Rindi Gets Mugged

I wish I could say that the title of this is a joke, but unfortunately it is not. Friday night I came back to my compound between 7 and 7:30 PM with my telephone in my hand.  I had been using the flashlight option to watch where I was walking.  A young man I did not recognize was inside the compound, standing close to the front.  When  he saw me, he asked if he could use my phone to call his sister. Since he was a stranger I told him no and continued walking toward my house.  Unfortunately he followed along, so I stopped and told him I didn't want him to come with me.  At that point he got a weird smile on his face and then lunged and grabbed the strap of my purse.  I use a messenger bag and always wear it across my body, so it did not come off when he grabbed.  I grabbed my strap and started screaming my landlord's name. At that point I am fuzzy on details.  I ended up on the ground and felt him grab my phone and then saw him running away.  About that time my neighbors and landlord came running up and found me on the ground.  By the time I told them what had happened, he was gone.

The good news is that I still have my purse which had  my computer and iPhone inside and my landlord found my Gambian phone inside the compound the next day .  The bad news is that I was hurt.  When they came running up, I was already starting into shock.  They kept trying to help me stand up and walk back to my house,  I would take a step sit down on the ground and go to a happy place only to rudely come back to reality. It was like I was in a white cloud that would get an expanding hole and I would realize where I was -- on the ground, in the dark surrounded by people  Kinda weird.  They finally brought out a chair so I managed to stay with it for awhile.  My landlord called the Peace Corps and they came and picked me up and took me to the med unit.  Bonus was that our regular doc was out and they had a cute American doc from Malawi -- too young but fun to look.  My left wrist hurt like crazy and several ribs were very painful.  It took awhile to get the shock under control.  At one point I was under two blankets and a heated towel and still shivering but my blood pressure recovered before he had to do an iv.  I spent the night in the med unit, mostly wide awake keeping my wrist on ice.

The next day we set off for AfriMed, the only place open on Saturdays that takes x-rays.  The PC doc was a little horrified.  The x-ray room was totally unshielded and people were waiting directly outside the room.  When I went into the room, neither I nor the tech were shielded.  My arm had been wrapped with an ace bandage and a splint and the tech told me to take it off so I took everything off.  Then he told me he meant only the ace bandage clips, and proceeded to wrap the arm back up with the splint.  Then I had to squat down and lay my arm on a little wooden bench for the x-ray. When the films were developed we had a lovely picture of the splint in the background of my arm.  However, the films were clear enough to show that I had cracked a couple of metacarpals and the bottom of my radius.  I think my ribs are just bruised because they do not hurt as much as the time I fractured 2. They do not x-ray ribs because they do nothing to treat them, unless they are so broken they are out of position

I had to wait until Monday to get my cast.   They still put on the plaster casts here and the PC doc had never done a plaster cast, so the weekend was spent putting cold gel packs on my wrist -- when the electricity stayed on long enough to keep them cold. So Monday I went to still  another clinic and a Gambian named Dr. Jones put the cast on.  He said it needed about 4 weeks to heal, which after one day with this thing cannot go quickly enough. This sucker is heavy -- I can see why they use fiberglass or splinting in the US.  It is lined with cotton batting so I know it will be very ripe by the time it comes off.

So that is the end of the mugging story.  The good news is that the Peace Corps talked my landlord into hiring a night watchman so I will be a little more comfortable about coming home after dark.

Thanksgiving is coming up in a couple of days.  Peace  Corps is having a potluck with turkeys provided so I will not be sitting there alone thinking poor me.  I hope that anyone reading this before has or had a wonderful time with their family.  After all of my experiences here I am richly aware of my blessings and the importance of family.

My First Trek for Work

I went on my first trek for the WFP last week.  I was only out for two days which was a good introduction to the process.  I was the WFP representative for a multi-sectoral team that was interviewing Sengali refugees in the Fonis, one of the regions in The Gambia.  They are fleeing from a rebellion in the Cassamance province of Senegal.  This rebellion has been going on since 1982 and waxes and wanes.  We were interviewing people who had come 6 years ago and people who had fled earlier this year.  We were also interviewing their hosts.  Our questions revolved around their living conditions and availability of water and food.  It was a humbling two days.

