A Placement at Last!

We moved to this house. It is a great relief.  I am able to sleep better at night and, when waking up, I can go to the bathroom as I am without having to put a piece of clothing on.  The house is nice and quite isolated. Only the Director General of the National Agricultural Research Institute (NARI) lives nearby. I believe there are no other residents. It is where the offices and labs are of NARI, the partner organization we work with. 

Of course a move is a lot of work. Once they left all our belongings on the floor the work started.  The house has not been occupied for some years and although they painted it and did some repairs there were/are many things to fix.  The carpenter varnished some wooden doors and in the process spilled drops of brown varnish all over the tiled floor. No one cleaned it on time so the spots dried.  The water heater in the bathroom was broken so a plumber was called and he changed the heater but did not connect it.  Further, now the pipe there is leaking. The bathroom sink leaks too. Now there is a leak behind the toilet.

Anyway, with the help of our cleaning lady, Yama, and a lot of elbow grease and a razor blade and some borrowed tools, we are doing much better.  We have two bedrooms. We set the computers in the guest bedroom because that spot has the best wireless internet reception. The furniture was provided included ome enormous, ugly and dusty easy chairs in the living room.  We have noticed that in all the private homes we have visited there are very large sofas and chairs, and they hang dark curtains all around the walls and windows, making it very dark. We removed some of these curtains that are hung in such a way that you are unable to draw them closed or open. We open the windows when there is cool breeze. We tie the curtains to let the light in. We close them when the sun is shining in.  It is getting hotter every day, particularly in the afternoon.  Today it was 36C/95F degrees.

There are many mango trees around us and birds too (today we saw Red- collared widow birds, all black birds with a very long tail. The mangoes will not be ripe for several months; then it will be a feast of them.  Today we discovered a lemon tree near the house, with few lemons left high at the top. We used a long stick to pick 6 of them.  I always wanted a lemon tree in my yard.  

It is very quiet and peaceful in this location because it is outside the next town (Brikama).  There are no shops in walking distance. Today we went by the public transport (vans that are very crowded) to the next market in Brikama and returned by taxi with our heavy bags.  I will also be going to the city three times a week for my French classes at the Alliance Francaise--something fun and useful I chose to do before I knew that I will be living quite far. It takes me about an hour each side with some walking too.  I go earlier so that I can drop at the supermarket to buy ingredients we can't find in the local vicinity, and carry it back in my backpack. 

Since David works at home, and there are no places to eat out, there is a lot of food preparation involved.   The market is a crazy place. Any product (not food) is imported from China, mainly, and is cheap and generally poor quality. We bought a cheap pot for cooking rice, after another we bought earlier fell apart after the first cooking.  The new one had to be reinforced before cooking but the rice came out fine.

Today each one of us took a bath for the first time in the bathtub, with hot water heated on the stove in the kitchen.  Though it was only about 3 centimeters deep it was much better than the bucket wash we have done before. Once the water heater gets wired and fixed we can take warm showers.

Our son, Daniel is coming for a two-week visit next Tuesday.  He does not understand the conditions here (no ATMs, can't use credit cards and the need to use cash everywhere.) The day after he arrives we go together on a trip to what they call "up country," where NARI has an experimental station where our project, to set up the computer training center, takes place.  We plan to interview the prospective trainees to assess their training needs, and see how the Center's renovations are getting along.  On the weekend we will go sightseeing and stay at a bird-watching camp.  Dani will probably take also some day trips around the coastal area where we live, and sometimes one of us can join him.


We traveled to Sapu expecting to interview up to 20 staff. We brought 20 copies of the questionnaire.  We interviewed 30 staff and, unfortunately, had to turn additional staff that was anxious to participate away.  Staff traveled from all over the region to participate in the interviews.  The staff interest in the opportunity to learn how to use a computer is overwhelming and very encouraging.  My impression is that the demand for enrollment in the training centre will likely be very great and may require prioritizing who is trained.

Our findings will lead to several additional recommendations for the implementation and further development of the training centre project.

First, there is a history which has been essentially unknown to us. We met a Peace Corps volunteer who told us that there had been a computer training programme at Sapu beginning in 2008. The project was terminated. The termination of this project came up in quite a few of our interviews. Staff expressed a great feeling of disappointment about the withdrawal of this training.  They also said that since they had had no opportunity to access computers in ordewre to put into practice what they had learned after the training, they had forgotten what they had learned and felt they would need to start over from the beginning to learn, again, the basics of using computers.

