The US Ambassador lives in a nice house with a beautiful view—but you already knew that, didn’t you? The party was full of interesting people that she invited in our honor, like the Methodist bishop of Gambia dressed all in white with purple trim—stole a page from the Catholics—who even knew there was a Methodist bishop? Two journalists from the Gambian paper which told me the paper was free press and is published Monday through Friday—(guess there is no news in Gambia on the weekend) Both are in a book club with two of the Embassy women and one actually had a copy of this month’s book with him, and told me he’s enjoying learning about Jeffersonian ideas—that was a bit heavy for cocktail talk so I moved on to the Minister of Something Else. The Peace Corps has a doctor to take care of the volunteers who assured me that malaria is harder to get than I think if I take my medicines and sleep under a mosquito net. I’m relieved! The Ambassador’s secretary is going home on leave for her son’s wedding in Burien, WA—it truly is a small world! I really liked her and we plan to get together when I’m back in Seattle. There are 30 US citizens and 70 Gambians working at the Embassy. The whole expat scene is very interesting. All the toubes (twobobs) hang together and I realize again what a unifying thing a common language is. I am so accustomed to speaking English and having it accepted everywhere that I forget that a tiny country like Gambia uses our language for the same reason—they cannot communicate with each other since the many language groups do not understand each other. The next morning we met Abdouli, one of our ward helpers with whom I’ve become friends and I will give you his story later—it’s a long one. The walk from our hotel to the Banjul ferry terminal is a tour through the usual markets, garbage, and masses of people. I thought the Brits might have left a legacy of proper queuing, but not so. Pushing and shoving through the turnstiles to get to the ticket window proved undoable, so Abdouli motioned for us to wait and he maneuvered thru the line to get our tickets. It’s about $1.50 for the one way ticket from Banjul to Barra. The ferry is small by Washington state standards and held about 10 of the cars/truck that formed a long queue waiting to cross the river. I don’t know how they decide which truck/car goes first, but there is a ferry attendant who tries!
Everyone seems to have gone to school with Abdouli so we had “facilitators” everywhere. We went out of the terminal, around the back and down an alley to enter with the cars. Looking back at the main waiting hall resemble waiting to get into a rock concert more than a ferry queue! A mass of brightly dressed people were squished up against the iron gates that remained closed until the cars and privileged few (us included) got on the ferry. There are three ferries that cross the mouth of the Gambia River and two were running at 9 AM, the other one was parked off to the side broken down. There is no other way across the river that divides south (where we are) from north (where we wanted to go). The ferry is so overloaded that I know exactly how the Joola Ferry disaster happens and over 2000 people died. People, chickens, goats, a sack with holes cut so that duck heads could stick out, mattresses, a love seat and couch—you name it and it’s being transported across the river by men carrying them off and on the boat—there is no machinery—just donkey carts and men. The overloaded ferry chugged across the river at a snail’s pace and we reached the other side in an hour. Coming back, that ferry was out of commission and we repeated the same process in reverse with a bigger ferry and felt extremely grateful that we got on since it would be a long time until the one functional ferry got back to Barra for another run! There is another way to cross the river and it’s the picture I’ve included. They pulled up alongside our ferry and emptied onto the backs of waiting porters who carried them to shore!! We counted 7 life jackets in the bottom of the boat.
Thanks be to Allah that Abdouli speaks the language because even before we got out of the ferry terminal, men were vying for the privilege of taking us to Jufureh. ( Abdouli is a Fula, who doesn’t speak or understand Fula, speaks Wolof, and lives in the Mandinka area and also speaks Mandinka.) Also Abdouli paid the taxi driver much less than we would have for the trip. We cut off the paved road after a couple miles and had 21 km of rutted, red-dust roads that passed small villages and farms. Our destination was just another dusty, sleepy Mandinka village until Alex Hailey traced his ancestors there and then wrote Roots. A 50 dalasi ($1.80) development fee is collected before you get to the village, a charge of 100 dalasi to tour the museum, 500 to take the boat to James Island, pencils and sweets are hawked so that you can buy them and give them to the kids in the village, and the village itself is a little too “African” to be real. A tip is expected to take pictures of the babies or huts and for a fee you can have your picture taken with a Kinte relative. You can’t blame them for making a buck off the tourists!
Where we really wanted to go was James Island, which as of Feb 2010 has been renamed Kunta Kinte Island. The island is about a mile offshore and was originally built in the 1600’s by the Portuguese to take gold and ivory out, and over the centuries the French, Dutch, and English have owned and enlarged it. American procured slaves from the area for northern and southern plantations. The ruins are extensive and in sad shape. Except for a few markers stating “Governor’s Hall”, “dungeon”, “commissioner’s room”, there is nothing left except to imagine how it was. The island is slowly being eroded by the water of the Gambia River and is about half the size of models in the museum and on the island, but obviously has great historical and emotional significance to, not only the Gambians, but descendents of slaves taken all over the world, and all of us who find it hard to believe that something like slavery could even happen. Apparently there is a lot a debate over the facts of Roots, the number of slaves taken from Gambia, and how do you ever measure the impact on the remaining population? It’s not a place any of us would voluntarily live and it’s hard to think that Oprah or Michelle Obama would fit in. As awful as slavery was and unpolitically correct as this sounds, what would western culture be like without Aretha, Sam Cook, Morgan Freeman, Toni Morrison and many, many more black men and women who’s great-grandparents were enslaved and brought to the new world?
No comments:
Post a Comment