The Book List.

Every day from after lunch until about 4-5 in the evening everybody I worked with in my village took a nap. I don't nap. I can't nap. So I read, and this is it. Two years of sweaty afternoon reading as a Peace corps volunteer.

Rating scale...
Five stars is life-changing-good.
Four stars is great.
Three stars is good.
Two stars is worth reading.
One star is not worth reading. Ever. At all.

Ok. Here goes. In semi-chronological order.
1. The Sex Lives of Cannibals- J. Maarten Troost- Four stars
2. Clockwork Orange- Anthony Burgess- One star
3. Dracula- Bram Stoker- Three and a half stars
4. How We are Hungry- Dave Eggers- Three stars
5. High Fidelity- Nick Hornby- Three stars
6. Shadow of the Wind- Carlos Zafon- Three stars
7. Red Dragon- Thomas Harris- Two and a half stars
8. 1,000 Splendid Suns- Khaled Hosseini- Two stars
9. Fahrenheit 451- Ray Bradbury- Three stars
10. White Teeth- Zadie Smith- Two stars
11. The Sun Also Rises- Ernest Hemingway- Five stars
12. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius- Dave Eggers- Four stars
13. The Magician's Nephew- C. S. Lewis- Four stars
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany- John Irving- Four stars
15. 3 Cups of Tea- Gregg Mortinson and David Oliver Relin- Two stars
16. The Old Man and the Sea- Ernest Hemingway- Three stars
17. The Brothers Karamazov- Fydor Dostoevsky- Three and a half stars
18. East of Eden- John Steinbeck- Five stars
19. Burmese Days- George Orwell- Two stars
20. Jayber Crow- Wendell Berry- Four stars
21. The Highest Tide- Jim Lynch- One star
22. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime- Mark Haddon- Three stars
23. The Cider House Rules- John Irving- Four stars
24. Travels with Charlie- John Steinbeck- One Star
25. The Power and the Glory- Graham Greene- Three stars
26. This is Your Brain on Music- Daniel J. Levitz- Two stars
27. All Creatures Great and Small- James Herriot- Three stars
28. Welcome to Havana, Senor Hemingway- Alfredo Jose Estrada- Two stars
29. Love in the Time of Cholera- Gabriel Garcia Marquez- One star
30. The Sound and the Fury- William Faulkner- One Star
31. The Pearl- John Steinbeck- Two stars
32. All the King's Men- Robert Penn Warren- Three and a half stars
33. The Green Hills of Africa- Ernest Hemingway- Three stars
34. The Golden Compass- Philip Pullman- Two stars
35. The Subtle Knife- Philip Pullman- One star
36. The Amber Spyglass- Philip Pullman- One star
37. Dark Star Safari- Paul Theroux- Four stars
38. A Movable Feast- Ernest Hemingway- Two stars
39. The Pre-history of the Far Side- Gary Larson- Two stars
40. That Hideous Strength- C. S. Lewis- One star
41. Getting Stoned With Savages- J. Maarten Troost- Two stars
42. The Great Railway Bizarre- Paul Theroux- Two stars
43. L. A. Confidential- James Ellory- Three stars
44. The Village of Waiting- George Packard- Two stars
45. The Bride of Fu Manchu- Sax Rohmer- Two stars
46. For Whom the Bell Tolls- Ernest Hemingway- Three stars
47. The Omnivore's Dilemma- Michael Pollan- Three stars
48. The Shadow of the Sun- Ryszard Kapuscinski- Four stars
49. The Best American Non-Required Reading- Edited by Dave Eggers- Two stars
50. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway- Ernest Hemingway- Three stars
51. Gestalt Therapy Verbatim- Fredrick S. Perls MD, PhD- Two stars
52. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle- Barbara Kingslover- Two stars
53. Mountains Beyond Mountains- Tracy Kidder- Two stars
54. Fidelity- Wendell Berry- Two stars
55. Captain's Courageous- Rudyard Kipling- One Star
56. The Kingdom by the Sea- Paul Theroux- One star
57. The Grapes of Wrath- John Steinbeck- Four stars
58. Reading Lolita in Tehran- Azar Nafisi- Two stars
59. The Assistant- Bernard Malmud- Two stars
60. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek- Annie Dillard- Two stars
61. Politika- Tom Clancy and Martin Greenberg- One star
62. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance- Robert M. Pirsig- Three stars
63. The Memory of Old Jack- Wendell Berry- Two stars
64. The Elegance of the Hedgehog- Muriel Barberry- Two stars
65. Leaving Home- Garrison Keillor- Two stars
66. The Heat of the Day- Elizabeth Bowen- One star
67. Into the Heart of Borneo- Redmond O'Hanlon- Three stars
68. The Castle- Franz Kafka- Two stars
69. All the Pretty Horses- Cormac McCarthy- Three stars
70. A Sand County Almanac- Aldo Leopold- Three stars
71. Homegrown Democrat- Garrison Keillor- One star
72. The Red Pony- John Steinbeck- One star
73. Dubliners- James Joyce- Three stars
74. Invasion of the Body Snatchers- Jack Finney- Two stars
75. The Snow Leopard- Peter Mattieson- Two stars
76. Sarah's Key- Tatiana de Rosnay- Two stars
77. Notes from the Underground (and other stories)- Fydor Dostoevsky- Three stars
78. Where there is no Doctor- David Werner, Carol Thuman, Jane Maxwell- Two stars
79. Dreams from my Father- Barack Obama- Two stars
80. A River Runs Through It- Norman Mclean- Five stars (I'd give it more, but that's perfection).

