I just returned from one of the most challenging, rewarding, inspirational, depressing, hopeful, and tragic experiences of my life. It was amazing and I hope to express in the limited space I have here just how amazing my adventure was.
Africa was one of the most profound experiences of my life, and will continue to touch me until the end of days. There were some very hard things that I had to go through that in turn were some of the most beautiful moments of my life. I would be lying to you if I told you that I didn’t have an incredible fear within me before I left. I had learned a week prior to my departure that the penalty for homosexuality there was death by beheading. Not that I planned on having any relations there, but just the possibility of being found out really scared me initially. And of course there were the usual fears and myths of African people as well as black people that are completely unfounded, yet institutionally promoted and ingrained within my psyche which as open as I am I had to embrace as one of my initial fears. And of course, living in poverty, with little to nothing to eat, surrounded by bugs and heat you could not escape which ultimately could have meant the end of my life. Each of these fears were with me as I flew into Africa and began my adventure. I was so scared, no, I was terrified as we landed and we drove into the village.
However, what pushed me to continue on with my journey, to confront my fears, and to partake in such an adventure stems from the same feelings and emotions that I have for you, a deep conviction about the notion of love and how it is central to each one of our lives and connects us across the width of the widest oceans and the span of all time.
And I’m so glad that I did overcome that fear. For two weeks I volunteered with an organization called “A Hand in Health” specifically targeting Dental care. It is a non-profit that is an extension of Crossroads Africa which provides basic health care services throughout Africa . I worked alongside three friends from the states as well as two Gambian women who only had 6 weeks of training and were the main Dentists in a 60 mile radius.
They were 24 and 29, each with at least two children, and were possibly two of the strongest women I have ever met in my life. All that they were able to do given the limited training and resources available to them were to be able to prescribe pain medication or to pull out the teeth of their patients. In this region of the Gambia , oral hygiene is really only a myth. The reason that people take care of their teeth is simply for social interactions so their teeth won’t smell bad, or when it starts to become unbarably painful and only then do they go in to take care of it through removal. So education is the primary goal of the Hand in Health component of the trip. And so on top of doing daily clinical work, we also helped to educate the community through educational outreach programs that targeted younger kids and helped teach them the proper techniques of brushing your teeth.
We also drew pictographs on the walls of the clinic to help use as tutorials on how to take proper care of ones teeth.
And yes, I even got my hands a little dirty and helped with some of the extractions of teeth. Now keep in mind that in Gambian culture, you have to have incredible patients. There was one day when one of the dentists, Kady, decided in the middle of a procedure that she was tired and could no longer operate on her patient, who by the way had little to no anesthetic and had her root exposed. And so, she let her sit there for 30 minutes until she felt like returning to her patient. And there was another time, when half way through, she realized that the tools she needed for the next step in her procedure were being sterilized in another part of the hospital. And so the man laid there for an hour just simply waiting for the procedure to be done. They also don’t have the kind of equipment that we have, so things like suction are not readily available…patients are just asked every so often to lean over and spit into a trashcan all of the waste that accumulates in their mouths.
One of the admirable qualities that I discovered about this culture was their ability to withstand intense pain. In Gambian culture, from an early age people are taught to not show pain. It is a very important aspect of survival within village life in the incredible climate there, where life and death are an every day reality. So even when mothers are giving birth, Doctors will literally hit the woman if she starts to scream or express her pain. It is not to say that she doesn’t feel it, but rather that they have to know how to withstand it.
And so as I assisted in the dental unit, as these people literally had their teeth being pulled out, the roots being broken off still within the gums, and then a woman with only 6 weeks of training digging, and digging until all the pieces were out, and through it all these people maintained their cool. It actually reminded me a lot of my grandmother, who once told me a story of how Native American warriors had a tradition of masking pain and thus overcoming it through meditative practices. It’s very strange how Grandmother snuck into my life in the middle of Gambia , but she did. But this aspect definitely made me have to spend some time reflecting on my own experiences of pain both physical and emotional and the strength that these beautiful people showed within their vulnerability.Another part of the clinic life that I thought was fascinating, which also was demonstrative of the Gambian communal attitudes and perspectives was the fact that so many young mothers would come in with their newborns strapped to their backs, and when it was their turn to receive treatment, they would kind of just pass their children off to the nearest person they could find. I don’t know how many times I was randomly handed some ones child and had to rock it to sleep in the two weeks I was there. And many times it wouldn’t be just one person who held the child. The baby would be passed from person to person to person throughout the course of the hour or so procedure. And it wasn’t just fellow women that held the children, it was the elderly and the young, it was men and women, and it was people like myself as well as fellow villagers. So there was no sense of division in terms of parental responsibility, it was anyone and everyone seemed to accept and embrace that. It’s an incredible component of life to think about. Number one: what a way to raise a child, but also what a way to support mothers and how this aspect of Gambian culture goes against our accepted American understanding that it is totally women’s responsibility to raise and care for children. What was also interesting was the profound idea that not only was their no immediate threat of their children being taken away, sucombing to child molesters, or them losing affection for their paternal figure, but rather the concept that they didn’t even have to think of these things in the first place. I’m sure that it has never crossed their mind that their children could be taken away by the hands of another human being in the blink of an eye. And because of this, the incredible trust that is given from person to person to person. Can you even imagine that from our social perspective?! What that would be like to live in a world where every person you came into contact with you gave them your fullest trust with your most precious possession? And this lesson coming from a dental clinic?!
