Peace Corps Take 2: The Gambia

The Best, The Worst, The Unforgettable

2010-02-18T11:19:00.000-08:00

Location: Morocco, North Africa

Cities Visited: Casablanca, Fes, Chefchaouen, Merzouga, Marrakesh

The Best: Miniature cakes, avocado smoothies, coffee, fruit, roses, camel treks, privacy, Art Deco buildings, handmade rugs, street food, and Arabic music.

The Worst: Frantically deciding how to descend from a cliff and Matt yelling “JUMP!” as three boys hurl huge rocks at our heads for refusing to give them a tip after an unsolicited explanation of Fes at sunset. Also, freezing in the hotel rooms that never had heat but always had blankets I was allergic to. Oh, and all the times we had to pee in the shower cause rooms just don’t have toilets.

The Unforgettable: The first bites of cous cous and tajine- Morocco’s classic, delectable cuisines- and wondering if I really could still be in Africa.

Location: Madrid, Spain

The Best: Riding the metro. Experiencing fabric softener. Huge burgers, not from McDonalds. Tapas with the tapa expert of Madrid.

The Worst: Throwing up after consuming huge amounts of ham and paella after realizing my body had no idea how to digest fats anymore.

The Unforgettable: “HELLO MADRID!”- Matt’s reaction to a girl wearing a short skirt and tights in his first minutes of being off the African continent in over 28 months, and his exit from the Muslim world where knees are never seen. Later, a moment of ecstasy in the form of the tortilla Española.

Location: Italia

Cities Visited: Rome and Venice

The Best: A bed & breakfast in Chinatown. Italian accents. Riding boat taxis all over Venice. Shopping for Carnaval masks with my mom. Eating gelato and more gelato, tasting horsemeat, and buying pizza by the kilo. Watching glassblowers make a horse.

The Worst: N/A. Is that a serious question???

The Unforgettable: Seeing my parents get off the train after two hours of waiting and running around the terminal convinced they were wondering aimlessly, lost somewhere in Rome.

Location: Minneapolis, MN, USA!!!

The Best: Making it back in time for my best friend’s birthday! Seeing my brother and old friends. Being home.

The Worst: Bringing home itchy skin lesions from the Gamb, and getting a letter in the mail saying it was likely to be Schistosomiasis, a parasite that enters the body after contact with contaminated river water. Only thing is, I was never in a river. So then a visit to a dermatologist with the conclusion that they are probably blocked hair follicles, 20 of them, in areas where I do not have hair. Treatment- One month of antibiotics with side effects of intense heartburn and uncontrollable gas.

The Unforgettable: Walking into Mall of America with the intention of buying clothes but getting totally distracted by Dairy Queen and its strawberry sundaes. And then Matt, stunned by the sight, grabs my arm and says dreamily, “Look, Tam, roller coasters……!” So of course we ride roller coasters and eat ice cream and leave, without buying a thing.

To see more pictures of Italy, click here.
For more pics of Morocco, check here.

It's been a wild ride, but boy is it good to be home.

Tam in the Gam- The Official Record

2009-12-03T11:10:00.000-08:00

Between the laughing and the crying, through pouring rain and scorching heat, after dropping dead mice down the latrine and before cooking mac ‘n cheese for the millionth time to quell the unstoppable hunger pains, I actually did squeeze in some work.

I know I have tried to explain what I do, but I always seem to get off track with some story about a gecko secretly pooping on my bedsheet or my friend eating a boa constrictor or the ram that sits next to us on public transport. So here, I am posting an official record of the work I did. Just in case you wanted to know, just in case you wonder what I did with my time, and just in case you know of a job I can get based on my stunning qualifications.

*********************

Volunteer Name: Ms. Minh-Tam (Tammy) Truong
Country of Service: The Gambia, West Africa

Ms. Minh-Tam (Tammy) Truong began her work with Peace Corps in Bolivia, South America but her service was interrupted when volunteers were evacuated from the country in September 2008 due to political unrest. She then elected to transfer to the Gambia, West Africa where she served as a volunteer in the Environment and Natural Resource Management program.

Training Summary

Ms. Truong arrived in country on October 23, 2008 and took part in a three month training program consisting of:

Technical Training and Trainee Directed Activities (136 hours): Covered environmental challenges faced in the Gambia and proactive agro-forestry practices, improved agriculture and horticulture techniques, natural resource management strategies, and environmental education skills.

Language Training (150 hours): Formal and informal Mandinka language lessons enhanced by living with a Mandinka host family. Rated at Intermediate-High language proficiency level at close of training.

Cross-cultural Training (20 hours): Increased awareness and understanding of Gambian culture, history and politics of the Gambia, Islam in the Gambian context, traditional beliefs and taboos, gender roles, and non-verbal communication.

Health Sessions (30 hours): Included preventative health measures, self-diagnosis, and basic medical treatment

Safety and Security Sessions (8 hours): Emphasized a lifestyle that reduces risk at home, work, and during travels, dealing with unwanted attention, and emergency action plans.

Work Summary

Ms. Truong was based in the coastal village of Sanyang, approximate population of 10,000. Her work included management and coordination of the Sanyang Women’s Community Garden and Skills Center and performing market research, informational surveys, and sales and marketing training in her role as a business consultant for Gambia is Good, a U.K. based NGO. She was also a fundraising coordinator for the Against Malaria bed net campaign raising $15,000. In her free time she completed various projects in graphic design and wrote blog entries detailing her Peace Corps experience to share with those back home.

Detailed Project Descriptions

Gambia is Good
Pro-poor horticulture marketing NGO linking rural farmers to the tourism industry. Promoting locally grown fruits and vegetables and reducing imported products, Gambia is Good helps its farmers move from subsistence agriculture to commercial enterprise to create sustainable livelihoods

Gambia is Good Business Consultant

Training of Sales and Marketing Team- Established customer database, led training sessions on sales techniques, customer service, marketing and advertising. Helped to improve inefficiencies.

Promotion and Sales- Designed display stand to increase impulse buys at point-of-sale, designed awards to recognize highest-volume vendors, and wrote script for radio ads.

New Item Feasibility and Customer Satisfaction Surveys- Designed and executed detailed surveys through interviews with purchasing officers, chefs, and general managers of major customers.

Competitor Benchmarking- Researched pricing, product availability, and selection of major competitors.

Agricultural Excursion Tour- Designed tour taking into account logistics, time-frames, and feasibility. Composed tour description for marketing product to tour operators.

World Bank Mango Processing Facility Project- Local Market Researcher

Conducted detailed market analysis seeking most compelling opportunities to maximize value of mangos, including both fresh and processed products. Results of market analysis used to carry out feasibility study and business plan to capture identified opportunities. Estimated local demand for mango products through interviews with importers, wholesalers, and retailers.

Agricultural Extension Support Officer- Liaison between Gambia is Good and Sanyang Women’s Community Garden and Skills Center, a key vegetable production site. Duties included:

Increasing technical capacities and horticultural capabilities among associated farmers

Coordinating with production managers to ensure timely sowing of correct varieties
Reporting activities and progress of producers to Gambia is good general manager and production managers

Sanyang Women’s Community Garden and Skills Center- Joint project between the Gam-Holland Foundation and Sanyang community aiming to provide income generating opportunities to increase rural female earning potential.

Managed various activities within the garden including inventory control, garden bed layout and demarcation, and supervision of reservoir and fence construction teams.

Nominated to Board of Directors as garden expanded from 4 to 12 hectares, and membership increased from 300 to 600 members. Planned long term objectives and membership rights and privileges. Instrumental in devising simple database management strategy for recordkeeping of member registration fees.

Represented the community organization at the Association of Small Scale Enterprises (ASSET). Networked with other member organizations, gaining access to tourism fairs for marketing and promotion and coordinating with Dutch agricultural expert to bring specialized trainings in improved gardening techniques

Wrote grants to secure additional funding for continuing expansion and improvement of garden and skill center.

Against Malaria Bed Net Campaign- Teamed with U.K. based organization Against Malaria, and U.S.’s Suto Yediya, initiative focused on raising money and building awareness to help prevent the transmission of malaria through distribution and proper instruction on the use of treated bed nets.

Co-chair of country’s web-based fundraising efforts. Personally raised over $1800 in an effort that yielded $15,000 over the course of five months.
Published newsletters to motivate fellow volunteers and track fundraising progress

Graphic Design Projects

Worked with local restaurant owner in tourism sector to plan and design menus for upcoming season

Performed edits and created publication design of “Freebee-The Gambia”, a beekeeping manual to be distributed to 30 communities.

Intercultural Exchange- Posted over 80 blog entries detailing life in a developing country through the eyes of a volunteer, initiating dialogue and facilitating cultural exchange to fulfill one of Peace Corps main goals. Online readership of several hundred individuals.

Only Africans Can Help Africa

2009-10-21T04:16:00.000-07:00

*Disclaimer: You know how you have those down times but you pick yourself up and go on, and realize it's not that bad? This is one of those down times. It's not representative of my entire emotional state of being but I did want to include some honest truths along with all the rah-rah-schish-boom-bah that happens when you save the world. Though I do appreciate all of the concern and support from friends and family. I love you guys!

I am tired. I am tired of sweating all the time. Of oppressive heat and the feeling of suffocation. Of never having a clean house, clean kids, or clean me. I am tired of people who cannot see a different perspective, who expect me to assimilate 100% to their way of life but will make no concessions to mine. I am tired of a host mom who takes every opportunity to tell me in the most indirect, confusing manner ever that my boyfriend is not welcome in the compund because we are not married and I am living in sin.

I am tired of skinny, starving children. Of poor medical care. Of collecting rain water to drink. And of never having a COLD drink. Of communicating with only two year olds. Of trying to watch DVD’s to escape it all, but having to give up when they skip from all the dust in the air, and I just bought them that afternoon.

I am tired of the begging. Of people who feel they are entitled to everything I might own. Of everyone who won’t listen. Of everyone who cannot formulate a single original thought. Of being told that I should observe all Muslim customs and holidays, when clearly, I AM NOT MUSLIM.

I am tired of bathing outside with the mosquitoes. And waiting for the middle of the night to sneak out to use the bathroom cause the privacy fence around my latrine fell down. I’m tired of everything in my house filling with mold and mildew from the rains and of cleaning up after the mice and geckos who share my living space.

I am tired of testing my patience to the breaking point. I am tired of hot, dirty, unsafe public transport with a fat woman sitting on me and squishing my leg. I am tired of people yelling at me as I walk down the road and people who invade my personal space.

I am tired of being fed up with this country, these people, this life. I am just so tired. I want to go home.

-Journal Entry, September 2009

It’s not always rainbows and butterflies…sometimes it’s just a lot of mosquitoes and malaria pills and Gold Bond Medicated Body Powder. Somehow the founders of Peace Corps knew that two years is the breaking point for most people. That after two years pass, minor irritations have become major frustrations. It's the point where you can’t remember exactly why running off to live in the Bolivian mountainside or African bush was ever a good idea and when you decide that maybe the world doesn't need saving after all.

My Peace Corps journey started in August of 2007 and will come to an end on Nov 27, 2009, when at the stroke of midnight I will be carried away to the airport in the last Gambian taxi I might ever have to take in my entire life.

At three in the morning my plane takes off and whisks me away from the Gambia, out of the life that I was wildly thrust into a year ago. After a service filled with ups and downs, evacuations, surprise reunions and new beginnings, I must admit that I am exhausted yet still enormously thankful for the opportunity. I leave with no regrets, only a true belief in the words of President Obama when he says, “Only Africans can help Africa." (And maybe only Bolivians can help Bolivia.)

So as I leave the development of Africa to the Africans, my boyfriend and I are off to take romantic camel rides across the Sahara of Morocco, spend Christmas in Rome with my parents, and finish off somewhere in Greece. If you’d like to meet up anywhere, let me know. If not, I’ll see you back Stateside early next year. Party planning can start now!

