Business centers and punching camels

I know, it’s been a while again. This once every two months thing won’t get to be a habit, don’t worry. I’ve just been very, very busy. Things in Kerewan, my new site, are going great. Hectic, stressful, and often surreal, but I’m finding that’s the way I like it. I’m a teacher, a bureaucrat, a DJ, a small business owner, and a building contractor. I wear so many hats I sometimes get rug burn switching them. I’m learning more about the realities of business and government in developing nations than I ever thought I would (or should).

The big project I’m working on these days is building a business center / rest area just outside of town. Twenty or thirty years ago Kerewan was a thriving economic and cultural center, with restaurants, shops, a huge street market, and even a bar. Its place on the main road, in the center of the North Bank District, made it a popular stopping place for travelers and tourists. Now the bar is closed, the market has shrunk and split in two, and the restaurants have all closed but one (and that one struggles to make ends meet). Vehicles passing on the road blow straight through on their way to larger cities, without ever spending a Dalasi.

So I’ve been working with the local area council on plans for a center where local businesses can cater to travelers. There are some abandoned building on the edge of town that are perfectly placed, with space for shops, food vendors, and craftsmen, with an open area for cars and buses to park. One of the buildings even has a few broken toilets, and I should be able to get the utility company to reconnect them. As I indicated in my last post, toilets are incredible luxuries here. There’s also a large building in the back with a kitchen and dining room that would make beautiful restaurant, with a cathedral ceiling and large windows overlooking the river. We could sell condoms at the bathrooms for almost nothing, which would be great, since truckers moving across country are among of the biggest contributors the spread of AIDS. I’ve been talking with local suppliers and builders, and they’ve agreed to some deals that would keep the price tag below 125,000 Dalasi, or about $5,000, easily doable with grants and loans.

This is the point where I have to be careful, though. All too often well-meaning NGOs and charities dump loads of money on a really cool-sounding project without ever consulting the community they say they’re helping or taking the realities of life in the country into account. So if I’m going to get the money together for a project of this size, I need to talk to community leaders, business owners, bus and cab drivers, tourist companies – everyone who will actually use the place, and make sure they actually will. So that’s what I’m working on now.

I’ve been finding this work very rewarding, which is strange, because I never pictured myself as the middle management type. But I’m shocked to discover that I like meetings and memos, and smoozing politicians and businessmen. I like working with people who have power and getting them to use that power to help me. Convincing Gambians to do anything that requires labor or concentration is often difficult, which drives most volunteers crazy, but I’m finding it an interesting challenge. And since they are generally so passive, I can get them to agree to a lot of things if I speak quickly and give the impression I know what I’m talking about.

The only person that hasn’t worked on is the governor, because he uses exactly the same tactics on everyone else. He and I have had a few run-ins, and in the beginning it looked like he was going to be the main obstacle to almost all of my projects. He’s a powerful personality, and he’s used to bulldozing over people, and when I wouldn’t just buckle under it caused some friction – our first three meetings were mostly screaming matches. He threw a stapler at me once, left a bruise. But I actually found it refreshing, because he was the only guy I was working with who will give me a straight answer. Most people, if I ask them if they’ll do something, they will say yes, but mean no. Or they’ll say, “yes, Inshallah,” an Arabic phrase that literally means, “if God wills it,” but here actually means, “not a chance in hell.” Working with the governor is great, because if he isn’t going to do something, he’ll just say so. He has no desire whatsoever to please me. On his end, I think I’m the only person he works with who isn’t afraid of him, which he kind of likes. So although I’ll never invite him over to paint our nails and gossip about boys, I think it will be a good working relationship.

On top of my work in Kerewan, I’m still heading up the Regional Strategy Plan in the North Bank. For those of you who found it too boring to remember from my last post, this is an idea I picked up in Senegal to get all the volunteers in my region together to work towards some common goals, share skills and resources, and get some hard data from the ground level about how close we are to meeting those goals. It’s been an incredible headache. Getting Peace Corps Volunteers to do anything together is like herding ADD cats in heat. But we’re making progress, at a faster pace than I’d originally thought, and most people are getting pretty excited about it.