The villages in which we stopped were all close to the border which is not a fenced border.  These people have traveled back and forth for years and most are related.  However when the fighting erupted again, the refugees fled leaving nearly all of their possessions behind.  They had nothing with which to cook and no farm tools.  They were truly destitute.  Their host families, who are also poor, shared what they had with the refugees.  All of the refugees were given land on which to build their homes and the hosts helped them to build.  The hosts shared their farming and cooking tools and food until the families could grow their own food.  They were given access to farm land for growing their crops.  Unfortunately the land has been over-farmed and is not fertile and fertilizer is too expensive.  One of the villages used to have cattle and would use the manure for fertilizer.  However when the fighting started up again they sold the cattle to a village farther from the border because the rebels were killing the cattle.  When we asked how much food they had left and expected to have left after the completion of the harvests, many of them said 1 month.  That is supposed to last them until next year.

Our first stop in each village was at the home of the alkalo, the head of the village.  He would gather the hosts and the refugees and we would interview each group separately.  Our first village was less than 1/2 kilometer from the Cassamance border.  Below is a picture of  a warning sign directly behind the interview area.

They used to go into the bush and gather firewood, fruits and nuts to sell.   But after this sign was posted they stopped doing that.  Wonder why?

The next two pictures are a group of refugees and a group of hosts.  Can you figure out which ones are the hosts and which ones are the refugees?

As you can see neither group looks wealthy and neither group is.  Below you see the alkalo's home and the other part of his compound.  I include them because when we asked for household size, his compound had 36 people, all family.  Doesn't it look luxurious?  Notice the mud block construction. 

I also included the second picture because of the little boy rolling the bicycle tire.  He spent the entire time we were there amusing himself with the tire, rolling it all around the compound.  Here is another picture below in which he came to a stop.  I saw a girl playing a game similar to jacks with stones.  Simple pleasures can be found anywhere.

The final picture is one of the crops they grow.  It is a variety of millet which the Gambians call coos.  This was super coos.  Some of the plants were at least 15 feet tall.  It tastes something like sand.  Not high up on my hit parade.

As I said earlier, the trip was humbling.  These people have so little but they share what they have.  Yes, many of them are related, but how many of us would put up with relatives for 6 years?

Warning -- Tobaski Ramicide Pictures

I talked about Tobaski in an earlier post before I went to Mariama Kunda for Tobaski.  Tobaski arrived and was a bright, sunny, hot day.  It took me 2 taxi rides and 2 gelly rides to get to Mariama Kunda.  I found that riding in air conditioned splendor in a Peace Corps vehicle is definitely a preferable way to go.  But when I arrived my family was glad to see me and I was made to feel very welcome.  There were 3 of us PCVs there, Xander who stayed with my family a year and a half before I did, Rita a PCV who is in training and staying with them, and me. My family was happy to get the pictures that I had had printed but Xander had even more special pictures.  When he was there they had a six year old son who died about six months before I arrived.  I had no idea there had been another child until I had left their village and another volunteer filled me in on the details.  Apparently when someone dies people do not talk about him -- and they did not.  But Kumba was very excited to get the pictures and told me these were .pictures of her son who had died.  I think he died of liver disease but they said yellow fever.  The Peace Corps doc said that when someone is jaundiced they will say it is yellow fever, but yellow fever has been eradicated in The Gambia.

Since I am not a Muslim the interesting part of the day (other than seeing my family) for me was the slaughter of the ram.  The ram had been washed and was clean and snowy white.  They had dug a small pit in front of where the ram's neck.  In the photo below Xander and Momodu, my host brother, are holding the back of the ram.  My host father is hold the ram's mouth and is reaching behind himself for the knife.  I am happy to report that he used a brand new knife for the ramicide.

