A week in the life
I wouldn’t say that last week was a typical week as a PCV but I think it shows a little something about the lives some of us lead. Last week was a very busy one and it’s a great example of the variety of work you can get yourself into if you’re not careful. When I came here one of my goals was to slow down and see what life was like at a more relaxed pace. In some ways that has happened, there are days I can sit on my porch or under the Mango tree for hours doing little and fully enjoying myself. The other side of the coin is how much I realized I enjoy days full of things to do and while the week was exhausting it was none the less a lot of fun and fulfilling.
So last Saturday (the 11th) was a big match between the Gambia Scorpions and the Senegal Lions soccer teams. This is a big rivalry so it’s always a huge game. The sad fact is that Gambia almost always loses. So the odds were already stacked against The Gambia but to make it worse it was an away game held in Dakar, Senegal. By halftime the score was still tied 0-0 and as we went into the second half Senegal scored their first goal. This was expected and some thought it was the beginning of the end. A bit later Gambia came back to tie the score at 1-1 and held fast to the end of the game. That’s right they didn’t win, they just tied the game. This however was enough to cause much excitement with everybody out in the streets cheering and so on. So, that evening the president announced a public holiday for the following Monday. Yes, a public holiday for a game we didn’t even win. To make this a bit more ridiculous we lost a match on Sunday which kind of put a damper on the Monday holiday. Anyway I’m telling you all of this not only because it’s pretty funny but also because it meant I didn’t need to go to work at the college on Monday.
Monday:
Over the last few months I have been helping another PCV design a solar system for her family’s compound in a small village south of Brikama near the Senegal border. There is no electric utility in this village so if you want electric light, solar or a generator is pretty much the only way to go. What we came up with was nothing too fancy just enough to run around 12 lights throughout the house during the evening. So we had the design and had done all of the price checking up in the capitol over the last few months and since I had this whole “holiday” with nothing to do we thought it would be a good time to go buy the stuff and figure out how to get it down to her village. Sometime in the morning we headed up to the capitol and did our shopping which went surprisingly smoothly. After that we even found a taxi for a decent price to get the equipment back to Brikama. Once we got to Brikama we had to get in touch with our friends host father who was bringing a donkey and cart up from Busura to pick up the equipment. So as usually things tend to take a bit longer than expected. The trip by donkey cart takes about 2 hours and he was supposed to have left about 2 hours before we got to Brikama. In actuality he probably left Busura about when we got to Brikama is my guess. So we sat on the side of the road with a solar panel and all its related accessories getting interesting looks from passing locals. Eventually they arrived and we loaded up the donkey cart with all the goods and gave special instructions to be very careful on the way back. The road in a muddy and rutted track though the bush and we didn’t want the solar panel to meet an early death. From there I bid the donkey and his solar equipment farewell until later in the week.
Later that evening I got home and hung out with Lydia and the family for a bit and had some good dinner. One of my coworkers from the beekeepers, Kaybe called me up and asked me if I could help him with some bee hives at the Director of Forestry’s house. The director has been trying to help us out with getting some things done at the beekeeping center and our center is also on forestry land so it was pretty much a necessary move on our part to help this guy out. Anyway, he’s a nice guy and I’m not one to pass up beekeeping. So around 8 that evening we headed over to this guys house and suited up to check his hives. A few had fallen over but mostly everything was intact and we spent about an hour and a half working on the hives. After that it was home, bucket bath, bed.
