In the direction of my daydreams

2009-04-22T10:10:00.000-07:00

I am tenatively going to continue this blog... For myself mostly, as a record, and of course for all the other thousands of regular readers. I just took a look at it for the first time in a long time and I just it- I like the way it looks, my words all layed out on top of pretty lime green background! And I like the way it reads, quick and casual, capturing my thoughts and experiences in a way that fading memories are proving to be inadequate. Now, five months after being back, I still miss my life in The Gambia in a way that springs tears to my eyes everytime! But, the memory is vague and my Woolof is fading and increasingly, what I miss is justan impression of a peaceful life... long ago in a galaxy far far away... a mud hut at night surrounded by giggling kids...

Anyway, I do miss it madly and am trying set myself up to go back, inshallah (God willing). I just got accepted to NAU's (in Flagstaff, AZ) forestry and natural resource management program, studying international forestry under a very cool professor. The stars seem to be lining up a bit for me, after months of anxious limbo. The professor that will be my advisor, Dr. Mike Wagner, does research in Ghana and has established a sustainable forestry center there in partnership with a university there. AND, he's currently seeking funding for re-forestation projects spanning all the way up through the Gambia into northern Senegal. When he told me that in an office meeting, I almost shouted at him "REALLY??? That's PERFEFCT!"

Other pluses, Karissa my fellow RPCV Gambia is moving to Flagstaff and starting the same program, and living with me!!! I need a hiking buddy so bad and I can't wait for her move. Meanwhile, I'm waiting tables, enjoying this extended vacation, meeting people, trying my hand at high altitude gardening and enjoying the first days of spring! I tried to go shorts shopping the other day, feeling so excited by the prospect of wearing short shorts and not being totally radical (in the Gambia, ankle-length is the style of the season and that's a trend that ain't goin away). Not having worn anything shorter than mid-calf in three years, I cautiously tried some on in the dressing room... and whoa, I gasped at how much skin was showing down there. I opted for below the knee "shorts" and got outta there, promising myself that I'd work into it. My whole re-adjustment experience has been like that short shorts experience, too much too fast. My desire to hold on to the theme of the past two years still dominates; "slowly slowly, you catch the baby monkey in the bush"- the slow, the peaceful, the simple things... too bad they don't really have much place in this busy busy world. So, I hold onto lessons from the past and jump into the new, which has a beauty and an energy all of its own!

2009-02-11T11:56:00.000-08:00

I have not posted on here in forever! It is my New Years Resolution though to write more, so I shall have to start. Meanwhile... I got a message from The Fresh Air fund with a great summer job opportunity for a great cause in NYC. Anybody interested? Check it out here:

http://freshairfundcounselors.smnr.us/

Everybody take care!

-Steph

2008-07-03T04:46:00.000-07:00

Rainy season, 5 mos left here

All is well here, the rains have come in full, so Im trying to implement the last leg of the tree planting project which is outplanting... trying to get people organized and motivated to come get free trees and free tree guards (very valuable here, woven small fences that protect trees from the starving goats and cows that ravage vegetation in the dry season) and then to outplant them around their fields as "border planting" to benefit their soil, give them firewood, act as a wind break... It's hard because everyone is so busy on their own farms but slowly slowly, they are coming. Everything is so beautiful compared to the long dry season, when the sky was grey with dust blown down from the sahara constantly. Now there are clouds and sunsets and pure blue sky in between, ah! Also, lots of snakes too which i'm learning to love, or well, deal with. I have a small garden trying sweet melons (like cantelope) and okra, and I inter-planted squash with my family's corn. The food crisis is really hitting here, and everyone is scrambling to grow as much food as they can... cash crops are still important but now people are growing rice too, a new varitey called NERICA (New rice for africa, however that spells NERICA...) which supposedly can grow without being immersed in water. It's having mixed success in the gambia, but people are trying it more and more. Many people are not having enough to eat and I get increasignly asked to loan money or pay for small things, which... ug...I try not to do, but it can be so heart breaking. One of my friends in village, a women with 5 boys, pulled me aside the other day to ask for a loan because she had nothing to cook and no money. Typical of the women here, she's great, beautiful, proud, always laughing and smiling...I know it was hard for her to ask for money, I could hear desperation in her voice behind the pride... I've been working with her to do many things in her garden and fields to increase harvest and earn money, so I gave her a small loan (12 bucks). She took the money and started to cry, and then I did... oh life! Not always fair. But we are doing what we can to encourage composting, green manure and intercropping to help out the tired soil and I'm even starting to mention family planning and the possibility of (gasp!) not having 9 children. It's meeting mixed reactions, as is our idea to fertilize with human pee! funny stuff.

One thing I'm starting to realize is that 40 years ago, before development came, the gambia was much better off. No one was hungy, the population was small, the forests were big so they had 100% self-sustainablity- millet and "bush meat" was their diet. Now, they all grow cash crops (cashews, peannuts, seasame) in order to buy their food (oil, rice, sugar) which is somewhat subsidized for them. Artifically cheap rice allowed their population to boom, now there is not enough land to grow enouch millet to feed themselves and there is no more forest to hunt for meat in. Now rice is going up... and I'm realizing how ridiculous it is to feed the Gambia with rice imported from half a world away when they were perfectly fine feeding themselves. "Development" is only money-based, economics based, and just tries to pull developing countries into the world of import/export, and therefore dependency on fossil fuels. It's all about moeny- anytime money changes hands in the gambia, that's a good thing for the country, no matter if it destroys the environment, social and cultural structures. One of the first things I realized in the Gambia was that I wanted to be a counter-develpoment worker, and I'm sticking to that (we all are as PCVs), just daily trying to point out the values of traditional culture, food, way of life... trying to beef up their cultural self-esteem.

That's the news here, we are keeping on keepin on!

2008-05-15T05:05:00.000-07:00

2008-05-15T03:55:00.000-07:00

2008-04-03T14:56:00.000-07:00

Hey guys... *ahem* it's been ahwile, I know... sorry bout that. But I'm back! In woolof they say "there was a river since i've seen you"- gej na la gis! And it's this instant guilt trip- because it's one of the pillars of society here to check in with everyone you know about every other day, let em know where the home people are(they are there only, with peace obly), where the kids are(there only, thanks be to God), and how your afternoon is (here only, with only peace, praising God, thanks be to God). There are many volunteers, and I'm gonna say particularly the guys, who get so amazingly good at these back-and-forth greeting rituals, going at acutioneer-speed, asking about the children and the health and praising Gods even when I'm pretty sure they're self-proclaimed athesists... ah but it's just impressive. I usually just rattle off a string of lazy "peace only"s.

So anyway, I just got back from Guinea! Guinea Konakary, not Guinea Bissau, since there's two of them, which I didn't know until I got here. There were seven us, leaving from the very eastern town of Basse, at around midnight. We're taking a European version of the Subaru, and we rent out the last 3 spots so that we don't have to Gambi-pack like sardines for what is to be this 28-hr-ride (granted, many hours spent outside the car, for a variety of fun reasons). They go through the elaborate ritual of shuffling our bags around on top, strapping em down with miles of rope, testing this and that, men everywhere with flashlights... and finally the driver gives us the sign and we pile into our wagon- thinking the red and silver sparkly shag covering the seats is nothing but a good omen. WRONG! There's no head lights, and even though the driver is sure that he can make it down the wretched road without them, we demand a new car. When we finally do take off again, with headlights, we are all shocked at just. how. wretched. the road is... our driver is barreling in-between, and through, the swimming pool-sized pot holes so fast though that we just gape in admiration... and wonder if he is escapeing the police? Anyway, we barrel through Gambia, then Senegal, and then sometime in the wee hours of the morning we camp on the border between Senegal and Guniea, in between huge 18-wheelers. In the morning we're off again... the car breaks, twice, which surprises us not at all considering Omar-the-driver and his mad man rally-car-driver ways. The shocks on our old car suffered, and so now we're sitting in a small Guinean village not at all stoned from the joints Omar smokes, eating mangos and staring back at the locals while we wait for... get this... the town welder to FORGE a new piece for the poor shock. OK. Eventually we do get there, into Pita, around 3 AM. Our ride was bumpy and sleepless but pretty fun, considering all the mangos (not yet ripe in the Gambia) and the ipod's bumpin through my little travel speakers. We stay the night in this semi-city at a tourist hotel for less than 4 dollars and the next morning we are OFF! to Dookie (that's right), a tiny village where a tiny man with a big nose, heart, personality, and penchant for abbreciations, meets us. "Hello!Hello Bonjour! I just got back with these two SG's (super girls!) from a K.A.H (kick ass hike)!!" He says. Everything he says comes with abbreviations and exclamation marks. The two SG's are cool girls working in Guinea, one from America and one from France, but they leave the next day and the week is ours to be led around by the man, Hassan Bah. He gives us bananas, rice with leaf sauce and palm oil, eucalyputs tea or nescafe with local honey... and more bananas, many more. He gives us 3 round beautiful Guinean-style huts with grass roofs, and he gives us hiking tours of his paradaise with a whole lotta love. Turns out a Peace Corps volunteer helped Hassan get this little tourist lodge together back in the 90's and it's been going well ever since... his guest book shows hundreds of PCV's and European tourists who have discovered this sweet getaway. The seven of us have a booze-free (Ok, well. the 2 boxes of wine that Karissa brought don't last long) and waterfall-soaked 4 days in the canyons and forests of the Fouta D'Jalan (that's the big raised plateau that we're on, the one that broke Omar's car to climb up). It's the dry season, the very end of the dry season, but still the place is lush. We, coming from the parched and scorched Gambia, are baffled and we commence Gambia-bashing and Guniea-PCV-envying from the minute we arrive. There are coffee trees, cola nut trees, banana trees, just TREES! And waterfalls, seemingly around every bend. There are baboons, and green mambas, and bush pigs (like wart hogs), and we are told there are deer and mountain cats... We're all led up and down this plateau by Hassan, often just bushwhacking (I taught him that word one morning as I was sliding and stumbling over his choice of "trail"). And we're trailed by Ebrima (arabic for Abraham), Hassan's super-cool aprentis. Of the 7 of us, Cam and Alex are the only ones who speak Fula, the primary language in Guinea. I speak Woolof and Karissa, Rob and Beth speak Mandika, the least popular language here. Ebrima speaks Pular and Woolof, and French, of course, of which very few of us speak very little. Ebrima is sweet tho, he just hangs back as we hike and we chat with him in woolof and fula and when we say something true or good he says "Thank YOU!." His other English word he says, when we get to a sketchy part of the non-trail, is "TRY!." In those difficult moments climbing a boulder or downed log, Hassan favors "PRESS!" PRESS and TRY and EASY EASY! All very good advice, and good as a combo. As we laugh and joke around in English, we hear Ebrima giggling along too, just from the contagiousness of laughing cuz he's just a good dude like that. He's fun, and he takes us to meet his mom and dad one day on the way back from a hike, and brings us 7 avacados on our last day. Yay for cool people, really. Hassan's wife is another one of those, she cooks amazingly and does our laundry. His brother is another, he offers to go to the Wed. market and set up a car for us all the way back to the Gambia. His kids too, a handful of 5 year olds trying so hard to stay out of the guests' way but unable to resist greeting us 100 times a day in French and Fula. At Hassan's promting, we all take billions of pictures at this overlook or atop that random arch-shaped rock, and we will post them all on facebook for you who want to see. At night we hang out, conversing and debating, predicting each other's life paths and the future of our world... One night we camp out on flat rocks overlooking a great canyon. Hassan leads us out there, sits down and does not roll a joint of not marijuana and not out of brown paper bag paper. He thanks us and walks away "to sit still for 20 minutes before HBH (heading back home)" We thank him for the amazing spot and sit chatting about how the moon orbits the sun and how exactly does it pull on the tides again? and other important things. We sleep out on sleeping bags and I get up early the next morning morning and find a secluded perch on a flat grey rock... ahh... it's overlooking green green forests and I can hear a rushing waterfall below... oh man.

