Friends

When I reviewed my last post it bugged me that I had missed out ‘friends’. When I was talking about fitting in socially and culturally I meant to comment on the friends I have made here, and the friends from back home that have supported me, but I guess I got carried away talking about learning Wolof instead! I really appreciate the fact that I have met some great people who, combined with my friends from back home, make me feel very happy. This past week I have particularly valued the bonds that I have made with people here in The Gambia.

Last Saturday I had a lovely day drinking tea and eating chocolate chip cookies (mega treat) round at Nicola’s. We listened to the rain outside and chatted away about old friendships, telling stories of daft adventures we had had with our best friends from back home. Then Helen called in and we continued the ‘girly’ day, chatting away about past and present friendships, feeling happy and content.

Unfortunately as the day turned into evening I started to feel a bit weird. Thinking I was hungry and / or dehydrated we went to get a shawarma and a coke. It gave me enough energy to get home, but I still felt pretty bad, and a little voice in my head started saying ‘I hope this isn’t malaria…’. I had a funny tingling feeling in my arms, like my blood had been replaced with fizzy drink, which I recognised from the last time, and a few hours later I had a full blown fever – shivering and covered in goosebumps despite it being about 30 degrees. To cut a long story short I had a pretty gruesome night and knew I needed to get to Africmed in the morning. Figuring I wouldn’t make it alone I texted Nicola as early as I dared on a Sunday morning, and she rushed straight round to help me. 7 hours later, having had a lot of fluid, quinine, antibiotics (default treatment at Africmed!) and goodness knows what else pumped into me, I went home feeling a little bit better than I had when I arrived.

As the week went on I recovered, Helen brought me juice, Nicola shopped for me and visited me, and Ebou, Alieu and Keway all came to visit me throughout the week. I got better, and feel fine now, but it was a good reminder that I couldn’t have coped here without the great people that I have around me. 

One year anniversary

This time last year I was boarding an aeroplane to come to The Gambia. I had a red wine headache, having spent my last night in England eating lots of cheese and drinking lots of red wine with my best friend, and I was excited and nervous all at the same time. 

The year has gone by so quickly in some ways, and slowly in others. So much has changed in my life, and the VSO adventure has been every bit as amazing as I thought it would be.

It has been challenging though, in ways I didn't imagine. Before I came I thought some of the biggest hurdles would be the social aspects that come with starting a new life in a new and unfamiliar country. It's true that there has been a lot to learn, but culturally and socially I think I have slotted in fairly well. My language skills are improving - I need to make an effort to speak more Wolof and practice more, but I understand it pretty well now. I have reached the point where I 'hear' it - that is, I can pick out nearly all of what is being said without consciously thinking about it. Sometimes I tune into conversations and reply (in English) and then realise my colleagues were speaking in Wolof not English, and I have followed what was being said without noticing. Or someone will ask a question in the office and I will respond in Wolof without meaning to - it's like it just spills out my mouth without thinking. But I do need to speak more Wolof - I'm kind of stuck at the greetings and ordering things stage... I can say what I need to say pretty well, but I need to take it up a level to in order to speak conversational Wolof. 

I understand the way of life here a little bit more now; I see the difficulties and the challenges, as well as the joy and the happiness, and I can walk around feeling safe and confident in a world that is familiar to me.

Before I came I didn't think that much about the professional side of things. When I look back I can see that I have achieved things. Lots of things. Both for the Programme Office, the project, and for myself. I have led a whole year's Annual Partnership Review process, designed monitoring systems, written case studies, chaired workshops and training sessions, reviewed manuals, written and delivered presentations for the British High Commission and our project partners, and worked with loads of different people. And I have helped to induct two cohorts of new volunteers, bringing new monitoring and evaluation systems to them as well as to the project that I am working on, as well as showing them around The Gambia and helping them to settle. 

But it hasn't been easy. I worry that I do too much work / service delivery and not enough showing/training/developing other people to make my time here sustainable. I don't always know what people want or expect of me, and I don't always know if I am taking the right approach. Sometimes I feel the weight of being 'the expert' or 'the specialist' as my job title grandly states, and I miss having a team of people doing similar things that I can bounce ideas off. But just as being 'the expert' is challenging, at other times I can feel overlooked, which is just as bad. I'm 'just a volunteer' and sometimes made to feel like cheap labour, which I find difficult. When I read blogs by other VSO volunteers before I came here they used to bemoan the lack of warning and notice that was given before a big piece of work, and I too find that I am asked to do things right at the last minute, giving that sensation of fire fighting and rushing that can leave me feeling a bit dissatisfied.  