Tuesday:
Tuesday it was off to the Beekeepers. Most of the morning I spent working with some of the employees on stuff for the up coming trade show. We worked on getting our brochures and honey labels finished up and ready to print. The other half of the morning I spend arguing with the guys who are supposed to install our water pump and tank. This is something I have been working on for a year now and they finally brought the stand and the pump that morning before I had to go. After talking with those guys and showing them where the equipment was going to be I headed for the capitol for the second time in two days to get our stuff printed for the trade show. Once I got there I spent about an hour wandering around trying to find this guy’s house that was going to do the printing. Eventually I found it and we went in so I could show him the documents that we wanted printed. The printer is Nigerian guy who runs a printing and designing business out of his house. Just going in his house was strange because it was all nice with real couches and a TV and all. In his office he had nice computers and printers. After living in a house with no running water for a year and a half it’s strange to go into places like that. The guy had a look at the docs and said he could print them so I could come back later in the day and pick them up. I left and headed for the PC office where I had to do a few things on the internet, check my mailbox, and send off our ballots for the upcoming election. A few hours there and then it was back in a taxi to the Nigerian guy’s house and then another walk and a taxi ride back to Brikama after grabbing some quick grub.
Wednesday:
Wednesday I went up to the college and was expecting a meeting with Mustapha and some other guys about a new database the college wants to make to store all its grades and student info. I think it’s a great idea in theory but I don’t know if people will take it seriously and realize what must be done in the way of maintenance and backups if you’re going to put all your data into an electronic database. Also, in a place where the power goes of a few time a day and is sometimes out for days it’s not a stretch to think we might have some problems with having everything on the computer. Anyway the meeting never happened and was rescheduled for next week. Mustapha and I worked on some other random things. We tried to get some networking equipment repaired/purchased, and did some things to get ready for all the new students coming in this term. I also met with the student I will be working on the biodigester project with. We found a place on campus that we could safely store all our equipment and a good place to put the digester once it’s finished. He also typed up the introduction to his dissertation on the biodigester project, which I have somehow agreed to be his advisor on, and gave it to me so I could go though and make suggestions. As you well know if you read this blog I can’t even spell so I don’t know how qualified I am as an advisor.
I managed to make it out of the college by about 5 and went home to chill for a bit until around 6:30 when I had to meet Kaybe back up a the college to take care of some bees that had made their homes in various structures around the college. There are about six or so hives that are causing some problems around campus and the college hired NBAG (the beekeepers) to remove the bees. Most of them are in these overhang support structures that are on all of the buildings and some of them are in the minaret of the mosque. All of them have been causing people alarm at some point or another. It’s difficult to pray when your being chased by angry bees. That night we decided to tackle three of the hives. We got there just about sunset and got suited up. The plan was to kill the bees and then break open the boxes they were in so we could clean out all the combs, honey and dead bees so that no bees would come back again. After we begun working on the first hive it became apparent that there was no way we could open these boxes up. They were sealed with hundreds of screws and the plywood was three-quarter inch. This is one of those times that I wish I had the tools I have in America. What I wouldn’t have done for an electric drill. I’ve never even seen an electric drill here, much less a cordless one. In the end we had to just spray enough pesticide in to kill off the bees and then seal the box so nothing could get in. The plan was to let the bees all die off in the next few days and then have the carpenter open up the boxes, clean them out and then seal them back up so the bees couldn’t return. The second hive took us up to the second story of a building with a similar style box. Not much more luck getting into this one so we went with the same technique as the last one all while standing on a table and the edge of the balcony. We finished that one off and moved on to the third and final. This one required scaling up a shaky scaffolding to a third story overhand. About this time it also started to lightning all around and the wind picked up a bit. It was at that moment, watching Kaybe head up the scaffolding in his bee suit looking like a space man with lightning flashing around and bees all over us, that I thought some people might consider this kind of crazy. Needless to say we tried to work quickly but carefully and finished the last hive without any disasters. By now it was about 10 at night and the rain and wind were getting going in earnest. Kaybe got on his motorcycle and I got on my bike and we both proceeded to get very wet on our way home, not that I wasn’t already soaked from having two shirts and a bee suit on in the 90 degree weather. I got home exhausted and went straight to the back to take a shower in the rain. The rain shower was very relaxing and a good way to end the night. I went in, had some dinner, drank some homemade hooch and passed out.
