Sometimes its hard to go back to site

I won't lie. I've gotten used to being in Kombo with friends and beaches and hot showers and cold air conditioning. But today I really must go back to site to try to get back to work. My post from April 15 might seem a little grim and you might be thinking that I'm depressed or downtrodden. But I am not. I'm excited to get back to work. There are many challenges in Peace Corps but those are part of what makes this experience so amazing. Challenging myself.

I helped out at IST last week especially with the beekeeping and composting components. The bees here are very different from those at my site. Its probably because we were working at Sifoe Beekeeping Kaafo and National Beekeeping Association of The Gambia where the colonies are more used to being disturbed. I only got stung a few times through my suit even though I led three groups on three separate nights. Training people about keeping bees has been very rewarding for me. It's a little easier when they are all English-speakers like it was with my fellow PCVs. I hope that I can continue to work with beekeeping and development after Peace Corps is finished. I feel like it is a very sustainable practice and that many people in developing countries can benefit economically from it: The farmers from the pollination, the beekeepers from the honey. Working in other people's established apiaries can be difficult though because I am a visitor there and have certain opinions about management that the operators might not share.

Hanging out in Kombo is so weird after being at site. The Stodge (our Transit House in Fajara) is the closest I've been to a fraternity house atmosphere in a very long time. It has enough beds for 40 people, a very messy kitchen, and an entertainment center. Volunteers from all over the country come there when they need a break from site so debauchery ensues. Late nights, beer drinking, loud music. I might have thought that it wouldn't be a very attractive environment but I have to admit that I actually enjoy being there. I am quite close with many of my fellow Volunteers. Also, PCVs get to know one another quickly because of the nature of our lives. Someone you've never met before might become your cooking partner or fall asleep on you watching a movie. Peace Corps can be sort of frustrating so we depend on one another to help us cope and relax. Also, there is an extensive bootleg collection of dvds so I got to watch the very excellent No Country For Old Men which was filmed in New Mexico. It made me homesick in a very pleasing sort of way. I miss that place so much and the scenery in that film reminded me of so many places that I have loved.

So I hope that you are all well. I have received a few comments from people I don't even know which I am very happy about. Thank you for your kind words and encouragement. Its probably time to get sowing seeds in America and I hope that you are each planting a few.

I've posted some photographs at http://picasaweb.google.com/knucklewalking/TheGambia

Also, my brother and his wife are set to have a baby in the next 2-3 weeks. I wish them success and happiness. My village is very happy for them and we will slaughter a goat to celebrate the occasion.

Kaira,
Matt

April 15

Another month in village (where things are starting to heat-up, in more ways than one) and now back to Kombo for the Agroforestry In-Service Training (IST) and to cheer on the new Health Volunteers who are swearing-in this week. Seems like only yesterday that that idealistic and enthusiastic young Trainee was me- obsessing about language, culture, an all-rice diet, and the heat. Well, I still worry about all those things. And plenty more that hadn’t yet even occurred to me then. But nevermind. Now I give them my best wizened look, scratch at some incessant bug-bite, and tell them that they’ll be just fine.

As I write this I am perched high above Fajara where an ocean breeze cools my espresso on the balcony of Timbooktoo, the bookstore and café where wireless internet is free with any purchase. Gambians love their Nescafe’ and its hard to find a good cup of coffee anywhere but there are two places I know of in this country that offer the finer things.

