Mad skillz

This has been a slow month, so this post will have to be a little shorter. There've been a plethora of holidays and school functions, so in the last month I've only had about a week of actual classes. I've spent most of my time hanging out with my host family, going to the various prayer ceremonies and watching bootleg copies of Gilmore Girls. I'm really living the life, let me tell you.

I love going to Muslim prayer. They don't really like me going to the regular ones, but for the special events they're more than happy to have me tag along. I don't understand the Arabic prayers, but the workout of falling to my knees, touching my head to the ground, then jumping up again twenty or thirty times is great. The head rush helps with the religious experience. Plus I usually stand in the back, so I get the indescribable experience of having thousands of Africans all moon me at once.

All kidding aside, I really do enjoy the prayers. There's an intensity, a fervor created by so many people all focusing on a single idea, united in their belief, performing rituals they've done their whole lives, so many times it's part of their muscle memory, but still finding it them some solace, some connection with each other. It's not something I can really understand as an outsider, but I appreciate that they at least give me the chance to be a part of it.

Their big December celebration is called Tabaskie, a celebration of Abraham demonstrating his faith in God by being willing to kill his son and God demonstrating his faith in Abraham by not making him do it. In the story, Abraham kills a ram instead, so on Tabaskie every family that can afford it (and most of the ones that can't) slaughter a ram and have a feast.

When my family killed their dinner they asked me if I wanted to hold the head still. I couldn't really think of a way to decline without looking like a wuss, so I got to keep the ram from thrashing around as my brother cut its throat. I thought I would have to look away when it happened, but I couldn't, even when I tried. At the last second, before the knife cut all the way through, it stopped struggling, its breath calmed, and I swear it just looked at me. I thought I saw something as it died, in its eyes. I'm not sure what. I kept looking until they shooed me away to skin the body.

That night they had a party at school, which was a lot of fun. Call me a racist if you want, but every African kid I've met can dance like hell. Put me to shame, certainly. Everyone was having a blast until they up and kicked us out and told us we had to pay 25 Dalasi (about a dollar) to get back in. That's a hell of a lot of money for a Gambian kid in the bush, so most of the children in the village just milled around outside and listened to the music. There was a vague feeling of shame in the whole crowd.

I was feeling tired, and annoyed, and not in the mood to be extorted on a religious holiday. So I grabbed my host sister and started swing dancing. She shrieked, of course, and tried to run away, but I persisted and soon we were doing all kinds of twirls and tucks and turns and whatnot. Once she stopped freaking out she was actually pretty good, so I grabbed a random guy in the crowd and told her to dance with him, then found my other host sister and danced with her. After a few minutes I had a good thirty or forty people all dancing, spinning and stepping around on the dusty road, in the middle of the night, as the music filtered out to us from the mostly empty party. There was a lot of falling over.

It was certainly my best Tabaskie.

The next day I was feeling good. There's a tradition of kids walking from compound to compound and asking for salibo, or little gifts like candy or money. It's like trick or treating, but a lot more annoying, as they tend to ask for a lot and don't have much shame about hitting you up again if you've already given them something. I wanted to keep my good mood, so I decided to hit the road.

A friend of mine in the middle of the country had left for a few weeks to visit her family in America. Another volunteer and I decided she should be punished for this. We took a bus taxi to her site, told her family we were her friends, there with her blessing, and painted her walls with as many garish and terrifying colors we could find. It looked like Jackson Pollack had a seizure, with twisted streaks of red, blue, and green streaking her walls, scattered with bizarre pictures and vulgar phrases. We forgot to buy paintbrushes, so it was finger-painting all the way. All in all a fine artistic achievement.

Karma caught up with us on the way back, however. We were in another bush taxi, this one quite large, and the driver was having some problems with shifting. Most of these vehicles are at least ten or fifteen years old, never been tuned up or maintained. They're absolutely terrifying the first time you ride them, and it seems like they're about to fall apart at any second. I think it's a testament to how the Peace Corps has made me a much less flappable person when the driver, speeding down a hill, stalled out the car and couldn't get it back in gear.

I have to admit, though, I got a little worried when he pulled the gear shift completely out of the floor. He looked at it for a second, almost curiously, as though he had no idea what this thing was or how it got into his hand. Oddly enough, the car wouldn't work after that. As they were trying to fix it, the man who owned the car and was riding along told me that there was nothing wrong with the vehicle, that this was a new driver and it was his fault we broke down. I don't know. I've met some bad drivers, but I've never seen one so bad he could dismantle a car with his bare hands.

Maybe by the time I leave, I will have learned such skill.

Oh, before I go, I'm linking to a blog of a friend of mine, Marcus Walton. I'm not great at taking pictures, which is why I haven't posted many, but he's amazing, so if you want a visual picture of the Gambia hit his site up.