Thursday:
Thursday gave me a chance to catch my breath a little bit. I went up to NBAG to help Gibbeh, our accountant, make a new spreadsheet to keep track of honey sales. She is all about it and picks stuff up quickly so she’s easy to work with. We continued our prep for the trade show as well. Bakary was running around filtering, bottling, and labeling honey so we would have good stuff to put on display. Kaybe was making beeswax candles and Kehta and I were trying to figure out a good way to package some of the candles and make pendants out of these little wax figures we had a mold for. It seemed like a slow day but four o’clock came quick. Once I got home Lydia and I packed our bags to head down to Busura for the night to install the solar system. The bike ride takes about an hour (significantly faster than a donkey you might remember) and is a beautiful ride though the bush. Lots of nice trees and very green and lush, especially this time of year when all the crops are ready to be harvested.
Friday:
We woke up Friday morning and Lydia had to head back to Brikama after breakfast so she should be at the nursery school later that morning. Our friend, Sunkary (Gambian name), her host family, and I started to work on the solar system just after breakfast. Our first task was to rip out the remnants of an old system that was there. There was a small panel and two other even smaller broken panels that we took out along with a dead battery and a bunch of wiring. We had some wooden frames made for the new panel and the one we were going to recycle from the old system and installed those on the roof. Then we got the charge controller and new battery put in place so we could run the wires down from the roof to the charge controller. It’s when we started to run the wires down from the roof that I did some acrobatics to get into the “attic” and discovered that it was somewhere around 120 degrees in there and pretty damn dirty. I went in only slightly sweaty and pretty clean and came out 15 minutes later soaked and covered in brown dirt. And so I would remain for the next two days. We got the main components hooked up so the battery could start to charge and then we set about the task of rewiring/installing lights throughout the house. All the old lights had to be rewired because they wire used originally was too small and there was a major loss in the wire from one side of the house to the other. We spent the rest of the day running wire and installing lights and switch boxes and got into a pretty good rhythm and Sunkary got the hang of it so we started to move faster but in the end we only had 5 of the 12 lights done by the end of the day. Somehow I thought we could get the whole thing done in one day but some of you may know that I have a tendency to underestimate how long things might take (No the trail head is just around the next corner!; No just 5 more minutes of fishing we can make it back before the kayak rental closes!; etc.). Well, guess what? Africa is the perfect place for me in that case because there is nothing that cant be pushed back a day or two in order to finish what needs to be done tomorrow. That being the case we just planed to continue on tomorrow and we finished up for the day as the sun went down.
Saturday:
We woke up and got back in the same routine Saturday morning. Wiring, some dirt and sweat, some more wiring, a little bit of rice, oil and some water, more sweat, a bit more wiring, etc. All the while we have a big crowd watching and again again I found myself wishing for a Home Depot when we would run out of something or have to improvise a tool again. We managed to get done around 4 in the afternoon and I packed up and headed for Brikama with Lydia who had ridden back down to Busura that morning to hang out and join me for the ride home. That night we finally just hung around the compound with the family and took it easy.
Sunday:
Finally I make it here to today. This morning we woke up and did our laundry so we could hang it up and let it dry for the whole day and then around noon we headed up to the trade fair to give our support to my fellow NBAG coworkers. The fair was nice and our booth was pretty impressive but they could have done a better job advertising for the whole event because the attendance has been pretty bad so far. It goes through Wednesday so hopefully it will pick up in the next few days. Now were back at home and I’m writing this excessively long blog.
This week had many of the components of my service that I will surely miss once I leave Africa. There are always a wide variety of challenges; technical, physical, and cultural. From one day to the next I go from living in the 21st (or at least the late 20th) century working on a computer network to riding a donkey cart or doing beekeeping which has been practiced in this part of the world in some form for thousands of years. The African rain “showers” behind my house, rides through the bush as the sun sets on the rice fields or behind the giant silk cotton trees. These are some of the things I will remember when I’m gone.
