Cleaning up

There’s a special sort of feeling you get when you’re raking flaming bones and offal with a pitchfork, as the fetid stench of decay roils with the greasy smoke in a horrific miasma of choking death. It’s called civic pride.

In a noble effort to clean our streets, get people invested in their communities, and really irritate the hell out of everyone, the bureaucracy of the Gambia created a policy called Set Settal. One of the more bizarre pieces of legislation I’ve seen, it requires everyone in the country to take four hours on the last Saturday of every month and, as an act of national solidarity and purpose, clean. It’s like that rule you had with your roommate in college, except it’s enforced with Kalashnikovs instead of passive aggressive little notes.

No one actually cleans, of course. But since everyone’s supposed to be, businesses are closed and transportation slams to a halt. Which is a lot of fun, since every vehicle is stopped at nine in the morning, wherever it happens to be, and doesn’t move until one in the afternoon. If you’re wise, you avoid traveling that day. I’ve never claimed to be so, and have spent more days than I’d like to remember trapped in some town the size of a bowling alley, napping in the scorching shade along with thirty other absent-minded travelers.

So in general, not a fan. I’m marking that a one on the customer satisfaction card when I leave. But the other week I was invited to an actual Set Settal event, where people from the government and community gather with shovels and wheelbarrows to clean up the trash in the street and tidy the miniature landfills. Sounds exciting, huh? Well, after a while you take what vacations you can get.

It ended up being a pretty good time. No one really expected me to do anything except stand there and be white (which is the case a lot of the time. I’m like a mascot or a trophy wife), so it shocked them when I picked up a pitchfork and started to clean. The novelty wore off fairly quickly, though, and before long they were shouting me orders. A group of us would gather all the trash in an area into a pile, then a guy would come around and light it on fire. It was gratifying to watch.

At one point we got into the middle of the largest mini-landfill, the one where they dumped animal bones and mechanical parts. We were working our way inward, when the fire guy got a little overzealous and lit the trash before it was fully in a pile. The flames spread quickly, and soon the ground was burning across the entire alley. I backed off, but the guys with me just headed right in - if anything, they raked faster, so I took a deep breath and followed.

It was a tad disturbing. I saw cow skulls that had been soaked in feces then lit on fire. Discarded machine parts burned along with plastic bags and old clothes. The voices of the other shovelers echoed weirdly, and I could dimly see their struggling forms through the smoke. Everything burned wetly. The stench was like a thick liquid, forcing its way up your nostrils, soaking into your skin.

When I got home none of my host siblings or my dogs would come near me, and I emptied three buckets of water scrubbing my brief visit to Hell out of my skin. Still, it felt good: I’d cleaned something. You don’t get many unambiguous wins here, so you take what you can get.

Life has generally taken a turn toward the macabre and bizarre lately. Keen readers will remember I have two dogs, Brownie and Chulo. Chulo’s the one I raised from a puppy. He's my best friend here, the only constant I have. Brownie’s the one I unwillingly adopted, who manages to be both the village idiot and bicycle, whose puppies I took care of for two months. This was not a pleasant experience, for either the dog or myself, and neither of us was looking to repeat it. So we were both unhappy when she went into heat again.

We did our best. She hid in my house, and I locked her away every night. Chulo was included in the lock-down after he got into a vicious fight with one of the visitors Brownie’s pheromones attracted. When I pulled him off the other dog he was latched on its face, actually pulling the skin away from the bone. I was almost proud; he’d come a long way since the scared little puppy who got beat up every night. Somehow in the tumult I got bit, which led to a couple fun little rabies shots.

But after a few weeks Brownie’s belly started to extend, and we knew we’d failed. For the next month she was prone to wild mood swings and bizarre behavior, like sprinting in circles around the perimeter of my bath room or trying to bite her own ears. When she was calmer she stared off into the distance with a hunted look, and I’m sure she was remembering half a dozen hungry mouths shooting off the floor, like tentacles of a squid, latching on to her and pulling her to the ground. I remember that look from when she would flee in terror from her own children, dragging them along the ground until their suction maws detached.

I went to the capital for a meeting, leaving a key with my host family and a request to lock up both dogs at sundown each evening. When I got back and the children saw me, they all burst into tears.

