"Are you going to blog about this?"

Rumor has it that the Roads Authority is paving the road outside our office. This is, ultimately, great news. For now, however, it means that the road leading to our office is dominated by tractors and rollers, and no one is allowed to drive or park on our road, so I've reverted to taxis as my commuting vehicles of choice. Yesterday afternoon, on my way home, I was sitting in the back seat of a yellow taxi, feeling hungry, sweaty, and tired, looking forward to getting home and taking my second of three showers of that day. When the driver pulled over to let out a passenger, I was surprised when the man in the front seat turned around and asked me, "Do you mind if I stop here for a few minutes? I need to go there and pick something up." He pointed across the street at the secondary school.

Keep in mind that these are taxis that run on scheduled routes: they'll pick you up and drop you off anywhere along the route, but that's it. If you want to deviate from the route, or loiter for any length of time, you get a Town Trip, i.e., you pay for your own taxi to take you wherever you choose. Thus my surprise and annoyance at the man's request to stop.

I was quiet for a moment, debating how annoyed to be in my reply. "No, I need to keep going," I said. He apologized and said it would just take a minute, and I sighed, preparing myself for some sort of interminable stop. Yet before I could settle too deeply in my cocoon of self-righteous annoyance, Mr. Quickstop was back. He had merely popped across the street to buy a bag of groundnuts from the old woman sitting on the side of the road. I could feel my little grey cloud lift as our taxi pulled back out into traffic.

As we proceeded along Kairaba Avenue, I half-listened as the man and the driver talked in a local language. From what I could tell, they seemed to be discussing how much money the taxi driver makes in a day, although I could only understand the few English words they sprinkled in their conversation. When the other back-seat passenger hopped out, the man in front turned around again to ask me, "Are you Peace Corps?" which is a question I hear a lot. I said no. He asked me if I spoke Mandinka, the language they'd been speaking. I told him that no, I only speak a little Wollof. "All the Peace Corps people these days, they all seem to speak Mandinka, so I thought maybe you could understand, sorry," he told me, apparently a bit concerned at having excluded me from their conversation.

Then he surprised me further by apologizing for his earlier stop. "I'm sorry about that," he said. "It's just that I promised someone I would bring groundnuts, and I forgot. Are you going to blog about this on the Internet?"

"No. Why?"

"It's just that, I didn't want to trouble you, that's why I asked your permission. You know, these Peace Corps people, any time something happens to them, they write about it in their blogs, and I don't like it when I'm reading there on the internet, and they're saying things about all of the bad things that have happened to them here." I assured him that no, no, I wasn't upset, that he had been very quick during his stop, that it wasn't a problem. Then, as we approached a mosque, he asked me whether I had ever considered becoming a Muslim. Again, I said no, not really, I don't know much about it, and he encouraged me to read the Qur'an.

Of course I need not point out the irony of blogging about a situation where I specifically told someone I wouldn't blog. And in some ways, I feel a bit like I've betrayed him by sharing this story. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt struck by the man's question, and I wanted to reflect on it. Even though I know that the Internet breaks down walls, and that there is nothing (save money and access to computers) to stop Africans from reading blogs written by Peace Corps volunteers and other sojourners, I still didn't really consider the possibility that non-Westerners were reading these cross-cultural chronicles, let alone moderating their behavior because of them.

While the man didn't actually go so far as to stay in the taxi when I told him that I needed to keep going, the fact that he bothered to ask permission of me, and not of the other passenger in the car, makes me realize that my presence here affects other people in ways I have not even imagined. Since our move here, I have been hyper-aware of all of the ways in which living here has changed me, but I never stopped to think about the ways in which my living here may affect Gambians. Sure, there is the obvious effect, I hope, of improving the lives of people who buy our lights. But I can't help but wonder, in what I hope is not too inflated a sense of self-importance, how else my presence affects the cultural climate, for better or worse. I can only hope that I will find out more as we go along.

