Saturday, August 25, 2007
Check it out
Hey peoples I just read Andy's blog and it is much better at giving the overall feeling of the place, so read up, and ignore the misspellings like on mine! He also gives a link to a good compilation of our pictures! Yeah! http://nasdrovya.blogspot.com/
Day after swearing in!
Yeah! We are officially VOLUNTEERS now! golly, that took a while :) Yesterday morning we went to the U.S. ambassadors house and had the ceremony. It was very nice, pretty simple, and they had a wonderful array of food! Of course we are very excited about anything that isn't rice, but seriously it was awesome. I could have filled up on desserts alone, of which they had about 20 different types. So, we took the oath, and now have our id's and no one, no one may call us "trainees" anymore! We were happy this morning when we came to the office and the guards asks us for our id's for the first time:)
Well, I'm sure you will get more details from Andy's blog about training village and I think he spend a good chunk of time yesterday putting up pictures up so make sure to check those out.
This will be the last full day here in Kombo before we go back to our site to officially start our service tomorrow. Tomorrow is going to be very chaotic, I foresee, (actually this isn't a big leap because it seems everything orchestrated for us is!) because we have a ton of mattresses, gas burners, propane tanks, metal trunks, food, etc. that everyone provisioned for the "3 month challenge". Getting all those things in cars with the right people going the right direction in the country, and making sure it's strapped down enought to withstand the leaps it will surely take because of the roads, is going to be a great challenge. The "3 month challenge" is something that our PC people request you take on. It is a challenge to you to stay in your site for 3 months without leaving it to spend the night somewhere else, or travel outside of your village very far. They want us to really force ourselves to get to know our surroundings very well, so that after the three months we will be able to know what the community needs and will really know our family well. For Andy and I it won't be very difficult because our site is a pretty good size city. We will be able to get everything we could get in Kombo there too. Though we surely will have a hankering to get out and explore the upper regions of the country after three months.
The place we will live in is called Brikama. When we first drove to it on site visit (last week) I was a little apprehensive because coming from Bambako a pretty small village, it felt like a big bustling city. I still think that it is a pretty good size bustling city, but only in the Gambian sense! There is a large market about a K from our house. It is open every day instead of just once a week, like most of the village markets are. There is a lot of fresh produce, and fresh meat (large livestock slaughtered and alive), and all kinds of things.
The Gambia college is located about a kilometer from our house, (really quick bike ride or short walk) All the teachers in the Gambia are trained through here, so I'm hoping that I will be able to make a substantial impact because I am at the center of the action. Andy will be working there too, though he seems like he might want to spend more time with the National Beekeepers Association. There is also an insane "carpark" which is where all the gelley gelley drivers go to pick up passengers to cram into their vans and take across bumpy roads to pretty much any destination in the country. You can not even imagine the chaos that ensues when a "toubab" (too-bob=outsider or white person) is near the carpark. Everyone is trying to hustle you into their van, and you have to be very wary of pickpockets we have heard. There are a ton of cars trying to go from a culdisack type area through a bottleneck entrance and exit. Horns are honking, the van driver's apprentices are yelling at people different destinations, men are yelling at each other, there are people winding through the narrow spaces between the crammed cars selling things like bananas, boiled mangoes, etc. from trays they carry on their heads, it is crazy! Last week when we walked down there to make our first trip from Brikama I saw this man sitting on a mat on the ground, surrounding by severed goat heads, and he was roasting one. I did a double take! Did not see the other parts of the goats though.... hmmm..??.. Anyhow you get the picture.
Well, I'm sure you will get more details from Andy's blog about training village and I think he spend a good chunk of time yesterday putting up pictures up so make sure to check those out.