“Brownie is bad! Brownie is bad!” they shrieked.

“What happened?” I said.

“She eat her daughters!”

At the house I found a thinner, happier Brownie grinning from ear to ear. Of the puppies there was no sign. Apparently when the time had come she’d retreated around the side of the house for some privacy. The family heard some grunting and squealing for a few hours, then Brownie came trotting back, licking her chops and looking pleased with herself.

My reaction probably wasn’t what they were expecting: “Great!”

Now, I’m not heartless, and I’m certainly opposed to post-natal abortion, with the possible exception of the Dallas Cowboys and anyone who says “awkward” when they mean “bad”. But I never met the little meals on wheels, and animals die every day here. Most dogs you see in village have been mistreated and neglected, generally leading pretty miserable lives. And I’m not going to lie, I wasn't going to miss cleaning up small lakes up urine each morning and positioning the heads of idiot puppies that can’t even suckle a teat properly. Brownie made the decision her instincts led her to, and I can’t really fault the poor girl for not wanting to go through that again so soon.

Still, for the next few days I kept my distance from the cannibal mama. Something in the way she smiled...

In village I’ve been trying to wrap up my projects. There’s a month left now, and the shadow of the real world is looming. I’d like to walk out of Africa thinking that something, anything, is different because I came.

The women’s business classes are still going, but they’re frustrating, both for my students and me, because no matter how much I teach them about supply and demand or proper budgeting, it won’t solve the essential problem they all face: there’s nowhere to sell their goods. There’s the local market, where dozens of women all sell essentially the same thing at absurdly low prices to a handful of customers with no money. Or they can trek to one of the weekly markets that are scattered around the region, paying absurd fares and letting a third of their inventory spoil during travel. Once they get there, odds are good that the market is already flooded with whatever they’re selling. If they don’t sell everything, unscrupulous Senegalese merchants will buy the leftovers, usually for a quarter of the asking price. Often the women will let their food rot rather than let themselves be cheated.

There’s an organization here called Gambia is Good that sells produce to restaurants and hotels in the capital. They run a few farms up-country, one of which is up the road past Kerewan. So we worked out a deal. They call me every week, tell me what they need that week, and the women have it ready each Sunday by the side of the road. GiG even paid better prices than you could get in the market. It worked incredibly well – my friends were able to sell the bulk of their crop without ever leaving their village or setting foot in a market stall. Most of them saw about a 15% increase in profits; not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but that little bit put them consistently in the black. It made things just a little bit easier.

It’s is a pattern I’ve found again and again when I work with small businesses here, from restaurants to mechanics to general stores. Nobody’s buying. Nobody has any money, so nobody can make any money. What they have they’re careful with, too careful to spend it on something new, something they haven’t been buying for years, which means that any innovative business folds almost immediately.

I was thrilled when a restaurant opened up in Kerewan. They were in a good location, a nice atmosphere, and they served chicken. Chicken! I can’t remember the last time I was so excited. Although Gambian food takes away your hunger, it never leaves you feeling full or satisfied, at least not for me. Those of you who saw me when I visited the States know how much weight I’ve lost. So this place was a godsend. And it wasn’t just chicken – he made pasta, salad, fish, omelets, it was like mana from heaven. I did everything I could to help him out, designing a menu, helping with the books, and eating there as often as I could.

But less than two months after the grand opening, the owner skipped town, a step ahead of a mob of angry creditors. He hadn’t had enough of a consistent customer base to make a profit. The entire concept of dining out is foreign to the village culture, and no one was willing to try something new. I remember once I wanted to thank my friend Yusupha for some help he’d given me, so I offered to buy him dinner. (Yusupha is the one who brought the severed ram head last Tabaskie, for folks following along at home.) He asked if I could just give him the money and he would eat at home instead. Bah.

Speaking of Yusupha, he’s also just started his own business. He’s selling small, low price solar-powered lights to villages without electricity. These are great little devices, simple and reliable. They were brought to the Gambia by an American couple who thought they could do a lot of good by offering locals a decent product that was affordable and useful. They wanted to set up distributors across the country, and asked me if I knew anyone with the energy and charisma to sell them. I immediately thought of Yusupha, who’s been my go-to guy for just about every community project I’ve done here.

