Once Upon a Ramadan Afternoon

One day during Ramadan, I went with some of the girls in my compound to collect leaves for the dinner sauce.  Turns out, they had more plans than just collecting some leaves.  This was one of the most fun afternoons I've had in Salliyaa.

Fanta posing where the journey all began

Can you find the girls hiding in this picture?  Siabatou and Nyima hid from us in the shoulder-high weeds, but eventually we tracked them down.

Here's the crew-  (L-R) Nyima, Fanta, Sibo and Siabatou in the back

Trekking through the bush

Sibo and our bowl ready for harvesting

A big termite mound.  This thing is as tall as me and much wider.

Sibo and Fanta fighting over the bowl (and the camera shot) at the quarry.



Nyima and Fanta swimming in puddles at the quarry.  When we got to the quarry, the girls stripped down and went nuts- swimming and running around.

Here they've switched puddles.  You can see the road right behind them.  I scared them a couple of times yelling that a car was coming.

By this point, we'd collected enough leaves for the sauce for dinner and the girls found some bush vegetable that looks like a green grape but tastes like okra and started collecting that.

On the way home with our harvest.  There was some song and dance going on in this picture.

The girls decided that they would try and hide the bush vegetabe so they wouldn't have to share any of it and could cook all of it for lunch the next day (Remember how the girls cooked for just the kids for lunch during Ramadan?) and it was decided that under Nyima's shirt was the most inconspicuous place.

Bike Trek

A couple of weeks ago I went to a few villages in my area to teach how to make mosquito repellant out of local materials.  All it takes is soap, oil and some specific leaves from around the area to make a batch of this "neem cream."  Here, getting bitten by mosquitoes is not only uncomfortable- it's a health issue because malaria is spread through mosquito bites.  So for these dual reasons, people are enthusiastic to learn about "tule ay bawolop" as we call it in Salliyaa.  I went by bike and was escorted by a man from a village near mine who worked basically as my assistant for the trek.  He set up all the engagements and showed me how to get to the villages he had talked to.  This was originally going to be a one-village, one-day trek, but Ablie got enthusiastic on the scheduling so it expanded to a 2-day, three-village trek.

This is perhaps the nicest road in the country.  This is an offshoot of the Gambia's south bank highway, and all the villages I went to are off of this road.......

Some of them way off the nice road.  Here we are wading through a flooded rice field with our bikes to get to waht is supposed to be our first village.

Still on the way...

 

Things don't always go as planned in the first village.  It was funny- this village that had been our original target bailed on our meetings twice!  This is a picture of the second day when we have resorted to searching for women in their rice fields asking why they aren't showing up for the meeting they scheduled.  This is my frustrated face and Ablie's 'what is she doing now? I am trying to talk' face.

 

This village was the first where I actually got to do the demonstration.  The location was really picturesque, but the people didn't speak any jola so I was really glad Ablie was there to translate into Woloof.

 

Here I am with some of the participants.  The girls on my right are shaving up bars of soap to add to the recepie.  The people from this village were so nice and really came out for the demonstration.  I really wish i could understand them so I could do work there more often. 

 

Finishing up the mixing and getting ready to distribute. A man from this village actually came to Salliyaa to thank us the next day for teaching this in his village.  He told us how well it worked and how excited the whole village was about knowing how to make neem cream.  Its great to hear that something made of things everyone can get locally for a reasonable price is actually working!  Hopefully when I go around on a follow-up visit everyone will have made a new batch when they ran out.  I'll keep my fingers crossed!

Wuli bay jaw kamojak- We're going to fetch water

The pump in my village is out of commission for the time being so everyone is going to the wells in the garden to fetch water for drinking.  (Except for me. I'm taking the safer route and going to the pump in the next village, which really isn't as far as that makes it sound.)  I followed along with my camera on a water run.

Sibo and me on the way

Sona (with Joma on her back), Binta, and Seedy in the back with a bucket on his head

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.