A Month in The Gambia

I've drafted a few posts for this blog, but none have felt right so I've kept them in the catacombs of Blogger for now; one day those posts may see the light of day, but today I just want to share a bit about my day-to-day in The Gambia over the past month, instead of my other grand musings.

For some background, I am spending a year (May 2023 through May 2024) working as a Peace Corps Response volunteer in The Gambia. My site is "in Kombo," which is what rural Gambians call the capital region: I live with a Fula host family in a village called Abuko and commute to an area called Bakau. I work a desk job with the Department of Agriculture, in their office of Monitoring and Evaluation; while we will start going on treks to the provinces in the next couple of months, the first month has focused on developing data collection and reporting tools from the office as I settle into life in The Gambia.

A Little About The Gambia

The Gambia is the smallest country by land mass in mainland Africa, stretching to be about 30 miles at its widest and bisected by the River Gambia for its 300 mile length. It sits on the western coast of Africa, surrounded by Senegal on three sides and the abutting Atlantic Ocean on its fourth. The country has a Sahelian climate, with a rainy season from July to September when it is most hot, humid, and stormy followed by nine dry, temperate months. Essentially, it is nine months of Los Angeles and three months of summer in Miami.

Abuko, where I live, is a charming little village that sits on the southern edge of the capital region, with much less hustle and bustle compared to the areas to the north. Only very recently did it stop being a farming community (as my boss said, "20 years ago, Abuko was a bush") and it has very little commercial development, except for the main drag along the highway that connects it to Kombo, where there are some small gazebo-esque shops, motor oil stores, and stalls that make up a small market. Tourism is rare in Abuko, so the little kids will call out "toubab" (foreigner) as I walk by, but I am definitely not the first white person that people have seen so the gawking among adults is minimal. I'll flesh this out more in a future blog post, because it is a major part of my experience that eludes being captured in the "here is my week" format, but standing out from a crowd is a new experience for me and truly changes how the world interacts with you, even if you don't let it change how you interact with the world.

Bakau, where I work, is a more touristy area, though it is not the main tourist area of Kombo. Bakau is the neighborhood in the northernmost point of Kombo, where the colonial British had their administrative complex. My work campus is a half-mile west of the hotels that sit on the beach and a half-mile east of the Bakau downtown, which has a bank, grocery store, library, and larger market, among other stores. Bakau is more developed than Abuko, but is not over-run with tourists (at least not yet, we'll see come October to February when the northern Europeans invade) and doesn't seem as geared towards tourism as Senegambia, the main tourist district.

Other notes and observations:

• The country is a democracy, with it's current president elected on the heels of a 22 year dictatorship in 2017. Though I have heard people lament the lack of authority in the current administration, it has been remarkable to hear and read about the experiences of living under a brutal dictator.
• The population is majority Islam, around 96 percent, with most of the remainder identifying as Christian. 
• The country is facing rapid urbanization, in part due to migration from neighboring West African countries and in part due to an influx of youths moving from the provinces to the capital region in search of economic opportunity.
• The lack of economic opportunity also drives a lot of out-migration, though only a small portion of it is legal. Many young Gambian men attempt to get to Europe by going over to Mali, up to Algeria, and across the Mediterranean Sea. This route, called "the back way" is harrowing and has resulted in many deaths, but the lack of economic opportunity coupled with the lure of sending remittances to their family pushes many young men to attempt the journey.
• Most of the economic activity is informal, with the public transportation system consisting of a mostly unregulated assortment of taxis, vans, and buses and most commerce taking place in street markets.

What is a Peace Corps Response Volunteer?

Peace Corps Response is a relatively new concept, at least in it's current iteration. It used to be a program for returned Peace Corps volunteers, but since the pandemic, it pivoted to bringing new early- and mid-career professionals to developing countries for 3 to 12 month stints in roles specified by organizations within those countries. The only reason I emphasize it is that my experience looks a lot different than the 30 some odd traditional Peace Corps volunteers in the country. 

