The wind is in from Africa

The wind is in from Africa
Last night I couldn't sleep
You know Carey it's gonna be hard to leave here but it's really not my home
My fingernails are filthy
I've got beach tar on my feet
And I miss my clean white linen and my fancy French cologne

- Joni Mitchell, Carey

That just about sums up how I feel right now. I fly back to Britain
tonight and I don't think my fingernails will ever be clean again.
I've probably got something worse than beach tar on my feet and my
sheets at home aren't linen, aren't white and if I'm completely honest
sometimes aren't clean but they're my sheets, on my bed, in my flat
and I have a burning desire to sleep on them for a very, very long
time. I'm sorry about the lack of blog posts for the last month or
so, but my laptop cable kersploded during a power surge. I do have a
few posts written on paper which I may type up when I get home, if you
were wondering how it all ends.

I must admit that I've found my time out here very hard, particularly
the last few weeks, and there were times when I've felt about this
fieldwork rather the way I felt about reading 1984: it was very
rewarding, I'm glad I did it but I'm not sure if I'd want to do it
again. And some things were very tough: the heat and the filth and
the exhaustion and the heat, the village with conjuntivitis, the
little girl with the broken arm and the man whose arm I may have
broken in self defense (spoilers, spoilers) and the dog that our
convoy ran over on the way down to Fajara. But some parts have been
amazing - I've seen the sun rise over a glittering river, watched a
bird of prey take an enormous snake and fly off with it, seen a
termite mound so vast it engulfed the lower branches of a bloated,
bubble-barked baobab. I've shared attaya with people, attended a
naming ceremony, sat in Sainie's compound handing her friend locks of
nylon hair as she wove them onto her head, played the best scrabble
game of my life under African stars. I may even have managed to get
some useful data.

I've learned a lot too, how to gut a fish and that Duck Tape is more
useful than all the equipment sold in Blacks put together, gained a
limited and very specialist knowledge of Mandinka (mostly the names of
foodstuffs and insects) and discovered that just because your
supervisor is an internationally renowned researcher published in the
highest impact journals it doesn't mean he knows anything about
restaurant etiquette. I've learned that although I crave the comforts
of home they are luxuries, not the necesities I believed them to be. I
can live without a shower if I have a bucket, without tv if I have a
book and a radio, without chocolate if I have mangos and without
alcohol if I have attaya. The one thing though that I've learned I
can't live without is the people I care about, I've miseed you guys
terribly and am really looking forward to seeing you all again soon.

I'm going to pack up my samples now, then have a pressing appointment
with a bath and a bed. Thanks for reading.

Naming ceremony

So we drove back up to Walikunda, pausing briefly in Farafenni for
Jeff to buy a boiled egg "tapa-lapa" sandwich and visit a public
toilet that I think has given him PTSD. I spent most of the journey
seething with envy - unlike me Jeff is able to sleep in landrovers,
even bouncing down roads that make your head bob about like a nodding
dog's.

Distressingly underprovisioned in the clean water and air conditioning
departments as Walikunda may be, one thing it doesn't lack is fresh
fish from the river. Siaka, the machete-wielding nightwatchman, has
taken it upon himself to be my gourmet personal shopper bringing me
plump, juicy kossou and delicious but spiney joto and once but never
again the revoltingly muddy, soapy tilapia. These I was taught to fin,
scale and gut by Sainey, Walikunda's inscrutable, baby-backed cleaner.
Throughout the lesson she looked at me with much the same expression
as I would have reserved for someone asking me how to open a can of
tuna.

With Jeff here to feed too Siaka excelled himself, knocking on the lab
door one day with a cement tub from which he decanted a little brown
tortoise. He explained how to prepare it - apparently you hold the
back end over a fire (or as he rather more evocatively expressed it
"You put a flame to his anus"), then when the tortoise sticks its head
out you chop it off (he demonstrated the motion with the machete).
After that you just treat it like a particularly crunchy Cornish
Pastie. He left me standing on the lab step, watching the little
creature stumble ponderously towards the wall where it put its head
and forelegs into a hole in a mud brick and rested, apparently
concluding that it was now invisible. Call me sentimental but it
seemed rather unsporting to eat an animal whose idea of hiding left
half of its body exposed, particularly as this was the half to which a
flame would be put. I am therefore pleased to report that the
tortoise "got away", possibly at a rather higher velocity than it was
accustomed to.

Following Samuel L's reassignment I have been given a new fieldworker.
I had just about gotten used to the local concept of GMT (Gambian
Maybe Time) and was by now used to asking people to turn up half an
hour before I actually needed them. This new chap rather threw me
though by turning up early as often as he arrived late. I established
the limits of the variability of this phenomenon to be eighty minutes
either way, so for the purposes of this blog will christen him +/-80.
I'm still not entirely sure how to deal with this, but suppose it
ensures that I'm always up and ready to go early in the morning.

