Ram-a-lam aka Tobaski

Written on November 18th, 2010

For someone who was a vegetarian for a large portion of my young adult like I have witnessed my fair share of ram slaughter. Wednesday marked my second Tobaski spent as a PCV in The Gambia. Tobaski is the holiday that falls two lunar months after the end of Ramadan and its a BIG holiday--Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas all rolled into one. The days agenda includes praying, asking Allah and each other to forgive us for any of our known or unknown offenses, eating as much ram meat as humanly possible, showing off the newest and fanciest clothes, shoes and hairdos and going from compound to compound, house to house asking for money, candy or groundnuts.

The morning started with the men, older women, children and Ramatoulie, (the toubab exempted from normal social norms) going to the big mosque in the village for communal prayer. I always go back and forth on whether its acceptable/OK for me to use my toubab card to go pray/observe prayer when (1) I'm not Muslim and (2) all other women my age can't go pray. For Tobaski though I wanted to see what that experience was like and my little sister Fatou was pretty insistent that I go with her. So I wrapped up my head, put on my fancy new complet and headed off. When we got there we set up our mat among all the older women from our side of the village and they all clucked about my clothes and braids and helped me put on my shawl correctly.

The communal prayer was a very moving and powerful experience for me. Now people may want to debated the ethics of participating in a Muslim prayer service as a non-Muslim but for me this wasn't about being a Muslim or not. As we stood and knelt and placed our foreheads on the mat I thought about my blessings and how my experience here consistently reaffirms my belief that kindness and understanding is what can connect us all and that these ideals are more powerful than religion, race, gender and nationality. Finally, I prayed because I could think of no better way to express my joy and gratitude for the place the community of KJJ has made for me within it. After the prayer I shook hands with all the women who truly provide me with so much inspiration and motivation to continue my work here. Any lingering fear of how my act of prayer would be received was assuaged when I came across a teacher from our village later in the day. He told me he had seen me shaking hands with the old women at the end of the prayer. He said that he was very touched and he though "That's what a human being should be." I don't think I can get any better affirmation than that that I made the right decision.

After prayer came the ram sacrifice which starts the feasting of Tobaski. Every compound slaughters at least one ram, with larger compounds having more so in my village of 60+ compounds there were at least 100 rams slaughtered. That's alot of meat. After they are killed and cleaned children are sent all around the village with platters and bowls with piles of meat to be given out for charity. We gave away probably half our ram but received the same, if not more, back in the end so its probably safe to say that my compound, of about 15 people consumed a whole ram. Now half the compound has diarrhea (luckily not me) but that's a story for another day. The entire morning we spent cooking up "sauce" (potatoes, oil, onions, pepper, Jumbo, mustard and vinegar) which we inhaled hungrily around 4 pm with the two neighboring compounds. We all squatted around our bowls and dug in, scooping out sauce with our fingers and little pieces of bread. A very Gambian Thanksgiving.

After lunch was time for the adults to sit around and drink attaya while the kids put on their fancy new outfits and go salibo--which is basically trick or treating. They go from compound to compound in groups of four or five and collect minties, dalasi or groundnuts. The minties they consume immediately while the dalasi and groundnuts (which they sell for dalasi) will either be divided up amongst them or used to buy milk and attaya and radio batteries for a party. The difference between salibo and trick or treating however is that once the sunsets adults head out too. I went with my host sister, Mbayang, and some other girls from our part of the village. We walked along in the moonlight, ran into other salibo-ers, stopped to admire each others outfits and walked on. We stopped into the compounds of friends and family and asked for their forgiveness then they would give us dalasi and we would walk on. After about two hours we had been all over the village and pulled in over D100. By salibo or Halloween standards that's a good haul.

Back in my compound by 11 pm I lay out on my mat, stared up at the almost full moon and listened to the music blaring from some compound on the other side of the village. I had health, happiness and a belly full of ram--if that isn't being blessed I don't know what is.

HIV/AIDS Education Bike Trek!!