Friday morning we leave in our pre-arranged car, which takes us to Labe. Here, Rob, Alex, and Beth leave me, Cam and Karissa cuz they're Peace Corps vacation days have run out. But first we wander around the maze of a market and buy stuff, like Guinean rocks. I ask the lady what they're for and she responds by picking up a large chunk of slate and biting into like its a bar of dark chocolate. Sold! I buy three little bags of rocks for my pregnant village friends to eat(it's the Guinean calcium vitamin!). The 4 of us get off ok, and it's sad to see them go, and then there are 3 and we find a little hotel to stay in and eat really good pizza. The next morning, the 3 of us head to a bordertown, Maliville, and precede to HIKE to Senegal! That's right, we hike! We have no guide book, but Cam remembers an ex-Gambian PCV telling him this was not only a possible border crossing, but also way faster than in a car, and pretty. Cam thinks he can promise me and Karissa that's it's all down hill, and Guineans enthusiastically confirm these ideas.... so ok, we say. A man in Mali-ville leads us to a little shop where some thin women with big bags are sort of fluttering around, preparing for the same trek. They are porters, paid to trek the 21 miles down this plateu (3500 ft down, by cam-estimate) carrying heavy stuff on their heads and backs and everyone wants us to wait for them and go with them but we are impatient so we go ahead... we camp that night after just two hours of the hike and the next day we catch up with them. They are wisely sitting out the hot part of the day (it's around 105- 110 F)and smiling at us as we gulp down the water at this kind compound. We move on (we win by the way, beating those little women down the mountain, but only cuz we're stupid whities willing to dehydrate ourselves and hike in the heat of the day). All in all, its a fun hike and we end up in Senegal, with dark colored pee but a nice memory of Guinea. Now we go see our friend Sara Lee, an ex-Gambian PCV who extended for a year to Senegal. She lives in a big town now, with electricity and 4 kinds of beer and 2 other volunteers and everyone speaks French... compared to her old village just a 15 k from mine, where there was no water much less electricity. She's my hero... Here Cam departs (another one fallen to finished PC vacation days) and Karissa and I hang out, eating lots of amazing food (wart hog sandwiches anyone?), watching grey's anatomy (could that show be any better? i cry twice per episode, maybe just because I miss it), drinking cold water and sleeping with a fan. Finally we leave Senegal to go home, with Sara too, whose going back to her old Gambian village for a wedding ceremony. We travel all day, packed into the back of a covered pick up truck. The three of us white girls argue with the 3 Sengalese women as to whose big butts are taking up more of the really uncomfortable bench. We see so many baboons, and some wart hogs, sorry bout the sandwiches... 3 kilometers from our Gambian stop, our car breaks for good and we allhave to walk. We get swooped up by a Gambian driver/white knight and his big white van... and finally we are home.

Good vacation. At the end, we have a list of what the Gambia IS good at, and what it DOES have, compared to the snazzy, developed countries of Guinea and Senegal. We can better bean sandwiches. We have more mahoghanys. We have cuter grade 1-6 school uniforms. We have a better APCD (our boss). More baobob trees, more donkeys, more desert, more little kids screaming Tou-BAAAWWWWBBB!!!" Their little kids just politely call us Portuguese, and don't even demand that we give them candy or our bikes. And their young men don't hiss at us like in the Gambia. And the Gambia only packs 12 people into a 7-seater subaru, Guinea puts 14 and two on the roof. Pshaw. Although, when I call her Sengalese posting "Posh Corps" not "Peace Corps" Sara Lee snorts "Here?" She says, looking around, past the street lights to the barefoot begging boys and the way-too-thin young men sitting around because they have no work.. "OK. Not posh. But still..."

The best news? I still have 15 vacation days left!!

2007-12-24T03:10:00.000-08:00

Girls soccer day, grades 7 and 8

2007-12-24T02:55:00.001-08:00

Abli, just a rotund little ball of joy! Favorite kid ever.

2007-12-23T03:56:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas everyone- hope all is peaceful over there!

Well, here we just had the Muslim Big Holiday of Tobaski, where they sacrifice a ram and just cook the hell out of the poor thing- they cook every. single. part and then, with the ram testicles, which are schockingly large, they make purses out of them! In the morning, the old people and most males go under a big tree and pray, and then the imam (spiritual leader) goes around and kills the rams of those who were able to get one. The first goat meal is "sauce"- a bowl full of fried potatos, onion, other tubors, oil, and hacked up ram, including heart, lougs, stomach and plenty of splintered bone so that the marrow doesn't go to waste. Then they tear up bread and sop up the goo... it was glutinous and so good. Then they roast the hoofs and legs, head, ect and throw it all in a cauldron with water to stew... the deliciousness that results is served on top of cere (the millet) or rice for the next 6, maybe 7 meals in a row. For me, I can grab a Fast Ali's extra burger every now and then... but for them, it's the only meat they'll get all year so you see why they make the most of it. Last year, Tobaski fell on my second day in village. I didn't eat with the family but got a bowl of my own... I remember opening the bowl, looking and the "meat" parts and thinking it looked like a diagram of a cell (golgi apparatus here, endoplasmic reticulum there...). But this year when my host mom poked a crinkly piece of what could have been an aorta to my section of the food bowl I just said Bisimilah and chowed down... heh heh are you guys grossed out?

In the afternoon of Tobaski and the day after, everyone dresses up in their new clothes (the only ones they get all year usually) and goes from door to door around the village with their age mates in a group, asking for "Salibo!" That means the compound should give them a dalasi or 50 bututs, or some coos or peanuts that they can sell to the bitik... and then in return, the group prays for them and everyone asks each other to forgive them and to meet the new year in peace (ah-meen!). Then at night, my host brother the bitik owner (bitik- small store selling the basics) and the other twenty-somethings bring out the music and attaya and they have a little dance party... all night, for 2 nights in a row! Everyone really goes all out, esp. the young girls during Tobaski, getting elaborate outfits sown with bright colored sequinced-splashed frilly fabrics, and matching gaudy earrings and necklaces, Barbie-esque shiny shoes and hair decorations... the hair braiding gets extremely elaborate with different colored fake hair woven in (blonde, red) and the tighest little braids covering their heads in rows and swirls. Henna too, on the feet and one hand is a must. I "asobe"ed (dressed alike) with all the women in my compound, all of us wearing the same style outfit in different day-glo colors. Mine was Get your Groove on Green, and pictures are on their way! Aw, it was so much fun. And I have ear plugs so I got some sleep too.

So, now we are making the most of a warm Christmas here, with a baby banana tree for a Christmas tree and the beach instead of sledding... Merry Christmas from Africa!

2007-11-25T05:33:00.001-08:00

This is my big tree planting project for next year- it got accepted as a Peace Corps Partnership so it's now just waiting for funding! Please go check it out guys, the link is below!

Hello friends and family! Salam malekum, peace to you

As a agriculture/forestry Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia, West Africa, I'm excited to announce the "Trees for Fuel" reforestation pilot project! This is a tree planting project between myeself, a few other Peace Corps Volunteers and even some Gambian Department of Forestry counterparts, to be carried out in several villages in my district. It is registered now as a Peace Corps Partnerships project, which means everyone can go to the link and glance at the proposal and, if you want, contribute ANY amount right then and there. If you have nothing extra to contribute right now, or course, no worries. But please, if you know others with charitable tendencies or interests in rescuing this planet's forests, please pass this link on.

https://www.peacecorps.gov/resources/donors/contribute/projdetail.cfm?projdesc=635-042®ion=africa

This is why I'm so excited about this project:
Driving a few hundred kilometers through northern Senegal to the airport a few weeks ago I saw the shocking picture of desertification in full for the first time. The parkland of The Gambia, sparse but still treed, unfolded mile by mile into a devastated washed-out waste land. It's not fair to call it a desert, conjuring up pictures of lizards and cactus, red sand dunes and canyons, wolves howling at the moon from atop mesas. This was a man-made expanse, stripped of its layers of life down to a nutrient-void greyness, dotted only occasionally with an angry little shrub inevidably snagging some shred of plastic trash. Yikes. Senegal has electricity; power lined cut through the desert scene in all directions. Yes they are "developing," but at what cost?

The Gambia in in trouble, but it's not a desert yet. And the institutions are in place to inform people that desertification is a real scenario, that planting trees will keep their wells wet and the rainy season long. The time is right to make it "cool" to plant you own trees for firewood- the concept of planting mangoes and cashews caught on beautifully and it's just a small hop to making fuel wood tree propagation a practice.

So- thanks for listening! Pass on the link to all who might be interested and help us if you can. Feel free to email me with any questions. I wish you all well!

2007-11-25T05:05:00.000-08:00

Hey guys! It's been too long since I blogged. Life can be really busy in a slow-moving way. These past few months, it seems like I've been in Kombo so much for this and that... before my Morocco vacation to get all that in order, and then I was gone to Morocco for 2 weeks, and then now this past weekend has been the Great All Volunteer meeting! It's so wonderful to come down and just see EVERYONE, all hundred of us, just relaxing, indulging and partying. For all the tough moments, all the dirty days and un-luxurious duties of site, Life really rewards 2-fold... listen to this: We all came in on Wed night and hit a karioke bar in the touristy part of town... goooood stuff! Who knew we were so talented? Our rendentition of Ace of Bases's All That She Wants was probably phenonmenal. My sister reminded me of how we found the tape and memorized all the words in 5th grade... Then Thursday morning, Rodney, our env. sector director, let us storm his house to cook for our big Thanksgiving dinner. He provided 3 cases of beer for us, music, his entire kitchen, his BBQs, playstation and fresh basil from his garden so we could bake 20 (yep.) pumpkin pies and roast 260(that's right.) quarters of chicken... there's not much better than cooking out with friends with good music and good beer (well... it was beer anyway!). That night we all got prettied up and headed over to the ambassador's mansion with our gross quantities of chicken and pie and preceded to stuff ourselves with so much good food. The new agriculture/forestry volunteers that just recently got into country were there too and we got to hang out with them a little. We all swam in the moonlight in the ambassador's pool, with the palm trees and ocean as a backdrop. The next morning we attended a formal "40 year anniversary of PC The Gambia" ceremony in a big room with lots of important people. We had to one by one stand up and tell them what we were up to in our villages... the president's band played some tunes for us, and the ceremony was over before it became painfully boring. More free good food followed. After some afternoon beach time, Life granted us yet another ridiculously wonderful boon... JelBrew, the one brewery in the country, threw us another free beer party! That means we all go to the brewery and hang out on their patio all night while a few cool employees feed us beer after beer from the two big fridges... 30 cases in all!! Goodness. This was our second, even better than the last- the full moon was shining down as we busted moves to our ipods and there was a movement amongst the guys to take off their shirts and sprawl around on the Peace Corps Land Rover to pose for a calender we're making... at least that's what we told them it was for...
Anyway! Much to be thankful for. I miss my family and home so much this time of year, but good friends here make is all A OK. The next morning we has our All Volunteer meeting, which was pretty nice... lots of annoucements, introductions to new NGO's and partners, updates on health stuff, ect. Now all is over and we're all heading our separate ways, until the nect JelBrew party, which, rumor has it, is going to feature a new beer- a mead actually, made with Gambian honey!

