The Gambia is Really Hot

Hardship is Relative

2010-05-22T15:41:00.004Z

The following was published in the Albany Times Union on May 2, 2010:

The advertisements on the New York City subway enticing me to trade my morning coffee for a cup of tea made me smile. They were selling flights to London with the promise of unparalleled comfort and the ease of unburdened travel.

If the price was right, one could hop continents and barely notice. But with volcanic ash floating high above Europe for several days in April, a good portion of the world accustomed to the modern trimmings of travel was left wondering what to do.

I thought back to the molten days of April in West Africa, and about the two years I had spent there as a Peace Corps volunteer. The heat would last until the rains arrived in mid-June. Punishing afternoons with highs in the 120s burned the skies as farmers burned their fields in preparation for planting. I tried everything to escape. I swam in the river, but April found the river, too. The current flowed like a solid mass and felt as thick as bathwater. Even the cool well water in the small upcountry village where I lived didn't stand a chance. It broke the surface in a pumping rhythm, confident and full of optimism, and then fainted into my bucket, dejected and defeated. Like travelers to and from Europe those few days flights were cancelled, I felt the world had tipped and left me no options.

Then I stopped myself and simplified. My life was already comfortable in its iron-age simplicity: I lived in a mud hut with a thatched grass roof, and I slept on a bed made from palm boughs. Still, I simplified further. I took heed of the old adage and did as the Gambians did. I took apart my ceramic and steel water filter and traded it in for a giant jug. A jug made of clay.

I traded in my standards and expectations and found a little relief.

The jug or londe was simple. As water slowly seeped through the rough exterior, it moistened the outside and evaporated leaving the water inside the vessel crisp and cool-- a little oasis of temperature. It was enough to get me through the hottest part of the day, and since the jug was the size of a bass drum, it was enough water to pour over myself before attempting to fall asleep at night.

I bought the jug at a weekly market an hour outside of my village. Carrying it back was not a pleasant experience. It was fragile and so I couldn't store it on the roof of the ragged bush-taxi van that ran past my village.

I sat crammed next to 23 people in a space made for 15, and stared straight ahead over the heads of the people in front of me. The londe was searing hot in my lap, having sat all day in direct sun. All I could do was gaze out through the cracked windshield and wipe the sweat out of my eyes. I knew it would be worth it in the end.

My subway car rumbled along the tracks headed north between Rector and Chambers streets in New York City's Financial District and I sat looking over the heads of the people across from me. Splinters of light flashed through the temporary ceiling on the west side of the tunnel and I realized where I was. The Cortland Street Station used to sit here, beneath the steel and concrete of the World Trade Center. That was nearly nine years ago -- the last time so much airspace was silent.

Outside on the street in a light spring rain, a young woman jumped out of a cab and ran across the sidewalk to the shelter of an awning. Her friend who had been waiting there for her looked at her in shock.

"You took a cab? It was only 10 blocks!"

"Yeah, well I don't do rain," she said zipping her purse.

The price was right.

An Irishman in the Paddy

2009-07-24T12:12:00.003Z

I don’t claim to be Irish. Rather, I’m an American with a genetic makeup engineered for optimal performance in a cloudy, damp and relatively cold environment. This is thanks to Irish ancestors who originally moved to New England – a place, in terms of climate, relatively similar to the original and its western insular neighbor. That leap across the Atlantic was huge, but still temperate. My descendant leap back across the pond was a little different. It landed me in the West African tropics.

Skin maladies and intestinal parasites trump all else here. I’ve had a good share of them – from strange rashes to maggots under the skin, from amoebic dysentery to mono. So it was with trepidation that I ventured out into my host’s rice field for an afternoon of standing in stagnant, tepid mud under and unconcerned searing sun.

I had managed to avoid the rice field for more than a year and a half. Last growing season I received a couple invitations to go, invitations I accepted with a smile but never showed up for. It wasn’t a problem or insulting. Part of the culture here is to accept things in theory but not actually accept them, or to invite someone to do something without really inviting them. This can be tricky, but sometimes it’s obvious. When a guy in a bush taxi offers his newly procured bean sandwich to you and the other 20 people around you, you say no. Obviously there’s not enough sandwich to go around. He’s being polite. But the rice field was a gray area.

In Gambian culture rice cultivation is strictly designated to women. Likewise, corn, millet and sorghum is strictly designated to men. There isn’t any mixing. It was with this in mind that I assumed the rice field invitations were simply niceties and a means of starting conversation. Thus I passed my first growing season here without ever stepping foot in a paddy.

Then the invitations began again. I had forgotten them. A year had passed. But these new invitations had a distinctly stronger undertone of authenticity. After the fifth or sixth invitation in two weeks I realized I was in trouble. I was actually going to have to go. Here’s where the ‘honorary’ card comes into play. As a foreigner I am always, to a degree, outside of the culture. Everyone understands and accepts this. It’s not a big deal, but it is a loophole. It’s a loophole that lets me be the only guy in the rice field and have it not be weird on a gender level to anyone in the community. I become an ‘honorary’ woman and am allowed to do women-only things just as an American woman can become an ‘honorary’ man. But the bottom line is I’m already the pasty white guy living in the traditional African village, and that’s weird enough.

On the first day of my authentic-rice-paddy-invitation-realization Cas, my girlfriend, came to visit me in my village. I was in the clear. Being a good host to a guest is immensely important in The Gambia. And so I was basically off the hook from having to do anything at all. Cas was my guest and I was expected to be a good host. The expectation of a host placing their entire attention on a guest is so strong in this culture that the Fulas actually have a proverb about it: A good host’s work suffers, but a bad host’s name suffers. Enough said.

Not mentioning the invitation and my need to comply to it, I waited until the next day to slip it into conversation.

“Well, I have to go back to site and get the rest of my garden planted.”

“Now? It’s almost noon. Way to hot. You should just stay until it cools down. You can still make it if you leave by five.”

“I know, but I really have to get that garden finished.”

“You’ll get it finished. Besides, you can come with me to the rice fields today. Ever been to the rice fields?”

She hadn’t. Her site was far from the river. And despite my best, yet futile, effort to make it sound like a great adventure she wasn’t convinced in the least that there was anything great about it. Instead, she was convinced of my one enormous apprehension about diving into the paddy: that I would come out covered in rashes and squirming with worms. If something could go wrong it would go wrong, and if there was something out there to catch, well, then I would catch it. Regardless, it had to be done. I drenched myself in sunscreen and set off.

Eventually, after bouncing through a jumble of other people’s rice fields, I found my host grandmother and two host moms. They looked surprised. I had come. After a year and a half I was there ready to see what it was all about. First line of business, though, was break-time. I had showed up at low tide. The river wasn’t high enough to fill the fields and so we waited. We brewed tea, I sweated and my host grandmother stuffed me full of peanuts like I was a baby bird. Then when it was time to work everyone asked me if I was headed home.

“No, I arrived to do ricings,” I said in the English equivalent of my less-than-stellar Pulaar.

“Ok, you’ll have to lose the sandals, though. The mud is pretty deep. We’ll go transplant from the nursery over there into the paddy itself.

“Yes.”

Everyone laughed a little when I took off my flip-flops and started walking down the clay barrier wall beside the field. It was a laugh that said, “Holy crap, look at this guy! He’s actually going out into the paddy! Ok, wait, what do we do with him? He might screw everything up.” I started transplanting with fury and zeal as I slipped around in the ankle-deep mud and calf-deep water. I managed not to make a fool of myself. “Thanks! That looks really great!” said grandma. And since she kept handing me more seedlings I knew she didn’t mean it in the sarcastic that’s-enough-you’re-ruining-everything kind of way. But after a couple of hours it became apparent there weren’t enough tools to go around and not enough open space to keep transplanting in. I walked to the riverside and washed all the clay off my legs and arms. Grandma smiled a big smile, her entire body covered in specks of clay like she had just been standing behind the rear wheel of a pick-up truck trying to free it from the mud. The rice fields had been a good time, but then my dread returned – what was I taking away from this besides a nice afternoon and a supersized dose of UV rays?

So far, nothing. A week has gone by and all is well. That could mean two things: 1) That all is well and that I survived intact and un-invaded, 2) That the invasion is of a scale to this point never experienced – that a worm as thick as a tree trunk is waiting in silence for the moment that it will explode out of my chest. Really, either seems possible at this point. Maybe it’ll be something in between. Either way I can’t be too upset. I’ve been a host to parasites before. And as long as I’m in The Gambia I’ll have to deal with it and smile. After all, being a bad host is bad form.

Leviticus 2009

2009-06-29T09:36:00.002Z

It had become necessary to escape the heat by any means necessary. April was wrapping her molten fingers around everything: around myself, my clothes, my hut, my bed and my thoughts. The sun stood so high in the cloudless sky that a full 90 degree tilt of the head was necessary to locate it, and it blared a white light so intense that it burned the blue around it.

I tried swimming in the river to escape the heat, but April had found the river, too. Its lazy current flowed like a solid mass and felt like thick viscous bathwater; thick like the deep silty clay that lines its banks. It redeemed itself only by washing the sweat from your skin – at least momentarily. And when you dragged yourself to shore you started to sweat again just from the effort.

Even the cool well water in village didn’t stand a chance. It broke the surface in a pumping rhythm, full of optimism, and then fainted into my bucket defeated like an ice cube on hot tarmac. If it sat in the sun too long it could burn your fingers. It would scald the skin. And thus April kept its watch, May held the course and June made it all humid. The cool rains lingered on the horizon and all one could do was wait.

But cool water can be had using the most primitive of technologies. A clay water jug, or londe, can be found in almost every Gambian compound. As water slowly bleeds through the fire hardened clay it evaporates into the air leaving everything inside cool and crisp. A little oasis of temperature.

The idea is ancient. I had recently been browsing Leviticus after reading an essay by Paul Theroux where he had observed a diet based on Mosaic law. By chance I came to a passage on clay water jugs. The law said that if a lizard fell dead into your water jug then you must destroy it. Outside a lizard scrambled past my door and up the woven grass fence. Water jugs, I thought. Water jugs. Lizards. Leviticus. 2009. I was living in the iron age. Either that or the sun was hard boiling my brain. Downtrodden and disenchanted by the pounding sun, I set off to the weekly market thirty kilometers away in search of my own.

Before I left, my host family told me to bring towels and clothes with me. I could stuff them in a box and make a nest for my londe – something to protect the fragile clay against the bare angular roof racks on top of the bumpy bush taxis. When I got there they told me to look for Omar, my host brother, who would be selling bread. He could lead me where I needed to go and help me negotiate the sale.

When I arrived at the market in Wassu the main road was thick with people. Men were selling bicycle parts spread out on old rice bags that had been sewn into tarps. They had rows of old soda and beer bottles half filled with clear, golden glue. There were hammers and machetes. Shovels and palm frond hand brooms. The women sold little piles of peppers and pyramids of onions and sweet potatoes. There were buckets full of dried fish and mountains of handmade soap – white and round and stacked up like little cannonballs. Horse carts crawled by with boxes of green tea and cigarettes. It was loud and cramped and close to chaos.

I tripped out of the back of the old Mercedes bush-taxi van followed by twenty other passengers. We spilled out like clowns from a clown car and were absorbed into the crowd. Across the street, 15 yards away, I saw a line of water jugs. Not sure whether these were the ones I was looking for I went out in search of Omar.

Inside the market the stalls were shaded by thin tarps tied to crude bare branch posts. The tarps hung down to shoulder level and so I walked through half crouched with my head bent sideways to my left. Fabric merchants sold bolts of cloth hung from bare branch walls. Piles of cheap Chinese sandals stood in the pathways next to mounds of second-hand clothes from Europe and the United States. A table of radios blared static and overdubbed cassettes.

I pushed through a thin clogged passageway where women sold fake gold jewelry and bin-bins, strings of beads that women wear around their hips as a type of lingerie. I passed tailors and tables of cosmetics and mirrors with pictures of young Chinese women on the back. I squeezed past stalls selling t-shirts of Barack Obama and 50 Cent while merchants yelled at me “Toubab (white man) come look! Gambian price!”

The crowd thinned when I came to the butchers. Sweaty men with greasy hands hacked bits of meat and bone with machetes. A cow’s head sat sideways in the road. Sand covered an open eye and the tongue pushed out through the teeth. The smell of raw fat was thick in the dry heat. A small mud shack spewing black smoke out one window and up the wall was painted with pictures of goats, sheep, chickens and cows. Omar walked out of the door with an empty bread box.

“Momodou,” he said, calling me by my Gambian name.
“Omar, how are you?”

He picked up an armful of bread from under a tarp beside the hut.

“Momodou, give me one minute and I will come and help you.”

Omar was busy. The market was packed. And so I waited for him for about half an hour on the shady side of the hut.

We wore our way back through the mass of people to the main road. Back to the same line of water jugs where the taxi had dropped me.

“This is it? I was just here.”

Omar called the woman who owned the jugs over and he looked at me. I looked back at him. I had assumed Omar would help me negotiate in the sense that he knew something that I didn’t, or that he was friends with this woman. Neither was the case.

“How much is this one?” I asked in Pulaar.
“Three hundred,” she replied in English.

Her price was too high. I grimaced and made a noise as if this initial offer had physically assaulted me. I offered a price too low and she made the same contortion back at me. We settled at one hundred and twenty five.

“Jarama,” I said.
“Jarama.”

Omar stood next to me a moment looking at the londe and then at me.

“Ok Momodou, I’m going now.”
“Great.”

I left the jug where it was and went to look for a cardboard box to make my nest of towels and clothes. There were small shops along the road and so I stopped in each one. Nothing. Every box was accounted for – new and old. Even the battered and dirty ones were sewn back together with rice bag linings. I was out of luck.

The londe was big and an easy target. It might barely fit into a bass drum. I figured my lap might be the safest place. In the middle of the bush taxi van I sat crammed into the hard bench seat with my arms around my purchase. The van was nearly empty, and so I sat and waited another 45 minutes for it to fill up. The van was an oven and the windows were sealed shut.

Even worse, the clay londe had sat beside the black tarmac road all afternoon in full sun soaking up the 120 degree rays. Those rays were now soaking into me. My skin was red and dripping, my hair was matted to my forehead and my clothes were soaked. I looked at the woman sitting to my right. She smiled a painful smile and tapped the londe with her finger tips, her hand bent at the wrist.