My Level Best

It was only supposed to be a quick trip to Serrekunda Market to meet with a potential customer. At the guidance of the friend traveling with us, I turned the car down the crowded, narrow market road, navigating slowly down a dusty, unpaved road teeming with people on foot, people on bicycles, people pushing wheelbarrows full of household items, and people carrying stacks of fabric on their heads. I tried to turn down a side street where we needed to go, but a man in the crowd waved his arms at me and shouted, "One way! One way!" Then, in Wollof, our friend asked the man where we could park, since we couldn't drive right to the shop where we needed to go. The man gestured to a place further down the road where a few taxis had pulled over to park in front of some market stalls selling fabric and plastic buckets. I pulled up in front of the plastic buckets, getting as far to the side as I could, and we went off to see our customer.

Twenty minutes later, as I walked up to the driver's side of the car, keys already in hand, a female police officer approached me. I have a theory about female police officers, which is that I'd rather deal with them than the male police officers. The women generally seem less threatening, and less inclined to yell at me, than the male police officers I've encountered on the roads so far. "Is this your car?" she bellowed. "What are you doing here? You cannot park here! Show me your documents!" Gulp. So much for my theory. I hand her my license and the insurance paperwork. She folds my license inside the insurance paperwork and holds it tightly in her hands. I hate surrendering the originals, but officers always ask for originals. Now they are her leverage over me. "Come with me," she says. "We're going to the police station."

Ah, the dreaded words: We're going to the police station. Doug and I have already bribed our way out of this dreaded phrase on four separate occasions, and for a moment, I have hope that we can do it a fifth time. But suddenly, one, two, three more police officers of varying ranks surround us, their voices raised in various degrees of anger and authority. I glance down the street, and my chest tightens as I see a gleaming white police tow truck pulling up alongside our car. It's the first tow truck I've ever seen in the country, and it is now blocking all traffic on this cramped one-way street. A long line of taxis and cars behind it are now honking furiously, and the highest ranking police officer starts yelling at the others to hurry up.

"Where is the key?" the female police officer demands of me. 

"It's here, it's here," I say, keeping the keys firmly inside my purse. "Please, I'm here now. I do not want any trouble. You do not need to tow my car. Please, I will drive it to the station myself." 

"Talk to my boss," she says, waving in his general direction. I look over at the man, and he is gesticulating angrily at everyone while talking to Doug and our friend. At some point, he waves the tow truck along in frustration, since it has been blocking traffic for too long, and I breathe a small sigh of relief as I watch the truck roll slowly away from us. 

After a bit more heated gesturing, the police boss assigns our case to another, lower ranking male police officer who has been hovering about. The female officer hands my documents to our new escort, who joins us in the car. When I look up, I see that the tow truck has picked up another poor soul's car further down the road, and I am suddenly grateful that we got to our car before the tow truck did. The officer in our car tells me to follow the tow truck down the road. Where the road widens slightly, the police officers bark at me to make a seemingly impossible U-turn as dozens of onlookers stare and point. I hear someone call my name, and out of the corner of my eye, I spot my tailor in the crowd, but I am too distracted, nervous, and embarrassed to wave back at her. 

We survive the U-turn, and the police boss and the original officer both yell at the officer in our car to take us directly to the station. Dang it; there go all of my hopes of bribing this man. We crawl down the street to the station, and my heart sinks even further as we roll through the green gates.

Our escort asks me, politely enough, for the key to the car. I fumble nervously with my keychain for a moment, and finally manage to detach the key. Then the three of us follow the officer into a small office where half a dozen people sit waiting for two other officers to process their documents. Our escort hands my papers to the man sitting at the desk, who passes them off to the woman next to him. I watch as she copies my name onto an official-looking sheet of paper, then starts writing other things.

When she finishes, she calls my name. Her first question is not what I expect, and I have to ask her to repeat it. "Can you read?" she repeats, and I nod. "Here, read this." She hands me my summons. It states, in very official language, that on today's date, on or about 14:30, I have hereby obstructed traffic on a public highway, etc., etc., and that I must appear in court tomorrow morning for a hearing. Appear in court? For a parking violation? There wasn't even a No Parking sign! She asks me to sign the page, but I hedge, saying that Doug is calling our friend who is a police officer, and I want to wait for him to arrive. She huffs a bit, and another officer says, "You refuse to sign our papers, you don't listen to us, then how do you expect us to help you?"

