3 Month Challenge Accepted!

I've been at my site for almost 3 months now!  Yay!  Very soon I will be reporting for my second part of training which will take place right before Christmas.  Here's a quick overview of what my life has been like the last 3 months:
-I photographed my family slaughtering a goat for Tobaski, then enjoyed its meat for the next 2 days.
-I prayed with my community on Tobaski and wore a traditional outfit including a shawl over my head, much to everyone's delight.
-We had a drum and dance circle at my compound one day, and the next several days was complimented by countless people on my "dancing"  ...haha.  Alison, I need you to help me figure out how they move that way!  I know I looked like an idiot but I'm glad they appreciate that I'm trying.
-Helped my wife/partner in crime/neighbor Rachel with a portion of Peace Corps' HIV/AIDS bike trek that took place in her village.  So happy that kids are being educated on this sensitive but important issue.
-Started working at my little school, which has an Early Childhood Development program, very much in the works at this point, and grades 1-6.  There's a lot of work to be done, starting with getting a teacher for each class to be posted at our school.  Still waiting for a grade 5 teacher.
-Informally started teaching some gymnastics to kids in my village.  One kid already beat me in a handwalking contest and can do a running front flip. (scared me half to death when he showed me!)
-Went to a friend's naming ceremony for his newborn baby girl, got to hold her for a little bit.  So sweet!
-I've made friends with the rat and lizards that live in my house, but have also decided to adopt a kitten which I will have in late December and will be a huge help getting rid of those other creatures, who of course I will miss dearly.
-Started reading to a little girl in my compound who's in ECD.  She asks me every day to read to her now.
-Started organizing the very small library of books at my school with one of the teachers.
-Watched a goat give birth right outside my window.
-Successfully baked my famous chocolate chip cookies here for Thanksgiving!  And they tasted pretty damn good.

Those are some of the highlights.  Thanks so much for all the kind words of encouragement and support in all the ways it's given!  I'm loving life in the African bush.  Every time I leave my site I can't wait to get back to my school and family.  I've fallen in love with this little part of the world that I now like to call home.

Love and peace and Happy Thanksgiving!

P.S. Shout out to my big sister who's getting ready to have her 2nd daughter.  I wish you all the best.  Keep me updated!

Wolof Woman

Right now I am sitting in the Peace Corps transit house, a house for volunteers to stay in when they come down to Kombo (the city).  In two days I will have completed my swear-in ceremony and I will officially be a Peace Corps Volunteer.  Where have the past two and a half months gone?  When I first got here I was told that the days are slow but the months go by fast.  This has truly been the case for me.  Sometimes it takes SO long for lunch to come.  Or I spend the entire day sitting under a mango tree drinking ataya, waiting for time to creep on.  But then all of the sudden pre-service training is over and I’m saying goodbye to my training village and hello to my new life as a PCV.  On Monday my little group of 15 new volunteers will be shipped off to our sites and we will begin our “3 Month Challenge”.  We will spend 3 months at site getting to know the people, the village, our school, and everything.  About a week and an half ago we all went for a 3-day visit to our sites.  I met my family that I’ll be living with for the next two years and they’re pretty cool—very little English, though, so my Wolof skills will be put to the test!  They are all very friendly and caring.  My host dad was always making sure I had everything I needed.  He even escorted me out to the road (about a 20 minute brisk walk) when I left to catch the gelly-gelly (van used for public transit) back to Kombo.  How cute.  My house is a little thatch-roofed hut in a family compound of about 6 huts.  I am really excited that there are cows up there and that means I will be drinking milk!  At site visit I had cerre (pounded cous or corn) with milk for multiple meals.  It may not surprise some of you that I didn’t mind this at all!  Yum. J  Enjoy the pictures and keep the mail and packages coming!  I think so far Alison has won the title for best thing sent to me so far—a box full of cookies, snacks, and drink mixes.  Thanks babe!!!  Love you!

After I move to site it might be a while before I get internet access again but I promise I’ll update ya’ll when I can.  Take care!

Henna and Hippos

Hello everyone!  Hope you are all doing well.  I’m still loving life in Africa! 

