Religious Life

One aspect of life here that is very different from home is religious. Ninety percent of the population in the Gambia is Muslim, so Islam inculcates the culture and daily life here. For example, sometimes I will wake up around 5:30 in the morning and hear the Muslim call to prayer. The call to prayer can be heard basically no matter where you are, and comes from loudspeakers attached to the mosques scattered across the countryside. Muslims must pray five times a day facing Mecca. People carry around prayer mats so that they can do this no matter where they are. Out at the university, I sometimes see students praying on their mats, and the aerobics instructor at the National Stadium takes a break to pray between classes. Coming from the United States, where prayer and religion are viewed as largely private experiences, this took some time for me to get used to.

In addition, Friday, not Sunday, is the holy day in Islam. On Friday afternoons around 2 PM, everyone is supposed to meet and pray together. The men pray inside the mosques and the women pray separately, outside or in the back. At the university, 2 PM classes on Fridays are pushed forward by half an hour to allow for prayers.

Here, as in many Muslim societies, women keep their heads covered. Many Muslims believe that the Qur'an, the holy text of Islam, teaches that women must keep themselves covered. This means that they need to cover their heads and wear modest clothing. In class one day, Dr. Nagengast asked one of the Muslim women if the American women were dressed inappropriately, and she said yes, we needed to be "covered." (Keep in mind that we are still dressed much more modestly here than we would be in the states. We don't wear clothes above the knee or low cut shirts.) Even though most of the women here wear head coverings, I am not sure that it is really a sign of oppression. Very few of the women wear Burkahs (which cover everything except for their eyes), and most of the head scarves are colorful and match the women's outfits. There are still women at the university, women who own businesses, and they can leave their homes and walk in the streets unaccompanied.

Islam is also part of the education system here. Some of the male students in my Drama and Society course attended Islamic school as children, where they learned to speak Arabic and were schooled in the Qur'an. Some children only go to Arabic school, and never learn how to read and write in English.

Although the Gambia is mainly Islam, there is still a very visible Christian community here, and Christians and Muslims live peaceably side by side. (In general, the Gambia is a very peaceful country in that people of different religions and tribes live together peacefully and have for many years, which is rather uncommon in Africa.) Many of the Christians who do live here are Roman Catholic, and I see a Catholic church in nearly every town we pass through. I attended mass a couple of weeks ago for Ash Wednesday. The service itself was the same as home, but only the readings and a couple of the songs were in English. The sermon, prayers, and the rest of the singing was in Wolof, so I didn't really understand what was going on. Still, everyone was very friendly and I will probably go back for Easter.

Getting Lost in the African Bush, aka Tendaba

I am finally somewhat recovered from our 3-day long upriver adventure. We had a long weekend as Thursday was Gambian Independence Day, so we took off for a nature camp at Tendaba, about 3 hours upriver. The drive was pretty intense, 1 hour on normal roads followed by 2 hours on incredibly bumpy unpaved roads. I spent half the trip sitting cocked up on my hipbone because I got the bush taxi seat over an exposed metal bar. After arriving at Tendaba we went on a 2 hour boat cruise (on basically a giant canoe with a sketchy motor on the back) on the Gambia River. It was beautiful and felt a bit like the Florida Everglades. We saw a variety of birds and much more vegetation than there is here, closer to the city and the coast. Then we had a very late, 3-course buffet style dinner. We all realized how much our stomachs had shrunk here when we attempted to eat this seemingly enormous (though, in American terms, perfectly acceptable), amount of food. Following dinner there was a music and dance performance. The Gambians from the Tendaba village came up to sing and play drums for us, and to teach us white people to dance like a Gambian. It was really fun once you stopped thinking about how ridiculous and out of place you probably looked. I made friends with one of the little girls, who was really adorable. I also met some teenage girls and a young woman who was my age. At the end we tipped them and they went back to the village.

Then we all went to sleep in our little huts. Belle and I realized that our ceiling light and fan weren't working in our hut, and were very impressed that the staff at the camp got them fixed before we went to bed. There was electricity at the camp for half of the day since it runs off of a generator. Our hut had a queen-size bed with a malaria net and a bathroom without a door on it. The bathroom had a really nice shower...the shower head came out of the ceiling, and if you showered in the afternoon the water was even lukewarm! There was also a slightly chlorinated pool at the camp, and I practiced my swimming skills a bit.

