Reflections after three months at site (written April 5)

On Wednesday we leave for Kombo, where we will spend 2 1/2 weeks attending most of our group's Environment/Natural Resource Management in-service training, an all-volunteer conference, and then finally our group's Health/Community Development in-service training. We decided to attend the ENRM training in addition to the HCD one because they will be having sessions on gardening, food preservation, waste disposal, etc, that are very relevant to health and commmunity development, so we wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to learn about those topics. It will be an intense couple weeks, particularly during the two-day all-volunteer conference, when all 100+ volunteers in the country will be in attendance, but we are really looking forward to it. In addition to the actual training, we are really looking forward to catching up with friends and sharing stories and experiences from the past three months. From an mental health perspective, it will also give us a much-needed opportunity to escape the fishbowl element of our villages, where we feel like we always have to be "on."

From the beginning, everyone always told us that our Peace Corps service would change us. They couldn't tell us how, since it affects everyone differently, but they all agreed that there would be signficant changes. Since the three months at site mark is a pretty significant milestone (in the eyes of Peace Corps/The Gambia at least), I wanted to write a post about the changes we have seen in ourselves thus far. I think intend to do this periodically throughout our service, so (inshallah), you all will get to see how things progress. So here is a sampling of some changes we have noted, in no particular order:

-Our views on development have changed. The Gambia is a prime example of aid gone wrong. Colonialism, combined with decades of aid in the form of hand-outs, has created a culture of a complete dependence. Everyone from children to professionals are looking for handouts and it would never occur to many of them to try to take a problem into their own hands. Based on this experience, we are much more skeptical about the effectiveness of foreign aid (and in fact, it has us thinking about the potential of aid to do harm). Jacob is now leaning towards the opinion that the role of aid should be primarily to fill in the gaps in basic infrastructure and services such as roads, hospitals, and education (everything from basic k-12 to trade schools) when the government is not providing completely for its people in those areas. He feels everything else should be left to private enterprise. I still want to believe that there is a place in development for training, capacity building, and other sustainable approaches, but only time will tell how my views may change on that.

-We have a much better understanding of and appreciation for the deep challenges women face in many developing countries, particularly in a muslim context.

-We have seen and now understand first-hand how a good education truly is a child's ticket to a successful future, particularly in a developing country. This is not only because education is crucial for getting a good job, but also because a good edcuation teaches a child how to problem-solve effectively in daily life and also gives the child the confidence to actually pursue a career. On a related note, we also have had quite a reality check about how bad an educational system can be and how hard it is to actually get a good education here.

-We are much less cautious about eating "questionable" food than we were at first. This includes sharing a food bowl with people eating with unwashed hands, chocking down mystery meat, drinking bags of juice and water by biting off the corner of a plastic bag that is probably not clean, eating street food that has been sitting out for an unknown amount of time in the heat, etc etc.

-We have drastically cut down our water use. We can share a bucket of bath water and have a quarter of the bucket left when we're finished (when my hair is braided, which it generally is now). We can wash a large load of laundry in 1 1/2 buckets of water and we use the grey water on our garden. We can wash a meal's worth of dishes with 1-2 teakettles of water.

-We have become much more creative in our cooking. Recipes, an essential in our previous life, are a thing of the past. Everything is cooked a gas burner and based on the limited available ingredients, sometimes with an entire meal revolving around an "exotic" ingredient received in a package from home or found in a corner of a toubab store in Kombo and seasoned to taste with available spices.

-We have become used to not being able to understand most of what people are saying around us. Initially that was frustrating and stressful for us, since we were constantly worrying that people were talking about us and straining to pick out familiar words. While our language skills have improved, which has helped, we also have become more at ease with being surrounded by foreign language(s). We also have developed coping mechanisms for not being able to understand half the words in rapid-fire questions, such as anticipating the questions and spitting out pre-prepared answers once we recognize a few key words. This works surprisingly well.

-We need more sleep here. We generally go to bed between 10 and 11 (generally closer to 10 than 11) and wake up around 7. While this is less than we were sleeping in our training village, it still is quite a bit more than we regularly slept at home. If we don't get a solid 8-9 hours of sleep we are tired. Life is intense and tiring here!

As they say here, "I think we have a good list," so I'm going to stop for now, but stay posted for an updated version of this list in a few months...