My ace neighbours

There is so many lovely things about living in the Gambia I just wanted to do a blog on that. First is my gorgeous neighbours – everyday I get up and go to work and I’m greeted by my neighbor Lamin (note Lamin is the usual name for the eldest son so it is the most common name in the Gambia – Fatou is the name given to the eldest daughter). Lamin is known for holding you up for a chat but on my first day I was running late and I even though I stopped for a chat I said I was running late – so he said I will have to let you go. Now each day that I go to work when the kids all surround me to say hello Lamin tells them I am in a rush to work and I can get on my way.
My other great neighbor is Mr Tourai – if I leave my house for a second and don’t lock it Mr Tourai gives me a big lecture. He will always make sure I am safe. My other great neighbours are two lovely teenaged boys who drop by everyday to see what they can do to help me. Yesterday they took my bike away to pump up my tires and tomorrow they will take it away again to fix the tyre. They got very upset that I swept my house myself because they had looked forward to helping me to do it. Tonight they just dropped by to show me their dance which I have posted for you.
Everyday I also get visited by little kids who just want to play – today we did maths games – I gave them a banana when they got it right. I can’t sit down for more than half an hour without a visitor but I can tell them ‘fonato’ if I need – which means till later.
I also live a couple of minutes walk from the market – a market which has everything, from little bags of omo to buckets, kettles, vegetables, shoes, bras etc, etc. It is open until sundown which is about seven o’clock at night. This means I can go shopping when I get home.
One of the other beautiful things has been my school visits. My boss is not well organized so we drive to the approximate location of the nursery school and then stop and ask a dozen people who direct us to the school. We even stopped at one school who got a small boy to jump into the car with us and direct us to the school. When we got there he just walked back to his school (you couldn’t do that in Australia!). At that school the teacher we observed left his class of thirty students, jumped into the car and took us to the next school and sat around while we did the observations (not that I liked that I thought it was irresponsible). That is a common thing in the Gambia though – I don’t know what the little kids did for the hour and a half they were left alone.
My boss’s car also doesn’t start so at each stop – every young man around – plus several of the teachers get behind and push start the car through the deep sand. Luckily he got it fixed today but ran out of petrol on the way back so Lamin, the other lecturer had to catch a bush taxi to the service station and get some petrol. The best bit is that through all of this no one gets fussed at all! It’s just Inshallah – God’s will. So they get on with it (I do think that putting petrol in a car hasn’t got much to do with God’s will but I just love everyone’s attitude!).