The Time Traveller's Wife

Those of you following my career (hi mum) will be pleased to hear that it continue to spiral, and I am now the Acting Dean of the Law Faculty. In other words, the Dean went on holiday and I was, literally, the only one left.  The highlight of this new position occurred at an event to mark the end of term, at which all the Heads of Department (including me, as Acting Dean), gave speeches thanking their visiting lecturers (i.e. me). I pointed out that it might be a little unconventional to give a speech thanking myself, but as they say here, ‘all protocols must be observed’ so I thanked myself very nicely.  

So this leads me to reflect on my year here, and I think the best way to sum it up, is that, as a westerner in The Gambia, it’s a really easy place to live, and a really difficult place to work.   For me, as an uber-planner, one of the hardest things about working in The Gambia is the very different attitude to time.  

Today was a typical morning in the life of the Acting Dean. At 9am I got a phone call from Bobo, (the assistant at the law school and general legend, of whom photo attached). ‘Good morning Madame. There is a student arriving from America to be an intern for a month. She will be working with you’. ‘Really? I didn’t know anything about this’. ‘No maam, we did not tell you’.  ‘OK fine, when does she arrive?’. ‘She is here now’. (Deep breath). ‘Right, ask her wait, I’ll come in now’.   I get on my bike. The phone continues ringing. I ignore it in the interests of getting to work.  All around me Gambians, ever-helpful and ever-keen-to-point-out-the-bleeding-obvious, shout ‘THERE IS A PHONE RINING IN YOUR BAG!’ as I scream back ‘I KNOW BUT I’M CYCLING!’.  I stop to answer it. It’s Bobo.  ‘Bobo, I’m not there yet, you only rung five minutes ago’. ‘But Madame, there is something else. The Vice President of the Cape Verde Islands is coming and wants to look around the Law Faculty’.  ‘OK no problem. When is he coming?’.  ‘He is here now’. Thankfully it turns out to be the Vice Chancellor of a University in Cape Verde, not the Vice President.  Drenched in sweat, as always, I give him the tour of the university.

Saturday was the final competition to choose the students to  represent The Gambia at the African Human Rights Mooting Competition in Pretoria in July.  I was running the event, and was determined that it would start on time at 10am. I told my students they had to arrive by 9, which many did, so towards 10 it looked like we might be on time. However, shortly before 10 Bobo came to see me. ‘We have to wait, The Chancellor is coming’. ‘Why?’ ‘Because it is an important event’.  Hmm. OK. He arrived, but still we could not start. ‘The TV crew is arriving’.  Why???? ‘Because it is an important event’.  They arrived. Can we start now? ‘No. We are waiting for the sandwiches’.

It started at 11 – an hour late – not bad.  The event was great (photo attached), and I am taking the winners to Pretoria in July.  The item was on the news, but as it clashed with the Champions League Final, I’m not sure how many people saw it. If there is one thing that unites Gambians (even more than their love of sandwiches) it is their love of Man U. We watched the match with our neighbour, Saikou, who was so distraught at the end that he went to sit in a dark room on his own without saying goodbye, contrary to all rules of hospitality.  (I attach a photo of him with a Man U book which my sister sent him from the UK).

Talking of media, Pete was excited to hear that they were going to do a radio piece about his National Volunteering Programme, and was asked to write some content. He asked how long the slot would be, imagining twenty minutes at the most. He was told there would be eight one-hour slots, and he had to talk on all of them.  He’d got a couple under his belt when he turned up to a radio station where the previous presenter was just wrapping up. He told Pete the new presenter was late, but Pete should just ‘sit down, introduce himself, and get on with it’.  In this country, even hosting your own radio show is no reason to turn up on time.

Finally, attached are some photos of our neighbours on Independence Day, all in their best marching gear.  They invited us to watch them parade in front of the President, and said to be in Banjul at 10am. Our friends had been to a similar event and said it started four hours late, so we split the difference and left at 12.  We were just getting in the taxi when they called to say that … it had started on time and we had missed it. After ten months, I still don’t get it.

School

Berni fans (hello mum) may recall that back in September I achieved gainful employment as a visiting lecturer at the University of The Gambia. I had some trouble remembering this myself, after a rather pleasant six week Christmas break.  But there I was, back lecturing  for just ten days, when  school closed again.  This time the reason was a week with  two public holidays in it. (Public holidays here entail a day off before to travel home and a day after to travel back, so two in a week and the whole week is a complete write-off). 

