Real quick!

27 Sep 12

Brief highlights:

Inherited project update: they built a garden, formed a garden committee, repaired the well and hand pump... it's actually been cool to see them erect this all with very little of my input or help!

I assisted in killing my first rat, my host sister helped/did most of it as I barely had the heart to.  He/she was driving me crazy the last four months but the bugger was kind of cute.  Just, not a suitable roommate ya know?

PC is coming up tomorrow to change out the white wooded window frames and door frame for red wooded ones as this type of wood is less tasty for termites.  PLUS I get a free PC ride which is such a huge bonus compared to public transport!!  Just coming in this time to submit a status report of the inherited garden project took EIGHT hours!  That's not that bad but you know, it's a small country!

I think we've seen the last of the rains.  Sneaky thing or things left without much of a warning.  We were so lucky this year, almost too much, with plentiful hearty rains.  As much of a pain they could be at times with the constant wetness/sogginess, mold and thick humidity, it was really  nice and they will be greatly missed.  I'm almost in disbelief, if we have seen the last of them, that we won't see them again for another 8-10 months!  Painful.  But 'cold season' is just around the corner.  After getting caught in a mild rain and soaked I found myself shivering pretty impressively for a formerly claimed AK girl.  Suppose I really am acclimating.  Still it's nice to feel cold sometimes you know?  Especially when it's a rare treat.

New environment volunteers arrive tomorrow.  A group of ten.  My group (20), the most recent education group (20), and this group are all very close to each other.  It's kind of nuts!  The training schedule got temporarily de-railed due to the joint training of my group in Senegal.  But Gambia PC training will find it's stride in due time, Inshallah.

My host father let me talk him into planting FIVE Leuceana trees in his corn field!  And that was inspired by him recruiting me to help him plant a Mango tree he had in a poly pot!  That was actually super awesome.  It was probably the most broken wolof I could have tried to speak but it worked.  Leuceana is a great ally cropping or live fencing tree species as it has nutritious leaves that give back to the soil as well as a root system that symbiotically lives with bacteria that help fix nitrogen further giving back to the soil.  And it has very light shade cover and a not invasive root system that corn or whatever can grow right amongst it.  As agfo (agroforestry) volunteers we try to support ally cropping or any tree planting as much as possible as it helps stabilize soil and in most cases can provide food to both livestock and humans, helps the water table and eventually with enough trees, can help bring more rains as you are increasing the amount of evapo-transpiration in an area.  They also can use trees of course for firewood  and structures, but we're trying to not promote that use as much.. Did I ever mention how much I love trees...? 

My host father then tells me, too late for this year now I think, that he wants to plant cashew trees!  I tried to get him to do this earlier but he didn't seem interested.  Not sure what has changed but he seems much more interested now!  I don't think I can do justice explaining what a victory it was for me, a foreign woman playing role of host daughter, to be asked by and work with a Gambian man playing the role of host father.  Even if I was Gambian it would be unlikely for my father to listen to me as a female.  So yes, super duper exciting!  He's a most excellent hard working thorough farmer and even better host father.  Peace Corps, it is not always easy; ok it's rarely easy, but I feel very lucky given my placement, family, and community.  Even with the rats and termites... pesky buggers. 

Hope everyone had enjoyable summers and are getting ready for "harvest season" aka fall (lower 48) and winter (ak).  May you stay warm, see beautiful fall leaf colors, amazing northern light displays if you are in an area to see that, and enjoy good company with family and friends around warm fires, delicious food and beverages.  Amin amin.

Bee Cause, IST, and pictures!

This will be mostly a picture post for a change since I actually had my camera this time!  These pictures were taken at our counterpart workshop at Bee Cause just outside of Banjul at a charitable trust organization promoting sustainable methods of bee keeping in The Gambia.  Earlier pictures are from village from the three month challenge capturing moving in, rainy season, etc.

