Posh Corps

Sometimes a person joins the Peace Corps, an organization that demands flexibility under extreme conditions, but gets lucky enough to not have to be flexible at all. Sometimes people in the Peace Corps, even though living in a developing country, gets a sweeter set up than they had back in America. If you have an apartment, you’re in the Posh Corps. If you have electricity and/or running water, you’re in the Posh Corps. If you can get ice and/or ice cream in your village/town/neighborhood, you’re in the Posh Corps.

In no way could my Peace Corps experience be considered “posh”. I pretty much got the ”maximum flexibility” option. However, this past week, I have lived how the other side lives. This is the story of my one week of Posh Corps.

The American Embassy in the Gambia sent out a text a few weeks ago, asking for volunteers who would be willing to assist with a basketball camp in Kombo. Being the basketball aficionado I am, I promptly jumped on this opportunity. As I learned more about the camp, I got more excited. An ex-NBA player would be flown in, to teach the people of this tiny African country how to ball efficiently. It would involve about six hours of basketball a day, in ocean-breezy Bakau. It was too good to pass up.

When the other two volunteers and I arrived in town to assist, we didn’t know what to expect. We had no idea that the upcoming week would be the most luxurious and worthwhile one we’d had in this country… perhaps ever.

Day One of the camp was pretty standard. My fellow Peace Corps buddies and I didn’t really know what to do to be most helpful, so we just ran drills with the camp participants. We felt like rock stars when Tommy Davis, ex-NBA player, invited us to help him demonstrate drills or skills, and then, after fundamentally flawlessly completing the play, all the Gambians would cheer when we scored, yelling “Basket!” and offering enthusiastic high fives.

There’s about a four hour break in the middle of the day, so on day one, we just went back to our Peace Corps house and hung out. Then we returned to the camp to coach the little ones in the afternoon. Pretty standard day of basketball camp.

On Day Two we started to get to know Ole Tommy Davis even better, and he turned out to be the nicest man in the world.

A quick biography of my main man TD: He played at the University of Minnesota , and his favorite college memories were dropping thirty plus points on Indiana and a furious, chair-hurling Bobby Knight. As a child, he went to the annual camp for the best youngsters in the country, and he played with the likes of Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, etc. According to him, (and you don’t doubt a man with as much integrity as Tommy Davis has), he was better than Michael Jordan when he was twelve. After graduating college, he was drafted by the Dallas Mavericks. He played I think only one season in the NBA, and then traveled to play in the Philippines. He was a huge star in the Philippines, and made tons of money while living in paradise. When he left there, he traveled around Europe, scouting for the team he coaches in Bordeaux, France. He has lived there for the past twenty years, and speaks French fluently. Now he travels everywhere, running camps, scouting and recruiting internationally. He still keeps in touch with Popovich, coach of the Spurs, and has been extended an offer to coach in the NBA when he wants to return to the US.

When a man with this many credentials comes to chill in the Gambia, you know he’s a good dude.

So, after the first session on Day Two, Tommy asks us if we’d like to go get something to eat – something Gambian. After dining on cheap Gambian food, he’s like, “We have a couple hours before we have to go back to the courts. Why don’t you tag along with me to the hotel I’m staying at, which happens to be none other than Cocoa Ocean, the most luxurious hotel in the country? My personal driver will drive you there, you can hang with the celebrity likes of me, and then we’ll return to play basketball.”

So we did that. And you don’t know luxury until you leave a Gambian village and then are suddenly surrounded with the blatant, extravagant luxury that we were thrust into. There were like eleven horizon pools, just waiting to be dipped in. The hotel overlooked the ocean, and was filled with tasteful yet funky furniture, enough pool chairs to seat my entire village comfortably, color and beauty.

Old TD hung out with us by the pool, telling us all about the basketball royalty he had faced, asking us questions about the Peace Corps, reminiscing about NCAA tournaments past, and continuing to offer us things we had been deprived of – food, hot showers, air conditioned rides across town.

So, daily, we continued to do this. We were Tommy’s helpers in the morning, perfectly following his instructions and demonstrating skills which we had mastered as children, being worshipped by Gambians for making simple shots or dribbling between our legs.

One day, I invited Tommy to play a friendly game of HORSE… in which I couldn’t miss. I beat him and one of my male volunteer counterparts, and THE Tommy Davis, NBA star, friend of Gregg Popovich, pal of Tony Parker, who played with the legends of my youth said, and I quote, “That girl can shoot.”

Then we’d go eat Gambian food, return to luxury, and sleep by the pool for a few hours, before we’d go back and play basketball again.

