Trip to Soma / Pakalinding
After the trips to Dakar and my weekend trip to Georgetown I realized I had more time to travel. Most upcountry volunteers don't receive that many visitors so I wondered how many I could reach. I made a conscious decision to try and visit as many volunteers in our group as possible. For most volunteers it would just be a weekend trip; leave on Saturday and come back on Monday in order to be back by Tuesday to teach. While looking at the map at The Fishbowl it occurred to me that I never stayed in Soma before, a town about halfway upcountry on the south bank. I decided I would go to Soma on Saturday. Doug lived near Soma in Pakalinding and was in the kitchen when I announced my plans.
"You're going to Soma on Saturday?"
"Yep. Weekend trip."
"Who are you staying with?"
"No one yet. I figured I just show up and call either Greta or Kate [J.] and say 'I'm here!'"
"I might have to go back there anyway. I can let you know tomorrow whether I'll go with you on Saturday and show you around."
"OK"
This being Thursday night there was another day ahead. Annamarie and Kate [L.] were having dinner together and so the three of us, Bear, Doug, and I had spaghetti had the Fishbowl - a mutual girls night out / guys night out type of thing. A while later Hilary showed up, just getting back from her Spanish class. What followed next was a funny discussion of the semantics of the sentence "I am well," along with the direct object meaning of "me" and "I" in proper usage. Next came a half-hour of experiments of determining if one can count when they are reading. Hilary read aloud of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" while Doug tapped his leg to keep count to see if Hilary could read and count the taps simultaneously. I counted the taps as a double check while Bear couldn't believe we were doing this for half-hour and just sat in the corner playing on his laptop computer. One thing you quickly begin to realize is that you definitely have time in the Peace Corps to do experiments like this for a half-hour without thinking it's a waste of time. What else are you going to do? She was able to count while reading and other experiments to determine exactly how were put on hold for another time.
Friday we all went out to dinner to say goodbye to Robert. He went back to the US permanently that Sunday. Although he was not a member of our training group he became friends with us all. The day before he had a going away dinner with his group and tonight with people from our group. Knowing we would be going out to eat at a somewhat fancy restaurant I thought I should cut my hair since it had been two months without a haircut. Hilary said she would cut my hair for two boxes of Macaroni & Cheese that I got as part of my Christmas packages a few days before. I thought that was a good deal but Bear was trying to convince me otherwise. Although not explicitly stated, the jiff of his argument was basically in the form of: what if someone had a hundred Mickey Mantle baseball cards and he gave one away for a haircut? To him, losing one out of a hundred is nothing but for the person giving the haircut it's as if they won the lottery. In other words, you must savor your Macaroni & Cheese! On the balcony of the Fishbowl I received my haircut, with a few funny mistakes along the way. None to worry about but fun if you noticed them.
An hour later we met at the gas station to find transportation to SeneGambia. It was Kate, Annamarie, Hilary, Robert, and I. He wanted to go to this Indian buffet in the tourist district. As we were waiting on the corner for transportation a van pulled up and told us we could climb in. The odd thing about the van was there was no aparante. He was officially done for the night but figured he could take us to SeneGambia as one last trip. Every time someone wanted to climb in or out along the way he would have to stop the car, turn it off, get out and walk around to open the door. This was not out of courtesy; it was out of necessity as the door could only be opened from the outside.
For D199 (~$7) you can have all you can eat. I noticed something as we sat at the restaurant waiting for the buffet to begin. Volunteers are so used to eating cheap that going out is a luxury for us. The most popular chop-shop that we go to is right across from the Peace Corps Office and we can order a full plate of rice with a chicken leg and sauce for only D10 (~35 cents). A half-chicken is D35 (a little more than one dollar) there. If we feel good enough to go out we step it up a notch and go to someplace that's in the D50-D100 range. When there's an occasion to celebrate, such as a going-away dinner or birthday celebrations, we dress up and go to the tourist district for a fancy meal of $10. Most tourists are in shorts and t-shirts since $10 is nothing to them, but we're all dressed as if we just got back from a wedding.
Dinner was quite good and even paying D199 I could only have two plates and bowl of soup. The all-you-can-eat found new meaning to everyone since we all couldn't eat as much as if let's say we were at an all-you-can-eat resturant in the States. My stomach was full to the point of being painful.
Earlier that day Doug and I agreed to meet at our house at six in the morning to find transport. At a quarter before six I woke up, put on old clothes and waited. There is no point in taking a shower or even putting on new clothes when traveling because within an hour you will be so dusty anyway that you practically wasted your time in the morning by getting ready. After an hour of waiting I left for the Peace Corps Office. On the way there Diana drove by and was kind enough to give me a ride to the office. The reason she was going to the office so early on a Saturday was that Peace Corps was having an auction of old office supplies. I saw it the day before when I went to retrieve the mail and the driver had to stop by the warehouse. There were file cabinets, old computers, desks, and even a few Peace Corps vehicles up for sale. Three hundred people were expected to attend and bid on the items. I told John, the driver, I'd like to bid D200 for the car. Needless to say I didn't win. There is a few reasons for having the auction: All property of Peace Corps is US Government Property and can not be thrown away (except paper and the sort) and they have to be sold at auction with the money going back to the US Government. The money they make from the auction stays within Peace Corps to buy new material.
Louis was already at the office because he wanted to get on the computer and get stuff done before the onslaught of volunteers wake up and there is a wait for the computer. While checking e-mail, and talking to Louis, Doug showed up at a quarter to eight with the first words he said as he walked in the door were: "We're even now." This was in reference to WAIST when it was Bear and I who overslept and had him waiting for an hour. This time he overslept.
Knowing we were going to Soma, we placed Greta, Kate J., and Jeff Z. mail in our bags and checked the package room to see if any of them had packages we could deliver to them. Greta had one and it couldn't fit in our bags so we just carried it along.
We took a town-trip to Bundum Car Park and as we were waiting in line to take the D50 van to Soma a bumster tried selling us another trip: "This van too full, not comfortable. I have small car, very comfortable. You are going to Soma, yeah? I will go to Soma, small car, very comfortable. Only D100 each." Up until his last sentence it sounded nice. Doug exclaimed: "D100! Are you crazy!" with full seriousness. We got on the big van and paid D50 for our comfortable-enough-for-D50 ride to Soma.
Along the four-hour ride we had a discussion about probability. For my midterm exam that I gave for my statistics class I had the students roll a die ten times to receive random numbers to do their analysis. I had a spreadsheet made up so all I had to do was input their ten numbers and the correct answers would instantly appear for easy grading. There was a small problem the day of examination as not everyone had dice. Some students had no choice but to share. While grading, I found two groups of students who had identical numbers. One group the students had different answers for most of the questions but the original ten numbers were identical. That first coincidence could be explained as one student didn't have dice and so he copied the numbers from the first one who did, and then they worked individually solving the problems. This, in by itself, was not a major problem. The second group of identical numbers had every answer the same. They were obviously cheating. One reason for doing the dice experiment is to detour from cheating as it is very prevalent in The Gambia and most students don't see why it's a big deal. Some volunteers teaching at the equivalent of Middle Schools and High Schools became exasperated the first day when explaining the rules of their class had to continuously explain why cheating was not allowed.
The question we were trying to solve on the ride to Soma was this: What is the probability that out of a class of 57 students at least two of them will have the same numbers when rolling a die ten times? The mathematics to solve this problem is the same as trying to solve the classic birthday problem: What is the smallest number of people you need in a room to have a 50/50 chance at least two people have the same birthday? The answer to that one is 23 people, a surprisely small number but easily testable at any gathering of that size. At Fishbowl a few days before was when the initial discussion happened about the exam problem, we forgot to take into account the rest of the class and just thought it was a one in 6^10 chance that there would be a match. The problem we had now was two-fold: 1. We had to take into account all 57 students, 2. The only calculator I had couldn't do permutations of that high an order. We did some tricks of multiplying by prime factors, dividing by other factors, and making approximations and came up with the chance that at least two people having the same numbers couldn't be better than 1 in 18,000. When I returned to Kombo a few days later I figured it out on Excel and the true probability was 1 in 38,000. In other words, they cheated.
