Imagine you lived in a place without drainage. Imagine your own town, and take away the drains and the sewers. Where would the water go to after falling as rain? This is something I have never thought about before – I didn’t need to; I have always lived in places where surface water simply drained away. I thought that it was a universal law, that rain fell on hills, and that streams formed and grew into rivers and flowed merrily to the sea so that all the fishes could be happy and the hills alive with the sound of plants growing. But that doesn’t happen here. Rain falls and then just lies around. Pools of water form everywhere, on roads, in maize fields, and encircling houses to turn them into islands, and people make stepping stones out of car tyres and other debris.
Much of The Gambia is covered with a thin layer of sand on top of a slab of rock, so water is slow to drain into the ground. Most of our roads have no particular ‘surface’ – they are simply an uneven bumpy course through the sand and rock. They are uncomfortable to drive on, and cars must repeatedly ford through pools of red muddy water in order to make any progress. Vehicle tyres distribute water onto the drier bits and in busy areas the whole road quickly becomes a mushy red skid-pan, and a nightmare for the majority of travellers who are of course pedestrians.
One benefit of the standing water is that it makes the land suitable for growing rice. As I travel I see men and women stood ankle-deep in water, planting and weeding as this country struggles to feed itself. The Gambia is not self-sufficient for rice and depends on donations from Japan and Taiwan. One problem with growing crops is the saltiness of the soil. The Gambia is a very flat country, completely below 100m in altitude, and nearly all below 50m. Much of the land is vulnerable to flooding, especially when there is heavy rain in the mountains of Guinea where the River Gambia rises. The river water is salty for a hundred miles inland, so floods deposit salt on the soil and leave it unsuitable for crops. There are efforts at desalination on some of the North Bank, but this is expensive and difficult work.
So imagine your town covered in water for many months of the year. Think about walking to the shops through three inches of mud. Imagine how rapidly disease spreads through the dirty water and via the mosquitoes that breed there. And be grateful for the investment in your local area over the last century into water treatment and sewerage infrastructure. And say a grateful prayer for these services as you pay your council tax.
Another thing that simply drains away in the developed world is household waste. Of course this is not completely accurate – consumer rubbish is a massive and increasing problem which threatens the fragile global environment. But at the point of disposal, turning our back on unwanted stuff remains a simple task for many of us. There is, however, virtually no refuse collection service here in The Gambia, and the traditional Gambian household would have no need of one. Fresh produce bought at the market results in only biodegradable waste, and pots and bottles are always carefully cleaned to be reused or sold. Oil drums are taken apart with a mallet and chisel and the metal sheets flattened and worked into shutters for doors or windows. Cars and minibuses in The Gambia are hand-me-downs from Europe, and the local people are expert at coaxing engines into life that would have been rejected long ago in a wealthier nation. And when a vehicle does finally come to the end of its useful life it will be taken apart and the doors, wheels, axles, windows, chassis, seats, radio, wires and lights will all be preserved for repairs to another car.
But in The Gambia we increasingly benefit from convenience products familiarly found in European supermarkets, and this has created a litter problem. There is simply nowhere to put discarded tins and packets. As a result, food cans lie flattened on the streets and plastic bags blow around in the bush. Drinking water can be bought in a plastic bag for 2 dalasi, and the resultant debris is everywhere. President Jammeh has responded by passing a new law. You can now be fined 5000 dalasi (or imprisoned) for dropping litter (or for not keeping the street outside your compound tidy, or for urinating in the street, or for allowing your cess-pit waste to drain into the street); all these practices are common
And a year or two ago, the President also instituted ‘Set Settal’, a national cleaning morning on the final Saturday of each month. During Set Settal, no transport is permitted to run and shops and the market must not operate. Everyone is required to clean their compound and the area around it, and burn piles of waste. This monthly effort makes a small dent in the mounting piles of rubbish, but will not solve the real cause of the problem. In some areas litter lies deep across the road and you cannot avoid walking through it. This has clear implications for health.
If someone reading this happens to be a wealthy philanthropic entrepreneur, then perhaps this might be a project to get your teeth into. The Gambia could be cleaned up if someone could organise the workforce with tools, vehicles and instructions to collect the rubbish, and could then devise something to do with what is collected. In fact, I would not be surprised if there is sufficient recyclable waste metal lying on the streets (in the form of steel and aluminium food cans) that would make such a project very nearly economically worthwhile. You would have to build a recycling plant first, but after that it might almost pay for itself.
But I am not really advocating such a move; at least I don’t think I am. First, it would not be sustainable; without some kind of intervention at other levels the litter would simply come back. Secondly, I worry that it is a bit paternalistic to come steaming into this country or any of our neighbours and announce that we the shiny ones from Europe are going to clean up for you because we don’t like the mess you guys are living in. And then I realise with horror that this is exactly what I am doing here, albeit related to education rather than waste disposal. Furthermore it dawns on me that since we the Colonial powers left this continent in a disgraceful state when we ‘allowed’ these nations their independence, perhaps we should be the ones cleaning up the mess (the litter, the education system, the health system, the governing systems, AIDS, debt and the billions of dollars worth of small arms we have exported to this part of Africa) and perhaps we should be doing that work for the wages that my friends here have come to expect, which is a dollar a day if they are lucky.
So I don’t know whether my suggestion is a good idea or not, I genuinely don’t know. And that is the way it is with so many issues I am learning to face here; it is complicated. But I have come to realise how interconnected, interdependent and startlingly efficient are the systems we take for granted in developed countries. For example, if you were trying to organise household waste collection you would first need to import vehicles and bins. We could probably get bins from Morocco, Spain or Egypt, and rubbish trucks from Saudi Arabia, Germany or South Africa, so no problem there if you ignore the crippling national debt. But after that things get complicated. Most roads will not take a large truck; they are just too uneven and wet. If you did send a lorry down some of these it would irreparably plough up the surface rendering the road unusable for anyone else. There are only about ten tarred roads in The Gambia and of these I can think of only two without potholes; one is the main road from the airport to the tourist hotels, and the other is the north bank road from Barra to Janjanbureh which was finished last year. So without road improvements it will be difficult to collect rubbish. And who is going to build the roads? I am confident that Gambian labour could be just as skilled as any other, but the north bank road I just mentioned was built by Guineans under the direction of a South Africa contractor. Why? Ignoring roads for a moment, let us assume we did manage to collect the household waste, now what are we gong to do with it? We could put it in a hole in the ground or dump it out at sea (both of which the UK does, before you complain) but if we wanted to attempt any waste treatment, we would need to build a processing plant. This would require water and electricity, but neither of these services is widely available here, nor reliable. This is what I mean by interdependence of services. Power, water and roads make a lot of other things possible. A clean environment leads to better health and more productivity. Wealth leads to wealth and poverty appears to lead to poverty.