So life has been luxurious. I just got back from Morocco too, which I won't go into, but it was amazing! Figs, oases, being cold, and a rented car named Fatima were the highlights. (:

In Jamagen, all is well... things are gearing up in village for a great second year, inshallah. Village life is so peaceful, finally I feel just completely at home there. Our two chickens started laying eggs! Our compound got a puppy! I'm tutoring my host brother, just started a little garden with my two 12 year old sis's and am starting a "nursery" school for all ages once or twice a week to practice A,B,C's and numbers and maybe do some fun projects too. Other than that, just hanging out until time to collect tree seeds and plant.

Hope all is well for everyone all around the world, take care!

2007-10-05T01:38:00.000-07:00

Allison Hoff, a health and community development worker, wrote these awesome haikus. They do a good job of summing stuff up!

Please kids, wash your hands.
Fine, just don't grab the goat shit.
Okay, don't touch me.

I can't speak Woolof.
What the hell are you saying?
I'll just smile at you.

You're still talking.
I hope this isn't important.
My answer is yes.

This meat is chewy.
Maybe it's just bad chicken.
Nope, sheep intestines!

I need something sweet.
There are cough drops in my med kit.
This can't be healthy.

They are called freckles.
They are not mosquito bites.
And that is acne.

2007-10-02T13:26:00.000-07:00

Hey guys!! Enjoying fall? The crisp air, the crunchy leaves, there's no season like it right? Well I'm enjoying 100% humidity and sweltering heat of the end of the rainy season, which is charmingly timed with Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting- no eating or drinking from sun up to sun down. So bad moods, low energy and lots of colds and malaria do their part to make this month... not that exciting. Anyway... here's some excerts from an email I just sent my sister that tells a little about what I'm up to now that I'm officialy in my second year of volunteering!

"Well... life here is good... it's a little hard in ways but so amazing in others. I'm never able to be as productive as I want to be, but am also learning to just "be here now" and watch bugs and kids. But I'm always wanting to make the most of my time here... but you know, there are language barriers and cultural barriers ect.. and it's just hard to make anything happen. Last dry season Jamagen (my village) planted a tree nusrsery and that has been my main project I guess... getting those outplanted and working with the village every sunday to put up a fence, tend the field, ect. and it's been as awesome success. Then, I worked with the forestry dept. and others on tree nurseries in schools, as part of that "All-School Tree Nursery Comp" I always talk about, and that was a minor success but had a lot of problems, oh. so many hang ups! Things are sooo un organized here and gambians have a different way of thinking and communicating.... not that we don't get along but working together... sometimes its just a halarious mess. Next, I wrote a proposal to get a few thousand American dollars to do a small project in 6 villages starting soon, with the end of the rains. I haven't heard back yet about the funding. but the project is.. yep, tree nurseries! But this time, not mangos or fruit trees at all, but only fuel wood trees. The Gambia's beautiful forests are all but gone and it's so heartbreaking... most of it is from women collecting firewood. The funds would actually pay villagers for each successful tree they plant... it's based on the Green Belt Project in Kenya which was really successful. If I get that going then I will be so happy... trees, I really love them! The giant baobobs, silk cottons and mahoghanys- they remind me of dinosaurs, they seem like they could seriously just up root and start roaming around, like in the Lord of the Rings. They are magestic. I'm also encouraging the youth group of Jamagen to harvest honey and sell that, and get that organized. That's going well. Last thing, I'm a little nervous I guess and so am dragging my feet on this project, but I want to have kind of a kid's club in Jamagen. Something that mixes environmental ed, arts and crafts, fishing and other sweet skills, and yeah i guess teaching a little English too... I hesitate to teach English and might instead teach reading and writing in Woolof. I hate that assimilation thing, it's what I hate about development work. I know English is good to know and all that, but gosh it just goes against something in me... to come and spread the great Western gospel. So maybe if certain people kids who already go to school want to be tutored in English, then I can do that. But I'm hesitating to start because I don't want to start something I can't finish, don't want to be in over my head. But I'm bout to just jump in.

Speaking of jumping in! I have a new site mate, her name is Philipa and she lives about 3 k away in the same village as Elgn, my other site mate (both teachers)... she's rad, it's so fun to have another girl near by. Well, my story about jumping in goes... it's sweltering hot one Sunday, during Ramadan. Everyone is just laying around fanning themselves. The three of us snapped and decided to break the PC law about not swimming in the river (this is off the record). We bought a watermelon, the first of the season and some cookies and took our bikes to the river. We met 4 small boys doubled up atop some donkeys and they too were going for a dip, so they showed us the way and assured there were no hippos here, only fish. They lead us through some mangrove areas to a nice deep spot and entertained us for the afternoon. Anyway, it was much fun just floating the the brown mostly warm water... reminded me of my days in east Texas lakes. We're schemeing now to build a raft, since there are no skiing boats around. It's nice to go be away from people in nature, you feel almost not in The Gambia. The palm forests all around, the beautiful birds... the cows."

Anyway hope everyone is enjoying. I'm going to Morrocco at the end of October... SOOO excited!

2007-08-17T04:39:00.001-07:00

Update on Fatou:

I got a donation, enough to pay for her first semester and some of her second for grade 11! Awesome, I'm going back to site now and can't wait to tell her. Thanks Yaron!

2007-08-14T11:14:00.000-07:00

This is the first time I've done this... I'm asking for money for a Gambian cause! Here is the plea: an 11th grade girl needs money to finish school
Here is why you should help: This girl is the most inspiring girl student I've met in the Gambia. Her name is Fatou Dabo, and she is a Fula living in a village near mine. I met her mom first- a skinny energetic Fula women, fiesty and sweet. I ended up giving her mom some soy bean to try and hanging out in their compound for the afternoon.

Fatou came in and greeted me in Woolof and in English and we chatted. I had never before met a young girl in The Gambia who could converse well in English so I suriously asked her about her schooling. It turns out she has been going to school in Kombo, living with an aunt, and just comes home during the rainy season to help farm. School was free for her until 9th grade, and paying the 3,000 dalasi (115 US dollars)a year fee has been hard for her family- of course, because they are subsistance farmers/gardeners. Last year, she began grade 11 but the money ran out and the school had to turn her away. I ask her what she will do now, expecting her to not care one way or another about finishing school... sadly, that is the popular view in the villages. But no! She says she LOVES school, loves reading writing and math, (math? i ask in disbeief) and that she wants to go back and finish. She says proudly that she does well in school. She tells me she goes to her uncle's hut every evening to study (this is summer break for her! and it doesn't look like she'll be going back anyway, and she's studying in the evenings!?) I'm totally taken aback by her un-fashionable attitude- a young girl caring strongly about school is not something I've come across yet here. I've offered to tutor girls in my village but even as they politely agree, I can see that there is no interest. Fatou is 17 she tells me, and her father wants her to leave school and marry. With all the rebellious-ness you'd expect from a teenager but in a wierd reverse way she raises her small voice a little and says "My father tells me to leave the school and marry but I don't want this. I tell him let me finish school." My inner feminist cheerleader is waving pom poms and cheering "You go girl, you go you go!" I resist the urge to cheer and instead encourage her to keep studying on her own.

We sat in her spotless mud hutt and talked all afternoon, and she came to visit me a few days later in Jamagen. The thing that impresses about Fatou is that she loves school in a time and a place where it's not the cool thing to do. She is truly a rariety. She really can read and write- she wrote her name for me and read Newsweeks in my hut... this may sound trivial but the young girls in Jamagen who have finished highschool cannot read, write or speak English. Because it was not important to them, which is not all their fault, it's a problem with really deep roots.

Anyway! Can you help? I'm looking for friends and family who want to support this awesome young lady. It's 1,000 D per semester (US $39) and there's three semesters in a year. She would start the first week of September, grade 11. It's coming up soon! If you can donate any money to sponsor Fatou, let me know. If you're annoyed that I'm soliciting money, I'm really sorry!

stephrayburn@gmail.com

2007-07-05T12:46:00.000-07:00

Summa time and the living... well "it's not easy in The Gambia"

The rainy season is here finally, tho that doesn't mean it's raining hard or everyday. It just means the rain is around, here and there, and the relentless brown and orange is being overtaken by green. Actually the rains are late... usually by early July they have set it regularly and heavily. Still, up-country (east Gambia) looks "like a park" now, covered in grass and even the north bank has gotten enough for the crops to germinate.

So... how are my days flled these days? I often go to near-by Kerewam to work the awesome Department of Forestry guys there... they were my main partners in working on the All School Tree Nursery Competition in the north bank. The competition was not a huge success this year, due to some hang ups at the national level but several school did create great tree nurseries and are planning on outplanting soon. The schools are closing now for the summer but will keep an eye on their trees and outplant as soon as the rains are steady. Now we start planning for next year's competition!

Jamagen and two other villages within 2k are participating in a forestry department initiative to create wood lots... the "PWAMP" project. This keeps the women of Jamagen busy preparing the land and tending their little tree nursery- every Sunday is a work day! I have started to bring a bucket of water with a packet of "jumpkin," a powdered drink mix they sell here at the little bitiks because otherwise they don't drink. Several hours of work in the hot morning sun and they don't drink! But the work days are effective... and halarious. It's a bunch of women with their tools, babies strapped to their backs, arguing, gossiping, cracking up, throwing things, stealing babies, and yeah, working a little too- so fun for me!

The forestry department has just delivered their promised chain link fence to the PWAMP villages- my village, Jamagen and two others near by that I monitor. Now the fence goes up and we outplant our trees from nursery to wood lot! Our wee and humble wood lot contains mango, cashew, some nitrogen-fixing "green-manure" and firewood species and a bush fruit tree called mandinka cola. And our coveted beds of sisal, the wonder-species for live fencing. It looks like agave and grows to be about 4 feet high- even the goats don't brave the huge spikes. We are wondering now if some sort of tequila can be brewed from it... that might be my next project. (: Have I mentioned that I made a successful cashew-fruit liquor? I just added sugar and yeast and let it sit, and it was so good!

Anyway, the forestry dept. will be bringing up more seedlings as well. Next year I hope we can expand our tree nursery in Jamagen and start tree nurseries in the other near-by villages.

There are other small projects I'm working on too I suppose... trying to get some "alley cropping" going in the fields around Jamagen. Basically, when the soil is degraded like it is here, you can add fertilizer (which is expensive) or you can plant trees that act as green fertilizer. This is not a common practice here, it's a new idea but the women and a few men farmers are patronizing me and allowing me to plant a fast-growing pea tree in their fields and gardens. I can't wait to see how it works out... if it sticks, it will be a good source of protein for the village and maybe we can expand it's use for green manure.

OK, that's about it for work. This week in Kombo has been ridiculously fun... Jul-Brew, the one and only Gambian beer, threw us an all-you-can-drink party on July 4! It was a good time... a hundred of us volunteers throwing back Jul-brew with lime, dancing to the blaring i-pod and speaker set up... all in the out-door worker break area at the jul-brew factory! A few days later, our awesome APCD threw us a laid back dinner BBQ at his house. His beautiful tropical backyard held all the volunteers who cared to pitch 75 dalasi (3 bucks) and served up delicious pastas in huge metal bowls, lentil burgers on the grill. His new toddler and 3 dogs played underfoot and we all played like we were at an American BBQ. Our new country director, who flew in that day, showed up to meet us all and the party was full of lively how-to-make-a-gambiatopia chatter...good times, so different than being at site!