“At least your water will be cold.”

Peace Corps and Glimpse.org Story Contest

2009-05-08T14:28:00.002Z

Last month my essay A Little Bit of Knowledge was chosen by Peace Corps and Glimpse.org as the winning submission to their joint contest on how volunteers are dealing with the worldwide Food Crisis.

After editing and re-writing, the essay became a story entitled It Takes a Thorn Tree To Raise a Child. On May 5th the story was published on the Glimpse.org website.

http://glimpse.org/stories/view/it-takes-a-thorn-tree-to-raise-a-child/

The original essay submission is published below this post under its original title.

Thanks to everyone who follows this blog. This is my first official publication.

Cheers,
-Brian

A Little Bit of Knowledge

2009-05-08T14:23:00.003Z

Inside Amadou’s grass-fenced compound I squat down on my heels in front of a communal food bowl and struggle to squeeze myself into the open space. There are ten of us sharing lunch together, and an entire village celebrating the birth of Amadou’s son: Abdoulie. We are wrapped around the giant stainless steel bowl and wrapped inside the billowing cloth of our kaftan robes. Elbows knock each other as we all reach for handfuls of scorching benachin (a mixture of oily rice, sweet potato, cassava and a trace of meat). Keeping my balance is as difficult as pulling my hand up to my mouth. Every movement next to me shifts my weight and threatens to knock me backwards. If I fall over I’ll probably take someone else along with me. We’re at the mercy of each other, a delicate balance. One ill-timed twitch, one spasm, and we might all end up on our backs.

The meal vanishes in minutes and people scatter to the shade of mud walls and mango trees. Respite from the relentless sun. They find comfort on the palm bough stools and in tired radios that strain to push music through thin static speakers. The celebration has ended with the last bits of the feast. Abdoulie’s few wispy curls of week-old hair have been shaved off and he has officially joined his community.

By the gate to the compound sit two hundred seedlings in black plastic-bag pots. Winter Thorn trees, Faidherbia albida, or what the Fula people of central Gambia call badansang. In the next few weeks Amadou and I will plant these trees throughout his millet and corn fields to improve the soil and strengthen his crops, a technique not practiced in this part of the country. With food prices steadily rising Amadou is open to suggestions, especially with another mouth to feed.

According to the World Food Program, production of cereals within The Gambia was down by 35% in 2005. The price of corn increased by about 21%, and rice by about 25%. Even millet, the staple of the Fula people, saw its production affected by the rising price of fertilizer. Most of this change can be attributed to the rising cost of oil. Global corn prices have been affected by the use of one quarter of the US harvest for ethanol production. Rice prices have increased because of the growing expense of exporting the crop from Asia. The story is the same across West Africa. And since the fertilizers used by subsistence farmers (the job title claimed by almost the entire population) are petroleum based, feeding the soil has become increasingly expensive, too.

After saying his goodbyes to Amadou and the rest of the family Yero Ketta, one of the village elders sees the trees and asks what they’re for. He does not like the answer, and he does not like the tree. The thorns fall off and are painful to step on. The branches give birds a place to perch as they endlessly raid the crops. These are bad things and he lets Amadou and I know as the bristled white hair on his chin seems to stand on end. After a brief pause Njie, the village tailor, leans over to me and says in perfect English to avoid being understood by the crowd, “A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

But a little bit of knowledge might also improve life dramatically. Knowing that current fertilizers are petroleum-based and that they are shipped to this tiny river-country on giant oil consuming freighters is important. Knowing that the poisonous run-off from these fertilizers could significantly impact fishing along the river and the fishing industry along the coast is something that every Gambian should know. Most importantly, however, is knowing that something as simple as a tree could relieve some of this pressure. A solution in a seed. The technology is free, and the cost of production is measured only in time.

From an agricultural point-of-view the Winter Thorn is something close to perfection. Its deep roots fix nitrogen into the soil and leave the top layers undisturbed where crops are planted. During the growing season the tree drops its leaves adding nutrients and biomass to the soil while at the same time relieving all competition for sunlight. Even the leaves, shoots and seedpods are considered one of the most important types of animal fodder in the Sahel. The fallen seed pods and hot season shade attract foraging animals that leave behind manure. A perfect cycle.

Planting trees to improve food production not only fights hunger and dependence, but it also fights a quickly encroaching desert. The Gambia has seen its population explode over the past fifty years from 300,000 to 1.4 million. The accompanied strain on resources has been evident. The total deforestation in the past forty years is a frightening 80%, and the degradation of land quality in the Sahel has been just as negative. If this trend continues The Gambia, as it exists today, could be in trouble.

The rainfall was good this year, and so were the harvests. The best rains in over ten years, the people of Koli Kunda village say. There will be food in the hungriest season – the months when the rains finally come and a new crop can be planted. This next year won’t be desperate, but while the weather might be nice, the climate is still changing. It was a good year to be a farmer and almost everyone is a farmer, but there is work to be done. A bad harvest would be a disaster. The sound of pounding mortars and pestles crushing grains into powders and stripping their shells might cease. This rhythmic heartbeat pulsing through every compound of every village might dwindle to a murmur; an uncomfortable silence in the dusty Harmatan winds that blow south from the Sahara.

Yero Ketta has put his tools away and left his fields in his old age, but in less than ten years Abdoulie Nyang will pick his up for the first time; working in fields planted with Winter Thorn. A change of perspective is what is most important: A little bit of knowledge, but the right knowledge. Amadou brought his trees and his son into the world at the same time. How these two will interact will be the test of a father’s ideas; the test of a changing relationship between farmer and field.

Some strides for food security start long before their results are felt. Bala Musa Kolley, a local forester, reminded me of a Jola proverb, “When a bush pig is thirsty it is forever doomed to dig in the soil where it stands.” Since the bush pig never plans ahead it can never shape its future. It is doomed to repeat its work and never build upon it. A little preparation might make all the difference in the next generation’s food bowl. With a little work there might be a little more room.

The Dueling Buses

2009-04-02T13:46:00.001Z

There is a uniformly defining characteristic to travel within The Gambia – misery. It isn’t necessarily that way, though. With money, misery could be upgraded to awfulness, but as a Peace Corps volunteer living on a paltry allowance the high rolling trappings of awfulness will have to wait. For now misery will remain. And as the old adage goes, there is nothing misery loves more than company.

For this reason it is always valuable to travel with a partner. Forget safety in numbers. The new rule is sanity in numbers. But then again don’t let the numbers grow too big or misery might get downgraded to hell – an easy move. It’s hot here.

In order to travel to the capital from my site I must spend about eight hours in transit. This begins with waking up early and taking advantage of the best transportation this country affords: the dueling buses. I have an advantage in this respect since I live 2 kilometers from where the capital-bound buses depart. They leave at almost the exact same times everyday, and because of these facts my hut has become a place of transit for many friends. This is extremely advantageous in recruiting miserable companions for my journeys, and for restoring my sanity and English language skills while spending long stretches upcountry.

The dueling buses include the government-owned Gambian Public Transport Company (GPTC) bus that we refer to as “the blue bus,” and the privately-owned Unique Transportation Services Company (UTSCO) bus that we refer to as both “the Africell bus” (because of it’s billboard size ads for the cell phone service provider) and “the magic bus.” The blue bus is a decommissioned Barcelona city bus complete with city map, warnings in both Catalan and Spanish that smoking is punishable by a 40 Euro fine, and all sorts of undecipherable graffiti. The contrast of riding in this bus past thatch-roofed mud villages and overloaded donkey carts is worth the journey alone – probably more so if you’re from Barcelona. The magic bus is one of a fleet of brand-new, offensively chartreuse, American-made Blue Bird school buses. Unlike the blue bus’s individual bucket seats, the magic bus has the cramped faux-leather benches that remind you of the horrors of middle school. There are pros and cons to both, and therefore they seem to be forever dueling. While blue leaves in the early morning and is more punctual, magic is faster and less prone to mechanical failures. While magic has cushioned bench seats, there is no sense of boundary and personal space within The Gambia and a passenger will, no doubt, become crushed between a ripe smelling old man and a fat woman whose baby will continuously kneed its dirty feet into your thigh like it was a lump of dough. While the bucket seats on blue won’t necessarily save you from aggressive baby feet or odor, they will grant you enough room to gain free function of your arms, and if you have a traveling partner you can claim a pair of seats and hold your breath as long as you can.

Lately, I’ve been a loyal customer of the blue bus, or “the man” as my host-father likes to refer to it – calling to mind images of beatniks and smoky bars. This is a problem. For the entirety of my adolescent and adult life I have functioned at the mercy of a metabolism in overdrive. However, at the same time, I do not always suffer from hunger pangs. The result: I get hungry and don’t always realize it. This results in a state called “hanger,” or alternately, I become “hangry.” I love this word and wish I had coined it myself. It is defined as a physical/emotional state of anger that occurs as the result of being hungry. I like to believe that it is among the earliest of human emotions. Our ancestors thought process might have gone something like this: “Hungry. Hungry make me angry. Angry make me kill deer.” Then one would eat the deer and all would be well with the world.

This state of hanger while combined with miserable travel is like vinegar on baking soda, one must bring snacks in order to prevent the two from mingling with each other. Another good measure is traveling with a woman. This too, I believe, has its roots in early human emotion. If I was hangry and miserable while traveling with a male, my chances of seeing him as a rival are greatly increased. This would almost inevitably result in a battle for alpha superiority. Two men and a beautiful woman might be an even bigger disaster.

Luckily, both buses stop around noon in the town of Farafenni where provisions can be acquired. The most alluring of provisions is the chicken sandwich. Not only are you given chicken and bread, but also potatoes, noodles, onions, spicy sauce and a topping the locals refer to as “mootard” that is identical to our familiar condiment: mustard. This all costs a dollar. However, the women selling the sandwiches are brutal and cutthroat and might find life more comfortable playing hockey toothless somewhere in Calgary. Their aggressive sales techniques only serve to aggravate the miserable and hangry traveler. In terms of video games like Mario Brothers, the Farafenni sandwich ladies are like the bosses at the end of the levels. Once they are defeated and a sandwich is secured you have won the level and may proceed to the next.

From this point forward your misery will hinge simply on every other possible disaster save acts of cannibalism. Again, this is where a traveling partner is of greatest value – especially a woman. If I become angry my traveling partner(s) might say, “Look, it’s the New York coming out in him.” This statement serves two purposes: 1) It undermines my anger as having no legitimacy by assigning it simply to my place of rearing. 2) It confuses me because it seems like a reference to a New York City stereotype, a place where I have never lived. If a male said this during a period of hanger it could be dangerously interpreted as a veiled threat that could result in horn locking.

Recently, my girlfriend took a decidedly unorthodox approach and had a travel juju made for me. A juju is a West African charm whose origins of use are ancient. In this case my travel juju consists of passages of prayers from the Koran written on a sheet of paper and bound inside a half-dollar sized leather pouch. I wear this on my upper left arm around my atrophied bicep, and still fail to look any more badass than I did before.

So far my travels have been exceptionally less miserable, but this could also be a result of the exceptionally better mood I have found myself in lately. Regardless, I’ll continue to wear the charm and convince myself of its mystic powers. If it keeps working, I might find myself in the market to add to my juju collection. Some of the more impressive options include protection from guns and knives, and invisibility. If there’s one that prevents hunger and anger from mingling, I might be all set.

One Size Fits All

2009-02-11T11:44:00.001Z

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.

Nine Lives

2008-12-27T12:28:00.004Z

Little Amadou is just shy of two-years-old. He is quiet and calm with a flared upper-lip and patient eyes that speak in his silences. Every morning and every evening his mother takes off his clothes and places his feet on the worn center of a square concrete tile. When the cool bath water hits his head he frowns and his arms slowly rise at this sides like the arms of a corkscrew, until finally, as if he has had trouble comprehending the audacity of this chilling injustice, he begins to cry. His voice is not loud and piercing. Rather, it slowly builds from a nearly silent but ominous hum to a sound that might precede a sneeze to a mid-range drone of disappointment punctuated by long breaths of air. The only time the drone changes is when his face is being washed. His monotone shifts to a rhythmic garbling as his mother’s hand scrubs across his lips and nose.

His performance ends with a towel and a ride in his mother’s arms back inside their hut and away from the sun. Clean clothes await his recovery like fresh canvases ready to be covered with sand. And without much wasted time little Amadou is back outside calmly preparing himself for his evening performance.

Meanwhile, his father, Samba, is sharpening his machete on the wet concrete tile. He will need to cut tree limbs for fence posts that will protect his peanut harvest. The blade is worn and thin having been sharpened so many times. The wooden handle has broken off and in its place are the smooth-with-use treads of cut car tires. But the machete is strong and the limbs will fall. The peanuts will be protected. And so Samba leaves the tile to dry in the morning heat as he walks out of the village and into the bush.

The tile is a simple concrete square. Its surface is smooth with age, but its sides are rough and jagged. Sometime, somewhere this tile sat with others just like it. Now it sits in the sand beside grass fences and rolls of bark rope somehow dissolving unobtrusively into the earth colored backgrounds. I don’t know where this tile came from and I haven’t asked. It might be that I don’t want to know, or that any answer I could expect would have somehow changed with translation to be a disappointment. All I know is that the tile is a secondary thing – second to the services it provides. But as an object the tile is a whole; no longer just another chunk of the floor.

The tile provides two services: it is a tool for sharpening the well-used blades of kitchen knives and machetes, and it is a clean platform for bathing children. The surface bulges like and overfilled drinking glass, the center worn down only slightly by scraping steel. The rest holds a patina that reveals its age in scores of decades, and a construction that lifetimes were not meant to break down. Nothing about the tile has broken down. Nothing except for the forgotten intentions of its creators.

There are no buildings within a hundred miles that would require or possess a floor of these tiles, but I doubt its purpose was ever served further away than that. Its most likely another scrap of colonialism; a piece of the forgotten island settlement, Georgetown whose relics lie only three kilometers away. Its time had run out with the Union Jack, and so it left like so many others, in search of a chance somewhere else.

