Tales From Training

So I left work today, and wandered around Brikama in the rain trying to find the internet cafe in which I am sitting now. The internet is annoyingly slow and I have nothing to do but try not to make eye contact with all of the teenage boys sitting in here singing along to whatever reggae song is blaring on the radio and grinning creepily at me. Yes! I finally made it to Brikama and it's been ok so far. I guess I knew that I would be confused, lost, and overwhelmed again, like I was when I first arrived in The Gambia, but I didn't think about how having so much more free time would make those feelings that much more intense. I have more time right now than I know what to do with. SO here I am. In an internet cafe with all the time in the world to tell you a few of the hilarious stories from training. Here goes...

When I first arrived at Dibba Kunda, my new home in Madiana, I spoke enough Mandinka to greet the family...and that is it. They, on the other hand, spoke absolutely NO English. I walked into the compound and the first thing that happened was Caddy, my youngest sister, took one look at me, eyes widened, and she started screaming. Yes, she was scared of me. Maybe terrified is the right word. Next my host father pulled a plastic chair out of the house and sat me down in it. The family, along with about 30 children sat across from me and stared....and stared, and stared, and stared. This went on for about 2 hours, no exaggeration. No speaking, just wide-eyes staring. So what would anyone do when they have so much attention on them, but entertain. So entertain I did. I started to cry. Yes, cry. It was my first of many "what the hell am I doing here" moments I would have...but this time I just happened to be making a first impression on about 40 people who would come to know me as the strangest person they had ever known.

The night of the world cup, Julie, Trish, Abby, Dylan, and I decided to try and get into the video club to watch the game. We pay 5D to get into this "video club" which was no more than a small tv set with a poorly working satellite, in a dark sauna-like cave packed with about 35 sweaty Gambians lined up on benches. Although we only saw about 10 minutes total of the game due to a torrential rain storm...and even though I had to run to Abby's hut to use her pit latrine every ten minutes due to a recent fight between my GI system and the local food, it was totally worth it. Gambians LOVE football and they LOVE taunting each other. So as I said before, there was a huge storm outside (just a sprinkle by Gambian standards), it was getting dark and I was starting to worry. I had waited too long for the rain to stop to walk home, and by then it had gotten dark. Walking home in the dark is never an option here. So I'm sitting there flipping out, wondering how I will get home, and some random man comes into the video club yelling my name and telling me to go outside. I walk outside and my host mother is standing there barefooted, with her skirt tied up around her knees, with the biggest umbrella I have ever seen, tisking and shaking her head at me. She had come into the village looking for me, found me at the video club, and gave me one of those looks that made me feel like I was in high school again, and had just been caught sneaking out. The entire way back, we are walking in mud up to our calves, water rushing down the flooded streets, and she has one of my hands because its so dark that the only time anything is visible is during the giant flashes of lightning. Why one of those lightning bolts didn't hit the car sized umbrella my host mother had over our heads? who knows. After this my host family decided I wasn't allowed to stay out past 7pm...and I was perfectly fine with it.

We had language class everyday on Babboucar's front porch, but for lunch everyday we met up with the other Mandinka language group in Madiana under a gigantic mango tree behind Bakarey's compound. Even at the slightest breeze, 10 or so mangoes would fall out of the tree and slam onto the ground. We decided after the first day that lunch would have to be eaten with our bike helmets on.

Part of training was in an EcoLodge in a neighboring village called Yuna. The ecolodge was great. It had running water, electricity at night, food that didn't make us sick, fans over our beds, and the best of all...a pool. I would fantasize about swimming in that pool whenever we were in Madiana sweating our asses off allllll day long. There was one catch though. The pool had GIANT swimming cockroaches the size of your thumb. And not only were they speedy swimmers, they would swim right to you and bite a chunk out of your arm/leg/ass. Eventually we would have one person sitting on the edge of the pool keeping a lookout for the roaches to warn when one was coming near...not that I was ever fast enough to get away. I guess there's always a price to pay.

I was sitting in the front yard of my compound with my sisters one day when I met Madiana's number 1 rapper!! (according to him). He was wearing a cutoff bumster tank (mesh colors of the Gambian flag) which ended right below his chest. I had no idea what he was saying, but it seemed to rhyme so I told him it was good and I really liked his style. Then he asked me for a record deal.

One morning I woke up and walked to class and noticed a different air around the village. The children were all subdued and I wasn't toubabed even once! As the day went on I started noticing swollen, pink, bleary eyes. And this was the beginning of the Madiana Pink Eye Endimic of '10. I would venture to say that every child in my village had pink eye and had no problems grabbing at me with their little disgusting infected hands. A few weeks later, when the sticky eye lids went away and I still hadn't gotten the pink eye, I KNEW, for once in my life, I could say that I really, truly lucked out.

Every morning my host father would bring me an entire loaf of bread with either butter or mayo for breakfast. One guess as to which one I always hoped for in the morning. If I was lucky I would also get a cold boiled potato..yum. So along with that he would also bring me a thermos of tea with about a pound of sugar. I swear a Gambian would trade their baby for a bag of sugar of equal weight...they LOVE sugar. So, I would always give back half of the bread and most of the sugar because the last thing I want to leave here with is diabetes. After about 2 weeks of this my host father called my language teacher over one day and told him that he thought something was wrong with me because I wasn't eating all of the bread and using all of the sugar. This was just the beginning of our relationship. Almost everything I did made him think I was sick. By the time I left I think he was finally starting to realize that I was not sick...just weird.

One day Julie, another trainee in Madiana, said she saw a bus full of white tourists driving through village in bucket seats, taking pictures of the children and throwing out candy at them. Julie said that she froze up in confusion as they drove by but then started running after the bus yelling "I FELL OUT, COME BACK!! I FELL OUT!!"

