Peace Corps Reality

I don't know where to begin.  So much has happened since I left Philadelphia, it seems impossible to cover it, but I will give it the old college try.  I am now sitting in a village named Mariama Kunda and am living with a family in their compound.  This is one of the training villages the Peace Corps uses for the pre service training.  I am in this village because I am studying Wolof for my language.  The family consists of a mother, father, 3 girls and a son.  The youngest daughter is spending the summer with her grandparents in Senegal so I have not met her.  The son is 21 and studying for college entrance exams  He spends the daytime working on the family farm/garden that is about 1.5 kilometers away.  The two daughters are 13 and 17 and spend the day working around the compound and being with friends.  The interesting thing about the family is the fact that the father of the family died and the wife was inherited by the younger brother. She did have the right to decline but she had young children at the time and this culture is very family based.

I have been covering all the body parts deemed inappropriate for viewing by Peace Corps policy, but I would probably keep them covered anyway. No one should have to see these body parts on me.  However, the first day I got to the training compound my host mother walked out topless.  It definitely does not have the same connotation that it does in the US.  Topless may be okay, but the waist through the knees are never visible on any of the women.  Even the little girls wear ankle length skirts.

I do not spend all my time with this family, because a lot of the training is held at the compound in which my Peace Corp trainer resides.  This family has 8 children  so there is always a lot going on there -- 6 boys and a 5 month old baby girl.  When they say it takes a village to raise a child, I think the phrase was invented in Africa.  All the kids seem to pitch in with the baby, even the 3 year old.  People from all over have been very welcoming and accepting.  Cooking meals is a long slow process but the kids get involved as part of their upbringing.  The middle area of the compound (family living area) serves as an outdoor living room.  So one of the chores is sweeping the dirt  every morning to get rid of  accumulated debris.  I  spend time sweeping my own room.  This area has very fine, sandy type soil so dust gets everywhere.  I will take a picture of the broom and post it.  Sounds weird  but the broom is weird.

The village culture is very friendly.  We were given Gambian names in a naming ceremony shortly after we arrived in the training village.  I was given the name of my host mother, Kumba Joof.  The ceremony included tribal drumming and African dance, which all the trainees attempted to imitate.  Now that I have an African name, when I walk to the training compound the children  along the way call out Kumba Joof, Kumba Joof. 

 Language training  has been difficult.  These young whipper snappers just out of college are kicking my butt.  We have a fairly interesting group.  The only other one over 36 is a man from Portland, OR.  We have both been in remedial Wolof training.  Another of the volunteers is a Brit.  He has American citizenship because he was born to an American woman, but his mother died when he was young and he was raised in England.  He sounds like the people on the BBC.  Several people studied abroad  including one who had a semester abroad in The Gambia. One of the guys did ESL in Korea.  He is the star of my language class.  This is his 4th language.   BTW the reason it is The Gambia is that they were trying to distinguish the country from Zambia.  

The weather has been hot and humid but not unbearable.  There always seems to be a mango tree for shade and a nice breeze.  I will say my room can get a little warm since I am supposed to lock it down whenever I leave.  I can get it cooled off by bed time though.  This is the rainy season and it knows how to rain here.   It will give some wimpy warning drops and then a wind comes up and whoosh, major downpour.  We probably get as much rain in a hour as Portland gets in a month.  Since most of the roads are dirt, it makes car travel interesting.  We were in a gelle gelle (aka bush taxi, aka van crammed to the gills with people) and I was stilling next to the driver.  Watching him select the path through the pools of water was amazing.  I guess the rain only comes for 3 months.  We have had a lot so far but I guess it is still a huge problem if they quit early.  Last year was a bad food year.

Ramadan started on Friday for some and Saturday for all (depending on whether they had seen the moon).  My family gets up before the sun rises and eats breakfast.  Then they do not eat or drink until the sun goes down at which time they will have a light meal to break the fast.  But two hours later they have another bigger meal.  Two days ago I saw my brother walking around carrying a rooster upside down.  The rooster did not seem to realize that he had been chosen to be part of the big dinner.  Luckily,  my brother did not make me observe the rooster's demise.  Volunteers do not have to observe Ramadan.   I might try it for a day but I know that I do not have it in me to do it for longer.  It is meant to make you empathize with those who have nothing.  I think that I am capable of one day of empathy. The meals I have been having have included a lot of fish since Mariama Kunda (the training village) is pretty near the coast.  Some of those devils have some tiny bones.

The big news (save the best for last) is that I have been told my permanent assignment.  I will be working with the World Food Programme, which is a UN agency.  They are doing both a school feeding program and an emergency food program.  I am supposed to be working with the data which apparently is not in good shape and then also traveling to sites and verifying the collection methods and the data itself.  I met my supervisor today and she said it has internet and air conditioning.  :-)  I also will travel with a UN driver when I go and have a travel allowance.  I am not entirely sure what difference the allowance will make when I am in a remote area, but we shall see.  My supervisor today is a bright woman from Ecuador  on her 9th assignment for the WFP and has a lot of goals that she wants to accomplish.  I definitely  will be busy and I am pretty excited about the assignment.  My lack of language skills will not be a problem there but I still need to develop them to get around in the rest of the world.  

For those of you to whom I promised pictures of me with a crocodile and python, it will not happen.  The visit fell prey to budget cuts.