In the last meeting, as we were going over plans for a village survey that each of us would conduct, a difficult and time-consuming job, one of the newer volunteers finally called bullshit on me and asked me to explain exactly how all this work would actually benefit her service. I’d been expecting and dreading that question for a while, because I didn’t have a perfect answer to give. This whole project is experimental, and even though I’m the one who’s supposed to have the vision, I can’t say for certain what the real outcome will be. But I discovered something interesting about leadership: if you do your job right, you don’t ever have to defend yourself. As I was struggling for an answer, all the other volunteers, whom I’d been cajoling and pushing in this thing for weeks, jumped to my defense with arguments that were much better than anything I could have come up with. And when they were finished, and the criticizing volunteer was slightly mollified, I told everyone straight up that I had no guarantees that this would work or that all their work would be justified, and that even if it did help our service I wasn’t sure what form that help would take. Oddly enough, they all seemed happy to hear that. People are strange.

So that was March. In April I didn’t get much done at site, because I was gone for most of it. The first week and a half was taken up with IST, or Inter-Service Training, which was a chance for my training group, six months after swearing in, to come back together and talk about what we’ve learned since training, what we’ve accomplished, what problems we’ve encountered, etc. We had some sessions on various education-related themes, like non-formal community teaching and classroom discipline. The highlight was a session I taught on drama groups. I went over the best ways to form a group in the Gambia and put a show together, then took everyone outside for some drama games and warm-ups. Sotl-ites will be happy to hear that I taught them “Lion Face / Lemon Face” and “Mother Pheasant.” That last one was fun, because it’s a tongue twister that sounds dirty but isn’t, and the house we were using was right behind the US Embassy. If having a dozen Peace Corps Volunteers screaming psuedo-profanities at the US Embassy is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.

Then came the Morocco journey. This was a trip that had been planned by a group of my friends months ago, and they were able to get tickets dirt cheap. By the time I decided to go, the price had moved out of my range. But I heard rumors that it was possible, although extremely difficult, to get there overland. I had thought that it wasn’t allowed for Americans to travel through the area of the Sahara south of Morocco, but apparently there was one route along the coast that held only a mild chance of being abducted and murdered by desert nomads. I did my research, and found that it would be four or five days of dirty, uncomfortable travel, in fruit trucks and bush taxis, through countries that don’t speak any languages I’m familiar with, some of which are actively hostile to Americans, and I would be doing it alone.

So I figured what the hell.

The only difficult part of the preparation, aside from convincing an understandably reluctant admin to let me go, was getting a visa for Mauritania, one of the countries on the way. I had been told that I would be able to get one at the border, but two days before I left I found out that wasn’t true. This was on Friday, and I had to leave on Sunday if I wanted to meet my friends. Friday is a holy day, when everyone stops work to pray at one pm, so I sprinted downtown to the Mauritanian embassy at twelve forty-five, ran breathless into the lobby past the crack security team out front, and stopped the Mauritanian ambassador as he was walking out the door. I was… extremely persuasive, and so I got my visa processed, a procedure that normally takes at least 24 hours, in ten minutes.

The trip itself was just as difficult and uncomfortable as I expected. Getting through Senegal was relatively painless, and only took a day, but transportation through Mauritania was slow, frustrating, and often insane. There were guard stations every twenty miles, and each one took an eternity as I gave them my passport, answered a series of bizarre questions in French (my grasp of the language improved remarkably on this trip – that is, from none whatsoever to the ability to say “I have no cocaine or pornography”), then they carefully looked over every single page of my passport, slowly wrote down all my information, and let us on our way.

A quick side note – the new American passports are gorgeous, with beautiful pictures and famous quotes on every page. I hate them. Every goddamn person that examined mine had to look at every single pretty picture in the goddamn book. I think at least three or four hours of my trip were taken up waiting for random guards to admire the images of George Washington and the moon landing.

It was in Mauritania that I ended up chasing the camel. I was in a small car, only the driver and three passengers, at midnight, trying to get to a town on the border. The driver got a call on his cell phone, spoke for a minute, then turned the car off the road and into the desert. This was the Sahara, just like you’ve seen in the movies, sand dunes and all. He switched off the headlights and we just coasted through the sand. After a while I saw the dark silhouttes of camels near the car. A few dozen of them were walking in a loose line in the night, and we coasted among them for a while, like a ship floating past icebergs. There was no moon, and the stars were like white embers. It was surreal and beautiful, and only slightly marred by the fear that they were taking me out here to kill me. Eventually I saw a man riding on the lead camel, oblivious to us. The driver silently maneuvered behind him, then flicked on the headlights and honked the horn at the same time. The guy whirled around, stared at us for a second, then started to run.

So of course we chased him.

If you’ve never seen a camel gallop, it is hilarious, like a giant hairy slinky on toothpicks. But the car was driving in sand, and we couldn’t go very fast, so it was actually a real chase. The driver stuck his head out the window and screamed at the guy, and after a second the passengers in back stuck their heads out and started screaming, too. So I figured what the hell, stuck my head out the window and screamed.