We arrived in Soma around one in the afternoon. Doug asked if I wanted to walk to Pakalinding, being around a 20 minutes walk, or take a D5 van there. We agreed on the van and climbed in through the back. The aparante wanted ten dalasi as oppose to five. We were just about climb out and just walk the way (yes, to save D5 the equivalent of 15 cents) but realized everyone else was upset but were paying the ten dalasi anyway. It was later explained to us that fuel was hard to come by in The Gambia and so they had to pick up their fuel from Senegal. To make up for the lost cost they had to increase the payment a little. A little I can understand, but to double it? Here comes another lesson. One good thing about being in a van full of HCNs (Host Country Nationals; Peace Corps talk) is that if you think something isn't right but everyone else is doing it then more likely then not you are not going to get ripped off and it's just the way things are done. It's like the phrase: "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." Heading back from WAIST we had a private car and didn't know we were suppose to pay ahead of time. In this situation everyone else started paying their ten dalasi fee and so we did too. A few minutes down the road we were let off at Pakalinding.
Doug had been away from Pakalinding for about a month and I could tell. The villagers started greeting him the moment we started walking inside the village. "Long time!" they would say. We started walking down a street, which I thought led to Doug's compound but instead was Kate Jorgensen's. She was leisuring laying in a hammock in the middle of compound saying she was sick. We could tell it wasn't a true sickness, just the sickness of it's Saturday and I don't want to do anything today, so I'll think I'll lay in the hammock and tell my family I'm sick.
We talked for a few moments, dropped off her mail, and continued on to Doug's compound. The night before I called the Fishbowl and asked Doug if I should call home, for Owen's birthday, before heading upcountry or if there was a telecenter nearby in Soma I could use. He gave a little laugh before saying don't worry about it and that there's one in Pakalinding I could use. As we turned the corner to his compound I could see why he laughed. His host-family owns the telecenter and it's connected to his compound. You could walk out Doug's front door, take ten steps and you're at the telecenter.
His host father greeted him: "Long time!" and asked how was Kombo and his trip to Senegal. He had to explain that he won't be living here anymore and that after this week would be transferred to Kombo to work at the University. His host father was a little disappointed but understood. His host-father was the former bursar to Tahir Senior Secondary School and his compound was quite lavish compared to other villagers. He owned the telecenter and even a car.
The compound is quite huge. Coming into the compound you have the back-door entrance to the telecentre directly to your right, followed by a small building (about the size of a walk-in-closet) which served as the kitchen, and then the main living quarters. There were four separate doors so I'm pretty confident there were four separate rooms. Which rooms for which members of the family, I do not know. On the left-hand side was Doug's house. His house also consisted of two rooms but the first one was comparable to size of other volunteers both rooms combined. I like to call it his "map room" since he had four full-size maps hanging on the walls. From left-to-right were a map of his European trip, his bike trip across the US, a world map, and a map of Africa. There was a big chair in the corner and a table/desk with four chairs on one side. He had all them made months back with a funny side-effect. The table/desk was made during the rainy season and so the drawers stick and are distorted is some shape and fashion. Walking in the room you see a door to the left which actually leads outside the compound, but he has it blocked off and doesn't use. To the right is an open doorway to his bedroom.
The backyard was quite unusual in a sense. It had the usual pit-latrine but also had brick walls separating the latrine from the yard. Usually, from other volunteer sites, the latrine is out-of-sight from the door but is still open-air. Outside the latrine and also separated from the yard was a pit for a bonfire, still smoldering from what his host mother burned that morning when she cleaned.
He told me earlier that Kate and him were back-door neighbours. I didn't know that was quite literal. At the back of his compound is a back-door leading to Kate's compound. Previously, they used the door when visiting one another but the kids and chickens got mixed up and so they just go around the block. Another unusual aspect of his compound was the water tap. Doug had two taps in his compound; one inbetween the telecenter and the kitchen, and the other near the backwall that was the back-up. The overflow of the water from the backup tap fed a banana tree that was growing in the corner of the compound. Through the backdoor was Kate's compound with zero water taps and she had to go outside her compound everytime she needed a bucket of water or two. We had to walk ten feet.
One of Doug's host-brothers came up and Doug swung him around as a welcome-back hug. This boy, in particular, has an interesting story. He was named after the former principal at the school and so even from an early age his friends gave him the nickname of "Prince" (short for "Principal"). This happened so frequently that even his parents and family now call him Prince. He's about ten years old. To keep him occupied I brought out the travel-Simon game I received as a late Christmas present, which I just brought along. Even though Prince speaks perfect English, explaining the game took same effort.
[Simon]: Red
[Prince]: Red
[Simon]: Red Blue
[Prince]: Red Red
[Simon]: AAAAAAaaaaaa [Repeat twenty times with different two color combinations]
It took a good fifteen minutes for him to realize that you had to repeat what Simon gave and not hit any button you wish. For more than a day that's all we heard from Prince was the sound of Simon, until his father took it away from him and gave it back to me.
After relaxing a bit and taking the hottest bucket bath I've ever had, we set out for Greta's compound. Greta previously lived in the Fishbowl but requested, and got approved, to transfer to Pakalinding. She now lives in the same compound that Olivia used to live. Olivia met her future fiancé the first day in country back in July and went back to the US to plan their Fall wedding. The odd thing about all this is that coincidentally both Greta and Olivia have the same Gambian name, Seynabou. Whenever conversations arose with Seynabou coming into the conversation they either had to say "Seynabou One" for Olivia or "Seynabou Two" for Greta.
The distance from Greta's compound to Doug's is about a two-minute walk. They both live on the same dirt road. If you are walking down the road Doug would be on the left and Greta to the right. The only reference point I knew to get to her compound was a small water tap, and this was validated later on when Doug drew a map for me and independently put down the water tap as a reference point as well. As you walk into Greta's compound you see a nice bantaba in the middle of the compound. Bantabas are elevated platforms made by half-tree trunks or other wood material that people just relax on. They usually have a bumpy feel to them as the round part of the tree trunks are faced up, but feel quite comfortable after a while.
The first door to the right after entering her compound was her house. Jeff was visiting and they were just relaxing, talking and listening to music. She was quite surprised to see me with an exclamation of "Dude! Mike!" The first room had three chairs, a table, and a four-piece Chinese latern hanging from the ceiling. We sat around while she opened her package. Whenever anyone gets a package it's Christmas and everyone wants to join vicariously in the celebration. Packages are that big of a celebration and even more so when they don't expect them to arrive upcountry other than mailrun.
Lunch was being served back in Doug's compound and so we went back to eat. Doug and I shared a foodbowl inside his house while Prince played Simon in the background. Doug wanted to relax and take a nap so he drew me a map of Pakalinding in case I wanted to walk around. Even though the map is a simplistic representation of the whole village of the area that the volunteers live, it's quite funny the landmarks he put down. Only six lines were drawn with reference points being his family's telecenter, a water tap, and a big tree. The water tap was the reference for Greta's compound, and the big tree for Jeff's. I wandered back to Greta's compound first and seeing no one was there went to Kate's. Greta, Kate, and Jeff were just relaxing by the hammock reading old Rolling Stones magazines and braiding their host-sisters hair.
