The Missionary Position

After a variety of sickly soft drinks containing enough tartrazine to
send a whole class of eight year olds hyperactive, the most popular
drink in The Gambia is attaya, a very sweet, frothy green tea. There
are rituals around the making of it, involving pouring it from glass
to glass to make it foam, and around the drinking of it; the first,
weak cup is for the children, the second for the women and the third,
after it has stewed for some time, for the men. It's not unpleasant,
once you get used to the fact that it's brewed in what is basically a
saturated sucrose solution, and it gives you a welcome caffeine kick
in the soporific, scorching afternoons. The trouble with attaya is
that it's the reason I can never get a bloody shower.

I am staying at the Catholic Mission in Farafenni, as the missionaries
have all left now and are renting it out to the MRC. The compound
gets water twice a day, in the morning and evening, and this is pumped
into two storage tanks held high above us on scaffolding towers. In
theory this should mean that there's running water on tap, as the
water in the tanks should last until the next time it's available to
pump. In practice however the compound guard station is situated just
next to the tanks, and when they fancy making attaya they open the
storage tank drain tap to fill their kettles rather than walking the
extra ten metres or so to the water tap. As they usually forget to
close it again the water drains away, and then we have no water until
the next pumping period. Apparently there is nothing that can be done
about this, as every other firm of security guards in Farafenni is
crooked whereas ours are just incompetent, but coming back from a
dusty drive to find there is no water is enough to make me wonder how
bad the others could really be.

The guards' other job, apart from failing to open the gate when we try
to get back into the compound, is to switch between generators. We
have 24 hour power here to keep the sample freezers running, but it is
only provided by the grid for a few hours a day. Because of the
timings the guards have to switch on the backup generator at three
ever morning, but they will not do this unless someone wakes up at
three to tell them to, no matter how many alarm clocks they're
provided with.

Staying here is a strange mixture of hardship and luxury. Water is
scarce and the fan in my room doesn't work, so I'm typing this in the
coolest place I can find, the senior kitchen (or rather the "senior
chicken" as it says on the key fob). On the other hand we eat off
fine china and silver tray; the visiting Bishops, coming to check on
how the conversion of the heathens was progressing, apparently liked
their home comforts. I have a fridge in my room, although it's
currently full of dirty dishes that I haven't been able to wash up
without water (it's the only way to stop them smelling). We also have
the amazing Sarah, who comes in to clean our rooms and somehow manages
to leave everything spotless with barely any water, no mean feat given
the thick red dust that settles on everything. She will also take
away your filthy clothes every morning and return then, immaculate,
ironed (no Tumbu flies for me!) and neatly folded, in the early
afternoon. She even managed to get the Deet stains out. I think I
could get used to this.

Driving up to Farafenni I needed a bush, the African equivalent of a
Starbucks, and had no sooner started performing my official business
when I felt a sharp pain in my left buttock. My first thought was
that I'd been bitten by a snake and that I was just going to have to
die from it as the alternative was asking my driver or the Professor
to suck the poison out. Fortunately, or perhaps not, it turned out
that I had simply flooded a red ants' nest and they were now biting me
in all sorts of amusing places and indeed everywhere else. It took a
great deal of thrashing and a fair bit of nudity (luckily it was a
very secluded bush) to dislodge the majority them, and I was still
finding them in my hair several hours later.

The wildlife at the mission is rather friendlier. Jewel-bright yellow
and blue lizards bask on the trees and scuttle across the verandas and
the ground is pitted with ant lion traps. There are three potter wasp
nests on the bathroom doorframe too, but they seem to be abandoned at
the moment. The mission also has two semi-feral cats, Clair (mostly
white with black bits) and Vas (Mostly black with white bits), named
after two previous researchers here. Claire is the friendlier of the
two and keeps trying to get into my room, but I have a policy here of
not getting too friendly with anything that could give me rabies or
fleas and have learnt to open the door very quickly and make a dash
for it before she goes between my ankles. This mode of exiting my
room does of course look ridiculous when there's no cat outside, but I
just have to live with that.

The strange thing about Claire and Vas is that half-starved, scrawny
creatures that they are they're just as fussy about food as a pampered
pussycat back in the UK. The first time Claire ambushed me she did
get into my room and under the bed, and proved impossible to
extricate. I was finally forced to make up some dried milk in a tin
to tempt her out, and although she followed it outside she took one
lick of it then turned her nose up and walked away. She also refused
to eat a perfectly good dead yellow and blue lizard. I know that it
was a perfectly good dead lizard because it was a perfectly good live
lizard until I didn't look where I was going and put my fat hoof on
it.

Anyway, shower time, let's see if there's water today.