“You better run! We’re gonna cut you up, man! We’re gonna feed you to your camel!”

Finally we caught the guy, and the driver got out to go yell at him. They shouted at each other for a while, then the driver turned and punched the camel. This was not a light tap. I heard it from inside the car; it rocked the camel back a few steps, and this was not a small animal. The driver walked back, looking satisfied with himself, and we drove back to the road.

“What the hell just happened?” I said.

He smiled.

The next day, on a twenty-four hour bus ride through West Sahara, a Frenchman got on and sat right next to me, although there were plenty of empty rows.

“Hello,” he said, in broken English. “You smell very bad.”

“You’re French,” I said.

“Yes! And you smell very bad.”

I sniffed, and he was right. I had been traveling through the desert for days without showering or even changing clothes. I turned back to my book and tried to ignore him. I’d brought James Joyce’s Ulysses, figuring if there was one time in my life I would have the time and lack of stimuli to tackle that massive, incomprehensible tome, it would be this trip. It’s a stream of consciousness, one of the most impenetrable books ever written, and it was taking all my concentration just to follow the plot.

“What are you reading?” my new friend asked.

“Ulysses.”

“Read it to me!” he said. I declined, until he started petting my head and making up his own version of the story. "Once upon a time there was a rabbit..."

“Other hand a sixfooter with a wifey up to his watchpocket,” I said to shut him up.

“Amen!”

“Um… ok. Long and the short of it. Big he and little she. Very strange about my watch.”

“Amen!” He threw up his arms and stepped into the aisle. “Amen!”

“Wristwatches are always going wrong!” I was getting into it. I stood up too, and adopted a Southern evangelist accent. “Wonder is there any magnetic influence between the person because that was about the time he!”

“Amen!” The Frenchman danced up and down the aisle, then took off his hat and started soliciting donations from the other passengers.

“Yes, I suppose, at once! Halleluiah!” That last part was my addition.

We preached the gospel of James Joyce for a while, until the driver made us sit down. We actually collected about ten dirham, enough to split a cheese sandwich at the next stop.

I met up with my friends in Marakesh, and we traveled around Morocco for about a week. It was absolutely beautiful, and I highly recommend it as a travel destination to anyone. The food was great, the people were friendly, the cities and the mountains were beautiful. We met some Moroccan volunteers, who showed us some of the real life in the country that tourists don’t usually see. We had tajines and kebabs, hiked up mountains and through waterfalls, and just generally had a blast.

We even tried out the himmam, a Moroccan bathhouse that’s like a giant steamroom. The idea is that you sweat for a while, then scrub off the sweat, dirt, and dead skin with a rough brush. But the Moroccan volunteers told us that the ritual was fairly elaborate, and that unless we knew what we were doing we should pay someone to scrub us. I was a little dubious, but I figured what the hell. So when I walked in and a giant Arab man asked me if I wanted to pay for a massage, I said sure.

I have never been so terrified in my life. This was not a massage. This was an assault. He twisted me like taffy, grabbing appendages and pulling, seemingly at random, grappling and kneading me until I was a whimpering puddle on the bathroom floor. The worst part was that he kept making sound effects. I think in his head he was a pit crew, and I was a race car, and he had to completely overhaul me in less than five minutes. A sample of our conversation:

“Whoosh.”
“Ahhh!”
“Zip zip!”
“No! I – uhhh!”
“Bam!”
“Ow”
“Bam!”
“Oh, God, why?”

Then he dumped a bucket of scalding water on my head and scrubbed my skin off with steel wool. After the massage, it was fairly relaxing. He didn’t speak point. I felt used. Although I have to say, when he finished, I have never felt so clean in my entire life.

It was as I was leaving that I ran into trouble. I had paid when I came in, but the guy who had given me my towel and brush stopped me and indicated that I should pay him more money for them. Now, at this point I was getting really tired of people claiming I owed them money after the fact. Guys had been trying to charge me after they gave me directions, or I took a picture with them in it, and I was sick of it. If people wanted to charge me money for something, they should tell me before they did it. So I argued with the guy for a while - I’ve gotten really good at arguing with someone without speaking their language. Through an impressive series of pantomimes he told me to perform an act on myself that is physically impossible, so I just started to walk out. At that point he tried to get into a fight with me, but because the floor was so wet and he was a small guy he mostly just slid around a lot. I fell back on years of locker room brawls and flicked him with the towel he was trying to charge me for until he stopped.