However, I definitely think that the benefits outweigh the negatives, and the challenges just make life that bit more interesting. I think the biggest benefit has been personal; I can see that as a person I have really changed and developed. Coming here a year ago felt like a chance to just be me. I didn't have to fit with how people saw me, and do what people expected of me, because nobody knew me. I could do what I wanted without people thinking 'well that's not very Nat like' and I found that really liberating. I had to do things for myself, speak up for myself, and manage. And while I have never been totally shy and backwards about doing things for myself, I think sometimes it's easy to sit back and rely on your friends and family around you, and being here has given me a chance to wake myself up a bit. I feel more confident now - and that frustration of being asked to do things last minute has been a blessing as well as a pain, because now I know that I can just get on with it, and do and deliver with confidence. Without being too cheesy, I think I have learned a lot about myself in the past year, and I feel confident and strong and happy. 

And as the year anniversary rolls round, it's time to say goodbye to Rob. He leaves tonight and last night we had a farewell meal at Mama's restaurant. He had a great turnout, which shows his popularity among all of us - he's an easy going chap who gets along with all of the volunteers, and I really will miss him. 

Pork and tortillas

On Saturday we went to Manjai to a friend's bar. He is moving into the world of pig farming and selling pork afra - pretty rare for these parts! We sat outside for as long as we could before the rain came, and then moved inside to eat and drink. After a while two huge trays of barbecued pork were brought out to us, and we all tucked in.

The pork was very delicious, and quickly shut us up as we all concentrated on eating... 

Note the look of sublime pleasure on Rob's face! 

Post-pork contentment!

In other food related news, always on the lookout for ways to liven up my evening meals as cheaply as possible, I have been trying to make flour tortillas. I tried once before, using a glass as a rolling pin, and although they worked they were a bit thick and chewy. While in England I bought a cheap rolling pin and last night I tried it out. 

The first one I made turned out pretty well, so I kept going! The recipe is very simple; mix flour, water, oil and salt, leave to rest, roll out, then lay on a hot pan for thirty seconds on each side. 

I found that my biggest challenge was rolling out circular tortillas, mine kept going a bit square! 

The gin in the background is water - honest.
I haven't gone all Keith Floyd.

But practice makes perfect and they started getting more consistent in shape. 

For dinner I used them to wrap up some rice and home-made tomato and sardine sauce - it was pretty delicious, and cheap and entertaining at the same time!  

Enterprise based development

On Saturday I went to the VSO office for a meeting with the Programme Office staff and Dr Sal Buckler, a researcher and VSO volunteer who has been doing a VSO / Barclays study on enterprise based development. We talked a little about the projects we have here, and a little about her work, but we spent most of the meeting planning a forum that the British High Commission had agreed to host for us. We wanted to bring people together, show them what we are working on, highlight some of Dr Buckler’s research, and start to get the audience thinking and talking about how we might find a new way to bring corporates and investors in to provide capital for development.

We planned that, after opening speeches from the British High Commissioner and our Country Director, Samba (Programme Manager) would give an introduction to VSO The Gambia’s strategic plan, then I would give a presentation on the World Bank Growth and Competitiveness Project, followed by Dr Buckler talking about her research. I went away and spent Saturday evening and Sunday morning working on my presentation, and then tweaked it with the office staff on Monday.

On Monday I also met again with Dr Buckler, and a few other volunteers who are working on the Growth and Competitiveness Project. We had a more in depth chat about what we have been doing, the groundnut value chain, the challenges that we are facing, and what we needed in order to ‘add value’ to our project. I hate the phrase ‘added value’.  It gets thrown around all the time and I think of it as a filler that is used when people don’t know what else to say.  But sometimes it fits and I have come to realise that sometimes I have to say it, even though it makes me shudder!

We were talking a lot about issues across the value chain that impact on our project. Our funding enables us to provide training on business development and build capacity around technical growing and processing techniques. But there is so much that falls outside the scope of our project that hinders what we are trying to do. For example, technical training can advise on the importance of crop rotation and the need to improve soil fertility, yet land tenure and ownership often means that farmers get moved on every year to a different piece of land. This means that they can’t plan or rotate crops as they might wish, yet changing this will require serious cultural and systemic changes that our project probably won’t even come close to.

However, Dr Buckler’s research was really interesting and she spoke of what she had seen across Ghana, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. She has been researching projects where big companies have invested in development. This is often for two reasons; to help their corporate and social responsibility targets and also to ensure sustainability for their own businesses and production. For example, a well-known chocolate company has been working with cocoa farmers in Ghana. They were worried about declining production; cocoa trees were not being well looked after, established cocoa farmers were getting older and retiring, and young people weren’t showing much interest in cocoa farming. The company were concerned that the supply of cocoa could eventually run out. So they established community projects to inject some life back into cocoa farming, and the model that they used has turned out to be really effective. If we could get something like that going for groundnuts, and get backing and resources from a big company who are the ‘end users’ of groundnut, then it would really help us.

