I HATE MOSQUITOES

STOP SUCKING MY BLOOD INSIDE THE HOUSE!!!

Is that too much to ask?

Run, Toubab, Run!

I went for a run today. I was bored with my usual route along Stadium Highway and sick of breathing in exhaust fumes, so I decided to try a new loop one of the other girls had shown me. This loop ran past a women's collective garden. It was much greener and much prettier.

As I huffing my along my way, I jogged past a group of little boys. "Give me dalasi!" called out one of the boys. "No money!" I said and kept on puffing along. A little farther along there was another group of boys. One of the boys approached me as he opened his mouth I cut him off. "You give me dalasi?" He gaped at me confused. I jogged a few more steps and another boy approached me. "Any minties?" I said. (Minties are what Gambian children call candy). "Any minties?" I repeat, hand outstretched. A few of the boys were very confused, but most of them laughed.

As I continued along my route, I noticed I had a shadow. The boy who had asked me for dalasis was running along behind me. When he saw me looking, he grinned. I grinned back and picked up the pace so that he wouldn't think I was a wimp. We got to the end of the road and I stopped. "Now we go back," I said to the boy, pointing back to the way we came. I started jogging again and he fell in behind me.

We got back to where his buddies were and they shrieked with laughter to see the two of us running together. I waved at them and kept running. Three more boys fell in behind me. With my bright green tank top I imagine looked like a scruffy and confused pied piper.

A woman working in one of the gardens seemed to have the same impression. She called something to me in a local language. I have no idea which language she was speaking, let alone what she said,but I imagine it was something along the lines of "Why are you kidnapping children?" Having nothing else to say I said what I always said in that situation.
"Asalamalakum," the standard Arabic greeting. I smile at her trying my best not to look like a kidnapper.
"Malakum salam," she replies, smiling back. "Suemolay?" Ah, she's Mandinka.
"Eebeejay," I answer back, thrilled to know the proper response. The boys are thrilled, too.
"Etonday?"
"Sarah!" Once again I am thrilled to know what she is asking. The boys laugh at my enthusiastic answer to a mundane question. "Etonday?" I ask the woman, grinning.
"Mariama," she answers laughing. At this point, I've exhausted my entire knowledge of the Mandinka language). I thank her ("Abaraka!") and wave good bye. She laughs again and waves back. The boys wave, too.

We keep jogging for another few minutes. We stop when we reach Stadium Highway. "I have to go home now," I tell the boys. "Did you have a good run?" They reply yes in way which could mean "Yes, the run was fun" or "Yes, I understand you are speaking English." Using a combination of Mandinka, English and hand gestures I find out their names. "Thank you for running with me," I say before crossing the street. When I look back, the boys are racing and shouting back up the road to their playmates.

All in all, I'd say it was a good run.

"Potty" Break

Last weekend we took another trip up-country. A few hours into our journey, we pulled off at a gas station to use the bathroom. Gas station bathrooms are never a treat, but gas station bathrooms in a developing country achieve a class of their own.

The gas station manager walked us over to a shed, more a shack really. He opened the door on the left revealing a squat toilet and the overpowering stench of stale human waste. He then opened the right side door revealing a four walls and a wet floor that smelled slightly better. He explained that this side was "For urinate! For urinate!"

I decided to take whichever room (stall?) became available first. It turned out to be the "for urinate!" side. I took a deep breathe of the refreshing exhaust scented air outside and stepped in. The door didn't close all the way by itself, so one of the other girls held it shut for me.

It was dark in the shed, but still light enough to see. I looked around and tried to figure out the best way of doing things. There didn't seem to be any particular place "for urinate!" Rather, the whole place was wet and smelly. I picked a spot a decent distance away from the extra gross looking and smelling walls.

Being a woman and therefore not particularly talented at peeing standing up, I decided the best course of action was to just removed my shorts. It was a tricky process, keeping my balance without touching the wall and attempting to keep the grossness of the floor (and now the bottom of my shoes) away from my shorts. But I eventually did manage.

So, now that I was pants-less in a damp, dark shed in rural Africa, there wasn't much else to do but squat down and take care of business. While doing just that, I noticed that there was a sort of drain after all. There was a ground level hole in the wall that divided the "for urinate!" side from the squat toilet side. That meant all of the urine from my side of the shed emptied into the other side. Meaning that right now one of my girlfriends was peeing as the trickle of my pee sought its way to her drain. I pushed that thought out of my head after a brief moment of gratitude that I had ended up in the "for urinate!" side.

