Our first student in medical school

Mariama Ceesay is the first of our students to be admitted to the medical school of the University of The Gambia. The medical program lasts seven years, after which she hopes to be a gynecologist.

Mariama, 20, comes from a different background from most of our scholarship students. She didn't grow up in Salikenni, although she has strong ties to that community. Her parents lived in Salikenni but moved to the Banjul area before she was born. She grew up in Latri Kunda, a suburb of Banjul. In school she was a good student. The middle school she attended lacked sufficient books and teachers. She obtained books from previous students. "If there is no teacher and you have books and you are willing to learn you can do your best and get into secondary school," she told us.

She finished ninth grade with rather spectacular results on the nationwide exam which determines eligibility for high school. She was admitted to the science program at Nusrat Senior Secondary School, which has particularly stiff entry criteria.

Our manager, Fatou Janneh, brought her to our attention as a promising student who needed financial help and would also be a role model for our younger Salikenni girls. Mariama was on our waiting list during 2007-08, her first year at Nusrat. We admitted her to the program the following year in grade 11.

She graduated from Nusrat in the spring of 2010 with results which more than met the university's requirements. Her goal was medicine, but the timing for consideration by the medical school didn't work, so she spent 2010-11 studying biochemistry at the university, while pursuing her medical school application. In late September, 2011, she received her admission letter.

Her first goal, back in high school, was to become a surgeon. She said she now leans toward gynecology because she sees the medical problems of Gambian women and, "I want to work with them and help them." Mariama lives with her parents in Latri Kunda. Her father, Momodou Ceesay, sells used clothing at the Banjul market. Her mother, Hawa Kassama, is unemployed.

While benefiting from our scholarship program, Mariama also has given back to it. In November, 2010, and again this past spring, during university breaks, she went to Salikenni as a volunteer and held tutoring classes in English for our students. In the village, she lived in a compound of her extended family. When we saw her during one of those visits she seemed quite at home in the rural environment. While she didn't grow up in Salikenni, she clearly has developed a strong commitment there.

Another young woman in the university

In the spring of 2011 Fatoumata M. Fatty, 19,  became the first in her family to graduate from high school. On the nationwide examination which Gambian students take at the end of grade 12, she got A in five subjects, B in three and one C. In September she was admitted to the University of The Gambia in a four-year program to earn a bachelor's degree in accounting.

We are especially proud of Fatoumata, because girls' education is a major goal of our scholarship program. In a very quiet way, she has succeeded while many of our girls have had difficulty even getting as far as high school, much less the university. Fatoumata has done it with no special advantages, just hard work.

She joined our program in 2005 when she was in grade 7 at the Salikenni school. Her father, Masanneh Fatty, for many years a Salikenni farmer, and her mother, Fatoumata Marong, both now live in Banjul, and she lives with them. Masanneh at one time worked as a laborer at the port. He now is a petty trader at the Banjul market.

After finishing grade 9 in Salikenni with good results, Fatoumata did her high school years at Muslim Senior Secondary School. This is a very big urban school where students get little or no special attention -- a sink or swim environment. Every year Fatoumata managed to come up with good results. We hope she will set a good example for our younger girls.

Returning for more education in mid-career

Ebrima M. Fatty, now 29, first entered our program in 1998, two years after it began. He had just started ninth grade at the Salikenni school. His father, Muhammad Fatty, a Salikenni farmer who recently had become a petty trader in Banjul, had paid his tuition through grade 8 but could not afford the steeper grade 9 fee. A teacher told us that Ebrima was a good student and that it would be a shame if he dropped out of school.

From the very start, Ebrima told us his goal was to learn modern farming methods and help to "do something about Gambian agriculture." He knew the problems  first hand. His father had given him responsibility for a small groundnut field outside Salikenni. Ebrima and two younger brothers farmed it with a primitive plow, pulled by a donkey. They could not afford fertilizer and eked out only a few bags of groundnuts.

"Gambian farmers are working with our energy," Ebrima told us at that time. "We use our bodies to work. Our parents borrow rice [to feed the family until the groundnuts are sold.] When they sell their groundnut there is no profit left. It is because of lack of machines ... I want to learn the machines."

In 2002 Ebrima graduated from Gambia Senior Secondary School in Banjul, the first in his family to finish high school. We continued to sponsor him in two successive courses at Gambia College, where he earned first a certificate in general agriculture and then a higher diploma in agriculture, which qualified him to teach agriculture in Gambian high schools.

Since 2009 he has taught agriculture at the Latri Kunda Upper Basic School, a big middle school in the suburbs of Banjul. Recently he asked us to sponsor him at the University of The Gambia to work for the degree of bachelor of science in agriculture. We agreed. He took a leave of absence from teaching and began full time studies at the university in September, 2011.

Ebrima, says he would be willing someday to return to Salikenni, or another rural area, to teach modern farming. "If I have the chance, I will do my part for the agricultural development of my country," he said. Ebrima and our student Fatoumata Fatty (top of page) are not related. Fatty is a very prevalent Mandinka name.