And the list goes on. This is what it was when I left site and moved to the "big" city. You can ask me for further reviews of any of them when I see you in less than two months.

Keep in touch.

bjorn

One step closer to you...

Brian and I on the countrywide adventure known as mail run.

Hello everybody,

There is finally some exciting news from the gambian front, and even more importantly I now have the time to blog about it.  Yesterday Peace Corps came and picked me and all my gear up from my site in the bush, and moved me down to the peace corps house in Fajara so that I can help work on the training stuff on a day to day basis.  I'm back near the coast, with daily access to phone charging and the internet, so I'm feeling one step closer to you at home. Technically I should mention that I'm one step farther away from my loyal blog readers in asia, but I'll come back your way inshalla...

So I'm out of Ker Katim.  I'll miss it; the long pointless walks looking for a tree to climb, the sunsets in senegal, the food that was good enough to eat but not always safe, trading cultural wisdom with the moustapha my alkalo, listening to talks at the bantaba (sun patio-thing/meeting place)... I could go on, in fact I could probably write a blog about each of those, and I may.  Later.  I know looking back that I had a wonderful village, and a community that I built a relationship with based on mutual respect from the very beginning. 

My last week there was especially great.  The alkalo (village chief, for those of you who don't deg the wolof- interesting side note: the american phrase "dig it" is wolof in origin, from the word "deg" which is to hear or understand) made sure that his wives made me my favorite food.  The only person in the village who tried to ask me for something said "what are you leaving behind in the village?" The alkalo said "He leaves behind knowledge."  It was a great moment. I got my brother's package with a slingshot and flowery shirt. The slingshot made my walks in the bush more interesting, the flowery shirt was a big hit on my walks in town. I had two friends visit who both got terrible dysentery, with blood in the stool and fevers of 103 and higher, but I was the same as always and I felt pretty invincible... I also feel really bad that's what they got from my village.  That and knowledge?

Moustapha and I also did this traditional Wolof goodbye walk-through of every compound in the village on my last night there.  round the village with the Alkalo to do the very official goodbye.  We'd walk into a compound, he'd explain that I was leaving, and people would usually say a sentence or two before we left on to the next compound.  It was fast, but it really erased any feelings I had left that I'd not been a good volunteer.  People prayed for me and wished me health and money and luck, as usual, but they also said things like: : "You didn't bring any trouble to the village at all, thank you" and "Take some peanuts to your family" and "Don't forget to greet your father for me" and my favorite, "If we get another volunteer, god willing, they will be like you."  It was a lot more uplifting than I thought it would be.  So... After a year as an up-country volunteer I return to finish my service here in Kombo.  I have a few months left so again, no need for letters and packages anymore, but there is a need for emails, and I'll get back to you!  Really!