Samba named his son after this older brother. And together the two brothers work their land. They plant rice, coos, corn, beans and most especially: peanuts. The land was their father’s before them, and his father’s before him. Fathers and sons who have worked land in this village for one hundred years. Before that their ancestors came from Senegal. No one knows for sure why they came, or why they left. Perhaps it was to chase the high prices paid for peanuts back then, prices that have since steadily dropped. Maybe it was the deep River Gambia filled with fresh water fish. Or it could have been something different altogether. Maybe they were just searching for a chance somewhere else. Regardless of the purpose one thing is certain: they have adapted. They have used the resources around them and made them their own.

This is common practice in The Gambia. You use what you have and you make what you need. The tile that was once flooring becomes born again – reincarnated into another life. Old vegetable oil jugs become water vessels, or with their tops cut off they become buckets. The weave of empty rice bags are taken apart and turned into rope, or they become the harnesses around the cattle that pull plows through fields. Oil barrels are cut open and become doors or the beds of donkey carts. Some are painted and put up as signs. Everything has a second life.

In America, this type of resourcefulness is not as common. The implements of everyday use are much more disposable. We are wealthy and we act that way. Sometimes for better, but more often for worse. But that does not mean we are not resourceful. Most often we just show it in different ways.

Walk into any college dorm room for inventive examples. A closet door laid across two chairs on their sides becomes a table. Milk crates become shelves. A window sill in winter keeps the beer cold. Two dressers can loft a bed. Many failed inventions and innovations have found an unintended life as toys. Silly putty was a failed replacement for rubber. The Slinky: a useless spring. Even the simple bouncy ball wanted to spend its life as an improved type of glue. Technology developed by NASA has found its way into cell phones and personal computers. It lives in satellite television and the cars we drive. Knowledge made physical; bent and twisted to fit all types and forms.

But the unquestioned king of American resourcefulness comes in a $5 roll, and can be found in any hardware store: duct tape. I can honestly say that I have used duct tape for its proper purpose: sealing air ducts. However, to stop there; to limit myself to the literal would not only be foolish, it would be borderline unpatriotic. Aside from fixing a myriad of problems (patching a tent, organizing guitar picks, securing a loose car bumper) duct tape is a raw material. It is turned into wallets and purses, tuxedos and wedding gowns. And with a full spectrum of colors to choose from, the flags of every nation could easily be had without ever picking up a needle and thread.

Regardless of who we are or where we come from, we all share the ability to adapt. When we saw snow we made the snowshoe. When we felt rain we built the umbrella. One stifling May morning as I sat sweating in big Amadou’s riverside orchard, he untied a gallon jug from the back of his patchwork bicycle. On the front, in bold but faded print were the words, “Diesel Oil.” Carefully, he wrapped the jug in the remains of a tattered white dress shirt and carried it down to the bank of the river. With an old tin can he poured water over the shirt until it was soaked. He set the jug down beside a tree and left it there. An hour later, soaked with sweat and tired from work, he returned to the tree. Before he had arrived in the orchard he had filled the jug with well water. After an hour wrapped in a wet cloth, the moisture slowly evaporating, the water was cold.

“It’s my fridge,” he said in English slang as a broad smile stretched across his face. “The African kind.”

This Ticket is Non-Refundable

2008-11-26T14:04:00.003Z

It made sense that the headlights didn’t work. We were beyond lost. A whole day’s travel in the wrong direction had brought me and my five companions to the wrong side of Guinea; to a half empty town on a blank rolling landscape. There were no mountains or water carved gorges. And no beams, high or low, were going to light the way to the village of Douki before we figured out where we went wrong.

The problem was miscommunication. The trip had started out right, but as we went further Douki started to sound like Tougae. The drivers were confused. By the time the moon lit the muddy craters in the road we had reached the wrong destination.

Our trip had started in the dusty trading town of Basse in the east of The Gambia. The ragged Peugeot station wagon we had hired rattled down the defeated roads through Senegal and finally in to Guinea. We had slept sitting up the first night, crammed into the backseats at the bank of a bridgeless river. The ferry was closed and so we waited as one often does in West Africa. The next day we continued to Labe, and from there we lost our way. Even or Guinean drivers didn’t know this part of their country.

We were following the path of least resistance. Tumbling like water on a rocky river bed. None of us sure how we were going to make this trip go well. It was like the first time I hurled myself into Africa. There was a hard edge – a feeling of submersion. The sensation of moving feet dragging a reluctant mind.

* * *

It was early February 2006 when I booked my flight to Cape Town. I would leave Boston in late March and return in early April. The ticket was a graduation present from my father, and a chance to visit my girlfriend who was attending college there. The winter felt defeating. I had been out of school for almost a year and not sure what I wanted to do next. This was the time to travel. A perfect escape. The northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere. Winter to summer. A complete reversal.

When I sent an excited email to South Africa I received no reply. No phone call. The weeks of persuasive communication telling me to come visit had stopped. In their place was silence. A couple weeks later in mid-February, the phone rang. When I set it back down I was in reverse. I had been dumped and my ticket was non-refundable.

* * *

Bullshit. We had told this guy which direction to go. We wouldn’t be lost if he listened to us. We would be there by now. Unpacked and relaxed. Getting ready for the hike the next morning. We said go towards Pita. He said he knew a quicker route. We could have taken the safe way and burned a little more gas, but instead we were dragged into the gamble. What did we know anyway? Go ahead and take the shortcut. This isn’t our country. We don’t know where we are.

* * *

I sat down at the bar in Brown’s Brewery in Troy, New York. The building is an old warehouse from the mid-19th century. There had been a fire here at some point. Before it was a bar and after it was a warehouse. A fire in an empty building consuming forgotten things beside the hidden currents of the Hudson River. Some of the interior had been salvaged, and I ran my hand across the old support beams that were now the top of the bar; across a blackened section of wood.

“You know what you want?” my father asked me.

I ordered a stout and we sat quietly for a moment.

“So I’ve got to tell you…” I started. “We aren’t together anymore. So that might make the trip a little awkward.”
“Don’t go,” he said without hesitation, and I laughed a little with surprise.
“I can’t just not go.”
“Sure you can.”
“It’s my graduation present…”
“That doesn’t matter.”

I took another sip and put the glass back down directly in the center of the coaster.

“Well I want to go. And I don’t have to see her if I don’t want to.”

* * *

One hundred feet from the empty center of Tougae was a building freshly painted white. Next to the entrance was a giant sign, fifteen feet high and five feet wide, that was completely illuminated. It’s light flowing down the street past the dirty gray buildings that stood in their own darkness and over the garbage choked concrete gutters. Next to the sign was another sign. Another giant sign. Text scrolled across the red LEDs completely out of context and completely out of place. The building was a telecommunications center with internet access. An improbability, like the top of a tree reaching out from just beyond the ocean’s breakers. But at midnight there was no one to be found.

It didn’t take long before Robert appeared, though. And he did just that. He appeared. He didn’t seem to come from anywhere besides the very spot he was standing. One moment we were alone and the next moment there was Robert. He was the director of transportation in the town, the head of the car park. He spoke fluent English in a French speaking country and he drove and old white US Postal Service jeep.

Soon we came to a settlement. The drivers would take us to Douki the next day and we would split the cost of the extra gas. But before we could sleep for the night we needed to put everything in writing. Words were not enough when spoken so we needed to turn them into currency.

Inside a dark room with stained walls Robert took out two sheets of paper. The room looked like some secret POW prison cell or some third world interrogation room where your dirty clothes stuck to your sweaty body and the smoke from the guard’s cigarette hung motionless in the air. But there was no trouble here, just the business of writing a contract.

Everything was very precise. The man next to Robert lit a candle and dribbled some wax onto the table. He stuck the bottom of the candle into it, but it wouldn’t stay. He resigned to just hold it. With his free hand he neatly arranged a stamp and ink pad for authorizing the document. Robert filled the pages with French and sealed them with the stamp.

For now we would sleep.

* * *

Traveling was simple. All I had was a backpack. After breakfast I walked downstairs and locked the door to my apartment. From there I walked to the bus station a quarter of a mile away in the center of Dover, NH. I bought a ticket to Logan airport, found a seat and watched as the bare New England trees passed by my window. The flight to Frankfurt took off on time as did the connection to Cape Town. As I watched the runway get closer the landscape looked like what I would imagine California looks like. Mountains by the sea. Sailboats. Marinas. Suburbs.

I grabbed my backpack, strolled through customs and arrived. A little jet lagged. A little warmer. And with no idea about what to expect.

* * *

We were back in the car, back on the road and back in our same dirty clothes. By noon it was apparent that our drivers still had no idea where Douki was. They knew the general direction, but that didn’t quell any rattled nerves. Maybe it was “Dounki” they kept thinking out loud. And every time they thought it, and every time we heard it, the frustration grew.

On the side of the road, while the drivers asked for direction, I started yelling. In Pulaar. I surprised myself. Apparently more of the language had seeped in that I had thought.

The day before, Ryan had suggested we go to Pita. The people in Pita knew Douki. We knew they knew. Our friends had been there before us. The drivers had gone for a shortcut that had been all wrong. Ryan had told them to go to Pita. This is what I was yelling about.

Mark motioned for me to stop and to come sit down next to him. I did. It was time that was so frustrating. We only had seven days and it was already day three. West Africans act with the philosophy that there is always more time. Americans don’t.

We got back in the car and went to Pita.

* * *

She met me at the airport. I figured it was the least she could do. We drove through the early morning light into the city and got out at the hostel she was staying at. I sat down on the wide second floor British colonial balcony and changed my shirt. There was no way I was going to sleep at this point. I didn’t want to sleep anyway. I hadn’t come halfway around the world to spend my time with my eyes closed.

In Pita they knew Douki. Now we just needed the final directions. I wanted no part of it. So I sat outside an auto parts dealer, my beard stiff with dirt, and ate a loaf of French bread. The sun set behind the low buildings. Donkey carts stacked with anything crawled across the streets and the faint sound of the call to prayer echoed in the distance. The man in the shop beside me put his head on his desk. Slowly his eyelids fell, pulling him back inside and away from the afternoon.

* * *

I went with her back to her campus. I realized I had to talk about this before moving on. We talked. I talked. She talked. And then I decided it was worth it. Worth it to travel up the east coast with her and a few of her friends. Maybe it was the path of least resistance. Maybe it was the fact she had been my best friend only a month before. But it was probably the wine, the clear skies, the bare feet, the street cafes.

I went to her Afrikaans class feeling a little weathered. The campus was gorgeous. Dutch. Spread out between green lawns and spotless walkways.

“Is this your boyfriend?” the teacher asked.
“Yes.”

Well, I was a boy. I’m sure of that. And it did seem like we were friends again, however temporary and however shaky. It wasn’t a complete lie. Girls have girlfriends but aren’t lesbians, right? We both let it slide.

After a week, though, it seemed like we were back together. And when the trip was over, as I stood ready to step back through airport security, she cried. I fell right into it. And when she broke it off again five months later I fell out twice as hard. She was crying because I was leaving, yes. But really she was crying because what I was at that exact moment in that exact space and what she was in that exact moment and exact space was ending. It was finite. We defined us differently. And so we passed on.

Africa had left a different mark, though. And looking out on the coastline in the late afternoon light from high over False Bay I promised myself to come back. Maybe here. Maybe somewhere else. A year and a half later I was in The Gambia looking out over a completely different Africa. A year after that I was on the road to Douki, the past close behind.

* * *

The road to Douki was, of course, bad. But a couple hours later we were there. In the dark, and a day late. The guest huts in Hassan Bah’s compound were full. If we had just come one day earlier, he told us, we would have gotten to them first. A final little slap in the face. So the six of us slept on the floor of a spare room, happy to finally be there.

Most of the time West Africa doesn’t treat you nice. And when I leave in a year I probably won’t be back for a long time, if I ever come back at all. I’ll probably break up with West Africa for good. But in this exact moment and this exact space I’m going to try to make it work. I’ll just need a bright set of headlights to help me along the way.

Hearing Aid

2008-10-14T12:56:00.000Z

When I was five-years-old and out in the front yard of the house where I grew up, I used to scream. My sister used to scream, too. We were playing. More like fighting that resembled playing, but at the root of the whole experience we were having fun. Running around barefoot and happy. A big yard, a warm summer breeze, and absolutely no obligations in any form whatsoever.

We were doing nothing wrong. We were even spending time with each other in a way that didn’t result in bodily harm or the need for parental intervention. Things couldn’t have been any better. So, why would our parents appear at the door and demand that we stop? What kind of gross injustice was this illogical ruling? And after all, didn’t such a demand completely ignore the founding principles of the American Revolution? As a screaming five-year-old I was confused and shocked.

“Hey guys, stop screaming,” my mother and father half pleaded half demanded from the front door. “It sounds like you’re getting your heads chopped off!”

They were worried that people in the neighborhood might hear us, fear for our budding little lives, and call the cops, they explained. Looking back now, this probably wouldn’t have happened. The yard was big, surrounded by trees, and the neighbors’ houses were pretty far away. How could their logic be so off?

At the time I was fresh out of Kindergarten where I spent every recess playing the game climb-to-the-top-of-the-slide-and-hurl-everyone-else-off-of-it. I didn’t always win this game so I collected an array of multi-colored badges that I later learned were called ‘bruises.’ I wore them proudly, and when I wore them to the doctor’s office for my annual check-up the pediatrician took my father aside and confronted him. There were no beatings the doctor was assured. I was simply having a great time playing CTTTOTSAHEEOOI.

This kind of confrontation, I’m sure, can easily lead a parent towards temperance. And so I’m sure my screaming in the front yard only seemed amplified by the circumstances. This is where the logic might have faltered. The police might have never been called, but after the doctor’s office incident it might have seemed that they definitely would have been called. Or maybe it didn’t have anything to do with logical thinking at all.

Today, as a 25-year-old who has spent the past year in a traditional Fula village in the backwaters of West Africa while surrounded by hordes of thunderously loud children, I have finally come to realize what my parents realized twenty years ago: Screaming children are really fucking annoying.

As the youngest person in my immediate and extended family I am not used to being around little kids. In fact, the only time that I’ve actually been around little kids is when I, myself, was a little kid. And that’s no way to be objective on a subject. So I really had no idea what was going on when I moved into a family compound that consisted of eight adults and 14 children under the age of 12.

Add to the numbers an ample amount of free time thanks to an underdeveloped school system, and you have boundless undirected energy. Energy that almost always gets diverted, in part, to screaming like one’s legs are being pulled off.

