Village children.
Maimuna Cham with little Kaddy.
Omar and a friend of his.
Kaddy Cham, looking ridiculous.
Village children.
The Cham boys.
Mamasamba Cham and I.
Binta Sowe, a student of mine.
Village women.
Village women.
Village women.
Village women.
Village women.
Village woman.
Mamasamba Cham.
Village children.
Village children.
Village women.
Village children.
Village children.
Village children.
Village children.
Village children.
Village children.
Village children.
Village children.
Village children.
Ibremon Jallow; shop owner, loving father, all round good guy.
Omar, Mamdou Hawa, and friend.
The Cham boys and company.
The school year has gotten off to an exciting start. I will admit that I am not nearly as stressed out as I was at this point last year, when my host family, village, and school were all new to me. None of the teachers that I worked with last year returned. Many of them applied to attend The Gambia College, where they can earn or further improve their teaching credentials. Pateh Jallow, the headmaster, is the only one who has returned from last year. This is the way things work over here. All this moving around of staff is one reason that sustainable projects are challenging in schools. The grade one teacher from last year returned, but was then transferred to another school. He had caused me a lot of stress with his open use of corporal punishment on his grade 1 students despite my protests last year, so I am not that phased by him leaving. We have many more teachers at Suduwol Basic Cycle School this year, which is great. I am slowly getting to know them.
The month of Ramadan ended with many celebrations. I was relieved as well because I was tired of hiding in my hut and eating lunch like it was something shameful. Gambians refer to the end of Ramadan as “Koriteh.” For some reason my village extended the fast for one more day. However, every villager had a spring in their step as they gathered in a field behind the village to have the final prayer. I dressed in a large red kaftan (traditional men’s robes) and walked to the prayer grounds. Anywhere else in the world I would have looked like some eccentric wizard. I had also just recovered from a sinus infection that had slammed me with a fever for almost 2 days straight. I was still on Benadryl so I was so groggy that I did not mind all the attention I grabbed as I pulled out my camera. I took lots of pictures, then walked back into the village with my family and ate a big lunch of coos, meat, and groundnut sauce. I’ve come to like and appreciate this food. I was also glad to find that the teachers and students at school had more energy with food in their stomachs. This refers, of course, to the teachers and students who showed up before the end of Ramadan. Low student attendance and teacher presence allowed me to run several fun, improvised, lessons in the school library. We read story books, played spelling games, and did other activities. However, the end of Ramadan heralded the arrival of all the other teachers and students. Classes have officially started. I am still teaching, though not nearly as much as I did last year. This will allow me to focus on training my fellow teachers and getting clubs started. I have already begun handing the library over the students, which went surprisingly well. The trip I am currently on will cause me to be absent from school for 3 weeks, so the library is completely in the hands of the library council students and a few teachers. I have faith that they can run it well. I have premonitions of returning from my trip and finding the library in shambles, but they’re going to have to run it without me eventually anyway, so this will be a good trial run. I spent my first few weeks at school teaching my lessons and having my library club members write response letters to their pen pals at AOSR (The American Overseas School of Rome). They did a great job and I took pictures of all of them. I also managed to visit a few of them in their homes and take pictures of their families. This involved me biking to and walking around the villages, introducing myself and explaining what I was doing. My explanation was almost always followed with an explosion of parents putting on their nicest clothes and grabbing all their tiny children for the pictures. It was chaotic but fun.
The students at school are doing great. I was so happy to see that my science students remembered a lot from last year and are very used to my interactive teaching methods now. However, the new grade 7 students still give me the blank stare, but they’ll adapt eventually. One morning a new Gambian student walked up to me and asked in a thick New York City accent if I knew where the grade 7 classroom was and if she had a seat. I was speechless. She is an American, born and raised in New York City, who is visiting her grandmother here in The Gambia for a few months. This is her first visit to Africa and her parents seem to think that she should go to school just to keep busy. She is amazingly intelligent and is a great model for the other students around her.
I am currently in Kombo again to write a few reports and run some errands. I have to write up my activities for the summer and summarize my findings on the hippo survey that I helped with before the start of school. The Hippo search went very well. We stayed at a very nice camp on the river near a group of islands called the Baboon Islands. We had tents, beds, nets, a toilet, and a nice lodge to hang out in, which is used by tourists during the tourist season. We spent 3 days going out on the river, in a small boat with an outboard motor, in the early morning and evening. We spent up to 6 hours on the river with each trip. We managed to find 2 pods of hippos and a few loners, totaling about 35 hippos. However, we know that there are more out there. We talked to lots of fisherman, who had a lot to say about the “water horses.” Continued surveys will tell us more.
I will be here in Kombo until the 16th, at which time I will head back to Basse. From Basse I will travel up into Mali for two weeks with two other Peace Corps friends. We plan to visit Bamako to hear some excellent West African music and then go for a short hike in Dogon country. It should be fun! After the trip I will head back to site and teach until the all volunteer meeting in November. Time is flying by.
No comments:
Post a Comment