We tried to get him a loan to buy a crate of the lights at wholesale, but the same microfinance company that refused to do business in Kerewan because it wasn’t an urban area refused to give him a loan because he was trying to start a new business.

“Business loans,” the branch manager told me earnestly, “are only intended for people who already have a business started. No one ever starts out with a loan.” He laughed jovially. “That would be ridiculous.”

But my friends agreed to give Yusupha a few lights on commission, with the idea that once he had sold a dozen or so he’d either have enough money to pay the wholesale price for a crate or enough credibility to get a loan. I’ve tagged along with him on a few sales calls, and it’s great to watch him work. He really understands how things work in small villages, knows who to talk to if he wants to shift the opinion of the whole community, when to push and when to let the idea build on its own. There are so few opportunities for talented individuals here, unless they have family connections.

And here’s the thing – Yusupha’s really helping. It’s hard for most Americans to really grasp just how much of a difference having electricity makes. The ability to see at night, without cumbersome flashlights or smoking candles, changes everything. Being able to work, study, or play in those hours effectively adds a third to your life. Yusupha’s not helping by giving grants or building lavish development projects. There’s no patronizing altruism – he’s just selling a product that people need, letting them buy a tangible improvement in their lives.

Again and again I’m finding that it’s only those tiny little changes that are worth a damn. Every Peace Corps Volunteer comes in thinking they’ll build a school, change a village, or save hundreds of babies, and they’re all disappointed when they find out that’s not gonna happen. I know I was. You might remember a long time back I was trying to build a massive car park / shopping center for Kerewan, with restaurants, bathrooms and artisans stalls. I wanted the glory of pointing to some huge edifice and saying “I did that.” It’s embarrassing to read over those entries now.

You see the same mentality in aid agencies the world over. Everybody’s gotta build a hospital or a farm. Drive down any main road in the Gambia and within fifty miles you’ll see ten signs proclaiming that this is the site of an irrigation garden, or a skill center, or a mango dehydrator, donated in the name of peace to the benighted peoples of Africa. Next to the sign is usually an abandoned building or an empty field.

You want to know the best work I’ve done here? Spillways - little ditches next to roads and footpaths. They rarely take more than a week to dig, and cost less than four dollars a meter, but they can save a village. During the rainy season floods are common, and roads can be washed away in a single night. Villages get cut off from the world, making it impossible to get access to food or healthcare.

More often, though, they’re cut off from their fields. Farmers have to slog miles through the mud to do any work. Carts can't get through, which means that everything has to be carried by hand. Animals brought in to plow get stuck or snap their legs. Agriculture in the Gambia is barely at a subsistence level as it is; all it takes it one bad rain and an entire village goes hungry. Spillways are cheap, they’re easy, and they keep the roads intact. I’ve planned dozens of them, sneaking them into budgets whenever I can’t get the funds. None of them have signs telling everyone how cool I am, but I guess I’ll just have to live with that.

In other good news, my drama club finally put a show together. We’d done little ones for the school before, but this was an honest-to-God production, with tickets and a real audience and everything. Very fancy. The whole thing raised my blood pressure enormously, though. Although I like to think I’ve adapted fairly well to the Gambian conception of time, when the actors didn’t show up until an hour after the show was supposed to start and the audience didn’t show up for until midnight, I started seeing red.

But someone knew someone who had a speaker system, and someone else had an uncle who was
a DJ. We blasted reggae across the village and soon the place was packed with villagers, chatting and dancing, most of whom didn’t have the slightest idea that they were attending a play. Still, once we stopped the music and my kids started the scenes, they all shut up and paid attention. They even seemed to have a good time.

I think it helped that I’d finally convinced the drama club that although plays where everyone dies of AIDS are super fun, maybe we should try a little comedy. We had a play where two old men are trying to steal a cow, but the cow doesn’t want to move, so they keep slipping and falling in the mud. There was one where a girl got a magic ju-ju to get revenge on her tormentors. Every time she touched it whoever she looked at went crazy, flailing around and barking or laughing hysterically. This one was great, because it really gave them a chance to cut loose and do whatever came into their head, giving it all the energy they had.