Jeff has been rather a hit with the local staff, one of whom invited
us to his nephew's naming ceremony. This prompted a wardrobe crisis -
I had been slopping round The Gambia in my baggy trousers and
workshirts and didn't have anything smarter, but wasn't sure if this
would really cut it when surrounded by relatives decked out in African
finery. Would wheat i was wearing, I asked hesitantly, be acceptable?

"You must wear African dress" he said.
"But I don't have any!"
"No problem, my daughter will lend you some".

So the next morning we drove to his compound where his teenage
daughter (who I'm going to call Cher for reasons that may become
apparent) was waiting to help me into one of her outfits and make me
presentable. She had just come back from the coast, where she was
staying with relatives to attend what is apparently the best school in
the Gambia, and I got the distinct impression she wasn't very happy to
loan one of her outfits. She brightened on discovering that I was
English though. Did I know Daniel Radcliffe? she wanted to know, and
I disappointed by not only not knowing him and not knowing who he was
but by having seen only two of the Harry Potter films. She helped me
into a wrap skirt, surprisingly complicated to tie, then looked on
with interest as I removed my headscarf to don the shirt. Did I
always wear my hair this short? she asked. I explained that I didn't,
but that it was easier to have it that way when I was working. "Ah,
you are very simple!" she exclaimed, which I chose to take as a
compliment.

I was then ushered into the living room where Jeff was being presented
to at least a hundred relatives. Very few of them spoke English, and
Jeff spoke now Gambian languages, but they still seemed to be managing
to sustain quite a lively conversation. We were offered guava juice,
little sweet fritters and a greenish, watery porridge. I declined the
last two items, unsure of their gluten status, and Jeff declined the
porridge because frankly it looked like primordial ooze. I have
trouble explaining my coeliac disease here, not because people don't
understand the word allergy but because they don't understand the
concept; I guess the diet is so restricted here that people who can't
tolerate a common foodstuff just starve. But I never seem to be able
to explain that it's not that I don't want or don't like their food,
it's that I simply can't eat it. I did worry that we were coming
across as very rude and fussy, and felt particularly bad when Cher was
dispatched to the kitchen to prepare some "European food" and returned
with a large bowl of chips. They were excellent chips though, and we
certainly didn't have to feign appreciation eating them.

After eating we went for a walk around the compound and our host
showed us the new house he was building fr his children. We wandered
back to the central courtyard where people sat chatting, brewing tea,
feeding babies; the scene reminded me of the stage at British weddings
between ceremony and food when no one quite knows what to do with
themselves. I assumed the role of official photographer, snapping
guests, the kids who mobbed us to get into the photo and Cher who
rather enjoyed having her picture taken.

We eventually sat down next to a Griot. These traditional musicians
are the custodians of a tow's oral history, and over the melody he
plucked out on his 21-stringed kora he sang the names of passers by
and recounted their family history. Noticing our rapt attention he
asked our names and proceeded to sing a song for us. The music was
beautiful but hampered by his lack of knowledge of our stories his
lyrics were rather surreal; "Julie and Jeff, MRC Walikunda" repeated
over and over.

It was at this point that we met the guest of honour, a lively,
grinning baby boy, as yet nameless. He was apparently a little older
than was usual at a naming ceremony, but the celebrations had had to
be postponed following a death in the family. His motor skills were
therefore rather better developed than they should have been, which
made passing him amongst the guests rather more entertaining than it
would otherwise have been. I think mine was the first white nose he
had ever seen, and he made a very thorough investigation of how firmly
this strange object was attached. He also managed to poke Jeff
directly in the eye, which is probably an honour or something.

Then it was time for more food, which I once again declined. Jeff on
the other hand gamely munched his was through approximately two tonnes
of highly seasoned rice and most of the leg of the luckless sheep that
had started the morning tethered in the compound, doubtless wondering
what all the fuss was about. As he was eating traditional drummers
struck up a beat in the courtyard. We hurried out to see everyone
clustered around them but no dancing as yet. Suddenly one of the
sinewy elderly women who seem to form the backbone of the labour force
here stepped into the circle to dance and seemed to be encouraging her
cowardly younger relatives to join in. As any shocked outsider who
has attended a family wedding will tell you, my folks aren't exactly
shy on the dancefloor, and it didn't seem right to leave her to
shoulder the responsibility of starting the dancing alone. So I
hopped into the circle and joined in, trying to copy what she was
doing.

I think particularly the kids found the toubab and the grandma the
most entertaining thing they'd seen for days. We danced until the
drummers stopped, she acknowledged my efforts with a nod and a smile
and I realised I had to get back to set up my overnight experiments.
as we were leaving a donkey cart pulled up carrying speakers the size
of a refrigerator. I have no idea how they planned to power them,
maybe a treadmill for the donkey? By this stage of the evening we
were both exhausted and one of us was at least 50% sheep by weight,
but we both felt very privileged to have had an experience I doubt
you'd get visiting a country as a tourist.

