New Year 2008

I hope you had an enjoyable Christmas, wherever you are in the world. On Christmas Day I shared lunch with a family here (Ebrima, Bintu, Nyakasi, Moro and Haddy) and a family visiting me from the UK (Stephanie, Roger, Rachel and Caroline). We ate in local fashion from a communal bowl, sharing rice and cow meat (as beef is called here; it is a rare treat for most Gambians) followed by fresh papaya, all washed down with mango juice and baobab juice.

 

      

 

I enjoyed welcoming my ‘strangers’ to The Gambia (visiting guests are known as strangers). We saw monkeys, crocodiles and a violet turaco (a purple bird) at Abuko Nature Reserve. We spent a night in a basic lodge in Sanyang and dozed in hot December sunshine. We attended the church of St Charles Lwanga in Faji Kunda on Christmas morning, where we witnessed a fantastic nativity drama by local children, and the Catholic bishop of The Gambia presided.

I was sad when my strangers left yesterday. I walked away from their hotel and wheeled my bicycle along the beach under palm trees, with cool Atlantic water lapping at my toes. It was so lovely to see them, and to enjoy Christmas together. And it gave me some small comfort to call in at the VSO office in Fajara and collect a number of envelopes sent by friends back home. Thank you to all who have sent cards, letters and messages – it makes a big difference.

      

This blogsite has received nearly ten thousand visitors. I wonder who will be the first visitor in five figures. Please humour me by recording your visitor number as a comment below… 

I wish you well for 2008. I will toast 2007 in a few nights time, and will think cosy fond thoughts friends who I have seen rarely or not at all during the past year. Perhaps I can finish this year by quoting The Electrics, a Scottish Christian Celtic Rock band, who wrote… 

May your life in this world be a happy one
May the sun be warm and may the skies be blue
May each storm that comes your way clear the air for a brighter day
And may the saints and saviour watch over you.

Happy New Year
Justin

Merry Christmas

This week we will celebrate Tobaski and then next week Christmas. I send my greetings to all regular readers of this blog! I wish you a peaceful and relaxing holiday season. Christmas has crept up unannounced. The cues that normally signal the arrival of the season have been missing this year. I have heard no carols, seen very few decorations or lights, have not had to scrape ice off a windscreen or endured long winter evenings or irritating television. But soon I will have guests, a family from my church will arrive here at the end of the week; perhaps they will help me get in the Christmas Spirit! In recent days I have been thinking much about friends in the UK and around the world, as in our various places we prepare for our different celebrations. I miss you, and am so grateful to all who have kept in touch and sustained me through this year – thank you.

Click here to read the VSO 2007 Annual Review, which includes an article about our education programme in The Gambia.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL!! 

Tobaski

Tobaski is a major festival for Muslims. It celebrates the occasion when Abraham was about to sacrifice his son Isaac, but Allah provided a ram instead and Isaac was spared. Consequently, for families that can afford it, celebrating Tobaski here involves sacrificing a ram. There will be prayers at ten in the morning and then the Imam will begin the sacrifice. After this, all will hurry home to their own compounds to sacrifice their ram too. It all makes our Easter bunny thing seem a bit lame.

 

There are always animals on the streets around here. But they have multiplied in number in recent weeks, and there are pens of rams on many street corners, where they change hands for thousands of dalasi. Ferries into Banjul bring trucks heaving with rams from upcountry Gambia and from Senagal and Mauritania. Last week I crossed by ferry into Banjul at night, and from the passenger deck looked down into an open lorry carrying rams. They were pushing and pressing and squashing each other as the boat swayed with the swell. Four men stood amidst the animals, pulling them out of the crush by their horns and dropping them into a different part of the trailer, to save them from suffocation. It was a constant battle as the herd pressed together.

Tobaski will be celebrated just before Christmas. There is still debate about whether it should be the 20^th or 21^st December this year. It should be on the tenth day of this lunar month, but there is still disagreement about which day the new moon was first sighted locally. But whatever, this event combined with Christmas will provide many opportunities for family celebration, feasting, and dancing. And drinking attaya. This country is never slow to seize the opportunity for a public holiday (but can be slow to decide what day it should be).

It is a long time since I updated you about my work here, so I have written an article called Justin’s Work 2, with details of progress in my team, SQAD, and a recent visit by our major donors.

Recent Photographs (November 07)

     

     

   

Watermelon

My sister came to visit me. In fact not my sister (I don’t have one, as far as I am aware), but my cousin Vanessa and her mother Rosamund spent a week here. And here, everyone is ‘sister’ or ‘brother’, especially a cousin. When someone is introduced as ‘this is my brother’ it is difficult to know what that really means. Your brother might be a straightforward biological brother with the same parents, or perhaps the son of one of your father’s other wives . Or the brother might be someone else who happens to be staying in the same compound as you. Or just someone from the neighbourhood that you care about and who you can rely on. All these people are ‘brother’ or ‘sister’; the term simply means ‘here is someone that I consider as family’. And a number of people call me ‘brother’, which is a treat and an honour.

