The Gambia or Bust!

So guess what was in my bed last night. No seriously, guess. It’s probably the most disgusting thing you can fathom. Maggots. There were maggots on my mattress. Now I don’t have a lot of experience with maggots but these seemed a little more complex than your average ‘taco-got-shoved-behind-toaster’ variety. They had a sort of translucent body with a dark center and they would play dead when you brushed against them with a broom/newspaper/anything within reach at one o’clock in the morning. Why do I have maggots in my bed? Well I’m pretty sure it has something to do with her:

Boo (chewing my cell phone charger)

Meet ‘Boo’. She’s named that because the generic name for cat in Mandinka is ‘Moose’ so I was going to go with ‘Caribou’ but that’s kind of hard for Gambians to say so…Boo it is. I should clarify that I had absolutely no intention of getting a pet during my time here. Tell that to a tiny little kitten meowing relentlessly at two o’clock in the morning in a neighboring compound because she is hungry and being kicked around like an insect on someone’s shoe. Of course when the American goes out to investigate what in the world is going on, they all look at me like, ‘Well?’ My choices seemed limited to a) go back inside and pretend I didn’t hear anything while my sense of decency trickled away into the night or b) rescue the poor thing and buy a twenty cent package of powdered milk to quiet her down. Well the above is a picture of her on my bag so I’ll let you come to your own conclusions on how that little scenario played out. She’s pretty adorable and it is nice having her around but I do stand by my initial opinion that it is distracting to have a pet and it takes away from the amount of time I spend with my village and family. I think that will change as she gets older though, so I don’t regret my decision (like I really had a choice). She’s already graduated from being hand fed with a medicine dropper and crying constantly to eating out of a dish and purring the majority of the time so things are moving in the right direction.

What does all of this have to do with maggots? Well they don’t sell cans of Purina cat food out in the bush so I’ve had to experiment some with what to feed her. She’s too small to hunt for her own food at this point but I do want her to start doing that somewhere down the line since I’m not sure what will happen with her after I leave. They sell this powdered milk in the ‘bitiks’ (tiny little hole-in-the-wall shops within the village) which has been her staple thus far. When that didn’t seem to fill her up as much as it should (read: incessant crying) I started going to a Fulla compound and getting her some fresh milk. The Gambia is populated with five major African tribes: Mandinka, Fulla, Wollof, Pullar and Serahouli. Each tribe has their own language and customs yet they coexist peacefully for the most part. When I say ‘tribe’ it makes me think of pictures in National Geographic in which people are walking around in loincloths with gigantic plugs through their earlobes. It’s not like that at all. Technology wise these people are living like it’s 1852 (except for the cellphones – more on that later) but they have a lot of similarities to Westerners in their day to day activities and a lot of their attitudes.


Here’s my third grade report on The Gambia:


Clothing:

Me with Lamin the Mauratainian shopkeeper (3rd from left)

and a couple of customers.

My neighbors

About 50% of the men wear ‘traditional’ clothing which basically look like pajamas. It’s usually the older men who wear traditional clothing the majority of the time. Younger men fluctuate daily between traditional wear and western wear. On special occasions and Fridays (big prayer day) most people dress traditionally. A lot of the younger men have begun to wear western clothes almost exclusively. Most of it is ‘urban fashion’, i.e. baggy jeans, logo shirts, baseball caps and beanies (hip hop has a huge influence here). They have these piles of western clothes laid out on tarps on the ground at the market which they call the ‘dead toubob pile’ because ‘the only reason a toubob would get rid of stuff this great is if he were dead’.

The opening of our health center

The girls dress much more traditionally. In my village they ALL wear ankle length wrap skirts and matching shirts. Well the skirts start out with matching shirts but since they are doing pretty intensive domestic work throughout the majority of their day they usually trade those in for random printed t-shirts and when I say random I mean RANDOM, think Flaming Lips concert shirts from 1996. Next time you toss an old shirt into a donation pile keep in mind that it could quite possibly end up in a rural African village and be worn by a fourteen-old girl who is the third wife of a guy who lives in Sweden who supports his family by transporting corrugate metal to Africa and has a baby on the way (a fairly common scenario here).