A few hours later Jeff and Doug wanted to open the computer room at the school for public Internet use and asked if I wanted to come along. We walked the half-kilometer to the school while Jeff pushed his bike along. Earlier in the day we discussed watching a movie on Jeff's laptop but they needed the car battery that was in the computer lab, hence they needed to bring the bike along unless they wanted to strain their muscles on the walk back. The school looked vaguely familiar and I couldn't figure out from where. Doug finally pointed out that we stopped here one day during training while everyone in the education sector was visiting local schools. I remembered sitting on the bricks outside in the small open auditorium and the first memory of the school came back.
Me: "This is the school with the chicken coop!"
Doug: "Yeah. The chicken coop."
Jeff: "Why does everyone in your group remember a chicken coop from this school? Where is this chicken coop? I've never seen it!"
Doug: "It's behind those buildings along that path," and he pointed down a path along the other end of the school.
The reason why everyone remembers the chicken coop is that it was the first thing they showed us. Not the computer lab, or the principal office, but this chicken coop. Only afterwards did we get to see the lab, his office, and classrooms. Hence, it's the chicken-coop-school for our group.
The computer lab had two air conditioners hanging from the walls. Doug exclaimed, a little guiltily "I've spent many hours grading papers in this room." There were about fifteen computers with the main server up at front. From seven o'clock until nine, when they kicked everyone out, they had open-Internet night. The students who wanted to use the internet signed their name on the roster and paid D15 an hour to use the computer. As more people got on the internet the slower the internet became for each computer as they were all sharing a single line. Jeff played on his laptop trying to put together a picture collage of WAIST while Doug worked in the back of the room with a voltmeter to charge the car battery. This was no ordinary car battery. It wasn't Duracell, but Durecell, and we expected it to behave as such.
It was now around nine oclock and we still haven't had dinner. We walked back to Pakalinding, with the Durecell battery tied to the bike, against the moonlight. We stopped at Greta's compound to say the movie would start in an hour or so after everyone ate. In the compound Greta and Kate were tutoring their host-sisters simple algebra; quite unexpected for a Saturday night activity from a student's point of view. We walked back to Doug's compound and our food was already inside his house sitting on the table waiting to be eaten. I ate my rice with sauce dinner and then walked the ten feet to the telecenter to call for Owen's birthday.
After around an hour we headed back to Jeff's compound. The big tree Doug drew on the map for me was quite exact. Right at the entrance to Jeff's compound is this huge tree with limbs almost drooping to the ground. They were big enough that it's easily climbable and was told Jeff spent many hours his first year just reading in the tree. Jeff's house is in the way back of the family compound and is in the shape of Mickey Mouse's head. The main room is in the middle, his bedroom to the left and a kitchen room to the right. In the kitchen was something I had not expected to see in any volunteers compound, let alone one in a village. He had an old Coca-Cola refrigerator in the middle of the kitchen. It's the same type of refrigerators you see at 7-11 when you want a bottle of Coke. Now transplant that to a West African village and you have yourself a workable refrigerator for all your culinary needs - when the electricity works.
Jeff, Kate, and Greta were already there watching a mockumentary while eating their dinner of hummus with bread. The mockumentary was entitled "Fear of a Black Hat" and was quite funny as it was shot to portray a fake documentary that made fun of the rap industry. It was not something I had expected to see but a good laugh nonetheless. Halfway through movie the Durecell battery decided to quit on us and the whole laptop shut-down within a fraction of a second. That ended the night. Jeff said I could crash at his place since Doug had no extra bed or mattress. He brought out the mattress and pillow and I went to sleep.
The next morning I felt like a Senator running for reelection. I was trying to walk back to Doug's house but turned into what I thought was the correct street but ended up being a side street into someone's compound. Each person in the compound greeted me individually and I had to go through the whole greeting procedure a half-dozen times. They already knew my name as word travels fast in the village when it comes to visitors, but I knew none of them. I'm trying to be polite and shake their hands asking, "how is the morning?" They kept referencing my name as if we were old friends. I shook a dozen or so hands before I was able to make my exit and correct myself.
For breakfast his host-mother set down a bowl and left the house. We lifted up the lid and saw this thick liquid, and thought it was some new breakfast. The liquid ended up being some peanut concoction that was poured on top of rice and other items. I'm sure George Washington Carver missed this one! It was one of the best breakfasts I've had since being in country. Usually the give you more than you can eat and you give them back the rest. We finished the bowl within minutes. The next few hours were spent relaxing. We tried teaching Prince more about Simon, to no avail, until we switched to Crazy Eights. This was played on Doug's open-porch which is hard to describe. In Mandinka they are called "perengo." His entire house is elevated by about foot or so, so the rain can not run in; and you have to step up to get inside his hut. That step is extended around the front and makes a nice porch. We just laid out the baso, got comfortable and started playing.
Playing Crazy Eights with Prince tried my patience as he knew the rules very well, as it was primarily the only card game he knew, and I played it maybe twice during service without fully knowing what the rules were. After a game we switched to Memory and then a kid-friendly game of Bullshit (we called it "Liar"). This again had some funny situations happened as kids here are trained not to lie, or they get beaten. In this version whenever we want to call out someone instead of saying "Bullshit!" we say "You are a liar!" or "You are lying!"
Doug: Prince, you are up. We are on the number four. You have to lay down fours.
Prince: [looking at his cards] I do not have any fours.
Doug: You are not suppose to tell us. Just pretend. Lay down some cards and say they are fours.
Prince: [flips his hand over so we can all see] But I have no fours.
Doug: Just pretend and lay some cards down.
Prince: [Lays down three cards] I have three fours.
Doug: [Smiling] You are lying!
Prince picked up the whole deck and continued to play 'Liar' truthfully until the very end, when he lost.
After a few more games more kids showed up. We moved inside and Doug opened up his desk he had made to reveal wooden blocks with letters and numbers on them. We sat around playing with blocks. He would try and get them to spell a word but they were more interested in hearing how Doug would say the words when they threw random blocks at the beginning.
"Kanifan"
"Panifan"
"Xanifan"
"8anifan"
"2+3anifan"
We called it quits when replacing blocks turned into throwing blocks which turned into semi-lethal projectiles. We threw the kids out, packed up the blocks and went to visit Jeff. He wasn't there and so we just read in his tree for a while. I brought along Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" which is as boring as it sounds. The historical parts I like, talking about Newton and Copernicus but the rants on the philosophy gets a bit dreadful at times.
After lunch we walked to Soma. It was about a twenty minute walk and wasn't too bad even for being in the middle of the day. If you walked from Pakalinding heading north you'll arrive at the ferry terminal to reach Farafenni - if you head south out of Pakalinding you reach Soma. As we reached the main transport terminal, where all the vendors are, and was buying a bag of wanjo someone behind me said, "Excuse me." Usually when someone says that it's a bumster trying to sell you something so I ignored him.
"Excuse me, Mr. Sheppard?" I turned around and it was one of my students.
"Mr. Sheppard, are you here on Holiday?"
"No. Just visiting for the weekend."
"How was the examination for Statistics?"
"Went quite well."
"Will you be at Graduation on Saturday?"
"I do not know."
"If you are, I can give you a chicken. Or, you can take your car and pick it up from me some other time."
"Thank you for the chicken. I don't have a car, but I'll let you know about Saturday."
We exchanged cell phone numbers even though he already had mine from the first day of class. Saturday was not only graduation, but it was the first graduating class of the first university of the entire country of The Gambia. President Jammeh himself was going to be there. My counterpart was the main planner for the event and throughout the weeks leading up to it I could tell the stress was getting to her. I was invited to attend, along with Doug and Kate, but only Kate made it on time to be let in the doors.