Friday morning we woke up very early to go on a nature hike with Nags. We ate a very British-style breakfast, bread with butter, jam, cheese, and hard-boiled eggs. As usual there was also tea and instant coffee available. Personally, I thought Nags was exaggerating about the nature of our little hike. I was expecting a long walk, maybe through the village or on some sort of flat trail (there aren't many hills in the Gambia). Therefore, I was not smart enough to wear any sneakers. It turned out that what was actually planned was a 10-mile hike, albeit on a trail, and what actually ensued was a 15-mile hike in which we got lost in the African bush.

The first part of the hike was really nice. There were some slight hills on the trail, and we saw a big monkey in the forest. Also we tried a baobab right off the tree. Baobab is a kind of dry fruit with a hard outer shell. It has a chalk consistency and if you suck on it, it is sour. People here often make juice out of it. After the first two thirds of the hike, we stopped for a little rest next to the river. Nags asked a nearby Gambian where the trail along the river, back to Tendaba was at. The man said that we could go that way but that there wasn't really a trail and he didn't recommend it. He thought maybe we should turn around and follow the trail back the way we had come. Evidently the Gambian kids who had followed us from the last village agreed, as they thought this would be a good time to leave us and go back home. Being the stupid Americans we are, we didn't listen to the natives. We pushed stubbornly forward with our logic that the shortest route home would be along the river, as this would form a triangle with the trails we had taken thus far. We figured that if we kept the radio tower near the Tendaba camp in sight and the Gambia River close enough to hear, we would be all right. For a while there was some semblance of a trail, but soon this ended and we were literally wading through the bush. I stayed near the back of the group, reasoning that this would decrease my chances of stepping on a huge poisonous snake. Every so often we would send someone up a hill to see how close we were to the river, then press forward. Fortunately we had some seasoned navigators with us, but Nags, who kept insisting that he knew where we were, was not one of them. Instead, he angered some baboons that we ran across, and found the skull of a bush pig, which he paraded around on a stick, Lord of the Flies style.

Still, this was all rather entertaining until we emerged on the other side of the bush to find a giant swamp-like area. To get back to Tendaba, we soon found that we had to cross the swamp. A brave few crossed the swamp immediately. The mud was more like quicksand, and these individuals were covered in it from head to toe. They kept losing their shoes in the mud and would sink in up to their waists! As more cautious-natured individuals, I and the rest of the group resolved to find a way around the swamp. This was unsuccessful, although we were able to find a route in which we only had to wade through knee-deep quicksand. I abandoned the idea of wearing shoes and waded through. Due to my inability to swim, I found the whole experience terrifying, but still made out better than the more adventurous members of the group, who had cut-up feet from stepping on a big bed of shells and were walking around in their underwear due to the massive amounts of mud stuck to their pants. Personally, I felt a bit like Pocahantas walking around Africa barefoot, with giant clumps of mud stuck to my feet (Note: I understand that Pocahantas actually lived in America, but this is still how I felt). The sun was beating down overhead, we were dehydrated, and we had managed to wade through standing freshwater, which my travel doctor had definitely advised me against.

When we returned to Tendaba (alive!) we did some first aid on the unfortunate members of the group who had encountered the shells. Nags bought us some cold sodas, presumably to make up for the disastrous nature of the outing (even though we all secretly loved it), and we were very grateful for the lunch buffet. We spent the rest of the afternoon lounging around on the dock, reading, talking, and drinking wine. (We deserved it after the debacle that morning). We stayed one more night at Tendaba and repeated the bumpy journey home, except it was more miserable as we were all dehydrated from our little adventure, and/or had not gotten along so well with the food at the camp. Nevertheless, it was a fun weekend and we are all excited to go upriver again. Next time we will be taking the ferry across and traveling up the southern bank, so expect more stories!

Volunteer Time!

One of the main things I am doing here, besides venturing out to class and laying out on the beach, is volunteering. I mentioned this last time but I thought I should go into more detail. I found my volunteer job through one of my professors at the university. She is an acrobat, and teaches gymnastics classes at the SBEC International School. She took myself and one of the other students there with her, and we met with the administrators and discussed our majors and interests. Then the school tried to match these up with an unmet need they had.

SBEC is a private bilingual school, and 30 percent of the students are international. The students call the women who work there "Auntie," which is a pretty typical term for young people here to call pretty much any woman in a mentoring role, and which always gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.

I spend my time there designing workshops to teach the faculty and administration how to handle conflicts in the classroom and among themselves more effectively. The first workshop I am planning is all about communication and conflict. I am going to talk about body language and using I-statements, among other things. I am also going to be teaching some classes. On Thursday i taught third graders about national parks and about what conflict is, and then we did an example about conflicts in national parks. It was very rewarding and I actually enjoyed teaching more than I expected!

