So far this week...

...I have:

1) Felt unwell and taken a test for malaria (negative - phew).
2) Been to a gospel church.
3) Spent 11 hours in the VSO office as a panel member for the programme manager interviews.
4) Spent 7 hours in the VSO office working on my Monitoring and Evaluation presentation for the project start up workshop, which will be held tomorrow. 
5) Seen goats climbing on top of a car. 

6) Been given a mystery fruit from my vegetable guy.

7) Discovered I have lost half a stone.
8) Noticed a huge increase in tourists, and - as a result - spent more of my time convincing bumsters that I don't need a guide, that I am not on holiday, and that I really do live here.

Tobaski

Yesterday Helen and I celebrated Tobaski with my language teacher, Awa, at her compound. It was really nice to spend the day with a huge family, and I am really happy that we had the opportunity to join in with festivities that I wouldn't usually have access to.

The day started early – Helen and I left home at 8 and arrived at the compound just before 9am so that we were there in time for morning prayers. We gracefully declined the invitation to join in with prayer, which was in the street rather than at the mosque due to the huge numbers of people attending. As well as not being Muslim and not knowing the prayer sequence, I don’t think I could have knelt in the sun for thirty minutes – even at 9am the temperature was high, and I was thankful to wait at the back in the shade. The atmosphere was electric and the colours were amazing – men, women and children filed past us in their best outfits… some of the young women were also in 7inch stiletto heels, which was admirable given that the footpaths are only sand and rock!

Once back at the compound we changed out of our Gambian outfits and helped peel potatoes and onions while the men slaughtered three rams. I have never witnessed an animal being slaughtered, and in a way I was quite glad to be viewing it through my camera, but I was impressed with the skill of the men and the boys of all ages who quickly killed the rams, hung them from the tree and skinned and butchered them with ease.

Warning – these pictures might not be enjoyed by everyone!

The liver was cooked first with onions, and then passed round – men first followed by women and children. It was tasty, and once the meat smells started to fill the air we soon became hungry for lunch. Lunch was spaghetti and potatoes with ram meat cooked with onions and mustard – unfortunately I don’t have pictures, but it was good – although rather hot to eat with your hands!  

Not a single part of the rams were wasted; throughout the day I witnessed Awa wrapping long tubes of stomach around pieces of meat - like wrapping cotton around a bobbin - which I was told they would later cook and eat, and we watched in fascination as the ram heads were first roasted whole on the fire, and then hacked into pieces by a young girl who was handy with an axe!

Sitting around, playing with the kids, and drinking attaya was really lovely, and the time passed surprisingly quickly considering we weren’t really doing anything but... well sitting around.

Drinking attaya for a mid afternoon 'boost'

Around 4pm the kids dressed into their outfits and went out collecting for ‘salebu’ – sweets or money that was then counted up and divided equally on their return.

Counting out salebu with Awa 

After walking around with Awa, calling on other compounds to greet her neighbours and pay our own salebu, Helen and I decided that it was time to get some palm wine and beer from our favourite Nigerian bar, Aso Rock. Here we met with Williams, John and Patrick before heading to check out the street party going on in Kairaba Avenue. It was a long but fascinating day, and I am really happy to have taken part in the all the activity.

Joining in with the street entertainment

I was nicknamed 'African Toubab' last night!

Tobaski is coming

Things are really gearing up for Tobaski. There is a strong smell of ram / sheep in the air, and every now and then you hear an indignant bleat as a ram gets herded into a new space! On my way to work I saw a man washing a ram outside his house, and when I passed through Westfield I saw about 20 clusters of rams, all containing about 30 rams each. It was quite an incredible sight. The best moment of all, however, was when I saw a live ram being loaded into the boot of a seven seven taxi! I just wish I could have reached for my camera quick enough!

This is not my picture, I found it on the internet, but it gives a flavour of what I saw this morning – and was taken in The Gambia. Just replace the rural looking location with a busy highway / trading centre and imagine stuffing a ram into the back of one of the green and yellow taxis! 

