You Are Highly Welcome

Written on February 13th, 2011

There are a lot of things that I worry about when it comes to returning to America. Nose picking and spitting food (i.e. fish bones) on the ground while eating being two of them. I have also though about elements of professional life that are very different and how I will readjust--the most prominent being meetings. Let me highlight some aspects of the Gambian meeting (and let this serve as a warning to my potential future employees in America).

• Starting Time: whenever someone gives me a time that a meeting is supposed to start I do a very intricate calculation in order to determine what time it will actually start. Factors to consider include whose supposed to attend the meeting, what topics are to be discussed, what day of the week it is, how often the group meeting usually meets and if lunch will be provided. Generally I take the proposed starting time as more of a suggestion of what time I should start to think about getting ready in my compound. This being said I am still usually the first to arrive and wait anywhere from 1 to 3 hours for the meeting to start. Hence my Peace Corps (and life) motto--"Bring a book."
• Agenda: A large portion of the "agenda" is reserved for people to give "remarks." Though this is a good practice everyone wants to talk so everyone gives their remarks which are usually very similar derivations of: greeting, thanking Allah for helping them meet, singing the praises of the group/previous speakers, giving advice to the group and relating a long and detailed story of how they came to join the group/attend the meeting. All of these remarks take up so much time that everyone is either exhausted or argumentative when the actual meetings business is commenced. For example at the meeting of skills center representatives I attended yesterday the remarks took from noon to 6 pm with a short prayer break. The only other business completed in this time was the chair reading the groups constitution in English and then translating it into Wolof. By 6 pm everyone was starving so we closed and ate lunch. (Yes, lunch at six o'clock at night, I was about ready to eat my arm) Then they decided to take a break and meet again from midnight to 3 am to plan for the next years activities (the main purpose for calling the meeting in the first place). I didn't make it all the way to 3 am and bowed out and went to bed at 2.
• Multi-Tasking: If I remember correctly it has been somewhat acceptable in America to multi-task during meetings i.e. check email on Blackberrys and respond. But beyond that everyone at least makes a show of paying attention. Here multi-tasking takes on a new meaning. Naps, reading books (usually this is just me), taking and making phone calls, hair braiding, brewing attaya, breastfeeding, playing games on cellphones are all common forms of multi-tasking during a Gambian meeting.
• Networking: In America you get a business card. In the Gambia you get this text message: "RAMATULIE DEFINATELY, ITS TODAY THAT I MEET U, BUT REALLY U ARE IN MY HEART. I REALLY LIKE U TO ACCEPT MY KINDLY LOVE. DAMALA NOB BU BAAX." Enough said.

Entertain the People

Written on February 1, 2011

My experience with drama is very very minimal to say the very least. One line in two years of elementary school plays and a sixth grade turn as a man in the "Prince and the Pauper" has not an experienced actor made me. This past weekend however, lack of theatrical experience aside, I found myself organizing a drama tour with my peer health club. This past November six of my students acted in a drama on HIV/AIDS bike trek. Thanks to the extreme enthusiasm of a few teachers and the enjoyment of the students my group continued the drama and decided they wanted to take the drama to the villages from which the students come everyday to go to school. A few months later after revision and translation into Wolof myself, twenty students and six teachers spend a Saturday going to four different communities and presenting a thirty minute lecture and drama on HIV/AIDS addressing how the disease works, transmission, protection and stigma. We were quite a sight rolling into each village with a huge stereo set and speakers and all the students crammed into the back of a pick-up truck. Once in each village we would set up the speakers and blast music in an attempt to attract the attention of as many villagers as possible. Mr. Bah, one of the peer health club advisers, would implore all of the students to "entertain the people." This manifested itself as dancing, clapping and yelling. Once we had amassed a crowd of men, women and hundreds of small children the program would start. Four students gave a lecture on HIV supported with visual aides they made themselves. Afterwards the six students would act the drama called, "I'm Not a Sickness I'm a Son" in Wolof and the program ended with more clapping and dancing. After going through this in four villages we were all exhausted but the students seemed extremely energized by the village sensitization. For both the students and their parents, friends and family in their home villages it was very powerful to see/show what they've learned in school about HIV. This topic is still very taboo in the Gambia, as is talking about sex, so for the students to talk about these topics openly in front of their elders was difficult. If anything is to change however about the attitude toward HIV there needs to be a conversation and the first step to start that is for people to start feeling comfortable to say "sex," "HIV" and "condom" out loud. I hope in some small part our program helped start that conversation.

Get Tested!!

