The Rain King

Wrapping up is hard to do here. There are a million things to do, we can't take most of our things with us so we have to gift them to our host family,ex-pat neighbors, or fellow volunteers. We have to say goodbye, eat at our friends houses one more time, give hugs, hand shakes. Sometimes the handshake is done with the left hand, it is meant as an insult so that the people separating have to be reunited to rectify the insult, it's not goodbye but see you a lot later. We also have to settle bills, if we have them.

It's a lot harder when you aren't even at site. Our latrine filled with water after a kinda short rain. It honestly was pretty gross, and I will refrain from describing the mess here. Needless to say our small home been rendered somewhat inhabitable. We have been in town for 5-6 day now and our return to site just for an assessment has not been scheduled, yet. PCTG is really busy right now, there are new trainees in country, on top of day to day activities. If our latrine is repairable/replaceable they will do it and almost immediately replace us with, Dado, a volunteer that has her own troubles at site and does a bunch of work in our village. Kristy's projects might have a person to keep a watchful eye on them for another year, that would be really cool.

I mentioned new trainees are here. I get to do a training session with them! I am really happy about it. I volunteered to teach them how to cook American-style comfort foods with Gambian ingredients using the facilities we have here. This will hopefully supplement their dietary needs and give some much needed piece of mind that eating foods your recognize gives us. I will be participating in that at the end of this month.

post script Tomorrow is my 32nd birthday make sure you save all my presents for when I get home. Kristy will have just celebrated her birthday when we arrive, and we like presents.

Tire Swing

Last week after a long series of promises and some convincing that it would be safe Kristy and I installed a tire swing into one of the mango trees in our compound. It very well may be one of the only such swings in The Gambia. The kids love it, they are on it every morning and they laugh and laugh the whole time.

Because such things are so foreign I was not sure how they would react. We had to show the first kid how to use it and the whole time of his own maiden voyage he was silent and he was wide eyed. I thought it was sheer terror. He got off, didn't say a word and he left to join the rest of the family at a naming ceremony down the street. Moussa returned with the other kids from the compound and they spent hours on it afterwards.

Kristy and I are glad that we were able to give a sustainable toy to the family. We have spied some of the neighborhood adults on it, but not really neighborhood kids, yet. Thankfully, the tree the swing is attached to is far from our room and it keeps the kids at a distance where the cries of joy are not overwhelming.

Wish You Were Here

Recently there was a 3 day training event that was dubbed "The Man's Retreat". It was a chance for guys to talk about guys issues in PCTG and for us to teach each other about our manly interests. The whole thing was rather positive. I noticed that now my style of participation is focused on sharing my experiences and point of view rather than taking notes because this close to the end, I am not really starting anything new.

I have started gardening with my host family. It gets me some needed exercise and I really feel the bond growing. It will help supplement their diet and their income. It's the first time in my life I have ever really grown anything. It is something that I want to do when we get home, the experience is gratifying.

I'm in town right now doing some preparation for one of the things I hope to leave PCTG a cook book. I offered to help train the new PCT's on a topic that is near and dear to my heart, cooking in the Peace Corps. I'm going to go to the training villages shop for food make something that will supplement their diets. I'm stoked.

Kristy is on all these committees and has meetings all weekend. She always does important stuff like that.

I'm presently uploading a crap ton of pictures, I have 2 more albums up now and will be working on more if I find time while the interweb is moving along at decent speeds. Here is a link to my Picasa Album in case you forgot it.

I edited the care package page on the Google group. It's sad for me to say this but if you have stuff to send us do it soon soon soon. If you put it off past the middle of June there are chances that we won't get the package. So, don't send us care packages past mid June, this even includes stuff for my birthday. What you can do instead is, take care of us when we get back. We will need a lot of help.

Strange Days

This last few weeks have been a whirl wind of busy. The COS conference was intimidating but informative, there are some pictures that I fully plan on hijacking from another pcv blog
There are more that Ousman posted but, interweb being what it is, I'm gonna leave out the people you don't know.

We successfully held our Study At Home Quiz Bowl. It was a great time, some people won and some people lost. I think the message was heard by the participants and I tried to send it home to the spectators too, but I can't really measure that.

My library project is at a new challenge. We have too many books, and most of them aren't good. One of the problems with charity donations is: when your average Joe doesn't want that dieting book, illiterate and semi-literate kids don't want them either. So if your going to send books, send stuff you would want if you only had 5 books. Back to my story, (sorry for the side rant) We have too many books, I contacted / had others contact about a dozen schools and libraries and hundreds of books will reach thousands of kids through redistribution. I am gonna have find alternative uses for some outdated and unwanted books though. It will be a sad day for books.

I was finally used to do my job as a Teacher Trainer for my high school!!!!!!! This was one of my high points here. I actually was invited to hold a workshop after months of being ignored. I got to about 50% of the staff and hopefully they took away some good info.

