Craving beer and a movie

Filling in what I left out last week, here is what my living situation is like.

I live in the "suburbs" of one of the largest cities in The Gambia. It's a 30 minute walk to the city centre (the market) and to many of the comforts you can find in The Gambia including: a bustling market, internet cafes, meat sandwich stands, cold cokes, a football field, and toilet paper. Note that there is a lack of other such amenities like reliable power, city parks, sidewalks, street stop lights, air conditioning, or movie theatres. In fact most of those things can't be found anywhere in The Gambia.

The airport is about 5 miles from my house and as tourist season has picked up I am constantly reminded of the comings and goings of a nation. Psychologically odd, especially on the days when we have new volunteers arriving, or old volunteers going home.

Off the main highway, it is a 300-meter walk to my house. A deteriorating paved road runs for about 75-meters giving way to the much more common sand and dirt road. My school, on the right hand side of the road, flanks the entire length of the walk. Encasing the road on either side and also off in the distance are scattered palm trees providing much needed shade. The landscape in the area is overall so flat that it would make someone from Kansas think they were from a mountainous part of the U.S. A large and newly opened power plant hums fairly quietly in the distance about 1.5 miles away from my home. As you approach the plant, the structure shatters the skyline looking like something more belonging of a colony on Mars than in an African village. It stands as a constant reminder of the painful reality here. Too often, NGOs or companies pour money into the country with no system in place to actually reach the common citizen. I know of one person in the entire village who has electric current, yet all have to suffer the noise and pollution of the plant.

My house is of typical style here. Erected from concrete walls and topped with corrugate roof, I am growing rather fond of it. Through luck of previous volunteers generosity and needs, I have acquired quite a few furnishings. I live comfortably with plastic chairs, shelves, a gas stove, cooking utensils, a wood bed and couch, and plenty of places to hand my drying clothes. In the back yard a large papaya, orange, and moringa tree give temporary shade from the increasingly oppressive sun.

My host father, Darbo Jammeh, is a security officer in the Banjul area. Kaddy my host mother works as a cleaner at my school. They have two children, Amee age 6, and Bubacaar age 3. Our compound is normal sized featuring two rows of houses. One row consists of Darbo's family, their brother, and myself. The other unit has 3 more families (essentially aunts and uncles). There are about 12 children total in the compound ranging in age from newborns to roughly 7 years old. You can imagine what it must sound like here when things go bad or someone has a "boo boo."

Our meals are all rice based with meat and vegetables on top. Heavy oil is used with all meals, so when I finally do return home getting back on that bike and back to some health will be priority number one. Having said that I do cook or go out from time to time which helps switch up the diet. It has been a neat experience to live on a seasonal diet, something that we quickly forget in the supermarkets of America. It helps give some indication to the rotation of the annual cycle that you miss otherwise due to the relative stagnation of weather change.

Drinking water comes from a tap at my school, is then filtered in a PC issue unit and bleached with a couple of drops from an eye dropper. Is putting bleach in your water disturbing, yes. Is getting tropical disease due to unclean water disturbing, yes. You compromise with the lesser of two evils.

Moments when the good and bad come together bring a classic Todd grin to my face. On a particularly bad day, as I fetched water out of our open well (for bathing and the like), Darbo picked up that something was bothering me. With a smile he walked up and declared, "Only in The Gambia could you be having an experience like this huh?"

It was only a matter of time, pictures...


A picture of my housing unit. My house is the far one on the right.



Darbo tired after a long day of work is being bothered by Bubacarr.



Bubacarr attacking me and my camera, Kaddy in the background.



Myself, a random dude, and Darbo relaxing after a lonnnng month of fasting.