Beach and good food filled the rest of our days, along with some mandatory PCV meetings discussing work stuff, problems and successes, ect. Kombo is nice but I'm ready to head back now... I miss the Woolof! Oh, and we got another language test- I got advanced low! (There's beginner low, middle, high then intermediate l,m,h then advanced l,m,h) I can't beieve I can actually hack my way through conversations now... it seemed so hopeless when I first got to village. (:

Miss you all and am hoping all of us get rain soon soon. Jamma ag nop! Peace and love

2007-05-23T14:06:00.000-07:00

These are cashew apples. The cashew nut that we know and love is inside the green pod at the end. The fruit is super juicy and delicious yuuum...

2007-05-23T13:03:00.000-07:00

Bee Killing or Keeping and Spending the Night with the People of the Forest

Cam comes to visit for a few days... We do some work, borrowing my older brother's bike and riding to a near-by school. We help them Itt a really late start on their tree nursery and I'm so impressed by the students- they've brought in seeds from all kinds of bush trees and are falling over each other to get them planted... the two teachers helping keep it organized and write down exact numbers and varities.
Then we lend the people of Jamagen moral support by drinking attaya in the garden while they attempt to goat-proof the garden fence. The once-lush garden is mostly empty now, with the cabbage and onions all harvested and sold at the market and new garden beds being put off until the rains. But the few peppers and sorrel that were still growing have been relieved of their leaves by all the small ruminants that would brave the barbed wire... and also, my garden, which was late in starting because I got to Jamagen in January, has sadly been ravaged. I got 3 tomatos and 1 nice eggplant, tho! It's so dry here, there's not a bit of green for the goats and cows to eat so really I feel OK about feeding them my eggplant leaves.
That night, we drink my first attempt at cashew apple wine- not too bad. I never knew you could just throw yeast and sugar in water with some fruit for flavor and have something that passes as wine-ish. Maybe I shouldn't go so far as to compare it to wine, but at least it's alcoholic. (:
The next day we bike to a market in a near-by village I've been wanting to try... we buy 30 cashew fruits for our next batch of wine. Nice bike ride, cool market, only a few "toubab!" squawks pointed in our direction. That night we go "swim" in the creek, which is pretty low right now but nice and cool. Then, we do something ground breaking. We spend the night in the forest. We grab the tent another volunteer gave me, buy some firewood and pack a few things to cook. When I tell me host mom and dad where we're going they smile and nod... pause... ask me again what we're doing, then smile and nod again, saying "Ok, until tomorrow morning..." A little puzzled but not the out right shock I was expecting! The next morning when we return tho, everyone we meet all day asks me where I went last night. And for the rest of the week. My host sister greets us with her huge laugh and a "How are the forest people?" instead of "How are the home people?" They ask me if we saw hyenas, which were a problem up to about ten years ago, when finally the forest was depleted enough to run them off for good. I must admit tho, I dreamt about hippos and snakes... Anyway, the forest quiet and lingering smell of campfire smoke was nice.

The next evening, Cam has left. A man from onw of my favorite compounds comes to my door just after sun-down... it's time. I put on my one long sleeve shirt and jeans, two pairs of socks and my tennies, my rubber gloves from my med kit and rush out to meet him. He is wearing flip flops and a tank top, but is grateful when I hand him one of my bee suits. It's my first village honey harvest!
We go not to one of his actual "Kenyan top-bar" hives, the kind that you can harvest and leave in-tact to make more honey, but to a good old log hive, set way up in a tree. As I stand pondering the lack of duct-tape around the openings on my wrists and ankles, Mustafa is up the tree, flashlight under his chin, tying a rope around the log. Then the log is on the ground and the hum of the bees is awesome. He lights dry grass on fire near-by and sets to work, first removing the cover from one end of the log. A piece of wood from the top comes off too and he is grabbing combs and, wiping bees off and throwning them in the bucket- with his bare hands! And he's barefoot! He's quick and gentle with the bees, if unsentimental about raiding this bee-village, taking most of the food they've worked so hard to store up for their up-coming hungry season. He points out the queen cell to me, as I feebly stand by holding my headlamp for him. In minutes he is replaceing the cover, re-tying the robe, shimmying back up the tree and replacing the log. Alright then! My first harvest. The pool of bees left on ground, drowsy from the smoke, have made a cool amoeba-like pattern. There's enough honey and wax left in the hive for many of them to live on, I think, and start over. But man that's got to be frustrating!
We eat beautiful golden honeycomb as we walk back to village and Mustafa laughs at me when I ask how many stings he thinks he got. Lots! Nonnie, my host mom, helps me squish all the honey cells through a strainer, which is great fun. The next day I try honey in cocoa instead of sugar and it's so good! The fam. balks at first when I bring out the honey for our rice porridge (replacing the normal half-kilo of sugar) but they like it. Uuum honey. I will harvest again soon with my host dad.

2007-05-23T12:53:00.000-07:00

Jamagen at work
So... it's been awhile. After In Service Training last month, which was about a week of cool hands-on honey harvesting and tree grafting work, 'development' things in Jamagen have been moving fast. Well... fast relative to Jamagen's average speed. which, if you compare their style of dress, architecture, occupations and diets to that of their culture 400 years ago... well, it's not fast.

A while ago, I visited to main Department of Forestry in Banjul, to say hi and talk to them about a reforestation with native tree species project I wanted to start. I didn't get to finish my second sentence about the project idea, but their agenda for the meeting worked out for me too- they were looking for villages to participate in a wood lot project! Great I said, we've already started out tree nursery, the only problem is fencing. We can't afford barbed wire and after the rains end and animals are hungry again, the baby trees will be eaten or trampled. So we've started some live fencing species this year, and by next year they should...Great! they interrupt We'll GIVE you fencing, not just barbed wire but chain link! (Is that really neccessary?) And then we'll give you baby mangos, cashews, gmelinas (fast growing, used for timber)! Awesome.

Back in village, everyone is excited. Paradoxically, we have to CUT 400 fence poles before they give us the fence, which means trimming the branches off the few large trees dotting the fields. Sigh. Also, since they're giving us seedlings, enthusiasm for our nursery has trickled down a bit. But, not to look a gift horse in the mouth- the two-hectare wood lot will surely save a lot of Jamagen's pitiful "bush" from certain death by cooking fire. At the next meeting, it is decided that Sundays will be work days and the fence posts will be collected by everyone. Also, there's still motivation for planting our live fence because after a live fence grows in, the chain link can be moved to another project area or sold. Another idea is thrown out- we can plant corn inbetween the baby seedlings as a community crop! I wonder who will weed and harvest, and then who will help eat the corn? But I save my question for next time. (Family, remember that cartoon "who will help me sow my corn? no one. who will help me eat my corn? everyone! hahaha!) OK, pretty good.

Sunday comes and sure enough, all the men bring their axes and donkey carts, the women bring their hoes, and candy (?). The young men scoot up these huge trees with bare feet and hands, hacking off all branches except the main top branch. When the branches crack, I wince a little (yes, I want to hug the trees) but they hoot and laugh "AH! What is this?!" Others load the poles onto carts and take them to the fence site where the older men are digging post holes and packing dirt around the new posts. The women are clearing the land of what little greenery came back after the Great Bush Fire of Steph's 24th Birthday. They are also fighting over minties and who was late and has to pay the 5 delassi late fee. About half gets done, the rest saved for the next Sunday. Two other villages near by are also participating and I go once a week to check on them... their progress is about the same as Jamagen, sweet!

So, in the next 3 weeks or so before the rains set in, we will ideally have our fence and seedlings! In addition to the seedlings they give us, we'll plant our nursery seedlings at the end of the rains, and go ahead with our sisal-and-lime live fence idea.

In other work-related news, the Gambia-wide All-School Tree Nursery Competition, which was off to a rough start, is definitely underway. On June 4, I go on trek with a representative from the Dept. of Forestry and one from Ed. Dept to judge all the schools in the North Bank. It's taken several trips to the area offices in Kerewam, by me and Rachel, an ed. volunteer, but finally all is organized and ready. We'll judge the schools on how many tree seedlings have at least germinated, and how many varieties they have, as well as how many students participated. Then, in September we do another judging trek to see how well the tree seedlings were actually outplanted, then give prizes based on that. Good deal!

I have written a project idea proposal with the help of my Ag-Fo boss, Rod, on a small piolet project for reforestation with native trees in my district. The thing is, there are lots of government and NGO-sponsered wood lots, like the one Jamagen is doing, which promote monoculture lots of mangos and cashews. Ok, so bi-culture lots. And other fast-growing species, acaias and gmelina, are promoted but are their branches or even trunks are lopped often and never manage re-create a forest habitat. I'm hoping to address that... there's been some talk about travel agencies interested in "carbon offsetting"- they'd advertise their travel package as "green" and tourists would pay someone like me to facilitate a reforestation project that they could use to feel better about their travel. Trees during the rainy season can take in a ton of carbon I guess (literally a ton), which would theorectically offset the carbon put out by the flights. So, I'm looking- we'll see!

2007-05-23T12:34:00.000-07:00

This is "sisal," the shrub that could save the forests of The Gambia! A live fence around a garden of Jamagen.

2007-05-23T12:18:00.000-07:00

The garden at it's peak! Before all was harvested and goats ravaged every last speck of green that was left.

2007-05-23T11:27:00.000-07:00

One of these things is not like the others...! Me visiting Roxi at her compound in her village in the kombos.

2007-04-04T03:22:00.000-07:00

The 6:45 rooster crows at the break of dawn...

and pulls me out of my mosquito netted bed. My jogging shoes find their way on, my legs take me out into the still-cool morning air. The village is waking up slowly to the patient pleasant thud of the breakfast millet being pounded. My two 12 year old sisters stand over the mahoghany mortar each weilding a pounding stick, pounding out the sweet ryhthm of breakfast...i call out my thank you, which the appropriate greeting for anyone who is working, but my stomach knows I mean it.

I run past the women's garden, lush now with ripe cabbage, onions and tomatoes. My friend Roxi is watering. She calls out my name and asks if I've slept in peace, and notes truthfully that I am, in fact, running. I give her a big Peace only and note back that she is, indeed, watering.
I run past the fields of Jamagen, giant swaths of land, recently charred black by a major forest fire. These bush fires are way too common here, encouraged in the dry season by the loss of topsoil and trees and the dry Harmattan winds. A few large trees that dot the fields are blackened, but surviving; all smaller trees that were being left in fields or along field borders for their beneficial leaf litter are toast. I can see blackened mango and gmelina wood lot planted last year by the village youth group and feel a sense of urgency to help get a new orachrd started. New growth is popping up now in-between the black, giving my morning scene some nice neon green zing.

Home again, I wash up under the big mango tree in my back yard. The effortless morning songs of the birds above me are in stark contrast with the pained bray of donkey- he tries so hard! I laugh out loud, then text a good morning haiku about it to my up-country friend Cam. I listen to BBC and sweep my house. I'm called to breakfast, yummy coos porridge shared my my two moms and 5 sisters from a large bowl... as always, there's much giggling and hasseling, laughing at the babies, talking about the day. All in Bamara, my family's first language, with snippets relayed to me in Woolof.