My personal favorite, though, was this weird little scene that only lasted about a minute. I’ve never seen anything that so perfectly captured the human condition. Or at least the male condition. It went like this (translated from Mandinka):

Man 1 (enters): “Look! A bowl of food. I will eat it. Ow ow ow! The spoon is too hot, I burned my mouth!”
Man 2 (enters): “Why are you crying?”
Man 1: “Um… I’m crying for all the poor children in the world that do not have any food. Here, eat.”
Man 2: “Ok. Ow ow ow!”
Man 1: “Why are you crying?”
Man 2: “I’m crying for all the poor children in the world who do not have any food.”
Man 1: “Liar! You’re crying because the spoon is hot!”

I got my own chance to perform again, since we had another open-mike night. I wrote this when I was thinking about the good folks from Washington that might be perusing this blog, and what kind of job that would be. I want to emphasize, in case one of them does read this, that it is meant with love.

Ode to a Peace Corps Blog Monitor

It’s not too gentle and it’s not too quick
As you click click through our tricky secrets.
Our fabulous lies, our dramatic inversions,
Our vaingasp speakings, our spotlight seekings.
In our little words you hunt for our little subversions.

Hunt, then, blog monitor.
Hunt out the blood in our tall dry tales.
Hunt down the breath of a thought of a truth.
Slaughter our stillborn musings, gasping mutely.
Sever what neck we dare to stick out.
Bleed our bad blogs of a hintbit of meaning.

In a ninetofive and a ninetofive,
Infirm days of cubicle withering,
The torture of carpet dust and clean lines.
You blink to the beat of minutes dying,
Stories tattooed on the gleam of your eye.

O! You bane of blogs!
You purifier of posts!
You last best defense against dangerous information.
You grim voyeur of auto-electric masturbation.

My blog monitor.
My glob vomiter.
My lobe limiter.
My friend,

When you sip your stale coffee does your mind taste attaya?
Does the flickerdeath office light burn like a Basse sun?
Where does your underbrain go when your overlife pauses?
Squat with me on my little shit hole while porcelain spreads your cheeks.
Wake with me to prayer calls.
Walk with me through dark places.
Shed my worn-out tears for me,
I don’t mind – I’ve got life enough here to spare.

It’s not too gentle and it’s not too quick,
As we glitter flit our world-saving bit
Past your steady march, your daily dollar.
You turn the gears of the land of the free,
Dreaming of spices you’ll never taste
And worlds you’ll never see.

Points of light

In January I finally got to go hunting, something I’ve been wanting to do for over a year now. I went out in bush one night with a friend of mine, a teacher named Saho, and a few other volunteers. We never shot anything, or even saw anything worth shooting, but it was a beautiful evening, without much of a moon, so the stars were burning. It’s funny, I keep realizing something over and over, and every time I do it’s fresh: Africa is scary at night. I suppose that seems obvious, but it’s really, really true. There’s something about the darkness here that’s thicker, more alive. It seems to bunch behind you in twisted knots, move in the corner of your eyes. All the white people spent a lot of time spinning around, sure there was something behind us. Saho found this hilarious.

At one point we saw a light off in the distance, maybe a hundred yards away. It was just a pinpoint, and I figured it was another hunter and started to wave with my headlamp. Saho clamped a hand on my arm. I protested, and he shushed me violently. “It’s a witch light,” he said.

I’d heard about these. Little lights that appear in the bush, with no cause or explanation. No one knows what they are, mostly because people who see them up close tend to die. I had been wanting to go out some night and try to track them down, but none of my friends wanted to take me. The light flicked out, but immediately flicked back, some fifty feet from where it had been. It’s possible it was two lights, but if so they were perfectly synchronized.

Now, I hope that any regular readers of this blog will know by now that I’m not easily frightened, nor do I shy away from unusual experiences. But something about that light bothered me. Maybe it was because I couldn’t tell what color it was – it seemed orange, at first, then white, then sort of green. Maybe it was the way that looking at it made me feel like I couldn’t quite get enough air, like my chest wasn’t big enough for my heart and my lungs. As a group we opted for the better part of valor and decided to leave this mystery unsolved.