Having taken care of business, I was a little stumped about what to do with the toilet tissue. There was no trash can, certainly nowhere to flush it and I didn't exactly relish the idea of putting it my pocket to dispose of later. In the end, I just threw it on the floor. I did another complicated dance to put my shorts back on the least disgusting way possible and bid farewell to the "for urinate!" shed.

Once back out in the dazzling sunlight, I realized that despite my best efforts and wishful thinking, I had not entirely managed to avoid peeing on my own feet. No one else had either, so we passed around a pack of Wet Ones and agreed that this had been "an experience." Then we got back on the bush taxi and continued on our way.

The Lake House

There's a lake outside our house. Okay, not a lake but a really big puddle. One of the water pipes sprung a leak. The pipes here are made of rubber, so that's not so uncommon. For about two weeks now, water has been gurgling up forming an ever growing puddle in the dirt road. The mosquitoes probably love it. It gives them a great place to lay eggs and wash down the blood they stole from me.

Because the water flow hasn't stopped, the government isn't going to fix the pipe. Which means that the pipe won't get fixed until we can't shower. Since the Gambian government isn't renowned for its quickness and efficiency, I'm crossing my fingers that the water keeps flowing.

In the mean time, we have a mini lake outside our house. It makes going anywhere a bit tricky, but a conveniently placed tire gives you enough to bounce over a narrower part of the puddle. I wanted to buy a gold fish for the puddle and train it to do tricks, but everyone told me it would probably die from all the pollution (supposedly there was a dead rat floating in it. I didn't see it and refuse to believe it exists because that is too icky).

Probably the oddest part of all of this is how normal I find it. If the pipe still works, why should the government fix it? The water's not really in our way, we can jump over it, after all. And in a way, does add a kind of afternoon-at-the-park feel to the compound. Well, maybe an afternoon-at-the-desert-park-located-right-next-to-a-huge-garbage-pile-where-sheep-love-eat-even-though-it-is-perpetually-on-fire.

I think tomorrow I'll make a fleet of paper boats and reenact the British defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

Shower me with cleanliness

I really do not want to shower right now. I need to - desperately - as there is no way I can go to bed this dusty. But I'm having so much trouble convincing myself to face the shower.

To begin with, I'm dreading the cold water. Cold showers feel amazing in the middle of the day or when you've just come home from the bush taxi and you're over-heated and sweaty and just gross. They don't feel so good after the sun's gone down. I try as often as I can to shower when the cold water is a pro, but sometimes it's just not possible.

Tonight is one of those nights. I may be able to convince myself that the cold water isn't such a dreadful thing (you do adjust after the initial shock, after all), but I'm also very tired and not looking forward to shower aerobics.

The shower head is a sort of wand which is attached to a hose. The hose is about four inches to short for me to stand under. Or at least, it used to be. Our shower head broke and now we're left with the hose. So, washing my hair and anywhere above my shoulders requires a bit of work.

Showering is also very frustrating because it's very difficult (if not impossible) to get entirely clean. It's dusty and sandy here and the dusty sand seems to cling on to you, no matter how hard you scrub. It's very disconcerting and a little depressing as your scrubbing clean-looking feet to see that the soap suds gliding toward the drain are decidedly brown in color.

The good news is that the water pressure is always much better at night and I don't have to worry about not having enough pressure to rinse the shampoo out of my hair. The power has stayed on tonight so I won't have to shower by candle or flashlight. And the two girls who share my shower have already showered, so I'm free to shower whenever I can finally convince myself to stop putting it off.

All in all, I'm pretty lucky with my showering situation. The water pressure is so bad at my Swedish friend's house that some days there simply isn't enough to shower at all (on those days, he showers over here). And I only have to share my shower with two other girls as opposed to a whole floor (or a whole compound, which I suppose is the Gambian equivalent).

Even so, I'd give a lot to be able to have a hot standing up shower with real body wash and not the bubble bath I accidentally bought because the bottle was in Arabic and I couldn't understand it. Ah, well, imagine how much I'll appreciate my first shower back in America.

For tonight, I'll just savor the feeling of cleanliness. Until tomorrow when it's time to hit the (dusty) road.

The Companion's Burden

Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" is a beautifully written poem urging the United States to take over the Philippines, to assume their duty and bring the Philippines into the modern world. Although a racist poem, Kipling elegantly instills feelings of pride and honor about taking up a noble yet unrewarding task.

