From Dawn till Dusk

(Written on Thursday, September 13th)

Today marks the last night of freedom to eat and drink when they choose for many a Gambian or for that matter Muslims across the world. Based on the sighting of the moon tomorrow (Friday) marks the beginning of Ramadan. So for approximately the next month all the devout Muslims (most everyone) will fast from dawn till dusk. Fasting in this case means no food OR water for the entire day. Most will wake around 4 or 4:30 to Pray and have their morning meal and then go back to bed to catch a few more winks of sleep before the day begins. The next change to eating comes in the evening around 7 or so when you "break fast". This is done with sweet tea and bread which is followed about an hour later by dinner. That´s the strict mechanics of the day. I´m told I should be prepared for short tempers during this time due to all the hungry people. Wouldn't you get pissed easily if you couldn´t eat all day for a month?

Not being a student of religion in general and this being my first time living in an Islamic culture I can only tell you the little that I have learned so far about Ramadan. Fasting is one of the five pillars of Islam, the basic guiding principals for Muslims. While we're at it the others are: profession of faith, prayer (five times a day), charity (give to the poor and needy), and pilgrimage (if you have the means you should travel to Mecca at least once). Ramadan commemorates Mohammed's first revelation. Now, I don't know what Mohammed's first revelation was but that´s what it says here in this book. That´s about the extent of my knowledge on the subject.

All this begs the question how does this affect me or the other non-Muslims in the country. The answer to that can very quite a bit. For myself I think I will give fasting a shot. Now that may surprise some of you but give me a change to explain. No, I have not found religion in The Gambia. I´m still the guy you knew back home. I look at it as an interesting challenge and a good way to view the situation from the Gambian side of things. Also keep in mind that I´m the guy who often forgets to eat anyway when I'm working. Another reason to fast would be that it´s simply easier (yes, I am lazy when it comes to making food). I mean how much more unavailable can food get then when an entire 90% of the population stops eating. Even if you have food available it´s considered extremely rude to eat in front of fasting people so you would have to go off and hide somewhere to eat. So Ill give it a shot. The lack of food I don't think will be that bad but the lack of water may be a bit more challenging. I plan to chug about 2 liters during the morning meal to hold me over for the day. I may have to break down and drink water at some point but we shall see.



(Written on Saturday, September 15th)

Well, seeing as how I haven´t had a chance to make it to the internet in the last few days I though I might tack some more onto this post.



Update on the fasting thing:

Day one was not too bad but did yield some somewhat humorous culinary stories. So we get up at the designated time of 4:30 on Friday morning to have our breakfast. We proceed to stumble around in a daze and cook a couple eggs each and eat a small loaf of bread (kina like a baguette) half of it with the eggs and the other half with peanut butter. I also went ahead and chugged two full liters of water at the same time. Now under normal circumstances you would not go to bed immediately after eating a meal like that but that´s exactly what I did. Not a good idea. My stomach was pretty upset with me for over stuffing it and it took quite a while to get back to sleep. Turns out it didn´t really matter if I went back to sleep or not because I had to get up an use the toilet 2 or three more times between then and when I got up for good at 7:30. Surprise, surprise after drinking 2L of water. Anyway, I was a bit tired as would be expected when I got up to go to work but no worries a quick cold bucket bath pretty much fixed that. I stayed pretty busy all day with work at the Beekeepers and helping another PCV work on his computer lab so the hunger and thirst didn´t get to me too bad. So now comes dinner and the breaking of fast. I roll into my compound around 6:30 expecting to break fast at around 7. So I made up some Gatorade and wrapped the bottle in a wet cloth to cool it down for dinner. So 7 rolled around and no food, no worries I went the last 14.5 hours without food or water what´s a little longer. So I rinsed off real quick and by the time I was done they had brought what appeared to be dinner. Now we were kina wondering about that whole bread and tea thing I talked about earlier for breaking fast but we weren´t in any position to ask questions at that point we were hungry. Of course now Lydia decides she wants to rinse off too before dinner so why not wait a little longer. She gets done with that and we finally sit down to eat and this is a delicious meal. Some kind of birds nest type pasta with chicken and onion sauce (onion sauce is very common here and surprisingly tasty). So we chow down and eat the whole thing and I proceed to chug about three liters of water and Gatorade. We wash up the plate and give it back to our host family. Feeling overstuffed again I head for the hammock on the front porch to chill out in the night air and read a bit. Fast forward about an hour and a half. Still stuffed and still lying in the hammock my host sister walks up with a bowl in her hands. With what was probably a slightly disturbed look on my face I asked what it was. She said it was dinner. For about 3 seconds I was a bit confused but by the time I took the bowl said thanks and headed inside it suddenly became very clear. The ¨dinner¨ we had before was just a very special form of the tea and bread that most people have. Now we were supposed to eat our real dinner. Lydia and I looked at each other and wondered it if was possible to eat anymore food. But we managed to dig down real deep and hammer away some rice and fish. So now we will go into our second day with a little more caution around dinner time. Fast-forward again to this morning´s breakfast. Old routine by now wake up at 4:30 drink a bunch of water so on and so forth. Lydia really wanted to make omelets this morning since we could take a bit more time and cook and then just sleep in a little longer since it´s the weekend. So Lydia is planning this in her head all night apparently and having trouble sleeping because she has this grand scheme in her head. She starts to cut up the potatoes and other ingredients and go to crack open the eggs... Huston we have a problem. Eggs were hardboiled! (Background info: in the market you can buy cooked or uncooked eggs but if you forget to specify you seem to get hardboiled). Needless to say this put a damper on the omelet project. Lydia was heart broken and I was just like ¨Dude lets eat the damn eggs and go back to bed¨. So we ended up having a boiled egg, breakfast potato mash kina thing. Necessity is the mother of invention. Maybe we can add our recipe to the Gambian cookbook. Who knew the hardest part of fasting would be the eating.



A quick update on other things going on. The work at the college is going slowly slowly (common Gambian term, domanding, domanding in Mandinka) were waiting to get a internet connection and fix some other network related issues but it looks like it may be some time before that happens so we are just working on little issues here and there and getting to know people. Work at the Beekeepers is going well. I´m about finished setting up their computers for them and am working a simple IT policy and will start training them soon. Yesterday I spend the day being trained on beekeeping. We didn´t actually get in the suits or anything but we talked a lot about the theory and practices and walked through and talked about the apiary (place where all the hives are). I also chatted with the man who does the honey processing for awhile to learn about that and we talked about some ways to improve the efficiency of processing. So I might help out with designing some systems for that. The bee project is looking more interesting everyday.



Now for today´s technical section. Drum roll... RSS feeds. What does it stand for? Really simple syndication. Or maybe its Real simple syndication, but you get the point. This is a method by which you can get information from various sites on the internet in real time as they are updated. RSS is basically news or other webpage´s formatted in such a way so that a RSS client can gather the information. There are many RSS clients available. From stand alone programs such as Email programs (such as Thunderbird), to web based services like My Yahoo and Google. Firefox has a feature built in that can also be used to get rss feeds. Why am I telling you call this? Because you can subscribe to any blog on blogger, including mine and Lydia´s via RSS. Then you will get the updates as they occur. Now, I´m not going to go into the details of how to set up a feed here but read the following for more on rss and check your internet browsers, or email program/serviceś help section for specifics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

And here are the RSS feed URLs to Lydia and I´s blogs.

http://nasdrovya.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
http://lydia-travels.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default


Today were are just hanging out around the house and doing a few things about the neighborhood. Hope everyone is doing good back in the states or anywhere else in the world you might be.