I change tack a bit, becoming apologetic, asking if I can please just talk with someone, it was a mistake, I am very sorry, is there anything I can do? She says that I can appeal to the man inside the inner office. Our friend nudges me forward, saying that I should go in to make the appeal by myself, not wait for our police officer friend to arrive. He can tell by listening to their conversations in Wollof that they were willing to excuse the offense since they've decided we are foreigners who don't know any better, but they got offended when we started to talk about "calling our guy." I ask if it's OK to go into the office to speak to the officer in charge. Doug comes with me.

Inside, I find three officers, one of whom seems to be the leader of the group. "Excuse me, sir, may I speak to you about my situation?" He agrees. "I am so sorry, sir. I have made a mistake. You see, I am new to the country, and I asked the local people if it was OK to park there, and they said yes, so I thought it was OK. I never meant to cause any trouble, I am very sorry for this, I understand now that parking there is not allowed. I appeal to you for your assistance." I am humble, meek, penitent, slightly formal. I listen and nod while he explains how they are trying to keep the streets clear, that the market road is already too crowded, and that they are simply trying to do their jobs as police officers to keep the streets clear. "Yes, yes, of course, you must keep it safe for everyone," I say. "I understand, I will not ever park there again, I promise." He tells me that he has left my situation to the discretion of the officer in the front office, but that he will speak to the man for me.

Back in the front office, I stand in front of the desk officer who is still in possession of my license, my insurance, and most importantly, my car key. I have heard him request a $100 fine from another man in the room, and I steel myself for a similar amount, though I do not know the other man's offense. Surely, I think, he will not charge me any less, given that my skin color screams money to most people. He looks up at me and makes similar comments about needing to keep the roads clear. I repeat my apologies, more abridged this time. He says that he knows that I am new to the country, I am still learning the ways of the road, and that they will let me go with a warning this time. I promise that I understand now, and that I will not cause a problem again. Just when I think he will ask me for money, he picks up my court summons and tears it into pieces. "Don't worry, it is finished," he says. I ask for my car key, afraid to take it, uncertain if I am really free. "Is that your key? Take it," he tells me. I pick it up off the table and walk outside to where Doug has gone to greet our police officer friend.

"Did he really just let you go?" Doug asks.

"Yes, just a warning," I reply. We can hardly believe it.

The most unnerving thing about interacting with police officers here is not knowing the rules. Back home, if I get pulled over for speeding or for making a wrong turn, I am annoyed, or perhaps angry at myself, but not scared. I'm not worried about how to interact with the police officers; I know that I hand them my license and registration, they scan it, maybe ask me if I knew that my headlight was out, or that I really shouldn't have turned out into traffic quite so quickly. And except for that night in college that a cop pulled me over on the freeway in downtown San Jose and made me get out of the car and accused me of being both drunk and stoned (um, hello? I don't think so!), I know that at most, they'll just write me a ticket, hand it over, and then I'll go on my merry way.

Here, there are no such rules. I have been yelled at on multiple occasions by police officers, not in a threatening, I'm-going-to-hurt-you sort of way, but in a way that implies that I am an idiot driver with no right to be behind the wheel. Each time, I have also been told that I have to go to the station for a court summons -- this seems to be the common threat for every traffic violation, however small. And Doug and I have both been stopped for questionable reasons that seem like blatant attempts to get bribes, like the day a cop pulled Doug over because "our car sounded too loud." Up til now, we've paid small bribes to avoid going to the station. Officers don't usually ask for bribes outright, but will accept them if they are presented in a relatively suave, let's-not-have-this-hassle sort of way.

But today, I'm actually sort of glad that we finally went to the station. As I sat there in the office, crossing my fingers and sending up silent prayers for a quick resolution, I realized that the people in front of me were not my enemies. They're just people. They aren't out to get me (just maybe my money). I'm not going to get dragged into the back room and tortured. If I am apologetic, and state my case humbly and sincerely, going to the station does not have to be the end of the world. As our friend put it today, you just need to do your level best, and everything should work out. (And if your level best doesn't work, then you call in your police officer friend.)

Don't get me wrong, I hope today was the first and the last time I ever have to drive through those green gates. But now it's one less unknown for me to fear. I have been there, done that, and written the blog post. As much as I hope to never visit a police station here again, I feel a bit more confident that I can handle the situation if I do.

That said, I don't think I'll be parking near a market anytime soon.

