Eating like a Gambian

I thought I liked spicy foods before I came to Gambia. I didn’t know what spicy food was before I came here. A Gambian person will often eat three spicy meals a day. A person will cook a big pot of rice and a big pot of spicy stew to put over the rice to eat for lunch and dinner. The stew usually has some kind of vegetable, fish, and sauce with copious amounts of pepper in it. Domodah is my favorite. Domodah is peanut (or groundnut, in local terms) paste, mashed together with fish and served over rice. Whatever the stew is, it is always cooked for hours over a fire fueled by wood or charcoal usually in an outdoor shelter usually consisting of three walls and a tin or thatched roof. I have to eat the Gambian dishes slowly because the fish are always cooked whole, which means sifting carefully through to avoid tiny bones.
People here have no problem navigating the dishes. Food is always shared large communal bowls with everyone gathered around digging in with their right hands. Everyone is able to form a perfect ball of rice and stew with their fingers and pop it in their mouths. (Thankfully) They always give the toubab a spoon. There is no such thing as waste or leftovers here. This makes sense, because refrigeration is not very common. Whatever isn’t eaten for lunch and dinner is eaten at breakfast.
Nobody eats during the day. Breakfast is in the morning, with lunch often not eaten until four or five o’clock. Instead people drink copious amounts of a strong black tea called attaya. Attaya is not only a drink, but also a ritual. Attaya requires a big platter, a pot of clean water, a pot for brewing, a small stove, plenty of sugar, two tiny cups, and the special gunpowder tea which is a green tea from China. The tea is really strongly brewed over the stove, plenty of sugar is added to the brew, and then poured into one of the cups. The man making the attaya pours the tea from cup to cup cooling the liquid and also building up a foam so that eventually both cups are filled with attaya and foam. The cups are handed out to people who are supposed to slurp down the sweet, bitter brew as quickly as possible in order to pass the cup to the next person. It’s pretty delicious.

Abuko National Park

I finally made it over to Abuko National Park. The Park is located right across from where I'm staying, but it's taken me nearly a month to venture past the gates. I'm really happy I did. There is one trail, about 2 miles long, that goes from the entrance of the park to the opposite end. It is mostly shaded by gallery forest with huge vines. Some of the palm trees were wrapped in a parasitic tree that made a web around the trunk and ate away at the palm bark. The effect was to have these cylinders of webbed wood nearly empty where a tree used to stand.
All along the walk I encountered wildlife. All over Gambia (and especially in the courtyard of my lodge) there are these beautiful lizards that have yellow heads, blue bodies, and black tails that are tipped white. In Abuko, though, I saw my first monitor lizards. These are huge green lizards with long pointy tails that whip back and forth when they walk. I also got to see the first monkeys I've seen in the country. I saw a whole troupe of yellow monkeys sitting in the trees about ten feet away just kind of looking around. One of them spotted me and got out of the tree and started to approach me. I was alone, and not quite ready to make friends with a monkey, so I walked away pretty quickly.
At the end of the trail is the animal orphanage where the park houses injured animals for rehabilitation. There was a troupe of baboons, a cage full of parrots, and a pen housing some hyenas. The hyenas were incredible! I thought they were leopards at first because they had a really intricate pattern on their fur that I had never seen before. They were also huge! I was very impressed. I can't wait to go back.

Tanji Fish Market

Well, it finally happened. I got sick. I suppose it had to, because everyone told me it had to, even though I did my best to pretend like I was invincible. However, I’m feeling much better now, and even felt well enough to do an aquaculture rack construction training in Kartung on Tuesday.
The drive down to Kartung took me from my office right in the middle of the country all the way to the very southern border of Gambia, almost to Senegal. On the way we drove by the Atlantic coast and past huge areas of undeveloped forest and swamp. Arriving in Kartung we helped the women construct a rack. The photos here are not actually from that training, but from one last week. All the racks look the same though, so you get the picture. The other photo was taken at one of the landing sites, showing one of the women shucking oysters for sale along the Brikama Highway.
On the way back from the training we stopped at the Tanji fish market. Some of the guys I work with, Bouba, Babanding, Aleu, and Lamin, wanted to buy some fish there to take back to their compounds. In order to get to the market I had to follow them over this cement driveway and around the corner of a building. As we came around the building, the market and the sea became visible. I stopped and stared and took in the whole scene until Lamin grabbed my arm to pull me out of the way of a wheelbarrow full of fish about to mow me down from behind. The market was huge. It was hundred of vendors selling untold amounts of fish to thousands of customers all out on the open beach. People were shouting and carrying buckets of fish on their heads. They wore old ski masks soaked with sea water and stuffed with cloth to give their head a little padding. The vendors that weren’t lucky enough to have a spot at one of the tables to display their fish had to carry huge fish around by the tail and elbow or shout at people to try to get them to buy. I saw fish you could eat in one bite and some that were half the size of me. I saw squid and ray. There were bottom feeders like catfish, and pelagic fish like sardinella. I even saw one person selling shark. Out at sea the boats were coming in with the sun setting behind them. The boats are these painted wooden motor-boats with benches around the edges. About fifty young men fit in one boat and there were probably thirty of these boats coming in to anchor at once. All of the men hopped out and started carting the fish away in buckets to throw into wheelbarrows lined up at the sea edge. The men holding the wheelbarrows were shouting. They were fighting for the fishermen’s attention. I got slapped with more than one fish while at the market. All of that commotion and bargaining was happening in Mandinka, but I don’t think it was the language that made the market feel so incomprehensible. It was not chaos. It was just a lot of noise and movement that I did not have the experience to decipher, but it was perfectly reasonable to everyone else at the market. I think it was that disconnect- the fact that no one else was awed or laughing that made me recognize most how out of place I was. The men I was with each bought a grocery bag full of fish. I walked away with a couple of mangoes.

