Interesting Weekend

First a few announcements:

Congrats to my sister and her husband on the wedding. Hear the trip to Jamaica was sweet glad you guys had fun.

Two of my good friends (who happen to be married) are going to have a baby very soon. You know who you are. Hope everything is going smoothly. Keep the blog up-to-date for those of us who get our news from it.

I would just like to say that the Florida Gators kick ass and the Florida Seminoles… well the Seminoles … not so much. That’s four in a row for the Tampa/St. Pete crowd who likes to keep track of such things.

I would also like to say hello to Jacque and Charlie in Kansas. Thanks for reading the blog. Your son says hello and really appreciates the new clothes from the latest package.

And now the news…

Last Thursday we headed for the capitol for a Thanksgiving celebration, 40^th Anniversary of Peace Corps in The Gambia celebration, and an all volunteer meeting.

On Thursday after a bit of work here in Brikama we headed up to the capitol area for a quick meeting, some hanging out, and then off to dinner in the evening. We spend part of the afternoon cooking and hanging out at a Peace Corps staff house and then headed over to the Ambassadors residence for the dinner. Dinner was very nice and very American by Peace Corps standards. The house is right on the ocean so it’s a good setting and we had all types of food that you would normally have on Thanksgiving, right down to the cranberry sauce still molded in the shape of a can. We even had the United States seal on our napkins. Now this may not seem like much to you but I can assure you this is a pretty amazing thing here in The Gambia. A significant number of the items we had for dinner were brought in from The States by various arriving guests or staff. So we all ate well and then went for a swim in the POOL, another amazing thing. After dinner we just headed back to where we were staying for the weekend and relaxed. Were we’re fortunate enough to stay with one of the Embassy staff members in a nice house all weekend.

On Friday we all woke up early and headed down to the Kairaba Hotel which is a nice hotel near the beach. This is where the celebration was held for the 40^th anniversary of the Peace Corps in The Gambia. I believe its one of their longest continuously running Peace Corps programs. Is this something to celebrate or not? There are mixed opinions on that question. But the day went well and there were a lot of speeches buy Americans and Gambians alike, then we all ate a bunch more good food to top it off.

That night the one and only brewery in The Gambia held their annual Peace Corps party. Now I have heard various statistics on how much of the domestic beer supply PC volunteers drink but the most reliable and believable one I have heard is around 10%. Not a particularly surprising statistic considering most people here don’t drink and most PC volunteers are right out of college. So since our organization is such a good customer, every year the brewers throw a party for all the PC volunteers with all you can drink beer. So just about all 90 or so of us enjoyed a few free drinks and got a chance to chat with a lot of the volunteers we don’t see much. I also had a chance to chat with the German (of course he’s German!) brew master who is a pretty interesting guy.

After a late night on Friday we woke up early on Saturday morning to get to our all volunteer meeting. We spent most of the morning in meetings and closed out with lunch. After that most people just went to the beach to relax and some started to head back out to their villages. Lydia and I hung out at the beach for awhile and then ate dinner and headed over to where we were staying for the weekend. Our hosts being much better off then ourselves have satellite TV and we were able to see the stomping of FSU by UF. Of course we (actually just me) did have to stay awake till almost 2am to see the end. The next morning we packed up and headed back to home sweet home Brikama.

We had a good weekend but it was also quite surreal and small taste of the reverse culture shock that will no doubt take place on our return in a few years. After being here just six months we have become used to our surroundings and comfortable in our village. This weekend was a 180 shift from our normal every day lives. We hung out with Americans all weekend, drank beers, watched some movies, ate American food, stayed in American style houses ect. You would expect that to be a relaxing break but a lot of the time I was thinking that I would be more relaxed back in Brikama. It was a little like the feeling I had when I first arrived here and was trying to get used to village life but in reverse.

About two weekends ago Lydia and I had an interesting bike ride. We have been on the hunt for a good place to access the river from Brikama. So normally back in the developed world we would get out a map or go ask anybody in town to get directions. They would tell us go down here take a left and such and such street go two stop signs, take a right… ect.. Well things don’t quite work like that here. Most people here as I assume is the case in most developing countries don’t travel for the sake of travel or go places just to see them. For instance my little host brother has never seen the ocean. He is probably 9 or 10 years old and has lived his whole life about 8 miles from the beach but has never been there. This is not uncommon and my host father who is probably in his 40s could not tell me how to get to the river. That being the case it’s pretty hard to ask people how to get anywhere outside a 1 or 2 Km radius unless they go to that place all the time for work or some other function. They have simply never been to that place and may not see why you would need to go to that place. When Lydia and I tell our host family that were going to try to find the river they give us a funny look and I suspect think were kina crazy. So our best bet was a look at Google earth of all things. There are some paper maps of the Gambia but they are unreliable and only show about 10% of what’s actually there. So the satellite images on Google earth are the best we can come up with. We used these to locate what kina looks like roads and then just kina guess which road that is when were actually out in the bush trying to find our way. This has led us on several trips to nowhere and this one particular weekend we still didn’t find the river but we found a mining camp. We were headed on the up country road through a couple of small villages and then we saw a track going left that we thought was the one we were looking at on the satellite map (no street signs or street names in The Gambia). It was a well traveled dirt road with a decent surface that looked like it might be the one. When we were on the road we would ask people we pass if this was the way to the river. They would either say they didn’t know or say yes (sometimes people will say yes even if they don’t know just to satisfy you, this is a common occurrence). We continued down this road for about 2 or 4 Km ended up not at the river but at this mining area. All these men were everywhere with pick-axes and metal pipes chipping rock out of cliffs. This is the same rock that I see everywhere and is used to make cement and now I know where it comes from. It was amazing how much they had mined by hand. We stopped and chatted with some of the guys as best be could because they were mostly immigrants from Guinea and they didn’t speak Mandinka or English very well. They are all camped right there in the mining area and were getting ready to quit for the day. They were quite surprised to see us as they probably don’t get too many random white folks riding through on bikes. They were just about as interested in us as we were in them. Anyway having failed again to find a way to the river we turned homeward as it was getting late and we had a long ride ahead. We will probably try again this weekend and eventually find what were looking for but the lack of directions usually leads to more interesting finds.

Till later…