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Long hours and new demands

I began this week with a heavy cold, my first in years, as Tom went into work. This might have been picked up the previous weekend when we went on a long boat ride along the river Gambia in a small boat powered by a man and a paddle. He used a strange kind of turning action to move the boat forwards as he stood precariously at the back. By Wednesday I was fit enough to join a flurry of activity at the office and we ended the week spending very long hours in meetings and preparing training materials and presentations for teachers and getting ready for meetings in various schools across the region.
The strange thing about Basse is that it appears that everyone knows us. Having visited almost every school, children and now adults from pop up every corner of the town, villages and streets have replaced their cries of ‘Toubab’ with ‘Sira’ & ‘Alpha’. To further illustrate this point , we went shopping on Saturday morning only to be accosted by a young man we had never met before who welcomed Tom with the line, ‘ are you the VSO man that fixes computers, can you look at my laptop?’ Similarly I am now seen as somebody who can help with homework and am visited every evening by young children who want their help in doing their school work. I am delighted to say that I have been given 100% every night by teachers that have not commented on the different handwriting used to do the work. We also had a first last week when bugs began crawling out of a computer that Tom as repairing. Real bugs, not computer bugs but small nasty quick real black hard to kill bugs. Needless to say I made him fix the machine outside in the compound.
At the moment we are in a Gambian winter. Everyone is wearing padded parkas as temperatures have dropped to as low as 18O C, 12O at night and in fact it has become so cold that I turned our fan off for the first time since our arrival. Consequently we are now active and happy, wandering around in a bearable heat with cloudy days. That said walking is still hard work. It appears that the creeping Sahara has turned even the Gambia into a sandy country. Every path, bush highway and road is like walking along the beach at Skegness. It is not hard sand but a soft orange sand that makes your feet filthy and wears you down as if you were climbing dunes away from the sea. We have got to the stage where even soaking in a bucket for an hour has little effect!
Tom got very excited last week after a shopping trip to Basse town – he found some yoghurts which he brought home and as I remember it devoured all 6 of them that evening! He claims I had some but that I don’t remember and today there is not a yoghurt in sight. It has reminded us that when something is in the shops you buy it because tomorrow it will be gone and unavailable for months.
Life here in the Gambia was very frustrating when we arrived as everything was so slow and we did nothing but now we are accelerating along a highway which demands more and more of our time. We continue to play petanca most evenings and are joined by some regulars and a hotchpotch of other ragamuffins. We also continue to attract a large following of spectators and a mixture of passing onlookers including the women who sell ground nuts and bananas.
Looking forwards we have been asked to assist in the training of newly qualified teachers in Janjanbureh and Tom has been asked to visit and support the IT department in Banjul so along with the scheduled demands on our time that could keep us occupied until 2012 the new year promises to be a busy if not an exciting one. We are of course looking forward to Christmas but not the 12 hour ride back to the Kombo from Basse. Please note, last weeks video that went missing is now available, see last weeks blog.