Yup, do a PhD, travel the world, meet interesting people and dance
with their grannies.

Sacred gators - 27/6/09

So it's been a while, thanks in part to the arrival of my bloke and in
part to what happens to my laptop in two posts time, but here we go:

The drive down to Fajara had been hard, and I'd been looking forward
to a shower and a decent night's sleep. On all of my previous visits
to Fajara I had been put up in the accommodation reserved for visiting
scientists, and very nice it had been too, but on this occasion it
looked as though someone had finally worked out my true status - I had
been assigned to the student accommodation.

My heart sank as I stepped through the door. There was no mosquito
net, and the air was so thick with permethrin it made me cough. The
penultimate straw was either the lack of air conditioning, which has
been the only thing that lets me get a decent night's sleep here, or
the shower which yielded a grudging trickle of brown water than ran
dry a few seconds later. The final straw though was that after all
the effort I'd gone to to tell everyone that Jeff was my husband we'd
been given a single bed. Don't get me wrong, I've had some of the
best nights of my life in single beds but in this climate you do not
want to be sleeping in close proximity to a source of radiant heat, no
matter how much you may adore said source of radiant heat. I checked
the envelope the keys had come in - surely some mistake - but no, this
was indeed the room intended for "Judy Bristol and Joseph Jeffries".
So I flounced out, like a diva who'd been left white roses in her
dressing room instead of ivory, and booked us into a hotel.

A quick note about Jeff; I did consider giving him a nickname to give
the poor lad a bit of privacy, but decided not to bother as just about
everyone reading this blog will already know my bloke's name (except
Bug Girl, hi if you're still reading!). He would in fact have had a
ready-made nickname - in Wolof the word Jeff means "reward" but if I
started referring to him as "My Reward" you'd all be vomiting on your
keyboards by the end of the sentence and I wouldn't want to be liable
for the repair bill.

Anyway I waited in the cafe at Banjul airport for his delayed flight,
committing further crimes against dentistry with the aid of the Coca
Cola Corporation, then steered him through the bewildering throng of
people who wanted to carry his bag and summon him a taxi and be his
friend and all for whatever gift he wanted to give them, after which
experience the hotel room felt like a sanctuary. He had brought me
presents; new books and movies, toiletries and clothes and wonderfully
soothing AfterBite. This last I applied liberally and frequently
until I realised it was 3% ammonia and was making me smell like the
alley behind The Tyneside on a Sunday morning.

I realised how much I'd missed him, and not just for the presents and
conversation and the reasons I won't go into because I suspect my Dad
and his Mum may be reading. Somehow just having him here, even when
we were napping or reading in separate rooms or even bickering made
all the thousand tiny frustrations every day working in Africa brings
that much easier to bear. It was nice too to have someone else to
share all of Fajara's attractions with - we negotiated the filthy
gutters of Bakau market to buy fragrant incense from a Senegalese
herbalist, swung in hammocks at Leybato's beach bar as the sun set
over the Atlantic and, umm, bought baked beans and mayonnaise from
Kairaba Avenue's luxury European supermarket. Well I wanted to give
him the unedited Gambian experience didn't I?

We also visited the Katichikali Sacred Crocodile Pool, which would be
well worth a trip even without the crocodiles. There's a fascinating
little museum of Gambian culture and our guide was the first Gambian
I'd met with a wonderful dry sense of humour, solemnly informing us
that the crocodiles' diet was 80% fish and 20% tourist (at least I
assume it was a joke!). The pool is located in a beautiful garden,
like a lush rainforest with well-tended paths. the place was clearly
ancient, the vast trees testifying to the fact. I took a photograph
of Jeff standing between the buttresses of a majestic silk-cotton tree
to show the scale, but unfortunately realised when reviewing the
pictures that the way it was cropped made it look as though he was
standing in an enormous wooden vagina.

The pool at the heart of the garden is almost perfectly circular, with
a bloom of vivid green algae on the surface worthy of a St Patrick's
Day display. Crumbling stone steps lead down to the stagnant water;
women bathe here to cure fertility problems and I could well believe
that these waters could promote the growth of at least some form of
new life. But I'd imagine that of far more concern to pilgrims than
the foetid water would be the crocodiles themselves, several dozen of
which lurked beneath the water's surface with only their nostrils
breaking the algal bloom or sunned themselves on the steps and path.