After having a bean-sandwich for our second lunch we stopped at this second-hand clothes seller. Some jeans were faded, others stained, other ripped or torn. They come from all over the world as the sizes are not even compatible. A '6' on one could be a '24' on another, which was the same size as 'pi cubed over three' for the next. And of course you can't try them on so you're left handing two identical jeans, one labeled in probably Swedish with a '6' and the other Dutch with a '24'. It was confusing! I picked out two jeans and two shirts, but he wanted D210 for them all, and I wasn't going to pay more than D150. No deal. As I walked away I saw an array of belts hanging from the wall. I knew I needed a new one, the only problem was they were all women's belts with decorations or other items. No belts were bought that day either. When I returned to Kombo I just solved it myself and took an ice-pick from my Leatherman and made another hole. I guess you can say I'm on hole number negative one now.
Across the river, in Farafenni, is what's called "The Dead Toubob Store." It's not an actual store, per say, and it doesn't have that name but that's what we call it. Apparently, across Europe and the US whenever someone dies and the family doesn't want to deal with their clothes they just donate them all. A fraction of them shows up monthly in Farafenni, The Gambia and sell for very cheap; about D7 a shirt and D15 for jeans. They are not organized in any way, just boxes of shirts you can go through, boxes of jeans, boxes of belts, etc. Most volunteers in that area go there to buy good cheap American type clothing. Sometimes you become lucky and find a shirt that is quite recent as it has a face on it with a new famous young actor or actress on the front. Other times you don't get so lucky and you might have a good probability of finding a "Carter for President" T-Shirt among them.
As we were walking back we passed a very small convenience store. Don't think 7-11, think hole-in-the-wall. I went in and bought a six-pack of toilet paper for Doug. This calls for an explanation: For volunteers, toilet paper is the most convenient gift to give when staying at someone's house. During Christmas or Thanksgiving when people stayed at our house we received toilet paper. When volunteers stayed at The Fishbowl they gave them toilet paper as appreciation. This wouldn't have the same affect in the US. If your Uncle Bill shows up for a week and hands you a six-pack of toilet paper as thanks, most likely than not two thoughts would cross your mind quite simultaneously 1. Am I really related to him? [And if so, is it too late to change the will?] 2. Don't invite him over again! [Unless you just happen to be low on toilet paper]
Doug appreciated the gift of toilet paper.
While relaxing that night I read the instruction manual for the Simon Game. If you win at the highest level it does a little tune and sings for you. Having nothing else to do we asked for Simon back from Prince and commenced to try and beat the game. Doug had four fingers on each button and I sat on his right recording each color as they appeared. Originally I was on his left but my arm got in the way and it timed-out on us half-way through. We must maximize efficiency! I abbreviated each color by one letter, wrote in rows of three going down the page while Doug never took his eyes off the paper and used his fingers to push the buttons. Out of the 31 colors in a row we needed the best we got after an hour was 28 before we handed it back to Prince.
We then asked the question: When are we half-way there? It's not when you are done with 15 or 16 colors as each time you have to add one more color to the sequence and so the ending sequences are longer, and more prone to error, then the beginning. With 31 colors we needed to win the game it called for a total of 496 buttons we had to push. (1+2+3+. . . .+31=496) I saw the numbers 31 and 496 and was amazed at what a simple game of Simon just illustrated for me. 31 is the 3rd Mersenne Prime Number and 496 is the third Perfect Number. That night I spent a half hour proving the formula relating Mersenne Primes with Perfects Numbers with a corollary being that Perfect Numbers were Triangle Numbers. All this brought out by playing Simon!
Having given up with Simon for the night we had our dinner while discussing uncountable infinite sets, A.I., cellular autonomy, and other areas which also sprung from the Simon game situation. Kate stopped by later on and left, then Jeff showed up and we talked about Presidential Elections and Electoral College before I fell asleep for the night.
Since we were leaving the night morning I slept on the floor at Doug's with the six-pack of toilet paper acting as a pillow. The next morning, while packing, I reread the instruction manual again for Simon to see if there was an easier way to beat the game. One version you can play is two-players with the second person having to repeat the sequence of the first person. But what if you were both players and only push just one button! As Doug was packing I was pacing around the room pushing the Yellow light continuously "beep beep beep . . .". A quick 496+496=992 pushes of Yellow and I would win! I continued pushing the button " . . . beep beep beep . . .". Still pacing the room, " . . . beep beep beep . . . ". Finally, after 992 times Simon lit up and started singing as Doug ran from the other room to hear what we tried to so hard to hear the day before. "That's it?" was our mutual disappointed response. Oh well, what else are you going to do to keep yourself busy?
We left to visit the school one more time before us two headed out. Doug was going half-way back to Kombo to visit Justin for a day or two to help set up the computers in their school. The students this morning, as we walked into Tahir Senior Secondary School, were dressed in their uniforms going from one class to another. Quite a few students came up to Doug proclaiming, "Mr. Douglas! Long time!" He explained to each one in turn where we was and why he was most likely not staying the rest of the semester. They were disappointed to lose him.
I stayed in the Computer Lab with Jeff while Doug said goodbye to other teachers and the headmaster. Although he was going back to Pakalinding in a few days it was as if this was the true goodbye. During break some students go over to the bean-sandwich ladies for a quick snack, and knowing break was in a few minutes we headed over there early and got first dibs.
By noon we pulled our bags over our shoulders and headed out the door to Soma. Along the way we stopped at a telecentre to make a call and ran into Kate. She was on her lunch-hour at work and couldn't make a call as they had no electricity, but the telecentre did. After a few phone calls later we reached the car park. Whenever traveling it is best not to leave in the middle of the day as the car park will be full, it is better to leave in the morning when it is empty. It was the middle of the day, and lo and behold, the car park was full. We met a newly sworn in volunteer still waiting from that morning to go upcountry. As we were waiting in line to buy a ticket someone asked where we were going: "Serekunda". He said "Come! Come!" and so we followed. He led us to a big van which was still being loaded with people. He found an open window, grabbed the roof and jumped in through the window. "Here, give me your bags!" We knew the routine by now so we gave him our bags through the window and headed towards the back of the car to climb on. Upon reaching him our seats were reserved, with a little assistance from him, and we had a spot on the van without waiting not more than 10 minutes at the park. The guy climbed out the back and asked for a tip from the window. We were both quite impressed with his Dukes-of-Hazard abilities and gave him D25 each.
About two hours we passed Bwiam and let Doug out.
An hour after that someone tried to climb out and accidentally tipped over a large container, about a gallon or so, of peanut butter which slithered through the alley; as two people also tried to climb out they started slipping and sliding and had to hold on to the seats as they walked from the front of the van to the back. They threw the container out of the window and did their best to clean the bulk of the peanut butter up.
The ride from Soma to Birkama lasted four and a half hours. From there another van took me to Serekunda, which was another 40 minute ride. At Serekunda I had a hard time finding the car park and went up to a random taxi:
"Can you drive me to Seven and Seven's?"
"Yes."
"How much?"
"D75"
"D50"
"Make it D60"
"No," and I walked away.
"OK Get in."
I got in and after getting settled I noticed wires hanging from the driving wheel, radio, and other dashboard items. Then I noticed he had no key. "You have no key!"
"Don't need one. See these two wires. One red, one yellow," he showed me the two wires and continued, "this one starts the car, you just touch it while this one needs to be plugged in." He unplugged that wire from his set-up to illustrate the purpose that the car will not run without it plugged in. In this case the car immediately stopped in the middle of the street in Serekunda Market. Case proved.
For ten minutes I received a private lesson of how to start a car without a key and which wires to do it. He had me start the car a few times, leaning over from the passenger seat to do so. On the road out from Serekunda a bump rattled the red wire out of his duct-taped apparatus and the car stalled again. He turned to smile as if to prove again, that yes, that wire needs to be plugged in. He let me plug the wire in and using the yellow wire start the car before he headed out of the market.
