The Sched

Here’s the daily schedule of my life in the Gambia thus far. This is basically how it seems to go during training, and things will change a lot once we get out to our permanent sites.

6:38 – Awaken to my alarm, although exuberant roosters and braying donkeys have had me in and out of sleep for the past hour and a half. Hit snooze at least three times.

7-ish – Untuck my mosquito net, get out of bed, hit the pit. Sweep out my house, to avoid having sand dunes form in the corners of the rooms. Read through my notes one time, so when I go and face my host family, I don’t sound like a complete idiot.
7:40 – greet my family. This alone, with all of the member of the family, takes about 15 minutes.

8am – classes start. We usually start by walking to a bitik (store) to get some bread and chocolate (which provides me much of my sustenance for the day). Then we are thrown into the world of Mandinka, which follows exactly zero of the rules of the English language. We usually have an audience of about six adults and 14 kids, who just watch as we try to learn, and laugh as we try to speak.

11 or noon – Morning classes end, and we are set free. Usually we hang at our teachers house and drink attaya (a tea that is brewed all day long here, filled with enough sugar to build a cotton candy castle), eat mangoes, and sleep, read or study under the mango tree.

1pm – Lunch. Everyday, we eat from a giant food bowl, using only our hands. The food is always rice, some sort of meet, cabbage, cucumbers, beans, and occasionally some sweet potato fries… mmmm. It apparently is the best food that we’ll get in this country, so I’m trying to live it up. I eat a lot every day, because dinner is harder to swallow. After lunch we usuallly continue hanging out under the mango tree, either reading or studying. No one tells us to do this, but we like to stay as a group and hang out and study, since it’s a lot harder to do so in your compound.
4:30 – class again. More language lessons. Everything that I’ve learned from the morning is most likely gone.

6:30 pm – Bucket bath. Still trying to figure out the correct amount of water, the correct rinsing tactic, and how to keep the soap from slipping and getting crazy dirty.

7:30pm – Hang out with the fam. Sometimes I help my sister cook dinner, sometimes I play frisbee or a red light green light type game with the tons of kids, and occasionally try to awkwardly have a conversation with my family. Usually, this consists of them saying, “You came”, “You’re here” or the ever popular “you’re sitting”, each of which I respond to with a resounding “haa” or yes. Stimulating conversation.

9pm – Dinner. I am served a full fish, complete with eyes, along with a suspect sauce and a giant bowl of white rice. Usually I take a few bites of white rice and give the rest back.

10pm – it’s too dark to do anything, unless you have fox like night-vision, so I go beneath my mosquito net and read. Then go to sleep.