Our IST counterpart workshop was held at Bee Cause since honey production not only can be sold for lots of money, but it promotes not timber forest products since bees like and need trees.  Honey harvesting here often involves using destructive practices like burning the hive.  This wastes valuable product as wax and smokes/ruins the honey.  Bee Cause offers trainings to interested individuals at a beautiful sanctuary landscaped with amazing examples of sustainable agroforestry practices which in turn promote happy and healthy bee populations. One note about beekeeping at the village level is that because this is such a communal culture, beekeepers tend to lose more resources than money earned as family and friends will insist on getting some honey since they are related and since that's the way the culture works here.  Village beekeeping has been attempted and has also failed.  The best you can hope to do is to find serious counterparts who are on top of their honey harvesting and selling before too many people can badger them about honey they should have.

So enough talk, enjoy the selected photos!

Bee Cause IST counterpart workshop.  Beekeeping, honey processing, wax melting, training, and finished tourist grade product featured above.

Roughly from top to bottom: one of my host grandmothers, my garden growing including sorel, okra, and garden beans, host brother and I enjoying a Ramadan lunch for the non-fasters, baby host brother after being drawn on by host sisters, and a village sunset which means so much more during Ramadan!

HCA, Health Mural Training, and IST pt 1.

8 Sep 12

HCA

I write a lot in village.  At the time the transcribed thoughts seem like profound insights and revelations that I’m eager to share with the rest of the world (twelve other viewers or so..).  But oddly every time I re-enter ‘civilization’ near the capital city when I have the opportunity to share them via this interweb thing- I tend to decide to spare viewers with my overly verbose village ramblings as they seem somehow less relevant than they do in village.

A lot of us it seems tend to stumble over how to best communicate or share this experience with family and friends back home as it is that we are having it a quite different life experience than it was we were having back home.  And no my wolof is still not getting so sweet to account for the poor English skills.  That lovely ability can be attributed to speaking to Gambians in wolof and Gambian English rekk (only) for the past three months.

Anyway a volunteer from a group that recently COS’d came up with a neat system she called HCA standing for Happy Crappy and Awkward to highlight slash assist with sharing stories from the past month or months as it may be.  Hopefully this person doesn’t mind me borrowing it this nifty trick!  HCA simply helps me think of and share three stories that were, as you could guess, happy, crappy, and awkward, providing a fairly even taste of the last few months or so:

Happy:  Visiting a very good friend south of the river and hiking ___ km to Baboon Island where they had cold bottles of Coke! And we had amazing packaged Indian food and bread, during Ramadan but you know, we had to eat as it was hot and far and we’re not really Muslim, just Gambian-ish leegi (now).  It was an incredibly exhausting day highlighting how malnourished we probably really are considering how tired the hike made us but was an amazing most wonderful adventure that involved getting lost and almost stumbling upon a boys circumcision camp, meeting a very nice Gambian man informing the both of us that all people are one and that color does not matter sensitizing us to both of our first “deep” conversation with a Gambian, a rescued Sisal shoot (good for live fencing), and amazing views of the river with glimpses of chimpanzees- and the cold Coke which is amazing after being in village and especially after such a long and hot walk!

Crappy:  Hmm- I’m tempted to say not ever being able to keep up with the termites taking over my house is pretty crappy but honestly it’s not as bad as creepy not nice men.  I’ve been very lucky here and honestly feel very safe but have my alert on high.  And, perhaps I won’t be able to explain this well but I have fallen for these people and this culture head over heels.  I’ve embraced my family and have taken them in as my own.  It feels very much like a family dynamic in my compound where my siblings can get annoying and my host parents do their bestest to keep me safe, healthy, and engaged.  And so in away I feel a kinship now for these people as I have a family here.  A host family sure but these are people that I live so closely and intimately with for so long that real relationships are bound to form.  Anyway I guess you could say that I tend to see or look for the best in people always and mostly am blown away by how amazing the people are here.  So when someone is actually like a creeper it disappoints me even more as I don’t just take it personally for myself but feel disappointed that they are re-inforcing the unfortunate stereotype most people think of in the West as dangerous people etc.  But I’ve been in this region for almost six months now (CRAZY!) and have honestly only personally encountered a couple not so sweet men.  This one instance was very mild where I was trying to catch a ride back up to my region in what we call setplas’s (a seven seater car) and the driver tapped my bum saying it was nice.  It sucked.  Because of everything I just said about believing in these people so much and then having this man puncture that balloon.  The perhaps most crappy part was that another man who I thought was a friend didn’t do anything to right the situation or to help at all.  I found a cheaper ride in a gelle which seats maybe 20 people or so in a squished and crowded car but the driver was much mo gena nice (nicer) and I made it home safe.  I don’t share that story to perpetuate that stereotype or to freak family and friends out.  So I hope that from that you take more that while that did happen and it made me feel crappy, it’s happened honestly one time in the span of six months and it wasn’t aggressive and I wasn’t in danger.  I was disrespected and felt little supported but the men there did help me, a stranger, were fair, and kind when that man was rude and disrespectful. 

