3 posts tagged “gambia”

What an amazing week we've had - much too much to try and write it all down. We've been on a trip up country into Gambia along the Gambia River and across to a small town called Janjangbureh. The drive was wonderful but it was seeringly hot and by the time we arrived there I felt my blood was going to boil. My friends took a kettle and dipped it in the river and poured water over my head to cool me down and sat me under a tree for a while till I felt better.

The town itself was fascinating though so very hot I found it very uncomfortable. We got no sleep the first night with the heat, the mosquitoes and the smell of nearby burning rubbish so the next day we managed to find somewhere else to stay in a lovely place next to the river which was cooler and we played music and relaxed. We visited places of interest there relating to the slave trade and colonialism.

On the way back we stopped at a place called Wassu which had an amazing Stone Circle where you could literally feel the spirits calling from deep under ground.

There was a wonderful market there too where people come from all over (especially from Senegal on horses) to trade every thing from mangoes to horses and carts.

After a very eventful journey and a horrendous four hour wait at the ferry we ended up in a very minor car accident and car chase where the police caught the guy who'd pranged us and after much shouting and debate the matter was settled!

We are now back in our usual place tying up loose ends of the festival, thank you letters etc and it's now only a week till we get back to the UK - what an amazing three months it's been!

Here's a LINK to some photos of our recent trip - enjoy!

Two weeks in the Gambia doing amazing things every day could fill a book rather than a blog so it's hard to know where to start! I don't want to bore anyone but I don't want to leave important things out!

The two weeks was split into two - the first week I was working as a volunteer at the WYCE (Wonder Years Centre of Excellence) Project in Madina Salaam near Kartong - a small village about an hour south of Banjul right on the coast. The project has been operational for several years and runs about 7 classrooms, a basic clinic, a football pitch, a bee project, an ambulance, a kitchen garden and tree plantation, a fresh water stand pipe and other projects.
The Beekeeper

It's head office is in the UK and it was founded by an English couple originally. Nearly all the paid staff are local people (the teachers, the pharmacist, the general manager, the head gardener etc  and the volunteers are mostly visiting UK people there for the experience and cultural exchange.

The project is managed by local people with the co-operation of the village elders which is essential for such a project to have any chance of making a difference.

The village people have very basic living conditions - almost no-one has electricity or running water and health and education are the key factors the project is addressing. The project has single-handedly HALVED the child mortality rate in the area.

While I was there, I was involved transplanting 400 orange tree seedlings with a small group of people from the ground into little grow bags. They'll be sold on for fundraising.

Every job is so labour intentsive - I learnt such a lot doing these simple tasks about how much we take for granted. In the UK you'd go down to your local shop, buy a bag of compost and grow bags and hey presto. In Africa you have first to dig the rock hard soil, then break it up and soak it over night using buckets of water carried across the compound from the tap. You have to send plastic bags to the local tailor to have them stitched into small bags then fill them with the prepared soil.  You then have to move the filled bags in wheel barrows to another part of the compound and make a shade so that the plants don't dry out. Each plant is individually planted and watered carefully and then left in their shade for two or three months to grow before selling. The seeds are from the eating oranges and even those pips are never thrown away!

Admiring our handiwork - me and Omar the head gardener

I also spent a day cleaning the clinic area which consists of one smallish room and a modern bathroom so that if a woman gives birth there for example, they can have a shower. Myself and another woman spring cleaned the clinic and bathroom, did an inventory of the medicines and advised the staff that this needs to be done regularly. Despite the limited resources, this clinic has halved child mortalities in the village! Just through treating simple diseases like diarrhea and fast treatment of malaria and hygiene advice.

Yusufa the Pharmacist in the clinic

We also had tours of the project and of the village which was really fascinating. They are carrying out a local census through the project to find out who is and isn't attending school, who's been born or died etc and the people co-operate because they realise the benefit of it.

We watched a local football match on the sand pitch and despite some of the players being bare foot or wearing plastic sandals - they'd outrun some professional players any day!

Football in the Sand

We also learnt how to do proper tie dying stitching patterns into the fabric before dying. Here are the results and there are lots more photos on my facebook (see link at bottom of this post).

Tie-dyes

I can only touch on the things we did at the project and the lovely people I met but it was a wonderful and inspiring experience.

Receiving my Certificate of Participation from Eke the Chairman

My week at the project coincided with the Kartong Festival which we went to every evening to watch amazing singing, dancing, drumming, magic etc!

The second week was more of a holiday though focused on sabar drumming which is my main drumming speciality and I've written about it before. We had two two hour classes a day with a space in the middle of the day to go swimming or whatever we wanted to do.

This is a video clip of our wonderful teacher Modou Diouf playing the sabars unconventionally by hand bougarabou stylie - the man is rhythm incarnateOne night we played a small concert to local people and managed to get them up and dancing!

I spent a lot of time with my friend Pa Modou who visited the UK last year. He's a journalist and stayed with another friend in my home for about a week last year and he wanted to return the favour by showing me round the local villages. I met his wife and family, friends and neighbours and had the best of times really getting to see normal Gambian life rather than being a "tourist".  It was funny to keep hearing my music on local radio as it's quite popular in the Gambia and people had heard of me quite often!

With my friend Pa's family

One morning we went on a canoe trip up the River Halahin at dawn bird watching. The canoes are carved out of hard wood and take four months to make by hand.

Dawn birdwatching

The lifestyle is simple and hard but people seem pretty happy on the whole. We take so much for granted in the west and waste so many resources in comparison!

This was just a tiny snippet of what I did and saw. There are lots more photos at this link if you would like to see them:

Facebook Photos

I'm back from a most wonderful trip. I got back late last night and have a lot to do before I can blog about it properly.

I have lots of photos which I'll put up on Facebook soon and I'll put some here and a link to the rest.

I have lots to tell you all so watch this space and I'll be on the case in the next couple of days.

Hope you're all well xxx