One day, the employees of the embassy decided to show their appreciation for all the” work” we were doing. They took us to the best and most expensive restaurant in town. The amount of money I spent on my meal was more than the monthly rent I pay my family to stay in my house and eat with them every day… FOR A MONTH. We got fancy juices, ate meat without bones, Mexican food, salads, and dessert. It was perhaps the best meal I have ever eaten.

On Saturday, the final day of the camp, Tommy invited us to escort him through a few of the markets in Kombo. Where normally we would have to cram into a smelly broken car, his personal driver took us right to the market in an air conditioned vehicle. We helped him bargain for the items he wanted, and he was impressed with our comfort in the market, as well as our language skillz.

As he dropped us off for the final time, he took our email addresses, told us anytime we came to France we had a place to stay, double kissed my face, and then told us he loved us.

And we loved him too.

Dizzy Bats

The antics of ASP have given me many fun games to play in a tight spot, when I’m bored or need to entertain many.

This time I chose to enlist the help of Dizzy Bat, a hilarious game involving materials readily available in the Gambia. I grabbed a locally made broom (lots of grass tied together with a piece of fabric), and told kids to look up in the air, put the broom on the tip of their nose, look at the end of it, and spin around ten times FAST. Then, when they’ve finished, they should put the broom on the ground, stand next to it, and jump from side to side over the broom ten times.

That’s the game.

I played it with kids of all ages. Lots of kids fell down, tons of kids got real dirty, and my 9th grade friend and I exchanged words for “dizzy” in our respective languages. In Mandinka, it’s “tiroo”.

The next day, my ninth grade friend Maimuna approached me and gave me the following letter.

“Abby How are you today.
Yesterday the game that we played seen I go home I started sleeping at 7:49 I sleeping up to 10:53. my mother called me, did not anser, she ask me what happened. I say noting, she say no something is go on. I say noting go on. she say you never sleeping like this.
I willy I am not going to do these game again

From Maimuna”

So, obviously I made an impression on her. I also now have numerous kids who I don’t recognize start spinning around when they see me, yelling “Abby! Tee-zee! Tee-zee!” until they fall down.

I constantly wonder what my legacy will be when I finally leave this tiny country. I think this game is in the running for what people will remember about me. "Oh, yeah, Abby? She's the one that drew that map on the wall right? Or, she's the one that carried 20 liters of water in her backpack AND twenty liters on her bike for training? Ohhhhhhh, the dizzy bat chick... Now I remember."

Back to School

So, even though we still have about six weeks left in this term, I was thinking about back to school after the long rainy season. Then I was thinking about back to school in America.

American back to school time is my favorite time of year. WalMarts are filled with all of the students, unexcited to go back, the parents, unexcited to be in a WalMart, and me, excited all around. There are so many things arranged in rainbow order, the smell of glue and paper in the air...

And I was thinking about the sales. How for a dollar, you can get an entire pack of crayola markers, or ten packs of notebook paper.

So, if you or anyone you know is doing back to school shopping this year, think about this.

If everyone I know fills one standard weight shipping box (cost to send about $50-60) with school supplies, they will last my school years and years beyond my tenure here. So, if you're up for it, here are the things that are most useful to my school and the teachers within it.

- Markers - good crayola ones, thin and thick.
- CONSTRUCTION PAPER - Impossible to get in this country but SUPER important.
- Lined notebook paper
- Glue - not glue sticks, but elmer's in a bottle. Glue sticks dry out in like a day during dry season.
- SCISSORS - both big teachers pair and LOTS of small kids pairs. My dream is to make a class set so students can actually use them, but classes have like forty or more kids...
- Pens and pencils - less important than the above things, but nonetheless important.
- Dictionaries. I know these will be hard to send, but most kids don't know how to use one/have never seen one. Beyond that, I think they would be helpful for teachers.
- Books - used, new, any children's book are appreciated. See below.
- People here love certificates. If you can find blank "Certificates of Achievement" or "Certificates of Accomplishment" or whatever, they'd be great to have.
- Page protectors - I'm working on using some dry erase markers I have to make worksheets reusable, so putting them in page protectors is like the same as laminating them. If you have any of these lying around, send them.
- Prizes - any prizes that children would like. Colorful erasers or pencils, anything you can buy for cheap in a big pack that kids might like.

I also just painted a giant world map on the wall of the library, and I want to teach students a little more about the rest of the world, of which they know nothing! I was thinking about reading them books from other countries scattered throughout the world. I have West African books, and I have books from America and England, but none from anywhere else. So, if you can find books from Scandinavia, Indonesia, Patagonia, or Antarctica, I'll take ANYTHING!