Awkward: The first day or so of Ramadan I was working in my garden.  Almost all my Moringa trees have become victims to some kind of worm/moth larvae, and or spider mite so I was practicing physical control by squishing the buggers.  These leaves are highly nutritious and make a tasty albeit slightly slimy sauce packed full of nutrition that the women actually prepare fairly often.  Anyway I was trying to establish an intensive leaf bed where you plant several rows of trees within about a meter squared plot with about 5in spacing and keeping the trees clipped at waste height.  I have about one tree remaining from this attempt.  Anyhow I pruning them when there was still trees to prune and had just a few clippings of dark green healthy leaves.  I got excited to share some of the dark healthy green leaves with my family and came out before dusk to munch on some of them to one- get them excited/ show that you can eat the leaves plain, and two to hopefully share that with them by offering it to them since they try just about anything I offer- BUUUUT, believe it or not I was met with weird looks and polite dismissals to my invitation.  It could have been that the eating of raw leaves was too much for people that eat cooked leaves all the time- But more-so I think it is that I was offering them ‘food’ during Ramadan and that they were fasting and that I can’t believe I offered a strict Muslim family raw Moringa leaves during Ramadan where my host family is the prayer leader of the entire village!  Yup, that was awkward.

Health Mural Training

This was a really neat Peace Corps volunteer initiated two day training.  The Health/Environment group that came a little over a year before us has in their ranks two volunteers that attended design school.  A friend of theirs and volunteer leader for health (PCVL) applied for and received a grant to provide a two day training and paint and supplies for the twenty or so of us attendees with the agreement that if you come to the training, you complete two health murals in your community before this group departs (around Feb or Mar so they are giving us a deadline of December).  It is that I am an environment volunteer but I’m an environment volunteer that lives in a community who’s nearest health clinic is 10km down the road.  Personally I wanted to attend mostly to learn how to make more effective murals so that I can do it some environment murals in my community but contributing to the focus of health there I think would be appreciated as well.

A mural is actually a pretty incredible tool that can depict information regardless of ones literacy skills.  Without a training someone can create a mural and probably a pretty effective one at that.  Having the training led by design school graduates though gave us the tools information and know-how to help our communities design murals that “pop” by learning techniques of shading, lighting, color mixing, brush and paint care, face and people drawing, etc!

In Peace Corps we often hear about project sustainability.  This can only come when our communities feel an ownership over these projects.  This makes ones service a tad more tricky because now instead of me just finding a wall and painting a rad mural about using bed nets and feeling accomplished at that alone, I have to find health workers to work with, design the illustration together, gain community approval and approval from the chief, find interested people to aid in painting including local painters as we have many sign painters already, and pretty much stand in the background while giving the people in the village/community permission to shine and create something that can last maybe ten years further giving them the opportunity to be that famous artist for as long as the mural lasts and as long as they live there to brag about this or that thing that they designed and/or painted.  This is so important.  None of our work here matters much if it is just that, our work.  It may seem interesting that this is true for even a seemingly small project like a health mural.  But I left this training pretty inspired.

An inspiring project was done about ten years ago by a Peace Corps volunteer in The Gambia where this person held a training at x number of schools on some health subject and then held a mural design contest where the winning school got to share their mural at the ferry terminal where thousands of travers pass on a daily basis!  Now those long stretches of walls are empty but for maybe a good period of time there was a school designed mural there educating potentially thousands of Gambians to sleep under a bed net, wash hands with soap and water, eat healthy food, exclusively breast feed, etc etc. 