Sensory Overload: Metros & Starbucks & McDonalds & More

2009-07-23T12:45:00.000-07:00

Travel can be glamourous and exciting. Traveling in Peace Corps countries is often not. Taking advantage of my proximity to the developed world, I recently took a little trip to the land of milk and honey. Otherwise known as Spain.

We started our tour of Spain in France. I was fascinated by the pink house.

And the harbor.

And the food, once back in Spain. I found an old friend who happened to be living in Madrid. He invited us to his hometown where his parents took us out for a night of traditional San Sebastian eating. It's called Tapa Bar Hopping. You get tapas, little appetizer sized portions of food and drink, and you consume a little at one bar before heading to the next.

Obviously, Kasey and I have been a bit food deprived in the Gambia.

And ice cream melts under the African sun.

That's Alex, #1 Spanish Guide, buying us drinks at the world's #1 Bartender's bar.

We caught a glimpse of San Sebastian from above when we went to check out a castle.

And then the castle happened to have a thrilling roller coaster ride, which was in fact scarier than initially thought to be.

I then took a night train to Barcelona. My brother Tony met up with me for some traveling and quality time, and I must say I embarrased him with my Peace Corps habits. One being- always take advantage of the luxuries. That includes grabbing extra free mints at the hotels, buying food when it's available even if you're not hungry, and of course, stretching out in the extra leg room on public transport.

We saw one of the most amazing sights as we stepped off the metro in Barcelona- The Sagrada Familia Cathedral.

Tony loves the sights, I love the food. I also really really loved the human statues. I tricked this particular statue into moving several days in a row. And on the last day in Grenada I paid him a few Euro cents and he did a robot dance for me and blew me a kiss.

Lots of Gaudi, not gaudy, art. I learned this trick from a friend. You can now photoshop yourself into the picture and it will look like I have my arm around you. Oh, memories!

My bro Tony, after lots of European shopping, right before attending a meeting for Shopaholics Anonymous.

Food. Ham. I don't get ham in the Gam. It's Muslim.

We then went to see a palace in Grenada. Unfortunately we got lost heading up there. We did find a water spout.

And then we decided to have some fun with the water spout.

Eventually we got to see the palace after first finding out that the tickets we bought online were for the day before. And the only way to get in without paying again was to be elderly or disabled. The ticket man told me to cut off my arm and we could get in free. I opted not.

More palace-y stuff...

And a little more. The palace was too big for my taste.

And then we got lost going up to see the palace from the hillside at sunset. But it was beaUtiful.

Back in Madrid, I found that the Spanish are still making fun of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

And then I got back to the serious business of eating delicious things.

And staring at delicious things...

And returning to the same delicious place for more delicious things.

We also got down to business doing what I'm kinda known for... Clubbing.

And clubbing some more.

We cracked ourselves up as we were riding the metros, eating, shopping, sightseeing, catching up, gossiping, and remembering the old times. And then, because he loves me so much, Tones put on the African outfit my host mom had made for him.

Trip summary:

Cost of bush taxis, ferry, horse cart and flight to Madrid: $450

Cost of incidentals while in Spain, including Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, tapas, sangria, chocolate eclairs, sushi, and Chinese buffets: $900

Sitting down to a McDonald's Happy Meal after eight months in the African bush: PRICELESS.

Saving The World, One Bednet At A Time

2009-07-07T10:52:00.000-07:00

New Project: Fighting Malaria. And you can help. Check out my website, make a donation, and spread the word.

From all of us in the Gambs, THANK YOU!

http://www.AgainstMalaria.com/tammy

The U.S. eradicated malaria in the early 1950’s. It is now 2009, and the Gambia still has not. With the rainy season that brings beauty and life back to the land comes a darker side: the proliferation of the mosquito that transmits malaria and results in the loss of human lives. It’s a disease that infects almost every Gambian at least once in his or her life, and though there is a cure, for many it is painfully out of reach.

Peace Corps The Gambia is embarking on a campaign with the U.K. based organization Against Malaria. Our goal is to help prevent the transmission of malaria through distribution of and proper instruction on the use of treated bednets. Each net costs just under $5. We aim to raise $40,000, and with a dollar-for-dollar match from a generous donor this will allow the purchase of approximately 16,000 nets.

Epidemiological studies have suggested that for every 20 bednets used in Africa, 1 life is saved. Join me in helping to save 800 lives, one bednet at a time.

It's an Ugly World Out There: Part I

2009-06-16T10:50:00.000-07:00

(Slightly dated, I know. But I'm trying.)

Bolivia Plot: Assassins or Victims?

By PAOLA FLORES and FRANK BAJAK – May 2, 2009

SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia (AP) — Airlifted in from Bolivia's western highlands, some two dozen elite officers in green helmets and flak jackets entered the Las Americas Hotel just before 4 a.m., disabled its surveillance cameras and stealthily made for the fourth floor. A bomb exploded. After 15 minutes of gunfire, three men were dead in their underwear on separate hotel room floors: A Bolivian-born Hungarian, an Irishman and a Romanian. Two of their comrades with ties to Croatia and Hungary were arrested in rooms down the hall.

A few hours later, President Evo Morales announced during a visit to Venezuela that an assassination plot against him, hatched by right-wing extremists and employing foreign mercenaries, had been foiled on his instructions."Before I left," he said, "I gave the order."The strange events of April 16 have only deepened political and social rifts in this nation of 10 million, where Morales, an Indian and a strident leftist, faces an intransigent foe in the light-skinned elite of this provincial capital.

Vice President Alvaro Garcia has blamed the alleged plot on "the fascist and racist right" of Santa Cruz. Morales' opponents in turn claim the government is trying to discredit them and bolster his campaign for re-election in December.The killings have also brought Bolivia to the attention of four European countries impatient for an explanation. Hungary, Ireland, Romania and Croatia have all asked for what the latter called "a full and impartial" accounting. Was it not possible to wait a few hours and capture the alleged conspirators peacefully at breakfast?"The Irish government has a legitimate right to seek the facts of how one of its citizens came to be killed by the security forces of another state," said Ireland's foreign minister, Michael Martin.

Yet more than two weeks after the raid, Bolivia has yet to provide persuasive details of the alleged conspiracy. It's a puzzle, in the words of Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Balazs, in which the pieces don't fit.An indignant Morales at first resisted the calls for explanation. Then, at the United Nations on April 22, he said he was willing to accept an international investigation.

Such a probe would almost certainly begin with Eduardo Rozsa Flores, the only one of the slain men with clear warrior credentials.In September, he told a TV journalist in Hungary that he was returning home to organize a militia. You can only broadcast the interview, Rozsa said, if I don't return alive.

Born in Santa Cruz 49 years ago to a Hungarian father and Bolivian mother, Rozsa boasted in interviews and in a blog of serving as a translator for "Carlos the Jackal" when the Venezuelan terrorist was living in then-communist Hungary.

After the Berlin Wall fell, Rozsa became a minor celebrity in Croatia for commanding a brigade of foreign volunteers in its 1991 independence war. A poet, journalist and recent convert to Islam, he later starred as himself in "Chico," a biopic that won best film in Hungary's national cinema festival in 2002.

The other two slain men apparently lacked Rozsa's combat experience, if not his sense of adventure. So under what premise — and for what exactly — did he recruit them?Michael Dwyer was a 24-year-old Irish security guard whose family said he went to Bolivia in October looking for work. His Facebook pages show he liked to play Airsoft, a non-lethal military game like paintball where participants shoot nonmetallic pellets at each other.

Arpad Magyarosi, 29, was an ethnic Hungarian rock musician and schoolteacher from Romania who relatives said loved to travel. Neither of the men apparently told their families back home exactly what they were doing in distant Bolivia.

Authorities said Las Americas was the third four-star or better hotel in which the men had lodged.The raid's two survivors were flown to the highlands capital of La Paz and jailed without bail on terrorism charges after a closed hearing. They are Mario Tadic, a 51-year-old Bolivia-Croat comrade-in-arms of Rozsa from the Balkans, and Hungarian computer technician Elod Toaso.Bolivian Defense Minister Walker San Miguel said Rozsa recruited Toaso, 28, through the Szekler Legion, a right-wing group that promotes autonomy for Romania's ethnic Hungarians.

Hungary's ambassador, Matyas Jozsa, told The Associated Press after visiting Toaso in jail that the former bank employee may not have understood what he was getting into."My impression is that far from being a terrorist, he's fearful. Little by little he came to realize what he was involved in and that he'd made a big mistake," said Jozsa.He believes the slain men never had a chance to surrender and said Toaso saved himself by diving face-down to the floor, putting his hands on the back of his neck.

How Tadic survived is unclear. No relative has emerged, and a human rights lawyer who visited him said only that he was prepared to cooperate with authorities.The hotel's manager, Hernan Rossell, told the AP he arrived on the scene 10 minutes after the shooting ended and saw Rozsa's body on the floor, a revolver about 40 centimeters (16 inches) from his right hand, a bullet wound in his face. It was the only weapon Rossell said he saw on the fourth floor not wielded by the police, none of whom were injured in the raid.Julio Larrea, a police investigator, said the alleged mercenaries set off a C4 plastic explosives charge just before the shootout began. He said police recovered guns at the scene, though he didn't specify how many or where, except that a handgun and a silencer were found in Rozsa's room.

Authorities have offered no evidence that the slain men fired weapons. An autopsy done on Dwyer's badly decomposed body in Ireland determined he was killed by a single gunshot to the chest, but apparently little more.Many aspects of the case are still a mystery.On the day of the raid, Bolivian police confiscated about a dozen weapons at a convention center booth that they said the alleged assassins had rented through a local telecommunications company or a business fair. Prosecutor Marcelo Sosa later showed photos he said were found at the convention center booth of all the alleged mercenaries but Tadic posing with guns. In one, Dwyer has a pistol in each hand.

Police also said the men were responsible for a dynamite blast the day before at the home of the local Roman Catholic cardinal, in which nobody was hurt and minor damage incurred. They presented another man, Juan Carlos Gueder, who has been arrested on terrorism charges. Gueder told reporters he sold Rozsa a pistol, and that Rozsa said he planned to assassinate Santa Cruz's governor, Ruben Costas, to make him "a martyr."Garcia, the vice president, says the alleged mercenaries were planning to kill him and Morales, then "organize civilian groups for an armed resistance to violently seize power." Pro-autonomy groups in Bolivia are especially upset by Morales' plan to to seize fallow cropland from big landholders, many of whom are based in Santa Cruz, and "return" it to members of Bolivia's indigenous majority. However, the opposition vehemently denies involvement in any assassination plot.

The evidence authorities have provided to date is a three-minute video that Sosa says was obtained from an informant. He says it shows the three slain men lamenting missing a chance to bomb a boat on which Morales held a Cabinet meeting in Lake Titicaca in early April.The accompanying audio is unclear, however. Reporters who viewed it could make out words including "Titicaca," "wetsuit" and "explosives" but no clear narrative.

Another piece of the mystery surrounds the men's stay in Bolivia. The police investigator, Larrea, said Rozsa had taken Toasa and Tadic's passports from them so they couldn't travel.In the Sept. 8 interview where he laid out his plan to form a militia in Bolivia, Rozsa told Hungarian television anchor Andras Kepes that he intended to sneak in through Brazil. He said he was going not as an agitator, but as a defender."I have been called to organize the defense of the city and province of Santa Cruz," he said. "This isn't about me going to the Bolivian jungle to play Che Guevara." Guevara, a hero of Cuba's revolution, was executed in Bolivia in 1967 after failing to launch a communist uprising.

Rozsa insisted his mission was not "to attack La Paz or to help organize an attack on the capital and to drive away the president." Kepes said the videotaped interview could be considered Rozsa's "last will and testament."But more could be coming. Bolivian authorities seized five laptops in the raid.In the movie "Chico," playing himself, Rozsa quotes the 19th-century Cuban independence leader and poet Jose Marti in explaining to a Croat military officer why he's enlisting in another nation's fight."It's criminal to promote a war that can be avoided," he says, "and it is also criminal not to support a war that is inevitable."