An economist in the making

In 2008, Amadou Njie became the first of our students to enter the University of The Gambia. He is now in the final year of a four-year bachelor's degree program in economics. We have sponsored him since 2002, when he was in eighth grade at the Salikenni village school.

But for his ambition, Amadou might have had almost no education. His father, Abdou Njie, an elderly Salikenni farmer with two wives and 16 children, believed in putting his boys to work on the farm and marrying off his girls. None of the older siblings got more than lessons in the Koran and maybe a few years of primary school. But Amadou told his father he wanted an education, and the father agreed. Since then both parents have strongly encouraged him to continue.

Studying accounting while teaching younger students

Abdoulie Bah, 22, is in his first full year at the University of The Gambia, working for a bachelor's degree in accounting. He also has contributed a great deal to our program by volunteering to tutor younger students.

Abdoulie comes from a compound of mud-brick houses on the edge of the village of Dobo, about five miles from Salikenni. He first came to our attention during the school year 2007-08, when he was in tenth grade at Nusrat Senior Secondary School in the suburbs of Banjul. The family is of the Fula tribe, traditionally cattle raisers. His father, Amadou Bah, who owned only a few cattle, had just sold his last bull to pay Aboudlie's tenth grade fees. He was worried that the boy would have to drop out of school the following year.

We took Abdoulie into the program in 2008-09 and paid for his last two years of high school.
His grade 12 exam results won him quick admission to the university without need to study English and math in its Access Program, which many applicants need to do. He could have started at the university in September of 2010, but he wanted to help his family in Dobo with the annual harvest and also do some tutoring.
 
During about two months of the summer and fall of 2010 he spent weekends farming in Dobo and spent each Monday through Thursday in Salikenni holding math  classes in the library at night for our 22 scholarship students at the Salikenni school. Actually he ended up teaching day and night. During much of this time the Salikenni school had no math teacher for grades 7-9. Abdoulie would walk into classrooms as students sat idly during math periods. He would ask the students where they were in the curriculum and then conduct the class. He found that, in addition to the temporary lack of a teacher, most of the students were not familiar with foundation math concepts which they should have learned in previous years. He had to start at the beginning.

Abdoulie began his university studies in January, 2011. He is now in the second semester of freshman year. He lives in Talinding, a crowded, bustling suburb of Banjul, in a compound owned by a local teacher. He shares one room with two other boys, one a hotel worker, the other a student at a high school specializing in Muslim religious studies. The place is too noisy for studying during the day. "But I can study at night while they are sleeping."

A strong commitment to our program

Modou Lamin Darboe is beginning his second year at the University of The Gambia. He also has volunteered his time to help our program in important ways. During the last academic year he helped our hired math tutor conduct weekend math classes for our high school students in the metropolitan area. During the recent  summer holidays he taught those classes by himself. He also has served as secretary of two recent meetings of our students, at which they discussed the program and offered recommendations for improvement. His very detailed minutes of those meetings have been extremely useful in our planning for the future.

Lamin, as his colleagues call him, is the son of Yusupha Darboe, a citizen of Salikenni, who was a teacher. The father was posted to several different villages during his career and took Lamin with him. Lamin attended grades 1-3 in Ngundu Kebbe, 4-5 in Latri Kunda and grade 6 in Salikenni during 2002-03, while his father was posted there. At the end of that year he was selected by a committee of local residents and teachers to join our program. But again Yusupha was transferred and took Lamin with him. Our scholarship followed him as he went to middle school in Ngundo Kebbe and Abuko.

We continued to sponsor him through Masroor Senior Secondary School. In 2009, while he was in grade 12, his father died, leaving him an orphan. His grade 12 exam results were good except for English and math, which are the bane of many of our students. He spent a year in the University of The Gambia's Access Program, studying those two subjects, passed an exam and was admitted to the university in the fall of 2010.

We are very grateful to Lamin for giving so much back to the program while he is a student. He recently explained his commitment this way: "Without this program, I would be a dropout."
 

A future journalist, or maybe a poet

Mustapha Darboe, 22, is determined to become a journalist. This year he is taking a one-year course for a diploma in mass communications at Stratford College in Serrekunda in the outskirts of Banjul. He joined our program in 2002 in seventh grade in Salikenni. He is a brother of Fatou Darboe, who manages our library in Salikenni.

In middle and high school, Mustapha was not a strong student. His high school results did not meet university standards. But he had a talent with words, though not with grammar. When SSF manager Fatou Janneh several years ago asked a group of our students to write essays about how they had spent a recent holiday, most of the accounts were factual and drab. Mustapha wrote about "the brighter sun smiling at east, the sky in its lovely look blue like an ocean water, the air blowing sweeter than soul."

We encouraged him to continue attending Fatou Janneh's weekend English classes. And we sponsored him in several short-term courses in computers and journalism. His grammar has much improved, and we are confident he will someday achieve his goal to be a journalist.