Last week we celebrated the end of Ramadan with a two-day holiday called Koriteh.  It consisted of a lot of sitting around with my family, visiting friends, and eating a lot of food.  I’d compare it to our Christmas or Easter.  I woke up on the first day to the sound of one of our goats screaming and when I came out of my room my host sister Fatou (my Toma) took me to see the goat, already butchered.  They cooked it and we ate it for lunch and dinner.  Not my favorite dish but I’ve learned to tolerate almost anything put in front of me to eat.  My gorgeous sisters got all dressed up and had their hair put in beautiful braids and my host mom braided my hair too.  Then I got my feet and one hand hennaed—a tradition some women do for celebrations.  My wonderful neighbor came over to put little strips of tape all over my feet in a spider-webby looking design, coated it with henna, put bags over my feet and hand and left it like that over night.  Then in the morning we took it off and it had dyed my skin a dark orange color.  Really awesome.  Not sure how long it will stay but it’s been about a week and a half and it’s still there!  During Koriteh kids also walked around the village and asked for candy or money, kind of like trick-or-treating.  And to top off the festivities I got to go watch my village’s boys play a football match against the next town over.  It was a good few days!

The other interesting thing I’ve done lately was take a field trip to an island called JanJanBureh.  It’s in the middle of the Gambia river, in the central river region, which is the region I will be moving to in a couple weeks.  We had to take a little boat across the river to get to the camp we were staying in.  When we stepped onto land at JanJanBureh Camp we were greeted by several monkeys swinging around in trees and hovering around the dining area, waiting for someone to turn their eyes away from their food for a second so they could steal a piece of bread.  Those little stinkers were quick!  Luckliy I didn’t get anything stolen, but I did get to watch one of our Peace Corps staff members chase a monkey around after he stole his mango.  So great!  While in JJB we went on a boat tour with the slight hope of seeing some hippos.  We were so excited to not only see one hippo but a big group of them hanging out in the river, usually with just their ears and noses sticking out of the water.  We also were greeted by a group of chimpanzees and some baboons along the way.  Boat trip = huge success!  We stayed 2 nights in little thatch-roof huts at the camp, which I am pretty sure is what I will be living in once I move up to my site.

This week I am staying in the transit house, which is a house for Peace Corps volunteers to stay in when they come to the city.  We are doing a workshop tomorrow and the next day with our supervisors we will be working with when we go to site, and then Wednesday we all are traveling to our sites for a few days to meet our families and see our schools.  I’m excited to see where I’m going to be spending my next two years, but I’m also kind of bummed to be leaving my training village.  I’ve come to really love my life I’ve been living and in a couple weeks I’m going to be changing everything again.  Gambians are so friendly and welcoming; I’m going to miss my host family and friends I’ve made here so much!  Mariama Kunda has been added to the long list of homes I have in this world, and it’s almost time to add a little town called Lebba to this list, too.

My first taste of Gambian life

I’ve been in the Gambia for over a month now and today I have my first chance to get online and post something other than a short blurb on Facebook.  So for starters I should say that I have really been enjoying myself so far.  The people here are amazing:  my host family, the Peace Corps staff, my fellow trainees, and the Gambians I have encountered in my community and elsewhere.  After leaving the airport on our first day here, we were taken in a van to a place called Yuna village resort.  Even though it wasn’t a resort in the sense that I would normally think of a resort, it felt like I was being pampered by staying there the first week.  I expected to be roughing it starting from day one.  Much to my delight, the beds were nice, we had running water, a shower, a toilet, cold drinks, and great food—the most noteworthy being omelets with cheese for breakfast.  Kharles, I can finally see for myself how little cheese people eat in Africa and I understand why you think I and most other Americans are so weird for eating it all the time! 

During our first week we learned the basic greetings in the three languages the members of my training group are now studying (Mandinka, Wolof, and Pulaar).  Also within the first week and a half our group of 17 trainees shrank to 15.  Just a few days in, one guy decided it wasn’t the right time for him to be here, and one girl, who seemed unhappy from the beginning left without any explanation to the group.  Besides just taking me and the others by surprise, their ETs (early terminations) made me wonder if I was really cut out for the job the Peace corps wants me to do.  After the initial shock of it all, though, I determined that I really do want to be here and I think I can be an effective volunteer.  Yay me! 

The girl’s ET had an even bigger impact on my situation than that of the others.  I had been assigned to learn Mandinka and moved in with my host family and had stayed with them for two days.  We went through our naming ceremony, in which I was given the name Fatou Jaiteh—the same as my host sister and also my host mother—and I had unpacked my things and started to settle into my little house and new life.  Then I was approached by our program director and asked if it would be possible that I switch languages and host families because they didn’t want to lose the Wolof school where this girl was going to be working.  What?  Really?  Did they really think that they could uproot me from the very life I was already beginning to adjust to?  I responded, through tears, that if they needed me to make that change, then of course I would do it.  After all, one of the core expectations of the Peace Corps is to be flexible.  So, I packed up my things and moved to the other side of my town, Mariama Kunda, into a new family’s compound, into a new room, into a new mindset.