My position was created in consultation with the Department of Agriculture, who asked Peace Corps to bring in someone with a specialized skill set who could help in rebuilding their monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system. As a result, I work within the M&E unit of the Department of Agriculture as a 9 to 5 (except that work ends at 12:30pm on Fridays here, which is awesome!) during the week. A traditional Peace Corps volunteer in The Gambia is embedded in a rural community, working 7 days a week with self-determined hours, helping alleviate issues that their host community has identified in either the health, education, or agriculture sector.

To start service, I had a two-week orientation/training period in the capital region that focused mostly on safety and medical matters, which was a lot different than the three months that traditional volunteers spend in the provinces doing a curriculum that focuses on language and culture. As a result, I can't speak with the local languages (Wolof, Mandinka, and Fula) that traditional volunteers approach fluency in by the end of their training. I am working on this through self-study, plus an intensive language week scheduled for next month, but it has made community integration more challenging.

Luckily, I live with an incredible host family. This is similar to the traditional volunteers, however their families have young children while my youngest host sister is around 22. Additionally, most members of my host family speak English, with my host mother being fluent, unlike the traditional volunteers who are immersed in the local languages. In my compound, I live in an ADU that faces the courtyard behind the main house. My lodging is a lot more posh than the traditional Peace Corps site, with running water, electricity, ceiling fans, and ample space to myself. Along with my host father (Ba), host mother (Ne), host sister Bobo, host sister Jarri, and host nephews both of whom are named Ibrahima, there is also a dog named Bella and a cat I have taken to calling Enel, who was hitherto nameless.

My house is essentially a chain of three 10 by 10 rooms with a bathroom on the side and a veranda in the front. The house is furnished by the Department of Agriculture and has all the amenities I could want. The veranda is a nice shaded area in the front of the house, which serves as the patio/entrance. Once inside, I am in my living room, where there is a desk, couch, and TV; to the right is my kitchen (which has a plastic folding table, 2 burner stove, cabinet, sink, fridge, microwave, and water filter), while to the left is my bedroom and bathroom. The bedroom has a full size bed, covered by mosquito netting, an end table, and a trunk where I store my clothes. The bathroom has the full complement, a shower, sink, mirror, and flush toilet. I'll post a tour video in a future blog post.

While these seem like the basic amenities of American home, I can't emphasize how much of an aberration I am compared to the traditional Peace Corps volunteers in The Gambia. Other than the water filter, table, and stove, pretty much every other piece of furniture is a luxury not provided to other volunteers: most volunteers have to walk to get water, have no electricity, take bucket showers, live in the same structure as their host family, etc. These luxuries and my urban setting, plus the presence of WiFi in order to perform my duties at work, really make this experience very different than the proto-typical Peace Corps volunteer experience that comes to mind.

A Week in the Life

So how does that end up manifesting in terms of a week as a Peace Corps Response volunteer? I'm going to break it down into four different parts: Monday through Thursday and then each day of the weekend. I'm going to try and be as detailed as possible - excuse the minutia but in a few years I'll be coming back to this to remember what my routine was, so I want to capture as much as I can

Monday through Thursday

I wake up at 6am to get ready for work. I hop in the shower, shave (every other day - can't believe I actually have stuck to this), take a multi-vitamin and some allergy meds, throw on a polo and some slacks, brew myself 8 cups of coffee that I pack in a thermos, cut up a cucumber to bring to work, and head out to meet the M&E driver around 6:45, shooing away Bella's playful lunges on my walk through the compound. On days where there is some extra time, I'll throw in a set of push-ups or spend some time doing an easy NYT crossword puzzle.

I meet Makang by the back gate of the agricultural complex, about 100 feet from the compound's front gate, and we head to my Ne's restaurant at the mouth of the complex. There, I stop and pick up breakfast. which is either grilled chicken thighs, fried chicken thighs, or smoked oysters with stewed onions, maybe once a week she will switch it up with stewed yellow peas or fried shrimp. I don't order, I just pop in, hand over my food bowl, and wait for the delightful surprise; she is a great cook so anything is delicious. She used to give me french fries with breakfast but I've subbed it out with the cucumber or some cooked onions and carrots to try to work some veggies into my diet.

