I'm older but in Africa

1 Year Officially in The Gambia!

Holy cow, I’ve been an actual volunteer now for a year, and gone for a year and three/four months. How crazy is that?! Nuts, I know. On to the blog, lots has happened since I last posted
I have two road projects currently. I took over a road project from a volunteer who was done with her third year of service here (she extended for one year). This is a road that is in the middle of the region in live in—Central River Region (CRR). The volunteer, Kellee, applied to have Engineers Without Borders (EWB) come and fix the 14-ish k. stretch of road leading from the river to her village. EWB came in January 2009 to do an initial survey, I met the engineers at that time to asked questions about what they were going to do here because I am interested in doing the same thing to the road coming from my village to the highway (more on this later). It was then that I and another volunteer, Bill, agreed to take over the project when Kellee would leave. The EWB team is actually a group comprised of one comprised of a university professor and three students. This project is going. Bill and I are working with the country’s National Road Authority (NRA) to find where we can rent heavy machinery, local quarries, etc. My job is to play liaison to EWB and the village on the ground. In the next few weeks I will travel to the village and find the local quarries, take pictures, and gather rocks to be tested by the NRA so we can give this information to EWB. I also have to conduct a Health and Transportation survey to all compounds in eight villages. This is no easy task, and will take at least a week. Lets see how far I get. EWB say they will come back January 2010 to start fixing the road. This will be an exciting time.

The other road project, that I will dub ‘my road’, has just lifted off the ground. My road is a 9k bush road that is all dirt and gets hammered during the rainy season and blown away during the dry season. After trying to meet with local government officials to ask for assistance, we finally got through. The governor of the region agreed to have two tractors (w/ trailers), that are owned by the president of The Gambia and were currently assigned to plow local rice fields, come to my road for two days to ferry gravel to bad spots along the 9k stretch. Well, do to miscommunication or something, we only could get the tractors for one day….but on that one day the tractors showed up at the site at 1:00pm = way late. By the time we got the tractors to the local quarry, everyone had to eat lunch. (oh, the road committee for my road took it upon themselves to travel to Bansang a few times to gather donations to pay for food for the volunteer workers involved…yet I am not sure where all that money went to). Needless, we only got 6 trailer loads of gravel put in specific places at the beginning 1/2k. It was really cool watching the villagers of all ages and both women and men hand loading these trailers. In the states we would at least use shovels to load gravel, or most likely a tractor with a bucket. But all the villagers had were maybe buckets to load gravel, put the buckets on their heads, and dump it in the trailer. Luckily, many hands make small work. We plan to apply for assistance from EWB as well, but EWB has recently posted a notice that they are suspending applications from Africa and Asia, and we will reopened later in the year…hope there is time.