I managed another first this month, attending a wrestling match. This, too, was something I’d wanted to do since coming to this country, but any time they had one in an area near me I had always been busy. Finally they had one in my village, on a night when I was in town, and I got my game face on.

This thing was epic. Hundreds of villagers gathered in a football field on the edge of town. Light was provided in dim islands by a few scattered bulbs that hung from logs shoved into the sand. The power station had been having some problems lately, so the lights flickered drunkenly – they would switch suddenly off, slowly light again, then off a few seconds later. In and around these indecisive patches of illumination, dark bodies twisted and grappled. The multitude of feet kicked up so much dust that the whole field was covered in a haze, and as the men fought in this African fog they appeared and disappeared from view like dreams.

West African wrestling isn’t like what you see on American TV, or in American gymnasiums. There was no artifice, no bullshit name calling or expostulating. No one used any complicated holds or strategies. They wrestled standing up, face to face, and the winner often ended up picking the loser entirely off the ground and throwing him through the air.

It’s worth mentioning that this was also the night I discovered that palm wine isn’t always terrible. I’d had it once before, after being warned by more seasoned travelers, and found it to be the most vile substance I had ever consumed – and I survived on public school lunches for years. It wasn’t harsh like strong liquor; it just had this sickly, nauseous quality that made my entire body rebel and my throat spasm. But a friend from village had some that he said was better (bad, bad Muslim), so I figured what the hell. It was drinkable. Not good, not by a long shot, but drinkable. Also very, very alcoholic.

Now, for the benefit of the good folks in Washington, I want to emphasize that I did not get drunk. However, it is possible that the alcohol had something to do with my agreeing, after a lot of prodding by my Gambian friends, to participate in the contest.

There was a lot of good-natured joshing and elbow nudging as I made my way out into the wrestling area. Quite a few catcalls in Mandinka that I don’t think I was supposed to understand. My opponent was a big guy, with solid muscle sheathed beneath a decent layer of fat, which isn’t a common build in West Africa. If men are muscled here they’re usually slender and ripped. He was wearing a purple diaper, which I thought was a little weird, but far from the weirdest thing about the evening. He didn’t seem to like me, and I’m sure the palm wine on my breath didn’t endear me much.

We stepped close together. He grabbed my pants. I grabbed his diaper. Then I was in the air. Then I wasn’t.

I lay on the ground for a few seconds, trying to resolve the gyrating shapes and the cheering, laughing crowd into a coherent image. The damn flickering lights really didn’t help. My friends ran over to me, asked if I was all right. Their concern was belied a little by the fact they were all trying hard not to laugh. I said I was fine, and they said, good, then you can do the second match. I said, what?

It was the same guy. Now, instead of a contemptuous sneer, he had an amused and contemptuous sneer. Well, hell with this guy. I stepped forward, wrapped my fingers around his diaper, and as soon as I felt his hands on my waist I shoved forward, as hard and as fast as I could. The momentum knocked the chubby bastard on his ass, and me on top of him, right when the lights went out. I felt him struggle and curse at me, and I hopped up, victorious.

Oh, man, he was pissed. Everyone else thought it was hilarious. We circled and were going to come together for a final match, but the lights went out for good. It’s just as well, since that trick would only have worked once and he probably would have killed me.

It’s funny. Nothing I’ve done, none of the development projects, classes, or social functions have won me anywhere near the acclaim that five minutes in the wrestling ring got me. Kids run up to me in the street now and adopt the stance. People I’ve never met shout “champion,” which is funny, since I never won. I think everyone knows that I had no business out there, and that I have no actual wrestling ability. They just like it when they things they care about are taken seriously.

I also got myself all cut up this month. Several of the local tribes do ritual scarring, usually on the face, to signify passage into adulthood. They cut two or three parallel lines, then rub the ash of peanut shells into the wound to make the scar darker. It’s become a tradition with Peace Corps volunteers in the Gambia to get their own scars – though not on the face; that might be a handicap at job interviews or dates. I’ve never had a tattoo or piercing, mostly because it seemed a little silly to intentionally damage your body when so many things in the world seem willing to do it for you. But this seemed different. Something that would be a mark of my time here, a symbol of the changes I’ve been through, the incredible things I’ve seen and done in Africa. Plus chicks dig scars.