I get back in the car, an early 2000s white Toyota Hilux with a misbehaving battery and no passenger's side mirror, and head to pick up my boss Foday. We drive from Abuko, which is the southern rim of the capital region up to Bunding, which is in the thick of the urbanity, sandwiched between the two major highways so that the sideroads are our only route. When we get there, I move from shotgun to the backseat, as the boss is entitled to his rightful throne. Then we embark to Bakau, with my commute taking anywhere from an hour to ninety minutes depending on the conditions of the side streets and intensity of traffic. During this hour to and from work, I tend to either read or chop it up with Makang and Foday, depending on how talkative everyone is feeling.

The Gambian workplace is largely the same concept as the American, the whole room with desks and office mates where you click-clack away schtick holds, but it also departs in its own ways. Greeting people has great value here: while making time to say hello in the morning is considered a courtesy in the US, it is an expectation if one wants to maintain a working relationship here. Additionally, when eating, my office mates call out "let's have breakfast" to the room, a type of empty proposition that is meant to indicate that you would be willing to share your food if asked to do so. Also, coming and going from the office isn't frowned upon, it is understood if you need to take an hour to go to the bank, run an errand, or take a walk in the garden; in fact, one of my coworkers spends about 6 hours of his day conversing with people in the garden. Aside from garden man, I have three coworkers that fall into the following archetypes: Foday, the upset-the-status-quo boss man, Lamin, the seasoned veteran open to learning new tricks, and Omar, the talented young guy brought in to work directly with me.

Beyond the different cultural customs, the most notable change is the lack of organizational guidelines that are present. There is no central server for file storage, cloud or otherwise, and everyone operates on their own personal email accounts. The first part of my job was setting up an email and OneDrive for the department so that we had shared file storage. Then I moved on to migrating the quarterly reporting from the regional agriculture offices from random Microsoft Word tables into a formalized Microsoft Excel template. Nowadays, I'm building surveys with Omar Cole for extension workers to regularize the data collection so that each regional agriculture office is bringing in data of the same quality and granularity. I've done a bunch of different side tasks along the way over the past month, but the big emphasis is that everything I do is either in collaboration with another staff member or focused on organizational capacity building.

Then, around 4:30, we pile back in the Hilux and head back home, snaking through Kombo on the way back down to Abuko. When I get home, I take my lunch, which is the remainder of what Ne served at the restaurant that day; while Ne and Ba are normally home, they eat before I get back so I take lunch alone most days. Lunch is a stew that is served over a bed of white rice, with the stew depending on the day of the week: domoda (a groundnut stew that is the national dish of The Gambia) on Mondays, benachin (also known as jollof rice) on Tuesdays, curry on Wednesday, soupa kanja (okra stew) on Thursdays, and then a little fried locust egg scramble on Fridays. Then, after lunch, I will spend some time with Ne, who likes to watch Nollywood or Bollywood soap opera/movies in her couple of hours of peace before having to prepare dinner.

The next few hours from 6 to 9 make up my unstructured time for the day, except for the malaria pill that I take promptly at 8. I've avoided making a routine here, instead opting to play it by ear depending on how I'm feeling, which could mean reading a book on the veranda, doing research on graduate school fellowships, working out, doing language learning, writing in my journal (and I should maybe start including this blog), or reaching out to a friend or family member. I try to keep technology usage to a minimum: any time that I find myself binging content on my phone or laptop I try to snap out of it and switch to another activity in the above list. 

Then, I go to sleep. While my host family does eat dinner around 10pm, I am normally asleep by that time if I have work the next morning. Plus, I've found that a bowlful of yogurt and couscous does not exactly make for a smooth send off into dreamland, so even if I am up for dinner I tend to keep it light.

