Monday 8 June – Day 76

Poor Oussainou, trying to come to the team meeting and give us the benefit of his experience at this action planning stage of the assessment was stuck at the taxi garage in Brikama, Gambia, for hours yesterday. When he called me at 2.30pm he said he’d been waiting ages for the bush taxi to be full and still there were only seven people out of 13 seats.

I don’t enjoy travelling by bush taxi at all. It’s a painful experience waiting for the car to be full of passengers, often over an hour and being squeezed in with 6 other passengers plus the driver squished in to a car that’s had its seats moved forward to fit in another row in the boot area. You’ve got to experience it to believe it!

So Oussainou turned around and went back home. We postponed the team meeting in the afternoon yesterday, until this afternoon. Hopefully he won’t have too much trouble in getting the first taxi out of Brikama in the morning.

Meanwhile I’ve been working very hard preparing for the team meeting, putting together the proposal he and I thrashed out at the start of the week after the previous meeting last Sunday. I’m also starting to put together a report on the assessment, but if you see the fat wodge of papers I have accumulated of information gathered in the assessment process you will understand it’s going to take me a while.

I’m dreaming of vast warehouses of every kind of stationery item in existence. Without a ring binder, hole punch or even dividers the papers are lacking organisation. But in Africa you learn by example to be resourceful and make the most of what you have got. With the left over parcel tape from packing up my bike - having it with me as I thought I might need it again at the airport on the way over – and cut up bits of folded over paper, I have stuck sticky out bits to the sides of several sheets of paper and have brought order to a chaotic pile of paper.

I moved to Dianna a few days ago and am now well settled in. I was in a nice house in Abené, away from the poorer area, in a walled compound. A house with tiled floors, plywood ceiling material, wooden doors, shelving, a kitchen and an inside toilet and sink. Quite a contrast with how most local people live. I’ve now in 2 4 square metre rooms with lino flooring, corrugated iron doors, sand and what looks like woven palm ceiling material (the difference here is that sporadically throughout the day and night little bits of sand fall through on to the floor, or your bed, or clothes, you get the picture), an outside ‘African toilet’ out of the compound (I think it must be, because it is so far from the buildings, almost in the street), but a washing area closed off with palm leaves and sticks stuck in the ground nearer the rooms. The compound is not walled, or even fenced off, it’s hard to tell where one compound ends and another starts. This is the authentic experience living as a local. Except for my having a laptop, two bikes, plenty of food and generally far more stuff in my rooms than I’ve seen anyone else have. Although I haven’t got an income now, having given up my job in London to come here and do this, I am rich here compared to local people.

It’s hot. It’s too hot to do very much. Just sweeping up brings you out in a massive sweat, needing yet another shower. Now it’s not so easy to get water. Before I got it from a tap at the end of the compound and carried in a bucket to the bathroom inside the house. Now it’s a trip to a shared well, a longer walk and this well is deeper and for some reason requires a lot more muscle than what I’ve been used to. The young girls, no more than ten years old have no problem at all and watch me huffing and puffing (deliberately a little theatrically). I think they want to do it for me, but they do enough work as it is already. Later on I hear them talking, making heavy breathing noises as they tell the story of the toobab at the well without enough muscle.

I’ve talked about juju before, but not told you about the kankurang. That’s another story… men in head-to-toe fluffy orange fancy-dress going up and down the street intimidating people and scaring children (if rumour is true even to death) clashing machetes together. The kankurang is peculiar to Mandinka culture. The idea is to stop people picking fruit from the trees in the street before it is deemed the time to do so. I’m not so keen on those two aspects of the culture, but there are lots of other things about African that I am now more accepting of – let’s start with the showering area. So I can’t yet bring myself to clamber over the rubbish that’s been thrown out at the back of the compound, which happens to be between the bedroom and the far off African toilet, in the night, even with a full moon and a wind-up torch. But I am much less fazed now by the gaps in the palm that leave me rather exposed to people passing by when I take a wash.

I was on my own in my room working on my home-made paper dividers, sitting on a mat on the floor one day over this last weekend and felt happy. I was reflecting on how lucky I am to be here. To have this opportunity to experience a very different culture from the inside, learn an African language and do this work. It dawned on me that I am where I want to be. And that I’m doing what I want to be doing. It’s very hard at times and I cry at times (though I have gone quite a few days without doing so now). It’s difficult being in a different culture, different place, different language, etc. But it’s really worth it.