The day goes on... in the morning I go to the school, 2 k away. I teach general science to 3 classrooms of giggling seventh graders, two days a week. We address each other with the same mild amusement; our small grins say wow we really suck at each other's languages but this is definitely interesting. They take lots of notes, notes in English containing words like "combustion" and "room temperature"... they are used to understanding little and memorizing lots but I do my best to make these concepts real... I move students around to illustrate attractive forces in chemcical reactions... I translate to broken woolof often amid shreiks of laughter. Are they learning? Ummm... it's debateable, for sure, but if I weren't there, they would sit through that period without a teacher so for me that ends the debate- it's better than nothing!

Back at home, after lunch I lay around with Roxi and her daughter, her mother and others... it's hot. We lay, we chat, we appreciate the "sweet wind" when it gives us a little breeze. And then! They hear it- I do not- but there it is! The alcalo's son is banging on the rusty wheel rim haning from a mango tree in the middle of Jamagen- the meeting is called!! I bring attaya, sugar and also canned condensed milk to brew (yeah, it's wierd, but it's delicious). The meeting is held by the Alcalo's son, Osman Sar, the closest thing I have to a counterpart. He speaks in Woolof and his words are translated to Mandinka by another women. The women sit on matts, shelling peanuts, shushing their kids. The meeting is called by me, Osman says, to tell everyone that I want to help them start another woodlot. HHe talks about how great the last woodlot was, before it burned, and that we can do it again. He tells them I have brought sisal (a live-fencing species that I collected seedlings from from a neighboring village) and that this year we will work on a live fence and firebreak to surround the woodlot. We will call another meeting next week to plant the seeds of the fast-growing melina (prized for firewood) as a village. The fruit and the firewood can be sold for money in just a few years. Yes great! They say. The meeting was good... we'll see if it pans out and tree seeds get planted.

2007-03-17T01:48:00.001-07:00

A friend recently emailed me these questions:

Sounds like there are only 2 wives.....but with
11 children??? What is typical size of family....birth outcomes?
Family Planning???? How is health care/illness/prevention handled???
HOw much education have the women had? What about the 25 year old
brother. At what age do men usually marry? Do they have to have
land/house/furniture before they can marry?

So, to answer. In my compound, there are two brothers, each with one wife. One of the women has 7 children, the olther has 2 of her own and there are 3 from a previous wife who past away a while ago. So, yeah, 12 kids! That's definitely typical.

There are two clinics fairly close (the more comprehensive one is maybe 7k away), and because they are funded by UniCef, and others, the visits are only 5 delassi (the same price as a half kilo of sugar). A girl in village recently had a baby. She went to the clinic to have it instead of staying home, which I think is rare here, but she said the clinic was understaffed and she ended up having the baby ALONE! Total time, from the time she left to go to the clinic to the time she returned home with a new baby in her arms, about 5 hours. Crazy! I was totally shocked, she was sitting up in her house that evening! I made her eat bread with peanut butter (which they don't do here, pnut butter is for cooking). But the little baby is fine, healthy enough and not premature.

Many children get sick, I think it is malaria. I'm not sure about this yet, but in the rainy season I hear malaria can be very bad (they have malaria season like we have flu season). People do die fairly young, but the old people who DO live are in incredible shape! I have seen two "goiters" on people, which come from a lack of iodized salt. I've also seen osteoporosis, arthritis, the usual things. There are a lot of things I attribute to inbreeding- a surprising number of deaf people, crossed eyes, stuttering (is that ever genetic? I don't know).

Basic medicines are avaible at the clinics for around 5 - 10 delassi, like pain relief stuff, and ink as an antiseptic. But when my little sister got sick (coughing up blood, maybe an upper respiratory infection? no idea) she went all the way to a big city area for blood tests and a shot. My compound has the money to do this, because one of the brothers is employed by the government, paving the road. But most would definitely not be able to do that (the transport alone would have cost 80 D for 2 of them). Everyone still collects medinice from the forests, all kinds of leaves and barks which they usually seem to make into teas.

There is also a "marabout," a traditional doctor type guy- most of the animistic aspects of traditional medicine have been replaced with Muslim religious aspects. I went to his hut one night with some women, one of which had been having body aches. She blamed on her family planning medicine, and had stopped taking it. She was still experiencing pain, so the women explained that they were done with the clinic and they were going to take "medicine for black people!" The marabout's hut had lots of powders, leaves, ect...a bundle of horse hair. I was offered some medicine but declined (if body still can't totally handle their water and food, I should probably not push it)!

Anyway, so traditional medicine is still around, but is on the decline. Most women do NOT take birth control, even though it's available I think for free or for cheap. Most men prefer their wives to have as many children as possible, even though their resources are strained. I think maybe it's a sign of virility and power, and also it's just the way things have always been. Population control is something I really want to address, but it's a touchy subject.

Yes, men should have their own compound, or a place in a compound before they marry. They should have enough money to pay the dowry and have a house built (evenutally one for them, one for the wife and kids). My 25 year old brother is not married yet, I think partially because he's saving up.

That's all for now! Everything's great, super interesting. I will post later about my 24th birthday, the oddest and one of the best birthday's I've had! (: Take care

2007-02-25T02:20:00.000-08:00

Watch this video on the President of The Gambia curing AIDS. This is so telling of... a lot here. Many people believe this because their president would never lie to them.

http://news.sky.com/skynews/video/videoplayer/0,,30200-hurd_p2623,00.html#

The article that goes with it:

http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1252349,00.html

2007-02-24T01:27:00.000-08:00

Being away from America, on the outside of the bubble of American life, I've had some major realizations about the culture; the great American way is really bizzare. And it's not the only way, though from the inside it can seem that way.

Here's some major contrasts between here and there:

1. Here, petty/bratty arguing between kids doesn't seem to exist; the culture is not based on individualism and competition, so siblings, pre-teens, highschoolers, everyone communicates with everyone else with relaxed, comfortable respect. Not that there aren't fights, but they seem to be pretty cut and dry.

2. No one avoids eye contact when passing by; (you see this in small town America too) greeting everyone is a cultural must-do. I think it just adds to the friendly neighborly-ness, plus it's just kinda nice.

3. It is a classless society- everyone is on equal terms and everything is shared openly. Anyone who walks by a compound at meal time will be invited (ordered) to come and eat. .

4. People work hard and live off the land; they build their houses out of mud bricks, they grow their grains and veggies, they make tea from bush leaves, baskets from grass, lotion for leftover candles wax and oil, incense, henna, medicine from certain trees, tools from welded metal, furniture from local wood, etc.

All that been said, I see this mass desire for westernization! They ALL think America and Europe are wonderful, they all want modern things... they see money, luxury, 'the good life.' What they don't see is the massive ecological destruction that a consumerist culture brings. They want "development," but they see the replacement and assimilation of native cultures that comes with globalization.

Development: it is a dynamic process of improvement, which implies a change, an evolution, growth and advancement.

Ok, but by whose standards? How should we measure poverty? What is "improvement?" As development workers (if you choose to go that route as a PCV), we get to decide, based on the needs and desires of the communities we serve how we want to measure development. I say it's definitely not numbers in a bankroll or the number of paved roads a country has. To me it's not measured in economic growth but in a community's ability to live autonomously, replenishing the land they use, providing a stable, safe, healthy and happy environment for its population. Development should ensure that a community will be able to LAST, survive, thrive... not to grow in size or monetary wealth, or bring in factories and roads. The thing that America/ westernized civilization never questions is the standard of development... if the more we grow, the more energy we need, the more cars we drive, the more land we need to clear theennnn.... the more global warming we'll have, the more species we'll wipe out and the more resources (water, coal) we'll suck dry. Uh, right? So why would we all world-wide blindly agree that that's the MAIN goal?

My line of thought: money equal a class society equals inequality. Money will never be distributed equally and will lead to more imported goods- stuff people don't need shipped to them on huge petrol-consuming liners, in cardboard boxes whose production caused deforestation in some distant place that can be ignored, or in plastic packages whose production used more oil and gas and whose waste products were dumped into some distant river that can be ignored, all dyed with hazardous chemicals using cheap labor exploiting (probably native) people from another far away "developing community" somewhere far away, whom we can ignore.

I think I'll pass on that, as much as I can. It's not up to me to decide for my village what they want, but I can try my hardest to make them see the value and beauty of their lifestyle the way it is. I can try to make them see the value of their natural environment and the need to replenish and restore their own resources so that they can continue to self-sustain.

Hopefully I'll use the next two years to help replenish the local resources and encourage pride in self-sustainability. And chill out here, enjoying the beauty of this type of lifestyle- a place without money that can provide for itself is a place with no stress, no depression or anxiety. A culture without individualistic competition is a culture of happy, stable and respectful people. People who do physical labor everyday are healthy people who don't suffer from obesity, high rates of cancer, high blood pressure and other diseases of the affluent.

2007-02-24T00:20:00.000-08:00

So What Are You Doing?

So everyone asks what I'm doing, what I'm up to. I'll try to give some of the cool highlights of my days here...

You know I live in Jamagen, a small village of about 17 compounds- which are extended family groups, basically a u-shaped cluster of mud huts with a common area in the middle, space for small cassava and papaya gardens and maybe a few cows. Because The Gambia is the final destination for about 8 different tribes of Africa, my village is a cool mix of Woolof (what I speak), Pulaar or Fulas, Mandinkas, and another tribe similar to Mandinkas (both from Mali) called the Bambaras. There are also some Serers. My compound is Bambara, but they all speak Woolof and a little of everything like most Gambians. The compound consists of 3 brothers, two of them with one wife each and all their many kids, and their mom- my very old and very cool grandma. Madou is the youngest brother, unmarried now, about 25 yrs old, speaks fairly good English and is way cool. There are 11 kids in the compound, ranging from less than a year to about 18 maybe- they don't know their birthdays or how old they are and are confused when I ask (why would I want to know?)! I hang out a lot with the oldest girl (18?), Sabu, and the two second oldest girls, born 4 days apart from the 2 different wives in the compound (about 12 yrs old i think), Seneba and Nagale. I also hang out a lot with Roxi Bah and her family, (25 yrs?) in the Fula compound next to me.

So a typical day...?
Wake up at 7, push back the mosquito net, go for a jog or a seed-collecting walk, for my hopeful woodlot (more on that later). Come back, rinse off with water from my bucket... yep water I hauled on my head...water my little orange tree and baby papaya shoots. Go join my grandma around the fire-in-a-bowl where she heats water for tea- it's still a little chilly in the mornings here and by that i mean maybe 70 C. One child after another stumble out and wriggle in around the fire, poke each other and the fire with sticks. Two kids put on their uniforms and get ready for school (one girl, one boy, both about 8 or 9). The nearest school is 2 k away in Kuntair, where I will teach 2 days a week General Science to 7th graders- more on that later! I eat breakfast with the women, either rice porridge or coos porridge, in a big communal bowl. Coos is what we use as birdseed in the US (called millet) but it's actually really good, is a healthy whole grain with lots of fiber and anti-oxidants- it's the Gambia's main crop, along with peanuts. My mornings are free... I sweep my house, maybe do a little laundry, and usually hear Roxi call my name to come over. I hang out there for a while, they give me "sour milk" which is milk that has sat in a bowl in a cool place for a day or so and has become yogurt. You add sugar and sometimes coos and it is seriously amazing! Fula's are nomadic herders by nature and even the settled ones usually have a few cows. Some of them say they can talk to cows, which could be a useful skill for me to pick up while I'm here.

