Greenfield native, teacher helps open library in Africa

[ Originally published on: Tuesday, August 28, 2007 ]

At a PTA meeting, some of the village elders in the new library could be seen holding the books upside down, said Colleen King, a Rowe school teacher and school librarian, who's helped to set up three libraries in Gambia, Africa.

''This is really the first generation (in Gambia) where the majority are being schooled, and so it's a crazy and difficult transition, but there's interest and hope in it, too,'' said the 28-year-old Peace Corps worker and Spanish teacher.

King, who was born in Greenfield, has, since July 6, 2005, worked with several different schools in Gambia, a tiny East African country bordered nearly entirely by Senegal, with a small coast.

Although the communities are largely illiterate, reaction to the libraries has been positive.

''The community I live in is putting a lot of faith in their school. They are hoping that the next generation will improve the living situation by virtue of being educated,'' King said.

Setting up the library is the easy part, but integrating it into the school program is a difficulty, but one with ongoing small successes, King said.

Gambia is trying to achieve the ambitious goal of educating every child and getting qualified teachers in every classroom, but for now, there's a shortage of teachers.

''The school in my village has gone the whole year without a first grade teacher, but the children are sitting in that classroom every day, waiting,'' said King, who added that student teachers are supposed to work with a mentor for a couple of years, but typically are tied up handling their own, overfilled classrooms.

The Greenfield Community College and Vermont College graduate lived in the village of Soma, in the Jarra region.

Although Jarra is 100 miles from the capital city of Banjul, it's a six- to 13-hour trip by bus and ferry to get there.

But even the capital isn't exactly a metropolis.

''It's a bunch of fabric shops and chicken eateries and that's about it,'' King said.

King's became so accustomed to Gambian village life that she sometimes imagines returning home will be difficult for her.

''I'm worried that I'm going to be confused with what's going on around me, that my brain has slowed down to meet the pace of life (in Africa) and I'm going to get hit by a car my first day back in Greenfield. Yes, Greenfield seems hectic,'' King said.

''The village is mostly houses and gardens and donkeys and mosques. The town looks a bit 'Old West' with donkey carts and food stalls lit by lanterns and little shops,'' said King, who likes seeing the thick-trunked Baobab trees on the horizon and the stunning river that runs like an artery through the center of the country.

''I know it's cliche, but African sunsets are everything they're cracked up to be. Maybe it's partly the relief that the sun is going to take a break for a few hours,'' said King, who added that on some days during the hot season the temperature can reach 120 degrees.

Her village lines a dirt road that descends into a flat valley set about with mango trees. Brush fires have recently transformed the landscape into a hot, burnt, dusty abyss, but during the rainy season, it becomes green.

The Mohawk Trail Regional School graduate, who grew up in Charlemont, slept on a bamboo bed in a round room of plastered mud block, with a corrugated metal roof. She upgraded to the metal roof, after the grass roof she had leaked profusely during the rainy season.

''I have to sweep as often as I can, and the contents of my dust piles crawl away if I don't get them out the door quick enough,'' King said.

Like the other villagers in Soma, King took bucket baths in the backyard. Once, when she fell and banged up her legs, her host family brought her to a woman who is believed to have healing properties because she gave birth to twins.

''I laid down on her mat and she stepped directly on my bruises and cuts. This was the cure,'' King said.

King washes her clothes by hand, and protects her family's garden by chasing goats away from the fenced family compound that she lives in.

''After two years, they really feel like family,'' King said.

She and her six family members eat on the ground, out of the same bowl. The meal is rice just about every day, with a choice of one of three sauces.

''I miss sushi and chocolate cake and salads from the Bottle of Bread,'' King wrote earlier this summer.

Her neighbor has a pet monkey named Bubu that sometimes comes into the family compound and steals things.

Still, even after two years, King is an oddity in her village.

''Every single person likes to remind me that I'm white by calling out 'toubab' when they see me,'' said King.

Strangers tended to beg for money, tease her or charge her more for things at the market. Some people would stop her in her path to talk to her. However, once she started speaking in Mandinka, doors opened and she was treated with curiosity but respect.

