In the Gambia, Peace Corps volunteer Courtney Blake helped build a library, found another way to live



Blake had grown weary of the relentless focus on making money in her Wall Street-centered world, and in the Gambia she found a place as far removed from her former reality as possible. ''You come back totally humble,'' Stanford said. ''You go over there thinking America does everything the right way. They have their own ways of doing things.''

In the Gambia, Peace Corps volunteer Courtney Blake helped build a library, found another way to live

Peace Corps taught Bethlehem woman

In Gambia, she helped build a library, found another way to live.

By Chris Pollock Of the Morning Call

When Peace Corps volunteer Courtney Blake arrived in the west African nation of the Gambia, she found the presence of a white Western woman caused some head-scratching among the locals.

''They're not really sure how to treat you,'' said Blake, of Bethlehem. ''It's odd to them that I know how to drive. They don't have a lot of cars, and most of the people who can drive are men.''

But the differences in customs weren't the only ones she had to adjust to. The food, the heat, the clothing, and even the social structure were all totally new.

After a two-year term of service, Blake, 27, returned in the United States in July. A 1996 graduate of Moravian Academy, she gave up a good job as an assistant to the president of Apple Securities in Manhattan to join the Peace Corps.

Blake had grown weary of the relentless focus on making money in her Wall Street-centered world, and in the Gambia she found a place as far removed from her former reality as possible.

She was settled in the 1,000-person village of Manduar, near the Gambian capital of Banjul. Manduar has no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no telephones, and when Blake first arrived she had to hand-pump her own water.

The Gambian diet is heavily dependent on rice and fish, and Blake lost 15 pounds during of her stay.

But she also found that as a guest of a Gambian family, she had an automatic support structure.

''You belong to someone,'' she said. ''They make sure you're OK, you're not lonely, that you don't need anything.''

But that protection didn't follow her everywhere, Blake said. When she left Manduar and the company of her host family, she was often propositioned by Gambian men eager for access to her American passport.

Gambian taboos were also strange to her way of thinking. Although women occasionally remove their shirts to work topless, women showing their knees is considered uncouth.

Blake had to make sure she always wore an ankle-length dress. She said she grew so used to Gambian standards that she was shocked when she saw women tourists wearing shorts.

Although she went to the country ostensibly to help teachers build their classroom skills, Blake found herself working to build a library for the village.

She said it was a project the local school's headmaster had wanted, but the school was underfunded. By the time she left, the library had about 1,000 books, many of them gathered during a drive by Moravian Academy.

The lessons Blake learned about other cultures are a common outcome of the Peace Corps experience, said Mimi Stanford.

Blake was one of about a dozen former volunteers who gathered at Stanford's Bethlehem home Sunday as part of a semi-formal group called the Mount Laurel Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. Stanford served in Thailand from 1965 to 1967.

''You come back totally humble,'' Stanford said. ''You go over there thinking America does everything the right way. They have their own ways of doing things.''

chris.pollock@mcall.com

When this story was posted in September 2006, this was on the front page of PCOL:




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