Friday

Same morning schtick, same work schtick, but I get off around 12:30. Some days I'll go see another part of the city, especially if there are Peace Corps people in town that weekend. Other days, I'll head home, then take advantage of the extra time to walk to the market in Tabokoto to grab some vegetables. Also, I tend to stay up for dinner on Fridays to get in some family time, especially if I spend the afternoon gallivanting around town.

Saturday 

Saturday is my main exploration day. I will have a nice, slow morning where I make coffee, read, and spend some time with the family before breakfast. Then, after breakfast, I'll hail a ride in a group taxi or gele gele (a 14 seater van that magically fits 20 in The Gambia) to that weekend's destination. I've visited Lamin and Banjulunding to the south of Abuko, as well as Fajara to the north. I like to rip a long walk after my very sedentary week, so I'll go for about 5-10 miles, popping into cafes and mini markets along the way. This weekend I think I am going to head towards the beach, either Kololi or up in Bakau.

Sunday

Sunday is my boring day, I tend to stay around the house, but it anchors the week in its own way. I start the day with coffee and crosswords, sometimes in the kitchen, other times on the veranda. After breakfast with the family, once it gets close to noon, I make sure to call my parents to gab for a while. 

Then chores commence for the day. While my family lets me use the washing machine for my clothes, I do my undergarments in my house as per custom. This involves hoisting a couple strings that I've cut to certain lengths to be used as clotheslines, one across my bedroom from the bedroom door to the bathroom door, the other stretching across the bathroom from my shower head to my bathroom window above the toilet. I'll get a nice sweep and dust in, scrub the bathroom fixtures and floors, and finish up by mopping. I've also started cooking on Sundays, just making a big thing of beans or veggies to pack for the week, as I miss cooking but also don't have the heart to skip a family meal and eat on my own.

Then, after Sunday's lunch, which is a delightful onion stew over rice, I make sure everything is in its right place, scrub my ceramic water filter columns, and embrace some unstructured time before heading to bed and starting the whole week over again. 

Reflections

Though I've been here since 5/14, the first two weeks were their own little training microcosm that feels very disconnecting from my Peace Corps experience, so it really only feels like I've been here a month. I'm glad that I waited this long to write this post, both as I was/am still creating my routine and now it feels more like a reflection and less like a reaction, as I've been thinking about the experience a lot since the one month mark on 6/25.

There are things that have gone really well, like my relationship with my host mother, my fit at my workplace, my enjoyment of the Gambian cuisine, my habit of reading (so far I've read Crying in H Mart, The Count of Monte Cristo, Development as Freedom, a book about pre-colonial Gambia, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), my groundwork on graduate school stuff, and my weekly explorations. I have enjoyed getting to know the traditional Peace Corps volunteers when they come into town, inviting them to crash at my house when I can, and hopefully will get around to meeting everyone eventually.

At the same time, there are some things I struggle with. Not knowing the local languages, not having a lot of time/energy after work, and being white (along with the associated perception of unending affluence) have made it hard to connect with people in my community in Abuko. Sometimes work can feel like trying to push a feather through a brick, or just someone hitting me over the head with said brick, but I try to focus on the things that I have control over instead of the enormity of the broken M&E system. 

And there are things that I'm working on, like developing healthy habits, delineating boundaries with people, and accepting that I won't always live up to people's expectations. I'm not perfect on any of these fronts, but I'm putting forth a righteous effort to work on them in this Gambian context, which will no doubt serve me in the future.

Overall, I'm really happy I'm here, I think it's a good change for me and I'm excited to see how the year unfolds - and I'll make sure to keep y'all updated. As you can tell, the experience isn't some radical departure from life as I have known it, especially with the familiar flow of a 9 to 5; instead, I feel like it is a new setting with important work where I can also learn about another culture, share my time with a new family, form good habits, and prepare for whatever comes next.

Reach out with any questions, or if you just want to gab for a while!