I sometimes take a lift to work with a man called Clark. He knows everyone. So as he drives he calls to people from his cab, waving with one hand through his open window at a passing pedestrian ‘Hey, my sister!’ and taking his other hand off the wheel to salute a police officer through the sunroof ‘’My brother! My brother! Salaam Malekum! I Saama!’

Yesterday I met a mouse. I was in my kitchen and saw a dark shape scurry past in the corridor. When I looked, a large mouse was pushing herself under the mosquito-net screen at my door. Goodbye, I thought, I don’t really want a mouse in my house. I don’t mind a couple of lizards as they eat insects, but rodents are not quite as useful. But within moments Minnie was back, squeezing under the screen again and scurrying around my house. And then out again. So then I shut the door. Perhaps we might meet again.

And we have also been invaded, not just by mice but now also by watermelons. There are watermelons (or ‘Hal’ in Wolof) everywhere. Huge green fruits are stacked up outside compounds to be sold. Men guard these piles, sleeping alongside all night on mats, and will sell you a melon, or just a slice. Availability of fruit and vegetables here depends on the season. When I first arrived in February there were grapefruit and oranges. Then we had mangos, thousands of them, every day. And then it was the maize season, and women sat at the roadside cooking the whole sweetcorns over charcoal, an easy quick meal; fast food Gambian style. And now we have Hal. I wonder if these things could somehow be stored so that they would be available throughout a greater portion of the year. Presumably they would fetch a better price too if the market was not flooded with many people selling the same fruit at one time.

     

Similarly, when I travel through upcountry villages, it is common to see a number of traders all selling the same thing. In one village, many people will be selling firewood. In another, only rice and tomatoes are sold. In another village, several craftsmen will make bamboo beds. Residents of another place will make mattresses, rice sacks sewn together and stuffed with dry grass. It is unusual to see a variety of produces sold in one place. I don’t really understand why this is. Except that there is a measure of security in selling the same things as your neighbours. If we all sell tomatoes we will all meet the same fate together, whether that will be a good day’s trading or a poor one. But if I sell aubergine when all my neighbours have tomato, then I risk making less money than everyone else, and my children may not be able to eat. The logic of this does not make complete sense to my European mind, but this is how it has been explained to me.

So as I was saying before getting drawn into this diversion, my sister came to see me last week. With her mother, my aunt, who in Gambian terms is also my sister. And we had a great week together, enjoying The Gambia, the people, the markets, the coast, the tranquillity, and the varied blend of Arabic and African cultures. On their first morning I took my visitors to Kanifing Magistrates Court. I had been called to attend the trial of the man who drove into me (see Two Accidents). The driver is a schoolboy and pleaded guilty to three driving offences relating to the accident, and was sentenced. I am pleased that he remains free to attend school (someone who reaches secondary school is a rarity here) and that the matter is now dealt with and closed. It will be five weeks before my next guests arrive, so I had better get some work done in that time.

Koriteh

Ramadan ended a couple of weeks ago with Eid-ul-Fitr, also known here as Koriteh. During the final days fasting, families prepared for the feast that would follow. Markets were full, and tailors worked day and night on new outfits for the celebrations. I was invited to the compound of a friend, Ebrima, for a Koriteh meal with his family, and later to a party with other friends. It has become easier to make progress once again at work, as colleagues are better fed and therefore less prone to falling asleep in the afternoon. Moreover I do not have to go and hide each time I want to eat or to sip water. I joined the fasting for one week – that was enough for me, but my Gambia friends here appeared to view it as some kind of amazing achievement!

     

I have written a little more about lazy days on the beach, soggy walks through rice fields, and a short account about a volunteer who came to Africa and was mauled by a big cat. For these stories (and a bunch of new pictures), click on Weekends.

Spiders

       

Request

Thank you for your responses to my request. I have now paid your gifts to the college, and Sohna can start her course. Many thanks.

GRTS

 

The other evening I went to the ‘Point Bar’ a short stretch up the Banjul highway from where I live in Latrikunda. I had finished some work on a School Management Manual I am involved in writing and decided to go and find some European Champions League football to watch. (At this point I recall an email from an anonymous friend, let us call her ‘Jane Willis’ who told me ‘Great blog; I enjoy everything except the stuff about football’, so my apologies to you ‘Jane’).