After dropping me off a block from my house I gave him the D60 he requested.
-MIke
"You're going to Soma on Saturday?"
"Yep. Weekend trip."
"Who are you staying with?"
"No one yet. I figured I just show up and call either Greta or Kate [J.] and say 'I'm here!'"
"I might have to go back there anyway. I can let you know tomorrow whether I'll go with you on Saturday and show you around."
"OK"
This being Thursday night there was another day ahead. Annamarie and Kate [L.] were having dinner together and so the three of us, Bear, Doug, and I had spaghetti had the Fishbowl - a mutual girls night out / guys night out type of thing. A while later Hilary showed up, just getting back from her Spanish class. What followed next was a funny discussion of the semantics of the sentence "I am well," along with the direct object meaning of "me" and "I" in proper usage. Next came a half-hour of experiments of determining if one can count when they are reading. Hilary read aloud of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" while Doug tapped his leg to keep count to see if Hilary could read and count the taps simultaneously. I counted the taps as a double check while Bear couldn't believe we were doing this for half-hour and just sat in the corner playing on his laptop computer. One thing you quickly begin to realize is that you definitely have time in the Peace Corps to do experiments like this for a half-hour without thinking it's a waste of time. What else are you going to do? She was able to count while reading and other experiments to determine exactly how were put on hold for another time.
Friday we all went out to dinner to say goodbye to Robert. He went back to the US permanently that Sunday. Although he was not a member of our training group he became friends with us all. The day before he had a going away dinner with his group and tonight with people from our group. Knowing we would be going out to eat at a somewhat fancy restaurant I thought I should cut my hair since it had been two months without a haircut. Hilary said she would cut my hair for two boxes of Macaroni & Cheese that I got as part of my Christmas packages a few days before. I thought that was a good deal but Bear was trying to convince me otherwise. Although not explicitly stated, the jiff of his argument was basically in the form of: what if someone had a hundred Mickey Mantle baseball cards and he gave one away for a haircut? To him, losing one out of a hundred is nothing but for the person giving the haircut it's as if they won the lottery. In other words, you must savor your Macaroni & Cheese! On the balcony of the Fishbowl I received my haircut, with a few funny mistakes along the way. None to worry about but fun if you noticed them.
An hour later we met at the gas station to find transportation to SeneGambia. It was Kate, Annamarie, Hilary, Robert, and I. He wanted to go to this Indian buffet in the tourist district. As we were waiting on the corner for transportation a van pulled up and told us we could climb in. The odd thing about the van was there was no aparante. He was officially done for the night but figured he could take us to SeneGambia as one last trip. Every time someone wanted to climb in or out along the way he would have to stop the car, turn it off, get out and walk around to open the door. This was not out of courtesy; it was out of necessity as the door could only be opened from the outside.
For D199 (~$7) you can have all you can eat. I noticed something as we sat at the restaurant waiting for the buffet to begin. Volunteers are so used to eating cheap that going out is a luxury for us. The most popular chop-shop that we go to is right across from the Peace Corps Office and we can order a full plate of rice with a chicken leg and sauce for only D10 (~35 cents). A half-chicken is D35 (a little more than one dollar) there. If we feel good enough to go out we step it up a notch and go to someplace that's in the D50-D100 range. When there's an occasion to celebrate, such as a going-away dinner or birthday celebrations, we dress up and go to the tourist district for a fancy meal of $10. Most tourists are in shorts and t-shirts since $10 is nothing to them, but we're all dressed as if we just got back from a wedding.
Dinner was quite good and even paying D199 I could only have two plates and bowl of soup. The all-you-can-eat found new meaning to everyone since we all couldn't eat as much as if let's say we were at an all-you-can-eat resturant in the States. My stomach was full to the point of being painful.
Earlier that day Doug and I agreed to meet at our house at six in the morning to find transport. At a quarter before six I woke up, put on old clothes and waited. There is no point in taking a shower or even putting on new clothes when traveling because within an hour you will be so dusty anyway that you practically wasted your time in the morning by getting ready. After an hour of waiting I left for the Peace Corps Office. On the way there Diana drove by and was kind enough to give me a ride to the office. The reason she was going to the office so early on a Saturday was that Peace Corps was having an auction of old office supplies. I saw it the day before when I went to retrieve the mail and the driver had to stop by the warehouse. There were file cabinets, old computers, desks, and even a few Peace Corps vehicles up for sale. Three hundred people were expected to attend and bid on the items. I told John, the driver, I'd like to bid D200 for the car. Needless to say I didn't win. There is a few reasons for having the auction: All property of Peace Corps is US Government Property and can not be thrown away (except paper and the sort) and they have to be sold at auction with the money going back to the US Government. The money they make from the auction stays within Peace Corps to buy new material.
Louis was already at the office because he wanted to get on the computer and get stuff done before the onslaught of volunteers wake up and there is a wait for the computer. While checking e-mail, and talking to Louis, Doug showed up at a quarter to eight with the first words he said as he walked in the door were: "We're even now." This was in reference to WAIST when it was Bear and I who overslept and had him waiting for an hour. This time he overslept.
Knowing we were going to Soma, we placed Greta, Kate J., and Jeff Z. mail in our bags and checked the package room to see if any of them had packages we could deliver to them. Greta had one and it couldn't fit in our bags so we just carried it along.
We took a town-trip to Bundum Car Park and as we were waiting in line to take the D50 van to Soma a bumster tried selling us another trip: "This van too full, not comfortable. I have small car, very comfortable. You are going to Soma, yeah? I will go to Soma, small car, very comfortable. Only D100 each." Up until his last sentence it sounded nice. Doug exclaimed: "D100! Are you crazy!" with full seriousness. We got on the big van and paid D50 for our comfortable-enough-for-D50 ride to Soma.
Along the four-hour ride we had a discussion about probability. For my midterm exam that I gave for my statistics class I had the students roll a die ten times to receive random numbers to do their analysis. I had a spreadsheet made up so all I had to do was input their ten numbers and the correct answers would instantly appear for easy grading. There was a small problem the day of examination as not everyone had dice. Some students had no choice but to share. While grading, I found two groups of students who had identical numbers. One group the students had different answers for most of the questions but the original ten numbers were identical. That first coincidence could be explained as one student didn't have dice and so he copied the numbers from the first one who did, and then they worked individually solving the problems. This, in by itself, was not a major problem. The second group of identical numbers had every answer the same. They were obviously cheating. One reason for doing the dice experiment is to detour from cheating as it is very prevalent in The Gambia and most students don't see why it's a big deal. Some volunteers teaching at the equivalent of Middle Schools and High Schools became exasperated the first day when explaining the rules of their class had to continuously explain why cheating was not allowed.
The question we were trying to solve on the ride to Soma was this: What is the probability that out of a class of 57 students at least two of them will have the same numbers when rolling a die ten times? The mathematics to solve this problem is the same as trying to solve the classic birthday problem: What is the smallest number of people you need in a room to have a 50/50 chance at least two people have the same birthday? The answer to that one is 23 people, a surprisely small number but easily testable at any gathering of that size. At Fishbowl a few days before was when the initial discussion happened about the exam problem, we forgot to take into account the rest of the class and just thought it was a one in 6^10 chance that there would be a match. The problem we had now was two-fold: 1. We had to take into account all 57 students, 2. The only calculator I had couldn't do permutations of that high an order. We did some tricks of multiplying by prime factors, dividing by other factors, and making approximations and came up with the chance that at least two people having the same numbers couldn't be better than 1 in 18,000. When I returned to Kombo a few days later I figured it out on Excel and the true probability was 1 in 38,000. In other words, they cheated.