Written on November 8th, 2010

Last week myself and eight other volunteers set off on an HIV/AIDS Education Bike trek from Barra to Farafenni (over 110 km). We stopped at five schools along the way, teaching 160 students at each school for a total of 800 students. At the same time two other teams of ten volunteers were doing the same thing in the area surrounding Farafenni and in the Central River Region (CRR) from Janjanbureh to Farafenni. In one week our group of volunteers, supported by counterparts from the National AIDS Secretariat, reached 15 schools and over 2,500 Gambian upper basic (middle school) students, teaching them a 4+ hour lesson on HIV/AIDS risk, transmission, protection and stigma. What a week for Peace Corps The Gambia!
Along with Erica, I was in charge of the planning and coordination for the team that went from Barra to Farafenni. This meant feeding, housing, coordinating and motivating our team of PCVs and two members of the Gambian Cycling Association, Edi and Musa, who joined our team. Based on how inspiring and motivated our fellow volunteers are it was all in all a relatively easy task to keep it all going and together during the week. For the month before Erica and I lived and breathed bike trek but once everyone else showed up our job was made so easy. We had a team of amazing, strong, motivated and competent volunteers who all stepped up and gave their all to make this project a success.
So how did we spend our days? We would wake up every morning and go to the school where we would be teaching for the day. In teams of two PCVs we would break into four classes of forty students each. For the next 4+ hours we would work our way through the lesson "HIV/AIDS: Finding your own voice." The lesson featured lecture, games, drawings and diagrams and drama all aimed at teaching the students about HIV and encouraging them to feel confident to talk about HIV with their friends and family.
For most of the week we taught Grade 9 students and teaching in the Gambian classroom definitely presented its fair share of challenges. For one thing learning here is very strongly focused on memorization and regurgitation. Independent and abstract though is not really fostered and students often fear contributing unless they know the correct answer so getting them to "take a guess" is very difficult. The classroom atmosphere is very teacher centric--the teacher stands at the front of the class and talks at the students. The way we as Americans teach students is in a very child centered way and this is completely foreign to the students. It takes them a while to realize that we're not going to chastise them if they get the answer wrong or yell at them for asking a question if they don't understand something. Additionally, though most of these students understand a fair amount of English there was still a pretty high language barrier. We asked all schools to put two teachers in each classroom to observe and also to help translate things into local language when that became necessary. When the teachers were present, both physically and mentally, it worked out great but when that wasn't the case teaching and classroom management were definitely difficult. There were, despite the challenges, many times during the week when you could see something in a students mind click with understanding. When explaining how HIV attacks the immune system we drew a picture of the human body, the picture looks kind of like a football play with viruses coming in to the body to make it sick and how the immune system, or "blood soldiers", attack the virus to keep the body healthy. On the first day of the trek, at Essay Upper Basic School, I walked into the classroom at the break and came across a group of students all drawing the picture for each other and explaining how HIV works. later in the lesson we played a game called "Hyenas and Goats" where the students take on the roles of baby and adult goats and hyenas to show how the immune system (adult goats) protects the human body (baby goat) and how when HIV takes away the immune system, opportunistic infections (hyenas) can come harm the body. Many times during the week as students got all excited playing this game you could see the wheels of understanding starting to turn in their heads.
Just as the wheels of our bicycles turned this week as we rode from Barra to Farafenni, everyday as we stopped in Essau, Berending, Kuntair, Kerewan and Salikenne, we were able to experience many moments where students started to see, understand and discover on their own. The lessons were never perfect and in every class we were lucky if we had five or six really engaged students--but nonetheless it is those five or six who could make the difference and who will make a difference. As we were planning the bike trek the biking aspect was for the most part merely a way to get from one school to the next without having to find money for a bunch of fuel. But, for me at least, as the week went on biking started to take on a greater significance. As we moved from one place to the next I would find myself looking out across the plains of grass, baobab trees and mound of groundnuts and breathing deeply. I often found myself reflecting on my life here, my service and what type of impact my work and time spent here is having on this little country. I don't believe that I will ever be able to look back and say, "Then, that was the moment that I changed the lives of the people in Kerr Jarga." Rather it will be moments like this, project like this, that touch a few people, a few students, and help them start to think about thing a little differently. Maybe they just understand a little better how HIV is transmitted of how to protect them selves--maybe they remember that we told them they had a voice to speak loud and proud about HIV. No matter how a project like this impacts them the most important thing is that they realize they are the one who controls their future. They are in charge of their own development and they can really make a difference. If one student realized that by the end of the week than the hours and kilometers of biking and my very sore butt as a result will all have been worth it.