Outside I met my friends, who had gone to a separate himmam, one for women.
“How was it?” they asked.
“Interesting,” I said.
“Did you remember to tip the bath attendant?”
I looked away. “Yeah.”

I think karma caught up with me, because the trip back was much worse than the trip there. Nothing particularly exciting happened, just an endless series of delays and irritations. Cars broke down, rides were late. At one point a bus tried to leave without me, with all my stuff inside. I managed to chase it down. The Moroccan police turned my car away at the border, so I had to walk the mile or so from the Moroccan border to the Mauritanian one, which for some reason has no paved road. Walking through the Sahara in the middle of the afternoon is just as hard as they make it look in the movies.

I never thought it would feel so good to be back in the Gambia. Better the insanity you know, I suppose. I’m going back to Kerewan as soon as I post this, and I’m looking forward to being home.

On one last note, a few people have asked me what kind of things I would like in care packages. The thing I need most is protein, so any kind of protein bar or powder would be great, or canned meats. I'm also starved for news of current events, so magazines like the Economist or Newsweek would be great. If anyone could burn some CDs of movies or TV shows, that would be great, as you run out of digital media here pretty quickly. I've written a few people letters, but I don't have anyone's address here, so if you'd like a letter send me your address.

I've got a toilet!

So this has been a big month. For those of you who have not heard about my adventures in January, I’ve written the blog post, but I’m probably not going to post it for a while, so send me an email if you’re really curious. Suffice it to say that Peace Corps admin got a little irritated at me.

I tried to worm my way back into their good graces, because I wanted to get a site change. The projects that I posted about a few months ago kind of dried up. The computer classes became monotonous and largely pointless, as most of the students I was trying to teach couldn’t read. The drama club never really happened because the majority of students going to Njaba Kunda School don’t actually live in Njaba Kunda, but in one of the surrounding villages. Many of them walk for an hour or two to get home every night. It doesn’t matter how motivated a kid might be, he’s not going to walk two hours home and two hours back in the evening for rehearsal. The club had a lot of interest in the beginning, but after three meetings where four kids showed up (then three, then one), I had to admit defeat.

There’s a nearby town, Kerewan, where I’ve been doing a lot of interesting work. It’s the seat of the regional council, and it’s got a radio station, multiple NGOs, businesses, and schools with drama clubs already founded. It got a little ridiculous, to the point where I was spending two or three nights a week there, sleeping on my friend’s bamboo couch.

I had a simple solution. The amount of work I did in a week in Njaba Kunda I could probably accomplish in a day. Kerewan is about an hour’s bike ride away, so why not just shift over, living in Kerewan and spending a day or two every week in Njaba Kunda? I would be able to accomplish much more, working with the regional council, helping draft policies that affect thousands of people. The radio station reaches a good chunk of the country, and everyone listens to the radio, pretty much all the time. You can’t find a better medium for public messages. There’s a resource center with a meeting space and computers that the American Embassy donated, just sitting there without someone to run it. There are professionals who want computer training, who will understand the concepts and apply them in their jobs. And the drama club is well run and energetic, and just needed someone with some experience with larger productions to help them start performances for the public. And I would still get just as much done in Njaba Kunda.

That was the pitch I sold to Peace Corps admin. They were understandably hesitant. They don’t like moving people from their sights when they’ve been there less than a year, unless there’s a security risk, because they feel volunteers should give their sights a real chance. Plus, like I said, they were less than pleased with me at the time.

So we wrangled and argued for a while, until I had to leave for WAIST. WAIST is the West African Invitational Softball Tournament. It’s a meeting of groups from all over West Africa, mostly Peace Corps but also some embassies, to play softball and socialize in Dakar, the capital of Senegal.

I had gotten really sick the weekend before, vomiting and whatnot, and I hadn’t been able to eat for a few days, so I lost about five pounds. If you saw me these days, you would know I can’t really afford to lose five pounds. So when I went to Dakar I went crazy. Hamburgers, hot dogs, beer, Indian food, pastries, beer, steak, chocolate mousse, and lots of beer. At one point during a game I had to put down my can to catch the ball, which was a great sacrifice. I gained back my five pounds and then some.

Through a weird series of circumstances, I ended up being captain of Peace Corps Gambia’s C-team, the third-stringers, the ones that, when asked if they wanted to play, said only if they were allowed to drink on the field. Many of them had never played softball or even baseball in their lives. We didn’t win a single game, which was fine. No one expected to. More than once we walked the other team’s entire batting line up straight through. It was strange being captain, though, because I felt a sense of responsibility, like even if we weren’t going to win we could not completely embarrass ourselves. It made me oddly tense, which was the exact opposite of the point. Eventually I just said hell with it and drank more beer.