As sacred crocodiles these creatures are stuffed so full of fish that
they apparently have no desire to attack humans. Indeed the ones we
saw seemed to have no desire to move at all, but it was still some
time before I could be persuaded to touch one. It felt surprisingly
soft, I don't know what I was expecting but it was probably rock-hard
muscle and pure, compacted, primordial evil. Jeff of course knew no
fear, stroking them and shaking their hands and pretty much doing
everything short of picking them up by the forelegs and dancing a
tango with them. Amazingly we made it out with all appendages
attached. Maybe we were just too profane to be eaten by sacred
crocodiles, or maybe human marinaded in Afterbite held no appeal next
to a fish supper.

A live blog post for once!

I'm back on the coast and have managed to snatch a few minutes of
ludicrously slow internet access to upload the previous three blog
posts (I also have one for Feminazery which is annoyingly still on my
laptop, I'll see if I can bring it over later) for you to enjoy from
the comfort of your cool, clean living rooms. I've survived my first
two weeks in Walikunda, though it's been tough and rather frustrating
as nothing has really worked properly yet, making me wonder what
exactly I'm up there getting hot and uncomfortable for. But I'm
hoping things'll start coming together next week when I go back.

The biggest blow has been that I've lost my fieldworker, Samuel L, who
has been recalled to another project. Not only has he been invaluable
for identification work he's also been my interpretor, general fixer
and resolver of staff issues and I'm not entirely sure how well I'll
manage without him - he is without question the most diligent,
reliable member of local staff that I've encountered out here. I have
been assigned another fieldworker who I'll meet on Monday, if he's a
third as good I'd be satisfied

The drive down yesterday was pretty hard, with long delays crossing
the river and difficult driving across flooded roads. I've given my
driver the wekend off to recover, and I think I think I need a weekend
to recover myself. Fortunately my beloved arrives later this
afternoon, so I've booked us into a posh hotel (Fajara Golf
Apartments) and hang the expense (although I did feel bad spending the
money after spending most of the drive explaining to one of the other
fieldworkers that I couldn't afford to pay for his flight to the UK).
To be honest I have mixed feelings about bringing him over here - I
miss him like crazy and am so desperately keen to see him, but feel
bad that I'm dragging him up for two weeks in a humid, spider-infested
(not his favourite creature) mudhut. Still, we'll have fun being
tourists this weekend - I'm hoping to take him to see the sacred
crocodile pools, and plan to spend a lot of time at beach bars and,
frankly, in air conditioned rooms with no clothes on.

Off to the airport to get him now. Bye! :)

Tailors and tall tales

I can't upload pictures and even if I could you'd probably be more
interested in seeing a shot of me climbing the wall to escape a giant
millipede I've mistaken for a snake than a photo of a mesh fly cage,
so take my word for it that these cages can be converted into fly
traps by a skilled tailor, or even by a moderately competent one.

One of the lab workers here, lets call him Bud, assured me on Monday
that he knew of such a tailor who had made these things before so that
evening we took eight cages round to Bud's house for him to take for
modification. Unfortunately on Tuesday Bud remembered that he didn't
have a car and so couldn't take the cages to the tailor after all, and
as Lamin was at that point halfway across the country driving The
Runner to a conference there wasn't a lot I could do about this. By
the time Lamin returned on Wednesday Bud had disappeared.

On Thursday Samuel L took charge, wheedling the name of the tailor out
of Bud. We drove to Bud's house to pick up the cages from his rather
startled wife then took them to the tailor's shop in Brikama Ba where
Bud had told him this man worked. There we were told that he'd moved
to another tailor's shop – turn right at the mosque and drive to the
next village. We drove for quite some time, found a tailor's shop
that had never heard of him, drove a bit further and found another
shop that had never heard of our man, let's call him Mohammed Mbye.
They had, however, heard of a tailor called Mohammed Njie and directed
us to a fourth tailor's shop (it should have been left at the mosque)
where we found the man himself, dozing on the porch.

We explained that he had been recommended by Bud and he beamed. "Yes,
yes, that man is my brother!" he said, surprising me as Bud had been
rather uncertain not only about where he worked but about his name.
He said that he could do the work overnight, but asked for extra money
as he had a lot of other jobs to do which he would postpone especially
for us. Samuel L seemed to think that paying this was a good idea so
I did. I felt rather guilty if his other clients wouldn't be getting
their clothes on time, but given the lack of activity he had been
displaying when we arrived I couldn't help suspecting that this was
the standard patter that all of his customers got. "Thank you, thank
you, I shall start work straight away and I shall work through the
night!" Satisfied we returned to Walikunda for lunch.

Twenty minutes after we had sat down the tailor, rather startlingly,
roared into the site on his motorbike and pulled up a few feet from
the picnic table. He had just remembered that he wouldn't be able to
complete the job without sellotape, and had no money to buy sellotape.
I still don't quite understand why sellotape was necessary for the
job but handed over the money anyway. After this transaction the
tailor decided that his workload was not in fact so excessive that it
would prevent him from having a drink with us and trying to hit on
Shivonne for fifteen minutes until she eventually went indoors.

