About 6 months
Well what can I say I have been at site for nearly 6 months. A lot has happened and a lot is just about to start changing. For the last 5 months it has been mind numbingly hot. I mean wow. No rain, no clouds, no break. Oh it would cool off at night. It would get down to about 100. To cope with the unruly heat I have basically moved outside. My bed is under this beautiful Yellow Cassia tree, only problem came when a swarm of birds decided they liked the tree too. It is raining poo. Now mosquito nets are wonderful things, but they were never designed to catch wet bird poop. This was an inconvenient wake up call the first day. Shortly there after the top of my mosquito net was covered with cloth to separate me from the bird excrement.
Now though I have a new problem with sleeping outside. That silly thing called rain. I have survived my first Dry season. Now I have a whole new load of problems to deal with. One is I am sleeping indoors most nights, because when storms blow in. They blow in in a hurry and they dump a lot of water in a real short time. Another problem is my hut is not completely watertight. It is close and really the worst of it just harmlessly runs down the inside of my walls. I am still waiting for the humidity to raise up high enough to where the walls of my hut turn in to huge microscopic colonies. That is right, my walls will soon come to life, covered in a fine layer of mold. Hurray.
Oh this is also a fun development. My skin is finally starting to break down. It has developed Heat Rash, also known as Prickly Heat. No treatment and not a whole lot of fun. Not only does it itch, it also can feel like my entire body is covered in little tiny blisters. So yea this just sucks. Nothing to be too concerned about just a good old fashioned annoyance.
Ok bad stuff discussed. Lets see new developments, it is raining. This is an awesome development. Plants are starting to grow, in ground that I could have sworn was nothing more than an over grown child’s sand box. Birds and other bugs have decided to come back. It is just a fun time.
As far as work goes there has been some, I have been helping to organize a library at a near by school. I cannot believe how many books they have there. I have 8 shelves and some change of childrens books. 2 full shelves of more adult fiction. 3 shelves of teaching aids. 4 shelves of reference and non-fiction material. It is just crazy how many books they have, and also depressing, knowing that most of these books will never be read.
So I decided to help some people learn to read. Unfortunately, I decided to help my brother’s wives learn how to read their local language. Now there are a few problems with this, one I am teaching them Mandinka. Mandinka- A tribal language, spoken by about 1,000,000 people, very few written forms available, and no books around. Oh well it is what they wanted and I don’t see the harm in them being able to read their own language.
Also at the village level I have been helping my host brother do home construction. Yep thats right flew half way around the world to mix concrete and lay bricks. It is good though. I enjoy being outside working and just this year alone we have built and roofed 3 rooms. A room 3 meter by 3 meter square. Topped a pit latrine. Cement plastered his entire house, and porch. The plaster keeps the rains from eating away at the bricks, because the bricks are composed of sand and that is it, just SAND.
Other work, I am helping develop a garden and orchard plan at a neighboring village. Their plans are huge and I don’t know if we will even be able to get the project started, but me and another volunteer are going to try. First step is getting the village to do some homework, basic things like cost of materials, who gets how many plots, how many well, where are all the materials coming from. So we will see what they can get done. I am excited about this project, but I fear the commitment level of the Gambians is not going to be enough to see this project through to the end. But we trying.
Also I am still gardening. I have successfully grown pumpkins, moringa (yes it is a tree), watermelon, okra, and kering kerin (like sorrel). It is tough to grow stuff here and the local women do it so much better, but I am trying to show them that they can grow things out of season and it will be more profitable for the to do so. What happens is everybody likes to plant the same things and the same time and then everybody’s stuff hits the market at exactly the same time and the value just takes a dive. So if you can grow it out of season, there is serious money to be made.
Also a big part of my job (not sure how I feel about this) is networking. I get people with resources together with people that will use them responsibly not exactly what I planned to be doing with most of my time, but it is what it is.
Finally I will be starting to plant some crops here before too long. I am hoping my family will let me attempt to grow some high land rice. It grows in places that peanuts and coos grow, but unlike regular rice it only takes as much water as peanuts or coos. Looks kinda like grass most of the time. So we will see.
My closing thoughts are I enjoy my work and I love my family. I am curious to see what will happen over the course of the next 6 months. I want to put my knowledge to use, but here everything I seem to know does not matter. Just life here is a lot of work and anything on top of that is just gravy. I pray that I will slowly begin to do more development work in the surrounding villages and I hope to continue to be active in my local community. We will see what happens. So until next time
Later,
Matt