Thanks for checking my blog, and I'll be putting up more soon.

See you in December,

bjorn

The Gambia

Thanks for coming by. I apologize for not blogging more often, but things are busy when I have internet access and things aren't really all that exciting when I'm at site. Things are going well as I enter the "end of my service" stage. And honestly, if you're bored enough to be checking my blog you've got more than enough time to write me an email! Get on it!

betbjo@gmail.com


Check out the recent Gambian news at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8272774.stm

It'll blow your mind. This place is less than safe, and I'm not going to talk about it much until I leave. Fun stories though.

See you all before Christmas, inshalla.

bjorn

Pictures!

Snake in the house! It's not poisonous... Well, not deadly. I put him in a pillowcase and carried him outside. It really worked.

Gettin a new roof. It works, mostly.

Peace Corps contest of might!

My dog. The idiot.

A little bush fire smoke in the sunset.



Ryan, as I'll always remember him. He is missed. And no, he's not dead. He's in relative heaven. He has made it back home to America.

A simple update...

Dear blog readers,
I have to admit that since I’ve been up country I’ve gotten lousy at keeping up with my blog. Since it has been a while this blog will simply cover some basics of how I’m staying “busy”. Nothing too wild or crazy or adventuresome. But I try.

These days what Peace Corps would call my “primary project” is my little nursery garden over in Senegal. I’ve got ten beds of sweet potatoes and a couple beds of vegetables and trees for transplanting when the rains come. After the initial digging and planting most of the work is done, with just a few hours of watering a weeding every day until the rains come. Since the weather is still so dry it actually takes a lot of watering, with between 500 and 1000 liters of water every single day. I put my nursery in Senegal because the village has a tap, so I can just turn a knob and wait for the buckets to fill, instead of trying to draw it from the well like in my village. I’ve also got a few men in other nearby villages planting cashew seedlings, and I bike a round a couple of days each week to make sure that’s all still going well. It’s not a ton of work, but it’s enough going on that I keep sane. I’ve got some big plans for the rains, and big hopes I’ll be able to get some Gambian friends on board with me to do them. We've got to transplant all the stuff we're watering now, enough to fill 3 hectares, plus we're going to compost and re-fence the whole field. Wish me luck.

Sadly, a lot of my time these days is spent reading. Not thrilling, I know, but I bet some of you are jealous anyways. At the hottest part of the day, every single afternoon my entire village (including everybody I work with) takes a nap. I am unable to sleep in the afternoon, so I get some solid reading time in. I know I could be a more culturally integrated volunteer if I was to join the men sleeping under the bantaba (shade-place), but I’ll pass. So far in my service I’ve read something like 55 books.

Next on the time occupier list comes talking. I walk around the village, find people who are sitting and not sleeping, and I try to talk to them. For example last week a Gambian guy asked me:
“So what is it with you toubabs…? Have you seen Allah? Where is he?”
That was awesome. I’d say that 99% of the time I have the same conversations over and over again, but the new ones are a blast, and my Wolof still is improving. I’ve still got a lot of work left to do on it.
I spend at lot of time listening to my ipod. Any time I’m in my hut it is on, and it recharges by the power of the sun. It’s the best. Songs remind me of good times, or home, or people, and the NPR broadcasts are amazing.
Also, every day I try to take a hike around the bush, just to find some new trees or animals or something I haven’t seen before. It’s a great relaxer from the pressures of life in the village, more of an escape from dealing with the differences in culture, and I’ve found some pretty cool trees to climb.
Three meals a day are spent with my Gambian host and his little kids. Meals are a enjoyable experience of culture and I realize that I have some of the best food of any Peace Corps volunteers in the country. That said, meals are a frustrating experience, because you never really get full from eating rice or millet, but it’s more than that. Really the cultural aspects of eating with a Gambian father and his kids are frustrating, my host will eat 3 out of the four little fish in the bowl and then me and two kids share the last one. It’s just odd that a Father would so literally take food from his kid’s mouth. On the other hand, his kid is evil, and maybe he doesn’t really deserve that much food anyways.
Every other day I do my “workout”. It’s a plan from a website called hundredpushups.com and it’s amazing. You should check it out. I’m hoping to get to 100 push ups by the end of this week. No, I’m not joking. The contest is taking the Peace Corps The Gambia world by storm.
Another daily part of life here is text messaging. Here in PCTG we have found a local service provider that has given us unlimited texting for about 2 bucks a month. We text so often that I can now text without taking my phone out of my pocket. This isn’t something I thought I would learn while I was in Africa, but I’m sure it’ll come in handy.