Vegetable of the week

This week’s exciting vegetable award goes to the aubergine. Very happy to see this little beauty on the market stall yesterday. So my veg stock for the next few days looks like this:

I jogged to the market again, which was a nice way to stretch the legs. The only trouble is it takes so much longer to get anywhere when you have to stop and greet people! I was only out for about 20 minutes, and I stopped to shake hands or say hello to nine people. I knew five of them from the village, but four were randoms who just wanted to greet the crazy red and panting toubab! 

This week…

This week I have:

a)    Been giddy with excitement after buying a butternut squash at the market!

This veg haul cost me just under one pound. The salad leaves and squash were both novelty purchases which made me very happy. The bananas came free; the veg seller is my regular guy (or kiliyarn in wolof) and he usually throws in bananas, avocados, mangoes or oranges depending on what he feels like that day.

b)    Moved away from cooking pasta or rice with tomato, onion and garlic sauce (because all I can reliably buy at the market is tomatoes, onions and garlic) and have branched out into a more exciting world of sweet potato chips, lentil and butternut squash stews, and beans with rice.

This meal might look a bit odd, but was very tasty and I was proud of my creativity with an ingredients list of sardines, tomatoes, onions, garlic, sweet potato and salad items. The added challenges were the light* going off about three minutes after I started cooking, and melting my plastic cooking spork (sorry Jaime) because I don’t have a wooden spoon yet!

I have had to develop a whole new repertoire of dishes now that I am limited by what I can find that day/week in the market, and can only cook on a two hob gas cooker.   

c)    Learned that you shouldn’t attempt to cook beans in the middle of the day when it is about 38 degrees outside. The result (other than tasty beans) is that you turn bright red and sweat buckets!

Note this is not my kitchen. My kitchen is not as fancy as this!

d)    Been cut off from Nawec (the electricity suppliers) because the previous occupier’s bills had not been paid.

e)    Played cards by candle light (see above!)

f)     Played yahtzee on the beach. Ok so this might have been last week but I don’t think I mentioned it before! I know it looks like I am on a permanent holiday but I have honestly been going to work every day as well!

Seth, Helen, John and Graeme enjoying the sea breeze at Leybato

Tara and I playing yahtzee

g)    Been bitten by killer mosquitos. I won’t post pics, they ain’t pretty!

h)    Been invited to sit on the interview panel for the new VSO office project manager, and to organise a monitoring and evaluation workshop for the World Bank project that we (myself, eight other vols, and seven partner organisations) are working on.

i)      Discovered that my resident three legged lizard is still alive and well (I was worried I had poisoned it when killing the cockroaches).

*I have found that all electricity seems to be referred to as ‘light’. 

You can call me Naffie

Today I ate lunch with Ambrose and Frank, two brothers who live in my compound as part of my landlord’s family. We ate plasas and rice – plasas is bitter leaf (sort of like spinach) cooked with fish, meat, chili peppers, bitter tomato and palm oil – and drank some red wine… my first red wine since arriving in The Gambia! They gave me my Gambian name… Naffisetou or Naffie for short. They chose it because they thought it was similar to Nat or Natty which is what everyone has been calling me.

After lunch I had a quick nap (red wine in 38 degree heat just made me sleepy!) and then was picked up by two guys from my office, Kekou and ‘King Bob’ (I still don’t know his real name!), who had arranged to take John, Aloysious and I to a place called Tanje. This is a big fish market where lots of fishing boats come in to – even bigger than the fish market in Bakau which I have some photos of and keep meaning to blog about. You could smell that we had arrived before you could see the place, but the atmosphere was great! There were hundreds of people down on the beach, either there to meet the boats and buy fish, or to sell what had been bought in.

We walked along, surrounded by thousands of sea gulls, and watched all the activity. It became obvious that it may be the men who go out to fish, but it was the women and young boys who were doing most of the work. There were so many young boys, who looked about 10 or 12, and sometimes younger, who were crouching by piles of small fish like sardines and filleting them. They were so fast and efficient, just four slices produced perfect fillets, and the central bone was neatly flicked out, without wasting a scrap. Some of the women would then come round collecting up all the discarded bones, heads and tails, and would throw the waste back in to the sea. Other women were scaling and gutting fish (the sand had a silver sheen to it from all the fish scales) or were selling them directly to customers. Some men were attending to the boats, and a few men were crafting new boats, but in general it seemed that the men were less active than everyone else.

