The end of my 2nd Ramadan in The Gambia

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.

Searching for Hippos

Hippos on the river!


Sitting on the front of the boat.


The river.


Famara searching for Hippos.


A chimpanzee!


The survey team and the boat.


The river.


A very new truck parked next to a very old truck.

The WWF truck. 4 Wheel Drive is key in this country.








Hippo skulls.
















At the end of the summer I had the pleasure of helping with a Hippo population survey on The Gambia River; a project funded by WWF. We spent 3 days on the river searching for Hippos and talking to local fisherman. These are pictures from the trip. We managed to get a good look at two pods of hippos and a few loners, totalling about 35 Hippos. However, we're sure there are more of them out there and continued surveys will tell us more.

A village reunion, 13 new volunteers, and a van stuck in the mud

The education sector trainers, drivers, coordinators, and director.

The education sector!

Making a speech at the swear-in ceremony.

Taking the oath of service.

The Peace Corps/The Gambia director.

The new volunteers!

The new volunteers!

The new volunteers!

Some of the trainers.

The trainers ... looking very serious.

The new volunteers and the trainers.

Annie and Evelyn!

A compost pit I dug in my back yard.

I just got done with a week and a half of training with the new education group. There are 13 trainees (9 ICT computer people and 4 teacher trainers). They are an awesome group. They swore in as volunteers on September 4th. I went back to site for two weeks before returning to kombo for the ceremony. I had been away for almost a month and I really missed my host-family. During training I lead sessions on classroom management, professional conduct, making teaching aids, and running libraries and resource centers here in The Gambia. The trainees went through 5 days of model school, where they taught morning lessons in various topics to Gambian students. This program is used to introduce the trainees to what teaching is like in The Gambia and let them apply some of the technical skills they have been learning. They all did well, despite how nerve wracking of an experience it can be. This time I was observing and advising them. Only a year ago I was the one teaching at model school. In the evenings I went running into the mangrove forest that surrounds Tendaba Camp, where we were staying. I saw a big pack of Baboons in the distance once and found their tracks in a muddy part of the trail. Half way through model school we moved out to the training villages. Josh, a friend of mine, and I stayed for two nights at a Fula training village called Jiroff. This village is very close to our old training village, so Josh and I decided to walk over and pay a visit to Fula Kunda. After a 20 minute walk through beautifully green fields of coos and corn, we came to the village. Josh and I had not been there in a year, but the first group of children we ran into remembered us. We greeted our old families and brought them gifts (Attaya tea, sugar, and photos from training that we had printed). It was fun to see everyone again. Not much of the village had changed, though many of the younger children seemed a lot bigger. I spent two nights in Jiroff staying in a random family compound where I slept on a very smelly, but comfortable mattress. I returned to Kombo for two nights to do laundry and prepare for one last training session. I had no clean clothes, so I was glad to be able to do laundry (which meant I was able to fill two buckets and wash my clothes by hand, which is how you have to do it here, even in Kombo). I traveled back up to Tendaba camp for two final nights and helped with a few other training sessions. I went back to Kombo for a mid-term dental appointment (for two fillings). This appointment went surprisingly well and was basically painless. I want to Swedish dental clinic in Kombo that was quite nice. No more sugary Attaya for me! I traveled back to site right after that and got all the way from Kombo to my site in one day! Opening my hut after a month was an adventure. There were ant mounds and spider webs everywhere! It took a whole morning to clean out. I also came across a mouse, which I did not manage to catch but I think I scared him out of the hut. It was good to be at site with no school. I spent a lot of time with my family and did a lot of reading. I dug a compost pit in my back yard. I hope to use the compost in a few months when I start a garden. I climbed up the two trees in my back yard and used a machete to clear away branches that were taking over my yard. These were added to the compost heap. Josh Caswell came up to visit me from Basse and stayed for two nights. We did a lot of bird watching and cooking. This is the month of Ramadon, so everyone in my village is fasting. I tried fasting last year but decided not to do it this year. It’s hard! Josh and I cooked up lunch quietly in my hut, so that we wouldn’t drive my host-family nuts with the smell of cooking food. This last Wednesday I rode my bike back into Basse and stayed at the transit house. I met a few other volunteers there and we went out to eat at a chicken place in town that we often go to. A HUGE rain storm while we were eating and the owner of the “restaurant” was nice enough to offer us a ride back to the transit house in a his van. Unfortunately, after he dropped us off, his van promptly got stuck in the mud right in front of the house. The other volunteers and I set about helping him get out. I had gotten stuck in the snow plenty of times, so I figured it wouldn’t be that bad. After about 30 minutes I was starting to have doubts. I was exhausted from pushing and COVERED in mud from the spinning tire, which just seemed to be digging a deeper hole. We finally got a large piece of sheet metal under the tire and for the van free. I took a nice long shower after that. I traveled down to Kombo on Thursday. This time there were no hitches and no pick pockets. I left Basse at 6am and got into Kombo (after crossing on the ferry) at 3pm, which is pretty good. There I found all the trainees who were preparing to swear in. I went and played ultimate Frisbee at the MRC facility, which was a lot of fun. On Friday I attended the swear-in ceremony at the American Ambassadors house, which was very nice. The event went well and the new volunteers spent the rest of the sunny afternoon on the beach, which they deserved. We all cooked a big dinner for them last night here at the transit house and I had a wonderful time. Now it is back to work. The new volunteers are off to shop for supplies for their new sites. I will be spending the weekend here and they heading up to Central River Region on Monday, where I will be helping with a World Wildlife Fund project that is looking at a population of hippos along the river in that region. I’ll be heading back to site of Sept. 12th, at which point school will have started again.