I’ve been in Africa for three months now, but it never feels like it. Sometimes I think I’ve only been here a moment, that this place, these people are still as strange to me as if I’d just arrived, that all the things I’ve learned and experienced haven’t brought me any close to understanding Africa or it to understanding me. That I am still an alien.
Sometimes (and this is more often, lately) I feel like I’ve always been here. My perspective on some things have changed so radically, things once bizarre – like my pit latrine, or fishing for bones in my food, or washing from a bucket - are just parts of my life. I sweep the dead bugs through the door every day, casualties of the nightly battles between spiders, flies, and ants. I never touch anyone with my left hand. The call to prayer wakes me up at five o’clock every morning, shouting haunted Arabic through a loudspeaker at the mosque, a lonely voice spreading itself over the village. I once asked someone to translate one of the phrases for me: “Prayer is better than sleep.” It used to irritate the hell out of me, but when I go a night without it I feel a little disconsolate.
Other Peace Corps volunteers feel the same way (about feeling like they’ve been here a long time, that is. Most of them still hate the damn call to prayer.) During training we would talk endlessly about lives back home, friends, family, zany anecdotes and stories of college. But conversations with volunteers now concern only our lives here. Projects we’re working on, classes we’re teaching, frustrations with schools, living conditions, village leaders, plans for trips and vacations. It takes an active effort to get us to talk about our past, to relate anything about ourselves beyond our African lives, and when we do it feels strained. The stories we tell don’t feel true any more, like we’re relating events we only heard about second-hand. There’s something about this life that eats you up.
I’m perfectly happy to be eaten up, personally. Not that I had any particular problem with my life in America, or that I want to forget about everyone who cares about me – far from it. But for the first couple of months, none of this felt real. The idea of two years – twenty-four months, one hundred four weeks, seven hundred thirty days, seven hundred thirty early morning calls to prayer – seemed ridiculous. Surely, a part of me assumed, a part accustomed to twenty-four hour convenience stores and pizza delivery, this was just some vacation (a very low-budget vacation), and I could go back to my air-conditioning and internet soon. And because none of it was real, I could accept none of it; every other thought was of home. If I’d begun this little blog here a month or two ago, it would read very differently. Phrases like “doing well” would have come up a lot. “Learning to live with.” “Looking forward to.” “A tad isolated.”
It’s different now, though. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what the change is. The food has gotten better, and some of the other volunteers have been teaching me how to cook (although most of them get care packages from friends and family back home, hint, hint). Oddly enough, now that I’m the only white person in my village, I actually feel less isolated. My work takes me to other sites fairly regularly, and I have the freedom to visit people even when it doesn’t. My language has gotten to the point where I can carry on a ten or twenty minute conversation, and actually make jokes and tell stories with my host family. I have a job to do now, which is crucial. I’m teaching classes at my school’s computer lab, I’m organizing their large but anarchic library, I’m teaching a math class at a nearby town once a week because their school has no math teacher, and I’ve started working with a few drama groups to put on short plays. I’m here. I’m alive. Whatever part of me was holding back has decided that I am, in fact, living in Africa, that I will for some time, and that that’s pretty damn cool.
If you’ve just stumbled onto this blog, and you’ve kept with it thus far, you’re probably a little confused. So let me backtrack. My name is Nathan Anderith. I am a twenty-three-year-old American citizen, currently volunteering with the United States Peace Corps in the Republic of the Gambia. This here is my blog. There are many others like it, but this one is mine. Because my name is a little hard for the locals to pronounce, with their inability to make "th" sounds, I go by Yahya.
If you’ve never heard of the Gambia, don’t feel bad. It’s a teeny little country in West Africa, bordered on one side by the ocean and on the other three by Senegal. It’s a thin, snakelike nation that’s basically just a river with five to ten miles of land on either side. There’s a legend that the British created the country when they sailed a warship down the middle of the river and continuously fired their broadside cannons. Wherever the canonballs landed, that’s where they marked the border of the country. It has about a million and a half people, half of whom live in or near the capital of Banjul and over half of whom are less than fifteen years old.