We arrived in Soma around one in the afternoon. Doug asked if I wanted to walk to Pakalinding, being around a 20 minutes walk, or take a D5 van there. We agreed on the van and climbed in through the back. The aparante wanted ten dalasi as oppose to five. We were just about climb out and just walk the way (yes, to save D5 the equivalent of 15 cents) but realized everyone else was upset but were paying the ten dalasi anyway. It was later explained to us that fuel was hard to come by in The Gambia and so they had to pick up their fuel from Senegal. To make up for the lost cost they had to increase the payment a little. A little I can understand, but to double it? Here comes another lesson. One good thing about being in a van full of HCNs (Host Country Nationals; Peace Corps talk) is that if you think something isn't right but everyone else is doing it then more likely then not you are not going to get ripped off and it's just the way things are done. It's like the phrase: "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." Heading back from WAIST we had a private car and didn't know we were suppose to pay ahead of time. In this situation everyone else started paying their ten dalasi fee and so we did too. A few minutes down the road we were let off at Pakalinding.
Doug had been away from Pakalinding for about a month and I could tell. The villagers started greeting him the moment we started walking inside the village. "Long time!" they would say. We started walking down a street, which I thought led to Doug's compound but instead was Kate Jorgensen's. She was leisuring laying in a hammock in the middle of compound saying she was sick. We could tell it wasn't a true sickness, just the sickness of it's Saturday and I don't want to do anything today, so I'll think I'll lay in the hammock and tell my family I'm sick.
We talked for a few moments, dropped off her mail, and continued on to Doug's compound. The night before I called the Fishbowl and asked Doug if I should call home, for Owen's birthday, before heading upcountry or if there was a telecenter nearby in Soma I could use. He gave a little laugh before saying don't worry about it and that there's one in Pakalinding I could use. As we turned the corner to his compound I could see why he laughed. His host-family owns the telecenter and it's connected to his compound. You could walk out Doug's front door, take ten steps and you're at the telecenter.
His host father greeted him: "Long time!" and asked how was Kombo and his trip to Senegal. He had to explain that he won't be living here anymore and that after this week would be transferred to Kombo to work at the University. His host father was a little disappointed but understood. His host-father was the former bursar to Tahir Senior Secondary School and his compound was quite lavish compared to other villagers. He owned the telecenter and even a car.
The compound is quite huge. Coming into the compound you have the back-door entrance to the telecentre directly to your right, followed by a small building (about the size of a walk-in-closet) which served as the kitchen, and then the main living quarters. There were four separate doors so I'm pretty confident there were four separate rooms. Which rooms for which members of the family, I do not know. On the left-hand side was Doug's house. His house also consisted of two rooms but the first one was comparable to size of other volunteers both rooms combined. I like to call it his "map room" since he had four full-size maps hanging on the walls. From left-to-right were a map of his European trip, his bike trip across the US, a world map, and a map of Africa. There was a big chair in the corner and a table/desk with four chairs on one side. He had all them made months back with a funny side-effect. The table/desk was made during the rainy season and so the drawers stick and are distorted is some shape and fashion. Walking in the room you see a door to the left which actually leads outside the compound, but he has it blocked off and doesn't use. To the right is an open doorway to his bedroom.
The backyard was quite unusual in a sense. It had the usual pit-latrine but also had brick walls separating the latrine from the yard. Usually, from other volunteer sites, the latrine is out-of-sight from the door but is still open-air. Outside the latrine and also separated from the yard was a pit for a bonfire, still smoldering from what his host mother burned that morning when she cleaned.
He told me earlier that Kate and him were back-door neighbours. I didn't know that was quite literal. At the back of his compound is a back-door leading to Kate's compound. Previously, they used the door when visiting one another but the kids and chickens got mixed up and so they just go around the block. Another unusual aspect of his compound was the water tap. Doug had two taps in his compound; one inbetween the telecenter and the kitchen, and the other near the backwall that was the back-up. The overflow of the water from the backup tap fed a banana tree that was growing in the corner of the compound. Through the backdoor was Kate's compound with zero water taps and she had to go outside her compound everytime she needed a bucket of water or two. We had to walk ten feet.
One of Doug's host-brothers came up and Doug swung him around as a welcome-back hug. This boy, in particular, has an interesting story. He was named after the former principal at the school and so even from an early age his friends gave him the nickname of "Prince" (short for "Principal"). This happened so frequently that even his parents and family now call him Prince. He's about ten years old. To keep him occupied I brought out the travel-Simon game I received as a late Christmas present, which I just brought along. Even though Prince speaks perfect English, explaining the game took same effort.
[Simon]: Red
[Prince]: Red
[Simon]: Red Blue
[Prince]: Red Red
[Simon]: AAAAAAaaaaaa [Repeat twenty times with different two color combinations]
It took a good fifteen minutes for him to realize that you had to repeat what Simon gave and not hit any button you wish. For more than a day that's all we heard from Prince was the sound of Simon, until his father took it away from him and gave it back to me.
After relaxing a bit and taking the hottest bucket bath I've ever had, we set out for Greta's compound. Greta previously lived in the Fishbowl but requested, and got approved, to transfer to Pakalinding. She now lives in the same compound that Olivia used to live. Olivia met her future fiancé the first day in country back in July and went back to the US to plan their Fall wedding. The odd thing about all this is that coincidentally both Greta and Olivia have the same Gambian name, Seynabou. Whenever conversations arose with Seynabou coming into the conversation they either had to say "Seynabou One" for Olivia or "Seynabou Two" for Greta.
The distance from Greta's compound to Doug's is about a two-minute walk. They both live on the same dirt road. If you are walking down the road Doug would be on the left and Greta to the right. The only reference point I knew to get to her compound was a small water tap, and this was validated later on when Doug drew a map for me and independently put down the water tap as a reference point as well. As you walk into Greta's compound you see a nice bantaba in the middle of the compound. Bantabas are elevated platforms made by half-tree trunks or other wood material that people just relax on. They usually have a bumpy feel to them as the round part of the tree trunks are faced up, but feel quite comfortable after a while.
The first door to the right after entering her compound was her house. Jeff was visiting and they were just relaxing, talking and listening to music. She was quite surprised to see me with an exclamation of "Dude! Mike!" The first room had three chairs, a table, and a four-piece Chinese latern hanging from the ceiling. We sat around while she opened her package. Whenever anyone gets a package it's Christmas and everyone wants to join vicariously in the celebration. Packages are that big of a celebration and even more so when they don't expect them to arrive upcountry other than mailrun.
Lunch was being served back in Doug's compound and so we went back to eat. Doug and I shared a foodbowl inside his house while Prince played Simon in the background. Doug wanted to relax and take a nap so he drew me a map of Pakalinding in case I wanted to walk around. Even though the map is a simplistic representation of the whole village of the area that the volunteers live, it's quite funny the landmarks he put down. Only six lines were drawn with reference points being his family's telecenter, a water tap, and a big tree. The water tap was the reference for Greta's compound, and the big tree for Jeff's. I wandered back to Greta's compound first and seeing no one was there went to Kate's. Greta, Kate, and Jeff were just relaxing by the hammock reading old Rolling Stones magazines and braiding their host-sisters hair.
A few hours later Jeff and Doug wanted to open the computer room at the school for public Internet use and asked if I wanted to come along. We walked the half-kilometer to the school while Jeff pushed his bike along. Earlier in the day we discussed watching a movie on Jeff's laptop but they needed the car battery that was in the computer lab, hence they needed to bring the bike along unless they wanted to strain their muscles on the walk back. The school looked vaguely familiar and I couldn't figure out from where. Doug finally pointed out that we stopped here one day during training while everyone in the education sector was visiting local schools. I remembered sitting on the bricks outside in the small open auditorium and the first memory of the school came back.
Me: "This is the school with the chicken coop!"
