch, a coffee table, 3 chairs, 2 light bulbs, a ceiling fan, a couple of outlets, and a huge set of shelves complete with a mirror! All came with the house.

This room is way bigger than my old house!

Made in China

One of the most consistently entertaining things in The Gambia is the lack  of editing on products, papers, signs, etc.  The products are possibly the most entertaining and not Gambia's fault. If you thought that everything in America was made in China, the percentage can't even compare with here. I guess Chinese companies figure that if a significant portion of the West African population is illiterate, they can put their least literate staff in the copy room to write for products bound for West Africa.

Here is a brief introduction to my collection of entertaining examples of complete lack of editing.  Two things I have bought lately:

 I needed a pair of sandals while I was in Senegal and couldn't pass up this badly edited pair.  The picture above and below came from the same shoe.  Note: In the above picture, China takes credit for their workmanship.

Got some hangers for my work-wear.  I wouldn't have thought that hangers needed a cautionary note, but how else would they have fit this many English mistakes onto the package?

Inside the Fortress

Looking out from the porch.

  From the outside looking in.

Nice place right? The old place was nice, but its just not quite like the new one.

Life in Protugal

I've gotten some questions about my new living situation now that I'm in the city, so I thought that I would slowly share what the new place is like.  Today, outside the compound...

Here's my gate.  Keep in mind that I took these in the early morning.  There are always, always people around here- day and night.  It seems like around 7am is the only time there are no people on the street, so I took advantage to take some pictures.  I'm usually not on the street at 7am either.

 Here's my street.  I live on a side street in a densely populated area of the city.  The side street has no vehicle traffic ever due to the mound of dirt and gravel across from my car gate which I never use and the fact that sometimes, the end of the road you see here is only a ditch.  Other times they put concrete slabs over the ditch, I guess whenever they clean the ditch they leave it open for a few months so people never get in the habit of driving down the street.  The area right outside my house-less than the length of a block is called Portugal.  I have no idea why and neither does anyone else, but I promise though I've never been to real Portugal, this place is nothing like it.  But within 200 yards of my house there are more shops than there were in all the villages within 5 or possibly 10 kilometers of my old place.  Big city living!

This is the view down my street in the other direction.  It has a T junction into another street, which is where I go if I want to hang out with some teenage girls.  There's a family just a few houses down that road with 6 teenage-early 20s age daughters.  They're a fun group to go hang out with.  I can also go the other direction to head toward the market.  It's not right around the corner but close enough I don't mind going every couple of days to get vegetables and etc. I'll say it again- Big city living!  It has its advantages.

Next stop.....

inside the compound.

The Gambia vs. Algeria

Yesterday, I went to my first international football match. (Internationally, it is called football, not soccer- to all of you Americans out there.)  It was Gambia vs Algeria.  The day before the match, I had gotten to see the Algerian team arrive at their hotel.  It was right across the street from the UN building and I got stopped on my way home by a police entourage protecting the Algerians until they were safely in the hotel.  

I skipped out of work a couple of hours early to go to the game along with a few thousand other people.  Actually, a lot of people didn't have to skip because a lot of employers gave their employees a half day in honor of the game. The place was pretty packed.

At games here, there are still people selling food in the stands, but its very gambian appropriate.  Cashews, bags of frozen juice, bags of water, cans of coke, sour milk and coos...  And the vendors are mostly women with the goods on their heads and babies on their backs.

Lined up before the game for the national anthems.

The teams taking the field.

This guy was wearing a Gambian flag themed outfit and was a combination of cheerleader and self-appointed usher.

Playing the game...

We had pretty good seats.  A little less than $4 gets you a seat in the shade.  I'm really glad we had the expensive seats- way better than frying in the sun.  And we had a good view as long as most people stayed sitting down.

The game was fun.  Gambia didn't play very well and broke their tradition of "never losing a home game" according to a guy at work.  They were defeated 2-1.  Afterwards, it was interesting to see the Gambians attitude of team loyalty.  It could be summed up as a 'never root for the loser' philosophy.  Walking out of the stadium, you'd think that 75% of people had come to root for Algeria.  I'm still a Gambia fan, but if I ever get the opportunity to watch them play again, I hope they do a little better.

