Mali...

        Okay, so I've never actually been to Mali before, this will in fact be my first trip there but I'm trying to show some continuity with the rap songs/my life in The Gambia thing...

        Heather, Peter (the Canadian couple I flew over with) and I are leaving for Dakar, Senegal on Thursday morning where we will pick up our Malian Visas and then Saturday morning catch the 36-hour train to Bamako, Mali (and yes Dad, I know it's that country in the Sahara, not the island in Indonesia!). We'll be spending a week and a half there and then due to a rather inconvienient  schedule (the nerve of not consulting the tourists first, eh?), spending New Year's Eve on the train ride back. Looking forward to the trip but I'm really wishing I was at home for Christmas. A definite plus of living in a Muslim country is that Christmas isn't celebrated, I don't really have a sense of what it is I'm missing but every once in a while when I'm followed home by a man whistling we wish you a Merry Christmas, or venture into the tourist supermarket and hear Kenny and Dolly (eck, you know you are sick with nostalgia and melodrama when) I get a little misty. I don't think I said this very emphatically last year, so I'll say it now, Canada or Bust for Christmas next year!!!

        This term is winding down at school. We didn't write exams because we got started so late in the term (I don't follow that logic, at all but I've learned to just smile and nod when issues like this come up), next week will just be a whole lot of poor attendance and short attention spans, a grammar teacher's dream. I've heard the attendance really drops in January because students don't want to come to school in the cold; understandable, I remember a few days at university when that big, ugly orange couch and a few blankets took precedent over Developmental Psych (lots of things took precedent over Developmental Psych but that's another story) only
difference being "cold" here is probably 22 degrees! 

        On a more positive attendance note, my first day at school I rode the bus home with one of my students and he was telling me that he was a bit embarrassed because he is 20 years-old in grade 10 but couldn't go to school until late because of family committments. He came to school for the first week and then stopped coming altogether. I asked around him quite a bit and learned that his sister was in one of my other classes. I asked her what he was doing and she said, "just staying home". I told her on a few occasions to tell him that I was very angry with him for not coming to school. Wednesday I was teaching and looked over to see a kid, not in uniform, waving me over, immediately recognized him as the long-lost Ebrima

Drammeh. He informed me that he was coming back to school and came to see me
because he had heard I was asking about him. He gave some lame-o excuse about
having been sick and then going to Guinea but for whatever reason, he's been
attending classes every day since. Apparently he's a rapper and so I've
told him he has to write a rap explaining why a student shouldn't skip two
months of school to make up for the time missed.

        An interesting couple of weeks with the Peer Health Education group I work with at school. Last week was AIDS Awareness Week and class presentations were given by the students. One thing I must say, Gambians certainly are thorough (a more polite way of saying they are incredibly long-winded) and so, as far as they were concerned, no presentation dealing with preventing AIDS would be complete without the old banana to show the proper use of a condom demonstration. I often forget that these "kids" are hardly kids, practically my age and my referring to them as "cute" is hardly a fitting word choice for people who come out with, "Miss Keenan, I don't think Jalamang should be able to do these presentations, he doesn't know what to do with "bananas" that are that big! (peals of laughter)" or "Miss Keenan, that class laughed at me when I told them I had abstained from sex for a year!" and then all of the students who came to me after the presentations for any condoms we might have left over.  

       Actually the issue of AIDS is quite interesting. All of the statistics reveal that Africa has the most AIDS sufferers in the world, 15 million compared to about 2 million in North America. A lot of students have taken these statistics as a personal affront and over here, AIDS stands for Americans Idea of Discouraging Sex, they claim the disease doesn't actually exist. I suppose it could be argued that it is this very attitude which perpetuates the cycle, there is quite a push to educate about the
reality of the disease but the non-believers still abound, seeing is believing they
say and we haven't been able to convince any AIDS patients to come forward
and introduce themselves (not that we'd try). 

        Yesterday we went to Abuko Nature Reserve for a term-end picnic/meeting. Quite suprised I hadn't made it out there yet, closest thing I've done to a hike since I've been here (I think the closest I'll come as well). We're in the height of the tourist season right now and as we were sitting outside the gate waiting for the rest of the students to arrive, a big van of two-bobs (white tourists) pulled up. I was sitting on a rock, with three students, one of whom was braiding my hair and I seemed to be
as much a point of interest as the monkeys in the park to them. It's quite interesting to be accepted as a part of the society (or at least not lumped with the tourists) in my students eyes. When they had passed my students were grumbling about the way they were looking at us and made me promise that if we ran into them inside that I would go up to them and say, "two-bob, maima one dalasi, maima minty" (yo, white guy, give me a dalasi, give me a mint) because after all, I'm not really a two-bob. There was a craft market inside the park and we all met there before catching our
buses. Even though I was with 20 Gambian students I was still taken for a
tourist and hassled. One of my students noticed this and came over to me, put
his arm around me and said to the seller, "look, don't bother my wife, if
she wants anything, she'll buy it!" No day of non-two-bobilism would be
complete without eating like a Gambian, which on this particular day involved a
sardine sandwich, blech!!! It kind of tasted like tuna with a real kick,
I think the worst part was knowing what I was eating.

        Now that the weather somewhat more agreeable I'm trying to get some exercise beyond the walk to the taxi. Shawna and I have started going to aerobics classes taught by a Jamaican-English woman living here with her Lebanese-Gambian boyfriend (?!). I was quite relieved to learn in that class that I'm not quite as uncoordinated as my experiences at the ceremonies had led me to believe, aerobics involves more of my type of co-ordination than traditional dancing. I was out with a few friends a couple of weeks ago and this Nigerian guy leaned over to me and commented on all of the "African backyards" around, "come on, you could set a beer on that woman's butt and I am perfectly entitled to say that, I'm African!!" I won't generalize and say this is the case for all women but for the first time in my life, I'm among the more "toned". We've had power outages every day for the past week and as aerobics starts at 7:00, we've been having class by candlelight. It
really hasn't been too bad, the "studio" is outdoors so the full moon the other
night was quite a help. 

        Last Sunday I ran in a 10k, took a few days to recover from thatone. We ran through the streets of the town and seeing as this is a rather small community, every so often "hey, go Miss Keenan!!" would be heard from the crowd. I ran most of the race with two men and they would laugh every time we heard it. I was quite a celebrity after that, the talk of the school when I arrived on Monday!

Copyright © 2002 Worldbridges    Copyright Policies