That's all for now, see you sooner and sooner every day.

Thousand Mile Wish

We will be staying in a hotel this weekend! I hope it's super nice and they take good care of us. This weekend has a huge focus, going home. It's not as if this isn't often on my mind but this is the time where we officially begin to prepare for our fated departure to the land of the free. We shall be discussing all those scary professional things that exist in the world out there like resumes, job experience, continuing education, and how we can apply the last two years of our lives to all that oh-so-real and serious stuff. PC has some systems in place to quell our fears, most notably the network of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCV's). I hope we have some good things planned and we will prolly be busy 90% of the time.

We just requested to be able to participate in the mail run for August, we will be making a 5(ish) day journey through the whole country visiting all the PCV's dropping off the things their friends and family's send them.

Every quarter the North Bank Region, the one we live in, tries to do a large group project. This quarter we are focusing on trying to encourage kids to study at home. We are accomplishing this by having a quiz bowl at our individual schools and giving the kids homework. Inshalla, they will want to perform well that day and will study to not look foolish in front of the whole school, and win prizes. Our day is the 17th wish the kids luck.

It's coming down to the end of our window for being able to receive mail, too much past early June and we may not get what is sent.

Bent

I'm sick, it's a recent development and shall fade soon enough.

Two weeks ago there was a camp for young girls 7th and 8th and their teacher. I was able to help train the teachers in lesson plans that use alternative techniques to pull out creative thinking and use multiple intelligences. The camp was great fun, it was covered by GRTS the Gambian television station and it was obvious that each of us were part of something much larger. Some of those girls left their village for the first time. They learned about AIDS, life choices, leadership, teamwork, drugs, alcohol, and pregnancy. I am proud that I was a part of it.

We just attended a conference that included little to nothing that will effect Kristy or I. It was still exciting to see the beginnings of now policies to make PCTG a well oiled machine.

We covered a recent happening dubbed "The Philip Incident" that is making some of our new policies necessary. There are some unspoken pieces here and if I told you, I'd have to kill you, or you'd be bored outta your skulls and wish I would have omitted it. Regardless, I'm not saying anything about it until I firmly home and jobless.

Now that it's over we will be returning to site until the Close of Service (COS) Conference that will take place early next month. This is going to be just like our conference last year but without all that lovely evacuation confusion. We are going to get to learn how not to be the people we are now and how to be close to the people we were when we got here. We are broken Americans, and there is gonna be some things that we will do to embarrass those around us, more then we would normally have in America. You'll see and I will bring this up again, inshalla.

What it does mean though is that our trip home is planned and we are filling in the fine details. I can for sure say that we will be boarding a cruise that will take at least 2 weeks where will celebrate our anniversary and Kristy's birthday. I'll talk about that more at a later time.

The Fixer

Bloggitty, blog, blog, blog. Things to write about: vacation with the fam, good days, and I am sure I will think of something else, I talk a lot.

Vacation with the fam

It was AWESOME. Shannon, Jeremiah, and Kelly (or Kumba, Yahya, and Maimouna as we dubbed them) showed up early to Dakar by an hour so we were a bit late finding them. I know that I miss home (where ever that may be) and that is a reoccurring theme in my adventure, but seeing them brought it to a sense of reality that was stark and in my face.

We walked and walked and walked through Dakar, the Ile de Goree, the Kombos, and lastly Essau. They were able to show us the beauty and wonder of Senegal and The Gambia that had faded a bit for us. You always get used to your home and it somehow become less astoundingly beautiful. We translated, haggled, laughed, ate, and drank.

There is a lot of wildlife here in Gambia that we had not become familiar with. We seen a billion monkeys, a bush buck antelope, a bunch of crocodiles, amazing birds that I could never remember the names of, hyenas, and even a random snake on the side of the road.

We happened upon a Jewelbrew promotion and entered a competition where we made a great effort, but took a loss to guys who have been practicing for longer than we have been alive.

Before they left they showered us with gifts and we put them on a taxi going to a country where they didn't speak any of the languages :)

Good Days

It's not easy, as they say and I couldn't agree more. I have to force myself to step back and grab hold of the good days. The moments where in my daily life I stand there staring at the horizon filled with mango trees being cooled by a ocean breeze and realise that I am knee deep in a wonderful adventure that has changed me.

I woke up recently to hooting and peeked outside to see owls just outside of our home, this is the second time I have gotten to see wild owls ever (both times here). Owls are becoming more and more rare here, they are believed to be a sign of witchcraft being practiced and are hunted because of the bad omen they bring.

One of the kids in our compound has recently stopped being afraid of me and now lights up when she sees me with a heartfelt "g" which is the name the family calls me. Ironically the letter g does not exist in the Mandinka alphabet.