New pictures today! Check them out.
So last Saturday (the 11th) was a big match between the Gambia Scorpions and the Senegal Lions soccer teams. This is a big rivalry so it’s always a huge game. The sad fact is that Gambia almost always loses. So the odds were already stacked against The Gambia but to make it worse it was an away game held in Dakar, Senegal. By halftime the score was still tied 0-0 and as we went into the second half Senegal scored their first goal. This was expected and some thought it was the beginning of the end. A bit later Gambia came back to tie the score at 1-1 and held fast to the end of the game. That’s right they didn’t win, they just tied the game. This however was enough to cause much excitement with everybody out in the streets cheering and so on. So, that evening the president announced a public holiday for the following Monday. Yes, a public holiday for a game we didn’t even win. To make this a bit more ridiculous we lost a match on Sunday which kind of put a damper on the Monday holiday. Anyway I’m telling you all of this not only because it’s pretty funny but also because it meant I didn’t need to go to work at the college on Monday.
Monday:
Over the last few months I have been helping another PCV design a solar system for her family’s compound in a small village south of Brikama near the Senegal border. There is no electric utility in this village so if you want electric light, solar or a generator is pretty much the only way to go. What we came up with was nothing too fancy just enough to run around 12 lights throughout the house during the evening. So we had the design and had done all of the price checking up in the capitol over the last few months and since I had this whole “holiday” with nothing to do we thought it would be a good time to go buy the stuff and figure out how to get it down to her village. Sometime in the morning we headed up to the capitol and did our shopping which went surprisingly smoothly. After that we even found a taxi for a decent price to get the equipment back to Brikama. Once we got to Brikama we had to get in touch with our friends host father who was bringing a donkey and cart up from Busura to pick up the equipment. So as usually things tend to take a bit longer than expected. The trip by donkey cart takes about 2 hours and he was supposed to have left about 2 hours before we got to Brikama. In actuality he probably left Busura about when we got to Brikama is my guess. So we sat on the side of the road with a solar panel and all its related accessories getting interesting looks from passing locals. Eventually they arrived and we loaded up the donkey cart with all the goods and gave special instructions to be very careful on the way back. The road in a muddy and rutted track though the bush and we didn’t want the solar panel to meet an early death. From there I bid the donkey and his solar equipment farewell until later in the week.
Later that evening I got home and hung out with Lydia and the family for a bit and had some good dinner. One of my coworkers from the beekeepers, Kaybe called me up and asked me if I could help him with some bee hives at the Director of Forestry’s house. The director has been trying to help us out with getting some things done at the beekeeping center and our center is also on forestry land so it was pretty much a necessary move on our part to help this guy out. Anyway, he’s a nice guy and I’m not one to pass up beekeeping. So around 8 that evening we headed over to this guys house and suited up to check his hives. A few had fallen over but mostly everything was intact and we spent about an hour and a half working on the hives. After that it was home, bucket bath, bed.
Tuesday:
Tuesday it was off to the Beekeepers. Most of the morning I spent working with some of the employees on stuff for the up coming trade show. We worked on getting our brochures and honey labels finished up and ready to print. The other half of the morning I spend arguing with the guys who are supposed to install our water pump and tank. This is something I have been working on for a year now and they finally brought the stand and the pump that morning before I had to go. After talking with those guys and showing them where the equipment was going to be I headed for the capitol for the second time in two days to get our stuff printed for the trade show. Once I got there I spent about an hour wandering around trying to find this guy’s house that was going to do the printing. Eventually I found it and we went in so I could show him the documents that we wanted printed. The printer is Nigerian guy who runs a printing and designing business out of his house. Just going in his house was strange because it was all nice with real couches and a TV and all. In his office he had nice computers and printers. After living in a house with no running water for a year and a half it’s strange to go into places like that. The guy had a look at the docs and said he could print them so I could come back later in the day and pick them up. I left and headed for the PC office where I had to do a few things on the internet, check my mailbox, and send off our ballots for the upcoming election. A few hours there and then it was back in a taxi to the Nigerian guy’s house and then another walk and a taxi ride back to Brikama after grabbing some quick grub.