The Office

Here are all the people I work with at the WFP The Gambia office.  This picture was taken at our Annual Performance Plan retreat about a week ago.  

Dear System, Sorry about bragging.

So that last message about beating the system was a little hasty.  Yes, I went on trek but it did not go quite as planned. 

Day 1:
We were supposed to leave in the morning by 10 and go all the way to the end of the country.  Some delayed paperwork pushed departure back to almost 2, and then a flat tire sealed our fates.  We had to stop in Jangjanbureh for the night halfway.  Made arrangements to meet the trek I was supposed to be on in the morning.

Day 2:
Waved goodbye to the driver and other guy from my office so I could wait for the trek I was supposed to be on to come pick me up.  Waited. Waited. Called.  When I thought I had made arrangements for them to pick me up, I assumed an "okay yes" meant okay yes we'll pick you up in the way you are suggesting.  Instead it meant okay, yes, I cannot hear anything you are saying.  They had left me behind.  They said they would come to the place I was by around 2pm, so I should sit tight and wait.  So I spent the day exploring the town, eating street food, and hanging out with a friend who lives nearby.  Around 10:30pm, the group finally showed up.

Day 3:

The truck I shared with 4 guys for part of the trek.

Was told to be ready to go by 5am. Knowing we would be late, I set my alarm for 5:30.  We left at 8.  We went to a few schools to distribute tools and seeds for school gardens.  The schools we went to had all recieved these materials from the same grant.  Part of my job is to make sure they all get training on proper school garden management soon, so I wanted to go and see how they were doing now. 

 

Salikine's school garden

I think this place was Chamen.  Probably the best school garden I've ever seen.  Here, the kids are fake-learning about tomato plants.  This is a staged picture we had to work on for a while to get the kids to look down instead of at me.

In the early afternoon, things started to go sour.  The other truck we were traveling with had a tire problem and a couple of the men started fighting and name calling.  I think they had been together a bit too long by this point, with one more day to go.  The tire was not a routine fix so we spent a few hours at a mechanics shop.  One of the guys and I wandered around town for quite a while eating peanuts and "ice"- basically a popsicle in a plastic bag.  Eventually, we left and I changed vehicles.  We went to spend the night in one guy's home village.  They made us chicken with peanut butter and tomato sauce (domoda) and of course rice.  It was a nice night.

Day 4:

Remember when I said I changed vehicles.  My mode of transportation got a little more interesting- a dump truck.   The suspension was not so good, but how often to you get a chance to ride around in a dump truck? So I can't complain.

My day 4 vehicle.

Now for time #2 I got left on this trek.  Me and another guy were in the dump truch catching up with the group.  He called them and said 'don't go anywhere.'  Well, they went ahead somewhere that involved dropping things off at one school and buying several buckets full of milk.  The dump truck crew was then stuck going to the governors office and petitioning for a ferry pass.



The North Bank regional courthouse at the governor's office.  This courthouse is in a pavilion- no walls.

One hour and 2 ferry passes later, we got the whole group back together.  We visited a couple more schools and then got ready for the last big hurdle of the journey- the ferry crossing.  For the ferry crossing, they load a boat with about 10 vehicles and a couple hundred people for an incredibly slow journey from the north to south banks of the River Gambia.  You can pretty much see one bank from the other but you can never tell how long it is going to take.  This particular trip was 2 hours long.  Finally back on the south bank, we dropped off supplies and started dropping prople off at their homes.  I got home just in time to make it to the American school's elementary school production of a Midsummer Night's Dream, featuring the president's daughter and a really cool venue- the largest dome in West Africa.  (Impressive, however. probably much much smaller than you are imagining.)  Sounds like on Monday, I'll get to go over how this trek went and start planning our next one!

The System- 57 Lindsay- 1

A lot of the new job feels like me against the system. And believe me, the system always wins, but not today!

After jumping through some paperwork hoops and missing the car full of people I was supposed to go on a school garden observation trek with, it looks like I'm still going to get to go on trek.  A day late but certainly not a dollar short.  (They're giving me a daily field allowance.)  Turns out another guy in the office is going across the country for work tomorrow, so we're going to share a car and I'll meet the car I was supposed to be traveling with whenever our paths cross. On the way, I'll get to see what the guy I sit across from at the office every day actually does when he's not behind a computer and then I'll get to spend a couple of days checking out school gardens and making plans for the rest of the year.