And now there are twenty or so of us trained in designing effective murals that don’t just disseminate information, but murals that pop off the wall with shading and effective color use!  Twenty of us working in our communities doing two murals a piece has the potential of empowering/educating 20,000 Gambians or more as many of us live in communities of 1,000 or more people (save for lil ‘ol me in my village of 230! or so, but easily surrounded by villages accounting for maybe a proximate population of 800).  And if even half of those people are touched and tell even one friend where it’s more likely in a community that is so communal that you would tell more than one friend, we’re talking of now educating upwards 60,000 or more people on simple things that can make profound differences.

A lot of volunteers may add world maps to schools but when you teach a world geography lesson and then involve the students in the map and painting etc etc, you can see how just that little extra touch can add so much more to their sense of ownership (Look see that country?! I painted that!  Or in an ideal world they may even say something like, “Hey see that country there?  That’s Mali, it’s in West Africa too like we are and I painted it!” Or “See that big country there? That’s Senegal and we live in that small country inside.”

This training alone helped add five beautiful murals to our Health PCVL’s health clinic which made such an incredible difference to the previously plain white walls.  Her counterpart was included and even painted some.  And the counterparts were involved in selecting which murals we painted which were all designed by our design artist volunteer trainers.  

IST, pt. 1

In service training.  Really I feel a better definition of what we are doing right now is phase 3 where in service training is additional training the volunteer seeks out to assist us on our projects in the future once we have a better idea of what those projects entail.

IST is 9-5 training mostly indoors.  It’s tiring and difficult to be super enthusiastic at all times when the trainings are from mostly administration AND when many of them are probably on things you’re not going to end up doing.  But I do think it’s important to hear about the broad spectrum of opportunities as you never know what it is your village may think it needs over what you think they need and what is more important is their assessment granted it’s within the volunteers ability to assist (not a paved road, hospital, or electricity as my chief stated..). 

For environment volunteers we’ve been learning more about gardening, pest control, live fencing, ally cropping, livestock management, cashew farming, community garden projects and trainings, grant writing and will learn about bee keeping and tree grafting if possible during pt. 2 at our counterpart workshop.

The counterpart workshop is a really neat opportunity to bring someone from village you hope/anticipate to work with and give them to opportunity to experience a training with you so that they can learn themselves, in their language (Inshallah) so that they can share with the community as well as I could.  If nothing else it’s a trip into town and a training and opportunity that these people may never get again.  If I have time to reflect on how that goes I will!

If not- for you avid readers and curious monkeys, my plan is thus:

Attend an HIV/AIDS Bike Trek training immediately after IST for four more days.

Go back home after that training to get back into the swing of village and start moving slowly forward with ‘for real’ peace corps service: aka start to talk to community members about projects, re-sensitizing my community about what I am there to do as a PCV (i.e., not there to give them a road really even though that would be nice).

Attend our regional meeting in the first week of October.

I’m helping to scout out two boys and two girls grades ten and higher to attend our camp GLOW which is scheduled for January.  The organizers of the camp need the recruits by this month.  This involves me going down to the school 10km away to work with the headmaster there to scout them out.  I need to be there anyway from time to time to oversee the inherited garden project coming together.

The actual Bike Trek is in Nov so I will attend that and then be as site as much as possible before probably coming in again around Thanksgiving for feasting and banking and updating this lovely thing as well as perhaps drafting my proposal for my graduate research.

December: Hopefully staying at site mostly (you can see maybe that things come up often enough to render this slightly difficult!)  This I hear is the cold season where it actually might get “chilly!” aka 50 degrees!

Jan: Camp GLOW for one week in early Nov.  Hopefully I can be at site mostly this month also.

And that’s pretty much all I know.  Been in West Africa for just over 6 months now and will have been in service four months on the 11 (Sept).  Potential future postings about random things like water and markets and women’s chores and men’s chores and gender and development, etc etc perhaps to come.  Please ask me if there’s something you’re burning to know that I keep leaving out!

Much love, hope, and peace- as cliché as it sounds, I really mean it!  Here’s to a brighter world.