Heelllooo everyone! Let me just say how much it warms my little homesick heart to read everybody's posts... i have just returned today to the Kombo (read "city") area, after being up country (read up river, out in the sticks, in my training village) for the past... how long have i been here? 2 months nearly. besides one short-lived moment on the internet on my site visit field trip a few weeks ago, this is my first time on the net! And I've gotten 2 letters since being here (slow mail I'm sure, not the lack of motivated letter-writers among my freinds and fam), so I'm all giddy sitting here soaking up the cyber love... skipping lunch now.

How is the beautiful fall across the sea? How was thanksgiving? We had a good time here, we all met up together at Tendaba, our rented rendevous spot for PC training, and spent the day cooking in their kitchen. The men of the group, shirtless with JulBrews in hand, proceded to deep fry a turkey (in pieces) over an open fire... it was so delicious (says the reformed vegetarian). Trust me though, I'm ready to go veg again... I saw a sheep die for a naming ceremony in my village and it made me cry. The cheaper protein of dried fish is the food bowl staple though, luckily for the animal rights girl in me. I baked an apple pie on thanksgiving that was not half bad by normal standards and amazingly delectable by the fruitless Gambian standards.

but! well, the woolof is coming to me, not smoothly, not easily but not slowly with difficulty but rather in disjointed spurts, in hacked up coughs and small hiccups of understanding... but it is coming. I'd say I'm about where my Spanish was in Antigua, or a little better! woolof is a fierce language, and it is not so much spoken as it is spit or barked by it's fierce but lovely speakers. woolofs ARE fierce, the opposite of self-concious, but completely refined and graceful. I can't quit staring and marveling at them, even after 2 months. I have just spent 4 days in ker katim, which is to be my home for the next two years, after spending the past two months in sare samba, my training village. Ker Katim is tiny, my father is Mustafa (like the lion in the lion king, yep) and he is a baker of fresh bread, a watermelon grower, a hunter of phesants (sp? NOT peasants) and a bidik owner (bidik- small store). He has two wives and lots of cool kids running around. His family compound is a huge maze of cement or mud brick buildings with tin roofings, all connected by alleys. My house is about 30 yards away off the end of the village... I can see all the goings-on of the village from my fenced in front yard, but they think i'm very brave to live "far away" and "alone!" Ah but my one room hut is cool and peaceful, surrounded by eucalyptus trees and soon enough... gardens. I have a dog, Lady, who was adopted by a former PCV and now just likes white people. I fed her my leftover rice and sealed the deal. She only has one eye... the other was taken by gun shot when she ate a baby goat. I call her Mam Bena Bot, which means One-Eyed Mama, which she seems cool with.

The Gambia is, if you didn't know, very Muslim. Which amounts to men learning so Arabic and everyone dressing in beautiful long flowy things. And there's praying, yes, sometimes... definitely on holidays. There are mosques which have early and late call to prayers blasted out over thier loud speakers, but we in ker katim do not have the privelage of a 5 o'clock Koranic wake-up-call (dang). We don't have a mosque but we do have a smaller prayer building. Kevin, spears seem to be lacking around here, and unless I can steal one from the national museum, a bobble-head might have to work.. I have heard tell of Mosque-shaped alarm clocks that will wake you up with one of eleven call to prayers! If I find one, it's yours.

To Lucas, The Gambia is nothing like those speacials on TV... though I appreciate the romanticized dream of my being surrounded by adoring young 'uns. It's just poverty... and poverty is not unhappy, at least not in the way that those shows make you think. I can't really explain it, but everyone's fairly content... fairly healthy, fairly well fed. But like the rest of the world though, their environmental situation is getting worse, water tables are dropping, the sahara is coming, their crops are draining their fields of nutrients... their president is a benevolent dictator not a democratic anything... their one exported cash crop, peanuts, is bringing in less and less money and they need new cash crops. They have no luxuries, at all, they have little opportunity to learn new things, to travel, to expand thier minds- which should be a human right. Anyway, so there's plenty to do but nothing horribly urgent. Or it IS urgent, but we can't directly see the harm that we're doing in putting off change. Which is the case for all the world yes? Anyway, where they lack luxury, they also lack stress, depression, competition, anxiety, lonliness and other woes of the first world. Hm.


Well guys, that's all for now. I would love to hear more from everyone, I miss you all so much. I'll be around all week, then we swear in on the 8th and it's back to Ker Katim for good. I will be going back with a cell phone tho! Smooches to all!

-Steph/ Yassin