Library and Resource Center

The work on Berefet’s newest and only library is almost complete.  We received the money from FROGS and started work before I left for Senegal.  Upon my return, the mason work was completed!  The project went extremely well, with receipts and all money accounted for.  There are horror stories of working with Gambian contractors and village workers to complete building projects and I was extremely happy that it went so well.  FROGS executive director, Sally Reader, came out to see the work on Thursday and she was very pleased too.  The teachers and students made several signs and held them up for her and her husband upon their arrival.  They all chanted ‘welcome, welcome’ and it was a lot of fun for everyone.

 The next phase will be to replace the roofing, paint, build shelves and desks, and buy large mats to put on the floor.  And then my real work will begin of managing, and teaching a Gambian how to manage a small library.  And thanks again to those who have sent or are sending us books! They are often the best ones the school has, and people here really do enjoy looking at / reading them.  And know that people here do enjoy your gifts and your generosity is appreciated.

Fixing the House

Mason work completed, its Nice!

Thank you!

Taking the books out of the closets

Waiting for Sally outside the gate

Welcoming Sally

Another unanticipated activity I’ve been doing at the school recently has been helping the kitchen ladies fix some food sent to us from America!  My friend Lauren Grayson, and her middle school students from Irving Texas, sent our school a large box full of mac & cheese, ramen, and other food they raised together at their school.  We had days where I would help prepare the food for the school.  They were all happy to eat food from America! It was a lot of fun and some of the kids really liked the food while others…not so much.  Thanks again Lauren!

Eating Mac n Cheese

Biggest pot of Ramen noodles I've ever seen

She liked it.

Changes

While I was in Senegal, a couple of changes occurred for us in village.  First, our host mom, Mariama-Sibou, moved back to the city taking Yaya, her baby, and Al San, our favorite kid in the compound.  Her sister moved to Spain and asked Sibou to take care of the compound in her absence (which could be for the rest of her life).  Sibou told me before I left for Senegal but I was hoping to be back before she officially left.  Although strange for American culture, this is a fairly normal thing here.  While this is very sad for us, Sibou is much happier living there as she is not expected to work the farm, garden, fetch water, and cook three meals a day at the same time.  Her tasks now include cooking meals and cleaning.  She also is selling a local tea called Wonjo.  We visited her new compound last weekend and found her very happy and quite well off  by Gambian standards.  She made us a delicious chicken benechin lunch and we drank cold wonjo afterwards! That type of lunch was impossible for her to provide in village, so it was really nice for us to be able to do that with her.  The worst part was when we were leaving, she and the children walked us to the road and I carried Al San on my back.  When they had to stop, I put Al San down and he started bawling.  Although there are still lots of children in our village and compound, we will miss the little guy too.

The other change is similar. Our counterpart who helped us with anything in the village, Ebrima-Solo, also moved out of the village while I was in Senegal. He too had been planning to move to the city to find a job, but a large village fight set him off and he decided to move quicker than he had planned.   This is what happened:  Ebrima and I had been working on a food security grant for a village tree nursery and to cap the open well adjacent to the future nursery spot.  The tree nursery was going to be on the compound designated as the Youth Association building that we cleaned up last October.  However, while I was in Senegal, the Imam who lives in the neighboring compound built a 7 foot cement wall around the area, taking the Youth building and land as his own and cutting down the trees there (that did not belong to him either).  Ben saw this and told Ebrima that if the Imam owns this land then our grant will be canceled.  There was a village meeting in which everyone yelled at each other and blamed Ebrima for not telling the village our plans.  Ebrima had asked the village leader (the Alkalo) twice about the nursery plans and gotten the OK both times.  Likewise, the whole village saw the Youth Association working on the compound last October and previous months and were acutely aware of the nice lock Ben and I had donated to lock the door of the Youth building.  Never less, the fight caused Ebrima to move sooner than later before I came back from Senegal.  We also visited him, and it was evident that he was still quite stressed about the fight.  He told us that the forestry department had come to our village and reprimanded the Imam for cutting the trees and said the Imam does not own this land that it is in fact the governments land, but Ebrima did not know if any actions would be taken against the Imam.  Now, Ebrima is focusing his efforts to get a job in order to pay for his schooling.  Another friend we are sad to see leave the village, but happy he is trying hard to go back to school.   As Gambians say “It’s not easy, man” but “we are managing, you know” J.

Excuses why we haven’t blogged in awhile…

This past month we have been going up and down again.  We joined our site mate Jessica on a bike ride from our sites in Foni to the coast as south as you can go to Kartong.  Kartong is a really pretty little beach town where we met up with other volunteers and spent a couple nights at a lodge on the beach.  The bike ride took us 7 hours and was not easy, but fun.  We made some stops along the way, one involved getting ice from a random compound and another involved someone using a local toilet which is a story you’d rather not hear about.  As usual we had fun hanging out with friends and eating delicious (non rice based) food.  The lodge we stayed at is known as a ‘tree house’ lodge.  This name is misleading as the ‘tree houses’ are really just huts on stilts consisting of concrete blocks so I wouldn’t necessarily think of them as tree houses per say, but you are not sleeping  directly on the ground which is more like a tree, and also a lot scarier.  And the real clench is that it only costs 10 USD a night to stay in a tree house, which does not make it any less scary but does fall within our Peace Corps budget.

