Blogs from District of Banjul , Gambia, Africa - page 3

After getting to the hotel at 2:30 in the morning after 24 hours in transit, the 9am alarm for breakfast comes entirely too soon. I theory we have a slate of meetings today with the ministry of education and the mayor, the when and where is of course still in flux. A quick breakfast at the hotel, a quick dip in the somewhat chilly (but lovely) Atlantic Ocean and we are ready, but still waiting for word on our schedule and our transport. As Americans it is still an overwhelming case of HUAW (Hurry Up And Wait). We will adapt, though it will take a few days to really get the hang of it. This is the only day of meetings that I will be involved in for a couple of days. We are meeting with ... 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

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

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