I spent the past two months living in a very tiny village called Wurokang in Kiang Central. The whole village consisted of one row of compounds on either side of the main south bank road. I could probably walk from one end to the other in about 5 minutes. Wurokang has two pumps where the women go to get water, one mosque, and probably about 300 inhabitants. It has two small bitiks, where you can buy common necessities like soap and oil, and one tailor. On either side of the village fields extend back. This is the land where the people make their living growing groundnuts, rice, and coos. We lived in Wurokang toward the end of the groundnut harvest time, which meant that I had a pretty serious blister on my thumb from cracking peanuts on the concrete for long stretches of time. If you walk through the fields, the peanut plants have all been pulled out of the ground and piled in big bushels that the men guard from mischievous cows. They use thin wooden hockey-stick shaped tools to separate the nuts from the ground nut hay.
Meanwhile, the bulk of the work in the village falls to the women. They cook, fetch water, garden, keep the compounds clean, pound the rice and coos to extract it from its shell…
The kids put on their blue and white uniforms and walk to Kwinella for school, a larger village about 2k away. On Fridays and weekend nights they go to Arabic school, where they build a huge bonfire and sing late into the night. Everyone in Wurokang is Muslim, but bits of African animist culture still remain. The babies, and many of the grownups, wear jujus around their necks, waists, and arms to protect them from harm or evil. To pray, women wrap themselves tight in scarves but otherwise modesty applies only to the bottom half. It’s too hot and there are too many babies to feed for the women to worry about covering up on top.
As for the Peace Corps Trainees, the five of us meet every morning at our teacher’s house to learn language, and again for lunch, which is, like all meals in The Gambia, served in a communal food bowl. Usually it’s rice with some kind of sauce – peanut, leaf, or oil and tomato. We spend the rest of the day filling our time with chores – laundry, fetching water, studying, doing assignments, gardening – or hanging out with our families and each other.
Meanwhile, the bulk of the work in the village falls to the women. They cook, fetch water, garden, keep the compounds clean, pound the rice and coos to extract it from its shell…
The kids put on their blue and white uniforms and walk to Kwinella for school, a larger village about 2k away. On Fridays and weekend nights they go to Arabic school, where they build a huge bonfire and sing late into the night. Everyone in Wurokang is Muslim, but bits of African animist culture still remain. The babies, and many of the grownups, wear jujus around their necks, waists, and arms to protect them from harm or evil. To pray, women wrap themselves tight in scarves but otherwise modesty applies only to the bottom half. It’s too hot and there are too many babies to feed for the women to worry about covering up on top.
As for the Peace Corps Trainees, the five of us meet every morning at our teacher’s house to learn language, and again for lunch, which is, like all meals in The Gambia, served in a communal food bowl. Usually it’s rice with some kind of sauce – peanut, leaf, or oil and tomato. We spend the rest of the day filling our time with chores – laundry, fetching water, studying, doing assignments, gardening – or hanging out with our families and each other.
The Wurokang Health/Agroforestry Training Class of 2008.
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