For the first few months it irritated me. It was loud, nonstop, and completely unnecessary. The perfect reasons, I later remembered, for a kid to scream. I hadn’t joined the Peace Corps to spend my life listening to these un-waning howls, though. It was unbearable, unfair and unceasing.

I got used to it. It blended into the background of sheep and goats; chickens and cows. White noise that my brain managed to disconnect from. As a pretty much constant guarantee, it no longer lured me to the edge of insanity.

I struggled for a while with the fake crying, though. The attempts at drawing as much attention as possible despite the obvious lack of tears. But in a culture that shows no physical affection between parents and children I softened up and decided to let it slide. These kids are going to seek attention the only way they can, even if it’s negative attention. If that’s by screaming, then they’re going to have to scream. American culture and Gambian culture are different, I’ve reminded myself over and over again. I have to be sensitive and give allowances to the things I’m not used to; to the things I don’t understand… But on a closer observation I realized nothing was different on a fundamental level. Gambian adults hate screaming children, too. Maybe even more than Americans. So then forget sensitivity to culture, what’s the deal? Why do they let it slide?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s the fact that parents and children are around each other constantly. The screams become white noise to the parents the same way they became white noise to me. Maybe it’s the fact that beatings are encouraged and no pediatrician is going to call the cops (especially when there aren’t many of either). Maybe it’s a domino-effect: when one kid screams to be noticed, the next kid will have to scream louder. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s so hot no one has the energy to care much about a bunch of loud kids. Maybe. It’s probably a little of everything, anyway.

It’s not good to think about it too much. There is no answer. A lot of things are like that in The Gambia, and from what I’ve heard, in Africa in general. Open questions and confusion. Things that just don’t make sense. If you spend too much time thinking it over you’ll wind up further behind than when you started. Maybe you have to scream because it’s all you’ve got. Every little bit helps when you’re clawing to the top of the slide.

Ants Marching

2008-10-14T12:52:00.006Z

As the titans on Wall Street are collapsing into their own empty vaults and the rest of the developed world scrambles for life boats, The Gambia continues to hum its same distinctive pitch. The crops are coming in. The rains have almost stopped. And the moon completed another cycle about a week ago. It’s been a good year for the farmers, and everyone is a farmer.

Of course, The Gambia wouldn’t be The Gambia if everyone wasn’t complaining. Rice prices have more than doubled in the past year and that has made life difficult. The large irrigated rice fields that supported the country 30 years ago (before the ‘green revolution’ in Asia flooded the market with cheap rice) have been left to rot. But no one really mentions that. It’s the price that is seen as the problem.

People thought the flow of cheap rice would never end. It lasted three decades. But it was supported by the finite, most especially the finite supply of cheap oil that carried it across the Indian Ocean. Now the tanks are running on empty just in time for people to recognize they will have to fill them back up. No one really thought that far ahead. It seemed like the bubble would never burst. But the rains have come and the crops stand tall. It’s been a good year for the farmers, and everyone is a farmer.

Back in New York I’ve heard that everything tastes sour. This collapse didn’t bury the streets in rubble and fill the sky with smoke this time, but it will take just as long to clean up. People thought the flow of cheap credit would never end. Now it has, and the vaults are empty. But the taxpayers will have to fill them back up the Congress says. It’s been a bad year for taxpayers, and everyone is a taxpayer.

It seems simple from a detached perspective. If you can’t grow it, then don’t eat it. If you can’t afford it, then don’t buy it. It’s not that simple, of course, but it doesn’t need to be as complicated as it is. To tread worn territory: things are not what they seem.

Parallel to the River Gambia is a narrow dirt path that winds its way through the thick humid bush. Leaves and branches reach out like hands and arms looking to embrace; looking to reclaim this open gash with a simple sign of deterrence. The mud and water along the way make shoes impossible. This is not a place of formalities or predictable routine. It is a difficult place to enter and move through. Like the ocean waves, it acknowledges your presence uneasily and constantly hints that it wants you to leave.

There are no elected officials in the bush. No senate. No parliament. No ruling council. There is just the path of least resistance. Water flows to the river and trees climb to the sky. There are no lawyers or judges or courts. There are no bankers because there is no currency. There are no farmers because there is no need. Here food grows on its own or doesn’t grow at all. Everything has its place and the whole has a pulse.

I was walking down this path one afternoon, my pants soaked to the knees and my sandaled feet covered in mud and grass, when Amadou pointed to the path thirty feet in front of us.

“This is very dangerous,” he said in an un-startled tone. “This is the king of the bush.”

I looked ahead but saw nothing. No looming mass blocking the road. No set of angry eyes or ivory teeth. The path was empty except for the quick interruptions of the occasional flitting bird.

When we approached the dry patch of ground that Amadou had pointed at I looked down and saw what he was talking about. Ants. A bustling highway of ants that had carved a trench across the path. They were both impressive and unexceptional. My gaze could have easily missed them altogether. But here, at my feet, was the collective king of the bush.

“Nothing can kill this,” said Amadou. “Only the sun. Not the bush pig, not the snake, not the hyena. But this can kill anything.” Together they are the king. It made sense. More sense than the romantic image of the lion and the elephant. West Africa is not romanticized Africa. It is not Hemingway’s Africa. It is not the place Teddy Roosevelt came to 100 years ago. There are a lot of things that West Africa is not, and a lot of unexpected things that West Africa is.

We stepped over the ants and walked to the river where the bush ends and the orchards begin. Planned plots of land where a different kind of order exists – where the trees have been planted and man is the king.

The bush won’t let you stay long. It throws you back out into the mess you’ve created. And from there it’s up to you to take responsibility for what is yours. But the river offers a gesture; a kind favor to those who know how to respect it. The fish are plentiful this time of year and Amadou’s traps are full. He has no massive nets, only enough space to provide a little for his family. The fields he plants provide the rest. It’s been a good year for the farmers, and everyone is a farmer.

The Baboon

2008-08-08T10:25:00.002Z

Every now and then I need a reminder that I’m in Africa. I don’t know that I need a reminder. That would be too simple. If I knew I needed one then I probably wouldn’t really need one, and the situation would just be confusing. So Africa does the job for me. It probably doesn’t realize it’s time to give me a reminder (Africa is not punctual) so it just kind of throws reminders out every now and then. A random distribution.

For example, the bush road out to Amadou’s garden has become familiar. I’ve been riding it for eight months now. I used to notice the color and texture of the soil, the foreign trees, the flocks of strange birds making strange sounds. The small paths that would wind off the road would confuse me until I realized they were cow paths. Swerving to avoid a donkey cart laden with freshly cut fence posts and newly peeled bark rope was a new experience that made the day exotic and exciting. Now donkey carts are like old Fords: fat and slow and I always want to get around them. They are not reminders of my transplanted status. The bush road has just become an ordinary road. As exciting as the one you drive to work everyday.

I found myself pedaling in a mid-afternoon haze. The semi-conscious automated kind of traveling you do over familiar terrain when you are alone. I was deep into it on the way to the garden. Three kilometers behind me. Then I came to the border of Usuman Dem’s garden. I rode along the fence staring at the dried ruts made in the dirt path from the last heavy rain. Like staring at the bed of a dried up desert river from a few thousand feet overhead. Something smelled funny. And when I picked my head up I was face to face with the severed, bloody head of a baboon. It was stuck on a fence post. Covered with flies. A scarecrow of sorts. The message was simple: If you’re a monkey, stay out of the garden.

I was instantly very much aware of my location. The palm trees and massive mahogany trees were vivid and humbling. A giant monitor lizard exploded out of the underbrush in front of me and, legs flailing, hurled itself into the river. There were gnarled vines and termite mounds. Hippo footprints in the soft mud beside me. Africa was saying hello.

I had gone to Amadou’s garden to plant some trees that will hopefully grow into a live fence. I had 250 to plant and no help that day. It was quiet, so I began thinking. Specifically about the subject of severed heads.

My first thought was about the weight of a severed head. It must weigh a lot. There’s a lot going on with a head. In the movies when you see someone with a severed head dangling from their outstretched hand it just seems to swing weird. I’ve never actually seen a real severed head before, so I can’t really be sure. It’s just a feeling I guess.

My second thought was about a friend who recently tried to butcher a chicken. He said that when he delivered the business end of his machete to the chopping block the blade bounced off the chicken’s neck. I’ve never killed a chicken before, or ever had in-depth discussions on the topic of avian head removal, but I guess I assumed a chicken head would pop right off. Not like a cork out of a bottle or anything, but certainly not something that requires multiple attempts.

Finally my mind wandered back to the baboon and his distinct lack of a body. In America you don’t really see severed heads on stakes that often, and not just because our baboon population is somewhat lacking. It’s an art that we have lost as a culture. I say ‘lost’ because we definitely used to employ it. It was only a few hundred years back that the heads of traitors were hung on London Bridge. The message was simple: If you challenge the king, then he will chop your head off.

There was a reason for employing the severed head method of communication. It’s simple and easy. It doesn’t take a lot of time. And it says a lot without ever having to say a word.
Today, if a neighbor’s dog was wreaking destruction through your own garden then you could just chop it’s head off and stick it on a post. Problem solved. And a good chance future problems will be avoided. It would most likely be a sign your neighbors would pick up on. The applications are endless. Squirrels at the bird feeder, raccoons in the garbage can, rabbits in the lettuce patch. Celebrities could even take the idea mobile and use it as defense against paparazzi.

Then I heard the children. I looked up from planting and saw them coming toward me. Ten of them. Wielding machetes. Ten months ago a sight like that would necessitate a change of pants, but now I’m unfazed. If Africa was trying to sneak in another reminder it didn’t work.

Instead of attacking me with steel, they attacked me with questions.

“Momodou…”
“Yes?”
“How do you say ‘cat’ in English?”
“Cat.”
“Momodou…”
“Yes?”
“How do you say ‘horse’ in English?”
“Horse.”

Of course everything but the answers were spoken in Pulaar. And every question was prefaced with stating my name to attract my attention. My attention wasn’t straying anywhere, but if I didn’t respond with a signal that I was listening then the kids would repeat my name endlessly until I did respond. This continued for about 20 or 25 questions at which point I wanted to chop their heads off.

Instead, I redirected their energy into tree planting, and by the time the sun got low we had a pile of pulled weeds and about 75 trees in the ground. Not a bad afternoon. Then I realized that something was strange. A group of ten boys between the ages of eight and twelve had willingly and eagerly just helped me do manual labor for an hour with no expectation of compensation. A few of the boys live in my compound with me, and they’re all from my village, but it was still unexpected.

You would have to search a long time in America to find ten eight to twelve-year-olds who were willing to do free work for you. Then you would have to search a lot longer to find ones that were actually happy to help, let alone ones who show up without your asking. Maybe they were used to the severed head approach to life. They had all asked me if I had seen the baboon. Then again, maybe it was just Africa saying hello again.

Northwest Passage

2008-08-08T10:18:00.005Z

There is a tree about 30 feet behind my hut that my host-grandmother tells me is older than her. It used to bear fruit. Loads of fruit. But now it is tired and old and quiet in its many days. It doesn’t need to drop fruit anymore to be noticed. The base of it’s trunk flares out like the buttresses of a gothic church. It’s bark grey and textured. Massive dead branches the size of trees themselves hang naked and frayed.

A tree this old inside the village is something special because it is something rare. There aren’t many trees in the villages. And a tree in a village whose elders can’t remember it’s beginning is almost an impossibility. Of course there are old trees in The Gambia. Trees that are older than people, but not many. A tripling of population in 20 years has helped speed along a deforestation of 80% of the country’s forests in the past 40 years. This country used to be all canopy forest. But now, just like the elephants, you won’t find a trace anywhere.

I told my grandmother that in my ‘village’ back in America we had trees that were 300 and 400 years old. I didn’t have any particular trees in mind, but I knew such an age wasn’t totally unthinkable. Not where I come from. She gasped in amazement. I thought the reaction was strange since the Gambian countryside is speckled with Baobob trees that scientists believe can be as old as 6,000 years. But I realized they are a separate category. Less like trees and more like living monuments. Most of them were planted long ago like head stones on the graves of the most revered.

To me the idea of a 400-year-old tree is easy, but that’s because I have science on my side. I’ve seen foresters collect tree ring samples. I’ve seen the samples. I’ve counted the rings and seen the number. All neat and easy. Basic concepts I regard as so common are often not understood.

Sitting outside one night staring at the stars I translated the name ‘Milky Way’ into Pulaar. I called it the ‘Milk Road,’ and then realized I had absolutely no way of explaining to my host family that the Milky Way is a galaxy and what, exactly, a galaxy is. Pulaar has no word for galaxy. It is an ancient unchanged language. A language used by a people who were once nomadic herdsmen hundreds of years ago. Still today they have no word for ‘garden.’ Why would nomads need a garden? Now, in their sedentary lives, they borrow from other languages. I had been using the Mandinka word for garden (naako) when my host father looked at me with an expression of forced patience and said with a short laugh,

“Naako is Mandinka. That is not our language. We say ‘gaaden.’”

The only difference was a dropped ‘r.’ Instead of borrowing from Mandinka, Pulaar borrows from English and French. A battery is a ‘battery,’ and a small shop is a ‘boutique.’ So I guess a galaxy is a ‘galaxy.’

Here a tree has no age except the years observed. And if the years observed stretch from the memories of the living to the memories of the dead then they are lost and there is no age. The stories of an oral tradition can only stretch back so far as history. After too much time they become myth and legend. The Baobobs are like this and so no one touches them. They have more existence than a person, and this is understood.

For a mortal tree to achieve this agelessness under everyone’s noses is a giant feat. The impossible of probability. This has not always been the case though. Ageless trees were commonplace but people so easily forget the most recent of their pasts.

In the space between two neighboring villages, not far from where I live, is a footpath connecting them. Trees thin as poles are scattered through the grass and bushes that line the sides. The sun shines brightly, and if it wasn’t for a small birm one village could be seen from the other. This is a strange picture when a man in his mid-30s tells stories from his childhood, painting that path dark as night. He and his friends were scared to venture between the two villages where the canopy blocked the noon sun. Scared of the hyenas that I have never seen throughout the course of an entire year. I’m sure a century ago people were scared of the elephants.

The river was once the fastest way to travel through the thick jungle. The only place with a view. Now when I need to travel west to the capitol I can move along with speed on the north highway. Through the farm fields and scrub brush. Past the naked Baobobs and to the coast.