It's a poem used in history and politics classes to illustrate the mood and view of Europeans about colonization, which is essentially that the non-European peoples were not civilized and were incapable of existing in a modern world and it was Europe's moral obligation to help them along. We discussed it in our human rights class at the University of The Gambia.

"The White Man's Burden" was written in a different time for a very specific situation, but it has not lost its relevance even today. Today we speak in more politically correct terms, eschewing terms like "first world" and "third world" for the less egocentric "developed nations" and "developing nations." And we no longer assume that the reason for a country's developing or developed status is the color of its people's skin. But read through the poem again, replacing "White Man" with "Westerner," and the poem could speak for any number of aid efforts.

The IMF and the World Bank, various human rights groups, aid efforts like Live8 and an innumerable amount of NGO's, all \ are attempts by the West to develop Africa, to save it, to help its people progress enough to fully and fairly participate in today's modern globalized economy and world system. These efforts are sincere and earnest. We must help them not for our own gain, but because it is the right thing to do. However, sincere and earnest the efforts may be, there is still a sense that we, the West, must help poor Africa because they cannot help themselves.

Without a doubt, there are things that the West can offer Africa. But any help or assistance, be it in the form of monetary aid, equipment, training, human rights work or whatever, needs to be offered not from a benevolent giver, not from a wise mentor, not from a self-sacrificing teacher, but from an equal to an equal.

This is not an easy thing to do. It's easy to assume the role of the wise mentor, imparting wisdom and gently guiding Africa toward civil peace and economic prosperity. It's also easy to take on the role of admiring sycophant, extolling the virtues of communal living and extended-family based society.

What is difficult to do is to strike a balance. There are values the West can offer to Africa and there are values Africa can offer to the West. The trick is to appreciate and criticize each other's cultures as colleagues, rather than inferiors and superiors.

I can and should criticize the subordinate status of women in African society, and my Gambian peers can and should criticize the harsh individualism of American society which allows so many people to fall through the cracks. The value of any cross-cultural experience is being to view your own culture with new eyes, cherishing its strengths and working to improve its flaws.

I'll end this post with a slightly edited stanza of Kipling's poem. Viewed in the context of equality, it strikes an even more poignant note.

Take up the companion's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

Tower of Babel

I've had a love affair with English since before I could talk. I love finding just the right word to describe something. I love that you can change the pattern and cadence of a sentence to convey different mood and feelings. I love that the rhythm and taste of words can be beautiful and their meaning wondrous.

However, I have found English to be a jealous lover and there seems to be no room in my heart or my head for any other language. I tried repeatedly to cram Spanish in and accomplished very little. I did manage to have some minor success with American Sign Language, but other than that nothing seems to stick.

In The Gambia, everyone is multilingual. The official language is English, but most people speak at a minimum two tribal languages and usually more. There was an add in the paper for a mobile phone salesgirl. Among other requirements, the applicants had to be fluent in English and at least two local languages.

The majority of people in The Gambia are Mandinka but many speak Wolof as well. Wolof is the more prevalent language in Senegal one of The Gambia's major trading partners, so it has become the language of commerce. Fula and Jola are also common languages in the greater Banjul area.

As part of our study abroad program, we've being taking Wolof lessons. From my trip I took to The Gambia this past summer, I have a few (that is to say three) Mandinka greetings under my belt.

It's incredible how powerful even these rudimentary bits of language can be. The children are especially tickled. When they shout "Toubab! Toubab!" after us and we respond in Wolof or Mandinka, it's almost as if a dog had begun talking to them. Some of the older kids will laugh at our accents and some of the very little ones stare almost frightened at us.

Shop keepers, taxi drivers and passersby are so excited to hear a toubab speaking a local language. It's like Christmas has come early. I feel like a thief a few minutes later when they find out that beyond inquiring after the health of their family and thanking them, I can't say or understand much else.

I've had varying responses to my bumbling attempts at Wolof. An old Muslim man lectured me that if I was going to live in another country, I should already know the language. A friendly taxi driver taught me how to say "I have a husband." A security guard drinking attaya (green tea) told me I should be learning Mandinka instead.

I would love to be able to fully grasp even just one local language. It's frustrating to realize that even the little bit that I do learn is pretty much useless outside of Senegambia. Guess that means I'll just have to come back someday...