I managed to take some photos, although they aren’t great as I was trying to be discrete. They don’t capture the bright colours – the whole beach was a sea of colour, either from the painted boats, the women’s outfits or the fish themselves. I just wish I could have videoed the young boys slicing the fish so skilfully.

The boy in the yellow top is cooking fish on a fire in the sand

Click on the photos to enlarge.

One month in and avoiding crocodile babies

I have now been in The Gambia for one month. I feel very settled, and I am beginning not to notice the things that first caught my eye, like the many goats I see walking around Bakau, or the chickens running around my feet, or the children calling ‘toubab’. But everyday holds a new challenge or a new experience, and even simple things, like buying onions, can feel like huge achievements.

Work is still very slow – we are being introduced very gently. In some ways this is useful, because it takes so much time and brain power to just live and get used to this new life – whether that’s speaking Wolof, or buying vegetables, or taking public transport – that I don’t seem to have much capacity for work at the moment! But I am looking forward to things taking off a bit, and getting started on the project that I am here to provide support for.

This week was mostly spent on the office balcony – this is my view over Kairaba Avenue.

We also went to Katchikali crocodile park which is here in Bakau. This is a sacred place with over 100 crocs. It is thought that the crocodiles are very powerful, and you are encouraged to touch them to absorb their special powers – which I did… cautiously! They even have a washing area for women who are unable to conceive. It is believed that if they bathe in the water from the pool, and then go home and spend time with their husband, they will have a child which they must then call Katchikali. I asked if they had had many Katchikali babies and was told ‘oh yes, loads and loads’ although I didn’t get any exact figures! The washing area was a new addition by all accounts – they used to make the women dip directly into the pool! I stayed well away from the water …!

The brick square is the washing area

My day today

I have been wanting to write up a ‘typical day’ to try and capture what I do as part of my daily routine, but my days have been so random so far that I haven’t yet worked out what constitutes a typical day. The only routine I seem to have really put down is what I do first thing in the morning. When my alarm goes off I climb out from underneath my mosquito net and stumble to the kitchen. For a few days while I waged war on my resident cockroaches this involved being careful to avoid standing on bugs that had died in the night – but thankfully ‘operation exterminate’ seems to have been a success, and I no longer feel so invaded! I get to my kitchen and put a pan of water on to boil for my tea, and then head straight for a cold shower (or bucket bath if the water is off) before getting ready for the day. This happens most mornings. What follows afterwards varies greatly!

But today I arrived at the office and met John, Aloysious and a couple of staff members on the balcony that looks out over Kairaba Avenue. We spend most of our days on the balcony; things are slow while we settle in and get to know the place, and our programme at the moment is centred around ‘familiarisation’ – basically chatting with the staff as we pick up the rhythm of working in The Gambia. For breakfast I had some of John’s tapalapa (he had akra which is fried bean curd) – it is very common to share your food, and even if you only have a small piece of bread it’s polite to offer it to your neighbour and let them break some off. I was given a couple of cups of attaya to wash it down with; attaya is strong green tea which is brewed with about a million spoonful’s of sugar – giving you an intense sugar and caffeine hit in one small shot glass! The first cup is the strongest, and it is typically drunk in three rounds, each round getting slightly weaker, or mellower than the first.

We chatted with the staff, met the chairwoman of the organisation, and basically hung out for a while. Inevitably the conversation turned to food, and we were told that we weren’t truly Gambian until we had tried baxaal (pronounced baharl). Before we knew it, a big food bowl of baxaal had arrived and we sat around it and ate – with spoons this time not our hands. It was tasty, cous with dried fish and spices, but quite a dry dish. Once we had finished eating another pot appeared, this time containing domoda and rice. I have eaten domoda a few times here, and was very full from the baxaal, but we were still encouraged to eat! I am glad I did – it was the best domoda I have ever had. The ground nut flavour wasn’t as overpowering as it can be, and it had a delicious chilli kick to it. John and Aloysious must have agreed with me and before we knew it the dish was empty!

