Teacher Housing -- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The education system in The Gambia is national.  Teachers can be posted anywhere around the country with housing usually included as part of the job. Some of the schools are near main roads and others are much farther in the bush. I recently went to two different schools in the Central River Region and saw what the disparity in housing can be like. The first school was about a 25 minute ride from the main road over bumpy dirt roads. The head teacher at the school was new and wanted to bring the state of the teacher housing to my attention in hopes that I could bring it to the attention of the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education. Imagine being a new head teacher at a school and arriving to find that the head's housing looked like this:

He has to take money out of his limited salary to rent a room in the village.

The picture below is of the Deputy head's house which is obviously better than the head's home but still leaks heavily in the rainy season.

Now contrast this with the teacher housing in Illiasa. Granted it is not the Ritz but Iliasa is a few minutes from the main road and this housing is so much better than the housing for the village that was far from the road. The goats are just an added benefit.

Fashions in School Garden Training

Here are a few pictures that caught my fancy.  Below are a couple of pictures of Fula women.  Fulas like to wear jewelry as evidenced by the multiple piercings on these ladies.

Real men do wear lace.  This is the first picture I have taken of a man in lace but I have seen it all over the country, including the WFP.  This outfit is a long shirt over a pair of matching lace trousers.

It also tickled me that he was in a warm classroom but is wearing a knit stocking hat and also was not the only man in the classroom who was wearing a knit hat.

School Garden Training Finally Happens--

I have been out of touch for awhile because I have been buried in planning for School Garden Training.  But Round 1 is completed and I have lived to tell the tale, though at times I was in doubt that I would.  I had been left a great document by my predecessor that had all the information on how to plan school garden training.  So while the national head of programme was on a month's leave I proceeded to follow the document and got everything all planned. On her return she completely changed everything about how the training would proceed and upped the number of schools that would be trained.  Needless to say this raised havoc with the budget.  But eventually by tweaking here and there we finally were within the confines of the overall project budget.

Training was a two part process.  We are doing garden training in two regions so we first conducted a Training of Trainers (TOT) at the regional headquarters in each of the two regions.  For this training we brought in people from the national level to act as trainers. We had experts in setting up  and planning a garden, nutrition, and horticulture, who were able to cram what had been a two day program into a one day program.  We invited cluster monitors,  agricultural extension agents, school feeding focal points and garden masters to the training.  The Gambian government is in charge of all the schools in the country, which is divided into six regions for education.  Within the regions the schools are further divided into clusters.  The cluster monitor is stationed within the cluster and provided with a motorcycle so that he can visit all of the schools within his cluster.  How often they visit varies greatly with the cluster monitor.  School Feeding Focal Points are government employees that are responsible for school feeding and school agricultural matters for the region.  Agriculture extension agents  are employed by the Department of Agriculture but can be a real help in the school gardens if they can be encouraged to visit. Since the TOT was done at the regional headquarters we were a little more plugged in as the pictures show. WFP paid for gas to run a generator so that we could have uninterrupted power during the training. 

Below is a picture of Gibril Barry (hand up at the head table), a pixie of a man, with unending passion about what he is doing. Unfortunately his passion also makes him hard to shut up some times but I figured it was worth putting a picture of him in mid lecture since he was a large part of both trainings.  I am sitting next to him wishing he would be quiet and let the instructor get on with his own presentation.  The woman sitting in front of the door is our WFP nutritionist, a woman who WFP keeps extremely busy.

The gentleman from the Horticulture Department was very good in his demonstrations of composting and organic pesticides.  The picture below was a demonstration of the quick 
composting method. The stick is used as a thermometer.  If you pull it out and it is no longer hot then the process is complete and the compost is ready to use.  We did not use the amount of materials that were required for a real pile but the techniques were demonstrated. People seemed to be very interested in his demonstrations.

After we completed the training of trainers in both regions, the next step was training at the cluster level.  This training was all done at the school that was the cluster headquarters. We invited the Food Management Committee chair, a Mothers Club member, and any garden masters who had not been trained in the Training of Trainers. We are trying to encourage community involvement so that the garden can become a year round enterprise and provide to the school food bowl every term.

Unfortunately I originally set out for this training on Sunday when the car in which we were riding would only reach a top speed of 35 to 40 KPH (a blazing speed of 24.8548 mph). Luckily one of the people in the car told him to turn around because we would not be able to get to the places we needed to be at that kind of speed.  WFP was short vehicles because a food distribution was going on and most of the vehicles and drivers were out in the field.  It was hairy for awhile figuring out what was to happen but we ended up getting up early the next morning with a different car that could move (120 KPM).  However since we left on Monday I got to the first training late and still had to repackage and divide up the seeds for the different schools in the 4 clusters in this region. The headmaster for the school and I were in his office bagging seeds for a long time but we were able to get them all done in time to pass the first set out.  We also gave every school a garden manual, books for record keeping, gardening equipment and chain link fencing so the community members were pretty happy.

