Mangos in Manchester?

The weather is undoubtedly on the turn. I awoke on Tuesday morning to a definite chill in the air and grey skies. The usually blue skies through my window were a desolate grey [see photo]. The contrast of an African setting, with the red dust of the Gambia and the Harmattan winds lining roads and edging buildings, against the sky of a disappointing Manchester summer's day was eye catching after a month of blue backdrops. [see photos, Manchester backed mangos, mosques and meanderings]

As cardigan clad I picked my way to work I saw a man searching through the roadside drifts of litter for anything of remote value. [see photo, he's in the middle ground] As with the beggars surrounding the tourist cafes, my thoughts twisted to know whether to just give him some money. In the UK it's easier to feel ok about refusing money because of the social security system that prevents complete poverty. Here I haven't yet come to terms with what I want to do, even though I find the allowance tricky to live on it is still much higher than the average Gambian income. And this man in the litter wasn't actually asking, he was instead trying to make a living from the resources around him which is what development workers around the world recommend. I settled for a brief greeting as we passed.

The rest of the walk turned my attention to some of the beautiful parts of the Gambia, bare baobab trees with their eerie reminder of English winter, flowers glowing against their nondescript sky, the small garden next to my office where chickens keep the weeds down. These vivid flowers, this desire to make something beautiful, this way of gaining whatever you can from your surroundings, these things played on my mind as I started my working day. Of course, the cloud burnt off within the hour and a blistering hot day with regular applications of sunblock to my nose followed. But some of the questions about life and having an impact here linger much longer than Gambia's experiment with Mancunian clouds.