I’ve been staying with my host family for almost a month now and they are great.  My host brother, Momadou, and sisters, Fatou and Rohey, have great English and have been a huge help to me, especially when my host dad, Amat, tries to speak to me and I have no idea what he is saying.  By the way, pretty much every Gambian family has at least one Fatou and one Mohammed/Momadou/some version of that name.  So I still have a Toma (the word Gambians use to refer to someone with the same name as them) here in my family.  I wasn’t sure if I should change my last name or keep the one from my original family, so I ended up keeping both.  I now go by Fatou Jaiteh Ngum, or sometimes just Fatou Ngum, but I also will answer to Fatou Jaiteh.  J

My room is on the end of a row house made from mud bricks with a corrugated tin roof, equipped with my own backyard and pit latrine area.  We don’t have running water or electricity here, although my family does own a generator, which they fire up occasionally to watch their tiny TV.  My ceiling is lined with a bunch of large plastic bags sewn together, which has been a blessing and an annoyance.  Rats and possibly lizards take advantage of the space between the bags and the roof to run around and take shelter in at night.  No matter how annoying this can be, I am certainly glad they are staying up there and not down inside my room, especially in my bed!  Silver lining… J

Let’s move on to food.  The staple here is rice, which means I eat rice at least once a day, but often both for lunch and dinner.  Usually the rice is accompanied by cooked carrots, cabbage, eggplant, and either fish, chicken, or, on a couple occasions, SPAM (…I know…).  I eat lunch at my language teacher’s house with Rachel, the other trainee with whom I do language classes, and Gibril, my language teacher.  However, since it is the glorious month of Ramadan, Gibril hasn’t been eating with us.  Ramadan is 29 or 30 days in which Muslims do not eat during daylight hours.  This means they get up before the sun rises to eat breakfast, and don’t eat or drink anything until about 7:40 at night when the sun goes down.  Then Ndoguu, the best meal of them all (in my opinion), happens.  The first few times my family broke their fast they made rice or cous porridge, drank tea sweetened with an absurd amount of sugar and some milk.  Delicious! J  Ice is also a staple for breaking fast.  One evening I biked with Momadou to the nearby town Brufut to buy ice to put in their water and juice.  Lately Ndoguu has been less fancy and we just eat bread with butter and drink sugary tea or Nescafe, the closest thing we have to coffee here.  This is also what I eat for breakfast every morning.  Needless to say, Gambia isn’t known for their culinary expertise, but we make the best with what we have here.

This past week we did a “Model School” at the local school with 5^th and 6^th graders.  I taught the 5^th graders one lesson per day:  3 English and one P.E. class.  I was not really looking forward to playing the role as school teacher but surprisingly I really loved it.  The kids are all super adorable and so smart.  It made my job very enjoyable and easy.  When children start first grade, many of them have never spoken or heard the English language before.  There are quite a few local languages spoken throughout the Gambia, but school is entirely in English.  Not only are children learning Science or Math or History, but they are learning to speak a different language at the same time.  Anyway, being in contact with kids really made me miss coaching gymnastics, and it also got me excited for the next two years when I am working at my school.  (Side note:  my job title is Primary Teacher Trainer, which means that I am there to support the teachers at my school and help improve the school and teaching as a whole.  I am not going to be a teacher, as I might have told some of you before I left.  This is a recent change in the Peace Corps and it is really great because I am not taking someone else’s job as a teacher, I am there to help the existing teachers improve their techniques and their schools in general.) 

The next few weeks will be filled to the brim with technical trainings, language training, a visit to my permanent site, a field trip to Janjanbureh (an island upcountry), a hiking trip, and much much more.  Oh, and next week is Koriteh, the end of Ramadan, which is celebrated with lots of food, dressing up in your finest Gambian garb, braiding hair, getting hennaed, and going around to other people’s houses demanding money or candy, similar to Halloween in the states.  It should be a blast and I’m sure everyone will be very happy to not be fasting anymore.  Go them. 

Okay, til next time.  I’ll keep ya’ll updated when I can!

Xoxoxoxo

Stephy

P.S. Please feel free to leave comments and ask questions as I’m sure I left some stuff out that you might be curious about.  Thanks!