When will I learn to trust my woman’s intuition? (Mine I mean, I have no woman and she has no intuition). I knew I had to be in Kombo by Tuesday morning for a meeting at the Forestry Department and last Saturday I began to feel like I should not depend on things going smoothly. Two of the three gelegeles that leave from my neck of the woods have broken down along the road somewhere and haven’t been seen for weeks which left me counting on Molafi for my transportation to Kombo. On Saturday I went to his house where his kin assured me that he would be going on Monday. Inshallah. If Allah wills it, he will go. So on Monday morning I awoke at 5:30 and hefted my duffel of clothes and my burlap sack that I had sewn closed after stuffing with three beesuits, three pairs of boots, and all the tree seeds I’ve collected for the IST seed exchange (winterthorn, moringa, yellow cassia, flamboyant, pigeon pea, and pignut). I am building my neck muscles and so was able to carry one bag on my head like any good Gambian would, the other slung over my shoulder American-style. I hiked about four kilometers through the rice field before the cocks crowed but the bees were already awake and I could hear them in every gmelina I walked under. When I arrived at Kangsambu the aparante (boy who rides in a gelegele and negotiates tying the goats to the roof, haggling fares, and stuffing as many sweating human animals into a dusty metal box as physics will allow) was scratching his head looking forlorn at the flat tire. I knew it. Luckily, they had a spare. Unluckily, as soon as the thirtieth person climbed aboard in Kangsambu we began to hear the telltale hissing sound from said spare. We all climbed out and the aparante borrowed a bike pump from someone but it was mostly ineffective (due of course to the hole) so Molafi rigged some sticks to the rear forks of a borrowed bicycle and sent the boy with the flat tire to Kalagi (at least ten k away) to get it repaired. We sat in the dirt. About three hours passed and then Molafi threw my rice bag to me from the roof and told me that we’ll go tomorrow inshallah. So I humped all my stuff back home where my host family had a chuckle. But I couldn’t give up so with the help of my host-brothers’ wives Fatou and Syrah, we tied my bags to my bike with the shredded inner-tubes that are used as straps here and I set off on a wobbly and precarious ride to Kalagi. There I left my bike in the hands of some local police officers who, with a disturbing wink and grin, assured me that they’d take real good care of it. I’ll be surprised if I will ever see it again. Then I went to sit along the main road with about thirty other travelers with burlap sacks and waited in the sun and the dust. Because it is a police checkpoint, all vehicles are required to stop whereupon the riders are accosted by young girls hawking bananas, coconut slices, and plastic bags of water and the aparantes by stranded nomads who insist “Sure, you can squeeze me in right next to those chickens and sheep. Come on.” It took a while before I really asserted myself but I realized that if I didn’t push and shove like everyone else I’d be sleeping right there that night and I eventually got aboard an already crowded vehicle coming from further up-country. We eventually were impeded by a flat tire in Sibanor and then eventually made it to Serekunda where I eventually caught a taxi to Latrikunda and then another to --eventually—Fajara, my destination.

Things at site have been up and down this month. Most of my fellow Volunteers are experiencing the same. Gambians love to say “it is not easy.” Nothing is. I’ve been really experiencing some difficulties at site with the work that I want to do. For example, I have a hammer. Not many people here have hammers. Ali Dado asked to borrow mine and when he gave it back twenty minutes later it was in five pieces. How do you break a tine from the claw, the head from the body, the body from the handle, and the handle into two pieces? If you asked me to break a hammer and gave me six weeks to do it I’d be lucky to make it into two pieces. I had called a workday at the womens’ garden for the following day to repair the fence so that all the hungry cows, sheep, and goats wouldn’t be able to eat our modest crops. So I showed-up ready to pound fence nails with a rock. The garden is a total loss.

But I cannot totally blame that on the hammer. All gardeners no matter where they live struggle with nature and Gambians are no exception. Pests, climate, soil, germination, weeds. All these and more. The Gambia is a tough place to grow food. The sun is hot. Nange na wuli wut! Things dry out so fast and even the warm season and drought tolerant vegetables I was growing in New Mexico struggle to survive here. By 10:00am it is beyond hot and by noon the harmattan winds from the sahel blow whatever moisture there was to oblivion. Soil is actually sand and silt with no organic matter which compacts with watering to a state similar to cement. I am trying a mix of mahogany saw flakes and dried leaves as mulch to try to keep the soil cool and damp but I have to be careful not to attract termites which are a huge problem here. My tomato plants suffer from wilt and my cucumbers won’t grow fruit. The carrots are all stubby because they can’t break the compaction. Seeds that my family sent from America won’t even germinate. And then, if you can beat all of that, the local livestock will go through, under, of over any fence you can construct.