So another volunteer and I visited a little old lady who was well known in the area for her scarring abilities. I wonder how you get to be good at that kind of thing. Did she practice a lot? Was there a training program? Maybe she gave away free scars while she was a student, like a hair stylist. We brought our own razors, as well as medical gloves, hand sanitizer and gauze. We were dumb, but we weren’t stupid. We drew with pen where we wanted the scars to be, gritted our teeth, and she set to work.

My friend wanted hers on the sides of her wrists, which I thought was a little odd, especially since she wants to be a school teacher when she gets back. She bore the experience with manly stoicism. I wasn’t quite so tough.

I had two spots where I wanted scars: the back of my neck and my ribs; I guess I’m a glutton for punishment. The ones on my neck weren’t too bad, really, I was surprised when she was done. The ones on the ribs, though… there’s not a lot between skin and bone around the ribs, especially when you’re an emaciated Peace Corps volunteer, really just a lot of nerve endings. It was excruciating, and slow, and the lines were long, and it was in all not a happy ten minutes for me. The old lady maintained a professional demeanor, but every time I gave a muffled whimper I saw a little gleam in her eye, and thought I knew why she’d chosen this particular profession. When she was finally done, and my side was on fire, she grabbed a big pinch of peanut ash and rubbed it hard into the cuts, twisting and pulling at the skin. I swear the witch was humming.

We bandaged ourselves up, pained but proud, glad it was over. She handed us a bag of ash, and said that every day, for the next three days, we had to open the wounds back up and rub more ash inside. This woman was the devil.

It was all character building, I suppose. So now I have the distinct pride of looking like a bored child doodled on me with a pen.

I told this story to an American friend of mine, who’d had a gigantic red dragon tattooed across her entire right side. I described the level of pain, and she looked thoughtful and said, “Yeah, that sounds about right.” I asked how long it took, and she said, “About five hours.” So I guess there’s always someone more badass.

I got my revenge on old African women, though. I showed them but good. Remember that business class I’m teaching for local women? No? Tsk tsk. There’s gonna be a quiz at the end of all this, you know.

Well, as a recap for the slackers, I’m teaching a class to a dozen women in Kerewan who sell vegetables and other goods. We’ve been learning the basics, like supply and demand, the idea of competition, scarcity vs abundance, and so on. The thing we’ve been hitting the hardest has been basic bookkeeping – tracking income and expenditures, calculating profits.

These women have a strange relationship to math. They can calculate change in their heads faster than I can do it on a calculator, even for triple digits. But put those numbers on a blackboard and their minds switch off. They have this idea of written mathematics as this arcane discipline, far beyond the reach of simple minds such as their own. So we’ve been working on that, and most of them can handle basic arithmetic with small numbers. But their businesses don’t operate just in small numbers. They need to calculate expenses for entire crops, as well as seasonal profits, which are big, scary numbers.

So I taught them how to use their cell phone calculators. First I drew a big calculator interface on the board, complete with the phone keypad. I gave them simple math problems, and the women would come up one at a time, press the imaginary buttons, and I would write whatever the screen should display.

In order to really picture this scene I need to paint you a picture of a typical village woman when she’s dressed up. She’s wearing a beautifully cut dress, made of a shimmering, incandescent cloth. It’s always a striking color – neon green, or yellow, or crimson – and it’s usually covered in sequins. Her head is wrapped in a similar cloth, tied in an intricate knot known as a tika. Finally, when it’s hot she drapes a diaphanous cloth over her head and shoulders. It’s incredibly beautiful, and it’s amazing to see, in these villages of dirt and stone and rough metal, these floating visions of color like flowers in a muddy river.

The first woman to muster up the courage to try my fake cell phone was in her sixties, wrinkled and bent, but still dressed to the nines. She was in the toubab’s class, after all, and she had to look her best. She inched forward, staring at the chalkboard distrustfully, then extended a bony finger and stabbed a button.

“Beep,” she said.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“Beep,” she said, and she stabbed the button again. “Mobiles say beep when you push them.”