Doug: "Yeah. The chicken coop."
Jeff: "Why does everyone in your group remember a chicken coop from this school? Where is this chicken coop? I've never seen it!"
Doug: "It's behind those buildings along that path," and he pointed down a path along the other end of the school.
The reason why everyone remembers the chicken coop is that it was the first thing they showed us. Not the computer lab, or the principal office, but this chicken coop. Only afterwards did we get to see the lab, his office, and classrooms. Hence, it's the chicken-coop-school for our group.
The computer lab had two air conditioners hanging from the walls. Doug exclaimed, a little guiltily "I've spent many hours grading papers in this room." There were about fifteen computers with the main server up at front. From seven o'clock until nine, when they kicked everyone out, they had open-Internet night. The students who wanted to use the internet signed their name on the roster and paid D15 an hour to use the computer. As more people got on the internet the slower the internet became for each computer as they were all sharing a single line. Jeff played on his laptop trying to put together a picture collage of WAIST while Doug worked in the back of the room with a voltmeter to charge the car battery. This was no ordinary car battery. It wasn't Duracell, but Durecell, and we expected it to behave as such.
It was now around nine oclock and we still haven't had dinner. We walked back to Pakalinding, with the Durecell battery tied to the bike, against the moonlight. We stopped at Greta's compound to say the movie would start in an hour or so after everyone ate. In the compound Greta and Kate were tutoring their host-sisters simple algebra; quite unexpected for a Saturday night activity from a student's point of view. We walked back to Doug's compound and our food was already inside his house sitting on the table waiting to be eaten. I ate my rice with sauce dinner and then walked the ten feet to the telecenter to call for Owen's birthday.
After around an hour we headed back to Jeff's compound. The big tree Doug drew on the map for me was quite exact. Right at the entrance to Jeff's compound is this huge tree with limbs almost drooping to the ground. They were big enough that it's easily climbable and was told Jeff spent many hours his first year just reading in the tree. Jeff's house is in the way back of the family compound and is in the shape of Mickey Mouse's head. The main room is in the middle, his bedroom to the left and a kitchen room to the right. In the kitchen was something I had not expected to see in any volunteers compound, let alone one in a village. He had an old Coca-Cola refrigerator in the middle of the kitchen. It's the same type of refrigerators you see at 7-11 when you want a bottle of Coke. Now transplant that to a West African village and you have yourself a workable refrigerator for all your culinary needs - when the electricity works.
Jeff, Kate, and Greta were already there watching a mockumentary while eating their dinner of hummus with bread. The mockumentary was entitled "Fear of a Black Hat" and was quite funny as it was shot to portray a fake documentary that made fun of the rap industry. It was not something I had expected to see but a good laugh nonetheless. Halfway through movie the Durecell battery decided to quit on us and the whole laptop shut-down within a fraction of a second. That ended the night. Jeff said I could crash at his place since Doug had no extra bed or mattress. He brought out the mattress and pillow and I went to sleep.
The next morning I felt like a Senator running for reelection. I was trying to walk back to Doug's house but turned into what I thought was the correct street but ended up being a side street into someone's compound. Each person in the compound greeted me individually and I had to go through the whole greeting procedure a half-dozen times. They already knew my name as word travels fast in the village when it comes to visitors, but I knew none of them. I'm trying to be polite and shake their hands asking, "how is the morning?" They kept referencing my name as if we were old friends. I shook a dozen or so hands before I was able to make my exit and correct myself.
For breakfast his host-mother set down a bowl and left the house. We lifted up the lid and saw this thick liquid, and thought it was some new breakfast. The liquid ended up being some peanut concoction that was poured on top of rice and other items. I'm sure George Washington Carver missed this one! It was one of the best breakfasts I've had since being in country. Usually the give you more than you can eat and you give them back the rest. We finished the bowl within minutes. The next few hours were spent relaxing. We tried teaching Prince more about Simon, to no avail, until we switched to Crazy Eights. This was played on Doug's open-porch which is hard to describe. In Mandinka they are called "perengo." His entire house is elevated by about foot or so, so the rain can not run in; and you have to step up to get inside his hut. That step is extended around the front and makes a nice porch. We just laid out the baso, got comfortable and started playing.
Playing Crazy Eights with Prince tried my patience as he knew the rules very well, as it was primarily the only card game he knew, and I played it maybe twice during service without fully knowing what the rules were. After a game we switched to Memory and then a kid-friendly game of Bullshit (we called it "Liar"). This again had some funny situations happened as kids here are trained not to lie, or they get beaten. In this version whenever we want to call out someone instead of saying "Bullshit!" we say "You are a liar!" or "You are lying!"
Doug: Prince, you are up. We are on the number four. You have to lay down fours.
Prince: [looking at his cards] I do not have any fours.
Doug: You are not suppose to tell us. Just pretend. Lay down some cards and say they are fours.
Prince: [flips his hand over so we can all see] But I have no fours.
Doug: Just pretend and lay some cards down.
Prince: [Lays down three cards] I have three fours.
Doug: [Smiling] You are lying!
Prince picked up the whole deck and continued to play 'Liar' truthfully until the very end, when he lost.
After a few more games more kids showed up. We moved inside and Doug opened up his desk he had made to reveal wooden blocks with letters and numbers on them. We sat around playing with blocks. He would try and get them to spell a word but they were more interested in hearing how Doug would say the words when they threw random blocks at the beginning.
"Kanifan"
"Panifan"
"Xanifan"
"8anifan"
"2+3anifan"
We called it quits when replacing blocks turned into throwing blocks which turned into semi-lethal projectiles. We threw the kids out, packed up the blocks and went to visit Jeff. He wasn't there and so we just read in his tree for a while. I brought along Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" which is as boring as it sounds. The historical parts I like, talking about Newton and Copernicus but the rants on the philosophy gets a bit dreadful at times.
After lunch we walked to Soma. It was about a twenty minute walk and wasn't too bad even for being in the middle of the day. If you walked from Pakalinding heading north you'll arrive at the ferry terminal to reach Farafenni - if you head south out of Pakalinding you reach Soma. As we reached the main transport terminal, where all the vendors are, and was buying a bag of wanjo someone behind me said, "Excuse me." Usually when someone says that it's a bumster trying to sell you something so I ignored him.
"Excuse me, Mr. Sheppard?" I turned around and it was one of my students.
"Mr. Sheppard, are you here on Holiday?"
"No. Just visiting for the weekend."
"How was the examination for Statistics?"
"Went quite well."
"Will you be at Graduation on Saturday?"
"I do not know."
"If you are, I can give you a chicken. Or, you can take your car and pick it up from me some other time."
"Thank you for the chicken. I don't have a car, but I'll let you know about Saturday."
We exchanged cell phone numbers even though he already had mine from the first day of class. Saturday was not only graduation, but it was the first graduating class of the first university of the entire country of The Gambia. President Jammeh himself was going to be there. My counterpart was the main planner for the event and throughout the weeks leading up to it I could tell the stress was getting to her. I was invited to attend, along with Doug and Kate, but only Kate made it on time to be let in the doors.
After having a bean-sandwich for our second lunch we stopped at this second-hand clothes seller. Some jeans were faded, others stained, other ripped or torn. They come from all over the world as the sizes are not even compatible. A '6' on one could be a '24' on another, which was the same size as 'pi cubed over three' for the next. And of course you can't try them on so you're left handing two identical jeans, one labeled in probably Swedish with a '6' and the other Dutch with a '24'. It was confusing! I picked out two jeans and two shirts, but he wanted D210 for them all, and I wasn't going to pay more than D150. No deal. As I walked away I saw an array of belts hanging from the wall. I knew I needed a new one, the only problem was they were all women's belts with decorations or other items. No belts were bought that day either. When I returned to Kombo I just solved it myself and took an ice-pick from my Leatherman and made another hole. I guess you can say I'm on hole number negative one now.