As it was originally settled by the British, the official language is English, but you wouldn’t know it to walk through most villages. The nation is split up into about ten tribes, each with villages scattered around the country, each with their own distinct language. Since most of the traders come from Senegal, French is also common. One would thing with such a smorgasbord of tongues and peoples that communities would be insular and tensions high. Therein lies the genius of the Gambia, something that makes it almost unique from any place I’ve ever been: it has almost no ethnic conflict. Someone can travel from a Wolof village to a Mandinka and be welcomed. A Jola can marry a Fula. These peoples are packed into a tiny country together like a canned fruit salad, but instead of the pressure cooker of racial tension you’d expect there’s just a general feeling of live and let live. People from other countries, other walks of life are accepted, welcomed as guests.
From what I’ve been able to see, this Sesame Street-esque level of tolerance grows out of the practice of senewu, or joke-mates. A given family will have a few other families that are its official joke-mates; every time members of these families meet, they exchange a series of extended and vitriolic insults. The first time I saw this I thought the two men were going to start beating the hell out of each other, until everyone started laughing. It’s like the college rivalries we have in the States, but with genuine good feeling behind it, rather than thinly-suppressed hatred. Cities and even entire regions will have joking relationships with each other. I was trained in the southern region of Kiyang, but now I’m living in Baddibu, and any time I mention where I lived I’m subjected to a ten-minute rant about how people from Kiyang are poor, lazy, and dirty, and do nothing but eat and sleep all the time. I usually respond that Baddibu folks are greedy thieves who would sell their mothers for a bag of rice. The slightly disturbing thing is that both of these have elements of truth. People can get pretty nasty. But as long as it’s all in the joke-mate spirit, no one gets offended, no one gets in a fight, and, on a larger scale, no one starts a war.
Anyone who knows me even slightly probably realizes that this might be the perfect country for me.
I’m running out of time to write and, knowing my audience, you’re probably running out of attention span, so I’ll end with a story. It’s far from the most interesting thing that’s happened to me, but it’s the one that can best be encapsulated into an amusing bite-sized chunk. I had a dance-off with a leaf monster.
My friends in village invited me to an even in the next town. My Mandinka wasn’t very good at that point (still isn’t), so the most I could get out of them was that it was a “masquerade.” I was a little worried because I didn’t have anything for a costume, and I didn’t want to be embarrassed. Hah.
We get there, and I see about two hundred people standing in a circle and clapping (interesting side-note: these people don’t have much for instruments, but they more than make up for it with their ability to spontaneously generate incredibly complicated percussion beats. A group of them will get together, start clapping randomly, and before you know it they’ve got a rhythm going with enough complexity and intensity to put a marching band drum line to shame).
In the middle of the circle is something is moving. It looked like a pile of leaves you’d raked had grown feet and a red helmet, downed six cups of coffee and a handful of amphetamines, and started to boogie. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone dance that fast in my life, much less a compost heap. A group of young men patrolled the perimeter of the circle, dancing slowly and every so often whacking people with sticks for no reason that I could see. Groups of audience members, mostly women, would periodically run into the circle and dance around the leaf monster for a minute, then flee shrieking when it ran at them. All in all a good time. I was a part of one of these groups, but when I tried to run back into the circle they shoved me back to the center. The monster jumped and danced around, and when I tried to dance with it for a second it stopped, turned around, bent over, and shook its butt at me. Everyone laughed.
It was on.
The leaf pile was the better dancer, faster, more athletic, but I had hundreds of crappy movies and music videos to fall back on. While it was doing his leafy dance, I gave it some Saturday Night Fever, some YMCA, some robot. When the crowd cheered for me it started hopping in huge circles around me, clearing a good three or four feet with every jump. I had visions of it as Mario and myself a hapless white Goomba. So I did what anyone else would do, and started channeling Michael Jackson. I did the moonwalk, the Thriller dance, even the crotch-grab and yelp. I don’t think it saw that coming, and its expression seemed a little nonplussed; it turned around and started doing the butt-shaking thing again. I dropped into the Russian kicking dance and it actually hit me with its butt, sending me sprawling into the dirt. Clearly, I had to put it in its place.
So I took a jump to the left. And then a step to the right. I put my hands on my hips. And tucked my knees in tight. It just sort of watched as I did the entire Time Warp, ending with the falling over dead, at which point it spun around a few times and fell over himself. I don’t know if that means I won, but everyone cheered when I walked out of the circle.
I don’t mind telling you, I felt pretty damn cool.