One thing that I did not enjoy about the training was being keeper of the money.  Gambia runs on a cash basis.  Checks do exist and we get paid by a transfer to the bank but most day to day business is done with cash.   I have attached a picture below of the cash that I had to take with me to reimburse people for various things.

People coming for training, are given money for transportation and lodging. Most of them find someplace to stay for free, since friends and relatives are all over the country. We provided breakfast and lunch. If people are trainers they are paid at a higher rate as facilitators. This happens throughout the country for any type of training. Our government partners are always willing to come on a monitoring mission because of the DSA (daily subsistance allowance). The government pay is not very high so the chance to get more from DSA is always welcome.  My pile of money also paid the cooks, and for any required supplies, but the major part of it is DSA. 

So what my bags of money enabled was lots of participation in the cluster level.  People seemed very engaged and asked questions.  Below is a picture of a group exercise --
the people were supposed to look at the crops and determine whether they could be grown during the different growing seasons.

 The man below was my favorite instructor of all of the training I observed. He was the regional nutrition representative and he knew how to involve the class and make it interesting.  

He had people choose different foods and then moved them into the groups of the food pyramid based on what they chose Then he actually moved some of the people into a human food pyramid so that they could see the proportions of what you should eat in a very visible way.

I included the picture of the woman below just because I liked her interest and her face.

We still have 2 more rounds to go.  Altogether we are training people from 156 schools in the two regions.  I truly hope that we will get the community involvement that we need.  I have seen too many gardens that were eaten up by animals during a break. If the community is invested in the garden that will not happen.

Last but not least is a message from our sponsor, the EU. The European Union is paying for all of the school garden training, equipment, etc. In return they like to have some visibility so we have created signs  that are posted at many of the schools.  Of course WFP gets some credit too.

Bot flies and more

The  tourist season is getting started again in The Gambia.  I have seen early arrivals and have started to be approached more than I had been in the off season (downside).  However, tourism is a big part of the Gambian economy, so I guess it is worth being toubob'd more than usual. Cape Point, in which the UN House is located, has a number of hotels and restaurants that cater to tourists.  One of these is the Bakau Guest House which is both a restaurant and hotel. The restaurant  overlooks the fish market in Bakau where the fishermen bring their catch at the end of the day and people come to buy. It also has a tower with a winding staircase to a lookout that gives a panoramic view of the surrounding area. The photo below is facing inland and gives an indication of how closely packed in the houses are. As you can see the roofs are multi-colored.  This is because they are mostly corrugate roofs and have panels in different stages of rusting out.  They will replace a leaking panel with a new panel so you end up with the patchwork effect. You can see the football (aka soccer) stadium in the background on the right.

The next picture shows why the tourists come. The Gambia has a coastline with a lot of usable beach. Taking a beach walk is one of my more favorite activities.  On a hot day there is usually always a nice breeze coming from the Atlantic.  You can see some of the fishing boats in the foreground of the picture.

  

I recently participated in a class in Geo-Mapping along with Gambians from various government agencies. This class was sponsored by the World Bank and  held at the University of The Gambia, Faraba campus.  The University has a large campus in the metropolitan area close to where I live, however the Faraba campus is out in the countryside.  When we were taking the class in a well equipped Microsoft computer classroom, we were the only class in session at the school. There was another computer lab next door equipped with brand new Apple iMacs that were still covered with foam wrap. But there were no other students taking classes.  In the area for teacher offices all of the offices were empty except one that had a name tag and some books.  I think the idea was that if you build it they will come, but it hasn't happened yet.  The other interesting thing is that the campus itself is fenced and you have to be granted access by an armed soldier holding his rifle.  I would have been a little more intimidated by this, but there are roadblocks with armed soldiers throughout the country so I have gotten used to seeing this. Can't say that I will miss it when I come home, though.

I thought I would introduce you to another one of the joys of a tropical climate, the bot fly.  Luckily I have not had an up close and personal experience with them yet, however many of the other PCVs have had one.  The bot fly lays its eggs in your laundry.  If the clothes are dried in the sun that is enough to kill the egg, however if it is a cloudy day the eggs survive. When they hatch in your clothing the larva burrows into your skin to mature, leaving what looks like an nasty pimple.  When they have fully matured they emerge from your body.  This is not just a Gambian pest.  You Tube has many videos of emerging worms, many provided by PCVs. In the picture below the bot fly larva has not yet made its departure. Another one of the PCVs from my group, who is married, had her husband remove a bot fly from her bottom. They said that if they ever renewed their vows they would promise to remove all bot flies from each other.

Was Kunte Kinte here???