We decided that after this rather frustrating morning we deserved an
afternoon being tourists, and so took the car ferry to the confusingly
named Janjanbureh/Georgetown/MacCarthy island. Local folklore tells
that when the British first arrived they asked two palmwine tappers
the name of the island and they, having possibly sampled too much of
their own product, gave their names – Janjan and Bureh. Why they
bothered asking I'm not sure as the British promptly renamed the place
Georgetown, and after independence the island was renamed MacCarthy,
but the three names are now used interchangeably. The island was used
by the British colonial administrators as a slave trading post as the
crocodile-infested waters around it discouraged escape attempts. They
still serve the same purpose – someone with either a keen sense of
irony or an acute lack of historical sensitivity has situated a hard
labour camp for maximum security prisoners on the island.

The town itself feels shabby and neglected. Driving in we passed its
most prominent building; the slave house, or rather its remaining
three walls. What remained was two storeys high and effectively
windowless, strongly reminiscent of the industrial barns factory
chickens are bred in. The roof was long gone but when intact it must
have been horrific, a dark, airless prison. And this was where the
more cooperative slaves were kept.

Worse was to come though. We paid a local guide a quite frankly
extortionate price to take us into the underground cellar where the
most rebellious slaves were kept, which we reached via a low, dark
tunnel that must truly have felt like the mouthway of hell itself to
those who were led down here in chains. Inside the ceiling had fallen
in, making it less claustrophobic than it would have been when in use,
but the supporting beams remained. I cracked my head on these several
times; they couldn't have been more than five foot off the ground, and
this was where the tallest, strongest men, the ones judged most
dangerous, would have been kept stooping in the darkness. The cellar
was built below the water table and in the rainy season water would
have come up to their knees, mingling with their own waste and the
scraps of food thrown down through four tiny chutes at the top of the
walls. By the time we were shown the tiny cells where the most
rebellious slaves were chained up to starve within earshot of those
who may have been considering following their example, I was feeling
rather unimpressed with humanity in general.

While obviously to a rather lesser extent, I was also feeling rather
disenchanted with our guide, who had asked for a perfectly reasonable
100D for the upkeep of the place but then demanded nearly four times
that sum for himself. He wasn't worth it – Samuel L had already
filled us in on the most important points and the buildings spoke for
themselves, but we learned from our guide that when the Europeans
first came the Gambians had been living in tin-roofed houses, and that
the slaves were transported to Brixton in the UK. He then discovered
that Shivonne was a doctor, and tried to convince her to sponsor his
brother to go to medical school.

He also told us that the buildings had been in his family's care for
generations, but I couldn't help feeling that they could have made a
slightly better job of it. Granted restoring the crumbling structures
would probably take more investment than a poverty-stricken West
African state could muster, but I felt that they could at least have
done something to prevent the graffiti. While some of it was at least
a heartfelt condemnation of slavery, most was the usual scrawled
stream of conciousness – names, mobile numbers, football teams.

Our guide then took us out into the yard where slaves had been weighed
and sold. The gravity of the place was rather spoiled by the presence
of a pair of heavily soiled underpants next to the spot where we were
standing, and by the fact that our guide proceeded to give exactly the
same talk as he had given underground, punctuated by aggressive
demands to know whether we understood whenever out attention seemed to
wander. Behind the yard, now walled into a separate compound, stood
the Freedom Tree. The original was long dead but a replacement had
been planted by Peace Corps volunteers. Any slave able to run the
twenty or so metres from the cellar door to the tree was granted his
or her freedom, which sounds like a sporting chance until you realise
that the British considered it great sport to shoot at them as they
passed. Needless to say very few made it.

At this point our guide left us so we headed for the famous Wooden
House, built by the first freed slaves to return to the island after
abolition. I knew this because it said so on a sign next to the
house, and this was confirmed by Samuel L. I would not, however, have
known this if I had listened to the young man who sidled up to us
offering a breathless commentary on how the first British people to
come to the island had built this house to keep a vicious dog which
they set on Black people. What made this fabrication so bizarre was
the fact that he was standing next to the explanatory sign when he
told it.

Our new self-appointed guide proved impossible to shake off, which was
particularly annoying when we returned to the barn-like slave house
where I would have appreciated a little space for quiet reflection and
found his incessant patter about slaves being fed to crocodiles rather
distracting (for all I know this may well have been true, but it was
hard to know what to take seriously when everyone just seemed to be
trying to find the story that would shock the most money out of you).

