Merry Christmas!!!!!

Merry Christmas everyone! I'm back in the city for a brief time to celebrate Christmas with Peace Corps so I thought I'd better get a post written. Village life is fun but man it is nice to get away sometimes just to break up the monotony of it. I spent about two weeks in village without traveling anywhere, it didn't seem like that long but time is going by faster than I expected.

My day consists of me waking up at 7am every morning. I get up wash my face, open my door and go greet the family. They are usually up before me, especially the women who are normally pounding coos in the big wooden mortar and pestle. After that I will go into my backyard and check out my garden, see how my plants and everything is doing, make sure everything is how I left it and all that good stuff. I have tomatoes, carrots, banana, papaya, pigeon pea, cucumber, onion, egg plant and cabbage growing. Currently my cabbage and tomatoes are getting eaten by birds and other insects, I've take the necessary measures and I think They should be safe for now. I'll find out once I return to site tomorrow. But anyways then I water and work in the garden doing whatever work needs to be done.

Mid morning I'll take a little break to read and eat breakfast, this is around 9:30am. I get quite a bit of reading done in village, I always feel guilty because I don't study language a whole lot any more but I will be getting a tutor after x-mas so that will help a lot. At around 11am I go to the well and pump water. There is usually a line so it takes a while for me the get all the water I need. I water my garden in the morning and at night so I go through quite a bit of water.

During the afternoon I eat lunch, read, and drink attaya. Maybe I'll walk around the village and visit the different compounds. I still don't really know anyways name except a few people so that's something I'm trying to work on. Then when evening rolls around I'll water again, take a bucket bath and eat dinner. More reading, hanging out with my family and drinking attaya is done.

I've been visiting other volunteers, going to my fathers orchard and visiting the women's garden also, just not every day. That pretty much covers it.

Peace be with, have a Merry X-mas and Happy New Year.

Life In The Gambia

Some of you have asked me about the weather, food and just day to day life here so this post will concentrate mostly on that. As for weather, it is very nice here now, it still gets into the 80's during the middle of the day but usually I'm inside or under a shade tree by that time so it doesn't bother me a whole lot. Speaking of which, during the middle of the day almost all farmers and family's will come in from working the fields to eat lunch and drink attaya (the local tea).

Attaya is a big part of Gambian culture. Almost all men drink attaya at least once a day, if not 2 or 3 times, and women and children drink it too but not as much. Attaya is boiled in small tea pots over charcoal stoves, lots of sugar is put into attaya and it usually takes about half an hour to prepare one serving. The tea grounds are then used two more times to brew the attaya which makes having attaya about a two hour ordeal. This drink is high in caffeine so this is another reason farmers like it so much. I can attest, attaya is a real pick me up when you are feeling a little tired or sluggish.

The food here can be very good and also very bad. Some of the main dishes we eat are white and red benechin, maffe, mbahaal, cuwa gerte, cere, and lak. These all have either rice, fish, peanuts, coos, and or other miscellaneous things in them. At first there were some things I wasn't a big fan of like the cere (coos) but now I really do like all the foods that are prepared here. It helps that my host mother and sisters are excellent cooks, they really have cooked the best food I've eaten here in The Gambia.

Day to day life should consist of me waking up at 7am washing my face, going outside and greeting my family, going to pump water at the well and then helping my host brothers water my banana and papaya trees in my backyard. Since I'll be planting a garden I want to spend the mornings working in my backyard doing whatever needs to be done. By this time is should be about 9:30-10:00am and we will have breakfast. After this the rest of the day will consist of my walking around talking to people, drinking attaya, studying Wolof, reading, sleeping, eating lunch and doing little things here and there. My teacher is loaning me a bee hive so I'll be spending some time with that getting it ready and trying to colonize it. It's almost harvest season so I need to get it colonized as soon as possible. I have a bee suit also so don't worry, I wont get stung to much.

I'm tired so I'm ending it here, if your good I will add more later!

Story Time

So this time I thought I'd tell a funny story that happened to one of my friends, I wont name names. Anyways it was just a regular night for all of us trainees, most of us were pretty tired from working and studying all day so we went to bed early. Matt, Rob (not his real name), and myself were sharing a room on this fateful night and all got to bed at a decent hour. I should mention though, that Rob was experiencing Mr. D, diarrhea for the lay person, but I didn't really know how bad he was having it.

The next thing I know it's three in the morning and all I hear is Rob telling Matt that he had pooped his pants while he was sleeping. For some reason this didn't rouse me to much considering that Rob isn't the first person to have had this problem (we all get really desensitized to this sort of thing very quickly). Rob was sleeping right next to me, on a different cot of course, so I decided to wake up fully, and find out how everything went very wrong.

Apparently Rob had not changed out of his dress pants that he wore to the 40Th anniversary party of the Peace Corps The Gambia that afternoon so inevitably when he woke up and had to go his pants got the worst of it. He had washed those and had them in his bag or something, not really sure what happened to those pants. Matt and I were laughing pretty hard by this point, Rob took the whole thing really well, we actually got him laughing about it after a while. He just flipped the mattress over and went back to sleep, not for long though, Mr. D called again, and again, and... again.

Eventually Matt and I just stayed up and Matt read Clockwork Orange to us. This book, which was very weird, the fact that we were all dead tired, and the whole thing with Rob made for a very funny morning. I'd have to say it was one of the funniest things that has happened here so far. I mostly believe this because it wasn't me who had to experience the worst of it on this particular night.

Rob is now fine and doing well. His pride and bowels were wounded but he has since made a full recovery. We still joke about it and its also still very funny. Hope you all enjoyed this edition of "Story Time," I know I did!