Rather bad planning, I hear you say, to start a new term a week before there is another week’s holiday. But you would be wrong. Not bad planning. No planning. 

Holidays here tend to be announced the day before.  Sometimes this is understandable, because some Muslim holidays depend on the sighting of the moon, and so the date cannot be anticipated. However this holiday was the Prophet’s Birthday, which, one might think, fell on the same date each year.  After days of speculation we had not come any closer to discovering whether it would be the Tuesday or the Wednesday (speculation by me and my western colleagues I might add – Gambian colleagues were happy to wait and hear and were bemused by my demands for a firm date).  On Monday afternoon we had still not heard so called the administrator for an answer. He in turn called the Chancellor of the University. He confirmed that the University would have a holiday if it was a public holiday, for which we would have to watch the 10pm news that night.

Now all this was all of critical importance to me. Monday was Valentine’s night and someone was having a party. At 9pm I was in someone’s flat and my near future involved either staying at the party and making merry, or going home to prepare my morning lecture. In the end there was no announcement on the news, but lectures were cancelled anyway due to the confusion.  This is how things are organised here. Leaving things to the last, last minute is the norm. (I suspect that there are those amongst you who might suggest that waiting till 9pm the night before to prepare a lecture is also leaving things to the last minute.  Those people can keep their thoughts to themselves, thank you.)

What else to tell you about the University? It is by turn weird, cool, frustrating, challenging, amazing and moving. But mostly weird. Here, for your general amusement, are some of the more bizarre episodes.

This one from my friend Danny’s blog:

During the first week of classes we wanted to get email addresses for the students. One

student gave me her address as annaomendy@yahoo.com. Hers was among many, many,

many to bounce back. I called Anna (and the others) to my office. I asked if that was

her address. She corrected me – there was a full stop, annao.mendy@yahoo.com. Great,

problem solved, I must have misread her handwriting. I send out the next email round.

Anna O. Mendy bounces back again. A couple of days later (and now three weeks from

our initial attempt), I called Anna, walking through the halls, into my office.

“Anna,” I said. “Your email address still isn’t working. Is it annao.mendy@yahoo.com?” "Yes"

“Well it isn’t working, it’s bouncing back. Are you sure that’s it?” “Yes”

“…Do you have an email address?” “No”.

Well, that’s good. The next day, with a little help from her trusty Canadian contracts lecturer,

Anna O. Mendy had her very own email address, and would no longer have to make it up,

apparently in the hope that she would magically stumble across the syllabus in a pretend inbox, if

the pretend inbox had her name on it.

My favourite exam quote, and apologies for those who have heard this before, was about the Victorian legal philosopher AV Dicey.  ‘AV Dicey invented the rule of law in 1066 but it was later adapted by Aristotle’.  Nice teaching there, Berni.

And finally, another little tale to give you a flavour of life in The Gambia. Last Saturday Pete and I were feeling a little, er, delicate, after enjoying our Friday night a little too much.  In our weakened state we phoned for take-away from our local restaurant. Fatou assured me that she would send the same person who had delivered to our house before and so knew where we lived. (A crucial piece of information for this story is that streets here do not have names, and houses do not have names or numbers, so describing where you live is tricky. Especially if it’s ‘by the mosque’. I have *literally* no idea now Gambians find each others’ houses). 

Two hours later and no food. A rather tetchy Berni (and if you’ve ever suffered a hangover in a tropical climate, you will know it is no joke), called Fatou, who assured me that ‘he has just got in a taxi’.  Half an hour later a phone call.  ‘I am outside the Methodist church’.

 ‘Where is the Methodist church?’

 ‘I don’t know’

 ‘Do you know where I live?’

 ‘No’

‘Didn’t you come here before?’

 ‘No, this is Fatou’s son, I have never been to your house’.

 ‘Did Fatou tell you where I live?’

 ‘No’.

This kid had got in a taxi without knowing where he was getting out.  In my view this took not-planning- ahead to a whole new level. But if nothing else, your average Gambian is endlessly optimistic.

