Blogs from Gambia, Africa - page 4

I have been in Gambia for 2 weeks today. I can't believe the time is going so quickly. I guess that's why I havent written anything on here since last Friday. Over the weekend nothing too exciting happened. On friday night after having a quick hot sandwich from a local bar we came home and chilled out for a bit. I then watched the boys play poker using cotton buds as poker chips, I still have no idea how to play! We had a few drinks and then went out at about 12:30am to a bar/club called Ozio's, it was really good fun. We danced for a few hours then decided to head home about 3am. Everyone was really friendly and it all felt very safe which I was pleased about, drinking is not a big ... read more

I have now completed my first week in the hospital here at the MRC. It's really nice and everyone is really friendly. There is a main consultant whose specialty is paediatrics but he looks after the whole hospital. When I say hospital it's a bit of an overstatement, there are 3 wards, a paediatric ward with 17 beds, a female ward and a male ward with about 10-12 beds depending on the number of admissions. The wards are simple, each bed is a single bed and a bedside locker. There is no wall oxygen or anything like that and no electric monitoring. There is one electric BP machine for the whole of the hospital, a definite contrast. The only thing that I think the hospital does better than the UK is the space that it leaves ... read more

It’s been almost a week since I left Basse. I’m not sure where the time has gone. It always seems to go faster here in Kombo. I had very mixed emotions about leaving. Lamin came up on the Tuesday and I spent most of Wednesday packing up my little house. I managed to hold back any tears until Adama, my lovely little friend, came into my room and gave me a length of material with some little plastic earrings and a ring wrapped up in it. My last night was a bit all over the place. We’d planned to cook for the whole compound, or rather I’d planned for Lamin to cook for the whole compound, but at around 3 o’clock Binta had some terrible news that her brother had been killed in a car crash ... read more

I think I was on the telly last night! On Saturday we had the Region 6 Teachers awards and the event was featured in the evening news. I had to attend to present the award for best ECD teacher of the year. Over the last few weeks I and many of the other staff in the office have been verifying teacher’s nominations as I trekked around the schools. However, the actual oraginsation of the day happened in typical Gambian fashion i.e. there’s plenty of time to get things done... don’t worry about it... oh god it’s tomorrow, we’d better get something orgainsed. I’d been out of the office all week trekking with FIOH so I managed to pretty much stay out of the way of things but poor old Eleanor was stressed to death with it. ... read more

Work has been busy lately. I’ve done my workshops. I think they were moderately successful if not slightly frustrating.Most of the teachers responses were to complain that they had never had training in early years followed directly by requests to finish early or ‘I need to go out to drink water/answer this phone call/go for a wander around’. I thought the activities I did were relatively simple but they really struggled with some of them. The idea of planning an activity to do every day but making it a little bit harder towards the end of the week totally baffled them and you should have seen their faces when I said big sticks shouldn’t even be in the classroom even if they were to only threaten children with a beating rather than actually using them. I ... read more