The Internet is Actually Working So I'm Taking Advantage

Some of the men at the 40 Days Charity for my host father. There were so many people!

The cow from the 40 Days charity

Working in some rice

Sunset out my back door

Gibril, Ebrima, and Uspha looking at one of my magazines.  Magazines are a big hit here.

A classic example of no one ever behaving normally once i pull out a camera.  Uspha wanted to pose like a karate guy and Musa wanted to make sure he couldn't look cool in a picture.

Rainbow over Salliyaa

Ramadan's Over

Ramadan ended a day later than everyone expected because no one spotted the moon.  There wasn't really a big party because it rained pretty solid for the entire 2 days after Ramadan ended.  Everything is pretty much back to normal.
School is starting back again now.  It was supposed to start last Monday, but that day only one teacher who had come to inform the village he had been transferred and I showed up.  I returned on Wednesday to find a few teachers and a few students sweeping out classrooms and chatting. The next Monday, most of the teachers showed up and probably about half of the students.  We had a staff meeting, but there were still no classes.  By the time I get back, I'm thinking school should actually have started.  We'll see...
Other than that, since the last time I was in town, I've:
- waged war against the termites in my house
- accepted defeat in said battle
- learned how to carry a baby on my back
- taught the little boys in my compound how to thumb wrestle
- learned how to plant rice
- made some urine-based fertilizer
- had a baby boy born in my compound
- got some really awesome packages- Thank you!

Ramadan

The month of Ramadan is the Muslim month of fasting during which all muslims in the world who are physically able fast every day.  From sunrise to sunset, they drink no water and eat no food. From what people have told me, Ramadan is about showing devotion to Allah through fasting, purifying your body, and gaining compassion for those who do not have the basics of life through experiencing a little of their difficulty.  During this month, the people in this area, who are a pretty religious lot to start with, become extra religious.  They have longer than usual prayer services in the evenings, and i have seen more people sitting around studying the Koran.  They are also supposed to be extra careful about keeping all of the Koranic laws during this month. Everyone does all the work they normally would on the farm and around the house except without eating or drinking.  It's intense!
The fast is organized on the lunar calendar, so it has been going on since about the 10th of last month and has just a few days left.  I have fasted for 3 days so far, but I've never even tried to make it the whole 14 hours without water.  My general (well, all 3 times) routine is to drink water before I leave my house in the morning so I shouldn't have more than about 10 hours without water. Even with most of the village fasting, I'm still able to find food in the middle of the day. It's just a little more interesting than usual.   Since the children aren't fasting, they're the ones in charge of getting lunches together for themselves.  It's been a funny combination of leftovers from the night before and sauces made from leaves the kids can get from the bush themselves and sometimes even less preferred parts of the fish the girls had hidden away when they were cleaning the fish the night before.  And with the kids being in charge of the cooking, I don't get my own bowl so I eat with the little girls around their bowl. (Actually I don't know if I've ever addressed the way people eat in this blog. See * below)  With some of the women their daily question is not "Are you fasting?" it's "Are you a kid today?"  And most days I'm a kid. I'm not going to miss being asked if I'm fasting and/or told I should be fasting 50 times a day, and I'm glad that it'll be over just so everyone else can eat, but I have had a good Ramadan.
The Ramadan ends sometime in the middle of this week (depending on when you can see the moon- it is yet to be determined).  Everyone celebrates the end of Ramadan with big parties and good food.  Surprisingly enough, one of the most exciting foods to me and everyone else is soured milk with pounded millet in it called chakari.  When I came to The Gambia, having to eat soured milk was one thing that made me really nervous, but now I'm just sorry we hardly ever have it.  Supposedly after sunset on the last day of the fast, the party begins. There's food for all and lots of dance parties.  All of the young people go around to different villages in the area to attend all the parties, see all their friends, and celebrate the fact that after a month of experiencing hunger they can appreciate all they have.