A few weeks ago while in the garden I noticed that there was a goat eating some woman’s bitter tomato plants. I chased him with a stick and he ran out of a hole in the fence that I then repaired. The next day I noticed another goat and a sheep eating okra and eggplants. I chased them with dirt clods and they each went out through two new holes. I repaired those. The next day four goats, six sheep, and two cows. I chased them with sticks, clods, and a pitchfork. They evacuated through holes except for the cows who jumped over the four foot wire mesh and barbed wire fence that had been donated from NGOs Concern Universal and St Joseph’s Family Farm. Fencing in The Gambia is a big issue and one that agroforestry is trying to address. Local solutions include cutting bamboo or small trees for fences or twisting thorny branches or palm fronds together to try to keep the animals out. Livestock range the bush and most herders could never supply supplemental food for their animals. Because of this they are malnourished and insistent. The goal of the herdsmen is to keep the livestock alive through the dry season and then fatten them when the rains come sometime in late June or July. Women garden in The Gambia while men raise livestock and farm millet and groundnuts. Because of this, the men do not really help the women with their gardening and so fence maintenance- which is no easy task- suffers. Here’s where agroforestry is trying to help. We are teaching about “living fences” which is the use of perennial species to create a thorny hedge or impenetrable barrier. Most of the Acacia species do well here once established, euphorbia and pignut are unpalatable to most livestock, and sisal is an Agave that can make a low-maintenance living fence. Of course all these require planning and investment which “is not easy.” People have a lot of priorities and trying to get them to think about planting seeds and nurturing trees through their vulnerable seedling stage is a difficult task. You need a fence around your nursery to keep the animals from devouring your young living fence propagates. It is simpler to cut garden fence material every year in order to repair the damage that termites, sunlight, and livestock do. Or, in some cases, an NGO might provide prefabricated fences but not the tools that are necessary to maintain them. I’ve watched helplessly as men try to cut barbed wire strands by bending them over and over until they break because they have no wire-cutters. This demonstrates how development can hurt sometimes; good intentions become obscured when the people lack the basic tools for maintenance.

So in addition to the livestock and other pests, to the sun and the wind and the drought, to the lack of soil fertility, another obstacle to raising food is the people’s attitudes and abilities. And here is where I feel absolutely unprepared as a development worker. I have spent the last few years studying food production in difficult climates, researching organic methods and permaculture systems, fraternized with extension workers and farmers. But sometimes theory and practice do not meet. Good ideas. I have a particular vision, I’m not at all sure that the people I am working with share in that vision. For one thing, I come from America where some of the best agriculture in the world is practiced because of fertile soil, chemical fertilizers and pest control, superior seeds, and government subsidies. There I have seen crops flourish and watched men make huge sums selling the fruits of their labors. Here, I am working with people who have never seen such things and so just imagining such lush fields might be beyond their capacity. It requires a huge leap and I am asking these Fulas to strive for something that they have never seen, to project themselves to someplace else, to another time either before the climate grew inhospitable or after they have re-nourished their soils with organic matter- which could take years. People here have always practiced slash & burn techniques. How do I convince them that burning fields in preparation for planting extinguishes the rare biota that remains in the soil and releases carbon into the air making it even more difficult to grow food? How do I encourage leguminous cover cropping when people invest all they have into basic staple crops ? How do I convince people that they need to change their practices when the language barrier prevents me from speaking creatively and making my points clear?

The men of my village told me last week that the rains last year came late and ended early and their harvests of groundnuts and millet were disappointing. Usually they save the best seeds for planting the next year but this time they ate everything and now they have nothing to plant. As I’ve described, I tried to get the women to help me repair the fence against the livestock yet they were unable and unwilling. The sun is hot and people are tired. Traditionally this is the time of year when they take a break from growing vegetables and so when the ruminants started to break through, the women gave-up and lost over a hectare of tomatoes and onions and cassava. It broke my heart to see that small patch of green reduced to stubble in less than two days.