Thru the contact of have with EWB, they introduced me to another professor at their university that has developed a wonderful device, well, at least I think it is. This professor, Beena, and her students have come up with a bike powered millet milling machine. Here in The Gambia we eat coos, millet, peanuts, rice, and corn. To prepare some of these staple foods, they have to be pounded or ground. Women and girls spend hours a day performing back breaking work using a mortar and pistol to pound the above materials (see video from months back). To ease their workload, aid agencies donate fuel-powered milling machines that greatly reduce the women’s work load. This is all fine and dandy until people have no money to pay for fuel and/or the machine itself breaks and there are no funds to fix it or no one locally can fix it. You see, this creates an issue for items donated being sustainable. With my work with the Community Driven Development Project (CDDP), every village we go to and asked ‘what is a problem for you?’ they always state that they want a milling machine because theirs is broken or they already have one that works but they want another one. My hopes is to, instead of giving the CDDP villages big milling machines, to propose to the villages that maybe we can give each compound within the village a bike powered machine. (*see specs for more info on the machine at http://users.rowan.edu/~bacher60/My%20Web%20Sites/Grain%20Crusher/EIWB%20Home.htm). I plan to meet with the country’s head of Community Development in Banjul with my PC boss Gibril to go over this idea. I want to make sure that we will not reinvent the wheel, so to speak, by trying to implement this bike machine. This meeting would be huge and go past my counterparts who I work with on the ground back in my village. I also want the head honcho guy to give me permission to go to local blacksmiths in Bansang and maybe Basse to manufacture the device so to have it sustainable here in country, and to give the blacksmiths guaranteed business. All in all, yes, this looks great on paper and I am waiting for a snag to hit. There is always snags in projects here. I may hit a wall soon.
Right after last rainy season my village nurse and I heard that our region and few other regions in the country would be sprayed with DDT. You may have heard about this chemical. This particular spray substance was developed, apparently, in Cuba. (There is a tight bond between the two countries here *cough). The plan is to spray every house in every compound in every village with this spray. When mosquitoes come into the houses and land on the inside walls, the insect would die on contact…well that’s the theory any way. Well, for some reason it was decided to spray other regions that don’t have many mosquitoes last season when we were promised it…which was bad news for us. Good news is that the spraying campaign came back! There was a three day training for spraying supervisors in Bansang one long weekend; the village nurse wanted me to be a supervisor but somehow I was not invited to the training. So how can I supervise a team of volunteer sprayers if I was not told what this campaign is all about? So I went out with the spraying team for three days and hit 10 or so villages, then I quit because my job was to basically baby-sit = not my job here as Peace Corps. The chemical spray was nasty stuff, but when I worked with the team I was not involved with the actual spraying, just asking questions to each compound and telling people not to enter the sprayed houses for on hour. Overall good experience but I won’t do any more volunteer work here that doesn’t involved training if I don’t know what I am doing.
People who know me back home know that I have a unique ability to listen to people and to give back feedback/advice from many different angles. I did this a lot in the States, and in turn it followed me here to Africa. I was/am the shoulder to cry on for many volunteers who need some support. Here within the Peace Corps circle, there is what is called Volunteer Support Network (VSN). These people are asked from fellow PCVs and PC administration to volunteer their services and give support to other volunteers when asked/needed. Well, some volunteers nominated me for a VSN spot, and I was voted in. Basically volunteers call or text me when they need a help or advice or support. Easy enough, right? It’s not a big job, just a new title within my job here as PC. Thus my job as VSN is to keep other volunteers from early termination (ET) = quitting PC and flying home. The ET rate for this country is pretty high compared to other African countries so my job is somewhat important…to keep volunteers who are already here to stay in country. I also will be expected to setup fun activities for PCVs I my local area so we can go out together and feel American again.
I recently had a birthday. Turning 25 in Africa didn’t seem like a big deal. In our society, turning 25 is the last right of passage; we can now rent cars. Yet, while I am here, I can’t even drive a vehicle…go figure. The actual bday was laid back, I tried to do as little as possible and listen to music. My family back home called around the day and that was nice. I traveled to Kombo on April 30th, and then on May 1st my girlfriend took me to an off-the-beaten-path lodge place. Basically we went camping on the ocean. It was amazing, cold, windy, and I was totally surprised. The next day some friends came, another huge surprise!! Hanging out on the ocean beach, making mac-n-cheese over the fire and laughing about the good times of being here = great African time. Hopefully I’ll be back in the States by my next birthday.
An ‘elementary’ school 9k away from me called me to their campus one day while I was traveling about the bush. They needed assistance to get their school funding/money for school development and to fix their water pump. I made it clear that I did not come here to give out money. They understood this….for the most part. So I gave then an idea to meet with them a few days later, when I would bring in an Environment PCV, and we would teach the school how to make mud stoves. (Mud stoves are made from cow dung, straw, termite mound dirt and water. Mixed together in equal parts and let to ferment for a few days, we molded the mixture around a cooking pot and left a little space for firewood to be fed thru. The idea behind the mud stove is to save wood, save time, save work, and not cut down trees in a country that has a huge deforestation problem.) During the mud stove demonstrations, we had the local women’s group come to support what we were doing and to approve the stoves. We would need them to approve the stoves so they would tell all the other women to buy the stoves and state why. The idea was to have the boys and girls of the school make the stoves for people who wanted them and then get paid for their services, and the money going to the school. I hope this is what happens.
I recently had my mid-service medical and dental checkup. As of now, I am free of : parasites, worms, bugs, cavities, and gum disease. Good times. Odd going to a dentist in Africa, yet the ‘dentist’ was a med student from Sweden, what the?!
My goat TJ died, or we think he has. He has not been seen for weeks. My family thinks we was eaten by a hyena while hunting for grass in the bush with his mom. I was so looking forward to eating TJ just before I’d fly home next April. Oh well, it happens.
And no bamboo trailer or bamboo grown, yet. I tried to grow bamboo in my compound but my host brother never watered it and it all died. And I still can’t find second-hand bicycle wheels here, which is crazy since the main way of transportation in my area is by bike. BUT a PCV in Kombo recently asked me about my bamboo ideas and now we will try to make the trailer here near the capital (there are more resources here). I’ll keep you posted.