Looking up

I've been going out in the boats a lot lately. Most recently to help construct aquaculture racks and train the oyster harvester on how to make them. The racks are really simple. It's just nine pieces of bamboo tied together with wire and strung with lengths of rope with oyster shells attached.
The baby oysters will grab onto the old shells, grow, and you've got a little oyster garden.
My favorite part of the whole thing, though, is the trip to and from the building site. The mangroves are beautiful. The women paddle us in the dug out canoes while we just get to sit and enjoy the ride. I love to look at the fish jumping out of the water, like there are so many they don't all fit, and the crabs skittering through the tangled mass of mangrove roots.
More than that, though, I love looking up and seeing the sky filled with birds. I have never seen birds like I see them here. They are all shapes and sizes. There are herons and eagles, and loads of these tiny little swallows that look like jet fighters in formations when they fly. The sky is never empty, and it never fails to delight.
At night too, as I walk home from Kawsu and Binta's house I see some pretty incredible stuff in the sky. First the vultures swoop in to land in the mango trees and I always think they are going to break something- either a bone or a branch- because they are so huge! Then, the bats come out. You know they are coming because the trees come alive with noise. They start squeaking and shaking leaves and finally emerge from the trees by the hundreds. Thousands. Just at the sun goes down the entire town is covered in a shadow of bats. It's incredible.

Photos

Here are a couple of photos from the naming ceremony. The first is me in my new Gambia clothes and Binta in one of the fifteen beautiful outfits she had made for that day.
The second is the sheep we bought that day to replace the one that died unexpectedly that morning. It was delicious.

Naming Ceremony

Yesterday was the naming ceremony for Binta and Kawsu's youngest two children. This ceremony is basically just a big party that lasts all day. We started getting ready at about 9 in the morning. Everybody looks their absolute best for the naming day ceremony. For the women, that means lots of make up, nail polish, bags, shoes, and dresses. I say lots, because everybody changes throughout the day, including their make up. Binta put on a new outfit every hour! She had to bring an entire suitcase full of clothes just for the one day. Each outfit was more colorful and elaborate than the last, and each had shoes and bag to match. I only had one outfit, but it was specially made for me for that day. I'm not sure if it looked to good on me, because when people would see me their first reaction was always laughter. I heard a lot of "Today you are African" type statements too. Another big part of the day is everybody compliments everybody else on how beautiful they look and how nice their clothes are. I liked this part.
My favorite part of the day, however, had to be the dancing. After the sun goes down and the temperature drops from unbearably hot to tolerably hot, the band comes and everybody gets up and starts shaking it. Some of the women were trying to teach me how to do African dancing, but for the most part my attempts were again met with laughter. The band calls the names of people in the crowd and then everybody rushes to the front with money in hand. Someone holds out a huge metal bowl and everybody starts throwing money into this bowl to show that they like the music. The whole day had that same exuberant, extravagant atmosphere. By the time I left at around 10:30, while the party was still raging, I was ready for bed.

The market

African time is not American time. I had heard this before coming here, but it's no joke. We had to weigh one thing at the lab in Banjul, and the man who said he would be there in fifteen minutes showed up an hour and a half later. Binta, my sponsor Kawsu's wife, told me to meet her at West Field at 4, and showed up at 5. This will take some getting used to. I still get butterflies in my stomach if I don't think I will be to a place five minutes early. I've been here a week, but my clock is still set to America.
When Binta did finally show up in West Field, though, we had a great time. She took me to the market at Serrekunda. The market in Serrekunda is street after street of stalls with wooden sides and tin roofs. Women sit inside the stalls selling fabric or mangoes and waving themselves with fans. Many of the men walk around draped in their products- phone cards slung over their shoulders or sunglasses on racks in their hands. There is so much movement and so many people. Everything is dusty from all those feet and cars kicking up the dirt road.
It seems that there is no need for so many shops. Every fourth one sells the same shoes and purses, or the same tiny bananas. We were looking to buy some fabric and we passed fabric shop after fabric shop. Finally we came into the center of the market and found the fabric shop Binta was looking for, that seemed to me to have the same fabric as all of the others, but was apparently special. I picked out a color and we took it to the tailor for him to sew me a dress for the naming ceremony for Binta's kids tomorrow. I hope nobody minds when I show up in this beautiful dress and for my feet I only have Chacos.