Sometimes I go visit the men working in their garden's along Jamagen's awesome tributary, or go with Roxi and my sisters to collect downed firewood from the forest around the river... yep I carry it back on my head haha! It's the season for "bush fruits" or forest fruits, and there's about 10 different kinds of yummy figs, plums, edible seed pods, ect... I've been collecting these too for a fruit tree section of my wood lot! My favorite is called Mam Poto it's sooo good- I also named Roxi's family's little puppy that since he likes to eat them too.

Lunch is always rice with "maffe"- a delicious sauce made from their delicious home made p-nut butter, fish, hot pepper and onion. After lunch it's hot... which means it's prime sittin-around-chattin-brewin-attaya-shelling-peanuts-time.

Attaya is worth describing if you don't already know what it is. All Gambians berw attaya. It's green tea imported from China, pre-crushed up, in a little box, at least a few ounces. They all have their attya sets- two small plastic shot glasses, a tea pot and a burner which is small metal cooker that they load up with embers from their cooking fires and set their tea pots on. A whole pack of green tea goes into the pot and is brewed with water. Sugar is added and the attaya is poured skillfully from pot to shot glass to shot glass to pot to mix in the (digusting amount of) sugar and then to cool it a little. Now half or whole shot glasses are poured, the nearest small child takes a tray with attaya shots around to each adult presently sitting around, who slurps it down and gives it back. 3 rounds can be poured from one batch. This is just a Gambian thing, a nice social luxury that they enjoy, tho it is addicting and can get to be an expensive habit. Some men brew three times a day!

So I chat and hang out till about 5. Then I haul water with my sisters and go to the big women's garden with all the ladies. We water everything (my little garden, plus their many beds of cabbage, tomatos, lettuce and onions). I love this time: all women and girls are there, the sun is setting, everyone's chatting, it's fun. They we go go home, all tired, just as the sun is setting. I take another bucket bath and hang out till dinner... ususally coos with a green sauce (maybe made from the stalks of onions, or the leaves of cassava or of the moringa tree). Often there's fried whole fish which I'm starting to like (protein is protein!) Chicken or goat are for special occasions only and I've never seen beef but peanuts and fish are actually plenty- I feel way healthy!

There's a day in Jamagen! Special days are Saturdays when I bike with another close volunteer in the nearest market, and buy eggplant and garlic and onions for our food bowl and eat been sandwiches and drink coolish Fanta sometimes. This is always an interesting time... but because it's a big market, people come from all over so you do hear "toubab" a little.

Toubab is worth explaining if you don't know about it. It's the term used I think all over Africa for white person, modern person, person with money, person not Gambian. Many volunteers HATE is and made a big deal about not being called toubab. My take is that... well, I am white, I do have money (relatively ok?), and I'm not Gambian so sure. It's usually little kids and I usually respond to their bird-call like squawk with an mimic cry "Child!" One time at the lumo a boy trailed me for 5 minutes squawking "Toubab" and I was so annoyed I turned around and began gretting him in Woolof, which embarrassed him a little and hopefully made him feel rude. The main point is that many tourists give out candy ("minties")/money/pens to the kids so they assume I'm a tourist. If I greet them, or say hey "greet me first" then they get it- they just want to talk to you and hold your hand while you walk around. Once, when I was in another bigger village (touristy) for a workshop, some girls were hanging around, saying "toubab how are you what is your name" and I started talking to them in Woolof- they shrieked and giggled and then one grabbed my hand and said something wonderful (in Woolof) "You're not a toubab, you speak Woolof nice!"...I was elated, I just wanted to hug her and give her minties and coins! So I'm a toubab.

2007-02-23T11:55:00.000-08:00

You can click on the map below to blow it up. The main red line is the only road in the north half of the country... See Kuntair on the map there, right along the road in the top left part of The Gambia. Jamagen (my village) is just 2 K west of Kuntair. Kerewam is the closest place with electricity.

2007-02-23T11:20:00.000-08:00

2007-01-31T12:57:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone!

I'm visiting some volunteers in the thriving metropolis of Kerewam, and they just so happen to work with an NGO that just so happens to have generator-powered eletrcity and internet at night! So, I only have a quick minute but I have checked me email and letters are on their way soon soon.

My new site in Jamagen is pretty wonderful. I've been there about a month now, and have experienced Tobaski, the biggest Muslim holiday and Tatti Bon, the Muslim New Years. Both were fun 'cultural experiences,' though even my protien-starved appetite couldn't hang with the Tobaski food bowl. They kill a ram, as per tradition, and eat every little part... my food bowl looked like an 8th grade text book picture of the inside of a cell... over here, the golgi apparatus (piece of ram stomach) oh! and over there the endoplasmic reticulum (intestine). But the beautiful 'kompliets'- matching skirt and shirts- the awesome booty shaking from the women and girls, the kids dressing up in their best- SHOES (gasp!) and hats for the occasion, was all a very cool few days. One very cool kid in my village doned his black leather platform boots (think euro-tech dance club style) for both the holidays.

My days are filled with trips to the women's garden, to water my own little plots and help the other women water theirs. That is always the highlight of my day, seeing all the green stuff growing, and all women of all ages are there chatting and drawing water while the sun sets behind the roon palms... yes it is nice!

The rest of my day is down time, which I fill with a lot of visiting compounds, chatting, and shelling p-nuts. I'm working hard on my Woolof, and have a tutor now- the alcalo's son who is very patient but the language barrier complicates things so much! I think it's safe to say that language does not come easyily to me but I am trying and I do love Woolof- I tell them that their language is 'pretty' and they laugh at me! Also, my compund, like maybe half the compunds in the village actually speak Bambara (a Mandinka dialect, from Mali). To me, they speak Woolof, but to each other, when we're sittin around shelling p-nuts and what not, they speak Bambara. That makes things a little harder since I love hanging out with them, but I'm in the process of getting a Mandinka study book and will learn it too... ndanka ndanka (slowly slowly) they tell me.

I give myself plenty of alone time at night, when I read and write letters, and occasionaly listen spare some precious battery and listen to music. Biking, though, is the best personal time thing! I've gone to visit several of my neighboring PCV's and it's so great to see the landscape like that. It is deforested, but it really is beautiful and just refreshing to see some new sights, to pass through new villages and spend a few hours with another (native) English speaker! Ahh...

Today I rode to Kerewam, to meet up with the 3 other PCV's here and use the computer. I typed a letter that will go out to schools inviting them to participate in the All-School Tree Nursery COmpetition- something I'm stoked about. Schools grow trees and then out-plant them in their community with the rainy season. They compete to gorow the most and the widest variety for garden tools and other cool things, which is a big deal for them. Every lower basic school has a beautiful garden, growing vegetable to sell and to have cooked in their lunches- they're all great gardeners and the teachers are strict about watering the garden. So it's a simple step for them to start a tree nursery there and to keep that watered as well. It's a cool project.

I have also pretty much decided that I'm going to try teaching in Kuntaya, the nearest school 2k away. They desperately need teachers, and I'm very curious about the Gambian education system. Education, done right, directly correlates with development and is such a direct way to influence kids. Though I absolutely don't want to just teach English and watch kids go off to Kombo (the city area) to find work and live a western-style life there, I think it's possible to teach students to value their culture and also to value knowledge and to be curious. I have seen how separate village life and school life are- there is no parent participation what-so-ever and almost a resentment between teachers and villagers. Teachers have lived in Kombo and see village life as a step down. They call them country people, or fana fana. At the same time, isolated parents downplay the importance of school and see it as a luxury. Even though school is free for all girls in The Gambia, most don't go- they are needed at home or just aren't encouraged. So we'll see, with my horrible Woolof and their horrible English...! I'm not sure, but the rumor is they need an 'arts and crafts' teacher- fun!! They're so creative here- I've seen awesome drums made out of empty tomato paste cans, plastic bags and wire as well as flutes made out of papaya stalks.

So all is well! Hope all is well is the big U.S. and that spring is coming soon for ya!

love,
Steph/ Yassin

2006-12-20T00:56:00.000-08:00

So I'm back in the Kombo area after only 4 days in village! There was a small problem in Ker Katim... the bidiks (small stores) were robbed by several men with guns. It's kind of a long story, not entirely pleasant...

It's wierd because The Gambia has no money! Ker Katim has no money itself but the bidiks there sell a lot of sugar to Senegal because they're right on the border, and sugar is cheaper in The Gazmbia (especailly if you sell it at night when customs is closed and you don't pay the sugar tax.) They use CEFA, a currency that's used all over parts of west Africa, and there was a lot of money concentrated there in little Ker Katim. I heard on the Gambian radio that 7 million CEFA was stolen. Several men were shot at, two were critically wounded but I think will be OK. When I heard gunshots, I left and went to a near-by village and stayed the night there.

This kind of thing never happens in sweet little Gambia! Gambians are so peaceful... if they were any more laid back, the recliner would tip over. If they had any more of their "peace only" they'd all be experiencing Nirvana... So it's sad that it happened, but I'm excited about getting to my new post, called "Jamagen" which I think, at least in Woolof, means "Peace" (jamma) and "more or most" (gena). So my new site is the most peaceiest place in all of Gambia...

Well happy hollidays to everyone! I'm getting PC transport tomorrow to take me to make the move, then I can sigh and start again. I'll being going even further up country to visit a group of friends for Christmas... can't wait! Take care!

2006-12-07T13:32:00.000-08:00

It is the eve of our swearing-in... the eve of our baptism in the murky croc-infested waters of PCV-dom! We will be born again as fully prepapred, totally trained and highly skilled PCVs... or something close-ish. We're all feeling pretty nervous about shipping out to our respective villages- partly nervous-excited, partly peeing our pants scared nervous (perhaps I should just speak for myself on that one). But we're ready for sure- this week has been tiring.

Our week has consisted of breakfast at 8, a few last mintue training sessions and LOTS of shopping. We've been browsing the little grocery and electronic marts on the few kilometer walk to the beach, trying to get stuff to cook with and to outfit our houses with. Our shopping lists include cell phones, shortwave radios to get our precious BBC, paint for our white washed plaster walls in our mud hutts, stoves to cook with and fruit trees to plant in our yards, seeds for out gardens, all manner of solar things, mattresses/pillows, ect.

The markets are amazing to me... you walk down the streets and everyone has their little cubby hole, selling whatever it is that they sell... fabrics, veggies, cell phone, cola nuts, brooms, fish... then you make a turn into the maze of alleys just jam packed with smiling Gambian sales people. Gambians are just so cool too, so laid back and they love to chat so it's a good place to practice language. I can't help looking around and just loving it all... humanity is sweet. But it's been a bit exhausting trying to anticipate everything we'll need for the next long while. We can shop at local markets in our villages, but of course they won't have much beyond the basics so we're stockin up.

What's NOT exhausting is the beach... there are four or five of us who make the walk about every day. The beach is really nice, the water is beautiful and the waves are really big... perfect for trying to body surf. That amounts to me jumping into an oncoming wave, getting pummeled like a sock in a dryer, giggling and swallowing a pint of delicious sea water... standing up, coughing, sputtering and repeating.

So... I'm trying slowly to upload picutres to Photobucket. I will also link my freind Karissa's pictures to my blog. She's a great photog. and should have some interesting pics.