I actually got a lot done on that trip. I met a woman who worked at the Embassy and we started talking about West Africa and development. She had some fascinating stories to tell about the foreign service, and she seemed really interested in some of my ideas about economics and outsourcing in developing countries. I told about her some of the projects I was working on, trying to get some advice, and she gave me her card and told me to email her and we could follow up. It was only as I was walking away that I looked closely at the card. She was the American ambassador to Senegal.

So that was embarrassing, but great. I’m sure she’ll be a great contact. I also attended an all-volunteer meeting for Senegalese volunteers. They had a number of interesting round-table discussions, including one about something called a Regional Strategy Plan. I can say without exaggeration that that discussion changed my entire Peace Corps service.

It’s a little too complicated to fully get into, but a Regional Strategy Plan is a way of creating a framework for the projects of all the PCVs in a region by finding common goals, quantifying them, and coordinating efforts among volunteers to accomplish them. Basically it gives PCVs some extra credibility and authority, making their work part of a larger effort rather than just an individual’s good idea. It’s an amazing plan, and I walked out of the meeting knowing how I was going to make my mark in the Peace Corps.

Back in Gambia, fired up with my idea, I started networking and making meetings, getting all the volunteers in my region of the Gambia together to start making plans. We actually had our first regional meeting last weekend, and it went well. If we can pull this off, it will be a model for all the other regions of the Gambia, and it will change the way we do our services.

In the midst of all this passion and bustle, admin told me I could move to Kerewan. Like a kid with a new toy, I had shifted all my energy to this new project, so when I got the news I saw it more as an inconvenience than anything.

Until I saw the toilet.

You don’t understand. You can’t. Nothing can communicate to you the almost religious awe with which I beheld this porcelain beauty on first site. In Africa, you spend a lot of time on certain unpleasant activities, and when your only outlet is a whole in the ground, it gets old fast. Now I can just sit. Maybe read. Rest. Be secure on my throne, lord of my domain.

If I’m going to be perfectly honest, it’s actually kind of a pain, because I only get water at random hours of the day. It’s even less constant than the power. But when it’s working, man. Watch out. After I’m done, I wash my hands. In a sink. The luxury is overwhelming.

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.

Thoughts on hyenas, urine, and microphones

There's a new addition in my household. He's six inches tall, brown, and he leaks so much liquid I think sometimes he must be part sponge. He's called Chulo, Spanish for gangster, a name he has so far completely failed to live up to. He cries and whines and bitches more than any creature I've ever met. He's terrified of everything, all the time, and once spent twenty minutes cowering in fear from a dropped saucepan. Sleep has been a little more exciting since I got him, because two a.m. is usually the time he decides it's time to play, and when I don't wake up he tries to chew my face off. On the plus side, his bean-bag-like body handles being thrown at the wall pretty well.



Yet another way Gambians are weird: the women are scared of puppies. When I bring him near them or he moves around their feet they scream and flail like they've sen a rat. They don't have any problem with the grown dogs that roam around the village, mangy curs that I can hear trying to rip each other to pieces at night outside my compound. These poor creatures have been in so many fights and live in such terrible conditions that many of them look like zombie dogs, with gaping wounds on their scarred faces and chunks missing from their bodies. But my little eight-pound puppy is the terrifying one.

I got to be pretty scary myself, last week. I got to be a hyena, an evil hyena. I was defeated by science! (Possibly blinded, too). Maybe I should explain. About a month ago one of the teachers came into my lab, told me they were starting a science club, asked if I wanted to help out. I said, "sure." "Great," he said, "we're announcing the launch at assembly later today. You should stop by." So I said "sure," again. Like a fool.

So I'm standing near the back of the crowd at assembly, watching the teacher give an impassioned speech about the importance of science, and clubs, and the combination of the two. He whipped them up into a frenzy, painting utopian visions of a world governed by reason, truth, and bake sales. And just when they reached a fever pitch, he pointed at me and said, "And let me introduce our founding director!"

I said, "Huh?" And they all applauded.