On my last trek, I was in Janjangbureh, originally called Georgetown, which is an island that was used by the English colonial government. The island is currently the regional headquarters for education and the home of the regional governor.  But back in its not so glorious history, it was home to a prison for keeping captured Africans for the slave trade until they could be loaded onto ships.  The remains of the prison still exist on the island. I was traveling with a Gambian who told me that when the captives entered the prison it was often the last time that they saw The Gambia.  When ships came to take the captives, they were taken out through a tunnel and loaded into holds of the ships in the dark. The pictures show the ruins of the prison, still standing today. They are the two worn brick buildings on the left of the road.

I do find it interesting that the English would not allow slavery in their own country but were more than willing to profit from it by enslaving people in their colonies.  I have no idea if Kunte Kinte had to pass through this prison, but he may have.  For those of you young puppies who have no clue who Kunte Kinte is, he is an ancestor of Alex Haley, who wrote a book called Roots.  The book traced his family back to a young Gambian who was captured in the forest and taken to America where he spent his life in slavery.  The book was a best seller and the subject of an incredibly popular mini-series in the 70's.  I reread the book after I had been here a year and  the scenes of village life meant a lot more to me. Obviously many things have changed but some definitely hit a familiar note.

Rant

Okay, I reached my limit with critters over the weekend.  I was used to sharing my house with geckos.  I would catch sight of them from time to time but they were always hurrying away to hide themselves.  They eat bugs so my price for their bug extermination was to sweep up the occasional droppings.  When I came back from nearly 3 weeks on vacation I realized that there were many sweeping opportunities, I just did it everyday so I did not notice.

Big roaches (aka palmetto bugs in Florida) and I did not live quite so peacefully.  Once when I was taking a shower I felt something on my upper arm and looked down and there was a big roach on my upper arm.  Luckily I always were flip flops in the shower so I brushed it off and crushed it. But again when I got back from vacation they must have been using my shower as a hotel because when I pulled the shower curtain closed there were 3 on the floor and one crawling up my leg.  Flip flops work well as roach killers.

But my most recent experience was the final straw (I hope).  One night I walked into the kitchen and flipped on the light just in time to see the back half of a rat disappearing behind the shelf/table that I had had built.  I actually let out a scream when I saw it (did not know that I was that kind of person) but quickly shut up.  I did not go into the kitchen but turned around and left.  The next day I looked for signs of my visitor and decided that it was just passing through and was not setting up residence. Boy was I wrong. This past weekend I noticed that something had been chewing on my sponges so I decided to check things out again.  I found definite signs of the rat this time but was not quite prepared for most absolutely definite sign that I found.  I lifted up my cook top and found 5 baby rats.  I think they were fairly new born -- pink, hairless and helpless, with about two inch body lengths.  I was so grossed out I had to walk out of the kitchen.  I finally decided that I could sweep them into a dustpan and flush them down the toilet (low flush toilets are not part of Gambian life) so I went back into the kitchen and followed my plan. Mama never said there'd be days like this.

End of rant.

It's Ba-a-a-ck

Rainy season in the Gambia definitely is definitely back.  It was slow getting started, but once it got going it has been doing its best to make up for the slow start.  There are some paved roads in The Gambia, but the majority of them are sandy dirt.  Rain can really wreck havoc with them, creating channels and pot holes that make car travel interesting to say the least but sometimes even walking can be difficult.  The pictures I have attached were taken from the corner nearest to my compound. In addition to the water it also shows the way that compounds in the city are configured.  None of the grassy spaces of Mariama Kunda (my training village) but one compound after another with adjoining walls. The other pictures are the other roads from the corner.  As you can see there is water, a lot of water.  Since I came with the education group, they trained us in the summer before the next school year started.  Because of this I will have the privilege of experiencing 3 rainy seasons.  There is one good thing about the rain though.  By the end of October you just get the sun without any cloud cover and it is bloody hot.  The rain at least keeps temperatures to tolerable levels.

The girl below is the daughter of the bitek owner on my corner.  Her name is Bintu and she is rather fascinated with good ol' toubob Rindi.  I included the picture because #1 she is such a cutie but also because you kinda get a long distance glance at my compound in the background. If you look behind her you can see double red doors above her left shoulder which are doors to a garage, the beginning of the compound. Then you see a brownish horizontal streak in the background above the middle of her head.  That streak is a beam above the entrance to the compound. She is leaning on one of the doors to the bitek, behind which is stacked bags of charcoal. These are not briquettes, but charcoal that villagers have made themselves by burying slow burning wood which is a source of income for them. Many city dwellers still cook their food over charcoal the same way they did in Mariama Kunda.

The following picture is not a rainy picture but shows that there is an up side to the rainy season -- The Gambia turns green again.  I was in Region 2 a couple of weeks ago and took a picture from an upstairs window.  Everywhere you looked you saw the green of growing crops, often with women tending to them, bending straight over from the waist (ouch!). If you zoom in you can see a group of them.