Well guys this might be it for a little while! I will be off on Sunday to Ker Katim, where I'll spend my first three months trying to find my niche in my family and my village. A little about my project ideas:
In the North Bank, deforestation is devastating. My host dad, the progressive Woolof that he is would like to start a tree nursery so that he can sell trees for firewood and for building things- so I'll be trying to figure out how to start that. The other thing I know I'll be working on is writing a grant to get a water pump or a water catchment system in Ker Katim... they have two small wells, both open with no pump and both 30m deep! So water is hard to come-by, meaning it's hard to garden and to grow fruit trees, ect. Also, I'm hoping to work with another girl in a neighboring "big" village on the All School Tree Nursery Competition... it's all about the reforestation, and I am a big ol tree hugger. Can't wait! I will report back after our a few weeks in village, with some details of my project idas.

Write me, email me if ya want, send me news from the sates! Send me chocolate, send me CD's, send me pretty pictures of your smiling faces for my walls. I love you all, smooches.

oh, and crossword puzzels.

2006-11-29T06:44:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-03T08:22:00.000-08:00

End of October...

I’m in The Gambia – this whole thing is such a trip! I’m in a small rural village bordering Senegal; I have my own mud and plaster hut, complete with concrete floor, thatch roof and pit latrine (read “hole in the ground, with a cover”). My name is Yassin Tuday and I live in the Tuday compound, which consists of another hut for two undes (21 and 22 years old, both names Aladdy) and a bigger concrete house (with a super-modern corrugated tin roof) with three rooms, where the rest of the compound lives: a young couple, one for my “parents”, Savo and Yassin, their three little ones, plus two other kids whose parents are relatives, but not around, plus a grandma. My whole village is pretty tiny, but beautiful. They all go to the fields that surround the village every morning to harvest rice, coos, and corn, and peanuts.

It’s the end of the rainy season, and everything’s green and lush – there are big boabola and mango trees everywhere, and lots of livestock – goats are my new favorite thing! It’s about 85F and humid, but really beautiful weather and not too many mosquitoes. My days go like this:

6:45am – bike ride with Ro-hee (a.k.a. Cheyanne, another Woolof PCT) down one of the 5 or 6 roads leading to other villages. Fields, trees, birds, coos, mud/sand, donkey carts…awesome.

7:45pm – bucket bath (from water I carried on my head!), breakfast (coos & peanut porridge).

8:00am-1:00pm – Language with my three other Woolof PCT’s (Cheyanne-from Alaska, Grover from Kansas, Mandy from Washington – all very cool) and our language teacher, a twenty-something Gambian girl who’s awesome, Hadi Sow.

1:00pm – Lunch, Gambian style – a big bowl of food the 5 of us share, eating with our right hand. Always, rice with meat and sauce.

1:30pm – Get water, take a nap, read, study, play Uno with the fam – in the shade!

5:00pm – go bird watching with the PCT crew, herd of young children in tow, eat peanuts growing road-side.

7:00pm – Break fast with the fam (it is the month of Ramadon – they don’t eat or drink from sun-up to sun-down). Have dinner served to me in a separate bowl. Always rice with fish, tasting sauce and perhaps a bitter tomato (yum!).

8:00pm – Hang out, maybe drink some attaya (their version of sweet tea – intense, bitter, so sweet even American’s southerners would wince).

9:00pm – Read by head lamp, snooze. Rain sometimes comes at night, with refreshing wind. Night skies, when clear are just completely amazing!

Woolof is hard, but being immersed as we are is great and we’re learning fast. At lease we have the greetings down pat! Greetings are extremely important, you do it to everyone you come across. They go like this:
“Peace be on you.” Response -“And on you”.
“How are you”. “I’m here only”.
“How are the people of your compound?” “They are there only”.
“How is your morning/afternoon/evening?” “Peace only”.
“Does your body have peace” “Peace only”.
“How is the work” “Peace only” or- best part! “I’m on it, slowly, slowly.(That makes an important statement about the culture I think).

Two guys have gone home already! With my hopes of working in development later, and goals of personal growth and simplifying life, this experience is perfect for me – it’s pure mind-expanding fun. But it’s pretty intense, and it’s such a specific type of experience that it’s not hard to understand why those guys left – it’s either for you or it’s definitely not.

Though I started this letter in my training village I’m not at our group training camp, Ten-da-ba, right on the Gambian river, which is wide and muddy like the ‘ol Miss. It’s great to be back with a big group of people, big good meals, a nice shower, a pool! We just have training sessions all day, with teachers or in-country volunteers conducting “skills sessions” – we’re learning “sweet skills” – mud stove making, tree and crop ID, gardening, lesson planning, bee-keeping, etc. And language!

I haven’t been missing TV cuz this group of PCT’s are pure entertainment. Lots of funny quirky interesting people, from all backgrounds. It’s “Real World” Peace Corps, complete with random hook ups and all the stereotypical “Real World” roles! Funny stuff.

Write me often! I’m crazy to hear from everyone. Tell me everything that’s new! Things to send if you get the desire to mail something. My list of wants and needs:

I’m hoping to do some of my own cooking (dinners I think – other meals I’ll pay my fam to cook for me) cuz Gambian food s good but lacks variety and nutrition. So, spices, dries fruits, and veggies, seeds to plant (tomatoes, basil, salad greens), whole-wheat or whole-grain or fiber in any form – this may be kind of hard…but dried soup things, anything with protein powder. I’m craving fruit so much so dried fruits I would love.

Also, need baking soda, baking powder (can’t find it here), UNO game cards – a couple of sets, news magazines – I’m totally disconnected! Pictures – lots of pictures of everyone and everything. Laminated if possible. And chocolate!! Powdered is the only way to send it.

Books: The World and A Small Place in Africa, Any Vandanna Shiva (except the Water one), anything interesting about development work, environmental work, sustainable development especially in Africa. JANE or SEED magazines, also TIME magazine.

Lots of letters – I won’t have any time on the Internet until some time in December and would love to hear from you before then.

I love you for sending things but please don’t send:
Peanuts or peanut butter (there’s plenty here)
Vitamins
Normal toiletries
Rice…(someone’s family sent them rice!!)
Snickers candy – I can buy them here
Postcards – OR put them in an envelope, people snag them.

2006-11-03T08:14:00.000-08:00

Middle of October 2006

Hey Everyone,

Hello!! Let me just first say that I am really missing you guys and I wish I could hear your voices! I’m going to send this letter to my Mom, and then maybe she can type it into an email – letters are fairly expensive to send, because we’re now living on Delassi and we’re living on the equivalent of other Gambian life-costs. So… we have D900 (=$30) until November 1! I bought a beer on the beach (D40), required cola nuts to bring to our host families (1/2 kilo, D160), some dates (D5), whisky (D50), and 3 ½ letters worth of stamps (D120) – D375 total. I still need laundry soap, toilet paper, etc., so it’s a tight little budget.

So! We’re all here, staying in dorms at this little training center. We’ve been split up into language training groups: 15 are learning Mandinka, 6 are learning Fula, 4 Woolof – that’s me! Although all 3 languages (and several others too) are spoken all over the country, there are concentrated areas of each. Woolof is the main language spoken by the Senegalese (which makes me happy because I can travel to Senegal and get around) and is concentrated in the more urban areas, like around the capital (Banjul) here and in the north-west part of the country. So, not to speculate, but it may be that I’ll have some electricity or at least closer access to it. We won’t get our assignments for a month or so more.

During the next 10 weeks, the 4 Woolof’s and our teacher will be living with our individual host families in Sare Saamba – a very rural village on the Sought border of Senegal. Mostly in Sare Saamba, we’ll be learning Woolof. Every other week, we get together at camp Ten-da-ba (look it up on the net, its cool-http://www.moxon.net/the_gambia/tendaba.html) and have more learning sessions – stuff (also, all our agriculture skills and classes, bee keeping, etc. a.k.a “sweet skills”) less geared toward language, like filed trips, cultural stuff. So we’ll be going back and forth between Sare Saamba with our language groups/Ten-da-ba with everyone.

Woolof is so cool. It sounds very Caribbean. This is my favorite phrase so far. It’s part of the extensive greetings. Goes like this: Naka leegey bi? (Knock-a lee-gay{stretch this syllable out}?) May ci kawam, ndanka, ndanka. (Mong cheek o-wam, n-donk-a, n-donk-a {emphasis on donk}). And it means – “How’s your job?” And then (best part!) “I’m on it, slowly, slowly.” This is a standard line in their greetings, if that tells you anything about the culture!

Our training center is a catholic mission owned place, very small but pretty with lots of flowers, trees. The birds here are amazing! My roommate Katie and several others are into birding and bought the one and only Gambian bird book. I might like to get into that a little at my site.

We’re training just outside Banjul (BAN-jewl) the capital (only 30,000). We have toilets that flush sometimes, some electricity, running cold showers. It is so f’ing hot/humid here, and our room doesn’t have a fan so at first it was hard to sleep. We take cold showers right before bed, then lay around dripping into your pillow. But it’s better now, I’ve been sleeping like a babe – during the day there’s a nice maritime breeze.

I got my first bout of stomach troubles today, but I think it’s from eating the cola nuts yesterday. We were all walking through the market, supposed to buy cola nuts to bring to our host families. It was crazy, pretty exciting – but we all were wondering what was so cool about them ,because people give them as thank you gifts, celebration gifts, can I marry a few of your daughters gifts, everything… and they’re kind of a stimulant of sorts (I haven’t really felt anything, so I guess it’s subtle, but I trust them!) So, we all started chewing on them, even thought their gross, we wanted to be Gambians, Their tubers and they taste like little raw potatoes. Any who, we didn’t wash them and so…I got a little sick.

The food here is just a scotch monotonous…rice, hard white bread, over cooked but yummy veggies and meat in spicy really good sauce and fried fish…everything with palm oil, kinda greasy. Yuck-o “porridge” for breakfast, spam sandwiches (oh, sorry “corned beef”) for tea time, yogurt and papaya/watermelon for dessert.

We’ve had some really awesome training…I’m so pumped up about all the possibilities for projects. The Gambia has a constant growing season, and endless crops they haven’t taken advantage of…just tons we can do here, seriously…more about all that later, but I’m excited. Our trips have taken us also to a mosque, an eco-tourist resort (sweetest site placement ever!), a little mini-zoo run by a hippie-Belgium man with three wives. This naked son ran around with us carrying harmless giant pythons around his neck…that was a great time. My fear of snakes is dissipating, as is the needle fear…which I think is so cool.

More about my interesting group of PCV’s (Peace Corps Volunteers) later. Ok, I love you all very much – I’m loving every moment of this ride, learning and soaking up so much. Please write, and tell me details of that’s up with you. Also, sending money instead of goodies is wonderful (smaller bills!).

Love,
Steph

PS If you want to send me packages read the package link on my blog. Stuff that can easily fit in a padded envelop: spices (cumin, pepper, et.) powdered Gatorade, CD’s, Pictures PLEASE!! (laminated), etc.

*Possibly later: protein/fiber powders, bird book, binoculars

* Speakers!! Maybe that can work for my CD player & IPod Shuffle. Card reader for my camera (though one guy does have one, so let’s wait on this).

*Solar powered battery charger (batteries here suck and I don’t wanna keep buying and throwing away – which means dumping down my pit latrine.

2006-10-03T11:43:00.000-07:00

Whoa...

So, we flew into Banjul last week... we're staying at this little place run by a Catholic mission, with dorms and a cafeteria and a huge mango tree that everyone sits under to have "sessions".. There are 25 of us, 13 guys, 12 girls... all very very cool, like surprisingly cool. It's been good fun getting to know each other... there is Gambian whisky, cards, and Ipods with speakers involved.