This will be the last full day here in Kombo before we go back to our site to officially start our service tomorrow. Tomorrow is going to be very chaotic, I foresee, (actually this isn't a big leap because it seems everything orchestrated for us is!) because we have a ton of mattresses, gas burners, propane tanks, metal trunks, food, etc. that everyone provisioned for the "3 month challenge". Getting all those things in cars with the right people going the right direction in the country, and making sure it's strapped down enought to withstand the leaps it will surely take because of the roads, is going to be a great challenge. The "3 month challenge" is something that our PC people request you take on. It is a challenge to you to stay in your site for 3 months without leaving it to spend the night somewhere else, or travel outside of your village very far. They want us to really force ourselves to get to know our surroundings very well, so that after the three months we will be able to know what the community needs and will really know our family well. For Andy and I it won't be very difficult because our site is a pretty good size city. We will be able to get everything we could get in Kombo there too. Though we surely will have a hankering to get out and explore the upper regions of the country after three months.
The place we will live in is called Brikama. When we first drove to it on site visit (last week) I was a little apprehensive because coming from Bambako a pretty small village, it felt like a big bustling city. I still think that it is a pretty good size bustling city, but only in the Gambian sense! There is a large market about a K from our house. It is open every day instead of just once a week, like most of the village markets are. There is a lot of fresh produce, and fresh meat (large livestock slaughtered and alive), and all kinds of things.
The Gambia college is located about a kilometer from our house, (really quick bike ride or short walk) All the teachers in the Gambia are trained through here, so I'm hoping that I will be able to make a substantial impact because I am at the center of the action. Andy will be working there too, though he seems like he might want to spend more time with the National Beekeepers Association. There is also an insane "carpark" which is where all the gelley gelley drivers go to pick up passengers to cram into their vans and take across bumpy roads to pretty much any destination in the country. You can not even imagine the chaos that ensues when a "toubab" (too-bob=outsider or white person) is near the carpark. Everyone is trying to hustle you into their van, and you have to be very wary of pickpockets we have heard. There are a ton of cars trying to go from a culdisack type area through a bottleneck entrance and exit. Horns are honking, the van driver's apprentices are yelling at people different destinations, men are yelling at each other, there are people winding through the narrow spaces between the crammed cars selling things like bananas, boiled mangoes, etc. from trays they carry on their heads, it is crazy! Last week when we walked down there to make our first trip from Brikama I saw this man sitting on a mat on the ground, surrounding by severed goat heads, and he was roasting one. I did a double take! Did not see the other parts of the goats though.... hmmm..??.. Anyhow you get the picture.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Passed!
Yeah! We just found out late today that we all passed our last language test! Now the 50 ton truck of pressure will finally be lifted, and be replaced with a 15 ton truck. :) Now we are all looking forward to the swearing in ceremony, and not really looking forward to buying stuff for settling in to our new abodes. It will be a bit chaotic finding everything, because its so spread out, and getting all 20 trainees things in cars to take back to their sites!
Ok, anyhow, I left on the getting to training.
In the morning in training village we would get woken up at about 5:30 with the prayer call from the mosque, and people and donkeys (making the weirdest noises ever!) and roosters, and any number of other things. We would try to sleep till 7:15 when we had to get up and get ready. As soon as we put ourselves together one of us would go out to open up the door to the house and prop it open. We would then greet all the people in the compound (these greetings are sometimes lengthy) Then we would leave Andy's family's compound and go across the village to my host family's compound to greet them as well. Sometimes they would have my breakfast for me and I would take that to class. Breakfast usually consisited of a small baguette type bread, and tea. On rare occasions I would have rice porriage, but Andy got that a lot. We could get ahold of local peanut butter which is delicious, because its just ground peanuts not added anything, but we would sometimes add a little sugar!) We would then head over to our teachers compound and have class for about 4 hours. After class we would often go take a nap, (the heat, lack of high energy foods, and of course lack of sleep makes you tired!) because the middle of the day is the hottest part, most people would hang out in the shade. Locals ( mostly boys/men) would hang out under shaded trees in certain areas of the village called "bantabas" The women, always doing work for the household, would sit under the porches on plastic mats called "basoos" (pronounced kind of like 'baa-sews') and do idle work like shell mountains of peanuts so as not to get too hot.
Ok, anyhow, I left on the getting to training.