NEW everything

Around the new year I moved out of my village to start my new job in the city.  This involved the arduous task of finding a house, which proved much more difficult than I could have imagined, but ended in what seems like success.  I don't want to jinx this place.  The second I say this place is perfect, the cats and rats or whatever creatures go nuts in the ceiling on occasion will come down and take over, or who knows what else might happen, but the place is pretty good.  I've got running water, electricity, a shower, a toilet, my own space indoor and outdoors, a fridge (that really is more like a freezer but whatever), a couch, shelves, 2 bedrooms, a kitchen... there's a lot to be excited about.  And the location is good.  A ten minute bike ride from work, a short walk to public transport routes, the same 10 minute ride that gets me to work can also get me to the beach and the new place is in a really lively part of town.
The new job-
I'm still a Peace Corps volunteer, but my posting has changed.  I'm now posted at the World Food Programme country office as a Programme Assistant working on school gardens (and whatever else they tell me I'm doing.)  I've been kind of doing this job on the side for most of my PC service- just doing coordination between PC and WFP, helping at trainings, etc.  Now I just do it all of the time and have some responsibility.  I've been on the job almost 6 weeks now.  So far, its been a good experience.  I've learned a lot.  This is the first time I've had a job anything like this.  I'm getting a lot of opportunities to work on my business writing skills, learning a lot about working within hierarchys and government agencies, trying to figure out how one gets used to a job where you are at the computer all day, and much more.  Right now, I'm working on planning trainings (which may or may not ever happen, which is a little unnerving), working on getting some educational resources on gardens made, planning on going on a monitoring trek, writing a partnership proposal for us and a different organization, etc.

Ni rano rano Kanjibato. - I miss Kanjibat.

My last picture in Kanjibat.  Hopefully I'll be able to visit soon.  I was going to go this weekend, but then a trek got scheduled for next week.  As much as I'd love to go say hi, the last thing I want is to go hang out for the weekend, then come back, pack and leave the next morning for a week on the road.  I talked to my "husband" (the boy I'm holding in the picture) a little while ago on the phone and since I left, he's gotten a lot better at talking.  I can't wait to see how much Muhammed (the baby in my compound) has grown in the last couple of months.  I can't wait until I can go.  I even miss the food a little tiny bit. Who would have thought?

That said, life in the city is going pretty great.  An update is coming very soon.

The Big Reveal

I moved out of my village a couple of weeks ago to start work in the city. I served for two years in a small rural village yet unveiled on this blog. Since I no longer live there, I'm allowed to tell you all about the place now.  Drumroll please.  The place formerly referred to as Salliya is............. Kanjibat. Spelled like that but somehow pronounced Con-G-bot-toe.
Its a small village just off the south bank road in the Western Region of The Gambia. Home to a whopping 60 people and formerly me. Check it out on google maps. You'll be able to see http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Kanjibat,+The+Gambia&hl=en&ll=13.261333,-15.446777&spn=2.614285,3.532104&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=34.038806,56.513672&vpsrc=6&hnear=Kanjibat,+Foni+Bondali,+West+Coast+Region,+The+Gambia&t=m&z=8
Make sure you look at it on satellite view.  Probably more cool to me than anyone else, but you can see the house where I used to live behind where the A marker is to the left. The closest house to the marker was mine.  If you drag the screen to the right you can see the school I used to work with.  Further down the road  near my house you can see the garden.  Even further down that same road you get to the river. 
The cluster of 3 houses that are formig a rectangle with my house is Sanneh Kunda.  That was my compound.  Maybe that gives people a little better idea of what a compound is.  I know I've used that word with some of you and its not a concept we have in the US.  All the people who live in those 3 houses are related by blood or marriage.  They all eat together and share a lot of things- work, clothes, stuff, responsability for raising the kids, etc.  Its an extended famiy all technically living in different houses but in the same compound, and really I feel like people treat the whole compound like immediate family.
I miss it a little but I knew from the get-go that this was just going to be for two years.  And I'm really lucky and can be more objective about it than someone who is leaving the country because I can still see and talk to the people I miss.  Hopefully I'll get to go for a visit in the next month or so.  I'll blog an update on what I'm doing now- life in the city- soon.