Associated Press writers Carlos Valdez in La Paz, Pablo Gorondi in Budapest, Hungary, Alison Mutler in Bucharest, Romania, Snjezana Vukic in Zagreb, Croatia, and Shawn Pogatchnik in Dublin, Ireland, contributed to this report. Bajak reported from Bogota, Colombia.

It's an Ugly World Out There: Part II

2009-06-16T10:49:00.000-07:00

http://www.whcaware.com/gambia/Gambia.htm

Changing the World, One Grandma at a Time

2009-06-01T11:35:00.000-07:00

"Most of the things we try to accomplish in the Peace Corps go flying off the roof of the bus; in the end you're lucky if the thing rolls into the station at all. More than likely however you will end up sitting on the side of the road while the drunk busdriver tries to rig a new tire out of an old pair of socks and a cigarette filter. You hardly ever get where you wanted to go, but hey- in the end you're sitting on the side of the road enjoying a very nice sunset chatting it up with someone's grandma. And I personally would rather change the world one grandma at a time. "

~Britta Lilley Hansen, Returned Peace Corps Volunteer

Weddings and Babies and Puppies and More

2009-05-22T06:53:00.000-07:00

Mbaa. That’s the word for “mom” in Mandinka. That’s what I call my host mother here. In the beginning I was a bit apprehensive and uncomfortable using that title with her. To me, it is a title bestowed solely upon the woman who raised and nurtured me. The woman who rubbed medicated oil on my stomach when I was sick, who tried to make me pretty for my first-grade class photo by putting my hair in braids but forgot I would run around too much at recess and end up looking like a disheveled nutcase by the time the camera flashed in my face. The woman who calls and gets so excited to hear about the new country, new foods, new clothes, new boyfriend, and new life I now have all the way in West Africa.

Though she is not my real mom, Mbaa is a pretty good substitute. She owns a fabric shop and dresses so beautifully that I feel like an African queen is entering the room each night she returns home and throws open the curtain door with a flourish. She speaks only Mandinka and delights at every new sentence I put together. My first week in site she asked me which fabric I liked best in her shop and then took it to make a new outfit for me to wear to meet her parents, since she wanted me to make a good impression in my “African Dress.”

Mbaa treats me as one of her own, as best she can, and with that comes the unavoidable conversations about my marital status. She was so excited to meet my boyfriend Matt, or Lamin, as they know him here. She wants to know if I will marry him. She wants to know whether I want her plot of land next door so once Lamin and I are married, we can build our own compound here in the Gambia and be Mbaa’s neighbors. She asked me if she could throw a naming ceremony for my firstborn, and if Lamin and I would name the child after her. I told her “Mundow” was too difficult a name. She told me not to worry, her real name is Hawa.

Once we settled on that, I regrettably had to inform her that the birth of my first child would probably not be in the Gambia, and that I would probably not be present for the naming ceremony. “EHHHH!” she told me. Not a problem. Just let her know when the child is born and she would have a tiny little outfit made and sent to America so I could have a proper Gambian naming ceremony there, while she threw one here, in my honor.

I must admit, I'm a little flattered. I think I'm getting this integration thing down. That little exchange above, as you can imagine, has to be one of the most tedious conversations ever! Not for me, but for Mbaa. Imagine the patience required to have some strange visitor sitting on your couch, not understanding what you say, repeating each phrase out of your mouth in her own version of three-year-old Mandinka. Then each time this pale-skinned girl who glows in the dark interprets incorrectly, you have to try to speak slower, with simpler words so that maybe she can figure out what the conversation is even about.

I always have to give this woman credit. She certainly does try. I don’t know if I would have the same patience. I am the first Peace Corps volunteer living with her family so much of the time she does not know what to make of me or what to do with me, I am just so strange. But isn't that what it's about? Uncomfortable silences that stretch so long they become comfortable. Weird exchanges that take place so often they become normal. It's all part and parcel of volunteer life.

At any rate, in the event that I for some reason decide I will take her up on the offer, I got a glimpse of what a wedding in the Gambia would look like. The following are photos from my host cousin Adama’s wedding. I am still puzzled at why almost all of the 1000 attendants were women. Equally puzzling was the fact that I never did identify the groom. And the unveiling of a new bedroom set in the middle of the compound was later explained to be a part of the dowry, a gift from the groom to my host mom. Though I still don’t understand that either, since she is technically the bride’s aunt, not her mother. I guess some things in this life just can’t be explained.

Over 1000 people showed up for the wedding. Speakers stacked right outside my door. Partying stopped at 2 in the morn. Rather early, actually.

Drums. Dancing. Drums and dancing.

African Dance Queen teaching me how to dance.

Asian-American Dance Queen turning it back around on them!

Kids in their matching outfits, known as "asobees." You dress according to your age group. Mine consists of many women with infants and toddlers. Apparently I missed the boat.

The older lady asobees.

Where's Waldo? I mean, Kaddy.

Hint: She glows in the dark. (They actually told me I did.)

My host bro Lamin with my host niece Sally. I loved her outfit and wanted to get it copied. Then I realized I would be dressing like a two-year-old.

Host sis Asa who thinks I am hilarious. She was once in a near death state with malaria when I came in the house. I didn't realize she was sick she was so animated. Then she told me it was only because I was so funny she couldn't help but laugh and forget she was sick. She got well again soon. Apparently malaria is not always fatal. Whew.

The bridal party. Or so I assumed. The third girl in with the Macy Gray hair is my sister Rohey, Sally's mom.

Bride on the left, Rohey on the right. Look guys, one day that could be me!

I'm So Out Of My Element I'm In It.

2009-05-22T06:01:00.000-07:00

Skin fungus. Parasites. Flies that hatch from your body. Relentless harassment. Language barriers. Children chasing after you. Rocks flung as you ride your bike. Faces peeping through doors and windows to glimpse the Toubab. Latrines and bucket baths. The same conversation over and over and OVER. Hiding in the hut because you are so overwhelmed and just wish for one second, just ONE second, that you could be in a world with McDonalds and Chinese buffets and supermarkets and hot showers.

All that in mind, does one have to be absolutely crazy, absolutely mad to choose this lifestyle? Of course every one wants to know (at times, myself included), why do I do Peace Corps? How could I have transferred knowing what it’s like? How do I get by and continue on and most of all, how could I love it?

Really, this is a very difficult question to answer. You know when a friend tells you about something funny that happened and you don’t really laugh, and they finish lamely with a “Guess you just had to be there?” Sometimes I feel that’s what Peace Corps is like. It’s not something that can necessarily be explained, it’s something that must be lived and felt. However, because I do want to impart to you why I continue to do what I do, I will describe it the best I can.

My journey with Peace Corps actually started back in second semester of my junior year in college. At that time I decided that in order to land my dream job with P&G, I really needed to have some international experience on my resume. The quickest and easiest route was to do a trip over spring break, and so that’s what I did. I heard about the Timmy Foundation through a friend and learned that there would be a building brigade going to Honduras. I signed up and went. I had always heard that these trips could be “life-changing experiences.” I wasn’t really interested in all that. I just wanted to go abroad in the most painless way possible.

Too bad I met one of the most beautiful souls on earth during that trip. Too bad he inspired me to the point that I hastily changed school plans in order to study abroad first semester the following year. Too bad I went back to Honduras that next year with near-fluent Spanish and realized just what an impact I had made on Walter, and Walter had made on me, and how that one relationship could be generalized across so many other relationships with the children I met at this all-boys school/farm/orphanage.

It’s hard to put in words what happened there, but the best that I can describe it, at the risk of sounding insanely cheesy, is that it was an experience that made my heart and soul sing. Honduras was the first time I felt it; Peace Corps Bolivia was the first time I lived it.

Peace Corps is not only about providing technical assistance, it also focuses on cultural exchange. That is one thing that differentiates this organization from other aid organizations and NGO’s. Aside from the fact that volunteers are paid only what the average host country national earns (meaning that we often rely on hand-me-down clothing from exiting volunteers, regularly wear shirts dotted with holes and pants that have obviously seen better days, bargain with anyone and everyone, and count each and every penny- dalasi actually- before stepping foot into a “regular” restaurant), volunteers can easily be distinguished from other Toubabs by their level of cultural integration.

In other words, we speak local languages and observe the traditions and customs of the people around us. We don’t get to live in the nicest areas of town, drive around in air-conditioned cars, or hang out exclusively with other ex-pats. We do, however, sit in overcrowded vehicles with crying babies placed into our laps whether we know the child or not. We hitchhike. We live in small communities and rural villages where we have to try as best we can to communicate with those around us.

It’s that cultural exchange that keeps me coming back for more. One week in Honduras, one month in Vietnam, one semester in Costa Rica, one year in Bolivia. Each time I go abroad and immerse myself in the life and language of people so different from myself I walk away with a greater understanding of not just who they are, but who I am. It provides a higher level of awareness and insight that I would struggle to achieve while in the U.S. And it would take ten times longer, if it happened at all.

Once I discovered how much joy I gained from going and out and seeing what the world has to offer, and what I can offer to the world, I just didn’t want to miss out. Extreme hunger pains aside, despite hot weather and crowded, unpredictable, sweaty transport, I must admit that when my little host brother walks in my hut each morning grinning his little smile with the missing two front teeth, I can’t help but smile right back.

Ultimately, Peace Corps reminds me that life should be lived. It should make you laugh. It can make you cry. It should make you learn and grow. It surprises you. It frustrates, it puzzles, it delights. It shows that even with the different languages and cultures, customs and religions, the different levels of wealth and education, there are common threads that link us all and at the end of the day we really can sit down and brew a cup of attaya tea and chat. We have so much to share and to gain from one another.

Whether it be with random strangers or with the host family, I think that on both sides, the impressions made will last a lifetime. I took the dive into Peace Corps and day in and day out, I find myself in situations where I’m so out of my element, I’m in it. And though sometimes I would die for a Big-Mac, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

The Real Deal

2009-05-08T04:17:00.000-07:00

Straight from the source, check out real Peace Corps life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMI-tsTLVcw

(This guy also happens to be my love interest. Whatcha think 'bout THAT?)

All in a Day's Work

2009-05-06T15:26:00.000-07:00

Survey Responses: Britta Hansen (aka The Greatest Sitemate in the WORLD!)

1. Who are you and how did you find my blog?

Hey Tammers Its Britta. I found YOU one day walking around Samaipata. ME-"Hmmm I wonder who that Asian chick is over by Amboro tours... no she couldn't be PeaceCorps, those pants are way to to hot and ummm, are those highlights in her hair... Definitely not PeaceCorps." You- "O my god, who is that dirty hippie with those nasty stinky chacos, yuck, oh god i hope shes not in PeaceCorps too. What would we talk about..." Us, two days later "Holy shit you are the funniest person ever, oh my god I cant believe we just ate so many pancakes!" Thats how i met you, fell in love and found your blog!

2. What were you in the middle of doing just now? (If it was eating a McDonald’s cheeseburger and fries, OMG AM I JEALOUS!!!).

I was just posting some photos on FB from a totally fun weekend up at Lusten, Old friends good times. And i thought i would check out if anything new was going on with you.

3. What burning question do you have for me that I have not yet answered?

I want to know... a day in the life... do a post about just an average day in your life..."got up at bla bla ate rice with hot shit on it, had lots of latrine time, Thank god for the newsweeks..." you know all the little stuff you do each day.

4. How many times have you laughed, cried, and/or thrown up as you have read my blog?

I have totally cried, sorry its true, i miss you and honestly im a bit jealous that you are doing all this way badass cool fun stuff in AFRICA no less, and here i am driving my ass down 94 everymorning at 730 to go to work with the rest of the shmucks. I have laughed too, and worried about your poor little stomach.

5. What is the best/worst/funniest recent moment in your life for which I have been absent?

Oh so many moments you have missed, like a fun evening at the VFW on Hennepin, whoa. The rest of Bolivia. We will have time to make many more memories.

6. And last of all, what do you miss most about me???

Again so much i miss about you, I miss your gate with the ants marching across the top, and your little garden that could, i miss staying up late and talking about boys, and eating Kilos brownies, you teaching me how to be a lady, and me teaching you how to set up a tent and that a head lamp can be used for more than a reading light! Mostly i miss your beautiful face and smile, and the way you make me laugh and think about the world... now im crying again... Im so happy for you and i will try to skype call you as soon as i can.