I know that it's monumentally arrogant and insensitive of me to be
disappointed by the way this place seems to be preserved with only the
minimum amount of care necessary to ensure that it continues to
function as a cash cow. As a white British woman I have no claim on
the ruins here, they should belong to the people who were taken, the
people who were left behind and the people who returned and if they
choose to let them crumble and tell fairytales about the remains then
who am I to have an opinion? But then a part of me says no, this is
part of my heritage too – the university I went to, many of my
employers, the wealth of my country that has allowed me to enjoy a far
more comfortable life than Samuel L could dream of – all of this was
built on the profits of slavery. Britain has benefited from slavery,
and I have benefited, and that debt should not be forgotten. Nor
should the suffering of those wrenched from their loved ones and
transplanted to an alien land be forgotten; out here I feel I could
empathise with the homesickness and dislocation but can't even begin
to imagine how people could have coped with a displacement that was
not of their own choice and from which there would be no return. Mine
should not be the last generation to see this; monuments to their
suffering should not be allowed to slide into the silt or be obscured
by the names of today's petty idols – Beyonce, Paul Gascoigne.

Lost in thought I bought a warm, sticky Fanta and we headed back. We
reached the dock to discover that the ferry had broken down, and for
once I was glad of traditional Gambian gender roles as Shivonne and I
sat in the Landrover while Lamin and Samuel L joined the other men at
the ferry railing, pulling on a heavy steel rope to haul us across.
At the other bank I asked Lamin whether we still had to pay full price
for the ferry crossing. "Of course!" he laughed "This is The Gambia!"

The next day we returned to discover that the tailor had made a
complete pig's ear of the fly traps (these were unlikely to trap
anything smaller than a gerbil, and even then only if it wanted to be
caught). Samuel L was furious, I was actually unsurprised and had to
leave the shop at one point in case the fit of the giggles I felt
coming on undermined what he was saying. The tailor was once again
shown what it was that we needed, and promised to have it done for the
next day, when we returned to find he'd cocked it up in a slightly
different way. I gave up at this point (if we'd given him back the
traps he'd probably have turned them into a wedding dress or
something), paid reluctantly and took them back to sew myself, which
at least I could do sitting by the river.

One of the senior entomologists on site saw what I was doing and asked
why I was making them myself. I explained the whole sorry saga. "I'm
not surprised" he said "there are no tailors good enough up here, we
get ours done in Farafenni."
"But Bud said this was the man you always went to!" I protested.
"Of course, that man is his brother" he said then seeing my
expression (PMT + prickly heat + access to machetes) and surmising
Bud's likely fate added with a sympathetic shrug "these things happen
here".
And I had to laugh.

Here comes the rain again

The first night was horrible – I've never been so hot in my life. I
could hardly breathe let alone sleep and was finally forced to abandon
my hut and spend the night sitting at the picnic table while Mansonia
(a mosquito roughly the size of a 747) treated my back as an alfresco
buffet. I was a little worried about being eaten by crocodiles, but
reasoned that they were at least cold blooded so maybe I'd be cooler
in there. I spent most of Sunday drifting around the lower values of
the Glasgow coma scale.

On Sunday night the storm broke. In theory this meant that it was
cool enough to sleep, in practice the torrent of rain water (and for
all I know dissolved rat and gecko droppings) cascading through the
thatch onto my right shoulder made sleep impossible. I tried to drag
the bed out of the way, quickly discovering that Gambian furniture is
incredibly heavy, made from solid wood and apparently depleted
uranium. Gambian flooring on the other hand is incredibly flimsy;
what I'd taken for linoleum was in fact sticky back plastic ("Today on
Blue Peter, Yvette will show you how to build your very own
entomological research station") and I realised to my horror that in
dragging the monstrous bed I'd managed to tear two massive holes in
it. As icing on the cake I'd also managed to trap my thumb between
bed and table and was now sweating as much as I had on the previous
night. As if on cue the rain stopped, the cascade shrank to a trickle
and I collapsed onto the bed, cursing and praying for sleep, a
blizzard or a teleporter.

The next day was beautiful, as close as this place gets to cool and
with the heaviness washed from the air by the storm. We breakfasted
watching the river while a fairy-like swarm of winged ants issued from
the roots of a nearby tree. "They call them flood-flies in Belize"
said Shivonne, who has visited more countries than I've had hot
nights. A lovely name for lovely creatures. Later that day discarded
wings littered the compound like confetti. Large vermilion red mites
have emerged from their hiding places too, "the sons of the rain" they
call them locally. They stride purposefully across the earth, going
about whatever urgent business it is that brings them to the surface.
And a graceful, slender potter wasp is building a nest beneath the
toilet cistern, skilfully navigating the narrow crack between door and
frame with her burden again and again.

The lizards and geckos must think it's Christmas. I watched one
station herself next to the mouth of an ants' nest, busy tongue
flicking in and out to catch the little fairies as they emerged as
though from a snack dispenser. The feast has made the ubiquitous blue
and yellow lizards randy – the males circle each other, do pressups to
intimidate their rivals then begin a bout of tail-flick jousting that
usually culminates in a high speed chase across the compound.