Our Tree House

A couple weeks back, we went to another volunteer’s site up country to help her paint a health mural on her women’s clinic building.  Her village is a wolof village and very different from our mandinka/jola village.  To us, they seem much more relaxed, have horses, grass roofs, and most importantly they eat coos more than rice.  And coos is good! It is hotter there but while we were there we had a fluke rain which made it awesome.

Walking through Shawn's village

Painting the health mural with an audience

Shawn painted herself in the mural

Road to Shawn's village

 However, rain in March is a strange phenomenon that hasn’t happened for at least 7 years we were told.  Inshallah, this means we will have a strong rainy season this year.  Last year’s rain was not enough causing harvest yields across the country to be down about 50 percent from the year before.  Department of Agriculture is asking the international community for food aid this year because of last year’s poor harvest. 

I also volunteered to help lead sessions for new trainees who arrived in March.  This year they merged our Gambia training with Senegal’s training so I went up to Thies, Senegal to help teach sessions on advanced gardening, vegetative propagation, and cultural sessions.  Thies is a really nice city (as far as West African cities go) and I enjoyed being there and helping out with training.  Peace Corps Senegal has a really nice training center that we Gambian volunteers are jealous of.  The food was delicious and they have amenities like wireless internet, bathrooms, and showers.  Completely different from our training experience.

New volunteers finding out their sites

Thies, Senegal

Ice Cream!

Shoes.

Entrance to the training center

Back to Village

Things have calmed down now and we have settled back into our village.  Ben settled back into managing the bee project with Luis, and I was just approved for my library and resource project at the school.   We started working on it 2 days ago! 

Recently we helped Luis harvest a wild hive from Luis’s friends’ restaurant in the city.  We drove to the city, dismantled the hive, and the next day Ben and Luis took it back to his farm in a European bee box.  All three of us ‘got got’ (stung) but it was still fun and the bees are doing well at the farm.  It’s hard to explain why this is a crazy thing to do so I’m hoping the pictures will do a better job of it than I could.  Elma, Luis and Maria’s daughter, told us we looked like Ghostbusters.

Lots of bees!

Ben trying to smoke out the bees

Ben had a few meetings with the women’s tie and dye group. They are having trouble collecting money from people who paid on credit.  The money has been due for 2 months now so Ben had a meeting and explained that if they give back the fabric and allow others who can pay now to buy the fabric, then the kafoo will be able to do more jobs and at the end of the year would have more money.  They were surprisingly receptive to this idea. 

I have also been helping with our school garden and another school garden at a neighboring village with our sitemate Jessica.  I gave both schools seeds and instructions on how to plant an intensive moringa bed and made a small handout for one school to keep track of their produce.

Breaking ground (they all got stickers afterwards which they loved)

Also, we really appreciated all the care packages that came around January!  Thank you so much!  Miss you friends and family!

"Going up and down"

I like how Gambians talk about traveling or being busy.  Instead of saying you have traveled or went out they say ‘you have been going up and down’. And as I mentioned back in January we got to do some traveling.  We went to Dakar, Senegal for the West Africa International Softball Tournament (WAIST) and then flew to Tanzania to meet my parents for a safari.  Both Dakar and Tanzania were great, and all our travels went smooth.  WAIST was a lot of fun and felt like we were in America.  We hung out with lots of other Americans, ate fajitas, cheese, ice cream, nachos, hot dogs, played softball, went to a mall, and to an island with a nice beach.  I realize this list of food may not impress most people reading this, but to volunteers, it is what we dream of.  Dakar is West Africa’s biggest city and it has a lot of good restaurants, venues, and beaches.  We are excited to go back someday.

Tanzania was also fun and cold, which we really enjoyed.  We stayed in Dar El Salam for our first 2 days and enjoyed walking around the city, going to the Indian Ocean, and eating delicious street food.   The food was a lot of Indian food with different spices and curry than we are used to here in West Africa.  It was delicious and fun for us just to walk around and look at everything that is so completely different from Banjul.   From there we took a bus to Arusha where we met up with my parents.  From Arusha we took a 10 day safari! We took lots of pictures, and saw lots of animals!  It is definitely something anyone can and should do!  Our favorite thing was seeing the lioness with her cubs. 

Indian Ocean

Guided tour

one of our 'tented' lodges

top of the crater

Lion cubs!

Our ride

Maasi women

When we returned from Tanzania, my parents came back to Gambia with us and visited the Gambia coast and our village.  The village really enjoyed seeing my parents visit and ask us about them; likewise, my parents really enjoyed seeing our village and listening to us speak mandinka.  Right after my parents left, Ben flew to Georgia for Andrew and Sarah’s wedding.  Ben had a great time with the Turner family and came back with funny stories and lots of food from America!