Food

I’m writing about the food of The Gambia due to popular demand (hi mum).  The main crop of The Gambia is peanuts. This is a bad thing because peanuts are worth, er, peanuts. Hence the country being very, very poor.  Apparently during the colonial era the British, in their wisdom, decided each African colony should be turned over to a different crop. Gambia was turned over to peanuts and remains so, meaning that there is almost no subsistence farming and everything is imported (including 80% of the rice, which is the mainstay of their diet).  It’s a bad situation and it means that food is relatively expensive – most of our income goes on food, and vegetables are expensive.  Most Gambians seem to survive on a diet of bread, palm oil and sugar, accounting for the disproportionately high diabetes rate.

However, we are rich westerners so we don't concern ourselves with such things.  Our biggest problem is where our next beer is coming from.   Julbrew, the only available brand, is tasty, cold, fizzy, and costs just 40p a bottle in your nearest non-Muslim shop. Unfortunately, here, your nearest non-Muslim shop is likely to be some way away.

Many things in Gambia remain a complete mystery to me and here is just one example – every road you go down has at least 2 or 3 goats, and yet I’ve never seen goat meat on a menu or in a shop, or goat’s milk, or cheese. What are they doing with the goats?

There seem to be five Gambian dishes, of which four (domada, yassa, afra and benachin) are delicious, and the fifth, (ebbeh), is fish stew so vile that Beelzebub himself would refuse it.  However, what Gambians mainly eat are tapalapas, which are french-bread –style sandwiches filled with omelet, beans or liver.  Gambians tend to have one of these around midday, call it breakfast, and as far as I can tell don’t eat for the rest of the day except sugary drink s and peanuts. Pete, on the other hand, has breakfast with me, then Gambian ‘breakfast’ tapalapa with his colleagues at 12, and then lunch at 1.

The Brufut 'Marathon'

I should have had an inkling of how the Brufut ‘marathon’ would pan out when I went to pay my entry fee.  Having been sent to three different buildings, I finally met a lady who took my money, wrote my name on a scrap of paper, and gave it to me (presumably in case I forgot my own name).  She assured me that the race began at 9am, despite the announcement in the newspaper that it began at 8am.  Arriving on the big day at 9am to find no one around, I assumed she was mistaken and that I had missed the race. However, as women in running gear began to drift up from about 9.30 I realised that getting there too late was not going to be a problem for anyone.  I say ‘women’, but apart from a handful of very fit looking women from the Gambian national team, this was more of a schoolgirl affair.  And I say ‘running gear’, but most of the competitors were running in socks, with the rest in jelly shoes. Only I and the other white woman wore trainers.   

If milling about were an Olympic sport Gambia would get a gold medal, and so it was that we passed quite some time waiting for the race to start.  Then, without ceremony, someone (I suspect a bored schoolgirl) said ‘go’ and everyone tore off at maximum speed.  Within minutes I could hardly see any other competitors, so fast did they all sprint. However it wasn’t all that long before I began overtaking my fellow runners, who were now walking or collapsed in a heap having run all-out and exhausted themselves.  I do not exaggerate when I say ‘collapsed’; they really did fall over in the most over-dramatic of styles, at which point the ambulance would come and scoop them up and take them to the finish line. The ambulance was constantly picking up exhausted athletes who had run, in some cases, over 300 meters.  I don’t know what percentage where stretchered off but I suspect over 50%.  (And I have no idea where this ambulance came from either. It’s the only ambulance I’ve ever seen in The Gambia).

The route was lined by the good people of Brufut giving enthusiastic support.  Whenever they saw me the people would shout ‘go toubab’ (meaning white person) and then literally fall about laughing, so amusing was it to see a white woman being outclassed by the remaining schoolchildren.

In terms of distance, I heard that the course was 42k, i.e. a full marathon, but it turned out that was for the bike race.  Then I heard it was 15k, but that was the men’s race.  The women’s was advertised as 8k, but a quick check on google earth showed it to be more like 3k.  Of course I didn’t know that when I started so I was holding quite a lot back when it suddenly ended.  By elbowing some of the smaller children in the face I managed to finish in a decent position.

At the finish the runners were of less interest to the crowd than the frequent arrival of the ambulance, which with every new arrival had a small army of children running after it (no doubt preparing for a legal career by chasing ambulances, ho ho).