A Day in the Life.

Señora, this one's for you!!!

I awaken to the sound of crowing roosters outside my door, the squeak of the well wheel as water is drawn, and the shouting from a wide awake host family who has been up since the dawn prayer call.

Next, pit stop at the pit latrine. That little block in the background? My shower.

The two sweet little host family kids, Sally and Njaka, check up on me each morning. They do things like take one bite of a cashew apple, just one, and leave the rest neatly on my table and hope I don't notice.

After a breakfast of sugary tea and bread with unsalted butter, I strap on my Peace Corps standard issue helmet and head out to work at the women's garden.

There are about 300 women in this 12 hectare garden, with 300 more to join soon. I was recently named to the board of directors. This consists of endless meetings to determine rules and bylaws, a lot of screaming in Mandinka that I don't understand, exhaustion, frustration, yet the tiniest glimmer of hope that we might be getting somewhere.

These women are working on a vegetable production trial that I headed up. It was my first effort in which I ran the show. And I think they understood maybe 10% of what I said. But we got it done!

Manual labor, backbreaking labor, more manual labor. That's what gardening here is all about.

Around 1:00 I head home for lunch. The bike ride home includes children screaming "HELLO! GIVE ME PEN! GIVE ME MINTY!" And from the ones that know me, "KADDYYYY BOJANGGGG!!!!" Also there are the cops who harass me and try to pull me over, on my bike no less. The alleged infraction? Not saying hello. The real reason? To ask if I will marry them. To which I respond to with a tongue lashing in Mandinka, at which time they decide I would probably be too much trouble as a second wife.

Home for lunch. Everyday, rice & sauce. Leaf sauce, peanut sauce, ground up fish in sauce...

After lunch, back to work. The family has a 12-year-old maid. I hate making her wash clothes. But so far I can handle only washing the unmentionables, since hauling water is hard work. And I have a lot of garden plots to care for.

Carrying that water back G-style baby!

It's kinda hot here. (Time is inaccurate. It's about 2:00 by now. I bought a satellite clock that only works in the U.S. It is so confused here.)

Washing and washing. Wish I had that nice little running tap I had in the old country.

My clothesline, in the bath area, tied to a fence made of coos stalk that I had to paint with motor oil to prevent complete consumption and destruction by termites. But not before they had eaten enough that people can kinda peek through.

more garden plots. You first double dig to allow aeration. Then add leaves for nitrogen and soil improvement. Then add manure that I collect for half an hour a day with a shovel and a bucket by jumping my wall to get next door.

They call me an ag-fo supastar. I no longer have a little garden that could. These days, my little garden ROCKS IT!

But even supastars get tired. Break!

Breaktime is cashew hunting time. Quite the delicacy. They are delicious, provide tons of vitamin C, and replenish a dehydrated body. Yum.

Tossing rocks to knock down a cashew. My aim sucks. I toss about 15 to knock down one.

Sweet success.

Done with work for the day. I live near the beach, better APROVECHAR!

Kids chasing. They like to try to catch the Toubab. Remember the staging videos where volunteers have rocks flung at them by the native children? It's no joke...

Sand.....

Cows....

Gardens...

A quick 10 min ride and I arrive at the beach, a little thirsty. Eight cents later, problem solved.

Destination: Paradise Beach. And in tribute to those who did, those who are, and those who wish they still were, I go on livin' the dream. Just livin' the dream......

Your Mouth is Short

2009-03-28T10:30:00.000-07:00

My mom called again the other day. Among other things we discussed my infrequency of blogging and the flurry of activity that happens in the Kokomo Housing Authority office at the end of each period of anxious anticipation for the next installment of My Peace Corps Life.

So, to the ladies of KHA, here you go. Pace yourselves. Make it last. (Oh, and if you did not answer my survey questions, go back and do it, cause that’s what these next few entries are about. It’s just the all the answers to all your questions.)

Survey Responses: Le Nguyen (aka Mom)

1. Who are you and how did you find my blog?

Lady, I forward your blogs to the PC volunteer mom. The mom, Lydia Thompson encourages one of us who has a son or daughter serve in Africa, to join the email to share thought and ideas.

2. What were you in the middle of doing just now? (If it was eating a McDonald’s cheeseburger and fries, OMG AM I JEALOUS!!!).

Working and starting to read your blog as Mariella, coworker told me , Tammy blogs is updated.

3. What burning question do you have for me that I have not yet answered?

How are your native language going? Do you speak well now?

4. How many times have you laughed, cried, and/or thrown up as you have read my blog?

I laughed or giggle myself many times for you are hilarious not thrown up yet.

5. What is the best/worst/funniest recent moment in your life for which I have been absent?

I miss you the most for not be talking to you on the phone.

6. And last of all, what do you miss most about me???

Your hugs and kisses.

So she wants to know how language is going. How indeed.

Language is a relentless struggle punctuated with an occasional shining moment of glory right when the outlook is so dismal that I am ready to throw in the towel. As the Gambians like to put it, I’m learning slowly slowly.

Learning Mandinka is particularly complex and puzzling in ways that learning Spanish never was. And though I speak Vietnamese, I never actually had to sit and learn it- it just seeped into my brain as I grew up, though I must admit I can barely read and write due to my inattention during Vietnamese lessons the summer after second and third grade. I am thus regrettably illiterate. Sorry Mom.

At any rate, being that I am on my fourth language, you would think I have learned some secrets by now. If you happen to be good at languages like I mistakenly thought I was, or if you have never studied a language before and can’t imagine why Mandinka would be any different from any other, let me outline a few challenges for you now.

Challenge #1: Mandinka is not a written language. It has been passed down orally throughout the years, and the majority of efforts to capture it in writing have been done by missionary groups or Peace Corps. As a result, words are always spelled three different ways by three different teachers and/or books, and being that I am a book studier, each time I run into a different spelling I think I am running into a new word.

Challenge #2: Words have multiple meanings. For example, I ask where my brother Lamen is. They say “A be wuloo kono.” I hear, “He is in the dog.” What they mean is, “He is in the bush.” And when I say bush, I don’t mean a shrub. What I mean is the African countryside. The African bush. Leading to Challenge #3…

Challenge #3: I don’t even understand the English. Tentengo is a “basket for winnowing.” I thought winnowing was some sort of fishing technique. Then I realized I was thinking of minnows. Winnowing is actually the action of tossing rice in the air after it has been pounded in order to separate the grain from the husk. I believe that is what you call it, the cover of the rice is the husk, right?

Then there is kalamaa- “a small calabash.” I thought a calabash might be some sort of bush. The Gambian man sitting next to me told me it was a pot for washing rice. A volunteer told me it was a squash. It finally dawned on me. A kalamaa is the half gourd that makes a cute little bowl! Moving on…

Challenge #4: Translations have no meaning. Either because their English is different from my English, or because literal translations just make no sense. A typical greeting, repeated at least once to every person I meet, every day, regardless if I already know them or not:

Me: Peace be upon you.
Them: Peace be upon you too.

Me: Where are the compound people?
Them: They are there.

Me: You are at peace?
Them: Peace only.

Me: Hope there is no trouble there?
Them: There is no trouble there.

I cease to wonder what that means. If I come upon a group of 15 old men hanging on the side of the road, I must go down the line and shake all their hands and say that entire script to each and every one of them, individually. Which may explain why I generally try to avoid large groups.

Once past the rote memorization greetings, things can get even more confusing. Such as, in response to me saying I am from America, I am asked, “What is there?” The first time it happened I stood there stumped with a puzzled expression on my face as my mind raced through the realm of possible answers. Nothing seemed appropriate. And as I was pondering the question, repeating it out loud during my few moments of contemplation, I must have stalled too long because the woman shouts “She does not hear Mandinka!” To which I think, “I hear Mandinka just fine. What I don’t hear, though, is what I should answer with.”

Next time I’m just going to say, “Obama is there.”

Challenge #5: The dictionary cracks me up. That’s what it is best used for. Yesterday I wanted to buy fabric and thought I should prepare for the event by learning the colors. I had the typical black, white, red, and blue in my notes, but nothing about the colors I really like in clothing. So I went to look up pink, and there is no entry for pink, but there is a word for Pink Peanut. I then move on to purple, and sure enough, no entry found for that word, but there is a word for Purple Heron. I also had tasted some kind of vaguely familiar fruit the other day. After going outside to ask again the word in Mandinka, I go to look it up. Definition: Some kind of fruit.

Challenge #6: Definitions don’t help even when you have them. My host mum yelled at the six-year-old. I didn’t quite know what she said. Turns out he was told, “Your mouth is short.” I don’t know what that means.

Challenge #7: The language is rather fanciful. One time I was told “Your head is not on it on it.” They meant, “You forgot.” To say Chinese people and Vietnamese people are different, I must say, “Chinese people and Vietnamese people are not one.”

But you know, I’m starting to get the hang of it. I had to ask my host mom about moving furniture the other day and was lacking a few key words. Furniture being one. I find it and in trying to memorize it, I realize it is actually a compound word that means “things-in-the-house.” I then need the word for “truck,” and as I subconsciously will my mind to THINK Mandinka, FEEL Mandinka, BE Mandinka, I begin to think speculate that I would be understood if I call the truck a “big car.” But a little obsessively, I look it up anyway. And what do we have? “Moto baa.” Big car.

Ah Haaa! Mandinka, I think I got you figured out!!!

It’s Like Giving Birth to a Demon

2009-03-28T10:14:00.000-07:00

Peace Corps gets this great deal here with the mobile phone company Africell. For just 50 Dalasis (~$2) a month volunteers can have unlimited texting amongst themselves. For just 50 more Dalasis, we can have unlimited calling between the hours of 12 a.m. to 5 p.m. Being that most don’t have electricity to charge cell phones we try to maximize battery life by sending texts. I now present to you a representation of exchanges that take place in a typical day in my following compilation, “A Day in the Texts.”

Be forewarned, among volunteers, bowel movements are popular topic of conversation. If you don’t want to know, don’t continue reading.

A Day in the Texts

“My one eyed 90 year old grandma just grabbed a goat by its leg and started beating it with a stick while all the kids danced around singing.”

“My foot just slipped into the latrine hole! I’m going to vomit!”

“Thought you might like to know that I ate a can of Spaghetti O’s straight out of the can, unheated with no utensils, and it was ten pm at the hospital, so I secretly went outside and did it in the dark, so no one would see… And [I] have been consistently eating Chef Boyardee unheated this last week AND drinking the leftover sauce afterwards. I felt so embarrassed every time… Eating in secret makes it SO much worse for some reason.”

“I’m patiently waiting for my host sister to finish taking a sh*t in the middle of the road.”

“I just put moldy sauce on my pasta. It’s not delicious yet I’m still eating it.”

“It’s like giving birth to a demon.” (In reference to what it feels like to have the runs, on a daily basis)

“My house has smelled like rotting animal carcass with an overdraft of cow sh*t all day. I have searched high and low. Just went outside to look around… Lo and behold, Dead Chicken #5, complete with half a head and maggots, rotting delicately beneath my open window.”

“I had a cockroach crawl on my foot today while I was lost in thought on the latrine. Aka giving birth. I thought it was one of the kittens until a LIZARD ran up and took it right off my foot. I couldn’t finish pooping, I was so disturbed.”

“Some times I get so homesick up here I think I could die… then I think of your texts and I start laughing.”

[Editor’s Note: Ok, truth be told, pretty much all those messages come from one source. Her name is Kasey and she and I like to entertain one another with outrageous texts. None of mine are quoted here but generally we play this game and it’s a tie. I will leave the rest to your imagination.]

Vacay: Take II

2009-03-28T09:58:00.000-07:00

Attention all vacationers! If you do not yet have plans, meet me in Madrid! I will be there June 4-14. I know the last vacation rendezvous didn’t quite work out since I made it to Peru on evacuation two weeks before Mollie & Friends, but I want to try again. I hear rumors that my long lost bro and girlfriend may be meeting me? And perhaps my dear mother as well? Anyone else who would like to join, bienvenidos!