Perhaps you’ve heard- climate change is making it hard everywhere to grow food. The World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization are all predicting that things in the developing world are only going to get worse. It is not easy. Over sixty percent of the people here survive on subsistence agriculture yet the problems with that lifestyle are compounding because of changes to the climate, to the economy, and to the culture. I am here because I want to help and these people have accepted me because they desire help. Sometimes though- lying sweating in my bed or watching crops whither away or seeing children with distended bellies of malnutrition- I wonder if I am failing them and failing myself.

Sorry about all the doom and gloom. There are wonderful times in The Gambia too. Recently there was a naming ceremony in my village. Ok, the story begins kind of sad but…

My friend Sanna and one of his wives had a little boy and traditionally Fulas wait eleven days before naming the child which takes place with a huge ceremony attended by friends and family from all over, the child’s hair is cut, people donate money for his well-being, goats are slaughtered, a griot will come and sing stories, people dance all night. A few days before the eleventh there was a death in our village, an old woman named Hawa passed away suddenly. The mandatory grieving period for the village is forty days and so the naming ceremony was postponed until after that. As the date of the event neared people started to arrive in my village. Houses began to swell with family members from all over, new faces (to me) were happy to be home. Some folks had come from a long distance and some had not been here for a long time. Sanna encouraged me to invite some of my Peace Corps friends so I invited Amber, Tim, and Becca who live reasonably close to me and could ride their bicycles. A dj was hired: Since there is no electricity he had to bring a generator to power the huge speakers and dual cassette players that he brought on a donkey cart. People were dressed to the nines with fancily tailored clothing and I noticed that there were a few new goats in town.

Saturday was the day of the naming ceremony- also the hottest day of the year so far. Amber and Tim rode in filthy with dust stuck to the sweat coating their bodies; Becca arrived later in much the same state. They took bucket baths behind my house then put on their best Gambian clothes. We wandered out and joined the party. The baby and his mother were on a blanket and women were holding a blanket over them which was blocking the sun and catching the coins that people were throwing. The griot was singing praises upon them and telling the genealogical history leading up to his birth. Jarreh is the man the baby was being named after and he was proudly shaking hands and giving small gifts to everyone who had come. He is a good friend to the Peace Corps Volunteers of the Foni District because he owns a small restaurant along the Bintang Bolong where we often meet for the only JulBrews available for many kilometers in any direction. The time came for the ceremonial cut and a man with a razorblade took a lock from the boys scalp and the cheer went up as the hair was handed to the mother (never let your own hair lie because birds are likely to pick it up and build nests which will cause you to have a terrible headache for weeks). Then the attention was cast to the man with a long knife and he cut the throat of one of the goats. Then another and another until five bleeding, twitching goats were strewn about in the dust. All the women went to the big cooking pots already steaming with rice and onions over open fires beneath the mango trees and the men set about butchering the goats. The party lasted all day with people getting to know one another and catching up. I met many new people and we sipped attaya and talked about local issues. When dinner was served I wandered from compound to compound and shared the food bowl with many people. Towards evening the music started and people danced until well into the next morning. Fulas love watching us toubobs dance and cheered us on as we tried to predict the exotic rhythms and sounds of the music. Finally we were exhausted and so went to bed in my home but we were all too tired to sleep so lied around in my hot house telling stories until the sun came up.

Another adventure occurred two weeks ago when I rode my bike 72 kilometers to visit Jeff up in Kiang. I left early to beat the heat and saw a huge bush pig on the road along the way. Kiang District is different from Foni District in many ways and it was rewarding to get out and see the changes in the scenery. He lives near the River Gambia so the landscape is unlike where I live due to the different plants that grow and the landforms that are present. I got to his house by 10:00am and was introduced to his family. They are Mandinkas so I was only able to communicate on a superficial level before Jeff would step in and explain that I was Fula and then try to translate what people were saying to me. We went for a bike ride to the village of Kemoto where boats were coming in with the day’s catch of shrimp, tiger prawns, and various tropical fishes. I had a great time talking with the fishermen because many of them were Fulas from Guinea so we were able to communicate. Some of them told me that they were wanted back home for various crimes, some were drunk (not all Fulas are Muslims), some were trying to make enough money to get home to their families. I felt an affinity for many of them: What adventure are we each on that takes each of us so far from home to stand together amongst tangled nets trying to tell each other the stories of how we came to be there? They were impressed with my Pulaar and showered me with praises. They gave Jeff and I some crabs and we bought fish and shrimp to take back to his family. I promised to return when they invited me to go out on a two or three day trip with them.