We have 2 older volunteers here with us, Kelley and Kelley actually one boy one girl, their rad and very helpful answering all our questions. Our days go like this:

Wake up, breakfast at 8- that's corn flakes or outmeal with pineapple jelly and Nescafe.
Chill.
Language Session- my language is woolof. there are only four of us learning woolf, all the rest are mandinka or fula.
Tea break- spam or fish sandwiches, "digestive cookies" yum.
Chill.
Language session, or immunizations, or cultural sessions led by one of 8 of our rad Gambian teachers. they are so funny, beautiful and cool people.
Lunch- some meat, rice or coos, some veggies.
More sessions.
Dinner.
Hanging out with the crew.
Take a cold shower so that you sleep... not that there's hot water!

Yesterday we got to go to the beach, which was exactly like Atlantic coasts beaches except there were Gambians everywhere... "bumsters" are young Gambian men who run around excercising in front of you and offering to be your guide/ escort. We had Julbrew, the local beer, collected shells, played some ultimate frisbee.

Today we went to the market, which is HUGE, like a million times bigger than the Guatemalan market, approx. It was just the coolest experience, just craziness... I busted out my few Woolof phrases and bought some cola nuts, which are just these wierd things that are very important in the culture. Next week, I'll go with my other PCV's who are speaking Wolof out to a tiny training village called in the south, with our wollof techer, haddi sou. After a week there, we spend a week with the rest of the crew at ten da ba...

Anyway, I won't have much time on the internet for awhile, so sorry about the crap quality of this post, but i just wanted to give a little info to everyone.

It's really hot and humid, but there are beautiful tropical plants everywhere as a tradeoff. The culture here is so neat, crazily different. I will be writing and sending letters soon... I'm having a great time needless to say, I'm just thrilled and totally excited. I really miss everyone, esp. my sis, my mom, bro and my cat. I love eveyrone and will be in touch!!

2006-09-20T11:30:00.001-07:00

Wanna feel small?

2006-09-20T11:29:00.001-07:00

smaller...

2006-09-20T11:25:00.000-07:00

infinitesimal?

It's true that I have too much free time at the moment...

2006-09-17T21:31:00.000-07:00

Bend is good times

Bend was buzzing... or maybe it was just me. It was like everyone graduated and is back and not ashamed to live on their parent's couch and go out every night. The entire MV graduating class of '01 is chillin in Bend! Unexpected, but I love it. If I tried to relay my many elating experiences of the week, it would just be lame so INSTEAD... a top ten list! See Davey m'friend I told you they'd come in handy!

Top Ten Best Things About My Week In My Old Stomping Grounds of Bend, Or:
1. Oregon hikes (manzanita, spruce, pine, and river) smell like a vat of honey with an entire spicerack dumped in, heated and stirred.
2. Jason's delicious delicacies; also his wit, charm and good choice of girlfriend.
3. There is still no super-wal-mart; I love the way Bend has grown.
4. I score a pair of autographed old man shorts and find a crazy boy to yearn for from abroad.
5. Hillary, Al and I... that's it really.
6. Hill and Al trying to surf the Deschutes.
7. Seeing every constellation possible, at once, from a trampoline. The dots connect themselves, I swear. (;
8. Gettin inked up- as Al tells the guy we're virgins.
9. I randomly get to see Kevin and Brian again! Brian's ski-theme bathroom and hot tub are better than I remember.
10. Allison and Hil are my soul mates fo-eva!

2006-09-17T20:41:00.000-07:00

This is poem-ish... spoken word folk music I think! I wrote this in Guatemala, it's kinda awful, kinda halrious...just wanted to tell about this awesome drunk guy in my bar one night and his good advice...

He looked at me with bleary eyes and said he had just one piece of advice...
You've got to EAT the world, Stephanie
and I said I try and he said no...
You've got to EAT the world,
and I said alright...
He leaned forward and I could smell the gin, but I could tell he was serious and he said it again
You've got to eat the world!
Where I had been wary before, I now saw something more...
he was a soul-searcher, a traveler, his accents a mess,
he worshipped his moments, treated life like a quest
I quit smiling at him and looked in his eyes, then I smiled with him and then ate his advice
Take it and cook it however you like
Change is a must cuz we all love the spice
Some things gotta sit, til their time is ripe
Then we tear into life with big juicy bites

2006-08-29T11:37:00.000-07:00

Since the Gambia is tiny, the tiniest country in Africa, and people always ask me where it is... so there it is!
In the left picture, there is an orange arrow pointing to the Gambia. In the middle picture, the beige worm-shaped area is the Gambia- it's just the 15 km above and the 15 km below the gambian river. In the right picture, the gambia has an orange square around it. It's entirely enveloped by Senegal, cept for the little part that's coastline. Where I will have my vacation house, my second mud hut. Right on.

2006-08-28T12:44:00.000-07:00

Sweet! Got my staging kit!

I finally did get my staging kit... they said it would come 30 days before we were supposed to leave for ze gambia, and I think they made me wait 31. Not very nice to do to over-excited girls like me... But it didn't really say much, except that, yes, we are going to the Gambia and I will get to be a PC volunteer, and yes I'll being doing something involving the ever-elusive "environment"...ah the vagueness! The staging event is like a conference, in Philly, just giving us the run-down of PC rules and what-not. I'll be meeting the whole crew of gambian PCVs, and, I have to get shots, God help me, probably lots of them.

So I'm packing... trying not to defeat the purpose of living simply by buying too much stuff..
Things I Have Bought:
-Camera- a Vupoint, can play movies, record voice and video and play music. Lo me gusta mucho.
-Hydration Pack- which I already love like my firstborn
-KEENS- you know, the shoes- which yes, are an ugly overpriced outdoorsy-people fad, but are really doing the trick and i'm starting to love them too
-Bug spray- DEET-free, expensive stuff developed in Florida so I believe them
-some clothes, books, art stuff

I know I'll be speaking one of 5 tribal languages, which I'm gonna have to be fairly fluent in after 10 weeks in the Gambia so that I can be sworn in. During that training time, we'll living in a rural area with a host family, near-ish I guess to where we will eventually be placed. From the blogs I've read it seems like "they" decide where you're gonna go and therefore what language you'll be speaking within like 2 days of getting there. It's cool, who doesn't like surprises? Like, Hey! Here's your life for the next two years!! Why does our government expect us to just trust them so often?

They gave me a CD, that has online materials on like how to keep bees, how to dig a well, how to build a building, how to grow rice, ect. Ya know, stuff you always wanted to know. Funny, but I can't wait to learn.

So yay-ah, if anyone has any advice or good stuff like that, totally tell me. I'm SO excited yall!

2006-08-27T06:44:00.000-07:00

Volcan Agua from my front porch.

2006-08-17T11:25:00.000-07:00

From Guatemalan Time to 75 MPH

So I had to do it, I had to return... from soothing, soul-smoothing Antigua, Guatemala, which has it's own time zone we affectionately call "Guatemalan Time." Guatemalan Time does not include anything more specific than half-hours... any increment of time smaller than a half-hour is not worth nothing. Like you would never worry about someone being 10, 20, 29 minutes late... that's ridiculous, chill out man. When meeting up with someone to go out, the most common way is to just walk around and find them... try their work, el parque central and then the bars, one by one. If you start early, you will definitely find them before the night is over. If you showed up at Riki's and someone told you they had just headed to the Mono Loco for ladies's night but were actually next door salsa dancing at Sin Ventura's, don't be sad, cuz you can always catch them at Cafecito at the after-party because on Guatemalan Time, 2:00 A.M. is early and everyone goes to the after party. Even on Tuesday nights.

Anywho, I didn't wanna leave. No quiero regresar.
Leave the land of bright colored stucco, trees that want nothing more than to give you mangos or limes or avacados, the land of 70 degrees all the time? Leave the land of happy-lazy, es todo bien for the land of hurry up cuz remember, you have to do something with your life! I couldn't remember why I would want to do such a thing.
It's not that my stay in Guatemala was particularly exciting or productive. I didn't travel Guatemala or Central America extensively, I didn't contribute a ton to improving anything- although I was a faithful volunteer at a school and clinic for two months. The thing that made my stay so great, and made me not want to leave, was the lack of activity... Antigua is soooo chilllll! Almost to the point of being a bit slothenly. Sloth? I'm not sure if that can be an adverb, but I know it's one of the seven deadly sins. From the first morning I was shuttled in from the airport, I could feel it... the satisfaction with not a whole lot going on, no rush, no tengo prisa... tranquilo. You can cut the peaceful apathy with a knife- and like a tractor beam, it sucks ya right in.

I miss Antigua for sure, the colorful little crumbling city, everyone just bobbing along under the direction of Mama Volcan Agua. She sits all gorgeous and comfy and cloud-ringed above the town, conducting the goings-on below. She keeps it goin I think, she's the reason for the satisfied rhythm and rhyme of Guatemalan Time. She was my front yard and my walk-to-the-project view, so I know her pretty well. Moody, but totally cool. (:

So it's a good thing that I took off on a little road trip as soon as I got back, to remind me of my own country's goodness. The US can seem so sterile, colorless, manipulated and worked over... like an uptight overachiever? Why aren't all the houses pretty colors and why don't all the buildings have courtyards? Why would you NOT want that?
But, there's little better than renewing your faith in the beauty of your country from inside a little wheeled box, pumpin the good jams, being with some of your favorite people. I parted with my dear friend in Arizona, leaving him to explore the cool clash of tropical vs. desert in the southwest, solo. A little sad after being so physically close for so long, and battling a few of life's pink robots together, but the good-bye was due. I breifly viewed then flew the coop of stupid sinking barely vivando Las Vegas, then joined up with my mom and brother in the climbing canyons of Utah...I think Utah is one of the country's best-kept secrets... Mormon yes, but pleasantly so. I like Mormans, and I like Polygamy Porter. While sipping beer and eating a buffalo burger, one can almost ignore the looming temple in the middle of town (not that's it not pretty, or at least interesting...) And there's never an end to how many jokes you can make about having/not having/sneaking in without the special Moman underwear. My brother took us on a seriously amazing day hike, complete with moose, a billion wildflowers, amazing alpine lakes and craggy cliffs... so gorgeous.
From there, my mom and I drove across the corn-n-soy-corn-n-soy of Nebraska and Iowa, and the story gets much more boring... a million farms irrigated from the speedily shrinking Ogallala Aquifer, really cool other-worldly wind farms, law-breaking at Illinois toll-booths... and then a quick visit to my uncle in Chicago who teaches English at a highschool. We stayed in his art deco-style apartment, walls lined with books and movies and took in a little tour of Chicago. Really cool city, more middle-America-ish than I expected, borderline wholesome. But there's the sweetest silver bean in Milleum Park... there's not a chance I can explain that, so I say just go see it.

Alright, so I really really like America! Seriously, I have so much of it to explore still. Welp, time to go to Africa! hahaha

2006-07-19T09:48:00.000-07:00

The Gambia... like The Game, likes to make "the" part of its proper nounness.

Ever since I was invited to The Gambia for the Peace Corps I have been seeking out and taking in as many PCV Africa blogs as possible... Since they all started their blogs in the conceptions stages of their PCV application process, I´m thinking it´s high time for my own. Although, I'm impressed that anyone could find their application process woes interesting enough to read... a stretch even for their mom, no? (thanks mom!)

I'm leaving Sept. 20, and won't know much more till I get my a big envelope in the mail, with staging event info... till then!

So i´m a blogger, which sounds like a British slang word for something nasty, does it not? Bienvenidos.