One Size Fits All

Lying slightly crumpled and on its side, the van was empty. The doors didn’t close anymore. They were bulged out like a swollen corpse. It looked the way a donkey or horse did after it fell dead out in an empty field and had a week of sun to bloat it. Stiff legs spread far apart. Body ready to burst. The van was in the ditch on the side of the road – on the side opposite of where it had been traveling. It must have lost control, crossed the oncoming lane and collapsed onto its side.

The passengers were all standing around. Everyone looked alright. Maybe some cuts and bruises, but you couldn’t really tell. I was in the back of an identical van, or what they call a gele-gele here – the most common mode of public transportation. We stopped on the side of the road, just past the accident and the driver jumped out. I think he wanted to help. There wasn’t much commotion though, just a shocked stillness and low murmurs and a scattering of people on cell phones. I don’t know what the driver thought he was going to do, or why he rushed to do it so quickly. He left our van full of passengers, about 24 of us, and forgot to put on the brake.

When we started rolling backwards everyone inside started to panic. I looked up to the front and saw people standing and grabbing at their things and calling out to the distant driver rather than sliding over to the driver’s seat to put a foot on the brake. We were rolling backwards and starting to slide down into the same steep six foot ditch.

Somehow I didn’t care. Maybe I could tell we weren’t going to flip. We were just going to plow into the ground at ten miles-per-hour, bust the open back doors with the impact and be absolutely fine. I was in the middle of a trip back to my post, in the middle of a magazine and in the middle of an article. Really, I just didn’t want to be interrupted from all three. And so I sat there and kept reading.

I grabbed a hold of the seat next to me with my left hand as I turned a page with my right, and when we hit the ditch I didn’t budge. All around me people tumbled and groaned dramatic groans – an insincere symphony of competing soliloquies. They pushed each other out of the vehicle with flair and self-concern and I was alone. A moment later the driver climbed back in, backed up into the empty field next to the road and then found a path back onto the tarmac. The passengers climbed back in and we were headed out east and upcountry again.

No one yelled at the driver. No one was angry. Even though they were all convinced the driver had nearly killed them in a moment of blatant carelessness, they said nothing. It was absurd, and I just kept reading.

It reminded me of a Fula proverb that says, The heart is your enemy. A strange statement to a Western mind where the heart is always associated with love and wisdom and intuition – the seat of human instinct that holds more value in the eyes of so many than the mechanical logic of the mind. The idea that the heart was one’s enemy did not sit right the first time I heard it, but that’s because I was looking at it the wrong way.

The day I first heard this proverb I was working with Amadou in his riverside orchard. We were clearing the dry grass and weeds that had clogged the stretch of land during the rainy season. We were burning the grass in a patchwork – small sections to keep the flames under control – when I heard Samba, Amadou’s brother, let out a startled scream. There was a giant snake beneath a fallen tree among an unburned patch of grass. This was major news.

Gambians hate snakes – all Gambians and all snakes. I don’t think this is a misrepresentation even though it is so total and so final in its statement. The hatred comes from fear. They are hated because they are feared, and they are feared because they bite. But even though the vast majority of snakes in this country are harmless, almost all bites are fatal. People, it seems, are so good at working themselves up over a snake bite that it kills them.

It’s not the bite, but the person. Not the snake that is the enemy, but the heart. Some people even believe that touching a snake or touching the clothing of a snake bite victim can be fatal. The deadliness of a snake is a mind game here. One that can be felt in a pounding, adrenaline soaked heart.

Amadou and Samba were not about to lose this game and so they smoked the snake out and beat it to death with sticks. It was a puff adder, Bitis arientans, and could have actually been deadly.

Before the snake had been forced into the open, though, Amadou was covering a year-old mango tree with wet sheets to protect it from the fire he was about to set. He knocked into a branch of the dead tree that the snake was taking refuge under and dislodged a large chunk of shriveled bark. When the bark crashed to the ground Amadou leapt out of the way, his heart thrashing in his chest, as if his life depended on it. In a way it did. But really it was just bark, and nothing more.

On the gele-gele, as we rolled backwards into the ditch, we were rolling into a ditch and nothing more. We were not crashing, not flipping. We were not careening off the road and into a thick murky river. But those are all things that could happen to a person inside a gele-gele. You can’t treat all situations equally. If you stand up and thrash around as you roll slowly off the road, you can hurt yourself. If you sit calmly you’ll probably be fine. It’s the difference between the snake and the bite, and the danger of a deadly heart.