Five hundred years ago European ships poked the coast of North America looking for the Northwest Passage to India. It didn’t exist. It couldn’t be found. But now as the ice melts back, the ships can sail through the Arctic islands of Canada. It’s a different world and changing fast. So fast we might be strangers when we leave.

12 July 2008: A Journal Entry

2008-08-08T10:15:00.000Z

Today was seemingly ordinary and uneventful except for odd details that didn’t register as strange until much later. This delay in recognition is, I think, evidence that West African bush life is becoming very ordinary to me.

This morning I was in Jamali Musa at my counterpart Pah’s compound. He was out back taking a bath and I was sitting under a neem tree reading John Steinbeck on the old back seat of a van when a small kid came running into the compound crying. Pah’s sister told me he was scared of a man that was coming. The man wasn’t from Jamali Musa, but he walked around asking for charity.

I had no money at all. I don’t give out charity to roving beggars, but the terrified reaction of the little kid made me think handing out a couple Dalasis might be less stressful than dealing with the ever ensuing argument that I am a white man and, therefore, must be nearly immobilized by the sheer weight of my accumulated wealth. The ‘I have no money’ option was my only option, however painful it might be.

Children were pouring into the compound in droves. It looked like Godzilla was coming. “He’s a very ugly man,” said Pah’s sister. Apparently.

And he was ugly. Tall and lanky. A little hunched. Missing most of his teeth, but the four on the top middle stuck out with strength and tartar. He had a cataract over his right eye, and both eyes bulged giving them a perfectly round shape. He came up to me stumbling a little and reached out a crooked hand for me to shake. I took it and greeted him like I would greet anyone else, introducing myself and asking his name. He was pleasant and friendly. After we had finished exchanging greetings he put his mortar, a thick mahogany club, back into his right hand and turned toward the children. With a jerking movement he pounded himself on the back while letting out a half pleased sounding groan. The children once again screamed after letting their guard slip slightly having witnessed my successful and civil greeting.

The man, Abdoulie, continued towards them and then sat down behind me and about 30 yards away. I went back to reading hearing screams of fear and excitement as they taunted Abdoulie and Abdoulie taunted back. When I left an hour or so later he was gone. I didn’t remember to look to see if he had left. I just remember that the compound was quiet and that he must not have been there in that placid a setting.

He never asked me for money and was more cordial than the average Gambian. That itself was strange. Yet somehow, at the time, none of this registered as remotely unusual.

Later, when I returned back to my village I was Bulo, my two-year-old host brother, just outside the compound lying still in the road. There was a time not so long ago that a scene like this would have caused a surge of terror; pangs of panic. I would have dropped my bike and rushed over to him. Here was a child lying in the middle of the road. Still and unmoving. A greater cause for panic is beyond my comprehension. But I had no such reaction. Rather I calmly walked my bicycle to my hut and in passing asked my host sister, “Is Bulo sleeping in the road?”

“Yes.”

Five minutes later he walked by my door being led by the hand. My sister must have thought that despite the permanently slow traffic conditions, the road wasn’t an ideal place for a toddler to sleep. Lesson learned. I’ll never let any of my kids take naps in the outbound lane.

Bug Baby

2008-06-18T10:17:00.002Z

Spend enough time living differently and you’ll start thinking differently. Seems reasonable enough. If you packed up and suddenly moved from rural New Hampshire to the high rises in Manhattan your daily routine might change a little. Parking a car might become impossible. The concept of time and distance would be wholly redefined. Different prices. Different sounds. Different rules of engagement. You might begin to walk faster, talk louder, become more impatient with the things that never bothered you before. But it wouldn’t take long before the new routine became, well, routine. That guy pissing on the subway bench – not surprising you. A heated argument outside your window in what sounds like Russian – you barely noticed. Never being able to see the stars – you’ll survive. We’re human. We adapt. That’s what we do. So when the American Embassy doctor drained mango worm larvae out of a boil on my stomach I wasn’t too alarmed. The circumstances fit the environment, and the environment didn’t seem strange and new after almost 1 year. My only apprehension was the needle, and that’s the same no matter where I am.

Mango worms are not actually worms. They’re larvae. Tumble fly larvae. Better known to the world as maggots. The fly lays it’s eggs in damp, drying laundry (in this case my black t-shirt) and when this laundry is then worn the heat of your body incubates and causes the eggs to hatch. The hungry little miracles of life then burrow into your skin and suck your blood. The entrance is simple and easy, but the exit is like driving north in the southbound lane. Somebody is going to get hurt.

When the mango worm starts to mature Vaseline can be your best friend. By smearing the jelly over the boil you cut off the maggot’s respiration. When it comes to the surface for air you pop it out. But since I wasn’t at my post upcountry, I had access to the Peace Corps medical facilities. I left my maggots in the hands of the professionals – hands with scalpels in them.

It was nice to be away from my post. Specifically, it was nice to be away from the heat. My back, shoulders, neck and hairline were all recovering from a heat rash that made my skin feel like it was being beaten with a cactus. I couldn’t object to a little bit of air conditioning. My body thanked me despite its current battle. It wanted to remind me that contrary to medieval reasoning, maggots were not dead, rotted meat in a transformed physical state. Things weren’t that dramatic. I was still very much alive.

When you’re lucky enough to get away with only one boil things are pretty well guaranteed not to get miserable. Paul Theroux wrote about this same affliction when he experienced a similar shirt laundering mishap. His experience was a little worse, “At first I had no idea what this hideous outbreak was, and then I popped one of the boils and a maggot wiggled out. My body ached with forty-odd more, nearly all of them out of my reach.”

My maggot was very reachable. It was right below my belly button. And so, because of its location, I named it my ‘bug baby.’ But somehow I wasn’t at all emotional when I arrived at the medical office to part ways with the little critter. I had been going to the office for a few days to put heat on the boil. Heat increases blood flow, and increased blood flow hastens the healing process. But really it was never going to heal while it was inhabited. So I was sitting in the patient’s room with my stomach wrapped in Epsom salty heat, and reading a 1992 traveler’s guide to Africa, when the doctor walked in. I made a mental note of all the fantastic places to visit in Mogadishu and followed her down the hall to the examination room.

The procedure required local anesthetic. A syringe was filled. A needle inserted. And an appropriate length of time waited before the business began.

“Can you feel anything?” the doctor asked in her thick Eastern European accent. She was testing the area with what felt like a needle. I didn’t really want to look.
“Yes.”
“What do you feel?”
“A needle.”
“What do you feel?”
I paused. “Pain from a needle.”

Now I was sweating. Profusely. Soaking the disposable roll of paper covering the examination bed. A moment later she began again.

“Can you feel anything?”
“Yes, pain.”
“What do you feel?”
“A needle. Pain from a needle.”
“What does it feel like?”
“Like a painful needle in my stomach!”

I had no idea what the hell she was doing. It was like she didn’t believe me. Like I was just messing with her. This had happened to me before. I had a tooth drilled once with full nerve sensation. After three shots of Novocain had managed to numb every other part of my face but the afflicted area, I just said screw it. Lying on the sweaty examination bed it felt like the same thing. It’s not like I wasn’t reacting to the anesthetic on purpose. But the doctor was looking at me like I was about to say, “just kidding.”

She tried again. This time putting a little more muscle into it.

“Can you feel anything?”
“Needle pain! Needly pain!”

She gave me another shot and this time it worked. When it was all done I was given a can of Gatorade powder for the sweatiness, and five prescription strength ibuprofen. I didn’t need the ibuprofen that evening. The pain never came back. But about a month later when a bunch of fire ants crawled up my pants and bit my scrotum I was glad to have them.

All was well for a while. No problems. No discomforts. Then I woke up one morning with an orb-ish outcropping on my elbow. Another boil. I don’t wear long sleeve shirts. The temperature is too hot. So I figured this new addition to my physique was not fly related. No resident maggots this time. I started taking antibiotics and figured it would be gone in a week. It didn’t go away. When I popped a maggot out I shouldn’t have been surprised. The circumstances fit the environment. I should have been thinking differently, but somehow I wasn’t. After all, this isn’t New Hampshire.

Verbal Thermometer

2008-06-18T10:14:00.000Z

I was eating peanuts out of an old car battery casing as Pah sat beside me brewing attaya. The grass-stuffed rice bag mattress was a little lumpy, but the thatch roof over my head was keeping the square mud hut cool. It was a relative cool compared to the shade-less exterior. Any relief was welcomed. When Pah handed me a small glass of the African green tea I offered it first to Dowda whose compound we were sitting in. The motivation was cultural. I wanted to show my respect to my host. Dowda appropriately refused the tea and told me to drink first saying, “You are my stranger today. I could kill a cow.”

I figured killing the cow was a sign of respect. To Fulas cattle are a savings account. The more you have, the wealthier you are. But I didn’t want to see yet another animal die in The Gambia that week. While the extreme heat of early May hadn’t killed much livestock, it did have quite a toll on a few other creatures. It was so hot, you see, that things were falling dead out of the trees.

Measuring temperatures in words makes more sense than measuring in numbers. You can throw digits around, but they never feel personal. Descriptions like, ‘It’s just reached the point where I sweat without moving,’ or ‘It’s so hot that I have blisters on my ass just from sitting,’ do a better job of getting the message across than anything ending with “Fahrenheit” or “Celsius.” So it was with awe that I experienced an unknown extreme on the verbal heat measurement scale: ‘The point at which chameleons drop dead out of trees.’

Being from New York I’ve experienced the occasional 100+ degree day. The sun screams and everything sits still. Tar melts. People burn themselves on their seat belt buckles. Tickets to air conditioned movie theatres sell out. Not much gets done and collectively people wait. Once the temperature drops life can resume the normal rhythm and for the rest of the year people will look back and remember those few days with a hur of utter ridiculousness.

“Remember that day in July,” someone will say. “The day it was so hot even swimming in the lake couldn’t cool us off?” They’ll be saying this driving past the now frozen lake on the first day the winter temperature drops below zero. “I sure could take some of that heat right now.” Well, right now I wouldn’t mind a frozen lake.

Not only is the heat a vacuum into which all motivation and intention of constructive behavior is lost, it’s also a prime condition for my epidermal discomfort. Heat is energy. A lot of energy. A lot of energy tightly packed into a small space. And when all that idle energy realizes that there isn’t much to do, it gets restless. It finds it’s creative outlet on my skin by sculpting swirling rashes, mountainous boils, and speckled patches of infected hair follicles.

My skin isn’t the only host to medical misadventures, but it certainly holds the prominent position. I shine with the marks of a myriad scarlet letters. But inside I’ve battled heat exhaustion, giardia, and a disease I used to always die from while playing ‘The Oregon Trail’ in elementary school: dysentery. All of these ailments have had their own unique perks of discomfort, none of which quite reach the level of falling dead out of a tree. But in terms of annoying discomfort nothing can quite compare to my recent crowning achievement: a boil on the ass.

Before I get ahead of myself, let me explain that I have no ass. No butt. No bum. No fanny or buttocks. The maximus of my gluteous is an overstatement. There’s nothing there. It’s as mountainous as Kansas. As round as a 12th century view of the world. If I had four wheels I would be a flat-bed pick-up truck.

I never gave much deep thought to the phrase ‘pain-in-the-ass’ until recently. It’s overused. The meaning has been beaten out of it like the filling of an old feather pillow. The four words have fused together into a single four syllable word that means nothing more than ‘irritating’ and ‘annoying.’ The reality, though, is that any ailment that involves your ass is exacerbated exponentially because of its location. A boil on your stomach or on your leg isn’t pleasant, but on your ass it’s an absolute nightmare. If you have no ass, well, it’s even worse. Add to all this a day when small animals drop lifeless from above your head and I began to wonder, sitting tilted awkwardly with all my weight on the side of my thigh, “How, exactly, did I get here?”

This was a strange experience. I had seen things frozen to death before. Frozen made sense to me. It seemed easier to do. Cleaner. More matter of fact. If I didn’t want to freeze to death I could put more clothes on, move around, find shelter, start a fire. (Maybe it’s not that simple, but when you’re drunk with heat it sure seems that way.) Frozen temperatures were more of a novelty in my mind. ‘The point at which my hands go numb,’ or ‘The point at which my spit freezes before it hits the ground.’ When it gets hot you can’t keep taking clothes off.

I took comfort, despite the challenge of sitting, in the knowledge that my body was built using blueprints for a cloudy, rain-soaked island in northwestern Europe. It wasn’t my fault that I felt like I was about to join the chameleons. These kinds of temperatures might be normal here, but they were certainly not normal to me. So, I was startled to hear that none of the village elders had ever seen anything like this before. They had never seen the chameleons fall dead from the trees. They had never even heard stories about it. If it was the hottest day of their lives, then it sure as hell was the hottest day of mine.

Since then it’s been better. The first rains have come early and knocked the temperatures down into the ‘never-stop-sweating’ range. This is worlds better than the death range. Once you’re been in the death range the rashes, boils and infections don’t seem so bad. They become simple protests. Warnings that if things get worse my body might go on strike… completely. I know what to look out for, though. If my skin changes from green to yellow and my eyes start moving independently from each other I’ll be sure to climb down out of the tree.

A Faded Crown

2008-06-18T10:10:00.000Z

There’s no one named George in Georgetown. Even the town isn’t named Georgetown. Maps label the place as ‘Georgetown,’ and the people call it ‘Georgetown,’ but it’s not actually named Georgetown. The ferry that takes you across the river bears a plaque with the written destination: Georgetown. But don’t let it fool you because you’ll never officially get there. When you step off the ferry and walk south you’ll see a sign on your right. On top of the bold but faded lettering that bears the town’s former name, the peeling and carelessly painted title, ‘Janjanbureh’ desperately clings to life. A heavy summer rain might be enough to wash it off.

Call it what you want. Chances are someone will know what you’re referring to. If Georgetown or Janjanbureh don’t work try ‘Mkarti,’ the Africanized pronunciation and simplification of ‘MacCarthy’s Island.’ This place was British soil once – one of only two islands in this country that were officially a colony in the days of European imperialism. The rest of The Gambia was a protectorate. The British left in 1965. Forty-three years ago. Regardless, even names are slow to change.