The nightshift is something else though. Bats swoop low around the
research centre chasing the myriad flying things brought out by the
rains, each one a sinister little potential rabies vector. And we had
been warned about the scorpions and poisonous snakes that come out to
feast on this bounty after the lean dry season.

Shivonne and I were both very keen not to be stung or bitten by either
scorpions or snakes, and for once Michelle shared our caution.
Instead of eating out at the picnic table as usual (this would have
been impractical in any case because of the kamikaze ants dive-bombing the
candles) we decided to dine in the mess room – hot and stifling but,
we hoped, scorpion free.

Michelle stepped through the door first, carrying three plates of the
surprisingly palatable Indian MREs. I followed bearing assorted mugs,
cutlery and condiments. As Michelle headed for the table something
large, brown and extremely well endowed in the articulated legs
department scuttled out from under the sofa and stopped between her
feet. Hardened fieldworker that I am (hah!) I screamed, then gasped
"Michelle. Do. Not. Move". Amazingly not only did she follow
instructions she managed not to drop any of the food she was carrying.
Whatever-it-was then scurried on its merry way under the bookshelf.
"What's happening?" asked Shivonne, materialising behind me with a
large bottle of water and a puzzled expression. I waited until
everyone was safely out of the mess room before telling them what I'd
seen (Michelle looked rather ill), then went to find a night watchman
to hunt it down with extreme prejudice.

We decided to finish eating in my hut, which I was fairly certain
hadn't contained a scorpion half an hour ago at any rate. Halfway
through a rather nervous meal something came under the door and made a
high speed dash under the bed. At this point I invited one of the
nightwatchmen into my room (apparently as a woman you are really not
supposed to do this as the man will assume you want to sleep with him,
but I think he got the message from our terrified expressions and the
discarded food on the bed that this was not what we were looking for.
He flushed out something of approximately the dimensions and
colouration of an Alien face-hugger and trod on it. It burst quite
dramatically.

"Just a spider! Not dangerous!" he said, laughing. We leaned forward
to inspect the mangled mess of legs, mandibles and ichor. "Of course
it's a spider, it's got eight legs and no sting!" exclaimed Shivonne,
accusingly. ("I'd like to see you differentiate a patient with
pancreatitis and one with a burst appendix if they were moving past
you at 60 miles an hour" I thought of responding, two hours too late.)

Afterwards as we finished our meals we became quite blasé about the
facehuggers. I killed the next one myself with a surgical strike from
a sandal, not quite trusting it not to bite. Shivonne took photos of
its twitching corpse so that people would believe her about its size –
at least three people reading this will be very grateful that I can't
upload them. When the fourth and fifth came in we ignored them and
hoped they would eat the mosquitoes. We toasted snakes and scorpions
with ice-cold water and decided that Wali Kunda wasn't as dangerous as
we'd been told.

The next morning Michelle saw a real scorpion in the bathroom, which
the watchmen had to kill, and was very relieved to head back to the
coast. That evening the watchmen killed another scorpion and two
snakes. I'm wearing my jungle boots after dark now, and getting some
practice in with the sandal.

MRC Walikunda

On Saturday we drove up to Wali Kunda, bouncing along the corrugated
road behind buses and jalopies overburdened with rice sacks,
cloth-covered bundles and the occasional live sheep (looking entirely
unperturbed by this novel vantage point. I have a new driver, a
smiling, affable bloke named Lamin (MRC has two drivers called Lamin
and three called Omar. Lamin is the traditional name for first-born
sons here. Presumably all subsequent sons get Omar). Samuel L had
ridden on ahead on his motorbike, a form of transport that makes his
resemblance to Samuel L Jackson even more pronounced.

I was accompanied by The Runner, Shivonne, and Michelle, who is coming
with us because she has no project to work on and she has always
dreamed of seeing hippos. Personally I have always dreamed of living
long enough to have a horde of grandchildren, a rose garden in which
to potter and licence to say whatever the hell I like to anyone under
the pretence of dementia, and had therefore planned to stay as far
away from the hippos as possible, but each to their own. Incidentally
the mystery of Michelle's project, or lack of one, has been solved;
the NGO didn't change its mind about working with her, turns out that
her contact at the Gambian University who said he'd arranged
everything hadn't actually bothered to get in touch with them before
she arrived. She spent three days waiting for a meeting with him that
never materialised then gave it up as a lost cause and decided to come
hippo-hunting.

We stopped off for lunch at a small restaurant in Soma, a town as
sleepy as it sounds. As I has teh coeliac, as usual there was nothing
I could eat on the menu so I settled for my usual plain boiled rice.
The Runner, unused to the rather spartan meals I'd been having here,
asked if this would be enough. I explained that I had some
gluten-free bread and a tin of sardines in my bag to eat later.
"Have the sardines with the rice" he suggested.
"Will they mind if I eat my own food in here?"
"Not at all, this is The Gambia. They may charge you corkage
though." The Runner quipped.