After work we called in at Aloysious’ house to check out his compound, and then I made my way home. At 6pm I decided to jog to the supermarket and veg stalls. It’s only 2k there and back, but I haven’t exercised since I left England for Uganda, and haven’t run for months and months! I also didn’t know how the people of Bakau would react to a toubab jogging down the sandy roads, dodging goats and 7x7s, but I stuck on my I-pod and just went for it! I am glad I did, it was great to get out, and I didn’t even feel too hot – despite the fact that according to the Weather Channel it was 30 degrees at 6pm but was said to have felt like 35 degrees. I must have acclimatised!

I was very grateful to discover the water had returned when I got back, so after a nice cold shower I am sitting in the dark (I have water but no power – you can’t always have it all!) eating tomato, cucumber and cream crackers, feeling very content. 

I arrived home today to find this message from my cleaner! 

Tailor time

On Saturday Helen, Nicola and I met at Serrakunda Market to shop for material with which to make our Tobaski outfits. Tobaski is coming up on Friday 26 October (depending on the moon) and is the Gambian celebration of Eid-ul-Kabir. On Tobaski day all heads of families that can afford it slaughter a ram, goat or cow and divide the meat between friends, relatives and charity. After prayer in the morning, feasting and drumming begins, and everyone wears their best outfits… hence the trip to the tailor!

After shopping in the hectic market we came back to Bakau to get some food before heading to the tailor in Bakau market. We had a Gambian dish of okra, palm oil, dried fish and chili with rice, and watched the world go by.

View over Bakau lower basic school, complete with 7x7 taxi

I wanted some very bright material for my traditional Gambian outfit – and I think I succeeded! We took it to the tailor, and picked our designs. All three of us have gone for something different, but we will all have Gambian headpieces made in the same fabric as our dresses – I can’t wait to see how they look! 

Nicola getting measured for her dress by Bass the tailor

What a week!

Well, it has certainly been a busy one! It genuinely feels like I have been here for three months rather than just over three weeks. I am settling in really well, and have to remind myself every day that I live here now.

I started work on Monday – an easy day to ‘meet and greet’. Tuesday was also an easy day, which was good as I had been out dancing until 3am on Monday to celebrate Nigerian Independence Day! On Tuesday afternoon I went to the health centre to visit one of the group members who has contracted malaria since we have been here*; he was in his own room and conditions were fine, but it was nice to be able to give him some company and take him some bananas.

John and I went for lunch both Monday and Tuesday at ‘Omar’s Peace Corp place’. You can have a Gambian dish of the day, plus fruit and a bag of water for about 60p. Monday’s choice was chicken yassa with rice (chicken cooked with onions and a kind of mustardy sauce) and Tuesday was chicken stew with rice. As we were eating, the chickens that run around your feet (and I presume later go in the pot!) were picking up any spilt rice – first mother and chick, and then dad joined in too!

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were a lot busier work wise after a meeting with the VSO country director on Wednesday morning. I supported her to meet a deadline for the World Bank, and it was nice to get involved and see how the project links me and all the other agricultural volunteers who are here together.

Thursday also involved a trip to the British High Commission (which is next door to the VSO office) to meet with the Vice Consul and his staff. The building is set in amazing grounds with a swimming pool, and overlooks the sea – not a bad place to be posted if you work for the FCO! Speaking of the VSO office, it’s a lovely place that we are feeling quite at home in after spending two weeks there for in country training. The garden is full of banana and papaya, and it all feels very tropical!

Friday afternoon was spent at the beach, and then I had an early night – imposed by a lack of food, water and electricity, but welcomed after a week of late nights. The electricity and water has been really intermittent over the last week – the weather has been scorching hot and the thunder and lightning really dramatic as rainy season comes to an end, and I think the storms have been knocking out the power, internet connections and water. We are all getting good at having bucket baths and remembering to fill up our jerry cans and drinking water for the fridge when the water comes back. You never know at the moment how long it will last!

*On Thursday another guy became the third member of our group to be diagnosed with malaria – those pesky mosquitoes are dangerous at the moment!