Janjanbureh is the old name born anew. It is as old as the people who inhabit this area. A name the Fula people brought with them as they migrated from the east to the west. Any other names have been forgotten. Lost or destroyed. This place is an island in a river. A definite space. Flat and elliptical. Quiet and almost forgotten. Sometimes it begs to be noticed.

On either side of the ferry landing is a single abandoned building. On the east side is the crumbling ruins of a roofless brick and stone warehouse. Dead grass pokes out from between it’s cracks and lines the top of the empty walls like a faded crown. The retaining wall is slowly falling into the river among the rotted posts that once held a dock. The water is quiet. The cargo ships gone.

On the west side is the empty Maurel and Prom building. Once a perishable goods warehouse. It has survived it’s solitude with fewer scars. On the side of the building facing the road is a hand painted notice declaring that this was once a “colonial slave house.” The British bought the island in 1823, and the building dates from the early 20th century. The slave trade was banned by the Crown in 1807. The numbers just don’t work.

What’s left of a town is a single street. Slumping buildings that once had a pulse. This was the upcountry capitol, a place of importance when the river held domain. The one time home of Fort George, built to stop the slave trade. The center of peanut trade after that. But when the river yielded to road in the early 1970s people left. Boats were replaced with trucks and the bridgeless island fell into silence.

Now Georgetown is an antique. Even the persistence of it’s former name is an antique. A forgotten relic of a disbanded empire constantly whispering to you about it’s past. A past it’s inhabitants can’t seem to get straight. The mislabeled slave house isn’t the only inaccuracy. A block away from the main street, on what was once referred to as the corner of Jackson and Mercer streets, is a lonely metal pole. It had once been a gas lamp. One in a network that lit the town. I passed by with a friend and we stopped to notice it. Without a pause a young boy appeared from behind us to explain that this was where the slave traders tied their escaped slaves. He demonstrated by lifting his hands over his head and leaning back against it. None of the town’s crumbling infrastructure existed during the slave trade because there was no town then, just a place to camp. An imaginary history invented from a real one. Anything to fill in the gaps.

An occasional car drives down the road. White and brown stray dogs sleep in the pot holes. Broken street lights dangle from disconnected poles. The drainage ditches are clogged with sand and garbage. Discarded and unwanted.

Next to the market, where villagers still gather every morning to sell vegetables and fish, is the abandoned garage. The bays are dusty and strewn with weeds. The shells of two taxis sit on their frames. Gutted and stripped. The springs of a driver seat reach rusted into the air. Across the lot the shell of a cargo truck hangs in the air, a neem tree having grown between the cab and the bed lifting it up like a trophy. Like a bird with a broken neck. A giant beetle impaled on a pin.

Across from the market a woman named Lisa sells bags of cold water and ice made from the perforated spurts of electricity that come every day. People call her ‘Mean Lisa.’ She doesn’t say much. There are bars and tourist camps because there are birds to watch, but most of the year no tourists. The bars don’t resemble bars as much as they resemble sheds, and they’re empty most of the time even when there are tourists. The island is mostly Muslim, but it has a few alcoholics. One even sold his roof for booze. No one, it seems, just stops by for a beer.

The governor of the Central River Region lives here in the old British Commissioner’s residence, the island’s only two storey building. Rumors float around about how the British Commissioner’s wife would order festivals to be silenced in neighboring villages when she couldn’t fall asleep. Today she would have no problem.

On the far side of the island are the empty rice fields and the abandoned irrigation channels. A project started by the Chinese in the 1960s and abandoned a couple decades later. Only a few still function, maintained by the prisoner population. These inmates hitch rides from the penitentiary near the north ferry to the fields in the back of pick-up trucks. Sometimes they stop into a store unsupervised to buy some bread or a couple cigarettes. No one is alarmed. No one seems to notice.

At the end of the day the students of the Armitage High School flood the ferry to get off the island and back to their villages. White dress shirts with pleated khaki pants line the riverbank. A nod to the past. The ferry drops them off and crosses back almost empty. On the way, the sun begins to set over the river. In the silence of the orange hues the water flickers and smoothes. The ruined warehouse looks ancient from a distance. Thick-vined trees growing up the yellowed walls. Hornbills and Abyssinian Rollers dip from tree to tree and the thick smell of fresh water combs through the palms. To the east and west the river bends out of site leaving the island alone. The day ends, but time doesn’t go anywhere.

Stuck Inside of Bansang

2008-06-18T10:07:00.000Z

The village of Saare Yoba is about six or seven miles from the main road. The day after Bjorn and I arrived there, we left. We had arrived with Mark on our way back from Basse in the east. Saare Yoba is Mark’s village and we wanted to visit. When we arrived we were lucky to find a ride on a horse cart. But when we left, we walked.

We knew we were about half way to Bansang when the rice fields began. In Bansang I could find a taxi and head north. Bjorn could find a taxi and head west. Mark could pick up his bike at the small store where he had left it two days before.

We were walking fast. There was no breeze and no shade and the temperature in the mid-morning was already over 110 degrees. Walking fast made the air move past us and it was the only way to keep ourselves somewhat dry. The shirt between my bag and my back was soaked and dripping onto the seat of my pants. It was late May and the first rains of the season had not yet reached this far upcountry. The dirt on the road was as light as powder and we scuffed it into clouds that clung behind our heels.

After two hours of walking we arrived at the store. The sign read, “Cash and Carry.” It was a small warehouse. On the left was a wall of shelves punctuated by dusty windows. In front of them stood a wooden counter that was extended by the tops of three waist height, chest-like refrigerators. Two men were behind the counter and we asked one of them for water. He handed us each a half liter plastic bag of cold drinking water and we paid him two Dalasis a piece.
On the right side of the store were stacks of rice bags. A tall thin man was unloading them from a truck. He carried them on his head and made neatly stacked towers with the help of a ladder. In front of one stack were three men. An old Lebanese man in a wheel chair, the owner, and behind him two Gambian men seated in plastic chairs imported from India. Beside one of the Gambians were four bottles of Guinness Foreign Extra. Three of them were empty.

We finished our waters and all bought another half liter. I bought a bottle of pepper sauce. Bjorn bought a bottle of wine. Mark found his bike. Bjorn and I said goodbye to Mark as he took off back up the road. The water had cooled the two of us off enough that our appetites returned. We looked for lunch.

There was a sandwich stand across from the car park, but the eggs weren’t hard boiled. The owner asked us simply, “omelet?” We said no, knowing how drenched with oil a Gambian omelet would be. So we kept walking. On the left was a cargo truck. Its hood was open. Beneath it people had spread a mat and were lying on it out of the sun. Between two parts of the frame another man lay sleeping in a hammock, his fingers a few inches from the ground. The road rolled and pitted, scarred by the rainy seasons.

There was a woman selling bean sandwiches underneath a corrugate awning and we stopped to buy a couple. She was selling them for 10 Dalasis and chicken and pasta sandwiches for 30 Dalasis. She spoke to Bjorn in Wolof and to me in Pulaar. When we sat down on a wooden bench to eat she said to her friend in Wolof, “They have lots of money but they wouldn’t buy the chicken. They don’t speak the language very well.” Bjorn heard every word. We were dusty and sweaty and just wanted bean sandwiches. When I asked Bjorn why he thought she would say something like that he replied, without looking up from his lunch, “Extreme inferiority complex.”

We finished eating and walked back to the “Cash and Carry” for a beer. The man who sold us water gave us two Julbrews and we each paid 25 Dalasis. The old Lebanese man was gone so we sat down in his place beneath the ceiling fan. The man drinking Guinness started an argument and soon there was chaos at the door. Customers came and went through the may lay as if nothing was happening. At one point the man behind the counter jumped over the counter and almost hit someone. Things calmed down. More Guinness was ordered and then the electricity went out. The fan above us slowly stopped. We bought two more bags of water and left.
At the car park the engines were quiet. I asked someone where I could find a bathroom half knowing it was a futile effort. He thought I wanted to buy weed and rather than correct him I just walked away. He was stoned and babbling – the annoying kind of stoned person who goes on about how everyone is friends and blah blah blah. It was about 120 degrees out and I just didn’t have the patience to listen.

The bush taxis weren’t going anywhere so we walked to the main road about a half mile away to try to hitchhike. The customs and immigration office was at the intersection. Inside the small hut the on duty officer was asleep and slumped in his chair, his shiny black shoes crossed on the desk. We sat down on the bench outside and waited. The road was quiet. After 10 minutes the officer woke up and came to greet us. He wore a khaki uniform with a short brimmed khaki hat. We told him the car park was quiet and he agreed.

On the main road two old women walked by wearing traditional dresses and carrying bundles wrapped in cloth on their heads. As they passed, one looked at us and said faintly in Wolof, “White man, give me money.” She kept walking and didn’t look back. One truck drove by but it wasn’t going far. After an hour we walked back to the car park.

I found an empty taxi headed to Janjanbureh and Bjorn found an empty taxi to Brikama Ba. We waited. Each taxi needed 20 more passengers before it would leave. I took a seat, but the heat was so intense that I had to stand back outside. A young man started a conversation with us. He was the brother of one of Bjorn’s friends who lived back west outside the capitol. He was traveling back to school in Janjanbureh after a break. A few weeks before, when the President of The Gambia was on a country wide tour, he stopped at the school. The young man had been in the crowd at the President’s reception. The President had given him 10,000 Dalasis when he danced. He must have been a good dancer. And so he shared the wealth and bought us each a sorrel popsicle.

After two hours my taxi left and Bjorn was left waiting. He was frustrated he told me later. His taxi was full of passengers, but they were still loading baggage on the roof. Half the baggage belonged to people who didn’t have a seat and weren’t going to get one. So they had to unpack the roof. There was no one organizing anything.

I was one of four people sitting in the three back seats in my bush taxi. At a police check point along the road we stopped and showed our ID cards. One man forgot his and was taken into the office. The driver turned the engine off and I baked some more in the back seat. My clothes were soaked so I pulled a towel out of my bag to dry myself off. Two weeks later I would see the same taxi being pushed down the road outside of my village. More unhappy passengers in the waving heat rising up from the tarmac, the light behind them rolling like water up into the sky.

Throwing Stones at Vultures

2008-04-14T14:59:00.003Z

People aren’t drawn to me like ants to an ice cream cone melting on the sidewalk anymore. This is a good thing. When you’re unsure of yourself – nervous – you send out little signals from your brain that are received by Gambians (especially children). These signals are translated into irresistible impulses that banish free will to some neither-world. People can’t help themselves. It must have something to do with the brain and the secretion of chemicals and complicated scientific formulas that require multiple boxes of chalk to write. These impulses force people to gather around you and ask you odd questions while laughing and demanding strange things like money and bottles and pens. This never goes well for you and nervousness turns to suppressed frustration. But soon these things vanish or become ignorable white noise somewhere in the background.

My countenance has become as deadpan as the delivery in an Appalachian folk song. My suppressed frustration has melted away and life has begun to feel normal. But life isn’t really normal. I live in The Gambia. And being me and living in The Gambia does not equal anything resembling normalcy. It’s familiarity that tries to sell itself as normalcy. The cost is getting used to what’s strange.

Looking back through some pictures I took when I first arrived here, I’ve noticed a change. One picture is of a goat standing outside my door. This was strange to me: a goat almost in my house. So I took a picture. “Look at this crazy goat,” I thought. “The Gambia is wacky.” It didn’t take me long to realize that this country is really one large unfenced farm, as is most of the developing world. While a goat in my doorway was once weird, smashing into one in a van traveling 75 mph is now business as usual.

There are plenty of odd details that would have once made my head turn… made me gasp in shock. Children with machetes. Normal. Babies holding knives. Fine. A child teething on a lighter (not the business end). Not a problem. I have even become, I fear, irrevocably desensitized to women’s breasts. They were once a powerful controlling force on my adolescent mind. Now they’re just like a couple of elbows. Fallen from grace. Stripped of their title. Tossed in the bargain bin. Unaided by the preserving qualities that come from wearing a bra, breasts have become utilitarian and tired. I might never recover.

These details (once so strange, now so normal) creep into your life slowly. They are small at first. Small and repetitive. You can’t help but get used to them. Eight-year-olds have machetes, but they have them for a reason. These are not crazy American children. If I saw an American child with a machete I would be scared. American children are crazy. But Gambian children have machetes because they use them for work. They go to the bush with their fathers to gather things like branches to fix roofs and bark to make rope. Machetes are not strange to them. They help them live their lives.

Once I got my mind around the machete thing then babies with knives didn’t seem so insane in comparison. (The image of American babies with knives still scares the crap out of me. Not because I’m scared for the baby, but because I’m scared of the baby.) None of these kids were getting injured. No one was making a big deal. Maybe my view has been off on the whole small-children-with-sharp-objects subject. Maybe it was also good that all the children I saw were crawling around in dirty sand where a variety of defecating livestock made themselves comfortable. Putting the sand in their mouths. (These children could have been kept inside or somewhere else away from the sand, but that wasn’t the problem.) It strengthens the immune system one might say.

In fact, even Gambians look at each other as strange. Being Gambian is as diverse as being American. Ethnically the country is a tumbled mixture of Mandinkas, Fulas, Wolofs, Sereres, Serehules, Jolas, Akus, Manjagos, and more. Along with each tribe comes a different language and possibly a whole new set of cultural rules. Misunderstanding can be a daily experience, even for people who have never crossed borders. But misunderstanding is taken lightly and garnished with a sense of humor. A Serere once told me that the Fulas are always “throwing stones at vultures.” He was referring to the general Fula response of “jam tan,” or “peace only,” to standard greetings like: “How is the morning?” In Serere “jam tan” has nothing to do with peace, and everything to do with launching rocks at scavenging birds. The misunderstanding becomes a joke. All is well.

So it was in the spirit of adjustment and understanding that I lent a hand in the time honored Muslim tradition of goat sacrifices. Perhaps six months ago you would have correctly guessed that I was a goat sacrificing virgin. That my mind was focused on other things, like an appreciation for women’s breasts. You might have even guessed correctly that goat sacrificing has never been too high on my to-do list. Not one of those must do things before I die. But there I was, faced with a goat sacrificing opportunity, and I grabbed it by the horns.