Field work

Yesterday was my first field work experience! I arrived at the office (after a two hour adventure/debacle on the mini busses) and met Emily, a Peace Corps volunteer here. Emily and her two colleagues were going out into the wetlands to collect water samples and survey some experimental plates for baby oyster growth. Guess who they invited to go with them?! You may think I’m a little over-excited about this, but it was actually the bomb. Yaya drove us in a truck to the put-in site swerving down these tiny dirt roads. The previous night had also been the first rain of the season, so what are usually bad roads, were just barely navigable. That didn’t phase Yaya though- I think he just saw it as a challenge. After all that excitement we arrived at the put in spot where a few people agreed to paddle us out in their dug out canoes. These canoes are incredible. They are just these great old hollowed out and tapered logs with a few board rested across the top. They are even tippy-er than you might guess. We just stuck to the estuary where the water was calm because it is sheltered by huge islands of lush mangroves, but apparently people take these boats out on the open sea. I can’t imagine it.
Today we did “market research” which consisted of visiting one of the oyster harvesting communities and buying four cups of oysters. The women shuck the oysters by the ton, it seems. Giant mounds of empty oyster shells were piled high all around the area. Some of the mounds were smoking, which was explained to me to be the process of converting the shells into lime. After weighing and counting the oysters comes the best part of market research: eating them.

This is Africa...

I'm in Africa! In an internet cafe in Lamin, specifically. I just got in last night, and I've been spending the day trying to get acclimated a little bit. The people here make it really easy. I've already made a friend.
Yesterday Kawsu picked me up at the airport and drove me to the lodge where I'm staying. On the way he stopped to get me some chicken and water. The water was portioned into little plastic bags. I almost didn't bring my water bottle here, because I thought I'd be drinking bottled water-- but apparently bagged water is the fashion. There's a lot for me to learn.
My lodge is situated between the Abuko Nature Preserve and the Tanbi Wetlands. As far as I can tell by looking in from the road, both look beautiful and tropical. Kawsu picked me up at the lodge this morning and we took a mini bus into Serrekunda, the largest town in Gambia, so that I could pick up a few things and get some breakfast. The mini busses are basically vans that cruise regular routes, but only stop if you shout at them. A ride costs about 12 cents, and you sit shoulder to shoulder on benches retrofitted into the van floor. Breakfast was a choice between chicken, steak, and shrimp. I went for the chicken again, but I'm hoping a little more time here will bring some variety to my diet. I heard a rooster crowing outside my window this morning. That means there must be eggs somewhere, right?

Tomorrow's the big day

Tonight is my last night in Spain. I've seen a lot of amazing stuff-- Museo del Prado and Museo de Reina Sofia, parks, plazas, and gardens. I made a special effort to see Guernica for the second time in my life. I remember when Nik and I went to Madrid for the first time four years ago, we stumbled on that painting totally unaware of what we were in for. This time, I figured out which museum it was in and hunted it down. Still, I felt the same magic in seeing it again as I did that first time. It's a painting you really have to see in person to appreciate, I think. If only to understand the scale of the thing-- it's huge! It fills your whole field of vision with blue and gray and black. Its also kind of incredible to experience it with the fifty other people standing in the same room who are as awestruck as you.
My other favorite thing I did was also a repeat from four years ago. I visited the Atocha Train station to see the tropical garden I remembered from Nik's and my first visit. What I don't remember from that visit, but struck me this time is the number of turtles in the pond by the tropical garden! I counted 37 painted turtles on one rock, with many other rocks just like it. There must have been two hundred turtles in a pond no bigger than our kitchen. I heard somewhere that turtles are now functionally extinct in the wild, as a result of their propensity for being very slow and tasty, but I think the Atocha could singlehandedly revive the population of Spain if it wanted. It was bizarre and wonderful.
I leave for Gambia tomorrow! I still can't quite believe it. I think whether I believe it or not, though, it's going to happen. Twelve hours of plane rides is all that stands between me and Africa.

Hola!

Well my hips are a little bruised and my shoulders are a little sore but I made it to Spain! I spent most of the day wandering the streets trying to find an open bank. The bank search was a bust, but in the meantime I was reminded why I love this country so much- it is so beautiful here. It seems like every other building is some ancient museum or palace or plaza. The lack of street signs and the streets´ skewed layout are a recipe for getting lost, but I think getting lost is the best way to travel. You´ll never find what you weren´t looking for without getting lost, and I did my fair share of that today.
I ate a late lunch on the beautiful Plaza Mayor watching painters put the plaza on canvas and guessing the nationalities of all the tourists based on footwear. Tomorrow I´ll head for the museums and maybe siesta in the park. Can´t wait...