Reflecting on life in the village

We've been back in the city for three weeks, but I've been avoiding my blog (and my email inbox!) because I don't know where to begin. Our house is still under construction, and we've been living with construction frustration for longer than we expected. But the workers are mostly working on painting the outside of the house now, and we're looking forward to kicking them out altogether in about a week!


Our time in the village was intense, hot, thought-provoking, and exhausting. We ended up staying for two weeks. Even though I really wanted to come home after the second day (the day I was sick), I'm really glad that we stayed. I'm not saying I want to go back there for a sleepover any time soon, but I appreciated the opportunity to live and exist and survive somewhere that is more radically different from my own life than anywhere else I've ever been. And now that we've been back in the city for awhile, I've had a chance to think about life in the village and what I learned while we were there.

Some of the things I learned were practical skills: I learned how to avoid splashing myself with urine water while squatting in the shower/peeing area for a bucket bath. I learned how to squat over a latrine, and didn't even miss once.  I learned how to wash dishes in the dirt, how to keep frogs from getting into our hut, and how to best kill the big spiders that showed up on the backyard fence every night. (Flipflops are better for this task than Chacos, as it turns out. You need a nice smooth shoe bottom that doesn't have any treads for the spiders to hide in, and then you smash the spider and give it a good smear before lifting the shoe.)


I learned that I would never want to be a celebrity. We didn't have any anonymity in the village: we stood out in every way, and every time we left our huts, someone wanted to talk to us or show us something or introduce us to someone else. Everywhere we walked, people would call our names and want to beckon us over, or at least exchange greetings with us. We developed a strategy of not stopping when people greeted us. Instead, we'd exchange the traditional greetings, but we'd keep on walking, since if we stopped, who knows how many people would want to greet us, or when we would have had a chance to start walking again?! (And trust me, when I'm walking to the latrine, I am not in the mood to stop for a million greetings.) We got so tired of the constant social interaction that we took to hiding out in Rose's hut in the afternoons, avoiding the worst of the heat as well as the attention. 

The silver lining of this suffocating cloud of celebrity is that I never felt unsafe out there in the middle of the bush, since at any given moment, probably a dozen people or more knew where I was. When Rose and I decided to take a walk to the neighboring village, it felt like a big adventure. We made sure to tell our host family where we were going so that no one would be concerned. But we needn't have worried: people from the neighboring village immediately spread the word that we had visited them, and by the time we returned home, it seemed like everyone in our own village knew where we had been. It's a small world!

At this point, you may be wondering why I'm glad we stayed in the village. I liked learning Wolof and getting to practice it with people every time I stepped outside. I liked walking out into the bush and watching the sunrise or the sunset over the vast expanse of land. I liked developing the strength, patience, and confidence to survive somewhere so foreign to me. But most of all, I liked connecting with the villagers, especially our host family and our favorite kids. 


When we first arrived, I felt like an anthropologist on a quest to learn more about Really Poor People Who Live in a Village. I felt awkward interacting with them, and I felt overwhelmed by everything that was new, hard, and dirty about their way of life. But as the days melted into one another, and as I communicated more with people, I slowly started to feel more connected to people. People greeted me, and I greeted them in return. I asked them simple questions about what they were doing, and they would explain their work to me. Kids called my name and tried to get me to dance, and they took me out to the fields to gather peanuts, and then laughed at my attempts to find peanuts in the dirt. We sat around the gas stove at night and drank hot sweet milk with people from our compound. And throughout it all, even though I still felt self-conscious about my wealth, my privilege, my skin, my clothes, and all of the other things that make my life different from theirs, I also started to connect with them as fellow human beings. For this, I am humbled and grateful.

We've taken many more photos than I could ever post on the blog, so here are the links to our photo albums from the past 2 months, so you can take a look! 


Christmas: http://tinyurl.com/gambiachristmas
Village life: http://tinyurl.com/villagelife
China: http://tinyurl.com/shenzhenchina