Wednesday:
Wednesday I went up to the college and was expecting a meeting with Mustapha and some other guys about a new database the college wants to make to store all its grades and student info. I think it’s a great idea in theory but I don’t know if people will take it seriously and realize what must be done in the way of maintenance and backups if you’re going to put all your data into an electronic database. Also, in a place where the power goes of a few time a day and is sometimes out for days it’s not a stretch to think we might have some problems with having everything on the computer. Anyway the meeting never happened and was rescheduled for next week. Mustapha and I worked on some other random things. We tried to get some networking equipment repaired/purchased, and did some things to get ready for all the new students coming in this term. I also met with the student I will be working on the biodigester project with. We found a place on campus that we could safely store all our equipment and a good place to put the digester once it’s finished. He also typed up the introduction to his dissertation on the biodigester project, which I have somehow agreed to be his advisor on, and gave it to me so I could go though and make suggestions. As you well know if you read this blog I can’t even spell so I don’t know how qualified I am as an advisor.
I managed to make it out of the college by about 5 and went home to chill for a bit until around 6:30 when I had to meet Kaybe back up a the college to take care of some bees that had made their homes in various structures around the college. There are about six or so hives that are causing some problems around campus and the college hired NBAG (the beekeepers) to remove the bees. Most of them are in these overhang support structures that are on all of the buildings and some of them are in the minaret of the mosque. All of them have been causing people alarm at some point or another. It’s difficult to pray when your being chased by angry bees. That night we decided to tackle three of the hives. We got there just about sunset and got suited up. The plan was to kill the bees and then break open the boxes they were in so we could clean out all the combs, honey and dead bees so that no bees would come back again. After we begun working on the first hive it became apparent that there was no way we could open these boxes up. They were sealed with hundreds of screws and the plywood was three-quarter inch. This is one of those times that I wish I had the tools I have in America. What I wouldn’t have done for an electric drill. I’ve never even seen an electric drill here, much less a cordless one. In the end we had to just spray enough pesticide in to kill off the bees and then seal the box so nothing could get in. The plan was to let the bees all die off in the next few days and then have the carpenter open up the boxes, clean them out and then seal them back up so the bees couldn’t return. The second hive took us up to the second story of a building with a similar style box. Not much more luck getting into this one so we went with the same technique as the last one all while standing on a table and the edge of the balcony. We finished that one off and moved on to the third and final. This one required scaling up a shaky scaffolding to a third story overhand. About this time it also started to lightning all around and the wind picked up a bit. It was at that moment, watching Kaybe head up the scaffolding in his bee suit looking like a space man with lightning flashing around and bees all over us, that I thought some people might consider this kind of crazy. Needless to say we tried to work quickly but carefully and finished the last hive without any disasters. By now it was about 10 at night and the rain and wind were getting going in earnest. Kaybe got on his motorcycle and I got on my bike and we both proceeded to get very wet on our way home, not that I wasn’t already soaked from having two shirts and a bee suit on in the 90 degree weather. I got home exhausted and went straight to the back to take a shower in the rain. The rain shower was very relaxing and a good way to end the night. I went in, had some dinner, drank some homemade hooch and passed out.