I found that the Point Bar were showing Liverpool’s match at Porto, and I arrived midway through the first half. I am a little uncertain about this bar and have only been there a couple of times. The Gambia is incontrovertibly a Muslim country and therefore bars that sell beer are not exactly commonplace (except in tourist areas). So I have wondered what kind of people go to this bar, and what kind of reputation I will attract when seen there…so I have not visited often.  Nonetheless the clientele seem very friendly, just like almost everyone else in The Gambia, so perhaps it is fine. The fact that we are just a few days into Ramadan did not appear to make much difference; a number of customers were in the bar, sat at tables and watching the football. I arrived midway through the first half and enjoyed what I could hear of the commentary over the deafening noise of Senegalese drumming playing on the stereo in the same room.

At half-time GRTS (Gambia Radio and Television Station) broke away from their European feed and announced that they would now broadcast a reading from the Qur’an (with simultaneous translation into English) followed by a Ramadan quiz. GRTS provides a good service to this tiny country, but it can resemble hospital radio, or watching the most painful clips from TV Bloopers shows. For this reading from the Qur’an, two women (that was a surprise give that men occupy nearly all positions of responsibility in Islam) sat at a glass table in front of a picture of the Haram in Mecca. Both were wearing full Hijab, one pink and one black.

The first woman chanted from the Qur’an and the other gave a translation (second surprise, as I understood that the text of the Holy Qur’an is only to be read and heard in Arabic, and is not to be translated. This has a large impact on education here; the majority of teaching is delivered in English (probably the third language of most children) but they also have Islamic and Arabic (fourth language) studies too (unless they attend a Madrassa Islamic school, in which case the emphasis is the other way round). Parents feel pretty strongly about children receiving this component of their education – one of the most common reasons given for keeping pupils at home is when a school does not have an Arabic/Islamic teacher. I don’t recall too many parents at Beauchamps High School complaining because insufficient priority was given to RE.)

The reading was going well (although I could not hear much due to the stereo thumping behind my head) except that the woman in pink kept fidgeting and making shifty sideways glances. It was as if someone off camera was pulling faces at her. The camera wobbled from time to time, and the picture behind them rocked slightly, giving the impression that this programme was being broadcast from a boat. The second woman was not to be thrown off-track and pressed on conscientiously until suddenly she disappeared mid-sentence and we returned to Portugal just in time for kick-off. We never did get our Ramadan quiz.

During the second half the colours suddenly went funny. In a trice Liverpool players were dressed in blue instead of red, and the blue and white of Porto became gold and claret stripes. Liverpool v Porto instantly became Everton v Bradford City. The grass turned a pleasing shade of lilac, and the ball and pitch markings were deep purple. The dark ball appeared to glide across the paler surface; it was reminiscent of one of those games in the snow with an orange ball, when you can never tell if the ball is on the ground or in the air. It certainly brightened up a dreary second half. Then at 88 minutes it went off completely and I still don’t know the final score. Never mind, it’s not about knowing the result, it’s just about taking part. Anyhow, there will always be another game and another venue to watch it in, and with any luck it will be as entertaining as this one. 

 

Two things I never thought about before coming here

Thank you for sending birthday cards and messages. You are all lovely. I had dinner with some friends on Thursday, and on Friday afternoon met with another group to swim and relax in a local hotel. As this is a Muslim country we always have Friday afternoon off – hurrah!

We have a group of twenty new VSO volunteers who have joined our three programmes of Education, Disability and Rural Livelihoods. These have been in The Gambia since the final week of August, and on Sunday they travelled upcountry to Janjanbureh for their final week of in-country training. Introducing these new volunteers (from The Philippines, The Netherlands, Zambia, UK and USA) to the culture and practicalities of living in The Gambia has given us a busy three weeks. After this week they take up their placements all over the country, and the Kombos will be much quieter without them; I am one of a minority of volunteers working in or near the capital Banjul.

There has been serious flooding in Africa. I am aware that there were floods in the UK earlier this year, but I do not know if our floods have made news over there. Major hailstorms and enduring heavy rain have inundated fourteen countries from Senegal in the West to Kenya in the East. That is an area considerably larger than Europe. Africans have suffered damage to property and crops, some have lost their lives and many have been displaced from their homes. Here is a link to a related article on the BBC News website.

Living here in The Gambia is (obviously) very different to what I have been used to in the UK. It is odd how readily it is possible to get used to the dusty streets, goats and chickens on the roads, limited electricity and water, and buying unfamiliar vegetables in the market. This is a poor country, ranked 155^th out of 177 on the United Nations Human Development Index. And therefore there are a number of things that do not happen in the same way as they do at home, some of which I have never thought about before coming here. I have written about two of these in a longer article which I have called Council Tax.