P.S. I still have quite a bit of vacation days. If you have a destination in mind, let me know. Most of Europe is rather reasonable if it is a more appealing option than where I currently reside, though I would be more than happy to give the grand tour of The Gam.

Rebuild the Peace Corps

2009-03-03T02:46:00.000-08:00

More than ever, the world needs ‘underutilized’ organization

By Bob Shacochis
USA Today
McLean, Va.
February 25, 2009

Last month in central Mozambique, one of the planet's poorest countries, I stood among the thatched mud-and-wattle huts of the village of Vinho. I was admiring the subsistence farming community's handsome new school with Greg Carr, an American philanthropist who had built that school. Since 2004, Carr, who made his fortune in the information technology boom of the '90s, has devoted his wealth, time and considerable energy to the rehabilitation of Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park. Once considered Africa's premier game preserve, Gorongosa had been destroyed by decades of war and lawlessness.

The school is a small part of the comprehensive vision of Carr and Mozambique to use the restoration of the park as a development engine for the hundreds of thousands of desperately impoverished peasants who live in the forests and hills surrounding Gorongosa. The 20-year-long hand-back agreement between the government and the Carr Foundation is an exemplary model for the marriage of private altruism and public policy in the Third World.

Even so, the day Carr and I toured the school, marveling at its solar-powered electricity and computer lab, his voice grew somber as he responded to my questions.

How many students?

Two hundred.

How many teachers?

Five.

Carr explained that the government had an uphill battle trying to staff its schools with qualified teachers. Even when a teacher was hired, his or her tenure was a daily concern because of the high rate of attrition caused by AIDS, malaria or other diseases. Vinho's five teachers had dwindled to three. Carr thought the best hope for fully staffing the school had only one apparent solution: the Peace Corps. But he wasn't optimistic. There were only two Peace Corps volunteers — much-loved teachers — in the entire district, based in a town an hour's drive away.

Does Mozambique want more Peace Corps volunteers assigned to the country? Absolutely. The Peace Corps has been in Mozambique since 1998, after its civil war ended and its once Marxist-Leninist leaders changed ideological direction. The nation held free multiparty elections and did everything possible to make itself one of the most progressive countries in the region. There are 163 volunteers in Mozambique, where Portuguese is the official language. Carr and his Portuguese communications director, Vasco Galante, guessed the country could absorb 10,000 volunteers.

So here we find ourselves, celebrating the inauguration of President Obama, a farsighted leader who has inspired millions of young Americans with his call to service. We also find ourselves on the threshold of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's new diplomatic initiative, the exercise of "smart power" in a multifaceted effort to reclaim our moral and political integrity in the eyes of the world. The obvious equation seems written in neon: "Call to service" plus "smart power" equals Peace Corps.

Dollar for dollar, you cannot get a more reliable, cost-effective answer than the Peace Corps when the challenge is to win hearts and minds around the globe. For all of Africa's wars since President Kennedy launched the Peace Corps in 1961, one of the continent's most liberating achievements in the intervening decades has been the education of millions of African children by Peace Corps volunteers. Those once illiterate students are now Africa's middle class, civil servants and leaders, struggling to meet their nations' basic needs.

Today, the U.S. sends fewer than 4,000 Peace Corps volunteers overseas annually — half the number we sent four decades ago. The agency, which is underfunded, underappreciated and underutilized, turns away too many prospective volunteers for lack of resources. More than 20 countries that do not have Peace Corps programs are waiting for Congress to keep its bipartisan promise to double the Peace Corps' size. But that promise is likely to wither on the vine of our shrinking economy without Obama's support, which would be the equivalent, in budgetary terms, of upgrading a shoestring to a bootstrap.

Throughout Africa's villages and cities, portraits of Obama have already been tacked on walls next to images of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. It's impossible to go anywhere in Mozambique without hearing someone repeat what has become the world's marching order for a better future: Sim, podemos. Yes, we can.

Obama, our No. 44, who has a passion for saluting the creative legacies of his predecessors by assimilating their sensibilities into his own actions, should continue that fine habit by adapting a slogan of No. 43 to No. 35's powerful enduring vision of international service: No Volunteer Left Behind.

And in the eyes of the world, Mr. President, if you want the biggest symbolic bang for your ever dwindling buck, rebuild the Peace Corps.

I Am Temporarily Lactose Intolerant

2009-02-27T10:54:00.001-08:00

Thank god I already have a boyfriend…

Physically, I probably look like I’ve aged ten years since I’ve come here. My feet are not just dirty, they’re dry and cracked. I am growing fungus on my side. I thought it was just a mosquito bite. My skin has little lines in it, I believe some of them are called wrinkles, but the rest of them are just from the dryness. [Note to Readers: If you need an idea for a care package, Bath & Body Works lotion works miracles. It’s the only thing that does. Just make sure not to get bug-friendly scents.]

I also went through four months of strange stomach illnesses. I sent in a sample to the lab to be tested, and unlike the 24-hour turnaround that I was used to in Bolivia, here we have to send things to the U.S. to be tested, and I have been waiting since Thanksgiving to hear my results. I thought I had amoebas, giardia, or other horrific parasites. My stomach was incredibly swollen and I had stomach cramps and spent many nights on the latrine. Then a doctor comes along from the States to help out at our med unit. Previously we had two RN’s, who did great work, but could not diagnose my illness.

So the doc comes and tests me at a local lab and all results come up negative, except for the presence of white blood cells in the sample, but she seemed unconcerned. Her diagnosis: “Intestinal mucosa [has been] altered by the initial infection, by the altered motility due to the infection, and by the antibiotic therapy. Normalization of the mucosal lining takes weeks or longer. During this time, you may be lactose intolerant.”

In laymens terms, I can’t drink milk or eat milk products because my stomach is wrecked. By too many rounds of Cipro, too many rapid changes in diet, by new foreign foods, and by my former stomach ailments. What I need to do is let my digestive track heal and regenerate, but for the time being, since I have a defective digestive system, I am now temporarily lactose intolerant. Who ever heard of that???

Makes sense though, since after several months here I felt so malnourished I decided I needed milk. I then proceeded to put powdered milk in my tea, in my coffee, and in my cereal. Then I ate cheese like it was my job. I ate containers of yogurt thinking perhaps the bacterial would help my intestinal track. And there is this little delight known as chakary, which is coos mixed with sour milk and sugar. It tastes like yogurt with granola. A little stand sells it in my village and I was working towards being a regular. That just came to a screeching halt.

Doctor suggested I lay off milk products. Done. She suggested I boil water. Gas is too expensive for that. She suggested I stop eating oily and spicy foods. My food bowl is full of oil and so spicy I have to do that suck-in-the-air-thing-thru-your-teeth as I eat. She also suggested I have my family boil the veggies instead of fry them. She does not realize there are no veggies. It’s not her fault though, she had only been in country 2 days. How would she know??

So, I tried to listen. And I guess it was ok. But then I started getting that sneaking suspicion that maybe the doc didn’t know what she was talking about. So I tested her theory. I drank a glass of hot chocolate even though the packet read “CONTAINS MILK.” I also had a tiny bit of cheese in a tomato, ham, and cheese whole-wheat sliced bread airplane sandwich that was given to me by the Dutch folks who work at my garden. A sandwich with sliced bread!?!? I just couldn’t resist!

I should have tried harder. I really should have. Because I paid for that little bit of milk in the hot chocolate and that miniscule piece of cheese I ate. I paid for it and I paid for it. BIG time. All day and all night.

I now concede. Doc is right. I am lactose intolerant and I am calling the med unit to request some Lactaid. After all, I gotta stay healthy somehow, don’t I?

P.S. Thank you to all who inquired after my health. I did not realize my last post sounded so scary. I apologize. My stomach was just very full of gas and it was rather uncomfortable and I thought that bugs were eating me from the inside. But it was just gas.

Also, my fungus is doubled in size but not bothersome. I am treating it with athlete’s foot crème in conjunction with another fungal-fighting crème that I would rather not mention for fear of scaring readers yet again. Africa is not that bad. In fact, I love it.

Who AM I???

Remember back when I lived in Minneapolis? Remember when it was forty below zero and I had to leave my car in a heated garage or it wouldn’t start? Remember two feet of snow in the front yard?

I must not. Last night it’s seventy-five degrees and I’m sitting around a little charcoal stove in my host mom’s hut. We were trying to get warm.

It’s one of those moments where I wonder just who I’ve become. When I’m wearing a fleece and socks and it’s still in the 70’s, and I walk out in the afternoon heat of 115 degrees and think to myself, “Well, good thing today is nice and warm.” Granted, it’s a dry heat since it only rained for about five minutes in the last four months, and only small sprinkles really. But dry heat or not, I better get re-calibrated back to reality before I think of going home.

Who ARE you?

My phone rang this morning and it was a fellow volunteer from my training group. She had the urgent need to relay to me that her mother was following my blog and had called and said, “Marnie, I read Tammy’s blog and it's like yours...but funny!”

Apparently someone had set up a Parent Support Group through email for the moms and dads worried about their children in Africa and this is how this parent found my blog. With such sporadic communication, whether internet, cell phone, or good ol’ snail mail, I understand that it is nice for people in the U.S. to hear that their loved ones are doing well, even if it’s through Volunteer A’s mom, who talked to Volunteer A who talked to Volunteer B who says that Volunteer C no longer has amoebic dysentery.

This is fascinating to me. The interconnectedness of all of us. When evacuation happened, people really started coming out of the woodwork. I got emails from former Bolivia volunteers. Emails from parents of high-school classmates, high-school teachers, and old church members. I came back to the U.S. and had lunch with old acquaintances, and did a meet and greet with my mom’s co-workers who love following my blog. I never really knew so many people cared, so many people were interested, and so many people kept up with my life.

This blog helps meet goals two and three of Peace Corps, which is the cultural exchange between peoples of different countries. It takes a great deal of effort for me take my computer to some place that has electricity. Then to remember to take the correct adapters. Then to wait til the battery charges up and then take the computer back home to my two room mud hut and type out blog entries in the dark. I enjoy doing it though because I enjoy sharing my life and hearing from people.

I generally write about whatever random subject I am currently contemplating when I realize that I am again overdue for a blog post. In an effort to cater to my audience, I’d like some input from you. What you want to know, what you want to hear about. So stop right now, I mean RIGHT NOW, click the “comments” link, and answer these following questions.

Who are you and how did you find my blog?
What were you in the middle of doing just now? (If it was eating a McDonald’s cheeseburger and fries, OMG AM I JEALOUS!!!)
What burning question do you have for me that I have not yet answered?
How many times have you laughed, cried, and/or thrown up as you have read my blog?
What is the best/worst/funniest recent moment in your life for which I have been absent?
And last of all, what do you miss most about me???

Don’t even think about skipping my survey. Don’t. Cause in addition to fact that I do want to know my readers a little better (you just can’t get rid of the marketing side of me), it’s also a ploy to get to you to write to me. I worry about missing out on everyone’s life as I trek around the world on my prolonged Peace Corps journey. Now that you’ve read about my life, tell me about yours!

Give Me a Snickers Already.

2009-02-12T04:13:00.000-08:00

Some quick updates:

Swear-in came and went and I actually ended up not really swearing-in again cause I guess you only get to do that once in a lifetime.

I also got moved into site which is the one I originally thought I would go to, Sanyang, about a 15 min bike ride from the beach. Life is back to normal. Perpetually awkward situations, children yelling NEE-HOW, and me leading groups of 15 women on gardening projects in Mandinka, when no, I still don't speak it.

I got lucky with a really wonderful host family. A mother who owns a fabric shop, three sisters ages 25, 22, and 12, three bros ages 26, 14, and 6, a little niece age 2, and a father who lives in Atlanta. Or Madison, Wisconsin. I'm not sure which cause I never get the same answer twice.

