Blogs from Banjul, District of Banjul , Gambia, Africa

The day got off to a surreal start when I walked out of the compound to see a one legged man riding a bike. How does that even work? I’m still baffled. Lamin has to take some people to Dakar today so, as taking a car on the Banjul ferry is a bit of a nightmare, he takes it over the day before so he and his customers can get the first ferry in the morning and just hop on as foot passengers. Stupidly, I agreed to do this little job with him. Definitely stupid as I have to get this ferry every time I want to come down to Kombo,(unless I manage to hitch a lift with someone important enough to have a car, in which case we go on the south road) so I ... read more

The hot, as they say, has definitely reached Basse. According to the BBC the temperature reached 42° though without any breeze it felt even hotter. The heat wouldn’t be so bad to deal with if the generator at the local power station could handle the heat, but like everything else in Basse at this time of year, the temperature gets too much and it, along with everyone, stops working properly. Having electricity to charge my laptop so that I have something to occupy myself with on an evening suddenly dropped straight down my list of priorities; without electricity the fans don’t work and even worse than that, the fridges don’t work so you can’t get your water cold. The water from the tap, when it decides to come on, comes out warm enough to have a ... read more

It’s been a while since I updated my blog; I’ve been busy entertaining my Mam and Dad on their visit, so prepare for a bit of a long entry. I have lots to catch up on. First thing I made my Mam and Dad do was cheer me on in the 10k run. I was a bit worried about it as I’d had a nasty cold and had had an unusual busy week at work the week before meaning that I hadn’t been out training for 2 weeks before hand. The event was organised in typical Gambian fashion. An email went out to some of the runners at 4 o’clock the night before saying that the start time had changed to an hour earlier. Needless to say when we got there at the new time there ... read more

Yes I passed the motorbike course... finally! It’s been a week of ups and downs, one up being that we got a new instructor, Sal. Sal had this crazy forward thinking approach of actually giving instructions and a bit of advice as to how one should ride a motorbike as opposed to just letting us ride around a field for days on end trying to work it out for ourselves. So by Wednesday we were ready to have a go on the road. Unfortunately Chris didn’t quite make it to this. After falling off for the 4th time she finally admitted her limits, or at least the limits of her poor bruised legs. She’s fine thankfully but has decided that there must be other ways of getting about the schools of Soama. That was a bit ... read more

This week has been all about the language lessons. I’m learning Mandinka and it’s really hard! The structure of the language seems simple enough but all the words sound the same. They only have one way of pronouncing each letter which means there’s not many sounds to choose from. I have a feeling this is going to lead to some embarrassing mistakes. Here’s a possible one. We were flicking through our sheets of vocabulary and noticed that among the names of parts of the body they’d decided to give us the Mandinka word for vagina. This is ‘bee’, pronounced ‘beh’. The trouble is the word for ‘am’ is ‘be’, also pronounced ‘beh’ but with an ever so slightly shorter sound. Now what are the chances that at some point I’m going to unknowingly slightly over state ... read more

I'm sitting here writing by windup lantern light. The electric has been off all evening which means, worse than anything, the fan's are off. The water is also off which means we're flushing the toilet, in the dark, with buckets of water. I've just had a bucket bath, in the dark, which was rendered useless as I was just as sweaty after drying myself as I was when I first started. To top it all I have a dodgy belly and sharing the house with four others while having this dodgy belly has to be the most mortifying experience of my life. I won't go into details! So this is the life of the volunteer in The Gambia. Not that I'm complaining mind! I just want to remember this when I'm back at home sitting watching ... read more

Today we visited the village of Ndemban to get a taste of village life in The Gambia. We set off early in a little minibus and drove for about an hour out into the countryside. When we arrived at the village we were told not to drive down the small road leading to the village because the women had prepared a welcome celebration for us. We piled out of the bus to be met by about 30 women and goodness knows how many children all dressed in the colours of The Gambia and chanting traditional songs. They were really into it, blowing on their whistles, stamping their feet and dancing around the instrument that one of them was playing. We slowly made our way up to the village school where the rest of the village had ... read more

So where to start. It feels like an age since I set off. Thursday started after no sleep whatsoever. The nerves had definitely kicked in. I spent most of the day telling myself 'I'm fine, I'm fine, this is definitely the right thing to do and I will have an amazing time', when really I was think 'holy crap, what the hell am I doing, this is surely not the right thing to be doing!'. I flew from Newcastle to Brussels and at Brussels I met my fellow VSO volunteers for the first time. Boy was I glad to see them. Traveling felt a whole lot more comfortable with a group of people that knew as little as I did. On the flight I got my first taste of Gambian friendliness. About an hour from landing ... read more

Reverse Sex Tourism It may be low key, but for West Africa this place is a tourist haven - The Sharm el Sheik, the Zanzibar you could say. But it’s also a venue for sex tourism of another kind. It maybe in its infancy but its there - and it gives a chance for the male gender to inform women that, ‘Hey, you do it too!” There were two reasons for me to travel here. One was because the VISA is free for Australians. And after forking out extortionate visa fees of $93 for Bissau and $107 for Guinea I thought I have to take this opportunity. The other reason was to see middle-aged British women reverse the sex tourism scene. I wasn’t sure how I was going to travel this country. Should I venture inland ... read more