Tillo Kandita Bake! (the sun is very hot)

Official Volunteers after swear in ceremony at the Ambassador's

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve last blogged.  A lot and not much at all has happened all at the same time since you last heard from me.  Towards the end of training myself and about 10 other trainees in my group got a bout of (what the doctor thinks was) e-coli poisoning! It was brutal, we over flowed the septic and used the bathroom more times than is possible to count or remember… it was insane, but at least we had each other and lived through the experience. 

This photo from Kombo made me laugh, they will not stop until they serve the world with beautiful hair.

Since then we got a few supplies from the markets in Kombo (the city area) and then were dropped off at our “permanent villages” I was there for about four weeks when I started experiencing adverse side effects from my prescribed anti-malaria medication- mefloquine.  This is not uncommon but sucked, I was sleeping an average of 4 hours a night and started to feel pretty loopy.  Losing energy fast in the 120 deg heat drove me to tell the doc and ask for a change in meds.  Now that that’s resolved I will be heading back to site for the duration of what is dubbed our “3 month challenge”- our first 3 months of service as official volunteers where we get used to the heat- a quick note on that: the title of this blog is the response to any greeting and or topic of conversation every day all the time in my village and im sure all villages across Gambia.  It is HOT and it is hot because it is the dry season and we are too close to the equator to escape the constant ball of fire (sun) and the Harmattan winds that blow across the sahara are hot as well.  SO we talk about its everpresence all the time, - lack of everything (electricity, cold water, food, etc.) and get really good at our local languages AND of course pondering the philosophical reality of developing vs developed world…ex: how resourceful Gambians are- they make use of everything and anything until it disintegrates and vanishes into Saharan sand dust.  To quote a fellow new volunteer “Gellys (the local taxi bus) will break down in the middle of the country.  Sometimes they do not have matching wheels, suspension, or sometimes they have a tree branch tied together to hold together a broken axel.  I cringe because I can hear the dying, out of tune engines asking to be put out of their misery.”  They make things last, whether it’s safe or not, well that’s left to chance……  These gellys are very colorful and miraculously run with the random spare parts such as plastic bags and bubble gum known to repair them.  Click and Clack would have a field day with these guys.…

Konkoron wielding machete, village boys and girls running.

            While at site I have been busying myself with a few things such as walking/ biking the 14k to the Chimp Rehab Facility (Baboon Island).  On the way back one day (actually my first time there we walked and I was so spent) it was probably like 115 deg F and I was running low on water.  About 5k into the walk we reached a village where the Konkoron (the cultural French fry looking guy) who runs around with a machete or 2 clanking them and scaring village boys, is signifying that its time for circumcision camp to begin.  Everyone ran into their compounds and shut the doors, the village instantly became a ghost town.  I was concerned with my dwindling water supply and weighing the risk of jardia or other parasites against dehydration when the grown men I was with also proceeded to run into a compound telling me to follow.  When grown men run from the konkoron you know it’s serious.  As we ran from the French fry man into a nearby house and sat down, the sweat running down my face as fast as I was drinking water, I realized there was like 20 men women and children all gathered in this hut hiding (making it even hotter under the corrugate metal roof mind you).  I had to laugh on the inside as this was quite the scene.  Eventually, because everyone was too afraid to go outside, they flipped on the generator and turned on their 14-inch television.  It was insane, I was sitting in the middle of this village in a hut in the middle of Gambia hiding from a French fry machete wielding man watching botched kung fu movies with English voice over.  I couldn’t believe my eyes, ears, or drenched body. I pinched my arm to know I wasn’t dreaming or having hallucinations from the mefloquine….. nope it was real.  After the kung fu movie finished King Kong came on and that’s when we decided it was safe to leave, or was it? We made it home several hours later with a donkey cart sweeping us back into my village for the last 2 kilometers as my feet were about to fall off.  It was quite the day and yes there were monkeys and baboons at Baboon Island…..  

The inside of my hut, super sweet.

The view out the front of my hut to my family's hut. round grass fence in the middle is the tree we planted for future shade insh A'llah (god willing)

Red Colobus Monkey, chillaxin'

Green Vervet monkey with baby under belly looking for loose peanuts.

Random boy selling mint while waiting for my gelly to fix a tire.  Part of the philosophizing I was talking about, note the shirt and the fact that this boy is selling mint for like 3 cents and not at school.  Gambians are big Obama fans...

The inside of a typical Gelly, you don't want to see the outside....