And for the rest of the lesson, each woman would beep merrily as she dialed the chalkboard.

I just have to take a second to talk a little more about these women. They are absolutely incredible. They wake up before dawn every morning. They feed the children, work the garden, wash clothes, pound rice, and cook dinner in tiny, smoke-filled rooms that about as closely approximate Hell as any four-by-three space can. They work in the rice fields, travel long distances to market to sell their goods, and chop the wood. While the boys and men rest in the shade for eight hours at a stretch, the women do everything that’s needed to keep the massive households together and running, and they do it without complaining, without even being aware that they’re being taken advantage of.

And then they take the time to dress up in their best outfits, outfits they had to work their fingers to the bone to earn the money for, and come to my little business class. The truth that both they and I know is that I need them far more than they need me. There’s nothing I can really teach them about life.

Just a quick caveat - this isn't the standard bleeding heart bullshit about how hard life is for rural women in developing countries. I don't feel bad for these women, and I don't want to lift them out their drudge and misery. They live more and better than just about anyone I've ever met. All I'm trying to do is help them get something close to a fair return on the insane amount of work they do.

Someone complained that I don’t give a complete picture of my work here, that I just dole out funny little anecdotes that I think will make me look good. So here’s a quick rundown on the things I’m working on.

The Council’s strategy plan is still going, although very slowly. I made the mistake of including mostly concrete suggestions that can immediately be acted on, rather than vague policy shifts that will have no real effect, and that disturbed people. So I’m working on blunting it, while retaining some level of effectiveness.

I put got a web page for the Council together, with descriptions of its projects and the major problems facing the region. Finding someone to host it in the Gambia for a reasonable price turned out to be quixotic, so I’m looking elsewhere. Suggestions would be welcome.

The regional strategy plan (which is a bad name, since it’s neither a strategy nor a plan – it’s the thing where we did the play where I got stabbed by a big stick) is going decently well. We did another skit, although we did it two months after we were scheduled to, this time about the importance of planting trees. It was a nice little skit, a lot like the Giving Tree – a farmer takes from a tree to make medicine, food, a fire, etc., until there’s nothing left but a stump.

We used children from the audience to make the tree, and I, as the farmer, chopped one of them down every time I needed something. Now at this point my old theater buddies are shaking their heads at my stupidity. I broke one of the cardinal rules: never work with animals or children. They can’t be controlled. I, in my white man’s hubris, assumed that they would be so in awe of us that they’d do whatever we asked. Turns out they were so in awe of us that they ran away in the middle of the performance. I guess being chopped down and eaten was a little unsettling.

I’m still helping out with development projects for the Council, mostly by following my counterpart, Keita, around and trying not to get in his way. We recently visited a mosque that had been started a few years ago and then abandoned from lack of funds – which is very, very common here. You see a lot of buildings that look like they’ve been bombed, but actually were just never finished. We were called in to assess how much it would cost to finish it. It was a sad little half-building, with no roof, no floor, and crumbling walls.

The alkalo (village leader) showed up and started explaining why it was the imam’s fault that the mosque was never finished. The imam showed up and started yelling at the alkalo. Some of the elders showed up and started yelling at everyone. People were ripping chunks out of the mortar with their bare hands to demonstrate the quality of construction. My man Keita just waited, calmly, like a rock in turbulent waters, until there was a break while everyone took a breath. Then he began listing the improvements that were necessary, and exactly how much they would cost, and who they should call to do the work, and how they could mobilize the labor, all in a perfectly calm, professional voice. After a few minutes everyone was nodding seriously and agreeing to commit resources. This man is a genius. He has a way of cutting through the bullshit, dealing with hard reality in a way that makes problems seem solvable, and everything else unimportant.

My drama club, alas, is not doing so well. Last year most of the talented and dedicated members graduated, and the people I’m left with aren’t so much bad as lazy. Only about a third of the rehearsals I go to actually happen. The rest of the time there’s always some excuse. And even when we do manage to get them all together, they’re watching the clock the whole time, waiting to be done. It’s discouraging, but I can’t teach people who don’t want to be taught. I can’t force them to care. So I’m picking out the best, the ones who actually seem to give a damn, and having private rehearsals outside of school. We’ll see if that goes anywhere.