Story collage, Month 1

I'm not a huge photo buff, but each week here, I seem to collect a few random photos of moments that have stories attached to them. Here are a few snapshots from the past month in Kombo. (Kombo is the generic name for the urban region we live in; it's kind of like saying "the Bay Area.")

Once our house feels "finished," I'll post a lot more house photos, inside and out. In the meantime, though, here's a "view from the roof" shot to give you a sense of why I love the roof. Our latest endeavor, spearheaded by Doug, is to build a simply canopy for the roof so we can sit in the shade. Roof party, anyone? 

 

Last week, Rose and I went to Kairaba Avenue (think El Camino Real) to take cloth to our tailor to get clothes made. On our way there, we discovered that the road was teeming with schoolchildren in uniforms of every color, waving flags and occasionally breaking into cheer. Police officers had cleared the streets of traffic, and we waited for awhile in the shade to see if we'd get to see the motorcade that everyone was waiting for. But after a half hour or so, we lost interest, and went to ask our tailor what was going on. She told us that the president of Senegal was coming to town.

I've been curious about a large sunken area (we've nicknamed it The Canyon and The Dump) not far from our house, so I went to investigate. It is indeed a small canyon-ish place with hills and vallies that has become a de facto dump (though there is also an official dump in a different area of town). I ran into a group of wild pigs rooting around in the trash; one even posed nicely for this picture. I was also surprised and horrified to discover that people live in The Dump, too. You can't see their houses too well in this photo, but they live in buildings made of mud bricks with corrugated tin roofs. Their laundry is strung up on lines above the trash, and they even have little gardens growing. Oddly enough, their houses look bigger and better equipped than our huts in the village, though I'm still sad about the fact that they live surrounded by so much trash. And let's not talk about how I felt when I saw a little kid rummaging through a big trash heap. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised; the villagers in Sanchin Daxaar were only too eager to make use of our trash, which made us feel guilty and a bit creeped out. It's weird to throw away a soda can (sorry, people, there's no recycling here), and then to walk out of your hut the next morning and see a little kid drinking out of it. (Yes, that actually happened.) We compromised by saving up all of our "useful" trash (water bottles, juice cans, cereal boxes, milk powder container, etc.), and giving it to our host family at the end of our stay, since we just couldn't get comfortable with the idea of actually watching people use our trash while we were still living there.

It feels a bit strange to follow the "people living in a trash heap" photo with a photo of our car; perhaps, were I more awake right now, I'd spend some more time pondering the extremities and inequities that characterize life here. In any case, here's Doug in our spiffy car. I'm having fun learning to drive a stick shift, and Rose and Doug are both excellent teachers. Yesterday, Doug spent EIGHT hours running around town to get the necessary stickers and permits we need to actually drive it around town. Before that, we'd been stopped several times for having overly-tinted windows and for not having the appropriate police stickers on our windshield. But now our car is bestickered and tint-free, so we should be good to go!

Rose, aka Travel Chef, is a maven of creativity in the kitchen. Here, she demonstrates her ability to turn leek roots into body hair.

In addition to cracking me up in the kitchen, Rose has also been teaching me to cook some awesome dishes. This is a picture of us last night, when she cooked Spring Pasta (aka pasta with a yummy, light vegetable sauce instead of red sauce). It was damn good, people! She has also introduced us to the many pleasures of fresh feta cheese, which they sell at several local grocery stores. It tastes so much better fresh than it does in those little crumbly bits back home!

Just like in the village, there are chickens wandering around all over the urban area, including on our street. Today, the neighborhood chicken and her chicks strolled into our compound while our workers were painting. Before I chased them out, I managed to snap a few photos. Paul, one of our workers, seemed amused, and commented on the fact that I was photographing the chickens. I explained that unless you're on a farm in the US, you generally don't find chickens wandering around in your front yard!

This afternoon, we hung out at the Bakau Fish Market with a fun Peace Corps Volunteer named Lindsay. Each afternoon, long fishing boats pull up close to shore and dozens of teenage boys with plastic rectangular buckets go splashing out into the waves to collect the fish. You can see people rushing out to meet a boat in the first photo, and a boy in a red shirt balancing a bucket of fish on his head in the center of the second photo. Behind him is a slightly younger tag-a-long boy who is about to jump up and steal a fish out of the older boy's bucket. We kept musing aloud about how surprising it was that there wasn't someone out there beating the little boys that were jumping up to steal the fish. Occasionally, the boy carrying the bucket would swing out an arm or a leg to try to smack the thief, but overall, the thieves managed to sneak away unscathed, since their targets had to focus all of their attention on not dropping their loads.