When I’m not at site my life is totally different. Here in town I’m either at the office working or planning or trying to stay in some sort of touch with people back home or I’m hanging out with friends and catching up on time spent with Americans. Despite the huge draw of Kombo’s food and friends and cold beer I don’t love it here, and I prefer my life at site. But, since I like to do some extra work I find I’m in Kombo a little more that average. I’ve been helping with trainings for the other Environmental volunteers, some stuff for the health volunteers, and even a little help with trainings that went to Peace Corps Washington. It’s been fun.
Peace Corps The Gambia has managed to stick me in a bit of a trench, I’m stuck being the guy who talks about Food Security. Actually I’ve been reading about the topic a lot, and I get to “preach” about it fairly often. It’s important stuff though, and especially important for you guys- the Americans in America- because that’s where a lot of the changes can be made. Let’s face it; the way we eat affects the whole world. I could talk your ear off about it, but I won’t. It was just cool to hear from my sister that a lot of the family is already on the bandwagon with farmer’s markets and CSAs and eating local. Recommended readings on the topic are The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollack and Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. The first one is amazingly informational and well written, the second one covers the same information not quite as well but has the additional advantage of applying stuff to what you could actually do at home. As long as you’re getting into the “eating local” craze you probably don’t need all that processed/ packaged food that is sitting in your pantry, and since it isn’t ever going to expire you should box that up and send it to your favorite starving Peace Corps volunteer in Africa (me). The address is still the same, and somewhere nearby on this very blog page!
And if you’re thinking to yourself that "Bjorn’s been gone so long what’s the point of writing him now? Why bother with a package????"

Because I still have at least 6 months left! That’s why. You guys aren’t even thinking about the fourth of July yet, and you think it’s too late to send me a letter? I’ll be lucky if I get home for Christmas! Six months is a long time. Six months is two summer vacations. Six months is more than a complete semester of college. Six months would allow you to break a leg and heal it twice. Six months could contain (another) 90 bouts of Giardia. I think you get the point. In six months you can write me a letter, and I’ll write back, and then you can write back, and then I’ll write back again, and I’ll tell you not to bother because I’ll be back in the next month or so…
And don’t hesitate to email just because I don’t have a computer (or electricity) in my village. It can be a little bit of a downer to go to site for a month and then come back to town and see that I’ve gotten a whopping two emails, and they are both from my dad (true story). His emails are amazing though. He really gets what’s going on here, and what I miss, and development in general. Great man.


Then, after that annoyingly whiny “write to me” paragraph I have to say thanks. You haven’t forgotten about me, you still read my blog. To those of you who send letters, thanks again. You know how much it means to me, because I’ve written you back and told you, but I’d like to say thanks one more time. It means a ton. And thanks to everybody for the birthday greetings as well. I’ll try to put up some really awesome new pictures later this week.

Peace and love,

bjorn

Interesting story addendum

Ok, so after I finished the boring blog I was writing I went to lunch and something fun kinda fun happened, so I thought I’d tack it on. How can I deprive you of stories of my adventures when you’re stuck in your office? I can’t.

So I was in a little taxi on my way back from lunch, driving along the Gambia’s busiest thoroughfare, Kairaba Avenue. We were at a place where the traffic gets pretty bad when I noticed a couple of bikes lying in the road. And then, since we were crawling along slowly I noticed a taxi oddly stopped in the middle of the street. And there was a guy, punching the driver through the window. I hypothesize that he is one of the owners of a bicycle. So the driver tries to get out so that he can hit back, but the biker dude slams the door on him. So the driver climbs across and out the passenger’s door, and the two guys start kicking and punching like a combination of fake-movie-karate and two-year-old style wrestling.