*People here eat out of a communal food bowl. Each family generally has a series of food bowls divided by who eats together.  "Strangers" like me and any non-family visitors get their own small bowls.  The men and teenage boys all share one bowl (which is probably 2 feet in diameter- it's a big bowl).  The women and children share one bowl.  The grandmothers of one side of the family share one bowl and the one grandma on the other side of the family gets her own.  There are a few more bowls that are around for random parts of the family but you get the idea.  The bowl sits on the ground and all of the people eating out of the bowl crouch around the bowl and use their right hand (the clean hand) to eat.  Everyone has a pie shaped section of the food that is "theirs." Everything in "your" section is yours and if you don't want it you can put it in the middle of the bowl.  Anything in the middle is free game and you can feel free to take pieces of it an move it to your place. People who are nice might even throw something they know you like into your place so you can have it. When you eat you take a handful of food, ball it up and eat it out of your hand. Then you go for another. The older men often use spoons, and sometimes if I'm eating at someone's house or office they will give me a spoon because I'm the guest, but for most families only the fathers of the family would have spoons and everyone else would use their hands.

A Naming and a Funeral

The other day, I went to a naming ceremony in the city.  The naming ceremony was in honor of the new baby of one of my host brothers' wives.  The party consisted of lots of food and dancing.  It was really fun.  I got to see some of the family I hadn't seen in a while and talked to them.  I got to learn to cook some Gambian soup (ebe) I had never even tasted before.  It was good and being able to help cook was nice.  That gave me an excuse to hang out with some of the women and get away from the main party for a while.  I danced for a while, which is fun for everyone around me.  I'm quite a spectacle.  It's terrible!  I don't mind dancing for a while, and I actually like it if I have someone to dance with.  I just get uncomfortable having to freestyle solo dances in the middle of a circle of clapping women.  Thankfully I didn't spend too much of my day doing that!  Eventually I staked a place out on the floor, grabbed a couch cushion and fell asleep on the floor of the living room of the house. 
I woke up in the morning to a phone call from a man in the village up from mine saying that my host father had died a few hours earlier.  I spent the next several hours trying to figure out if people at the house I was at know about it or not.  After a couple of stressful hours, I finally had decided that a certain group of women knew what was going on.  I packed up my stuff and set out walking with them.  We walked at least 3 miles to get to this road where we waited for a little while as more of the family trickled up.  Then a big vehicle came and we all rode back to my village, stopping along the way to gather people from a few different villages.  (The ride back to my vill was one of the most exciting times so far in my service- honestly one of the most exciting things in my ervice.  I was having to try to look more at least a little somber.) We got to Salliyaa and everyone piled out of the vehicle.  There were SO many people at my compound.  I went around and greeted people, etc. It was great to see a lot of them.  A lot of people had some into town to see my host father in the last couple of months while he was sick, so I had met most of the people in for the funeral.  Eventually I got to shower and put on a complet (2 piece Gambian dressy outfit- see my swear-in pictures).  By the time I got out, the funeral had already started.  I actually have no idea what happened most of the time.  It was in Arabic and Mandinka and it was an Islamic ceremony.  There was a lot of wailing from the women and then the men carried the body to the edge of town for the burial.  After that, everything was pretty much over.  Since then, there have been lots of people and lots of cooking at my house.  I'm hoping there will still be some of my favorite family visitors at the house when I get back tomorrow, but maybe not as many people as were there when I left.  There were probably 100 people in my compound when I woke up yesterday morning.  That's a little overwhelming.    It'll be interesting adjusting to the new family structure and seeing what changes now. 

Sally, Sute and the Scorpion

Once upon a time, right after the rains in The Gambia had begun....
Dinner had just gotten done cooking and I came into my house with my 2 bowls.  The rice didn't have a red sauce, so I was going to eat with my hand. I walked to my back door, which latches at the top and in the middle. I reached up to undo the top latch without looking first.  I glaced up to find a 6" scorpion inches from my hand.  I leapt across the house and crouched in my plastic lawn chair keeping an eye on the scorpion and trying to formulate a plan.  I had never seen a scorpion before this point and had never seen one killed or shooed out of a house, so I had no idea what to do.  During my long staring session with the scorpion, Dad called, so he got to experience some of this excitement firsthand.  At some point during the call, the scorpion dropped from the wall down to the floor.  That thing was so scary looking.  After the phonecall was over, I was ready to take care of the situation, so I went out to find someone to help me.  I decided my host brother Sute was the perfect candidate.  He speaks enough english that I thought I could freak out a little and speak english about what I needed and this would still get taken care of. 
I went into Sute's room and told him I had a scorpion in my house and I didn't know what to do.  He asked me what color it was. 
"Black"
"Ooh- those are dangerous"
"Do scorpions come in other colors? What colors are the most dangerous?"
"All of them are black" (Come to find out later, there are white ones that are even worse than the kind I had in my house)
Sute came into my house and grabbed my broom and held the scorpion down.  He cut off the tail with his shoe and kind of smushed the scorpion.  The scorpion grabbed the broom and then Sute launched the scorpion over my bathroom fence.  Sute is such a hero!
I thought my ordeal was over here.  I finally ate my dinner, hung out with the family for a minute and went to bed.  In the morning I got up, walked out and took my bowl out to my family.  On the way I noticed that someone had hung the scorpion on the clothesline.  Yikes! I handed my bowl to one of my mothers, turned around and ran smack into the scorpion with my face.  That was not even the only time that day that this happened.  Ugh!  Thankfully me running into it repeatedly prompted it to be taken down and thrown out of the compound.
Thankfully that has been my only scorpion encounter thus far and now I feel equipped to handle an encounter if one does happen in the future.  Big thanks to Sute- he's such a hero.

