On the second term Language Arts exam, I asked my form II students to write a composition about their village. Mohamed Njola opened with the line, “In my village we have a church, a mosque, and a white woman.” After I had thoroughly enjoyed laughing at this sentence, I decided it made me sad. I do not want to be a landmark in Sembehun. (So if you want to go to the market, you’ll pass the church on your right, keep walking until you reach the white woman, and then turn left . . .) I want to be an individual. I want to be remembered not by the color of my skin, but by who I really am.
At times, I wonder if that is too much to ask. The other day, I was walking through my village with another volunteer, and a small child began shouting, “Manungima felei!” (“Two Manungimas”) My traditional Mende name is uncommon, so some children are under the impression that “Manungima “is synonymous with “pumuy,” which means white man. Is that all I am to people here? A pumuy?
Perhaps to some people, that is who I am. But there are others who see beyond the guise of an overly pale foreigner. There are people who laugh at how I walk, talk, sit, draw water, sweep, or breathe, because all they see is a white woman. Then there are the people who laugh, because they see me.
Before our school sporting event, classes were cancelled, but the teachers and a few students had come to paint the school. Mr. Jabbie and I had drawn the school logo on the side of the building, so I climbed up a rickety ladder with a paint brush in hand to draw over the pencil lines.
“Be careful!” Joseph Tucker warned taking hold of the bottom of the ladder. (Funny how they’re concerned with me climbing a ladder, but it’s no big deal when the students climb up on the school’s roof to clean the gutters or walk out along a thirty feet high tree branch to hack it in half with a cutlass.)
“Oh, I wanted to jump off… Let me not do so?” I said. Abdul Rahman and Betty laughed, catching the sarcasm in my voice.
The conversation continued as I painted. At one point, someone laughed at my pronunciation of a Krio word. I have a habit of pronouncing the “r’s” at the ends of words that shouldn’t have them. (i.e. “water” should be “wata”)
“Okay,” I said, feigning injury, “You all laugh at my Krio and Mende, but I never laugh at your mistakes in English.”
“You don’t laugh; you just make your face like this. Eh, Miss Kenley?” Joseph Tucker asked, doing a remarkably good impression of how I twist my mouth to the side when I am trying not to laugh.
I did laugh then, “Fair enough.”
To the people who really know me, especially the teachers and students, I am an individual not a caricature. “We’re going to feel it when you go,” my thirteen-year-old neighbor Babai Jalloh told me one evening as he sat on my veranda.
“Maybe another Peace Corps Volunteer will come here after me,” I said.
Babai looked at me and shook his head sadly, as if I had not understood. “Miss Kenley, we’ll never get your kind.”
There is some truth in that. We talk about getting a “replacement” volunteer, but really, no person can ever replace another person. We will all be different with our own sets of opinions and experiences. Though people love to compare us, those who really know us will know that there is no need for comparison. They will know that one person is not a representation of all things American. They will see us as people, as individuals. They will see me, not a faceless white woman standing between a church and a mosque.