And while you're at it, if you want to send me Clif Bars, raw almonds, and/or candy of any kind, I'd accept it. :)

Thanks in advance!

What I Do

I realized earlier that I often write stories of the ridiculous tales involving cultural mystery, discomfort, or the woe of being a toubab in a strange land, but I don't think I have told you all what I spend my time doing...

So,don't expect to laugh a lot during this one... only cold hard facts.

First of all, "doing stuff" in the Peace Corps, at least for your first year, from what I hear, is hard to do. You don't know the language, you don't know how everything works, you don't know who the movers and shakers in your community are. So, A LOT of my time is spent reading, writing letters, playing with kids, or in general wasting time.

My job is to be a teacher trainer. So, that sort of encompasses everything at school. I observe teachers occasionally, trying to give them encouragement (which they rarely get from their superiors) and also give them tips on how to improve things like classroom management and student involvement. The Gambia is slowly moving away from a "chalk and talk" style of lecture teaching, but it's slow going.

I also build teaching aids for teachers out of locally available junk, and try to encourage the teachers to do it too.

I have gotten a ton of books from Books for Africa, and am working on continuing to build our collection of library books. I have taken the library to be sort of like my showroom. Every class has one library period a week, so I teach about 13 periods a week. When they come in, I take the opportunity to do a fun activity or art project with them, because that's something they'll never do in their normal class, and I try to model a good lesson for the teacher. It's been rough because, despite being taught in only English for their entire schooling career, almost no one can understand me. Sigh. It's hard to model a good lesson and get students involved when they can't understand the question being asked, and have been taught not to speak out in class even if they did understand the question.

Beyond that, I'm trying to make the library look as much like an American classroom as I can. I painted a huge map of the world on the wall, I've put up all sorts of colors, hung up lots of student work, and am working on saving enough of my own money to buy some more paint, colorful curtains, and table coverings to make it a place where students like to come.

It's already been slightly successful. A few students come in before they go to afternoon class, or after they finish in morning class. They come in and sit quietly with their friends and look through the books. Maybe they're not actually reading, but I will take the successes where I can get them. One student even brought me a page of unfinished math problems and asked me to hang them on the wall.

So, there's the day to day. Not exciting, but it's what I do.

So, if you have books, ideas, construction paper, art materials, scissors, or other cool educational items, send them my way. I'm convinced that with the more visual stimulation in the library, the more jazzed kids will be about school.

Teleto

Teleto means “on TV” in Mandinka. I didn’t know this until recently, when I heard from numerous people in my village, many Peace Corps staff members, and one particularly observant vendor in the car park, that I had been on the one and only Gambian TV channel, GRTS.

No one can remember what the news story was on. All they remember is seeing a toubab run near the screen.

The accounts of the scene are all different. One says I was carrying a backpack. Another says I was carrying many “busoos” or plastic bags. Some told me I had “high hair”. Some say I was running near the bank, others say I was running to catch a gele. But all accounts involved one element – what made me sure that it was me they saw and not some other husky, tall, female toubab. They all described perfectly my huge red shorts.

When first the Peace Corps employees told me I was on TV, it made sense. They know me, so they’d most likely notice my presence. When I was on ESPN at Illini games, I expected friends to call me during the game, or at least mention after the game, that they had seen me on TV.

But when randos from the car park recognize me as the toubab on TV… at first that didn’t make sense. It’s like watching an Illini basketball game, and saying, Oh, yeah, I saw you on TV, you were standing next to the guy with the orange shirt on…

Upon further thought, and analysis of the demographics of this country, I began to realize this recognition makes more sense… it actually makes a lot of sense. It’s not like seeing a normal person, it’s a toubab! It’s like watching an Illini game and seeing a man in a gorilla suit in the stands. You’re going to remember. And next time you come across a gorilla man, you’re probably going to tell him you saw him on TV.

I just wonder how many toubabs the lady in the car park claimed to see before she came across me, the one who was actually on TV.

Games Weekend

This weekend was games weekend for Peace Corps The Gambia volunteers. Those who chose to participate met up in Juffareh, the site made famous by the novel Roots. Juffareh is where Kunta Kinteh was stolen from before being sold into slavery. It’s one of the most famous tourist sites in The Gambia, and each year lots of African Americans come to this little village to see where their ancestors may have come from.

Because it gets so much tourist activity, there is a little eco-lodge there called Kunta Kinteh camp. This is where we stayed. It’s right on the river/ocean/inlet/whatever that body of water is called. It had a pool. It had a bar. It had lots of tables where tons of nerds could play all sorts of lame games.