This is the scorpion hanging on the clothesline in the morning.  If you look closely, you can even see that he's hairy!  He used to have a tail too.

Welcome to the Rainy Season

The rainy season has finally come to The Gambia.  It's been raining every 3-5 days since the rains started the first week of june. It has been so exciting to have rain! There hadn't been even a drop of rain here since November, so I was so glad to see some RAIN.  I don't know when I'll get tired of it but I think it'll be a while. 
The rain changes everything.  The air is humid now all of the time, so I'm sweating all of the time.  The whole country is getting green.  There's grass coming up everywhere.  The area around my village is starting to look like a tropical rainforest, except for the farms, which are getting planted right now.  There are also a ton of new bugs coming out of hiding.  So far, most of the rains have come at night.  The rain is so loud on my metal roof!  When it rains during the day, everything shuts down. The kids don't go to school and most people just go back to bed.  The first day that it rained during the morning, I was supposed to go to the school and I didn't know that no one leaves the house, so I headed to the school.  Since I was going, my host father decided to make two of the boys go too.  The boys and I sloshed our way across the rice field between the house and the school.  One of them even fell in and got pretty muddy.  When we got to the school, there were a few kids, one teacher, and a lot of goats there.  Needless to say, nothing got accomplished that day. I just hung out with some of the little girls. It was fun, but next time I'll sleep in!

some of the green

Gelly Rides

The gelly is the Gambian bush taxi.  It's the way to get around the country. I'll just go through what it takes to get from my place to the city.  So first I walk to the main road.  I'm pretty lucky to live less than 1k away from the south bank highway so this leg of the trip isn't bad at all.  I generally take a circuitous route to the road that takes me through the other main compound in Salliyaa just so no one can say they didn't know I was leaving.  Once I get to the road, it's a waiting game.  I sit by the road until a gelly with an empty seat comes by, which could be 10 minutes or 2 hours.  It just depends on luck. When you see a gelly coming down the road headed the direction you want to go, you stick your arm out signaling you want a ride. If the gelly is full the driver will honk at you or flash his lights or just wave to let you know the car is full.  When your time comes, the gelly pulls off the road so you can get in. So you get in this van-sized vehicle that has been outfitted with benches so it can accomodate twice what a normal van would.  Then you set off down the south bank highway.  Depending a little on the health of your gelly, it's pretty much like riding a wooden roller coaster for a couple of hours. Somewhere along the way, the apprentice driver (apparente) asks you for your money, which amounts to about $2 for my first leg of the trip and about 50 cents for the next 2 legs of the trip combined.  Apparantes are some of the most interesting people in The Gambia.  They are mostly teenage boys who spend their days opening and closing the doors of the gelly, jumping into the gelly while it is moving, putting whatever people want to transport onto the top of the gelly (this varies from luggage to livestock to furniture), collecting money, passing people babies in and out of the gelly, arguing with people over what the pass cost should be, "learning people skills required for being a driver" and making rediculous fashion choices.  My first gelly stops in Brikama at a major carpark.  I get out and negotiate the acre of gellys everywhere. There have got to be I dunno... more than 100 gellys there at a time all coming and going.  There I have to get another gelly headed to a place where I get a taxi that will drop me at either the office or a short walk from the house. Overall in about 3-4 hours I can from my place to the office or house.  Always an adventure!