My family is highly educated and driven, relatively speaking, and they give me enough space while making me feel a welcome part of the family which is a delicate balancing act. The women in my family all could be on "America's Next Top Model" and they are quite the fashionistas, even by U.S. standards. Being that I wear Chaco sandals and dirty capri pants, their idea of integration is to make me beautiful. I don't know if this is a sustainable endeavor, but we gave it a go.

Thus far I have gotten hair extenstions in the form of Rasta Braids (an easy way to have long hair again if you can stand the intense itching, which I couldn't, and resulted in a Macy Gray fro, 100% natural. To all those who thought Asian hair couldn't fro, I beg to differ). I also get beautiful custom tailored outfits. Slightly difficult to walk in, but beautiful nonetheless.

On the health front, I have amoebas or parasites or something that has made my belly so swollen and full of gas that my pants no longer fit. And I have a small patch of skin fungus on my side, which pales in comparison to the larvae that hatched out of my boyfriend's arm. They call it a bot fly. These things lay eggs in your clothes as they hang to dry and then burrow into the skin. After a few days of incubation and hot water compresses and squeezing, out popped a little white squirming worm slightly larger than the size of a grain of rice. I almost lost my lunch.

For those of you who miss my witty analyses of life, they will resume in the next blog. I am finding that malnourishment really leaves little energy for life. Once I ate six bananas in one sitting I was so hungry. I'm in the city now where food is more abundant and I am going to go take advantage.

So until next time, leave your comments, questions, inspirational quotes and messages on the blog and drop some food in a care package and send it my way!

Feast or Famine

2009-01-05T06:40:00.000-08:00

Life in the Gambia goes a little like this: Kill a goat, eat him in three days. Buy veggies, eat immediately. Then the rest of the month (or the rest of the year), you wait for that one glorious day to come again. No refrigeration, or even power for that matter, makes storing food impossible. I live in a state of perpetual hunger yet I have a swollen belly either due to the insane amounts of rice I eat or the fact that parasites have invaded my body. I can’t tell which one is winning.

So anyways, feast or famine. That’s life here and it is reflected now in my blog. Months with no entries and now you have a book to read. Sit back, relax, and take a gander at the last few months of my life, aka Training Take II. (And please, comments comments comments! Leave ‘em!)

August 23, 2008

110+ Degrees, 85% Humidity.

What’s that feel like? Scorching, blazing hot. Hot enough to almost faint walking three blocks. Hot that gives you headaches from constant dehydration. Hot enough to melt, I kid you not, MELT my glasses. I know because I took them to the optical center and they told me I did not scratch my glasses, the material just melted. It was not made for this climate it’s THAT hot.

November 15, 2008

Class Under the Mango Tree

And I bucket bathe underneath the orange tree. It’s the first day in training village and I’m settling into my two room mud hut. The bathroom consists of a hole (my toilet) and a red bucket and green cup (my shower). Bathing happens about 3 times a day due to over-stimulated sweat glands, and I have learned to bathe using less than two liters of water. Key, when you have to go two blocks to the pump, fill up a bucket with about 20 lbs of water, and then carry it back to the house on your head- far easier than carrying by your side- while trying not to splash it all out.

One of my host sisters invites me to go somewhere that night and not knowing the language to ask what I am doing, I just follow. I find myself sitting around a campfire at a Koranic studies session with masses of little children chanting Arabic. As I’m staring into the fire lighting up the darkness, surrounded by people speaking a language I don’t understand, practicing a religion I know almost nothing about, I stare at the fire lighting up the night and I’m pleasantly surprised by my reaction. Whereas I probably would have felt horribly nervous and out of place just a year ago before I started this insanity that I now call life, all I can think now is how great it feels to be back in the Peace Corps. And again that night as I fall asleep to a symphony of random donkeys braying, goats knocking at my door, rats chasing one another above my head, and kids screeching outside my window, I gaze up at the corrugated tin roof through the haze of my mosquito net and think to myself, “It’s so good to be back in Peace Corps.”

November 17, 2008

KADDY DEMBA!

KADDY DEMBA, KADDY DEMBA!!! Oh, the naming ceremony. One thing you learn pretty quickly in the Gambia is that names are extremely important. Last names establish your lineage and I thought it strange that while a person was greeting me, they would ask me my mother and father’s first and last name in the U.S. I couldn’t fathom what they would need the information for and at first thought that I was misunderstanding the question. However, I wasn’t.

We had a naming ceremony today. It’s a traditional ceremony held for babies generally one week after they are born. It’s a celebration involving dance, food, drums, and offerings of kola nuts. The baby’s head is shaved, family and friends travel to witness, an animal is sacrificed, and the baby is named after someone of importance to the family. Gambians for some reason expect foreigners still to have Gambian names. So, in the spirit of integration, I borrow traditional dress from my host family, help fry up a million dough balls, pour juice into bags, and go through the ritual. I receive the name Kaddy Demba. I am named after an 8-month-old in my compound. She is the most adorable little naked African baby, with a runny nose, drool, and numerous little charms that adorn her body. She hardly cries and always smiles when she sees me. Later in training when I am totally in love with this child, I decide that when I have children of my own I will name one Kaddy Demba. And I will always use both names, Kaddy and Demba, because here no one ever says hi to me using only my first name, it comes out as more of a loud shout, something like “KADDY DEMBA!” Followed with a “NAA!” meaning “COME!” And if you grow up in the U.S. and someone yells your name with last name followed by a COME HERE, what option do you have but to come???

[Later in my stay when I have learned enough Mandinka to have basic conversations with the family, my three mothers establish the fact that I am too old to be without children. They suggest that I have fourteen. I say one. They say thirteen. I say two. We finally negotiate down to four. Also the jujus I am wearing (description on that to follow) will bring me a husband, they say. Oh, and since it is Muslim, men are allowed up to four wives, which is why I have three moms.]

November 23, 2008

Saalaamaaleekum.

That means “Peace be upon you.” The response is “Maaleekumsaalaam.” Peace be upon you too. I like being able to speak different languages. It was a talent and hobby I found more recently in life. I came to the Gambia partly because wanted to learn another language. My short term memory, however, forgot that language learning is hard and frustrating and sometimes downright sucks. I wonder sometimes why I didn’t just go to Peru or Ecuador where I could just change my accent and get on with life. However, temporary insanity brought on by sudden upheaval mixed with an unhealthy fixation on following through with commitments leaves me lighting candle after candle to support my late night study habits. Peace Corps expects all trainees to be at an Intermediate-Mid level of language by the end of the 10 week training, and with all that is going on with me I’m just crossing my fingers to get there. I also found it amusing that they wanted me to learn Mandinka plus a “second language.” I started counting, then did a recount, and indeed, it is not my second, it’s my fifth. This is out of control.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that I am not really learning new words, I am just learning to associate the same sounds with a new definition. For instance, the Mandinka word for fly is the same word for soy sauce in Vietnamese. I still wince a little when I use what used to be a swear word in Spanish with my host father who is at least 80 years old. And one time a fellow trainee was studying flash cards and said something out loud while I was only half listening, and I thought she had just dropped an F-bomb on me. Till I realized she doesn’t speak Vietnamese. Wow is my brain one linguistic nightmare.

[Editing note several weeks later: Contrary to what my consumer psychology teacher tried to tell me in college, cramming is an extremely useful and effective skill to learn. By the end of six weeks I hit the Intermediate-Mid level on our second of three language tests. However my quest for excellence ended there and I sadly have not picked up a book to study since.]

November 30, 2008

AgFo in Training

Training training training. My new job description: AgFo Volunteer. That’s short for agro-forestry. What am I doing? What am I learning? Plants. Flowers. Bees and trees. Fertilizers and compost.

I have never actually worked with plants or successfully grown anything in my life. I killed my lucky bamboo (which is extremely hard to kill for one, and extremely unlucky to let die, for two.) I planted beautiful flowers from the market in Bolivia that promptly stopped blossoming as soon as I put them into the ground. The most I know about compost is some ratio of green to brown things you have to put in, and while some volunteers are busy composting donkeys and ducks, piece by piece, the most experience I’ve had with it is taking all the vegetable peels out to the hole full of flies in my mom’s backyard.

Life is about learning though, and here I am again, learning. I’ve learned that if you collect your urine in a huge oil jug, mix one part pee and three parts water, you can use this to fertilize your plants. Just make sure that it is diluted or else it will kill your plants, and make sure you do not put it on too early or it will kill your plants, and make sure not to put it on plants of which you only eat the root (ie. carrots) or else it will make the leaves flower and the roots small. You also have to let the pee sit at least two days so diseases are not transmitted. And make sure to keep the container airtight lest it smell like a urinal in your backyard.

So many rules.

I learned about manure as well and how to use it in the plant bed before you sow seeds. We put huge hunks of cow manure in our garden and covered it with a layer of dirt. And of course, as soon as I start digging my hands in to transplant a tomato seedling, I run directly into a nice cow patty. No biggie. I just had to make sure to clean under the fingernails before eating with my hands from the food bowl.

Watering the garden is also a lot of fun. In my training village I happen to be the only AgFo volunteer. The other three are health volunteers, which basically means that everything we are instructed to do by using waste products, they are instructed not to do for disease prevention. At any rate, I am the expert ag-fo of the group.

We went to go start our demonstration garden. We dug, we put down neem leaves as fertilizer/insect repellent, we watered, we threw on a layer of dirt, and we came back the next day to sow seeds. The Gambia is currently in the middle of the dry season. It rained the day before I arrived in country on Oct 23, and it has not rained since. This makes for a lot of dust and hard dirt. So in order for us to breathe a bit cleaner and turn the soil a bit easier, we had to wet the ground.

There is a pump in the garden area. It is broken. But not to worry, there is also an open well. We could just draw water from that. One of the trainees went over to get some water, threw the bucket in, and as it fell down into the dark abyss that Tikky-tikky-tembo-no-serembo-berry-berry-buchi-pip-berry-pemble would have never, ever gotten out of it was so deep, he belatedly notices that the rope was not attached to anything and it is now floating in the bottom of the well. So now, five days later, we are still walking three blocks twice a day to fill up the watering cans at the nearest working pump and then teetering back to the garden with them delicately balanced on our heads.

It’s working out really well. Which means the seeds are in the ground. Whether they actually will grow, only time will tell. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

But enough about plants, let’s talk about bees. If you keep up with my blog you probably saw the beekeeping pictures from Bolivia. Now that’s something I have experience with. I went to split hives once.

Don’t let me start getting on my high horse yet though. I mean, I thought I was not afraid of bees. I worked with them and I got stung and I was fine. In fact, my sitemate had one in his mask the entire time we were working, and he told me, “Tammy, you have to show the bee some love and it will not sting you. He’s scaring me but I’m loving him and he will not sting me.” And sure enough, my friend was not stung.

So I feel like I know how to love bees and how to split hives and the role of a queen, worker, and drone, and I know how to trick bees into raising queens and I know all about smoking the hive and of course, how to look good in a bee suit. Everything I learned about bees I learned in Bolivia (and pretty much in one day. So really, no, I don’t know all that much about bees). Regardless, take all that amazing knowledge and transfer it to the Gambia. And this is what I find:

Bees in the Gambia are in fact the African Killer Bee species. They do not love, they sting. And when one stings he releases a pheromone that lets other bees know he’s in a fight and looking for some back-up and his bee friends come running to join the attack. That pretty much means that if you get stung once, you are about to be stung a dozen times so if you happen to be collecting water at the pump and not actually wanting to work with bees, you better turn and run, and when I say run I mean run fast.

And then the bee keeping techniques I learned in Bolivia are now irrelevant, as the bee expert informed me that what I learned and the hives we used were too “high-tech.” I must now learn new “appropriate technology.” Boy have I got a long way to go.

December 10, 2008

WARNING: Not For the Faint of Heart

Or for the weak of stomach. I’m warning you. If you continue reading on your lunch break, do not blame me for ruining your appetite. But don’t you dare throw that sandwich away. There are starving children in Africa. I know. They live in my compound.

Ok, so if you are still reading, let me share a little secret with you. I had testicles for dinner. Twice. Two nights and counting.