So apparently I'm the head of a science club now, a job title which seems to mean doing all the bitch work. I've been organizing debates and making ID cards for the officers, inviting guest speakers and whatnot. It's actually been a blast, mostly because the people I'm working with are pretty motivated and things that they say will happen actually happen. Like a debate we had last week over the economics of solar power versus fossil fuels. It was my idea, but when I proposed it I only half-thought it would ever come together. Eight days later we got the whole school, along with the elementary school next door, in a hall that hadn't been used in eight years and was now spotless, with new chairs lined up in perfect rows, with banners proclaiming to glory of our science club festooning the walls. We even got a local DJ to bring his massive speaker system and microphone.

The night before, as I was leaving school, the same teacher came up to me and said that he wanted to do a play. I said, "when?" He said, "tomorrow." I said, "no." He ignored me, explained the teacher coordinators of the club thought it would be great if they all put on a show about the importance of science, and how it can be misused, and it should be funny, but with a serious message, and with lots of action, and it should demonstrate different scientific principles, and it should be simple enough for the younger students to follow but interesting for the older students. He said the only time he could get the teachers all together to rehearse was in half an hour, so could I have it written by then? I said, "I hate you."

So we did Chicken Little. Each of the teachers was a different animal - we had Donkey Bonkey, and Horsey Norsey. I was Hyena Xena (I figured what the hell). I narrated most of it, then I dropped into character when it was time to trick the animals into going into my cave, where I promised they would be safe from the sky falling. I don't want to spoil the story for you, if you haven't read it, but I was actually planning to eat them. But I was defeated by my arch-enemy, Lion Vion the Scientist. He used his scientific knowledge to show that the sky was not falling, and because he studied animals he knew that I was, you know, a hyena, and I was going to eat them. So they chased me behind the speakers.

All in all it was a great success, although I can't take much credit. The microphone died while I was crawling on the floor and being evil, so most of the students had no idea what we were saying. They just liked watching their teachers pretending to be animals. The guy who played the donkey kept shaking his butt at them, and I think that helped. It was possibly the most powerful production of my theatric career.

There was a creepy consequence to all this. The Mandinka words for "dead" and "killed" are the same, and they don't make much distinction between past and future tense. So ever since my stunning Gambian theatrical debut, people from villages all round who either saw the show or heard about it have been coming up to me and saying, "Yahya, you are dead!"

Considering my fragile emotional and mental state, this is a little disorienting.

Microphones in general seem to hate me lately. I went to the Peace Corps Open-Mike Night last night. I wrote a little poem for the occasion. It was about a bug. I was proud of it. But one of the country directors, an American, decided to bring his kid, and while my poem was hardly pornographic, it had a few words that I wouldn't feel comfortable saying in front of the sweet little seven-year-old who parked herself in the front row and gazed up at each performer with worshipful eyes. So I asked the organizer to bump me back until after she left. Then a friend of mine gave a inebriated delivery of the Angry Vagina speech from the Vagina Monologues, complete with gestures and vernacular. His pantomime of the metal duck-beak at the gynecologist was particularly entertaining, and when the father didn't raise an eyebrow I figured I was in the clear.

But, of course, he who hesitates is lost, and the moment before I got on stage the mike died. So I got to bellow my artsy little poem, with all its carefully drawn metaphors, at the top of my lungs to a crowded bar. Most of them didn't hear me, but it's just as well, since the ones who did were a little too drunk to really follow it. Ah, well. I should have gone with my original plan done my impression of Donald Duck doing an impression of Malcom X. That always gets them.

If any of you happens to be curious, here's the poem. For a little clarification, GMT (Gambian Maybe Time) is a phrase we use to refer to the sort of vague time frame in which things in this country tend to happen. Meetings start hours late, appointments are kept the next day or next week. Seconds and minutes have a fluidity that's hard to adjust to.

There’s a bug on my ceiling.
He’s been there for a month-year now,
A chuck of that chewed-up Peace Corps maybe time.
When you skip through seasons and stumble through seconds
When time turns back on itself.

He was in that corner of my room I like
That point where if you twist your eyes and slant your mind
It flips out and whips you out and now it’s the outside corner of a cube
And you’re standing. And spinning in space.
Alone.

And this little bitch bug’s being on my ceiling,
On my spot, pulling me back to the world.
And I say, bug
I say, bug, you fuck off
Bug, you go get your own universe.

But he don’t leave.
He turns in a nice, tight little circle.
Pivots on his back leg.
Again and again.
Turn and turn.
And he stops.
And he starts again, throwing his legs up and eating his trail dust
On his one-bug, all-kicks, born-free little Route 66.

And he was there the next day, the next, each, beat-up blended Gambian maybe day
For three maybe months.
Walking, jiving, slipping and speeding,
In his smooth long circle-waltz
And his stately way of proceeding.

