Rain or Shine
We’ve finished our first full week of the Girls in STEM class! I feel like I’m getting a hang of the routine now, and I better understand what I am supposed to be teaching. The girls have an amazing drive to learn. They are all so positive and you can see the difference having a supportive group of people behind them makes on their attitude. The Starfish girls are confident, mature, and determined to better themselves and their community.
What has amazed me the most in the last month is their amazing positivity in the face of adversity. Rainy season in The Gambia is a strange experience for me, given that I grew up in dry California. I’ve spoken with several different people about the rain, and I’ve heard a bunch of interesting and impactful stories. Apparently, rainy season in The Gambia was almost two months late this year, and once it started, they haven’t been getting the same amount of rainfall as previous years. Agriculture is the backbone of the Gambian economy, and the late rains have made life difficult for farmers. I had a discussion about how climate change was partially (if not entirely) to blame for the the abnormal rainy season. But it is especially devastating to realize that The Gambia, with its limited population and resource consumption, is facing the dire consequences of the excess of the more wasteful countries who are the main cause of climate change (cough... cough… America).
Another student was telling me how she didn’t like the rainy season because it always flooded her house, and her family would stay up all night trying to get/keep the water out. There is no public service (that I’ve seen or heard of) here that provides sandbags. And the streets flood so quickly once it starts raining, even if it isn’t pouring. We went to Banjul yesterday, the capital of The Gambia, and the water in the streets was high enough to cover more than half the height of the car tires. I thought there was no way we could drive through it, but apparently this is normal. Businesses were open as usual, cars were driving through, and people were wading through the water. I can’t even imagine what people would do if this was San Jose (probably cry and scream), but these people, including our young students, just work around it, and still come to school. They embody the Starfish International Pledge, the last line of which says, “Even if every single possible bad thing that can happen to me does, I can keep going forward.”
In spite of all the challenges they face, all of the girls show up to school, on time and ready to learn. I know I am learning so much more from them than they are learning from me, about life and privilege and love. There have definitely been times that I’ve taken my education and family for granted (sorry Mom, Dad, Deven, Ba, and Dadaji), but being here has shown me, in graphic detail, how blessed my life has been and how meaningful my relationships are. I understand why events in my life were pushing me towards this experience, and I hope that I am giving something back to the wonderful Starfish Community that has welcomed me with open minds and open hearts.
