The rainy roads one

For those of you who read more than one Gambian VSO blog (mainly the Gambian VSOs), there’s a particular gap in my blog posts. Until now, I haven’t managed a decent write up of the experience of living and more precisely walking around during rainy season. This is a serious omission, especially as the rains have had a huge influence on all things Gambian over the past few months.  The rains are now drawing to a close and so there’s only short time to squeeze this one in.

As a Mancunian/Swansea alumni, rain is my home. Without it I start to go a little bit gung ho about the weather saying such things as “This isn’t a storm. Once I went to Manchester for a holiday and it only stopped raining for half an hour in a fortnight” and trying to wear rubber boots in the shower just to prove that both clothes and people dry. Yes, I have heard of tropical storms but I wouldn’t be from Northern England if I didn’t think that my type of rain is a) generally the most rain like of rain and b) the best (i.e. easiest to complain about backhandedly by being stoical about the whole thing).  However, I of course also concede that it rains all the time in Lancashire and therefore over time and as a developed country we have had to prioritise the development of infrastructure that facilitates movement during inclement weather. Or, put properly, we built solid roads with pavements and drains.  

However, Gambia is essentially a country built on the edges of a desert. It is sandy and it is not rich. It hasn’t needed to spend money putting rocks in the road to make sure its workforce didn’t drown before getting to a mill, or to make sure the newly milled cotton didn’t become an enormous muddy sterile pad on a highway miles from the market.  It rains for a few hours a day for a few months a year and the rest of the time it has bigger problems to deal with.  And so when the rains come so does the mud. And the water. And people who are quite happy to shelter for serveral hours far from home rather than getting wet. I faced disbelief when answering “We just go, people dry. Sometimes from water up to our knees” to the question “but if it rains all the time how does anyone get to work?” My cheap sandals have been glued back together twice. My rain coat is disintegrating.

But it is fun. One night after choir I was walking home with my friend Mathias as usual. Suddenly the wind rose sharply and waves of dust started trying to exfoliate our faces.  We took shelter behind a wall, then the drops of water started to fall. Sheltered in the crook of a wall we were getting wet. Dusty drops were bouncing in every direction, blown in parabolas by the whipping wind. Eventually I said “let’s walk, we’ll be as wet as if we stay here”. Instinct tells us to run but of course this makes no difference to the actual rate of getting soaked due to maths (speed of person + frequency of hitting drops balances each other out). The lights went out and, in flip flops, my feet were clinging to unseen mud and stones, as we dodged cars flying towards us, unseen in the thrashing storm. There comes a point when you are simply saturated and it’s dark and you are in the rain far from either house.  The water around us felt like being pelted by a gritter, flaying any exposed skin.

As many years of rain living will teach you, at that point the appropriate action is to dance and compare songs about the rain. We sang in the rain, we called the old man out on his snoring, we asked the rain to come again another day. And eventually, bedraggled, we arrived at Mathias’s family’s house.  His sister Antonia provided me with a towel and an entire new wardrobe. I unpacked my bag. As I tipped out the cup of water from the bottom, my iPhone slipped out. Buzzing with an electronical meltdown it died of exposure. But we had a cup of tea and a new story.

Of course, there was a lovely photo of my street as a river. Unfortunately it was on the iPhone. 

Ringing the changes

One of the elements of volunteering that I was worried about before arriving was nothing to do with the challenges of living overseas or making an impact in a different culture. It was sharing a house again. For the past few years I have lived alone and the freedoms and privacy that gives are very much appreciated. However, now I would have a housemate, in this case a Ugandan woman called Agnes. And now, six months later, she has left, finishing her placement early for personal reasons.

As housemates go Agnes was not a bad one. Of course we had different ideas about the washing up, the value of spending money running a fridge permanently or just overnight, and like all housemates she had to put up with me covering the dining table with enormous paintings most of the time.  Yet, for the first six months of my placement it was helpful to have an ear to bend about issues and strategies for pushing changes in our shared workplace, good to have someone to share food bills and shopping with, interesting to swap tips and ideas on cooking, family life, cultures and careers.

And, as Agnes left, I was drafted in to help induct the new batch of volunteers. The group was small, five people and only one of them female. On their first day I met them in the pouring rain with Amar (another serving volunteer). Vaguely remembering how disorientating my first few days in The Gambia were we had a simple walk up the high street and visited a few supermarkets to get a sense of what is available and where key landmarks are (OK, so we noted the traffic light but it is fairly central to getting around).  As the storm intensified we took shelter in a doorway and swapped advice on getting started. This was mainly “remember to eat and drink” and “try to relax at points, it’s not that bad”.

Later in the week, now working with upcountry volunteer Godfrey, I ran a discussion on topics from meeting strategic objectives to culture shock and sexual harassment. It was a short session, due to start conversations that would continue into the afternoon of exploring the local town. However, the day was incredibly hot and the afternoon became a coke by the hotel pool then moving everyone to the shared house. We took a walk round the local area, which is also my own, pointing out such essential information as “this is a corner shop”, “this is the way to the main highway”, “this is a masquerade but, don’t worry, the child dressed as a whirling monster with the machete won’t really hurt you”. I left them to settle into the shared house with a promise to meet in the morning.

Only one task was left on the essential information a serving VSO must pass on, taking transport. So I met the gang of excited VSOs in the morning ready for a trip to the capital Banjul.  Unfortunately for them, I rarely go to Banjul and prefer to walk than take transport. Still we soldiered on and it’s a testament to how settled I am that, while they remarked on how muddy the streets were after the previous night’s rain, I was commenting on an unusual arrangement of seats in the van.  We passed and negotiated with hawkers, picked up some cutlery and advice on internet connections and had a small tour of the sights of the city. I even, in a fit of longing for home comforts and long Saturday breakfasts in my new solo living environment, acquired a teapot.  I also acquired cockroach poison whilst my new colleagues were searching out irons and plates. Priorities do change.

We headed back from Banjul, me smoothly turning getting the wrong van into another exploring opportunity. We found dinner at a local volunteer haunt, Omar’s at traffic light, then indulged in that ever present VSO activity, ignoring each other when you sit in a wifi enabled area talking to home instead. They bought me cake and coffee as a thank you for the tour and one commented “yes, she did say she cried on the first night but that it gets better”. Pretty much sums up the three days I’d say.

The first draft of this entry, intended for w/c 16^th September, died with my phone in a tropical storm while I was singing in the rain. There are worse ways to go. The rest of the

month will be updated soon.