Everyday wear

Well that’s how they dress at all times except ‘program’ nights. ‘Programs’ are held regularly and they are basically makeshift dance clubs. DJs will bring in a generator and these enormous speakers, along with a PA system and CD player. They will fence off an area and then charge people roughly forty cents to come in and dance. This starts at about eleven and night and usually finishes up at about four in the morning. The music is so loud that it literally sounds like the speakers are pushed up against my window and turned to full blast. So anyway on program nights the girls trade in their traditional clothes for fairly trashy 80’s wear! There are a lot of really tight pants and skimpy tops involved. Big belts too and for some reason they enjoy leaving the tags on some of these items. I think it’s supposed to signify that it’s new but I’m not completely sure. I should point out that these girls are all in amazing shape from the daily physical labor they do, so no matter how tacky an item may be, it all looks really good on them. There’s a reason African American girls have a reputation for being able to fill out a pair of jeans and their sisters across the Atlantic are no exception.
Wait…wasn’t I talking about maggots? How did I get onto how Gambian girls look in their stretch jeans? Oh yeah, Fullas and milk. Okay, so anyway yeah, no one’s wearing a loin cloth or anything like that around here. The majority of my village are Mandinkas and they primarily farm for a living. Most of what they grown are sustenance crops (they eat most of what they grow instead of selling/exporting it). There are also a few Fulla compounds on the outskirts of the village. Fullas farm too but their primary source of income stems from cattle. Families can own anywhere from a couple of cows to large herd so they spend most of their time tending to them.

A village cow

(Gambians think it's crazy that I take pictures of cows and donkeys. I made the mistake of letting them see me do it once and now they get all excited when they see me approaching a herd. 'Natloo!(picture!), Nataloo!, Nataloo! can be heard far and wide.)

On the ‘tending’ note let me share an example of why I say the men, or at least the boys, are no slouches when it comes to the amount of work they do compared with the girls. During the ‘dry season’ (October – March) there is NO rain ( hence ‘dry’) and there are certainly no natural bodies of water to be found anywhere (except for the river which is pretty far from most settlements/villages). Well the cows need to drink so it’s the boys job to fetch water for them. Um okay, I'm going to stop whining about fetching my measly five buckets of water on laundry day. These boys fetch twenty, TWENTY! , 20-liter containers of water a day for the cows to drink! I can’t even pick one of those up after it has been filled with water. That container is like a shopping basket filled with ten, 2-liters bottles of soda!

The Fullas rarely slaughter their cattle for meat , they are too poor and that would be too indulgent. Instead they sell the milk the cattle produce and trade the animals themselves as a form of currency. I haven’t seen a lot of attention being paid to animal husbandry so I’m not sure how involved they are in the breeding process but calves are born occasionally which increases the family’s wealth. With limited options in the cat food arena, I’m grateful to have some Fullas around who will give me a little bit of milk once in awhile. (Yes I know you are not supposed to give cats cow’s milk but my options are pretty limited here so I’m doing the best I can.) Well Boo seemed to enjoy the milk and it seemed to fill her up more than the powdered variety but guess what happens to milk when you don’t have a refrigerator? It gets pretty chunky pretty fast. Gambians consume two types of milk: ‘fresh’ milk and ‘sour’ milk. Fresh milk is just that, straight from the cow. Sour milk is fresh milk about twenty-four hours after it has left the cow and is a totally valid food choice here. They usually mix into their porridge. It must be an acquired taste though because Boo isn’t having any of it, or maybe I just have to make some porridge for her, she is a Gambian cat after all. Now that she’s getting bigger a milk only diet isn’t cutting it so I have reverted back to the powdered milk (getting that fresh milk from the Fullas was a big production; long walk, lots of greeting, gifts of appreciation since they refused payment for it) and have introduced smoked fish. A main staple of the Gambian diet is fish (the country’s biggest geographical feature is a nice river full of them) and like the milk, it comes in two varieties, fresh and smoked.

Smoked fish

Smoked is very popular because of the whole ‘no refrigerator’ thing. They grind it up and add it to most of their dishes. I should probably point out here that my cat eats better than most Gambians which is something I’m not particularly proud of but I feel sort stuck between a rock and hard place about it. I’ve taken responsibility for the cat and I have the resources to feed her well and keep her healthy. I don’t have the resources to feed the country well and keep it healthy, so I’m doing what is within my ability. People aren’t starving here, there is generally a nice amount of food in the food bowl but it can be somewhat nutritionally wanting (a bunch of white rice and not a whole lot else). My cat on the other hand has been getting approximately one smoked fish a day. All right I’m done justifying my western value system, let’s talk about maggots! One day I got a ‘not-so-smoked’ batch of smoked fish and I think that was the source of my bunk mates. When I went to investigate the bag of fish, your run of the mill, white rice resembling wigglers were in there (eww) and I suspect the things on my mattress were ‘Stage 2’ of the life cycle process. The bag went down the latrine, the guests got swept out and I haven’t seen a trace of them since. So there you have it, how the horrifying discovery of maggots on one’s bed can lead to a discussion on West African fashion and tribal economic systems.

Fo Wati Doo! (Until next time!)