Power Up Gambia Blog

Impressions:

           Kathryn has asked me to do a blog about my impressions of Africa. I’m seventeen, and this has been my first extended trip to a third-world country. Showing up, I had no idea what to expect. Everything I knew about Africa had come from movies, television and books. After being here it is both exactly like that and completely different. Visually, the pictures I had seen were very accurate. Kids in ripped, dirty clothes, houses with dirt floors and rusty roofs. The feeling of pity that is usually conveyed with those images was what was different. Almost everyone I met seemed happy. The kids don’t have many clothes, and they wear them over and over until they’re full of holes, but all the kids clothing looks like that. The clothes probably had been clean when they put them on that morning, but they’ve been playing all day long, and there’s just a lot of dirt in Africa. I was covered in dirt every evening too, same as the kids. If you told one of the women here that from our American eyes, the dirt floors of her compound and the fence made from old roofing looked like poverty to us, she’d look at you like you were crazy. The corrugated metal functions perfectly as a fence, and what else are you supposed to put on the ground to walk on? It makes you rethink our white picket fences, and hard-wood floors. There’s a pretty good chance that it’s our culture that’s the strange one.

            Being here I get the feeling that in some ways these kids are more fortunate than American ones. American kids are rich in opportunities, but the sense of community here is unlike anything I’ve ever encountered at home. There is no such thing as homeless here. You may be struggling to support your family, but if your brother dies, you still take care of his wife and kids. You may not have enough food for your children, but if your husbands other wife is struggling more than you are, you tell him to bring that days earnings to her. Coming home, I wish we could be that selfless, and value people that much. That level of sacrifice at home would be applauded, but here it is commonplace. Taking care of each other is just what you do. I’m not sure I’d want to show our friends from Bwiam how things work at home, I think I’d be ashamed by the way we often treat each other, and by how greedy we can be. If I could snap my fingers and change things here I would give them good schools, clean water, better healthcare, and have their jobs bring in enough money to feed their families, but I wouldn’t want to make it like home. The hardships that people face here makes them tough, and the life wears them down, and yet they are some of the kindest people I know.

            I now understand why helping Africa is so popular. They need so much help with the basics, and they have a way of pulling visitors in emotionally. I was only there for three weeks and leaving still felt like I was leaving family. Sitting on the porch playing cards in the evenings with Bintou, Binta and Modulamin while the light turns a beautiful purple-orange that I’ve never seen anywhere else, I know why people fall in love with Africa. It’s because Jainaba is going to come dancing into our house everyday with a stuffed monkey tied to her back like a baby, Gia is going to keep trying to teach us the local languages and run through all the greetings every time she sees us, and when you visit someone’s compound, they’re going to offer you food, attaya and hand you a smiling baby, even if you showed up unexpectedly.

            For everything heartbreaking and emotionally draining that I encountered, from Binta’s bad teeth, to Gia’s description of what she can afford to feed her children and grandchildren, to the burned babies in the hospital, there would be something else exciting and uplifting. Gia would be organizing her women’s group to find a way to bring in more money for their families, Kathryn would get the night circuit running so the wards have electricity to save people all day and all night, or the entire crowd would be out dancing, singing, and celebrating on the soccer field after one of the local teams scored a goal.

            As we were driving away from the hospital the last time, rattling around in the back of the ambulance, I realized that while this trip has given me a lot to think over, the only thing that I don’t have to think about is that I’ll be coming back the first chance I get.