But before we could test our individual wit, strategic skills, and dungeons and dragons tolerance, we had to have the real contest. The contest that shows true will, true grit, true spirit, true desire. We had to have a mango eating contest.

The first round of the mango eating contest involved everyone who was interested in participating. Everyone was given a plate with slices of mango, adding up to about two to three entire mangoes. When the signal was given, everyone would eat the mangoes as quickly as they could… without using their hands. And if you’ve ever eaten a mango, you know that they are slippery. To get your teeth into one was way more difficult that getting it down your gullet.

If you know my desire to compete, my appetite, and my affinity for mangoes, hopefully by now you will have guessed that I was one of the people who ate their mangoes the quickest. I finished in second to a mango eating machine.

So, the first three to finish moved on to the real contest: a timed challenge in which each person tried to eat as many mangoes as they could in a two minute time period.

The large, burly, bearded mango eating machine was contestant number one. He has been mistaken for Bigfoot and is known for his eating abilities.

Contestant number two was a tall, thin, wiry guy. He looked beatable, but his resolve was strong.

And then there was me. The lone female, representing half of humankind, and about 70% of Peace Corps volunteers in the Gambia.

The contest began, and I shoveled those mangoes as fast as I could into my mouth. I had a counter on one side, and a coach on the other, guiding me on which pieces looked most mash-able, and which pieces were smallest, to maximize my eating potential.

The winner, Bigfoot, ate 26 pieces of mango, which according to my calculations, is about 5 mangoes. In two minutes.

Slim and I tied for second place, with 21 mango pieces, or about four mangoes. Two mangoes a minute. Not too bad, eh?

After that contest, the other games began. Think of a nerdy game, and we had it. French settlement building, German property trading, world conquest, railroad maximization, dungeons, dragons, munchkins… we had it all.

Late that first night, I played a game called Munchkin. Basically, it was a tryout to see who could hack it to move up to the big leagues of actual dungeons and dragons. And I failed MISERABLY. It was a ridiculous game, involving warriors, clerics, elves, and Halflings, where people obtained items like the “Boots of Running Really Fast” and “Huge Rock” and fought monsters like “the Floating Nose” and “the Plutonium Dragon”. It took forever, you had to wait your turn, and there were a lot of rules to learn.

Since I found out early I would never cut it for D&D, I decided to play a fun game and eavesdrop on the kinds of ridiculous quotes that are bound to come up during a game of intense Dungeons and Dragons. Here are some gems.

“Before we open the door, does anyone need to do anything to buff themselves up?”

“Well… maybe… I could call an extra creature to help us fight…”

Discussing a murder scene with dust, woman’s clothing, and is assumed to be the death of a vampire, “Is facial hair left behind?”

“Obviously, the vampire was a woman.”

“I’m not gonna mess around, I’m gonna go ahead and take out my sword and slice the carpet.”

“I think the mayor’s daughter might be queen of the vampires.”

“They’re a medium humanoid.”

Also involved in the weekend was tarot cards. I had a lot of skeptical fun, which in turn entertained my Buddhist, hippie, fellow volunteer.

I drew a lot of cards throughout the weekend to inquire and get insight about many different aspects of my life. My favorite was the “existence” card. This card basically says that the universe, all of existence, is not full with me. The universe would be missing something were I not in it.

Not only does the universe need me in it, but also the mango market would decline greatly in the Gambia were I not around, although Dungeons and Dragons would gain a lot more respect.

Lizard Tree

I was visiting one of my Peace Corps friends in her village, walking towards her school, when we heard a shrill and haunting noise coming from above.

We simultaneously swiveled our heads up and saw five children, at varying heights in a tree, all gazing down at us with terror in their eyes. Their howls were anguished, their mouths were wide, and their eyes pleaded at us to, for the love of allah, help them.

Based on prior experience in the Gambia, I assumed that these children were afraid of us, the three toubabs walking down the street. As soon as we passed underneath the tree, they must have felt trapped, and immediately reacted with a similar horror as I would have if I were in a locked room with an angry wolverine.

Since we were in a Wolof village, I couldn’t understand what they were screaming as they were screaming, and based on tone alone, they were afraid of death. My wolof speaking Peace Corps friend listened closely, and finally was able to understand that they were yelling that there was a chameleon in the tree. What normally would cause children to exclaim, “Cool!” instead caused the chaos we saw above us.

Then, the toubabs came to the rescue. Like firefighters rescuing people from a burning building, we raised our arms, and caught the children as they rained down to us.

Gambians believe that chameleons are evil and deadly. Just how strong is this belief? These Gambian children, who undoubtedly have rarely had the opportunity to be in the presence of a toubab, leaped, no questions asked, into the waiting arms of a strange toubab.