Want to know why? Tobaski.

First, let me tell you about the food. Food here is actually delicious for the most part. No sushi, no Taco Bell, no Chipotle, but they do have rice. And sauce. From fish. It’s not quite fish sauce like the Vietnamese eat and I adore, but everything has this fishy flavor to it. For me, it’s amazing.

There’s also a lot of peanuts. Peanut sauce and rice for dinner. Raw peanuts to snack on. Roasted peanuts to burn your fingers on. Peanut butter. Peanut soup. Peanut porridge. Please don’t ask me why I chose to bring peanut M&M’s instead of plain. And why do I have a million peanut butter flavored granola bars from both Quaker AND Nature’s Valley? Why did I not pick fruity things???

Occasionally I will get coos, also known as millet. Millet is used as bird feed in the U.S. Here it is a substitute for rice. It has no nutritional value but does fill up the stomach. Thankfully the Mandinka peoples I live with do not like coos, but once in awhile it shows up. To me it tastes like sour sand.

Food is served in enormous communal food bowls. It is eaten with your hands. No chopsticks, no forks, spoons, or knives. Squish and squeeze and form a little ball and stuff that into your mouth. There are about five people per bowl, but the family I am living with in training gives me my own mini-bowl and I eat from it by myself until I see that they have eaten all their sauce and are working on plain rice and I convince the old lady sitting next to me to take some of my share.

So, what about the testicles you say? Well, if we take inventory, we see sauce. And rice. And peanut sauce and rice. And coos. Notice the lack of meat? Well bring on Tobaski! Tobaski is a Muslim holiday celebrated in the fashion of Christmas back in the U.S.. New clothes, big feasts, dancing, and of course, the sacrificial ram. Or sheep, or goat, depending on the level of affluence of the family. Muslims do not eat pork, which makes risk of brainworm a moot point. I did kill pigs in Bolivia to eat, but I don’t remember ever killing a male. Just the girls.

Well, rams are male sheep. (I did not know a lot about farm animals before Peace Corps, so the clarification is for those of my friends who I know have no idea either.) Male sheep have testicles. Since I had only killed/roasted/eaten female pigs, the only animal I saw roasted whole, I have never had to deal with eating certain body parts. And let me remind you, in America people have the luxury of eating only whole, skinless, boneless chicken breast. Here, we eat it all. The whole chicken. The whole goat. The whole ram. Testicles included. Before dinner I saw them hacking it apart. Then at dinner I was confronted with mystery meat. And I just stared at my bowl…

And let me tell you! I am game! I am game for eating with my hands. I am game for tasting cow heart. I am game for moving to a Muslim-African country I knew nothing about as I was ripped away from the Peace Corps life I built for myself. I will eat bird feed. I will try other strange foods that are handed to me, at least the first time. But I am sorry to say, I am not game for testicles! I just couldn’t do it. Not the first night and not the second night either. (I must confess, I did stick a piece in my mouth but promptly spit it back out when no one was looking.)

The family was watching me and when I had finished without eating the meat the second day in a row, they picked up the pieces, stuck them in my face and said, “EAT!” Not knowing what to do, and not wanting to offend, I responded, “YOU EAT!” And so they did. They popped those big pieces of testicles in their mouth, chewed, swallowed and smiled at me. And I responded, “A diiyata?” And they responded, yes, delicious.

PS. After Tobaski I am taking a bucket bath and something catches my eye on the roof of the room next to me. It was right before Christmas but I could tell it wasn’t Santa Claus and his reindeer. I take a closer look and I find that it is the poor animal we had just eaten laying up there, all hollowed out. That night as his hide roasts on the roof I shut my windows and doors to keep out the scent of rotting flesh, and I spray Bath & Body Works room freshener to cover the smell and make me think of Christmas in my mosquito net.

Dec. 26, 2008

All I Want For Christmas Is You: Christmas Stories and More.

I was supposed to be home for the holidays this year, but it’s going to happen next year instead. Knock on wood. I will be receiving a one month home leave if I do actually stay for two full years as I plan. The timing should be that I will be around for the holidays of 2009! However, for now, another Christmas away from home.

To celebrate, Peace Corps organized a little get-together for the trainees. It consisted of a sixteen mile hike on Christmas eve that they named the “Marathon March,” previously known as the “Death March”. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for me) I was a little sick. And by that I mean that half an hour after I ate, each time and every time for the past week, I needed to be next to a toilet. No questions asked.

So I skipped the march and the next day we did a boat ride along the Gambia River. It was very pretty and we spotted the usual monkeys, crocodiles, and various bird species. This was followed by a white elephant gift exchange. It was the first time I ever did it and there are too many rules for me to explain, but I scored a half-used roll of toilet paper, a pen that might work, a pencil with no eraser, a newspaper page with a crossword puzzle and comics, some Werther’s Originals ripoffs, post-its, and some sweet stationery. All very useful items.

That was the tame part of my Christmas. I did also listen to Mariah’s Merry Christmas album, drink hot chocolate, and wear fleece Rudolph pajama bottoms and alpaca wool mittens in 100 degree weather. It was all in the spirit of the holidays. For many of the trainees it was a rather homesickness-inducing event. I’ve found that for me, homesickness is not so much missing the US as much as it is missing Bolivia. Missing the volunteers, my group, my sitemates, and my old community. It’s just a strange feeling of not having proper closure and therefore feeling that something has been stolen from me. Thankfully, though, Santa Claus brought me the strength that I need to maintain my sanity and mental stability through a time that leaves most people vulnerable when away from home. All I wanted for Christmas was one more day with Bolivia. One more day making banana pancakes with chocolate chips, one more day waking up and seeing the Andes mountains in my backyard, one more day to spend with the most amazing people I have ever met in my life.

Usually when I am inadvertently reminded of something Bolivia, I begin a downward spiral that usually leaves me in an ugly funk for a time. I am trying hard though to embrace my experience in the Gambia rather than dwelling on what I lost, so instead of laying around and listening to depressing music to match my depressing mood, I had begun to channel my energy into creating a memento that merges my Bolivia experience with my new Gambian home. It’s called a juju, and it was my Christmas present to myself.

Let me explain.

The Gambia is approximately 90% Muslim. The other major religions are Christianity and Animism. Though most are Muslim, there are traces of animism found and practiced regularly by Gambians in general. This is manifested through various superstitions and in almost every community there is a person called a marabout. The local marabout is actually the father in one of the training host families and when I went to see him he told me that he had been praying for the trainees in the village since we arrived.

When I started having dreams and couldn’t get over the fear of a potential evacuation from the Gambia, when I realized that I wouldn’t take pictures of anything in this country for fear that it would actually be a personal visual historical record of my time here, I decided I needed a way to make peace my abrupt exit from Bolivia and the sudden loss of friends who meant the world to me. The isolation resulting from no Internet and sporadic cell service and the lack of a support network with anyone who even remotely understood what it might feel like to have life ripped away with barely a moment’s notice left me in a state of what I finally diagnosed as post-traumatic stress.

Most nights I would lay awake with my mind unable to rest. Usually I would fall into a fitful sleep and awake early, with nothing to do but stare at that mosquito net, such a symbolic part of Peace Corps life. One such night I awoke suddenly with the notion that I needed to see a marabout and get a juju that would give me the strength and courage to start anew and make it though service in a country that I did not consider my home, and of course, to help keep me from getting evacuated.

Jujus, according to local beliefs, are used for various purposes. They can improve your status in life, by bringing love, money, or new opportunities. They can protect from bad things, from people who have put a curse on you, from illness and death. They can also be used to bring harm upon others, although because marabouts communicate with the other world, you must find one that communicates with evil. Good marabouts won’t cast bad spells on others. Jujus can even go as far as making you invisible, though to get an invisibility juju you must first find the paws of a black cat and because black cats are so valuable, you will probably not find one. Black cats also have a chameleon-like quality where they change their color when they sense that you are looking for them, so to become invisible you can’t be actively searching for a black cat’s paws, you just have to be lucky. I guess it’s like love. You won’t find it if you’re looking for it.

Anyhow, though I think being invisible might be kind of cool, I don’t need all that. I just want to serve my two years here as uneventful as Peace Corps can possibly be. Which, as see from my blog, is never really uneventful.
I consulted with the marabout and he made me a juju that would soon be slipped into a leather cover and worn around my waist. To make it he consulted the Koran to see what it had to say about my future in reference to me and my situation. The results were written on a piece of paper in Arabic, folded up into a tiny little square (with words actually left unknown to me), and that is taken to a local leather-worker who wraps the paper in leather and sews it up. It is then worn on the body.

He also made me a potion in which he wrote Arabic words from the Koran on a wooden tablet, then washed that off into a basin using some water, added spritzes of what looked like perfume, and mixed it up and poured it into my used Frappuchino bottle. I took the murky black water with me and washed my face and hands with it and it now wards me from evil people for the next two years, in that anyone who casts an evil look my way will suddenly be overcome by my power and energy and their evilness will bounce off me and my goodness will overtake them and they will instead welcome me with open arms and be more than willing to listen and work with me. All paraphrased by my interpreter, so it may not be entirely accurate.

However crazy this may sound, I guarantee you it was nothing compared to what I had been going through trying to deal with the aftershocks of evacuation. I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t get out from under the black cloud hanging over me, so I was not above consulting a spiritual advisor for any help he could give me.

I washed with the potion and I had the juju charm to wear around my waist, and in addition to that I made a juju charm bracelet. During that same night that I suddenly decided had to see a marabout, I also composed what later became known as “Tribute in a Juju.” Gambian on the outside, Bolivian on the inside. Just like me, and a happy little convergence of my two worlds. It is a way to keep my memories of my old life with me, a piece of paper folded up in my juju with my life and love of Bolivia Peace Corps wrapped up neatly inside.

The final step in the juju process was to go to the market to have them bound in leather. Because my marabout is a well-respected, well-known man, and since he was making the juju for a foreigner, it would be perceived to be better and more powerful than anything the locals would get. I was warned by my language teacher to keep a close eye on it as the leather-worker encased it lest he pull a slight-of-hand trick and keep my juju and return to me a fake.

The timing was perfect that I got the juju on Christmas day. A little gift to myself, and little something to make sure that Bolivia stays with me even in Africa.

So after making the jujus, I get home and greet my family. They are always so excited to see me and I did the rounds and all the formal greetings. I then decided I really wanted to bathe before handing out Christmas gifts or the required travel gifts, known as silafando. In order to bathe I had to first go fetch water.

I enter my hut and open the back door to grab my bucket. As I am doing it, Mr. Lizard who has been happily co-habitating in my hut in peace for the last month or so decides to jump on me and scare the living daylights out of me. Usually he just runs around and disappears when I come in, but jumping on me was a shock. I scream and go screeching through my hut back out the front door, and the only person standing there happens to be one my best friends. Secu, a 3-year-old adorable kid who only knows how to say my name and a few other things I never understand in his baby babble Mandinka. I grab him by the shoulders, shaking him, and scream, “SECU! There is a lizard in my hut. GO DO SOMETHING!” And he looks at me with his beautiful little eyes and bats his perfectly curled eyelashes and giggles. My 18-year-old sis comes out to see what the commotion is all about, and I proceed to tell her, “FATOU! Lizard-o be bungo kono!” (Translation: Fatou, lizard-o is in the house.) I forgot the word for lizard in my panic.

She is cracking up cause she doesn’t understand me, and at that point another trainee walks by with his 18-yr-old sis. The three of us troop in there and I’m telling the trainee (in English) to just get the lizard out of the house, cause every time I approach it it tries to jump on me and scares me all over again. The girls have no idea what I’m saying but I hear them say “fitarango,” which means broom. One goes to grab a broom as Fellow Trainee is looking for the lizard, and then broom arrives and Other Girl finds the lizard, starts to smack the life out of it, I’m now standing outside over my latrine hysterically laughing, and then Fellow Trainee announces lizard is dead. Right next to my bed. I tell him to get it out of the house cause I do not want to see a smashed lizard in my room. They throw it in my back yard. I am now covering my face with the bucket’s lid, and tell him the thing is still in my yard which means I still have to see it, so just please throw it over the fence. I am covering my face and waiting for him to walk by and do it, and after a few moments I ask why he hasn’t done it. And he says he has. He threw it over the fence. So of course I have to inquire which fence he could have possibly thrown it over, and of course he had thrown it over the fence that separates my back yard from the family next door. I start hysterically laughing again and go about my business of water fetching.

