A Very Gambian Moment
on Phil Bradfield (The Gambia), 25/Jun/2010 13:52, 34 days ago
(Written 25/06/2010 08:30, RED5, Janjanbureh)OK, so this is a real“Gambian Moment”. It’s 8:30am, and I’m sat on the porch outside my office. On any normal day, this place at this time would be well-populated with people milling around, lounging on broken chairs, chatting, shaking hands, and generally doing all those really urgent things which just have tobe done during the first hour of the working day.Today however, the office is deserted. No broad welcoming smiles, no staccato voices yelling across the compound. No-one. My office is securely locked, as are all the others, and generally the whole place has had a severe attack of the Marie Celeste’s. And I know why.It’s because it’s raining.I’m not talking about your typical Gambian thunderstorm-plus-torrential-downpour combo here. This is British-style steady rain pitter-pattering from a dull grey sky which could have been transported directly from Grimsby on bank holiday weekend. But it’s enough to keep everyone from coming into work. I guess now I know how a Norwegian, for example, must feel when he hears about British schools having “snow days”. To a Brit, the idea of a bit of rain stopping people getting to their place of work is just incomprehensible.I must admit, I quite enjoyed my walk into work this morning. Apart from the mango trees and the cloying mud underfoot, I could have been back at home! I’ll admit that, if I was in a Gambian’s shoes (or rather flip-flops, everyone here lives in them) I wouldn’t fancy walking on the slippery, sucking mud that I gaily strolled through in my walking boots. I was walking with one guy this morning when his flip-flop simply broke: he’d had to pullso hard to overcome the suction of the mud that the strap simply snapped.In the twenty minutes or so since I started writing, precisely one of my colleagues has turned up, accompanied by one of the cleaners. And how come Mucktar made it in when no-one else has? He phoned up one of the office drivers and got him to play taxi.There are so many things about this country which just seem bizarre to a European. Some of them are very touching. Many of them, especially at work, just make you want to bawl with frustration. But sometimes, like today, there’s nothing to do but sit back, consider just how far you’ve come and how utterly alien so many things are here, and just laugh, and laugh, and laugh.