Will You Be My Baby Mama?

Written on April 17th, 2011

Here's a good Peace Corps riddle for you: What's a more motivating force than helping the people in your community???? Having friends and family in the US forking over $$$ for your community.
Not long ago as you all may remember I put out a plea for donations to a community health competition I want to organize in my village. The outpouring of support was amazing (Thank you all!!) and within no time I had the money I needed--at which point I found myself thinking--"Shit, I guess I do actually have to do this now." because so many ideas and projects here often tail to even make it off the ground I find myself often pleasantly surprised when things work out.
I already place a lot of pressure and expectations on myself to succeed. That is just who I am and here it is merely amplified by my sense of purpose and urgency when it comes to helping my village. However great this commitment of mine is the downside is that it leads me to set high expectations for myself and those around me that are most often incredibly difficult or impossible to achieve. Not that the Gambia isn't full of people with a sense of drive and purpose which makes it easy for them to go above and beyond expectations, yet the reality is that a motto I've had to adopt since I have arrived is "lower your expectations."
The process of actually commencing the "Baby Mamas" or "Yow Yaay Yaay" health competition has really necessitated and put to the test this idea. For example, this past week I called a village meeting to introduce the competition. I imagined a picturesque community meeting with 100s of villagers. The village elders would all sit on plastic chairs in their grand boubous with small children at their feet, the women would be animated and engaged and make profound statements about the struggles they face in maintaining their personal health. In reality, an hour and a half after the meeting was supposed to start we had one participant. Finally around 7 pm (the meeting was supposed to happen at 5 pm) we had about 30 old women (not our target group of mothers with children under 5), half of whom couldn't talk because they were so busy praying with their prayer beads. No men were there and in the end I had about 50 "old women" and 20 mothers, so much for all the village diversity.
So by all accounts this village meeting was very far from what I had hoped for and imagined. But it did cause me to check myself and not necessarily lower but readjust my expectations. While developing my health competition I had high hopes for what if would achieve. I wanted to teach the women of my village about health and I imagined packed meetings and lots of participation. I'm realizing though that maybe I need to focus on the fact that if I can get 10 women to come and truly participate, to ask questions and teach others than that is an achievement enough. I'm sure as this project continues I will find myself with many more situations of disappointment when what I imagined isn't what I get. But in the end I will learn just as much in the failures as I do in the successes. So stay tuned to the Baby Mamas saga--next up is the opening ceremony!