I leave my compound and cross the next compound on the way to the pump, I am asked to put down my bucket and help pound rice out of its shell. Pretty normal. Then I walk by a lady who compliments me on my tshirt. Again, nothing out of the ordinary. I compliment her back on her outfit, a complete set of head wrap, shirt, and skirt made of one fabric print, the customary dress here in the Gambia. The woman keeps talking and I understand that she really really likes my shirt and she likes the fact that I like her outfit, and she starts teasing me about giving her my shirt. So I start teasing her about trading outfits, my tshirt for her skirt, top, and head wrap. She smiles and laughs and I am about to walk off when she strips off her shirt right then and there. I’m staring at her nakedness, quite a common occurrence since in this country, where women wearing no top is acceptable. Woman showing her knees is not. Knees are like cleavage, only shown for sex appeal. So of course I can do nothing else but laugh and stutter something about doing the exchange “tomorrow” and I continue towards the pump.

So there you have it. Merry Christmas to me. New country, new customs, new people, new surprises. Despite the troubles and hardships, the emotional roller coaster that never stops, here I am still. Still living the dream. I love Africa but as always, que viva Bolivia!

Gobama.

2008-11-05T04:48:00.000-08:00

I stayed up til 6 in the morn to see the results due to the time zone thing, and then I realized that Obama and I have parallel futures. He starts his training today, I start my training tomorrow. He does a crash course on being a president and swears in Jan 20; I crash course on being a Gambian supastar and swear in just a few days before.

As of post time, Indiana is still processing votes and has not become either red or blue. I'm still waiting... Hope the Hoosiers make me proud.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

2008-11-03T09:29:00.000-08:00

Intense learnings, followed by intense reflections. As of late, that seems to be my rhythm of life. So many new experiences and situations that I never would have imagined myself in, not in a million years.

I am one of two former Bolivia volunteers who chose to continue service in Africa. We had a range of choices- among them various countries in Latin America, plus Bulgaria, China, and a sprinkling of options in Africa. I have been asked numerous times why I would choose to go to the Gambia. Why of all places, if I was offered Caribbean islands or Costa Rica, did I pick a place that I myself had never even heard of?

This is especially mind-boggling for the Gambia’s volunteers who dream of being in Latin America and whose jaw-dropping reactions to my casual mention of living in the Amazon and Andes is quite comparable to my giddiness when directions to a friend’s house includes the phrase, “Just walk towards the ocean.”

My decision to leave Latin America and come to Africa, however naïve, was fueled by the desire to experience something different. I felt I had spent enough time in Central and South America that I had a good enough grasp of the language and culture that I wanted to travel and live in a part of the world that was completely foreign to me.

I also knew that one year ago when I received my invitation to be a volunteer in Bolivia, had the invitation been to Africa I would have had serious doubts on whether I would really make it. Bolivia provided the training wheels I needed to feel comfortable with an offer for the other side of the world. So of course, though I am about to be the veteran in a group of trainees that have not yet experienced Peace Corps life, I do have a very high level of respect for those who come in totally green and take the plunge without testing the waters. I don’t know that I could have done it.

My first week in country I went to visit a volunteer in an extremely rural site. I thought it would be so different. What I’m finding though, is despite the difference in modern conveniences and luxuries (ie. a toilet), the Peace Corps experience continues to be very similar. The details change but the ideas remain the same. Instead of being called a “chinita,” I now get “TOUBAB!!” Kids still love to talk to you and men still love to hit on you. Major infrastructure does not exist, roads are just sand instead of dirt, patience is of the utmost importance, and sitting around relaxing and talking is still a major past time.

There has been one notable difference that I can’t get over here in the Gambia, and that is the attitude towards Peace Corps volunteers. They love them. I remember one time at a taxi stand in Bolivia when some random Bolivian struck up a conversation with me and asked what I was doing in the country. I told him I was a Peace Corps volunteer and he responded by dropping his voice to a whisper and saying, “That’s not something you want to be telling strangers. I work for the Embassy…I know.”

In the Gambia, though, being associated with the Peace Corps is a sign of status, a badge of honor, a free pass through police checkpoints and an intimidation factor that brings shame and embarrassment to out-of-line officials looking for bribes. It gets discounts and warm welcomes into restaurants and clubs where DJ’s grandly announce the entrance of a group of volunteers.

Moving from an area where volunteer status warranted accusations of spying and sterilizing women to one where I am regarded as a superstar and a hero is quite a change of pace. Forget the changes in religion, politics, language, and culture. Just give me a second to get used to that one.

Around The World, Around The World

2008-11-02T04:54:00.000-08:00

Dates: Oct 23 - Present
Location: The Gambia, West Africa

I have lived in four countries in four weeks and traversed four different continents if you count a layover in Brussels. Yesterday I celebrated my one year in-service. That’s one year since I officially swore in as a Peace Corps Volunteer. And I live in The Gambia. Who’d have thunk it?

So much to post, such a long hot walk to the internet. I know many of you are very anxious and excited to hear about my new life as an African-American!

Just kidding…I’m actually an American-African.

Alright, so for lack of knowing where to start, let’s try to start at the beginning. I left the continental U.S. in the afternoon of October 22, 2008 after a second round of goodbyes to friends and family and a feeling of déjà vu from having just done the exact same thing one year ago. After approximately 30 hours of travel I step down from the plane onto the soil of West Africa. Incredible.

The rapid transition without sufficient warning, planning, and mental preparation from country to country and continent to continent results in moments of confusion and/or panic from time to time. Sometimes I am a little disoriented and it takes a second to realize where I am. Exiting the plane was one of them.

I was on the same flight as the Foreign Minister of Taiwan, or some Equally Important Individual. There was a huge crowd of Gambians gathered for this occasion and as I walk down the stairs and exit the plane, I see this group of people and I am seized with panic. Large crowd of host country nationals = strike, protest, blockade. My immediate response: Turn around and walk away slowly. As my eyes look for an escape route, I begin to realize that this that this crowd of people is not angry. In fact, they are singing and dancing! They’re not protesting, they’re celebrating! As I miss the shuttle to the terminal due to this incredible sequence of events that really all took place within my slightly unstable mind, I remind myself, “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

I continue with my entrance into the country of The Gambia and wait in line to pass through customs. The agent, the first Gambian I’ve met in the country, proceeds to take my passport, verify the information, and write down his cell number for me, telling me I “won’t regret it” if I give him a call. Some things never change.

I am greeted in the airport by four volunteers carrying a Peace Corps sign. Felt like home already. The driver takes me to the transit house. Unlike in Bolivia, where volunteers stay in hostels in their regional cities, the small country in which I am to live does not have even the same level of infrastructure as Bolivia. There are no hostels, and certainly no hotels within the budget level of a volunteer. So instead Peace Corps rents out a large house where volunteers stay. No more wireless internet of the Magdalena, the choice hostel in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Goodbye to a pool outside your room, to social gatherings on the rooftop and cable television with CNN Worldwide. Gone to two people a room and welcome to dorm life. Up to six people per room, common areas downstairs with a lone television, a fully-furnished kitchen minus the microwave, and a nice little dining area outside complete with deafening power generator. Welcome to the Gambia.

I have been spending my days adjusting to the heat, traveling “upcountry,” living in the bush, or rural areas, and not understanding anything said to me- neither Pular, Mandinka, nor Wolof, not even the English. I am to do full training with the new group that arrives Nov. 6. Until then I have time to enjoy the country and the nightlife, get to know current volunteers, celebrate Halloween, celebrate the elections (or at least I hope it will be cause for celebration), and then lose my status as PCV- Peace Corps Volunteer- and return to the dreaded PCT status- Peace Corps Trainee. Put best by an RPCV- Returned Peace Corps Volunteer- still living in The Gambia, “It’s like going to the prom when you’ve already graduated.”

But, it was my decision to go through training and I am looking forward to the opportunity to learn a new language and meet another group of people who, in my heart, will never never replace my former Bolivian volunteers, but perhaps a group who will find a different corner of my heart to occupy, a space all their own. The new group will be a mix of health and agriculture/forestry volunteers. We will spend approximately 10 weeks learning one of three languages, plus Gambian English which, trust me, is nothing like the English I taught in Bolivia. There will again be culture training and technical project training, same as before. Many things the same, but I am different. Older, wiser, seasoned, at times jaded. More patient, more open-minded, more adventurous. The biggest change though is evident by looking at my luggage. Two fifty pound bags, one carry on luggage and one backpack. And almost all filled with food, including several pounds of Velveeta. Might as well bring my wish list with me.

Send me questions and I will send answers, and don’t you worry, more interesting stories with gory details still to come when I have the time. I believe I will lose internet access soon after the 6th for a period of time. Rumor has it that there is cell phone service in the training villages so perhaps I won’t be cut off from civilization after all. Contrary to the information that I received while still back in the U.S., I actually do not have a determined site. I may not be living on the beach like I thought, and though it is a bit of a bummer, great projects and great people beat out location any day. So I’m still optimistic about my options and I’m just waiting to see what this crazy life of mine decides to throw me next.

Signing off and sending love to all of you- my family, friends, and former PCVR’s, wherever you now may be.

Tammy Truong
PCV The Gambia

We're Pretty Much Famous

2008-10-29T02:13:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in a hut in Africa and pick up a random Newsweek the other day, and as I flip through I come across an article on Bolivia with a mention of the Peace Corps withdrawal. You just can't get away from it!

Ongoing media coverage includes a story appearing on the front page of the Washington Post last week on a fellow volunteer and his decision to return to the country. Link as follows.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/22/AR2008102203710.html

Also a photo journal:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2008/10/22/GA2008102203342.html

Stay tuned for coverage on life in Africa. Coming soon.

I Love 'Merica.

2008-10-21T15:16:00.000-07:00

In case you were only following my blog and did not see me, I actually did make it out of Peru and back to the US on my way to the Gambia, West Africa. Unfortunately during my whirlwind tour of the States, I did not take the time to blog and I hope it does not take you by surprise to hear that I am leaving for Africa in under twenty four hours.

Yes, you heard right. I am leaving this beautiful country with its McDonalds and Papa John's and sushi and hotdogs, with its indoor heat and hot showers and clean bathrooms and carpet, to go work as an agri-business volunteer in the Gambia.

To prepare, I did everything American. I ate disgusting quantities of fast food followed with my mom's amazing cooking and several visits to sushi and Vietnamese restaurants on the side. I went to a political rally. I celebrated my sister's 21st birthday and my own twenty-something birthday. I shopped, I clubbed, I partied, I sang, I learned all the new hip-hop and battled young bucks. I went to a party to welcome my brother back from his three month long motorcycle ride. I crashed friend's houses and invited people over, I learned to play guitar and drums after first learning what exactly Rockband was. I saw all my best friends (minus Viet), and even got to hang out with a fellow B46 volunteer. Add into that several tall iced caramel machiattos from Starbucks and my never-ending reveling in the fresh scent of public bathrooms and the soft feel of toilet paper and my US visit is complete.

Wish me the best as I embark on travels to a post with no electricity, no running water, no internet and no cell phone. If you would like to send me letters, I can receive them at the following address:

Tammy Truong PCV
US Peace Corps

PO Box 582

Banjul, The Gambia

West Africa

And yes, the rumors are true. I cut off all my hair in preparation for bucket baths in the Gambia. Locks of Love now has the hair I had and I now wake up with major bed head. But it doesn't matter when you don't have a mirror!

Press Release

2008-09-16T10:24:00.000-07:00

If you are interested...

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/09/16/bolivia.peace.corps/

Oh, and I sweet talked my way into a free new phone number. Let me know if you need it.