In the next picture he has cut the wind pipe and arteries and is allowing the blood to flow into the pit, which you can see is right in front of the clothesline (??? -- not where I would have placed it).

In the last picture they have broken the ram's neck.  Apparently they are not allowed to break his neck until he has bled out into the pit.  That is a part of the tradition that is not so humane because our ram actually tried to get up before they broke his neck.  But he did not make one sound.

Once they had finished, they skinned him and prepared him for cooking. Another part of the tradition says that the heart and liver must be cooked and served first. Here is the plate they served to us.  The yellow things are french fries (even in the Gambia), there is a rib visible that was tasty and a couple of bites of mutton, but the rest were bites of liver.  I am proud to say that I ate several bites of liver without a fuss and it turns out that Xander did not even eat one.  .

During the preparation.and meal, neighbors were over with platters of ram meat and Kumba prepared platters to give to the neighbors.

After the liver and potatoes was gone they served the main dish meal which was more palatable than the liver. Meanwhile the Gambian sun was at its peak with not a breath of wind.  Sweat was poring off everyone.  I was leary about leaving too late so I left about the time that the neighbors were arriving in their fancy dress.  The same group of women who had been there for Ramadan showed up for Tobaski.  They are Kumba's buddies.  I was so hot when I got back to Fajara that I went straight to the transit house to sit in air conditioned splendor.  One of the PCVs there said that the heat index that day was 124.  Now that is hot..  Enough said.

Buying a Bed in The Gambia

I am now safely ensconced in a new home in The Gambia but getting to this point was has not been an easy process.  I will post more on that later but one of the things I needed was a bed.  I did not realize that this was going to be a difficult thing to find but it was.  A Peace Corps driver took me shopping in the Serrekunda market which deserves a whole post on its own.  We drove around looking for beds on display on the side of the road and found several used twin sized beds.  However Peace Corps had said to bring queen sized sheets so I wanted to get a bigger bed then twin sized.  Finally the driver spotted these beds on the side of the road.  They at least were big enough and were 1500 dalasi -- $50.00.  So I said fine.  Then the driver had to go find the man who had made the beds.  He turned out to be a white haired man who looked to be about 70 or more.  After we said that we wanted the bed, he had to nail boards onto the dies of the bed to hold the slats,

Then he had to cut the boards that served as the slats using a handsaw.  If you look closely at the picture below, you can see that some of the boards end with a diagonal cut.  What you can't see is that  the ends of a couple of the boards were lying in a puddle of urine.  I was starting to back out of this because I could not see how 7 boards were going to support a mattress when the carpenter said we needed to buy a "cardboard" to fit on top of the boards.  This could be procured at the mattress store across the street.  

The cardboard turned out to be a thin sheet of masonite so the mattress would be evenly supported on the cross boards.  Then it was time to get a mattress.  The mattresses are made of foam and I don't mean memory foam ala Tempurpedic.  I made the mistake of getting a thicker one so that my sheets would fit better.  These are super memory foam, in other words they don't forget.  There is a big crevice in the mattress from where I have been sleeping and another from where I sit on the side of the bed.  Not to mention that the foam is sweat inducing.  Thank goodness on some very sage advice, I purchased a wonderful fan that will build up a charge while it is plugged in and run off the charge if the power goes off.  So far I have always had enough charge to run the fan while I sleep.

Anyway,  my total cost for the bed, "cardboard", and mattress was 3400 D or $113.33.  Just for grins I went into furniture store and priced a bed.  Now any furniture store in the Gambia caters to foreigners and wealthier Gambians.  I was looking at a bed that had a mattress, box springs, and headboard with built in side tables.  I asked the salesgirl how much it cost and she said 75000 D or $2500.00 US.  I am sure there was bargaining room there but obviously not enough room to meet a Peace Corps volunteer's budget.  After sleeping on the foam I am a little jealous of the innerspring mattress though.