Yay!! I finally got my placement for the Peace Corps and I'm going to The Gambia! I will be leaving for my in-country staging on the 3rd of November and leaving for The Gambia on the 6th! For those of you who don't know The Gambia is a country surrounded by the Senegal in West Africa. It is Africa's smallest and least developed nation!
What will I be doing you may ask?
I will be an agfo volunteer, agriculture/forestry. This means I will be living in 1 village but also working with several others around it to bring environmental awareness to schools, women's groups and the community. I will also be honing in on other available resources (timber is one of the largest and causing deforestation at devastating rates) for the communities to use as another source of economic input. My site has had volunteers for the past 7 years and they have created candles and hand-made soap to be sold in markets. I don't know the name of my village or where it is yet so I also don't know what language I will be learning. I do know it will be an indigenous African language and since The Gambia is underdeveloped it is very traditional. It is 90% Muslim as well so the cultural events will be spectacular! My experience will be heavily determined by my ability to learn the language and integrate myself as quickly and fully as possible. I will be living with a host family during training and within a family compound during my service, although I will have my own separate hut and sleeping quarters. I will be sharing a bath house and eating some meals with my host family.
This is the basic information of what I will be doing and what life should be like for me while I'm there, but I won't really know it all until I get there. I also got about 2,000 pages of information from the Peace Corps (PC) and am re-reading it all already.
If you are interested in more information about what PC life is like in The Gambia check out:
http://www.peacecorps.gov/welcomebooks/gmwb635.pdf
Love and hugs!
2 comments:
I was a PCV in The Gambia from 02-04. It's a great assignment - I hope you'll enjoy it! Here is another site with some info about The Gambia http://resourcepage.gambia.dk/
He has some great pics, proverbs, even recipes of local foods.
Also, I started a website www.howtosaythatname.com. It is an audio database of names and it has Gambian names on it. When you start writing about people there, it can be nice for your family and friends to know how the names sound.
great Elizabeth!
Thank you for your help and I appreciate the resources, if you have any additional, please let me know. Thanks!
Jaclyn
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