In the morning in training village we would get woken up at about 5:30 with the prayer call from the mosque, and people and donkeys (making the weirdest noises ever!) and roosters, and any number of other things. We would try to sleep till 7:15 when we had to get up and get ready. As soon as we put ourselves together one of us would go out to open up the door to the house and prop it open. We would then greet all the people in the compound (these greetings are sometimes lengthy) Then we would leave Andy's family's compound and go across the village to my host family's compound to greet them as well. Sometimes they would have my breakfast for me and I would take that to class. Breakfast usually consisited of a small baguette type bread, and tea. On rare occasions I would have rice porriage, but Andy got that a lot. We could get ahold of local peanut butter which is delicious, because its just ground peanuts not added anything, but we would sometimes add a little sugar!) We would then head over to our teachers compound and have class for about 4 hours. After class we would often go take a nap, (the heat, lack of high energy foods, and of course lack of sleep makes you tired!) because the middle of the day is the hottest part, most people would hang out in the shade. Locals ( mostly boys/men) would hang out under shaded trees in certain areas of the village called "bantabas" The women, always doing work for the household, would sit under the porches on plastic mats called "basoos" (pronounced kind of like 'baa-sews') and do idle work like shell mountains of peanuts so as not to get too hot.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Let the updates begin!
Oh, gosh, Where to begin... Well, we reached out two month marker recently but it seems like a while ago that we came here to the Gambia. So the last time I wrote we were preparing to go off the training village. Our training village was called Bambako. It was a very momentous day when we all hopped on the Toyota coaster van with all our stuff strapped to the top of another car and bumped down the horrendous road to drop people off at their respected villages, group by group. Whenever someone would get dropped off you could just see the mob of children surrounding them and the look of "Oh boy what have I gotten myself into!" look on their faces.
So Andy and I were dropped off along with one other volunteer in Bambako. We met our language teacher there and we just sat in some chairs under the shade of a mango tree adjusting to the heat and the realization that we were actually there. After a little while, and a few glasses of attaya (strongly brewed green tea) we went around to meet people in the village and meet our families. The arrangement that we had was a little different because we are a married couple. I had my host family that would provide my meals, and Andy had his own host family that would provide his meals. But.... we lived in Andy's host family's compound. My host father is the alikahlo of the village, which is like the chief of the village. The compound is a group of houses in which a family lives. Now, the general family here is a very extended affair, because a lot of the people are poligamists, and of course they usually have the regualr extended family there too, like grandmothers etc. So, my host father had three wives, but most of the time only one was around. Andy's family had three wives and they all have a ton of children. So when we first got a chance be alone in our new living situation we were not really alone, because of the kids would just stand outside the screen door and talk about us. Whenever you are home the general rule is that you have to keep your door open, (but you can have the screen door closed) because people think that you have something to hide if you have your door shut when you are home. It would probably also be a bit crazy because it is so hot inside a tin roof house in Africa!
So Andy and I were dropped off along with one other volunteer in Bambako. We met our language teacher there and we just sat in some chairs under the shade of a mango tree adjusting to the heat and the realization that we were actually there. After a little while, and a few glasses of attaya (strongly brewed green tea) we went around to meet people in the village and meet our families. The arrangement that we had was a little different because we are a married couple. I had my host family that would provide my meals, and Andy had his own host family that would provide his meals. But.... we lived in Andy's host family's compound. My host father is the alikahlo of the village, which is like the chief of the village. The compound is a group of houses in which a family lives. Now, the general family here is a very extended affair, because a lot of the people are poligamists, and of course they usually have the regualr extended family there too, like grandmothers etc. So, my host father had three wives, but most of the time only one was around. Andy's family had three wives and they all have a ton of children. So when we first got a chance be alone in our new living situation we were not really alone, because of the kids would just stand outside the screen door and talk about us. Whenever you are home the general rule is that you have to keep your door open, (but you can have the screen door closed) because people think that you have something to hide if you have your door shut when you are home. It would probably also be a bit crazy because it is so hot inside a tin roof house in Africa!
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