Maybe he thinks he’s progressing.
Developing.
Sustaining.
He’s got his own buggy maybe kinda time
On his high circle march of mercy
His brain is so small and his world is so tall
The two-second revolution
Seems like two years.

He doesn’t know he’s walked this way,
Played this game,
Danced this dance a thousand times.
This ol’ howdy pilgrim’s walking the straight line
Toward some sacred and succulent salvation.

Maybe I’ve got him all wrong.
Maybe he’s coursing the Icaran heights,
Touching the gods, kicking their teeth, bucking their rights,
Secure in his god-damn, god-high sights.
Yeah, and though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I shall fear no evil, for my little bug buddy is watching out for me,
Watch it, watch out,
Lord and shepherd of all he sees.

I wonder if he volunteered.

Maybe he thinks I’m his god.
Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah.
Maybe I’m his fire and bile and riled up god,
Ready to smack him back him back down if
He fucking thinks of
Stepping his little stepper out of step
Or shining his light out of line.

I’d like to be a god. For just a maybe day. To just a maybe bug.

So I checked.
Three months, real, hard, sun-up months later
Me, the fucking empirical-goddamn-imperial-stupid-imbecile,
I wanted to see what was up.

Stuck in a cobweb,
A little buggy carcass hung an inch from my ceiling,
Turning in the air.

Stupid Democracy

I'm working in the education sector of the Peace Corps, specializing in ICT (information and communication technology), which is weird because I have no ICT experience. The closest I've got is a summer job as a web designer, where I almost got fired. I think it was because I never actually built a webpage. People are so picky.

Although I originally had some reservations, I'm glad I'm doing ICT. Compared to my students, I'm a freaking wizard. They actually applauded once after I demonstrated my amazing forty-word-per-minute typing speed. They've also never done anything like using a computer before, which means I have a lot more freedom than other volunteers in my teaching methods.

I should probably explain that. The education system in the Gambia is occasionally a little frustrating for Americans, as it's based more on memorization than analytical thinking. A typical scene in a Gambian classroom is a teacher holding a textbook and writing what it says on the blackboard, while the students earnestly copy it down, without a word spoken. I teach a few math and English classes on the side, to help out the chronically understaffed school, and I keep having the same problem. I'll try to explain an idea for a good half hour, with absolutely nothing getting through, until finally a light bulb goes off for one of them. He'll explain the exact same idea with slightly different words, and suddenly everyone will understand. Turns out they learned it last year. They have no way of relating different concepts, or even the same concept worded differently. They know it the way it was drilled into them or not at all. It drives me insane.

But with computers, they don't have any paradigms burned into their brains. It's totally new, self-motivated, requiring analytical and problem-solving abilities that they've never had the chance to use before. Some find it intimidating, and can't handle the lack of a rigorous structure, but the ones who get it are like genetic alcoholics on their first sip of Jack Daniels. I have to kick them out of my lab, and they're begging me each night to open it up and let them practice more. I even find that things go more slowly when I actually try to teach, guiding them step-by-step through some activity. I get a lot more out of them when I just switch on the computer and let them go to town, exploring, making mistakes, while I'm there when they need a tip or crash a program.

Although the liberal populist in me hates it, I'm realizing that I just can't reach all of them. Not even a large portion. In fact, if I leave here after two years and I've only really taught five or ten kids, I'll be happy. Because those are the kids that really want it. They're willing to fight for it, bleed for it, break through the malaise that's infected their culture. They're the ones that will study, go to school, start a business, really go somewhere, and maybe pull their country up with them.

The main project I'm working on right now is turning my computer lab into an internet cafe. The lab's got eight or ten decent computers, and I've just finished a deal with the country's telephone company to hook up a land line. Now I've got to convince a telecom company that it would be worth their while to give us free dial-up internet. If I can do that I can teach internet classes to the school, which would be nice, but I've got bigger ambitions. I want to turn it into a full internet cafe, servicing the community, run by the students. It would be the only full cyber cafe in the region, and if we can expand our small bank of solar panels it will be the only cyber cafe outside of the capital that is open all day - the power only being on for a few hours in the morning and a few hours at night. It would open up access to the internet to my village and those surrounding, as well as teach my students small business administration skills. I've already got a few students as my protegés, who help tutor the other students and run the lab when I'm not around.