At school the other day, I was offered a snack. It came in a little baggy and looked like croutons, but tasted like shortbread cookies. It is called chin-chin. A man goes around selling these treats at the school, and the kids get very excited, like they would about an ice cream truck in America.

So far I am finding my experience out at the school to be very interesting and rewarding. Since it is French/English bilingual, all the French I am exposed to will hopefully help me to improve my own French skills. I also have a lot of independence and my ideas and thoughts are taken very seriously by the teachers and administrators. They often ask my opinion about problems with students or even ask me to assist in situations, which is really helping me to feel more comfortable with thinking on my feet. On the downside, it can be stressful because I feel like they ascribe me more expertise than I actually have. Also, sometimes I have to force myself to sit around and just visit with the teachers, because I realize that I am working harder than the people who are actually getting paid to be there!

Getting Into a Routine

Last week I started my volunteer work and classes officially got up and going. I am taking four classes at the university and a cultural class through the program. I have International Human Rights Systems, Drama and Society, French Translation, and Sustainable Development. For our cultural class we go on field trips, have guest speakers, and learn Wolof. So far my most difficult class is Drama and Society, because I have to do a lot of public speaking (eek), and my most interesting class is Human Rights, because the Gambians tend to have very different conceptions of many aspects of human rights than Westerners do. I only go to class on Tuesdays and Fridays, since it is an hour trip out to the university and an hour back.

On Mondays and Thursdays, I do volunteer work. I am working at the SBEC International School. Because I do a lot with peace and conflict studies back at Juniata, the school asked me if I would help develop a conflict resolution program for the high school. Based on my startling amount of independence, I am thinking my title should be "Founder and Director of Conflict Resolution Program." Everyone trusts me and thinks I am some sort of expert, although I have tried to explain that I am just a student and have no certifications. So far I am getting great experience with thinking on my feet and "faking it until I make it." The administrators want me to help mediate conflicts between students and develop workshops for the teachers to better handle conflict in their classrooms. We'll see how it goes! Then on Thursday evenings, I am also helping with an English conversational class. It is pretty difficult teaching English to people when you don't speak their language well enough to explain what it is you are teaching them. This also should be an interesting challenge. I think it will be very rewarding to help someone learn English. For example, my student last Thursday knows two or three tribal languages, but learning English can help him to get a better job. Hopefully I will be a good teacher!

My New American Cultural Awareness

So everyone says that the more you learn about other cultures, the more insight you have into your own. Today, I was sitting in class and started considering all of the things I am coming to see about American culture since being here. As I followed a group of Gambian students today, and had to force myself to slow down, it occurred to me how much of a hurry Americans are always in, how fast we walk everywhere we go. As the students moved to one side to let me pass, one smiled and asked me "Are you okay?" Everyone here asks you if you are okay, people on the street, people you don't even know. Americans don't usually worry about the well-being of strangers they pass in their day-to-day life, and they certainly don't smile as much. Here, I feel rude if I keep to myself on the bush taxi instead of having a conversation with whoever I am sitting next to. That's the other thing I noticed on the bush taxis, how much personal space Americans prefer to have. Once, I was on vacation at Niagara Falls and found myself sitting next to an Indian woman on the bus. I was very uncomfortable with how close she sat to me, and how little personal space I had. But here everyone is like that, and you just have to accept it. As I get used to it, I find it almost comforting that there are places in the world where strangers are not held at a distance.

Some of my other observations on Americans (or at least on myself as an American):

1- We like schedules, planning ahead, and having things laid out in black and white. One of my professors today negotiated with the class as to the best way to set up the project that we will be doing. To me, the lack of clarity was overwhelming, and I wished that she would just hand us a syllabus with everything laid out neatly.

2- Americans aren't all that helpful. Now, I know there are plenty of helpful Americans, but I have truly been shocked by how helpful strangers have been to me as a foreigner here. I honestly don't think this would be so true were the roles reversed.

3- Americans eat a lot. All the time. Especially dairy and chocolate. I observe this because I am always hungry here and am seriously craving a Hershey bar and a big hunk of cheese.

I'm not saying that American culture is "good" and Gambian culture is "bad," or vice versa. Obviously, they are just different, and people will have varying perspectives on how positive or negative the differing aspects of any two given cultures are. However, I do think its beneficial to think about the norms in American culture and see how they affect my own behavior and what I am comfortable with.