* If you want to see bigger versions of the pictures, try right-clicking on the images and opening them in new browser tabs or windows.

Other brushes with celebrity

In my last post, I mentioned how we felt like celebrities in the village. What I forgot to mention is that I have moments of feeling like a celebrity here in the city, too.

Last Friday, we attended the swearing-in ceremony for the most recent group of Peace Corps Volunteers. They have spent the past 10 weeks living in training villages, where they've been learning local languages, preparing for their work in the country, and getting familiar with Gambian culture. They've also been living with D.lights for the past 5 weeks, and have given us lots of great feedback about the lights.

Their swearing-in ceremony took place at the U.S. Ambassador's house, which is a lush compound full of huge trees and gorgeous bougainvillea plants right on the beach. I thought our compound was big, but this place makes our house look like servants' quarters! The ceremony was filmed by the Gambian TV station, GRTS, and we felt a little uncomfortable about how often the TV cameraman filmed us. And given that GRTS is the country's only TV station, anyone who turned on their TV that night got a chance to enjoy the Peace Corps ceremony in its entirety. (A taxi driver told me that neighboring Senegal has a whopping 5 or 6 TV stations.)

That night at dinner, we got a phone call from Doug's Gambian friend Sainey, who told us he had just seen us on TV. Then my language teacher Modou text-messaged us to tell us about our TV appearance. And the next morning, our house painter was all excited about having seen us on TV, and told us that he'd pointed us out to his mom, and that we could visit the TV station and buy a copy of the program if we wanted.

To add to this feeling of celebrity, we picked up one of our two cars last weekend. It's a used sedan in great shape, and in Doug's words, it's pimptastic. Its windows are very darkly tinted, and as we drove around in it for the first time, Doug said he felt like a Cuban dictator. Today, we got stopped at a police checkpoint because apparently such dark tinting requires a permit from the police chief that we don't have. Oops! Luckily, a small bribe made the policeman happy enough to let us go, and we'll get our tinting paperwork sorted out tomorrow morning.

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

The circle of life

Today, a man from our host family's compound died. He has been ill the whole time we've been here. He has been inside a hut nearby, so we haven't met him or seen him, but we've heard people going in and out of the hut to take care of him. Right now, we're holed up inside our huts, trying to stay out of the way as the villagers gather outside Rose's hut for some sort of mourning ritual. I'm not sure exactly what's happening: many people came to our compound, and they seem to be sitting quietly on the ground and on chairs and mats, while a few men speak softly in the background. In the morning, we'll be able to talk with Modou, our language trainer, more about it. In the meantime, I'm left feeling curious and somber.

This is the closest (physically speaking) that I've ever been to someone who is dying. This afternoon, Modou and I were sitting outside maybe a dozen feet from this man's hut, chatting with kids and having our daily language lesson, when the man's sister emerged from his hut, crying and upset. A few moments later, we saw his brother come by, also crying. Modou heard what they were saying and told me that the man had died, and that we should stop our lesson and go to our huts. I went to tell Rose and then Doug, and then we decided to stay together in Rose's hut for the evening, eating dinner there like we usually do.

As the night went on, Rose and I took turns peering out the small holes in her corrugated tin door, trying to see what was happening outside. I felt like a spy, but we decided it was OK since we were not being disruptive. When it came time for Doug and me to go home to our hut, we tried to walk as quietly as we could through the group of people sitting right outside.
* * *
Another hour has passed, during which I heard some men chanting and singing, and then things got pretty quiet again.
* * *
We feel very close to the circle of life here. A baby was born in our compound on the day we arrived. There have been two naming ceremonies for new babies in the village in the past week. Just like animals here are not confined to pens or cages, birth and death are not confined to hospitals. They are right here next to us.

Quote of the Day

Heard tonight over a delicious dinner of baked beans, vegetables, and macaroni:
  Rose: "I really don't care where Tiger Woods' dick has been."
  Doug: "As long as it hasn't been in our food."