The medical training we had was pretty impressive. They showed us pictures of scary worm parasites, ridiculous skin infections, swollen limbs, rashes, that other volunteers had contracted. They taught us about malaria and schiztomiosis for hours on end. We learned more than we could ever want to know about our poop. But one day topped it all. First, we all had to stand around a table and practice making a malaria blood smear slide (for the future when we are in village and think we have malaria but cannot get to the medical office). All 16 of us stood around the table eying the gleaming razors, cotton balls, and each other. I'm not scared of blood or razors or needles or what have you, but that was not a fun experience by any means. Right after that we had the peace corps "sex-talk" which again, included more statistics and pictures that I never would have ever wanted to see. Then, as if we hadn't been humiliated enough since we arrived, they made us get up one at a time and practice putting a condom on a gigantic black prosthetic penis. Awesome.

One of the days I was sick of falling off my bike, I decided to walk to class. On the way back home a nice young man named decided to keep me company the entire way back. He told me that his name was Sinney but everyone around this neighborhood knew him as "Diamond"....really Diamond.

So the weekly malaria prophylaxis has given me the scariest, most vivid dreams of my life. I would have them the three nights after I take the medicine. They are always dreams that take place where I am in real life, usually in my bed, in my hut, under my mosquito net. So how scary is this: I would dream that I would wake up and see a little African girl standing in my doorway just staring at me and then I would ask her who she was. The other dream is me seeing a little black baby crawling into my bed. I would finally "wake up" standing outside of my bed flipping out, and the only way I would be able to tell that it wasn't a dream was that it was too dark to be able to see anything in the room. Buuuuut I guess having mentally scarring dreams is better than contracting malaria right??

From the first day on I noticed two things here that you see everywhere in America, but NEVER together. Children + knives. Everywhere. Everywhere I would look I would see some toddler, who can barely walk, wielding a gigantic machete. I would cringe, look the other way and see a 5 year old running around with a knife in her mouth. I would go home and see my youngest sister sucking on a razor or Bodo peeling a mango with a dull rusty knife. I have yet to see one of the children impaled by one of their many knives so I still think it's pretty funny. I was thinking of making a picture book while I'm here entitled "Children With Knives". Thoughts??

For the rest of my life, I will never take for granted waking up or falling asleep to silence. Every night here I fall asleep to the sounds of rats crawling around in my ceiling, crying babies, frogs, crickets, and the neighbors staticky radio that is turned up way too loud. Every morning I wake up to roosters, the 5:30am prayer calls, donkeys, and the ever soothing sound of the women pounding rice right outside of my window.

If you have been reading my blog I'm sure you have figured out that I have a natural, healthy fear of spiders in the US, which is amplified here by the size of Gambian spiders...and the fact that they are EVERYWHERE. So I have many Caroline vs. Gambian Spider stories, but I will limit myself to boring you with only two:
The second night in training village I had eaten dinner around 9pm with my family and decided to go back into my hut. I open the door with my flashlight and begin to enter. I see something the size of a shoe go scurrying across the floor. I didn't see where it went so I took a deep breath and considered sleeping outside in a tree far far from whatever it was I saw crawling across my floor, but decided that I should just forget what I saw and run to my bed and tuck myself into my mosquito net as tight as I could get it. As I walk back in...I see it...creeping out of the shadows. I shine my light on it and it starts running RIGHT. AT. ME. I had heard about these demon spiders before. Some of you may know them as camel spiders. Apparently, in Iraq they chew on American soldiers toes while they are sleeping at night. Whether or not this is true, I didn't care at the moment. I had a kitten sized spider chasing me in circles around my hut!!! I finally let the fear of it crawling up my leg go and I stop, let it catch up, and stomp the shit out of it. I couldn't even clean it up that night, I was still so scared of it. I later learned that it wasn't actually chasing me, but it was chasing my shadow to get out of the light. At the time, knowing the word for spider (talingo) would have made all the difference in my new families opinion of my sanity, or lack there of. But still to this day, I'm sure they are talking about that crazy toubab who lived with them, who they once saw running in circles around her hut for no reason.

The other time didn't actually involve a spider. Again it was pitch black outside. I was walking into my hut with my host aunt, Ami. This time training was coming to a close and Ami knew well enough the way I react when I see a spider. So we are walking up the stairs and at the same moment we both see it...something streak across my screen door. I literally jump into her arms. She is laughing and tells me she will take care of the talingo. I run away listening to her going to town on it with her sandal. I hear a long silence and Ami says " that was not a spider". I walk over and there laid a smashed salamander. Oh the guilt.

One of my favorite parts of every day was when I would come home in the afternoon and I would wait outside with my host sisters for their mother to come home from working in the bush all day. She would bring us THE most amazing fruit called folee. They are tiny ping pong sized fruit that you peel and eat. They taste like war-heads. Really sweet on the outside and super sour on the inside. We would sit outside and watch the sun set eating the folee...me spitting the pits at the children (which they loved btw).

I have found that relationships here in The Gambia between the genders, are something completely different. It's impossible to be only friendly with a man of the same age without giving him the wrong idea. I learned my lesson within the first month. Babboucarr, a 25ish year old, living in my language teacher's host compound (his name is also Baboucarr) would follow me around the village, so I would humor him and talk to him. No flirting, nothing, just talking. After about 2 weeks of this I get a knock at my door one night, open it, and find Baboucarr standing there. He professed his love for me, told me that he wanted to come with me whenever I left for Yuna, etc, etc, etc. He then asked me if he could come into my hut (gasp!). In Gambia, this is their form of asking to have sex. I just looked at him, slammed the door in his face, and went back to bed...but then I had to sit in language class for the rest of training with him staring at me the entire time...