Now, I didn’t actually do the sacrificing. My throat cutting skills were rusty. I wasn’t sure which way Mecca was. And most importantly my Muslim-ness was somewhere around zero. I did, however, provide a cheerleading section and the use of my Leatherman knife (yet another use for the thing.) I did a fine job of collecting all sorts of goo in every crevice and part of it’s inner workings.

Without a hitch we all feasted on goat. I cleaned my knife out and slowly time passed. Ritualistic animal killing went from being something new and uncomfortable to just another day from months and months ago. Then, without warning, I wandered into a child’s naming ceremony. And as we all know a naming ceremony is never really complete without a good old fashioned goat sacrifice. But this time, in stead of a goat we had a sheep. A very quiet sheep.

Somehow I was seated about four feet away from the sheep. This was a good place, people agreed, to put the white man. It’s head by my feet. Front row seats. There wasn’t much of a need for restraint. The sheep was very docile about the whole situation. I sat by unfazed. This stuff was water under the bridge. The same old routine. No problem. I demonstrated my ease with the occasion by striking up conversation with the person beside me.

“The sun is hot today.”
“Yes, very hot.”

The bleeding had stopped, some kola nuts were passed about and those sacrificing left the sheep to go get ready for the butchering. I looked at the unlucky animal splayed out in the sand. Quiet and still. The sand undisturbed by it’s hooves. There was something about it’s eye that looked strange. It wasn’t glazed over and empty looking: the look a veteran sacrifice observer notices at moments like these. It had presence… like it was still watching the people around it. Then, in a quick cramping burst the sheep, with it’s head barely still attached, leapt forward on it’s side almost landing on my feet. A spray of blood flew across my legs and men came running in every direction to hold the nightmare down.

In a freakish rhythm the sheep kicked it’s back legs over and over again, it’s tongue hanging out of its mouth. My mouth was just hanging: in amazement. This undead freak-show almost just tried to wrestle me – almost tried to take me along with it wherever it was going. What I thought I had so quickly gotten used to had just as quickly reminded me that it was weird.

Goat sacrifices: normal to many people. Leaping half-dead beheaded sheep carcasses: weird. If there had been some American children with knives I might have passed out.

Soup of the Day

2008-04-14T14:55:00.000Z

I remember reading somewhere when I was younger about what sailors resorted to eating when their ship’s supplies ran out. Sailors in the 16th and 17th centuries. The guys who were exploring the world in the name of Portugal and Spain. Men who weren’t thoroughly convinced about the shape of the earth, and whose maps showed unexplored areas filled with strange scaly creatures and the words: THERE BE DRAGONS.

I had felt ill at the thought of a sailor’s normal diet consisting of maggot-filled biscuits and pork fat, but when I read about boiled boot leather served on a bed of sawdust al-dente my stomach did a barrel roll. These were the reasons for mutiny. A bunch of men crammed on a ship without as much as the sight of land for months, probably all smelling stellar and working hard off the energy provided by the ground up planks they were standing on… barefoot.

When I think I’m having a bad day this is what I think about. While expeditions of exploration and discovery sound like adrenaline filled adventures brimming with excitement most of the time they are not. Most of the time they were not romantic at all. In fact, for a good majority of the time they sucked. A lot.

Now, I’m not trying to be negative. Honestly. I’m just trying to illustrate the point that food, as easily overlooked as it is, can play an enormous roll in the state of a person’s well-being. When the food gets bad and the appetites drop, the sad state of cuisine can unalterably affect the rest of your day. When this happens you must pack your bags and head off on your own expedition of discovery. Dragons or not.

My daily sustenance comes in the standard breakfast, lunch and dinner triple hat, but there is no cheering and running around the soccer pitch. Breakfast is some sort of white rice-ish corn-speckled water gruel. It has the consistency of a running nose and enough added sugar to worry me about Type-II diabetes. Gambians love sugar. It’s cheap and they put too much of it on everything. On cooler mornings this comes along with bush tea, but appropriately the tea is half sugar and I just resort to the stand-by plastic cup of water. For some friends the water situation is frightening, but for me it’s a victory. You take them when you can.

Whether the morning is cool or not the temperature of breakfast is frightening. (And the term “cool” is relative. It refers to whether the temperature becomes so unbearable that I take my shirt off at 8 or 9 am.) The best word I can think of to describe breakfast is “molten.” Consuming this most important meal of the day almost always results in burned fingers and a burned mouth. I sweat so much that a shower (a bucket of water that I slowly pour over myself with the aid of a second plastic cup) is necessary. Usually I eat half naked to avoid soaking my clothes, an effort I more than make up for later in the day.

Regardless of my geographical position sandwiched between the Sahara desert and the Equator, everything digestible shares multiple characteristics with burning coals. Every meal I eat is boiled until it threatens to turn from a liquidy solid into plasma. My body does not appreciate this. However, food that resembles lava does have it’s bright sides in such an undeveloped country. It tends to make life difficult for unfriendly bacteria inside my bowl. This unfortunately doesn’t explain my bouts with dysentery and giardia – two souvenirs of experience.

Sometime between noon and four lunch comes. This, like breakfast, never changes. Maafe gerte, as it’s called in Pulaar, is white rice topped with a peanut sauce. Kind of like rice with zesty, drippy peanut butter. Lunch is my favorite meal of the day. I stock up on lunch as a preventative measure against dinner. But eating lots of maafe gerte is a slow process if one wishes to avoid heat blisters on top of their burns from breakfast.

Dinner is a bit of a mystery. It’s a culinary gamble. When it involves more white rice I consider it a win. When it involves a bowl full of sandy dry millet I look on the bright side – at least no sugar. Millet beats rice at a ratio of about 6:1. That means millet, unfortunately, is almost a nightly ritual. But when rice reigns the victor it usually consists of white rice pulverized with dried local fish – bones included. Somehow I never have to remind myself to eat slowly. And thus, needlelike ribs in the throat are uncommon. Sometimes rice is so victorious that I get jitters of excitement. This only happens once every month or two, but when it does happen I do a little dance. Rice shows up wearing onions, sweet potatoes and a sprinkling of macaroni that causes sensations in my stomach that I thought extinct. This dish accompanies special events, but really the food itself is the special event. It makes me want to change into something more formal.

Reality, though, is millet. It’s the workhorse. The stand-by. The food your father might say, “builds character.” It’s terrible. Millet and I have spent a lot of time together. But don’t actually think millet just shows up alone dashed with a hint of road sand. No. Millet is better than that. It shows up with a bowl of mystery broth. This broth enables the millet to actually go down your throat without first drying out the inside of your mouth. The flavor and ingredients of the broth are the mystery. But it’s not a mystery like, “Wow this Coke is delicious. I wonder what the mystery formula is?” It’s a mystery like, “All I can taste is water… and why is there cloudy stuff at the bottom?” The broth and millet are mixed into a mud and by the time dinner is over I realize that once again I have gone through and entire day without using my teeth. Nothing needs to be chewed. The words crunchy , crispy and bite find no chance to describe Gambian food. And so my jaw muscles atrophy.

This dearth of options combined with the scant selections at the market and the meager Peace Corps stipend result in creativity only rivaled by college freshmen. Not only has ramen become a treasured and hoarded luxury, but the soup stock that accompanies the noodles is rationed in creative ways. Once, on a particularly desperate evening, I used half a pack of ramen chicken stock to spice some life into dry corn flakes. Handful of cornflakes, a sprinkle of soup mix and a swig from my plastic cup. A masterpiece not soon to be found on the menus in Manhattan.

When chicken corn flakes won’t do, then a trip to Kombo is in order. Kombo is the coastal region in The Gambia just south of Banjul island – the capitol. For reasons unknown to myself Banjul serves only as a governmental and financial center. As the sun goes down people desert the streets for Kombo where life goes on past dark. Any established foreign presence has taken due note of this and set up shop in the urban-like area south of the capitol. There you can find the American embassy, the Cuban embassy and the British High Commission along with the offices of every established NGO. You can also find food considered tempting – that is, unless you’ve just arrived from somewhere with respectable cuisine. Like Cuba.

On one trip to Kombo I found myself overjoyed at the prospect of a bacon sandwich in a country that is 95% Muslim. Despite the fact that the sandwich consisted of two strips of bacon on a giant hunk of bread, for the equivalent of $3, I was happy. As happy as, well, a pig in millet mud.
There are more options than just what the Islamic world considers unclean. There are hamburgers with French fries at Fast Ali’s (along with an ominous looking menu item simply titled “Brain.”) Fish and chips to be found at Omar’s. Even canned vegetables and pasta to be found at the “toubob shops,” the Lebanese run convenience stores. One can even find cheap Gambian dishes prepared with the care and flavors not found far up-country. All this induces feelings in Peace Corps volunteers only found elsewhere among excited 5-year-olds on Christmas morning.

The din of flavor is even further punctuated with the peculiar sensation of cold… cold beer. It’s a fantastic thing on a -50° Alaskan afternoon, and even better on a 110° Gambian evening. When you deprive your senses of cold for lengths of time measured in months iciness can be a jolting experience.

One of the numerous ill effects of British colonialism is that the English didn’t leave any commendable cultural influence behind. Maybe that’s too broad a statement, but what I’m getting at is that English food is shit. When was the last time you went out for a nice traditional English meal? You didn’t What is the culinary legacy left behind in The Gambia? Meat pies. A few hours north in Dakar, Senegal French architecture and food lives on. Excited friends who return after their first visit to the Senegalese capitol exclaim, “It’s actually a real city. It was amazing. I had dinner and it came in three courses. When I was done I didn’t want to throw-up.” Of course they didn’t. The food was French. And what makes French food so good is it’s total lack of Englishness.

However, what makes English beer so good is it’s total lack of French-ness. And one would assume that fact has rooted itself somewhere inside this skinny river country. No. The India Pale Ale, as is well known, is the finest legacy left behind by the British Empire, but it wasn’t left here. The only two beers found in the country are Guinness Foreign Extra and JulBrew, the latter being a lager brewed and owned by a German.

But at least there is beer in a country where almost no one drinks or can actually afford beer. I am grateful. After a 10 hour trip in a hot, overcrowded van from the up-country bush to the streets of Kombo a cold beer is the best welcome. I would even drink it cold out of my shoe. But if you boiled some boot leather for dinner I would have to decline. I’m saving my appetite for the meat pies.

Sunday Drivers

2008-04-14T14:53:00.002Z

The truck’s horn was stuck. I was sitting in the front seat, and a man from the back of this tired heap had leaned forward to my window and stuck his head in the cab. He was yelling something about dropping him off at the next village. I couldn’t really tell. He was speaking Pulaar and my Pulaar was terrible. The voice and the horn were competing with each other. All I knew was that he wasn’t happy. Neither was the driver.

I was right in the middle. My overstuffed bag squeezed between my legs; pressing them into the dash and door. Wearing long pants, as is culturally appropriate in the 90 degree humidity. Sweat soaking through every spot of cloth that touched my skin. Dust on my sunglasses. The smoke of bush fires on the horizon. A horn that wouldn’t stop.

In a burst of panic-laced fury the driver tore the panel off the dash in front of him, sunk his fingers into a cloud of wires and tore them out. Slivers of copper caught the sun. The man at my right shoulder had disappeared . The only sound was rubber on tarmac and the wheeze of a stressed engine.

I had waited at the Wassu car park for this thing to fill up, this gele-gele as the local various sized bush taxis are called. It was like a military personnel carrier. Rows of benches in the back. Canvas walls and a black metal top. Two hours sitting in the passenger seat watching the weekly market beside me trickle to a drip. I was the first in line. Probably just missed the last thing with four wheels that was going in my direction. So I sat in the front seat while men put live rams and palm wood furniture on the roof. I could feel my right arm burning in the sun on the side of the door.

This was my first day up-country. Away from the coast. Far away from the coast and into Africa. I was swallowed whole.

Public Transportation is basically like hitchhiking with enforced tipping. You hail a vehicle down on the side of the road, or if you’re somewhere with a population you find the dirt lot where everyone’s parked.

If you find the dirt lot there are no signs, no order, no organization. Just a grid-locked mosaic of dented, rusted, spray painted feerays (the Pulaar word for shit-car). Someone asks you where you’re going and then they overcharge you. You haggle until it’s right (and sometimes you’re only guessing what’s right) and then fight to keep your bag on your lap so they don’t charge you for putting it on the roof. After these small successes you take a seat and wait, sometimes hours, for the rest of the seats to fill around you. If you’re flagging the car down on the side of the road then you don’t have to wait for seats to fill, but you might have to wait all morning (5 or 6 hours) until anything with room for you rolls by.

So public transportation can be a nightmare. Once you’re on it you’re packed so tight that you can’t get things out of your pockets. You’re almost sitting on your neighbor’s lap. It’s hot and humid and some of the windows don’t open. If you’re going a long distance you need patience.

The bright side of this experience is the spectrum of vehicles clinging to their last fumes of life. This isn’t Havana, it’s more like a post-apocalyptic Sunday drive. From massive personnel carriers, like the one I rode in my first day up-country, to bare metal shells of station wagons that would look more comfortable on cinderblocks. The windshields are always decorated with tassels in red, yellow and green. Giant stickers obscuring the view. Stickers showing the face of some West African Sheik or just the words “city boy.” No explanation. Smaller stickers around the sides of the windshield. A very 80s Madonna blowing a kiss next to three Osama bin Ladens. Awkward pictures of the driver’s family members – usually just men – taped to the ceiling or on the dash next to the steering wheel. No one has any idea who Madonna or bin Laden is. He just looks like a holy man to them and that’s good enough.

On Janjangbureh Island, still known by it’s colonial name: MacCarthy’s Island (or just McKarti), a seven-seater Peugeot drives back and forth from the north ferry crossing to the south ferry crossing everyday. It used to be white until almost all the paint wore off. It used to have upholstery. Now two lonely sun visors are the only reminder of a lost interior. The broken analogue clock on the dash is installed upside down. The back driver’s side window is a piece of sheet metal. No key. It needs to be hot wired every time.

I’m sitting in the far back of this car as we take off one day for the south side. The driver takes a swig of water out of a blue jug with a fading “Diesel Oil” label on the front. I stare down through the holes in the floor and watch the road roll under us. The horn is wired to the turn signal control and the driver tugs on it anytime anything is remotely near the road. Luckily, the horn never gets stuck.

