Journal Post 11/5

Bright and early yesterday morning, Elizabeth, Alicia, and I caught a gele-gele (all by ourselves!) to Soma. I was able to deliver my note personally to Tombo and felt great. I was also able to return the dish that Arroy gave me with the spaghetti and I filled it with some boiled peanuts, and that was great too.

Anyways, gele-geles are beat up looking vans fit for 15 people with skinny dilapidated seats. They all look pretty worn out but keep on trucking people and things (bags, bicycles, carts, donkeys, chickens, etc. are stacked on the roof) from one place to another. It is one of the cheapest ways to travel in The Gambia.. but not the cheapest. We waited at the korosma which is a junction waiting area, hopped on, and we were off. About 25 minutes later, we arrived, disagreed with prices and I was setting my foot down, and finally settled at 25 dalasi. They were trying to charge us for 35! Psh no. 25 wasn't awful since it's usually 20-25 D.

We walked around a little bit before arriving at Gamtel, one of the leading phone companies and they had 3 empty fast working computers we could use for 20 Dalasi an HOUR! Plus it was fast!Talk about score. Naturally, I spent 3 hours there - totally could've done more, too. That's where I typed like my fingers were on fire to update my blog... sorry if descriptions were not rich. These blog entries are what I do every night before bed and I'm usually super tired by then, or super tired of writing at a weird angle so the ink in my pen can come out. After staying until a little after noon and getting our phones charged, we headed out. We walked around Soma which is a crossroad town between the urban capital and the eastern most half of the country. There was one huge road that cut the town in half. This road was flanked by shops and stands on both sides. There was a "toubab store" which caters to foreigners by selling western goods like Colgate toothpaste, prawn crackers (of course from China), drinks in refrigerators, etc. I found a surprising amount of stuff that I could also find in China and this is a store that our PC friends frequent often. There were seller stands that preceded the storefronts selling food and fruits, flip flops, clothes, bags, mattresses, and anything and everything. If you go down into the side streets which are like small veins that curl around the back of the main street, it's a lot cooler since there's shade but equally abundant in stuff to buy. There was a plethora of just RANDOM STUFF 9pasta, pens, batteries, suit cases, etc.). Needless to say, we were toubab'd a lot more from annoying kids (disrespectful!) than back in our own village) and I Couldn't even set them straight because they all speak another language! I speak Serehule (9% of the population) while they all spoke Mandinka (40ish%?) and Wolof (15ish%?). Note to self, learn key phrases in each language above the general greetings. Or just the general greetings is fine.

We wound up in a food market and the flies were EVERYWHERE. I never even saw Chinese markets that bad. It was like a storm of flies zipping from vegetable to fish, from fish to the ground, from ground to the humans, bleugh. People were friendly and tried to speak in English. The variety of food was sparse (a metric boat load of mini peppers, bananas, potatoes, fried/dried fish), but everything's so EXPENSIVEEE. Apparently Soma is the most expensive because it is at the crossroads. A teeny tiny apple was 25 D which was smaller than the size of my fist and I have baby hands! A carrot that's smaller than the distance from my thumb and pinky was 30 D. WTH! If toubabs think that's outrageous, how do native Gambians afford this stuff? The most affordable thing at the end of the day was the internet!

Of course, we didn't buy anything and decided to head back to Jalanbereh. We went to the car park and got directed to the gele gele heading to our village. We haggled for price - they wanted 35 D again but I was adamant on 25. They finally relented and told us to sit on benches again infested with flies... but in the shade. Some people came and left but we waited forever - 1.45 hours to be exact. Alicia was having none of that shit and went up to the apprentice boy helping the driver to ask why we weren't leaving yet. He said they were waiting for the gele gele to fill up with more people and he gave her lip IN ADDITION to toubabing her and she snapped. She marched right up to him, attitude literally dripping out from every pore in her body and I'm witnessing this from afar, and told him he was being disrespectful. We left the car park and headed to the Gamtel office to ask for directions to a bus stop. We hiked at least half a mile to the next bus parking area with the help of a ranger for the wildlife conservation up-country who spoke great English and took pity on us.

Amazingly enough, we met Ida on the way back!!!! And even better, the bus was even CHEAPER - it was 10 D! We were so hungry and dying to pee by the time we arrived at Ida's place for lunch. After eating, I was exhausted, headed home to tend to the garden, showered, dinnered all of three bites, and passed out. My mom called me but I was too delusional to have a conversation with. She'll have to get me at a better time.

Today, I went to Jenoi for training. I looked in a mirror for the first time in ages and I look like a mess. I'll need to do some crowd control on my eyebrows. My PC colleagues made a no-shave-until-swear-in pact and swore that none of us will, as the title says, shave until swear in which is in the 2nd week of December. It was a long day filled with trainings about politics, facts, food security, and sexual assault/awareness. I was sharing some of my insight of being a Chinese American with the staff and I'm so happy they're interested! I also found out super exciting news that I scored an Intermediate Low on my baseline language test which is a little bit better than average. I think average was a Novice High, one level below Intermediate Low. I'm just a small step ahead but that means I have to work so much harder from now on until the final test. I was also thrilled that some of the kids in Jenoi still remembered my name (Jess He, Jess He, Jess He!) and some of the ladies remembered my Gambian name! IT was just about dark when I got home. I didn't get to fetch water like I intended to but my family was nice enough to wash my clothes AND give me back my soap (out of respect, a huge thing. Normally when you give someone clothes to wash with a bar of soap, they don't give it back) without charge even though I wanted to pay. I worked on more math wit hthe kids and used my limited vocabulary but successfully conveyed putting all additions to the left of the equation and all subtraction to the right. I tutored 3 of the older ones and the host sister which I'm closest to really excels. I was also able to indirectly tell the 16 year old who was toubabing me that I didn't like being called toubab and that I want for them to tell their friends that my name is NOT toubab, it's Mariama Dukare. Looked her straight in the eye too. She nodded and we are good now :)

I then turned my attention to the younger kids and there's this one girl who is so spoiled because she's the youngest. I always tell her to wait even though she's always tapping on my shoulders and wanting to contribute but she's not at the upper level yet. She's very cute though and I will be teaching her the art of patience because I always will focus on her/the younger ones. I'll have to split the kids up into lower/middle/upper groups... somehow. I mostly played a game to get them to count with their fingers correctly and use English numbers more. It was fun! I did, however, find out that the brainy, reserved but helpful/respectful Spanish/Serehule bilingual boy who I REALLY liked is going to Serekunda - the same place the Sierra Leone girl went - tomorrow for school ... for the next 9 years? Jeez! Good luck to him. Tomorrow I have to wake up super early to pack for an overnight stay in Jenoi... we'll be finding out our permanent sites and I'll be grilling Ida all about it. In other news, the three rows of okra I planted three days ago are already sprouting! Talk about fast.