Thursday:
Thursday gave me a chance to catch my breath a little bit. I went up to NBAG to help Gibbeh, our accountant, make a new spreadsheet to keep track of honey sales. She is all about it and picks stuff up quickly so she’s easy to work with. We continued our prep for the trade show as well. Bakary was running around filtering, bottling, and labeling honey so we would have good stuff to put on display. Kaybe was making beeswax candles and Kehta and I were trying to figure out a good way to package some of the candles and make pendants out of these little wax figures we had a mold for. It seemed like a slow day but four o’clock came quick. Once I got home Lydia and I packed our bags to head down to Busura for the night to install the solar system. The bike ride takes about an hour (significantly faster than a donkey you might remember) and is a beautiful ride though the bush. Lots of nice trees and very green and lush, especially this time of year when all the crops are ready to be harvested.
Friday:
We woke up Friday morning and Lydia had to head back to Brikama after breakfast so she should be at the nursery school later that morning. Our friend, Sunkary (Gambian name), her host family, and I started to work on the solar system just after breakfast. Our first task was to rip out the remnants of an old system that was there. There was a small panel and two other even smaller broken panels that we took out along with a dead battery and a bunch of wiring. We had some wooden frames made for the new panel and the one we were going to recycle from the old system and installed those on the roof. Then we got the charge controller and new battery put in place so we could run the wires down from the roof to the charge controller. It’s when we started to run the wires down from the roof that I did some acrobatics to get into the “attic” and discovered that it was somewhere around 120 degrees in there and pretty damn dirty. I went in only slightly sweaty and pretty clean and came out 15 minutes later soaked and covered in brown dirt. And so I would remain for the next two days. We got the main components hooked up so the battery could start to charge and then we set about the task of rewiring/installing lights throughout the house. All the old lights had to be rewired because they wire used originally was too small and there was a major loss in the wire from one side of the house to the other. We spent the rest of the day running wire and installing lights and switch boxes and got into a pretty good rhythm and Sunkary got the hang of it so we started to move faster but in the end we only had 5 of the 12 lights done by the end of the day. Somehow I thought we could get the whole thing done in one day but some of you may know that I have a tendency to underestimate how long things might take (No the trail head is just around the next corner!; No just 5 more minutes of fishing we can make it back before the kayak rental closes!; etc.). Well, guess what? Africa is the perfect place for me in that case because there is nothing that cant be pushed back a day or two in order to finish what needs to be done tomorrow. That being the case we just planed to continue on tomorrow and we finished up for the day as the sun went down.
Saturday:
We woke up and got back in the same routine Saturday morning. Wiring, some dirt and sweat, some more wiring, a little bit of rice, oil and some water, more sweat, a bit more wiring, etc. All the while we have a big crowd watching and again again I found myself wishing for a Home Depot when we would run out of something or have to improvise a tool again. We managed to get done around 4 in the afternoon and I packed up and headed for Brikama with Lydia who had ridden back down to Busura that morning to hang out and join me for the ride home. That night we finally just hung around the compound with the family and took it easy.
Sunday:
Finally I make it here to today. This morning we woke up and did our laundry so we could hang it up and let it dry for the whole day and then around noon we headed up to the trade fair to give our support to my fellow NBAG coworkers. The fair was nice and our booth was pretty impressive but they could have done a better job advertising for the whole event because the attendance has been pretty bad so far. It goes through Wednesday so hopefully it will pick up in the next few days. Now were back at home and I’m writing this excessively long blog.
This week had many of the components of my service that I will surely miss once I leave Africa. There are always a wide variety of challenges; technical, physical, and cultural. From one day to the next I go from living in the 21st (or at least the late 20th) century working on a computer network to riding a donkey cart or doing beekeeping which has been practiced in this part of the world in some form for thousands of years. The African rain “showers” behind my house, rides through the bush as the sun sets on the rice fields or behind the giant silk cotton trees. These are some of the things I will remember when I’m gone.
New pictures today! Check them out.
posted by Andy at
4:41 AM
1 Comments:
Just went back and looked at this again.. the solar panel installation photos are really cool... looks like a success. And I love the photos of the kids on their "computers" too. We sure do take a lot for granted here.
-Cheryl
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Anonymous, At
Sunday, November 23, 2008 2:48:00 PM MST
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