Written on January 27th, 2010

Today I want to tell you all about my friend Abdullahi.
Abdullahi is one of my neighbors in KJJ. I've known him since about my second day living here when he helped me fix my bike tire. He's a husband and father of five. He's active with the skills center, often comes to our literacy classes and is a self taught English speaker, he's never been to school.
All of this being said I don't usually spend that much time hanging out with 'Lai though wherever he sees me hes happy to see me and likewise. A few months ago when I came back to KJJ after finishing the HIV/AIDs bike trek he came by my compound and we were talking about the bike trek and some of the things we had taught the students about HIV. We talked a lot about how a very important way to protect yourself is to know your HIV status and to go for Voluntary Counseling and Testing (VCT) which is available for free in some health centers. At the end of our conversation he mentioned that he wanted to go get tested so he could know his status. I told him that I would support him as much as possible in going to get tested and we agreed that whenever he was ready I would go with him to Kerewan to get tested. After that, I got really busy with schools and holidays and Lai got busy in the fields. A few weeks ago however he approached me again about going and we made a plan to go today.
At 9 am Lai showed up in my compound dressed in a nice white complet and all ready to go to Kerewan. As we waited by the side of the road for a car we talked about some of the reasons AIDS is a problem in Africa/The Gambia and some of the things that have reduced the prevalence rate in the US--like condom use and people getting tested, both men and women.
Testing in the Gambia is a huge problem because of the high stigma associated with having HIV. All pregnant women are asked to go get tested as a means to counter mother to child transmission and therefore the majority of testing comes from pregnant women. Testing of men however is practically non-existent and for men to voluntarily go for testing is uncommon.
This is what makes Lai such a gem. He decided to go get tested on his own so that he could know because, "It's good to know about yourself." Once we got to the health center things were a breeze. I had met the man who does VCT coincidentally the week before so as always in the Gambia it was helpful to already have that relationship. It was a little nerve wracking going through the process with Lai and I could tell he was nervous also. I had to cover his eyes when they drew his blood and when they gave him his negative result we high 5'd and hugged--two things Gambians don't do. After it was all over Lai told me how happy he was to know his status and beyond that how he wanted to tell all his friend about his experience so they wouldn't be afraid to go get tested. Within two hours of being back in KJJ he had talked to three people who now want to get tested and just wanted me to call the doctor to make sure they had as easy a time as him.
I am so awestruck and humbled by the quiet determination of my friend. He has no reason to be so concerned about this other than he just wants to do the right thing and protect himself, his family and his village.
I sometimes would get the sense in America that people saw HIV testing as unnecessary, something for druggies and promiscuous young people, but if my experience with my friend Lai taught me anything its that we should all know our status if for no other reason than as a support to people around the world, like him, who are determined to fight stigma, raise awareness and live their life, without fear, with dignity and honesty. So I urge all of you to go get tested, know your status and think of my friend Lai who really is a shining example of courage and selflessness.

"What is pus??"

Written on January 21st, 2011
Yesterday I spent the morning at the senior secondary school attending a lecture on Tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and STIs with my peer health club students. It was very much a fly by the seat of your pants session. Clearly the group that organized it had some extra funds they wanted to use up so they decided to call in a local nurse from Kerewan to talk to the students. Don't get me wrong, this is all well and good, well intentioned and much needed but as I've noticed lately with my work here, myself and the people I work with sometimes enthusiasm over the different that will be made overrides planning and consideration. I'm certainly guilty of getting so wrapped up and excited that I don't really take the time to consider important factors like my audience, their needs and sustainability.
This lecture came after almost six months of work on my part and the part of another agency to educate the students abut HIV/AIDS. Something we hadn't talked about at all is TB, so a session just on that would have been great but throwing STIs, HIV and TB together just caused a lot of confusion and repetition of information. I hardly could follow the presenter so I'm sure that the students didn't do much better. Because the presentation was so bad I found myself zoning out and thinking about what conclusions I can draw after a year of attending events at Gambian schools.
I think my most interesting observation has been that though all Gambian students are English language learners, i.e. they don't speak English at home, teaching and curriculum here is not geared towards ESL. Though English is the official language of the Gambia in reality so little of the population is literate in/speaks English that assuming that students will learn effectively without any attention given to their English learning status is really just setting them up for failure. The natural reaction to this system is for students to just memorize what they learn which means they can answer questions if they've memorized them but have very little ability for original or abstract thought. In addition asking questions is seen not as a tool for learning but a failure of the students. At this lecture the presenter threw out hundreds of very scientific terminology for STIs (including pus) but refused to answer students questions when they raised their hands asking them to write their questions down for the end of the lesson, effectively telling them not to ask any questions.
For me, coming from a background where inquiry and questions were celebrated this orientation is both extremely frustrating and discouraging. I wonder how many things would be different here if people celebrated rather than demonized what we don't know.

You Can Help!!!

It's a very very exciting day for me here in the Gambia. For the past few months I have been working to develop a health and nutrition education competition for the women in my village. My goal is to provide them with basic health and nutrition education in a fun and interactive way. They get points for participating in the different elements of the competition and at the end we will have a big community celebration where the women will share what they have learned and win prizes. Most importantly the women in my village, many of whom have never had the opportunity to go to school, will get a chance to educate themselves and be seen as resource people by the community. I've spoken a ot about how much the women in my village inspire me. But after a year in Kerr Jarga these women are also my friends. We laugh together, cook together and talk about life, theirs and mine, this is my small way of trying to help them and thank them for their friendship and support. I am truly humbled by the way they have all embraced me.So where do y'all come in? Unfortunately though health knowledge is free running this competition will not be free. So I am trying to raise money for my project through Peace Corps Partnership. A program where people can go to the Peace Corps website and donate to my project. I would really appreciate any support you all could provide. The total I need to raise is $764.79 so every little bit will help. A ot of you have asked me how you can help me in my work here and this is a way that you really can make a difference in the lives of the amazing women of Kerr Jarga. I promise to keep you all updated on the competition with pictures and blogs.So.....if my pitch has peaked your interest you can follow the link below to donate!
https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=635-069

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.