Across the river, in Farafenni, is what's called "The Dead Toubob Store." It's not an actual store, per say, and it doesn't have that name but that's what we call it. Apparently, across Europe and the US whenever someone dies and the family doesn't want to deal with their clothes they just donate them all. A fraction of them shows up monthly in Farafenni, The Gambia and sell for very cheap; about D7 a shirt and D15 for jeans. They are not organized in any way, just boxes of shirts you can go through, boxes of jeans, boxes of belts, etc. Most volunteers in that area go there to buy good cheap American type clothing. Sometimes you become lucky and find a shirt that is quite recent as it has a face on it with a new famous young actor or actress on the front. Other times you don't get so lucky and you might have a good probability of finding a "Carter for President" T-Shirt among them.
As we were walking back we passed a very small convenience store. Don't think 7-11, think hole-in-the-wall. I went in and bought a six-pack of toilet paper for Doug. This calls for an explanation: For volunteers, toilet paper is the most convenient gift to give when staying at someone's house. During Christmas or Thanksgiving when people stayed at our house we received toilet paper. When volunteers stayed at The Fishbowl they gave them toilet paper as appreciation. This wouldn't have the same affect in the US. If your Uncle Bill shows up for a week and hands you a six-pack of toilet paper as thanks, most likely than not two thoughts would cross your mind quite simultaneously 1. Am I really related to him? [And if so, is it too late to change the will?] 2. Don't invite him over again! [Unless you just happen to be low on toilet paper]
Doug appreciated the gift of toilet paper.
While relaxing that night I read the instruction manual for the Simon Game. If you win at the highest level it does a little tune and sings for you. Having nothing else to do we asked for Simon back from Prince and commenced to try and beat the game. Doug had four fingers on each button and I sat on his right recording each color as they appeared. Originally I was on his left but my arm got in the way and it timed-out on us half-way through. We must maximize efficiency! I abbreviated each color by one letter, wrote in rows of three going down the page while Doug never took his eyes off the paper and used his fingers to push the buttons. Out of the 31 colors in a row we needed the best we got after an hour was 28 before we handed it back to Prince.
We then asked the question: When are we half-way there? It's not when you are done with 15 or 16 colors as each time you have to add one more color to the sequence and so the ending sequences are longer, and more prone to error, then the beginning. With 31 colors we needed to win the game it called for a total of 496 buttons we had to push. (1+2+3+. . . .+31=496) I saw the numbers 31 and 496 and was amazed at what a simple game of Simon just illustrated for me. 31 is the 3rd Mersenne Prime Number and 496 is the third Perfect Number. That night I spent a half hour proving the formula relating Mersenne Primes with Perfects Numbers with a corollary being that Perfect Numbers were Triangle Numbers. All this brought out by playing Simon!
Having given up with Simon for the night we had our dinner while discussing uncountable infinite sets, A.I., cellular autonomy, and other areas which also sprung from the Simon game situation. Kate stopped by later on and left, then Jeff showed up and we talked about Presidential Elections and Electoral College before I fell asleep for the night.
Since we were leaving the night morning I slept on the floor at Doug's with the six-pack of toilet paper acting as a pillow. The next morning, while packing, I reread the instruction manual again for Simon to see if there was an easier way to beat the game. One version you can play is two-players with the second person having to repeat the sequence of the first person. But what if you were both players and only push just one button! As Doug was packing I was pacing around the room pushing the Yellow light continuously "beep beep beep . . .". A quick 496+496=992 pushes of Yellow and I would win! I continued pushing the button " . . . beep beep beep . . .". Still pacing the room, " . . . beep beep beep . . . ". Finally, after 992 times Simon lit up and started singing as Doug ran from the other room to hear what we tried to so hard to hear the day before. "That's it?" was our mutual disappointed response. Oh well, what else are you going to do to keep yourself busy?
We left to visit the school one more time before us two headed out. Doug was going half-way back to Kombo to visit Justin for a day or two to help set up the computers in their school. The students this morning, as we walked into Tahir Senior Secondary School, were dressed in their uniforms going from one class to another. Quite a few students came up to Doug proclaiming, "Mr. Douglas! Long time!" He explained to each one in turn where we was and why he was most likely not staying the rest of the semester. They were disappointed to lose him.
I stayed in the Computer Lab with Jeff while Doug said goodbye to other teachers and the headmaster. Although he was going back to Pakalinding in a few days it was as if this was the true goodbye. During break some students go over to the bean-sandwich ladies for a quick snack, and knowing break was in a few minutes we headed over there early and got first dibs.
By noon we pulled our bags over our shoulders and headed out the door to Soma. Along the way we stopped at a telecentre to make a call and ran into Kate. She was on her lunch-hour at work and couldn't make a call as they had no electricity, but the telecentre did. After a few phone calls later we reached the car park. Whenever traveling it is best not to leave in the middle of the day as the car park will be full, it is better to leave in the morning when it is empty. It was the middle of the day, and lo and behold, the car park was full. We met a newly sworn in volunteer still waiting from that morning to go upcountry. As we were waiting in line to buy a ticket someone asked where we were going: "Serekunda". He said "Come! Come!" and so we followed. He led us to a big van which was still being loaded with people. He found an open window, grabbed the roof and jumped in through the window. "Here, give me your bags!" We knew the routine by now so we gave him our bags through the window and headed towards the back of the car to climb on. Upon reaching him our seats were reserved, with a little assistance from him, and we had a spot on the van without waiting not more than 10 minutes at the park. The guy climbed out the back and asked for a tip from the window. We were both quite impressed with his Dukes-of-Hazard abilities and gave him D25 each.
About two hours we passed Bwiam and let Doug out.
An hour after that someone tried to climb out and accidentally tipped over a large container, about a gallon or so, of peanut butter which slithered through the alley; as two people also tried to climb out they started slipping and sliding and had to hold on to the seats as they walked from the front of the van to the back. They threw the container out of the window and did their best to clean the bulk of the peanut butter up.
The ride from Soma to Birkama lasted four and a half hours. From there another van took me to Serekunda, which was another 40 minute ride. At Serekunda I had a hard time finding the car park and went up to a random taxi:
"Can you drive me to Seven and Seven's?"
"Yes."
"How much?"
"D75"
"D50"
"Make it D60"
"No," and I walked away.
"OK Get in."
I got in and after getting settled I noticed wires hanging from the driving wheel, radio, and other dashboard items. Then I noticed he had no key. "You have no key!"
"Don't need one. See these two wires. One red, one yellow," he showed me the two wires and continued, "this one starts the car, you just touch it while this one needs to be plugged in." He unplugged that wire from his set-up to illustrate the purpose that the car will not run without it plugged in. In this case the car immediately stopped in the middle of the street in Serekunda Market. Case proved.
For ten minutes I received a private lesson of how to start a car without a key and which wires to do it. He had me start the car a few times, leaning over from the passenger seat to do so. On the road out from Serekunda a bump rattled the red wire out of his duct-taped apparatus and the car stalled again. He turned to smile as if to prove again, that yes, that wire needs to be plugged in. He let me plug the wire in and using the yellow wire start the car before he headed out of the market.
After dropping me off a block from my house I gave him the D60 he requested.
-MIke
posted by Mike | 5:13 PM
1 Comments:
I am from Pakalinding, Doug was my Class Teacher at Tahir. You article/site is great I enjoyed reading it. I am studying outside the Gambia presently so reading your article made me remember my nice village as if I was there. I was a in the 11th grade when Doug left Tahir and sure we missed him so much.
Though so many things seems strange to you in my nice village but the place is like any nice place to me. Presently I missed the place and I will not be back until 2013.
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