Steph, who I had gone to lunch with, asks “Is somebody going to call the police or anything?” Whish is an odd question, since there is no number for the police and you’d have to know the number of the closest police station. But anyways, nobody was calling the cops. Everybody was gathering to watch the show. Lucky us, the taxi we were in stopped right next to the fight. Perfect.

So we watch the fight for a while, nobody is really getting hurt, it’s a lot like actors fighting for a movie scene, with awkward pauses and lots of yelling and lots of weak punches/kicks. And a guy walks up to the window of our cab, as long as we’re stopped, to see if he can jump in and get dropped off down the line. The best part is that the guy who is at the window of our car is a police man, in uniform, watching a fight and not feeling like maybe part of his job would include stepping in. We tell him no, he can’t ride with us because our car isn’t going where he wants to go. And we drive off.

The thing is this kind of story happens all the time, I’m just not usually thinking about blogging, or about stories to tell home, and unless you catch me right in the middle of it I’m liable to forget it completely. Look forward to more and better blogs later this month.

Just a little update on life.

It’s been a while since the last blog entry. I know. I apologize. I’ve been having a wonderful spring. The bad news is that this is a lame blog entry. It’s not a fun story or a huge lesson that I learned. It’s just an update on my life. And I’ve got better blogs written in my notebook, but since I left my notebook at the taj-mud-hal you’ll have to settle with this one.

Like I said, it’s been a really good spring. First off was the visit from a great friend of mine from high school. Then my brother and sister-in-law came. I don’t mean to brush over these visits, or how much the meant to me, but I have written another entire blog that does a better job at explaining the visits, and I don’t want to spoil that one. Suffice it to say that this difficult time of my service would have been even more difficult if I hadn’t had the visitors. They were a reminder to me of all of the rest of you guys who still care about me, even though you couldn’t come visit, or don’t have time to write, you still haven’t forgotten about me. And I needed a real reminder of that.

Also, I just got back from Spain, visiting with Linnea and continuing on from Colin and Emily’s trip here in the Gambia. Spain is an amazing contrast to the Gambia, and it was the vacation I needed. I’ll put up pictures later this month along with my blog about my visitors. You can expect to see me grinning like an idiot while staring at a large plate of pork. My sister and brother said that they’d never seen me so happy.

The Gambia is moving slowly this time of year. Actually, that isn’t really news. It is always moving slowly. But now is even slower than usual. There isn’t much going on. The bakery next door is making bread every three days or so, since the money from the harvest ran out and people can’t afford bread anymore. This year was a great harvest year, and people where I live still blew through all the money so that they could struggle and barely scrape through another hungry season. Next year’s crops won’t come in for another 6 months, and most compounds are already only feeding themselves the minimum. It’s a different sort of a budget, in which the family lives half the year as a wealthy family, and then at a certain point they only have enough money to survive, and they spend the other half of the year as dirt poor. It’s what people do here.

There isn’t a lot going on. No farming, and no gardening in my village because there is no water (the well is 37 meters deep, so there is still water to drink but nobody is willing to haul water up that distance just to throw it on a garden). Last years crops have all been harvested, ending with the beans and the sweet potatoes just a month or so ago. And now people in my village are just chilling, killing time, complaining about the heat and already complaining about the work that is to come in the rainy season. This starts in late June. So for the people of my village life is pretty good.

The heat has arrived; most Peace Corps volunteers say that April, May and October are the worst months of the year. The last time I saw the temperature at my hut it was 112, and it should top off at about 130 in the next few weeks, and then stick in the 120s until the rains come in late June. I’m not recommending this as a time for any more visitors.

Luckily, I’ll be spending a lot of time at the relatively cool coast. I’m getting ready to train the newer group of Ag-fos at their In Service Training. I get to lead the sessions on agriculture and food security. It’ll be fun but it’s a lot of work as well.

So that’s what’s going on in my life now. Really, sorry about the lack of fun in the blog but at least it’s something, right? Look for better ones later this month.

Love,

bjorn