It's Sunny In Gambia: September 2010

I woke up at 5AM to the sound of wailng. Crying in this part of the world is a mix of screaming, moaning, and tears so when it happens in the dead of night, you hear it. At first I thought it was the man who does prayer call early in the morning and who once scared the wits out of me when I was waiting for a car. I thought he was some crazy man loose in the morning hours. Hearing the cries again I realized it was two different women crying. I thought that the lightning that had woken me up an hour earlier had finally lived up to my fears and struck someone in village. We have been getting late night storms with lightning that you can see, hear, and feel. Almost every night lately I am woken to what sound and feel like little earthquakes. I heard my host moms shuffling outside and peeked my head outside to see what was going on. They told me there was a fire, but when I asked if lightning had struck they didn’t have an answer. We got on our clothes, grabbed our buckets to rush over towards the smoke.

When I got to my neighbours I found that their Bitik (a small store about the size of a small bathroom crammed with sugar, batteries, oil, fish, etc.) had been completely burnt out. The women (including me) started to haul water from the wells so the men could throw the full buckets into the now charred roof beams. The ground was flooded with a mix of rain water, well water, and oil from now melted containers. Though the fire had been put out for a while there was still smoke streaming through the corrugate roof. People were standing around, watching the owner try to find some things not wrecked in the blaze. I saw a half burnt bag of sugar and some melted batteries come out of the soaked room. The will of Allah was mentioned over and over. Randomly there would be a wave of wailing coming from the yard of the house since this was their primary livelihood and there isn’t such a thing as insurance in the middle of no where Gambia.

I was happy to hear that the whole family had gotten out all right. This family has several small children including a new born so they were lucky no one was hurt. I don’t know the extent of the story, who woke up first, how the fire started, if it extended to any bedrooms or just the store. At 5 in the morning with people crying and the lose of so much capital it doesn’t seem the right time to expect people to speak to me in slow easy Mandinkda. After the fire seemed quelled and the family was being calmed by their friends my host mom and I retreated to our place. Later today I will go over and give the family some money. That was my favorite Bitik because the owner and his wife are so friendly. Most stores here are full of cashiers that will barely look at you or answer your questions. I hope before I leave they are able to get their store back to normal.

Rainy Season, Gambia

I have recently gotten to voyage out of my site to my buddy Matt’s place. He basically lives in the sticks in the CRR. As my service continues I want to visit a lot of sites but so far I have managed to only stay in Mandinka villages except one, even though I have stayed in all of the regions of this country. I’m sure at time goes on I will get to enjoy baby cows with the Fulas and talk about scandalous topics with the Wollofs.

Going out to Matt’s site is tricky, or not, depending on your definition of tricky travel and if you are lucky that day. I think I basically set a Gambia Geli Travel record the day I went out there. Poor Matt normally takes hours and hours to get up to the Basse area but I somehow made it to the cut off for his road in 3 hours. That might not seem like a long time but on the way back it took me 6 hours and that is still faster than it normally takes him. Back to travelling... Each time I got out of a car there was another car leaving the car park and going where I was going. It was amazing. I had to take 2 gelis, then a boat, then two more gelis just to get to where a hired car would come get me. I eventually got to the cut off for his site, but the cut off is still something like 10-15K (I’m leaning with the latter, oh, and that means 6-9 miles) from his actual site. I ended up sitting there, under a half built shed trying to read On the Road (good timing right?) while a old man tried to talk to me, and though he assumed I didn’t really speak any Mandinka, he still continued to talk to me and tell me about Gambia. Eventually Matt was able to find a driver from his village to come get me.

The car was a pale purple 70’s ride with basically no shocks and minimal interior anything. I was thrilled to be in it though since it meant I was going towards the goal. We drove and drove, and each village I saw I thought “this must be Matt’s village.....oh, its not....wow, Matt is out there”. Then we finally arrived, at the end of the line, since his village cuddles right up to the river.
I was only at his site for 2 full days but in the time we managed to hear hippos, experience one of the worst and thickest swarm of mosquitoes of the season, watch shamefully large amounts of the show Top Gear, crash multiple times on a bike ride, and give ourselves chemical burns. It was quite an adventure.

Matt’s family was great. At night the children would fan us vigorously (sometimes surprise hitting us with a big full arm swing) and we tried to fight the hordes of on -coming mosquitoes. They were so thick they were biting through my jeans and the air was full of a high pitched background humming. I guess his place is nationally notorious for this mosquito thing but even the people that lived there said that the nights I was there were some of the worst this season. The food there was really good but since my friend has had numerous bouts of food poisoning I expected the worst. So far though, my stomach remains to be a steal trap. (I have only gotten sick in this country once, at a friend’s house, and lets just say, I got sick everywhere...)
The first full day there we had to bike back to the road to go to the lumo. I had to use Matt’s bike and he borrowed his host brothers. The bike I was riding was huge for me. It fishtailed all over the place because of the sand and I had to bail often. At one point I went off sideways landing in a heap of smooth rocks. Could have been worse, could have been jagged rocks I guess. It was also really hot for a rainy season day, we were biking at noon, and the humidity was high high high. I’m sure I was not the best biking buddy for Matt that day. I didn’t cry though, so, win.

The best part of this whole thing (story wise) was making soap. Gambian markets are like a seasonal food, Obama themed stuff, strong chemical cornucopia. Sometimes you can get your all three within eye shot of each other. Any given day in a larger region you can get lye, caustic soda, bleach, etc. In recent months I have had to deal with all of these in different little adventures. This time around Matt and I got to mix the soda with water, wait several hours to cool, then blended in oil. We were really careful to not spill or splash and we had a big bottle of vinegar sitting around just in case. Once we got the soap into its mold we went to wash out the bucket.

We figured the time and oil would have neutralized the base-ness of the soda. We were wrong. Not only did we dumbly decide to wash the bucket out at the pump (people like drinking caustic soda right!?...) but we used our hands to clean off the bucket. It took less than a minute for me to start to feel my fingers pruning and my skin feeling tight and dry. A minute later Matt’s hands felt the same and we rushed off to splash some vinegar around. The oil that we had mixed in with the soap helped to make a barrier between our skin and the vinegar so we ended up having to do a combo of soap, water, vinegar to eventually get rid of the burn. I lucked out with just some rough skin and a lack of fingerprints, Matt had a couple little blisters on his forearm about the size of a silver dollar. So people, if you are going to make soap, be careful. We tried to be careful, still got burned and though we had a slow reaction burn, it still hurt.

After prepping the soap, but before the burn, we tried to go to the river to play scrabble. We ended up giving up when we hit the rice fields but it worked out because while there and later while playing scrabble, we could hear the grunt air bubble sound of a hippo. I’d like to see a hippo again, but from a perched type of position with an easy escape. I’m sure if I was chased I’d role my ankle and go straight into a useless fetal position and if I wasn’t killed I would at least be med-sept due to injuries. We lived though, and I made it back to site with far more difficulties, pauses, and less comfort than the trip there.