Tuesday rolled around and I started to feel a little nervous! First up was a lunch hosted by the High Commissioner for the VSO programme office staff, Dr Buckler and I. The food was delicious, although I didn’t eat much as I was feeling the butterflies! But when it came down to it my presentation went well, and as soon as I stood up I didn’t feel nervous - it was just pre-performance jitters! After the presentations had finished we went into a smaller room for discussion. The event was attended by the Permanent Secretary for Trade, and representatives were there from the World Bank, UNDP, Standard Chartered, the Chamber of Commerce and many other finance and development ‘heavyweights’. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of multi-agency sharing, and you could see that people had a lot to get off their chest. Our Country Director was trying to push them to think of new ideas, new possibilities, and it took a while to get there, but once people said what they needed to say you could see them starting to think more creatively, and by the end the conversation had been really useful. As a result of the event it was agreed that a working group will be formed and the meetings will continue. Tuesday’s forum was a first, and was intended to be a catalyst for other events – I think it went well and I hope that the interest continues. 

Rainy season in full force

On Thursday it started raining at about 5pm. A storm had been brewing and my head was pounding from the humidity and the charge building up in the air. At one point I felt like the air around me was ringing with electricity, so it was quite a relief when the storm broke. I went to bed and it was still raining. I woke up and it was still raining. I showered and dressed and it was still raining. Pouring in fact. Coming down in sheets, with the wind howling. I set up work on my laptop and figured I’d venture into the office when the rain stopped. A few hours passed and I noticed the puddles around the windows getting bigger and bigger. I then realised that rain was starting to come through the cracks in the walls, cracks I hadn’t even noticed, and water was dripping down the insides of all my external facing walls.

Damage control. See the flood line on the partition wall -
it was sucking up the water

So I duly spent the day mopping up bucket loads of water, working and pacing the house watching the roads run like rivers outside. The streets were deserted and I could tell that the rain was keeping almost everyone indoors. It felt a little like being a prisoner, and I was just glad that I had enough food in the house to get by! At about 7pm Nicola and I decided that it was better to face the rain than pace around like caged tigers, so we dashed out in waterproofs and met for a drink, joined by our other friends living in Bakau who were equally fed up with being bored and mopping up their houses. The rain stopped sometime after 11pm… about thirty hours after it started!

The rain is affecting people’s homes, work attendance, mobility and comfort. It’s desperately needed, but it feels so extreme to go for 9 months with no rain and then face endless torrential rainstorms within a short space of time. The biggest impact, for me and I presume I am not alone, is the effect on market produce. Variety is limited here at the best of times, but going to the market at the moment is… well, depressing really! Last week I bought half a kilo of tomatoes, 6 onions, an avocado, 4 chillies and a quarter kilo of green beans, which I managed to stretch out to last all week. The tomatoes were green and small, and when I cut into them I realised that over half of them had spoiled and were black and vinegary inside. On Saturday I went to the market and managed to walk away with 2 sweet potatoes and one small cabbage. That’s it. The stalls were bare! Avocados seem to be the only thing in abundance, everything else is in very short supply.

I sound negative and I don’t mean to. I will get by, as will everyone else. I will find food to eat, and things will pick up in a month or so, inshallah. But it’s coming as a shock having spent the last month in England buying and eating whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Broccoli, spinach, salads, meat, fish, cheese, you name it, I ate it, whether it was in season or not. It’s so different living somewhere that depends on seasons and good weather for produce.

I can, however, get decent bread from the bakery, and after drinks on Friday night I called in to buy bread from the night workers. I was rewarded with a loaf of hot, crusty bread straight from the oven, which I took home and ate before going to bed.

In complete contrast, yesterday Nicola, Abdou and I went to the beach up by Poco Loco, and were later joined by Janneke and a few others. It was great – a day of sunshine and relaxation on a massive bed on the beach! Perfect! Apart from the fact that the thatch roof was missing due to the storms, you’d never have known it was rainy season. It was the best antidote to the wet weather, and really perked me up. It seemed I wasn’t the only one enjoying a chance to get out; the beach was rammed with Gambian families eating lunch and relaxing, boys playing football, and later on, teenagers strutting up and down in their finest clothes. Great for people watching, and a very chilled out day!

Where did the roof go?!

Busy beach and sea

Our giant bed on the beach