On trek to the coast

I’ve still got about a week left in Gambia, but I’m already feeling nostalgic. On Monday I went to all of the different fish landing sites along the coast. To get to the landing site at Kartong you have to turn off the highway and take a rough dirt road for about three miles. On this stretch of the drive we got stuck behind a donkey cart headed for the beach. The donkey driver was hauling a cartload of fuel wood and whipping his donkey mercilessly with a shoe string to make him trot. The donkey was paying very little attention to the driver’s demands, so we were anxious to get around him. As we reached a wide stretch of road we sped up to pass the cart and I got a good look at the impatient driver. He couldn’t have been more than five years old. This is what I’m going to miss when I leave- toddlers making an honest dollar hauling wood on a deserted road leading to the sea. If that’s not enough to make me nostalgic I don’t know what is.
The trek along the coast was wonderful. I have been to many of the villages we went to, but most of the landing sites were new to me. The Gambia’s fisheries are co-managed by the Department of Fisheries and the communities. We were visiting the Community Fisheries Centers to check on the status of a study the project is coordinating to figure out what proportion of fishermen’s catch is the target species. I was amazed at how different the Centers were from one to the next. In Kartong the Center was little more that a thatched roof too low to stand up under just above the high tide mark. Men sat on oil cans mending their nets and watching the sea under the roof. Some women were hauling fish on the heads and laying them out on cement blocks for drying but little else was happening. Whereas, at the largest center in Gunjur hundreds of fishermen were milling around concrete buildings housing an ice factory, offices for Center employees, drying and smoking facilities, and cold storage facilities. This kind of variability is one of the things that have amazed me the most about Gambia. This is a country where you can find donkey carts and BMWs cruising the same highway and where women in dug out canoes land their harvests alongside huge luxury yachts with solar panels on the roofs. Development is leaking into this country in a very sticky way, profoundly affecting some parts and leaving others untouched. On a national scale that means that a lot of people are exposed to development activities, without necessarily benefiting from them. I don’t know what the solution is, but I’d like to find out.