The last few days I have been organizing my teaching observations so I just thought I’d write a bit about getting around in the Gambia.
The Gambia doesn’t really have any maps and to be honest they are not the best at giving directions either. The directions usually incorporate a mango tree (which one of the hundreds they are referring to I don’t know) and once I even heard three sleeping policemen used in directions. Anyway to do my observations I have been given a list of names, with or without school names, sometimes with recent phone number sometimes not. In general I have to ring a random number – try to explain what I am doing (it is really hard to hear people over the phone in the Gambia) and ask how to actually get to the school. Then hope like anything that I don’t end up lost in the middle of nowhere.
Obviously I don’t have a car so the joy of doing the observations is the public transport – which is very much like putting your hand (or your life in this case) in a lucky dip. Sometimes they look nice and work well, sometimes they are missing lots of panels but work just fine, sometimes they look nice or look very old and somehow just seem to get you to your destination.
What I really love about the Gellis (bush taxis) are the people. Women get in loaded up with stuff and usually with a baby on their back, hand all their stuff over to complete strangers to position for them – including the baby (which sometimes even gets handed to me!). It is great the way people work together to help each other out and no one is precious about their stuff. Except for things like wallets, phones and MP3 players your stuff is safe.
The other day I caught a gelli and the woman behind me was trying to get her baby to play with me. I did play with the baby, but then the woman asked me to pay her fare (she clearly didn’t need the fare paid for her and was just being cheeky). Then suddenly the Gelli stopped and the woman handed the baby to the apparente (ticket collector – about a 20 year old young guy) to take off the bus and stayed sitting there. I started getting really stressed that she was leaving her baby there because I wouldn’t pay the ticket. Then the apparente pulled the kid's pants up and handed the baby back to the woman. Amazing – how many people in their Western world would hand their baby to a complete stranger so they could take it for a wee?
Today I was handed a little baby to hold for the mother while she got on board – she then walked off. I was a little worried it was a donation, when she came back. We started travelling and I lifted the baby up to find it had peed all over my bag – much to the amusement of all the other women on board! The mother laughed and took the baby back. Soon after the woman forced the apparente to stop the Gelli so a young girl and her toddler sister could get in. They were walking a journey of about 5km in the hot sun so the women just put them on their laps and we continued travelling and dropped them off later. At times it is really sweet to see the community work together on these buses – clearly the child could not afford the ticket, but they don’t charge for kids sitting on laps.