Jagan, my next door neighbor, who lives with Mr Touray invited me to his school celebration on the first Saturday I was in Brikama. Jagan is kind of like a foster son for Mr Touray. At present Mr Touray lives in our compound in return for taking care of it. He does this really well – he is the best caretaker ever – he has transformed the compound with an amazing garden.
So back to Jagan, Jagan’s father helped Mr Touray out at some stage, and so now Jagan lives with Mr Touray so he can attend secondary school. He has lived with Mr Touray for five years now.
So Saturday morning Jagan, his brother (which in our terminology is cousin) and I caught a taxi around 9.20am to his school for the celebrations. We were met, walking there, by a group of women dressed up in nutty costumes, banging on water containers and being silly. It turns out they were ex-students who had dressed up and their antics were for entertainment. They kept this going throughout the day – the lady you can see with the home-made camera is one of them – she was hilarious she acted the part of grumpy cameraman very well!
Anne, my neighbor, warned me that things might take a while to start so take a book, but things were fairly well on time. This is very unlikely in the Gambia, I have been told that GMT here stands for Gambian Maybe Time – maybe it will happen then, maybe not!
When we got to the school Jagan showed me around, he is very proud of his school, and is keenly involved in the drama activities of the school. I think Jagan is 20 years old, although he is only in year 11. This is just due to the nature of getting an education in the Gambia – sometimes families can’t afford to send children until they are older. In one of the photo’s you will see a boy in a red t-shirt next to a woman. That boy is actually 22 years old. I couldn’t believe it when Jagan told me, but he is in year 12, even though he looks like he’s 12. I don’t know why he looks so young, but a guess would say it is probably due to poor nutrition. I took photos of the home ec room and vegetable garden at Jagan’s school. The patch Jagan is standing in front of is his – he admits to being a lazy caretaker!
I was a little worried about being the only white person there, due to the Taubab issue, but my worries were unfounded. Jagan’s school is sponsored by the Germans, so there were plenty of German sponsors there, as well as volunteers like myself either from peace corp or German gap-year students who were volunteering in school.
I settled down with Jagan’s brother (Jagan had a role to play as a drama student so left us) and waited around an hour for the parade to start. It was amazing – full of dancing people, whistles and African Drums. There were some dancers in traditional African Dress – costumes made out of grass. The red dressed ones were scary – they danced with real machetes. They have a special name which I have forgotten (Grade 6’s there is some research for you to do!) – but they are common in the villages and are usually fun and safe, however in one Peace corp volunteer’s village, one went crazy and killed a man.
After the march were are series of speeches (from 10 in the morning till 2 in the afternoon). By ex-students, the kindergarten principal, the principal, sponsors, etc, etc. I took a photo of the principal because he is also my landlord (he owns my compound.)
Luckily for me Sara rang me after the races, halfway through the speeches, so after battling my way through the crowd I got to chat to people from home, but then found it too difficult to get back to my seat. This turned out to be a good omen because I ended up running into and making friends with some Peace Corp volunteers who work in and around Brikama (peace corp is the USA version of VSO or AVI). We sat and chatted through the boring bits of the speech and rejoined the crowd to watch the kinder kids perform (it’s a little bit different from what kinder kids in Australia do in performances, as you can see from the photo). We also made plans to go out for dinner that night, which turned out to be a really nice evening.
After a while I felt bad for leaving Jagan’s brother so I battled my way through the crowd back to my seat. Just in time – because the drama students were doing a performance called ‘Mother Africa’. It was amazing – so much so that it brought me to tears. It was brutally honest with a character ‘Mother Africa’ who was the country Africa made into a human and speaking to her people. They didn’t hide a thing it covered the wars, fighting and the way the people treat the environment and their land (that is a whole new post – the environmental degradation in the Gambia is frightening!). It even went as far as to say that as a community they weren’t working together well enough and that colonialism may have been better. It did end however on a positive note.
Jagan had a role in the play but by far the funniest part he played was his dancing – which I will put in as a video – words are not enough!
So back to Jagan, Jagan’s father helped Mr Touray out at some stage, and so now Jagan lives with Mr Touray so he can attend secondary school. He has lived with Mr Touray for five years now.
So Saturday morning Jagan, his brother (which in our terminology is cousin) and I caught a taxi around 9.20am to his school for the celebrations. We were met, walking there, by a group of women dressed up in nutty costumes, banging on water containers and being silly. It turns out they were ex-students who had dressed up and their antics were for entertainment. They kept this going throughout the day – the lady you can see with the home-made camera is one of them – she was hilarious she acted the part of grumpy cameraman very well!
Anne, my neighbor, warned me that things might take a while to start so take a book, but things were fairly well on time. This is very unlikely in the Gambia, I have been told that GMT here stands for Gambian Maybe Time – maybe it will happen then, maybe not!
When we got to the school Jagan showed me around, he is very proud of his school, and is keenly involved in the drama activities of the school. I think Jagan is 20 years old, although he is only in year 11. This is just due to the nature of getting an education in the Gambia – sometimes families can’t afford to send children until they are older. In one of the photo’s you will see a boy in a red t-shirt next to a woman. That boy is actually 22 years old. I couldn’t believe it when Jagan told me, but he is in year 12, even though he looks like he’s 12. I don’t know why he looks so young, but a guess would say it is probably due to poor nutrition. I took photos of the home ec room and vegetable garden at Jagan’s school. The patch Jagan is standing in front of is his – he admits to being a lazy caretaker!
I was a little worried about being the only white person there, due to the Taubab issue, but my worries were unfounded. Jagan’s school is sponsored by the Germans, so there were plenty of German sponsors there, as well as volunteers like myself either from peace corp or German gap-year students who were volunteering in school.
I settled down with Jagan’s brother (Jagan had a role to play as a drama student so left us) and waited around an hour for the parade to start. It was amazing – full of dancing people, whistles and African Drums. There were some dancers in traditional African Dress – costumes made out of grass. The red dressed ones were scary – they danced with real machetes. They have a special name which I have forgotten (Grade 6’s there is some research for you to do!) – but they are common in the villages and are usually fun and safe, however in one Peace corp volunteer’s village, one went crazy and killed a man.
After the march were are series of speeches (from 10 in the morning till 2 in the afternoon). By ex-students, the kindergarten principal, the principal, sponsors, etc, etc. I took a photo of the principal because he is also my landlord (he owns my compound.)
Luckily for me Sara rang me after the races, halfway through the speeches, so after battling my way through the crowd I got to chat to people from home, but then found it too difficult to get back to my seat. This turned out to be a good omen because I ended up running into and making friends with some Peace Corp volunteers who work in and around Brikama (peace corp is the USA version of VSO or AVI). We sat and chatted through the boring bits of the speech and rejoined the crowd to watch the kinder kids perform (it’s a little bit different from what kinder kids in Australia do in performances, as you can see from the photo). We also made plans to go out for dinner that night, which turned out to be a really nice evening.
After a while I felt bad for leaving Jagan’s brother so I battled my way through the crowd back to my seat. Just in time – because the drama students were doing a performance called ‘Mother Africa’. It was amazing – so much so that it brought me to tears. It was brutally honest with a character ‘Mother Africa’ who was the country Africa made into a human and speaking to her people. They didn’t hide a thing it covered the wars, fighting and the way the people treat the environment and their land (that is a whole new post – the environmental degradation in the Gambia is frightening!). It even went as far as to say that as a community they weren’t working together well enough and that colonialism may have been better. It did end however on a positive note.
Jagan had a role in the play but by far the funniest part he played was his dancing – which I will put in as a video – words are not enough!
I'm glad you found some more Germans!
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