I'm also working with the school's peer health club to put on some short plays about health issues, like malaria and AIDS. It's a little annoying, because while I agree those issues are important, I'm not PBS. I don't care if knowing is half the battle. My goal is to branch out into plays about Gambian history and culture. It's part of an overall initiative that I've been working on with some other volunteers to improve the African self-image. Sometimes it feels like the entire continent has a insecurity complex. I can't count the number of times a Gambian has told me he can't do something because he's African. The country is caught between its tribal roots, the Muslim dogma that was imposed a millennium ago, and the Western values of the last century, and it doesn't fit with any of them. Western culture is its dream, Islam is its law, and tribal beliefs are its embarrassing past. Only a few vestigial remnants of the original culture, the one I came here to see and be a part of, remain visible. There's the leaf monster, I suppose. That's kind of cool.

We're tackling this issue a variety of ways. One of my friends, Tara Steinmetz, works at the local radio, an excellent medium for low-technology areas. Just about everybody listens to it. She's working on a Pan-African music hour, playing native music from across the continent and emphasizing the cool side of African cultures. She's also put up posters of African-American models, specifically ones with darker skin, at the radio and in her home. It's been difficult finding them, as most famous and beautiful African-American women have very light skin. I guess some things cross oceans.

From my end, I'm researching old Gambian history and myths. The local story-tellers, called griots, charge ruinous prices, but they're a trove of ancient family and tribal histories. They travel from village to village, attending ceremonies, and for a small donation they'll reel off your entire family history, noting famous ancestors, recounting amusing stories and bloody conflicts. Since I don't have a Gambian lineage, it's a little difficult for them, but I just ask them for their most dramatic stories, and no good performer, even a traditional tribal storyteller, can resist the chance to ham it up. Now I'm working on turning those stories into short plays. I've talked to some local musicians, too, and with a little luck and perseverance my students should be able to start putting on some shows for their villages about tribal stories, with tribal music, showing that maybe an African heritage is something worth taking some pride in, not an excuse to fail. Plus I get to do fight choreography with spears, which is freaking awesome.

Well, that's enough shop talk. I know the only reason you all are checking back on this is for another cute little story. I don't have another monster dance-off, but I do have an important lesson about the importance of voting. So grab your mini American flags and listen up, kiddies.

Because the Gambia doesn't have a functioning postal system, there is a mail-run once a month that travels from the capital up the country, stopping at every volunteer's site. This last one was very important, because it had our absentee ballots on it. Volunteer traveling came to a standstill for a day as everyone made sure to be at their sites so they could vote.

So the mail truck showed up, the guys delivering were friends from training, so we chewed the fat for a while as they gave me my stuff. They handed me my ballot, and told me that I had to fill it out right there and give it back to them. I showed them around my place, and they admired the wiring job I've done (that's right, I wired my own house. What've you done this week?). They had a long way to go, so they bade a fond farewell and climbed back into the truck. I went back into my house, and the cleverer of you can guess what I found: I was still holding my ballot.

I ran out after them, just in time to see the truck pull away. I was wearing shorts, with no shirt or shoes, so I grabbed my bike, bit the ballot between my teeth, and sped after them. The truck and I had a sweaty, slow chase through the streets of my village, as I wove back and forth through side alleys, trying to catch up. The pedals of my bike have spikes on them, which drove through the soles of my bare feet like tiny torture devices. The faster I went, the more it hurt. I shot through a gap between compounds and splashes through what I thought was a giant pile of mud. It coated me, and I quickly discovered it was not mud. This was seeming less and less like a good idea. But in a strange way, the more I suffered, the more determined I was to press on. After all, it couldn't get much worse.

I almost caught up with the damn truck at the junction with the main road. I was two feet behind it, waving my arms and screaming through my ballot, when every kid that likes to hang out by the junction after school started shouting my name. Why? Because, that's why. So the driver didn't hear me, didn't look in the rear view mirror, of course. and started down the road, quickly leaving me behind. I did some mental math. The next volunteer was about three miles away, so I figured hell with it. I was damned if I was going to give this up. So as the mail truck pulled away from his house they were greeted by the sight of me, shirtless, shoeless, with bleeding feet, covered in animal feces, eating my ballot.

They stopped. "What are you doing?"

"You deaf people!" (people was not the word I used)

They laughed when they heard what happened. A lot.

Of course there was no room in the truck to give me a lift back, so I got to put my bloody feet back on the Marquis de Sade pedals and shuffle my slow, stinky way back home.

The best part is that when I finally got to fill out my ballot I was shaking with exhaustion, so I think the election counters were probably a little surprised to record a single vote for "Ehdug Usdfe."

Let no one doubt my commitment to the democratic process.

An Introduction

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.