On the south side I watch as another station-wagon struggles to leave the ferry on the river and drive up the small ramp onto the island. No success. Men start volunteering to help and soon there are more than 10 people pushing the vehicle up onto the road. It takes a few minutes before they make it anywhere. The whole time the driver and three large women never think to get out and help or at least lighten the load to make the job easier.

In a country whose borders were drawn based on a river – a river meant for easy transportation – the population relies on roads. The roads that do exist are decaying except for the newly paved North Bank Highway, a two-lane thoroughfare that stretches from Janjangbureh to the coast. There are no bridges to connect the north of the country to the south. Only slow ferries, small metal boats with outboard motors, and canoes hollowed out from tree trunks.

As a Peace Corps volunteer you aren’t afforded the luxury of provided transportation. You’re on the side of the road with an arm out or wandering through the car park negotiating prices like the rest of The Gambia. It’s better that way. No pampering. The one luxury you are provided – the one means of dodging the world of “gele-geles” and public transportation – is a bicycle.

Never have I loved spokes and hand brakes so much. If you factor in time spent waiting and stopping in a gele-gele, you can easily cover 50K more quickly on your own two wheels. If you don’t mind the heat, a bicycle can be your best friend. It can handle the nicest newly finished highway (and there’s only one), or the sandiest gnarled bush path and all it asks is that you clean the dust out of its gears. Getting yourself out of the car and into the open air saves a few Dalasis and is guaranteed to over excite endless throngs of children who will demand pens and candy and money from you. But since your bike is faster than their feet you’ll be past them and on your way no problem.

The only down side to a bike is giving up the aesthetic world of the gele-gele. Bicycles just can’t compete. Mine is brand new and fully functional with all its original parts in perfect working order. The tires are full. The spokes are straight. The frame is newly painted without a scratch on it. No stickers. No tassels. No awkward photographs of my father taped to the handle bars. It runs smoothly and is always ready when I want it to be ready. It follows a flawless schedule that doesn’t leave me standing on the side of the road while the sun makes significant progress across the sky. It doesn’t even charge me for strapping my bag on the back. It affords me the pillars of American contentment: personal space, control, and a way to avoid walking.

So if I’m not going too far I pedal. It’s faster. It gets me out in the air. It lets my patience take some time off to recover from the constant abuse. I can pace the trip. Take breaks. Take side roads. Explore. But when I’m on a long haul it’s back to the gele. Knees crushed into the seat in front of me. Half sitting on my neighbor’s lap. A chain of fake flowers across the dash. And tassels. Always tassels. I guess I could try to spice my bike up. Try to incorporate the best of both worlds. Some stickers. A customized reflector cage painted red, green, yellow and black. Maybe tie a chicken on somewhere. But I have no idea where to buy a horn that won’t stop blaring.

Dead White Man's Clothes

2008-04-14T14:48:00.001Z

Just like drunk Spring Break-ers in Tampa seek out mysterious looking Chinese calligraphy tattoos, a good chunk of the non-Western world finds satisfaction in English language t-shirts: a much less permanent statement that doesn’t require expensive surgery to remove. However, everyone shares a common bond in these adventures – they don’t always know what these tattoos and t-shirts say.

While Mule will assure you that the ink on his upper arm is the character for “power,” Paul, the exchange student from Hangzhou will reassure you it means “donkey.” Oops. Maybe next time Mule wants to broaden his cultural horizons to include the far East he won’t look in a tattoo parlor owned by a guy with the last name “Duffy.” Maybe not.

At the same time, Paul can tell you all about the street markets back home in Zhejiang province. About the $2 knock-off designer t-shirts with blaring misspellings. Fine products from labels like “Pmua” and “abibas.” A back pack by “The Nurth Face” or a winter coat by “Moturola.” And you thought they only made cell phones.

But it’s not just the Chinese getting in on the English language party. In places like West Africa, where clothes donations from America and Europe flood the markets, a whole spectrum of second hand garments color the streets. Like in China these English language clothes, mostly t-shirts, are seen as fashionable – a status symbol even. And just like Mule, most of the people wearing these clothes have no idea what they actually say.

Here in The Gambia you’ll find examples spread across the country. From the crowded streets of the coastal Kombos to the quiet Fula villages of the Upper River District. From shopkeepers in the capitol to lonely cattle herders out in the bush. English is everywhere.

Most second hand t-shirts are innocent and unnoticeable. Some company picnic in Michigan a few summers ago. A Thanksgiving 5K race in St. Louis. Someone’s gym uniform from St. Ignacious High School. The kind of stuff you expect to find at thrift shops because it’s the kind of stuff no one wants. It gets marked down to 25 cents, doesn’t sell and then disappears.

But for every 10 or 20 easily forgotten shirts there’s one that induces a double-take. The kind of shirt you wouldn’t expect to find anywhere except some seedy stall on the Atlantic City boardwalk. A fine specimen of garish shamelessness in all it’s glory.

There was the 10-year-old girl with the bright pink “sex instructor” shirt. Or the 30-year-old man selling vegetables with “That’s Ms. Bitch to You” across his chest. The local businessman whose shirt read “Put your hands up and step away from the doughnuts.” And the friendly taxi driver in the “Tupac – Fuck the World!” t-shirt.

The Western world throws out its trash not realizing that it’s going to get picked through. It would be easy enough to get angry about it. To curse the tasteless and grieve for the victims. But no one here is too upset about the situation. Local tailors take a hit to their business because they can’t always compete with second-hand goods, but no one seems to be going totally out of business. The bottom line is that people are buying clothes with exotic writing on them and feeling proud about it.

Wanting something exotic is nothing new, and it’s certainly not attributed to any single culture in particular. The ancient Romans racked up an impressive trade deficit with China trying to quench their lust for silk. Silk was exotic, expensive and made people feel rich. The Celts craved wine from the Romans and so began a one way trade route through modern day Marseilles. More recently the British forced opium on the Chinese because their population couldn’t get enough tea and they were spending all their silver.

Not fully understanding an exotic import, like the writing on the t-shirts, is not culturally isolated either. While I don’t condone or feel good about the young girl in the “sex instructor” t-shirt, I also don’t feel good about the fact that I can’t explain how my Japanese CD player works. I don’t know how the Irish turned wool into my tweed cap. And I have absolutely no clue how the Swiss managed to create such a complicated tent that assembles so easily and works so well out of materials and fabrics that were created using concepts and sciences that I will never understand. I just know that I like these things and that I hope the Japanese, Irish and Swiss keep making them.

Basically, the idea of import is tantalizing. It makes people feel like they’ve got something precious and rare. Just think about modern assumptions about quality and origin. The things you know without question. The best wine is from France. The best leather is from Italy. Cars – Germany. Electronics – Japan. People around the world hope to send their children to American schools. Australia has really large cans of beer. But these are privileged assumptions. Assumptions made by people with access to education, access to disposable income, access to the internet. For the rest of the world that spends its evenings by candle light, not because it’s romantic but because it’s all they have, there are different assumptions. Different concepts of luxury and style.

In America jelly sandals were popular among girls in the 1980s. In The Gambia they’re popular among young men today. In America women don’t show their breasts casually as they walk around their homes. In The Gambia women would never dare to show their knees. In many parts of the non-Western world male friends show affection through hand holding. In America it would imply more than friendship. African American men have their hair braided into corn-rows, while in Africa they’re only for women.

There’s even a fundamental misunderstanding about the origin of donated clothes in Western and sub-Saharan Africa as a whole. While people understand that these second-hand items are donations, many refer to them as “dead white man’s clothes.” There is no concept of donating perfectly functional clothes for reasons of age or disinterest on the part of the original owner. If your shirt has no holes then it is a good shirt. Why would you get rid of it? Even if it did have holes, couldn’t they just be patched or sewn closed? Why would someone part with such a functional possession?

Second-hand English language t-shirts carry with them the combination of functionality, frugality and luxury. The meaning of the words printed on them communicate nothing, but the origin of the words communicate meaning. IF you read things too literally you might miss the point – it’s just below the surface, like the ink on Mule’s arm.

Fish in a Tree

2008-02-05T14:36:00.000Z

My friend’s problem is that the monkeys are eating all his bananas. In Africa. The banana trees that are owned by my African friend are getting attacked by monkeys. I could write it a few more times in a few different ways, but it’s not going to sound any less ridiculous.

I live in The Gambia. My job is to encourage improved agricultural techniques among rural farmers. I’ve spent months learning a new language and assimilating into a new culture. My senses have been assaulted from every direction. I’m out in the field. Ideas about live fencing, irrigation techniques and cover crops running through my head. Then all at once – silence.

Because the monkeys are eating all the bananas.

It sounds like a remark from some sarcastic friend,
“So, what are you doing in Africa? Stopping the monkeys from eating all the bananas?”
“Um, yes.”

It’s moments like these that pull me out of cultural submersion and with a swift slap in the face remind me that I’m from New York. That I’m pasty white with Celtic ancestors. That no matter how hard I try I’m never going to quite fit in. I’m a sled dog in the desert. A cat in the ocean. A fish in a tree. A banana tree. And when you put a fish in a tree you should expect it to act a little funny.

When I first arrived here I was living in a village specifically for training. I was there to learn a local language and about local customs. I was also learning that moving directly from a glacier in Alaska (where my last job was) to the humid final months of the West African rainy season was not a physically comfortable experience. The days were well about 100 degrees and the nights not much cooler. I would lay in bed at night and hope to fall asleep. Flat on my back. Arms and legs apart. Totally naked. If any one part of my body touched another they would both start to sweat. And since my back was already sweating – the thin foam mattress soaking it up like a sponge – I really couldn’t afford to lose any more fluids.

I had almost fallen asleep. I had reached that in between stage, the few fleeting moments of semi-consciousness before you’re totally out. I had reached that point, navigated through the heat and humidity, and was almost at ease… when the cricket started.

A loud, constant chirping from somewhere inside the walls of my one-room mud hut. Like a fire alarm the sound blasted through the heavy air and thrust me hurtling back into the waking world. It wasn’t long before my body was hurtling through the heavy air, out through the folds of my mosquito net, and in pursuit of this nocturnal nuisance.

The sound was coming from the door – a thin piece of corrugate metal framed by thin strips of wood – the top of which was precisely the same height as the center of my forehead. Between the smooth mud inner-wall and the top of the palm wood door frame was an unfinished space. A frightful other-world of rough mud chunks and gaps of dark twisting space. I shone my flashlight into them.

My gaze first met the small yellow eyes of a lizard. Apparently he wasn’t getting any sleep either.
“Why don’t you just eat the cricket?” I thought, not quite sure whether this idea was directed toward the lizard of myself. I decided it was for the lizard and continued the search for my cold-blooded friend’s potential midnight snack.

Nothing.

Silence.

My presence and the flashlight had given the cricket fair warning that his life was in danger. But I knew if I laid back down on my damp bed that the sound, of course, would begin again. This battle had to be fought NOW. I had no more time to give to the sticky tropical night. Then I noticed a small crack between two pieces of wood in the side of the door frame. Two tiny antenna sticking out into the air.

I grabbed my knife from the small desk beside the bed and stood in the doorway, satisfaction spreading across my face. Slowly I eased the tip of the blade into the crack and then thrust it forward for the kill. A small cloud of dust spilled down. My eyes followed it to my feet. Then all at once I came back to reality.

I was completely naked. A flashlight in one hand and a knife in the other. Standing in the doorway of a mud hut in Western Africa in the middle of the night. Sweat covering my body. Stabbing into the wall trying to kill a cricket.

Somehow the series of decisions I had made, and the actions I had taken in the past couple years of my life, had led me to this moment. This naked African moment.

My friends and family back home were driving cars and riding in subways. Microwaving popcorn and checking email. They were getting to work at eight in the morning and getting worried that if the traffic didn’t break they would arrive after eight. There were electricity bills and property taxes. Monthly minimum balances to maintain. Application deadlines and train schedules calculated to exact minutes. There were bells and buzzers and beeps that told people what time it was. There were business plans and blueprints. Manufactured building materials designed with weight, strength, shape, size, color, cost and durability all carefully calculated and quantified and put into numbers recorded on the hard drives of computers and the pages of reports.

Somehow these things were normal, and mud houses, pit latrines and constantly dirty feet were not. I had a new reality. Something much more worthy of being called reality.

I put the knife away and left the cricket alone. I let him have the gaps in the door, the rough twisting space, and laid back down on the damp mattress. The room was quiet and I fell asleep. And that’s good because if you’re tired it’s hard to stop the monkeys from eating all the bananas.

Well, how hot is it?

2007-12-08T11:28:00.000Z

Really really hot. I lied when I downplayed it as just really hot. But to be totally honest it's actually cooled off now that it's mid-December and we're dripping into the Gambian winter. Fridged temperatures in the low 70s greet me in the mornings and make me actually consider putting a fleece on. The body adjusts. Three months ago I was living in Alaska. Now I think 70 degrees is chilly.

So, I've been here in the Gambia, West Africa for close to three months now. Living in a village and learning the Pulaar language. So far so good. Yesterday I officially swore in as a Peace Corps Volunteer and tomorrow I head out to my permanent post for three months of uninterupted "getting-to-know-you" time.

There are 23 other people living in my traditional Fula compound. I have my own mud hut, complete with thatched roof and coos stalk fence. It's about 9 feet by 9 feet, and the last time I was inside it the concrete on the floor was still drying. There had been a volunteer here in the mid-90s, but the house had deteriorated and the family re-built.

The accent people have there is different than in my training village. That's making communication difficult. I'll figure it out.

For the last week I've been in Kombo, the more urban area around the capital city of Banjul. It's urban, but nothing like our American idea of urban. It's more like the urban you would find in the 8th poorest country in the world. It's exactly like that. I've been sick the entire time. Food poisoning that hasn't really gone away. A good napalming of antibiotics on the system and things should be back to normal in a few days.

In summary, the past 10 weeks of training has been packed. It's been the most information I've ever assaulted my body and senses with. Everything is new and there is no where to hide from it and you just have to let it all come crashing down on top of you. It's amazing to be knocked down and built back up again. The next three months will be a continuation of training, only I'll be alone. No schedule. No administration. Just myself and my village. It's going to be wild. My head just might explode.

If you want to send me a note, the post will be the only way to go. This is my info:

Brian Carroll, PCV
PO Box 582
Banjul, The Gambia
West Africa

Until then I'll be out here with the crocodiles, snakes, and hippos.