This story points out a concern and pitfall for a project of this nature. The training centre at Sapu will only make a meaningful impact and achieve the objectives stated for this project if access to computers for the Sapu staff follows the training, and the computers are serviced and supported to ensure that they continue to function by being repaired when they break down.  Providing the training without an enhancement of computer availability and support, and improvements in network and support infrastructure risks leading, again, to the kind of disappointment that staff at Sapu experienced when the Peace Corps withdrew from the training project initiated by the Taiwan Technical Mission.

Second, we learned, as result of the trip, that there are two major groups among the staff who will need to be served quite differently.  One group is novices who have never seen, touched, or experienced computers and have interacted very little with electronic devices, mainly because they have not had access to this kind of equipment. The second group has already been using computers to some degree for their work.

One of the staff that I interviewed told me his story. He is an agronomist and specialized in rice cultivation. He is a specialist for the extension workers.  When the extension workers bring a question or problem related to rice back from a farmer this staff person is the one an extension worker consults for an answer or possible solution.

A while ago he was sent to a meeting of agronomists in Egypt.  Agronomists representing 20 African countries attended this meeting. He represented The Gambia and he felt very embarrassed because he was the only one among the 20 who was computer illiterate. The representatives of the other 19 countries had computers and knew how to use them.

After the meeting he was able, through the help of an NGO in Nigeria, to obtain a laptop.  He has taught himself how to use it and can borrow a dongle from the current station manager to access the internet in order to Google on topics related to rice. In this way he has been able to find information from other African countries, Japan, China, etc. in order to solve problems and answer questions for the extension workers.

The third point, a very important one, arises from our activities over the weekend. Since our son is visiting us, we booked accommodation at a guest house near Baboon Island. The guest house was operated by a husband (Gambian) and wife (Scottish).  He is the brother of the akalo and the imam of his village. We visited the Horse and Donkey Trust that teaches farmers and youth to care for farm animals, provides farm animals to poor farmers who can not afford them, thereby increasing their income by 500%, teaches computer skills in the village school, is in the process of reopening a primary care clinic which shut down due to loss of funding, and women's vegetable garden project. (Word of our interviews at Sapu had preceded us.  They had heard in detail about the training centre (an hour's drive from Sapu) before we arrived.)

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We saw the chimpanzees and hippos. We toured their village and a Malian village that this village hosts. It was very interesting and significant for me. After the river tour we landed on the north side of the river at Kuntaur.  Our guide took us to meet the Assistant Regional Director CRR-North, Ministry of Agriculture.  His question was, when will the MOA staff at CRR-North be able to access training and learn how to use the computers that are located in their office? The point is that we heard that the need and interest in this initiative is becoming widespread and that the training centre at Sapu should be viewed as only a beginning.

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We had a 100 degree day a couple of days ago.  Today it was much cooler, only 94.  We have just returned form an upcountry trip.  Up country it is really hot; it was for sure well over 100.  We did a little tour and saw hippopotami, Chimpanzees, Baboons, Bush Pigs, and many birds, though the nature was the least of it.  We stayed in a guest house in the bush in a small village near the river.  This is the time of year when the sun is directly overhead, and everything is very dry, so the cattle are coming from Senegal to get water from the Gambia River.  At night it was totally silent.  No machines, no planes, nothing.  We could see the Milky Way.  No lights. No electricity, no running water. Just nature. The proprietress, however, from Scotland, presented wonderful European meals.  Her husband, Gambian, gave us tours of the villages and the river.  Being a farmer himself and owning in his family a lot of land, we learned a lot about the life here. Our son is with us for a visit and is seeing the real Gambia. 

 

We are bit exhausted right now.  Ilana is lying down.  We spent the morning working on our garden.  For me it was heavy work because I was preparing the ground for planting.  I prepared a flower bed in front of the house and four mounds, two for zucchini and two for water melons.  Wouldn't be nice if they grew and were ready before we leave! No promises in this business. 

We found seeds yesterday during our foray into town.  We were invited for lunch at the house of another volunteer and stopped at the supermarket on the way, the one that has almost everything.  It is an hour away, so it is not available for a quick trip to pick something up. After the lunch we went to a five star hotel for hair cuts.  The hotel is owned by Moroccans, and the barber is Moroccan.  These were our first haircuts since arrival. It was about time and we figured it was better to make an appointment at that place than try the local places where all they do is shave your head.  Most people here don't have much hair.  Many women who are fashionable wear wigs.  In the village they wear scarves or a head dress. 

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(The views are my own.)