I recently got to be loan collector, which was a lot more fun than it sounds. It was actually one of the best days I’ve had in this country. Microfinance organizations issue small loans to village businesses. The rates they charge are usurious by Western standards – as high as 30% - but since the original loans are so small, interest payments don’t come to much. There’s an organization called Reliance that offers microloans in a nearby city, so I shadowed one of their loan collectors for a day to learn more about it.

The first thing I noticed was that everyone loved us – well, him, I suppose. He was the market’s golden boy. People gave us free food, called out boisterous greetings, and generally couldn’t be happier to see us. Little old ladies ran up with their hundred-dalasi bills clutched in their hands, then watched proudly as we entered the payment into their account books. There was one guy who three months earlier had taken out a loan for three thousand dalasi – about a hundred and twenty bucks. The loan was for six months. He’d bought some supplies, started a business that took off, and that day he repaid the entire loan, straight out, then immediately took out a five thousand dalasi loan. The money here is printed in a variety of colors, and the big fistful of torn, stained bills that he held out to us looked like a rainbow.

Every project I’ve worked on, just about every development project I’ve heard of, tells a story. In that story, the main character is me, or someone like me, doing noble works and saving the day with daring do. The people being helped are side characters, movable set pieces of misery and need. But in that alley, in the sun, holding out his pride in a rainbow fist, that man was the main character. I was just, I don’t know, comic relief. And that felt right.

So I tried to bring the whole thing to my village, Kerewan. I talked to Reliance about extending savings and loan services to business people in my community, and they said it could work, if I got enough people and organized the payment structure. The problem would be payments. Reliance usually sends out loan collectors every day, which makes it easy to spot and deal with defaulters. Kerewan was over thirty kilometers away from their nearest office. So one of the conditions of the deal would be that someone in Kerewan would be responsible for collecting the payments and getting the money to the company. I said we could work something out.

For the next week I canvassed the community, talking to shop owners, carpenters, vegetable sellers, anyone who offered any kind of good or service for money. Over two hundred people, and most of them were interested. Many said that they’d tried to secure a loan, but the banks had turned them down. I even got them to agree to the payment structure, and appoint two representatives to be the loan collectors. We set up a meeting with an administrator from Reliance. The guy showed up five hours late, during which time most of Kerewan’s business owners came, sat around for a while, and left angry. Finally the representative arrived, so I went back into the town, re-gathered all the annoyed and busy villagers, and we had a meeting. It went well – the locals asked intelligent questions about payment rates and services, and the Reliance representative, while lacking in people skills, seemed to have the answers.

We scheduled another meeting for two weeks later, at which point people would actually sign up for accounts. The timing was crucial, as the shortest loan was for four months and it was exactly four months until the rainy season started and money became tight. Two days before the meeting I called to make sure everything was on schedule. The administrator said, “Oh, yeah, sorry. Upper management decided not to work in Kerewan. It’s not worth the risk.”

The worst part is that my people didn't seem very surprised when I told them. They were used to being ignored and taken for granted, and they expected people not to take them seriously. I was just one more outsider who promised a lot and didn't follow through.

So yay. Instead of ending with that depressing story, I’ll tell you about a game my friends and I invented. It’s called XP, or Experience Points. No, not like in a nerd game. You earn XP any time you have an experience. It can be good or bad, important or trivial, silly or serious. It just needs to be unusual, or interesting. It needs to let you know that this is real, that you are alive. Just about everything I’ve written in this blog is a time I or someone else earned XP.

You earn it when you climb a mountain, and when you get into a car accident. You earn it when you meet someone you haven’t seen in years and you have a great conversation, or when you get into a fight at a bar. You earn it going to your child’s birthday party, or when a relative dies. Any time you’re tested, any time you sacrifice. You get bonus points if you participate, instead of just observe, and you get bonus points the weirder or more powerful the experience is. It’s a great game because it keeps you aware that you are here, now, and you are alive. So the next time something terrible, or wonderful, or weird, or scary happens, be happy that you earned XP, that you’re earning the life you’ve got. The object is simple: get as much as you can until you die.