Peace Corps Volunteers

Erika and Josh

Sara in her Tabaski dress

The first time I gave a thought to this tiny country in Africa was when my college roommate from Pasadena, California had been accepted to Peace Corps in the Gambia. Twenty years later I’ve met old friends of my UCLA pal in this nation where everyone seems to be no more than 1-2 degrees of separation away. Currently in the Gambia there are 90 Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs – I don’t know what the official acronym is, but I’ll use this). We met three of them this weekend up-country.

In some ways, these recent college-grad volunteers were everything you’d think a PCV should be: “roughing it” without electricity or running water, learning the local culture and speaking the language (Mandinka or Fula or Jola or Wolof, depending on the location), developing close bonds with their host family or community, carrying out meaningful work for their local community, good-natured, wanting to make a difference in the world. The similarities pretty much stopped there, as each of the three possessed such a different background and perspective, making the persona of the PCV come much more alive through their diversity. It fascinated me that they each had different “favorite” things about their time in Africa, but all shared their biggest challenge: re-adjustment. What will life be like when they return home so changed, but the people around them have not changed, and really have no idea what they’ve been through?

ERIKA:
I was first in contact with Erika, as she works in the regional hospital that I needed to visit for a project I was looking into (more on that in a later post). She is a native of Northern Idaho and was a computer programmer for a municipal police department in Washington State. In the Gambia she developed a database for managing the large regional hospital’s caseload. She loves her “Gambian family” like her own family. She is a devout Catholic and they are Muslims, which gives her a whole different respect for the religion than she ever thought she could have. She hopes she can go home and dispel some of the myths that prevail in the US around Muslims. After a two year term, she’s down to her last month of service.

JOSH:
Josh graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in East Asian History and additional studies in Spanish – very useful for working in the West African bush, where he is an agro-forestry worker (?!). A girlfriend convinced him to go to Philadelphia with her after graduation, where they broke up a week later. In his nonchalant way, he explained how this was the best thing that happened to him. He started working for Americorps in North Philly with Habitat for Humanity, and the Peace Corps position came through. He accepted to go to the Gambia, though he didn’t know anything about the country, other than its location. He now lives less than half a mile from the Senegalese Casamance border, where there has been a civil war for many years. Josh reassures: “but if they didn’t tell you, you wouldn’t even know there was a border there, let alone a civil war.” During his brief Peace Corps training period Josh learned skills he’s trying out in his village, from making soap out of local ingredients (but the marketing was not successful) to beekeeping (still going), introducing soy beans (a failure: the variety would work well in Ohio, but not in this climate), and most recently, on reforestation for the timber industry and on cultivating orchards of mango, cashew and avocado (this seems to be going well). He wants to pursue these areas when he returns to the US and applies to grad schools.

SARA:
Sara comes to Africa from Appalachian Kentucky, near the Tennessee border. She was a Robinson Scholar, receiving a full-ride to the University of Kentucky and is the first person in her family to attend university. Both of her parents are truck drivers. Sara says “My mom is my best friend.” Her family encouraged her to stick it out in rural Africa: “After a few months I thought maybe I should go back home, but my family really helped me to stay. My mom and sister write me letters every week and support me so much.” Sara teaches computers and helps in the library at the rural elementary, middle and upper schools: “Since there is no electricity most of the time, I find other ways to be useful; that’s how the library work started.” She had just returned from a two-week vacation in Mauritania, where she “hung out in the desert and ate camel meat and just talked to local people. Even meeting the Europeans was a highlight of my trip, as we don’t see many of them where I come from, either.” When we met her, she arrived wearing a bright locally made dress: “all the women in my village got these made to match for Tabaski [a major celebratory Islamic holiday]; today when I walked out of my hut my “sister-in-law” was also wearing hers.”