The greatest part of my trip actually was outside of the dental clinic and it was within the relationships I developed within the community. In Gambian culture, since they have a hard time remembering American names, they give each guest a Gambian name. Mine was Landing Boyang. And at first I thought how strange, but by the end, it became a powerful medium for me to experience the village culture. Of course, the ones I connected with the most were the kids. And the true testament to that would be every day after work around 3:00 when 40-50 kids would all come to where we were living and shout up to our balcony, Landing, LANDING come down and play! And in all honesty, I was so tired every day after working from 8 am for 6 hrs straight in the clinic, but I knew that it was a rare opportunity to spend time with the kids, and so I would go out and play and it was so amazing.
These people may have just been children and young adults, but I truly felt like I connected with them in so many ways that helped me to understand and appreciate what their lives were like. We had some incredible conversations that were basic, but none the less profound. What is the meaning of love? How do you create peace in the world? What is the human experience? Why do you think you were born here and I was born there?
All of these moments were so incredible to me, and the best part was just being able to connect on such deep and human levels with people whom I had only known for a couple weeks. And the greatest thing about these deep connections is that it transcends things like racism, poverty, hunger, age, and gender. It was funny, because Gambian culture is very open and I would say touchy feely? Kinda? Anyway, all of the common stereotypes of gay men in America are not present here, so to be close and to express emotion are things that most Gambian men can express without much thought. So you see men holding hands walking down the streets and sitting in each others arms, and there isn’t a second thought to it. So in essence, I was more myself, then I can be in the United states there, because it was just comfortable. Not that these qualities make me gay or have ever been attributed to my sexuality in the first place, but in American culture I am forced to suppress them within my relationships for fear of reprisal. Whereas there, I didn’t have to think about it, I didn’t have to have the level of fear associated to my innate feelings and my interactions with people. So appreciation and connection were able to be expressed, and I never felt so loved, and able to express it before.
The hardest part, came in the end when the shocking reality of our differences were forced to be exposed. When it came down to it I was there for only two weeks. I could leave and come back to a country where I have so much more than they may ever have. I wouldn’t have to use a tub of water and a cup to bathe myself anymore. I wouldn’t have to fetch water every day and get as much as I could, because you never knew if the solar panels would be working or not. I could come back to a place where I could eat as much as I wanted and didn’t even have to eat it all. I could come back to a place where a heavy rain didn’t threaten the roof of my house. I could spend time in leisure instead of plowing the field and preparing the land every moment of the day for the inevitable food shortage that is in the near future. The most telling part of this was having to say good bye to all of the kids.
At the end, I got several letters from a lot of kids. Each telling me how thankful they were to have met me and built a relationship with me. They also told me about their lives, how hard it was to afford things like school uniforms, books, and things like that. Some of them went so far as to ask for support. I had one kid ask me for a book, just a book. It was so incredibly hard, because there is an immediate part of me that reacted with hurt and anger, I felt like they were taking advantage of my feelings and my friendship with them. But then there was the empathetic side to me that understood completely why they felt like they had to ask, and who could blame them. In the end, instead of giving a lot of things to a lot of people, I just picked one kid that I connected with the most, and decided to give him a bag of just about everything that I had brought with me. I thought to myself, I may not be bringing a lot of things home, but I have so much that I am returning too. It made no sense to me, to bring back so much, when I really didn’t need it, and they needed it. But it really brought home to me, the great divide between what they had and what I had, and how because they were born there and I was born here, our lives would be so incredibly different.
In the end this experience was something that ultimately taught me lessons that I will never be able to convey to their deepest sense besides experience itself. I think the greatest thing about living in poverty in an African Village , was that I took away ultimately what it means to have a community where all of your actions are in consideration of others and how it will ultimately affect them. No this was not the perfect community, but at the same time despite their extreme poverty, they have an abundance of love, affection and togetherness that I have never experienced before in all my travels around the world and smaller communities that I’ve been apart of.
So family, friends, all of whom are loved ones, thank you so much for giving me this incredible experience and you will never be able to understand how appreciative I am to have gone through these things. I look forward to when life will bring us together again, you each mean Jso much to me and always will
With endless amounts of love and admiration,
Ryan
PS
Thought you might enjoy some of the beautiful moments that I enjoyed while in Africa …a brief glance into my experience.
…seeing a group of young muslim girls all walking back from school through the village together singing in tune this beautiful African music.
…when a small child aged 8 told be about his oral hygene habits and explained to me that he no longer could use his tooth brush because his young brother had started using it, and the fear associated with possible transmission of HIV from one person to the next. At the age of 8, he had to be able to comprehend this.
…realizing in every moment of time there is pains and happiness, joy and suffering, and all of the other moments in between all at once.
…African Thunderstorms that lit up the entire sky like it was a movie.
…African Sunsets…
…the way that the lighting would appear behind these giant trees outside of our compound making the tree look like it was lit up.
…washing clothes with little modu, aka spider man, and his grandmother
…My friend landing walking hand in hand with his friend down the dirt road of the village
…all of the little kids taking care of me from hold my things, to brushing off my arms sand that had accumulated through the day, and chasing after tennis balls that were hit far away. I was so like, wow, that I actually one day was like no, let me do something for you, let me wash your feet.
…the bravery or the men, women and children who were being seen to get their teeth pulled out with no flinching at all.
…the incredible intellect of the homeless man while I was at the ATM in the Capital city. Banjul . He was begging for food and I realized that everyone, anywhere has intelligence and a capacity to develop to the greatest degree possible and that people need to be given opportunities to make the most of their lives, and not be trusted.
…The Catholic Church where we sat in the back and listened to the beautiful music of the African choir and celebrated the day of St Peter.
…The 72 year old man who came in and had only 2 teeth. Reminded me a lot of my own grandfather in his spirit.
and my favorite pic
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