''I've successfully dispelled the myth that I'm a doctor, so no one comes to my door anymore hoping I can cure their glaucoma. But women come to me quietly asking how they can avoid pregnancy (because I'm disturbingly old to be without a child, I must have some secret),'' said the 28-year-old in an e-mail.

King is also disturbingly old not to be married.

''The big joke in the Gambia is old men telling you that you're their wife. I have a lot of old, toothless husbands. My father came to visit and at least five men came into the compound asking his permission to marry me, and not the young strapping ones, either,'' King said.

At night, she reads by candlelight.

King said that for entertainment, at night, she and her family lie out on a big concrete slab, fan themselves and brew green tea.

''After a long day, that's where you'll find me. When I need a little more stimulation, I seek out the other volunteers. We have actually sat around reading television synopses that someone printed from the Internet and sent us,'' King said.

''It's pretty disturbing actually,'' she joked.

King said that there are many Peace Corps workers in the area. She had two Peace Corps neighbors, one of them a nurse and another a teacher, because Soma is close to the region's high school and nursing school.

King works with teachers from several different schools, regularly visiting school and co-teaching classes. She said that she occasionally runs workshops for teachers and tries to share activities and learning materials and whatever she came up with to make classes more effective for everyone.

''I try to be sympathetic to these teachers, some of whom make about $20 a month and barely finished high school. Still, my work often feels like cheerleading, because I came here with this American 'you can do it' attitude ... I try to pretend that attitude is infectious and sometimes, once in a while, it is,'' she said.

At the same time, she has a counterpart, Musa, who's in charge of teacher training in the region who tells her when she's being ''too American'' or being blind to a different way of thinking about things.

''He's so relentlessly committed to helping the education system here. He has kept me motivated when I'm discouraged,'' King said.

Alternatively, she's met corrupt higher-ups in the system.

''There's one guy who I've seen steal donated food supplies from schools,'' King said.

King said that there are parts of the system that she disagrees with. She said that she would like to see an end to corporal punishment in schools.

''It's been banned by the government here, but is still widely practiced and even parents don't seem to mind it,'' she said.

Some other things that took getting used to are female circumcision and having neighbors with three wives, as Gambia is a largely polygamist Muslim society.

''I guess for misconceptions, people either think what we're (the Peace Corps) doing is some kind of contamination thing and we should just get out of here, or that I'm here saving the world. Neither of those scenarios is fair or realistic or anything like the reality,'' King said.

King said that although she doesn't support aid projects that form dependencies, she doesn't think the world should ignore the health, education and stability issues in the region, nor should it just throw money at problems.

Along with her regular duties, King has helped tutor children, write letters for people, established a pen pal program with a class at Rowe Elementary and distributed mosquito nets to families, in a region where malaria is an epidemic.

''No one wants me to help them with the rice pounding or the cooking, though!'' King said. ''I've tried to help the women do things, like pounding, but it's tough. A 7-year-old girl could whip my butt at it,'' she said.

King went to Africa to broaden her experience as a teacher.

She said that in Gambia, she has worked with an untrained teacher handling a class of 72 first-graders with virtually no resources, whereas at Rowe she taught groups of 10 or 15 students.

''At Rowe, I had to tell students to put their palm pilots away during story time. Maybe the struggle in the U.S. has more to do with keeping kids interested in school. Here it's a struggle for some kids to get through school -- whether it's family responsibilities, being needed in the rice field or simply struggling to understand what's being taught in the second language.''

She said there's still a reluctance to send girls to school and most don't finish middle school because they get married or are sent to work somewhere.

King said that libraries are a foreign concept and sometimes she debates whether the schools are ready for a library and whether it has been a good use of time and resources.

''But when I work with teachers and we're in the middle of a lesson and I remember something in the library that relates to it, they get really excited and rush to find it,'' she said. The teachers have also been getting excited about borrowing novels, King said.

''Even if you want to criticize what's being done here, or the role of outsiders in Africa, and even if you don't feel like the problem is being solved, and I have days where I feel it isn't, it still feels important to try,'' King said.

King, whose term in Gambia was set to finish in July, has decided to extend her stay for another year. She is in the U.S. for a 40-day break before she returns.

 

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