Later, Jeff and I took another ride and ended up at the Kemoto Hotel. Kemoto is a long way from Kombo by road but fairly easy to access on a river excursion. The hotel is a beautiful example of tropical gardens, tourist crafts, and traditional architecture right along the river. Today it is an abandoned ghost town beginning to crumble into the earth. The story I heard about the place from a friend of mine who used to live near there goes like this: A wealthy toubob investor built this hotel and another in Kombo in the Senegambia region where tourists often stay. His plan was that Europeans would stay in Senegambia for a few nights and then take a boat trip up river where they could spend the night in Kemoto before continuing on to Tendaba or Janjangbureh. Land ownership in The Gambian provinces is nothing like the real estate of the western world and so apparently the man signed a deal with the alkalo of Kemoto that if he built there he would bring jobs, electricity, and water (all the water near there is too salty to drink because of the River Gambia). The hotel is huge and probably could hold over a hundred guests and so the potential was big for the villagers. Unfortunately, as things go in The Gambia, the potential was never realized. The hotel encountered financial problems and finally declared bankruptcy. The people of Kemoto never saw the income generation promised nor did they ever get water and electricity. Eventually there was something of an uprising described to me as violent and the hotel was abandoned. (Let me again say that I have no evidence to support this story but Sulyman who told it to me seems credible.) Now there is a fence around it and a big security guard (with only one eye though) who is friends with Jeff so he allows him to collect cuttings and seeds of some of the plants growing there.

Jambundi. Compost, compost, compost. I build compost all the time and actually have four pits working right now comprised of leaves, grass, cow manure, fish bones, urine (my own), moringa, millet chaff, shrimp shells, wood chips, ash, eggshells, food scraps, banana plant stalks, and the sun-bleached bones of a donkey I found in the bush and pulverized. I remember my compost mentor- Jim bragging about being able to compost a horse and now I know what he means. You just have to make it into manageable pieces. I am preaching the virtues of compost everywhere I go for two reasons: First, the soil is depleted and exhausted and requires mass inputs of organic matter to try to balance the pH, provide nutrients, and facilitate water retention. Secondly, this is the first and easiest thing that gardeners can do to try to improve their yields as the time investment is short and the resources are all locally available. I offer classes to villagers and to students in two different schools. At one school I had asked the students what sorts of things we should put in our compost and after all the obvious answers one boy told me that monkey heads should also go in. People are interested in compost but it is difficult to get people to really invest themselves into the process. I think that one factor is that the gardeners use manure from small ruminants with some success. One problem with this practice though is that the manure adds mostly nitrogen which makes the vegetation grow so people think that they are doing what it takes. But plants need a complex of nutrients and trace elements which are underrepresented in manure alone and so while green leafy growth occurs, the plants lack what it takes to remain healthy and strong. Thus fruiting yields are low, the plant succumbs to the effects of sun and wind, and general weakness makes them very susceptible to disease and pests. Try saying that in Pulaar.

Three nights ago I dreamt that I was so happy with some compost that I had made that I started to eat it. As I chewed a big mouthful and admired the worms and slugs in the pile at my feet I realized that I shouldn’t eat it because of the manure. My breath stunk of cow shit. The mephloquine that we take to stave off malaria causes strange and vivid dreams and many Volunteers enjoy sitting around comparing weird stories. I keep a dream journal next to my bed and write in it almost every morning upon waking.

(Let me begin again. This is getting too long and its been twelve days since I first started it. Blogs aren’t compost, this should be short and current not a thesis-- for crying out loud.)