All went well until the time came to leave and I idly wandered out
with the sardine tin in my hand. Realising this I asked if anyone had
a rubbish bag as I still can't get used to the Gambian car-window
method of waste disposal. "Just leave it in the restaurant, they'll
probably use it as an ashtray" said The Runner. Somewhat
apologetically I returned to the restaurant and deposited my greasy
burden on the nearest table. There was an indignant outcry from the
staff (who outnumbered the customers about four to one) and I was
forced to exit at a rather higher velocity than I'd entered. Diving
gratefully into the safety of the Landrover I realised I'd learned an
important lesson; your supervisor isn't always right.

We reached MRC Wali Kunda in the early afternoon and, after being
introduced to the hundred or so ground staff, brothers of ground staff
and cousins of sisters in law of ground staff, had a few moments to
explore. The compound is truly beautiful – the labs and living
quarters are in traditionally thatched mudbrick huts and the site
slopes down to the bank of the River Gambia in all its palm-fringed,
languid glory. Some thoughtful soul has placed a shaded picnic table
next to the river, where you can sit with a coffee and watch the
kingfishers hover and the fishing canoes glide by.

This beauty comes at a price though, Wali Kunda is certainly the most
uncomfortable place I've stayed to date. All the water for washing,
bodies, clothes and dishes, comes from the river and is most likely
teeming with Lord-knows-what. There is a filter for drinking water
but it's broken – I've had a shot at fixing it and will try again
later, but feel more comfortable buying the dusty, overpriced crates
of mineral water from a shopkeeper in the nearby Brikama Ba who can't
believe his luck.

My lab is a windowless mudhut with a distinct odour of rat. There is
no electric light, but as electricity is only available from the
generator for a few hours a day this isn't such a concern. Most
difficult of all to deal with though is the heat – if you've ever
woken up in a tent-turned greenhouse with a hangover, imagine that
feeling 24 hours a day. Trying to keep clean here is impossible,
shower and fifteen minutes later you're drenched in sweat again. I
smell of...myself actually, very strongly of myself. Strange how
humans must be the only animal that can't stand their own odour.

This place is a health and safety officer's nightmare. The kitchen
freezer functions as a fridge due to intermittent electricity and
sports a stern sign warning "NO ethidium bromide! NO unlabelled blood
samples! (Labelled blood samples are presumably acceptable) NO
dangerous hazard in the freezer!" Fortunately when I arrived it just
contained some chillis, which are only a dangerous hazard if you get
really creative. The wiring looks like it was done by a suicidal
gibbon on acid – sockets dangle off wall, empty light fittings dangle
off ceilings and French plugs are jammed into English sockets and
secured with matchsticks. The food hygiene isn't much better, with
dying fish deposited on every available surface and cups and cutlery
used then replaced unwashed – it's just like living with Johny again.

But back to our first afternoon, The Runner was delighted to discover
that the canoe he'd left behind was still there and decided to take
Michelle (praying to see hippos) and me (praying not to see hippos)
across the river to celebrate. A lot of squelching an one pair of
trousers that'll never be the same again later, we were safely on
board. We headed for the gap between islands (I say we but The Runner
provided most of the motive force and all of the navigation, I just
dipped my paddle in from time to time to feel useful). Halfway across
he instructed us to stop paddling and just listen for a minute. The
only sound was the local avian orchestra and, as the research station
was now obscured by trees there was no trace of any human presence
anywhere around us – quite an amazing sensation.

We reached the other bank and clambered out of the canoe, muddying the
places that had until now remained unmuddied. As I struggled to
extract my foot from the human equivalent of a yellow sticky trap my
trusty TEVAs finally expired, with the straps on the left foot tearing
away from the sole. Almost simultaneously Michelle managed to turn
her ankle. I had rather expected, given her hobbled state and my
uni-shoedness that The Runner would simply plant his foot on a nearby
rock, say something along the lines of "I claim this land for her
royal majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Huzzah!" and then we could
all row back for a nice cup of tea. Instead he established that we
were both capable of at least some form of locomotion, instructed us
to remember that the canoe was tied up under a big tree and strode off
into the distance. We stumbled after him as best we could, over a
drought-fissured landscape that suddenly, dramatically gave way to
lush rice paddies, then beyond into the forest at the foot of a rocky
escarpment.

I had been eyeing said rocky escarpment rather dubiously for some time
now, remembering how keen The Professor had been to climb the hill
back in Nianija. Perhaps this determination to climb things says
something about the kind of person who becomes a professor – as soon
as they see something high they want to be at the top of it. Sure
enough, as soon as we got to the base he smiled brightly and said
"Let's climb up!". My heart sank.

Then something magical happened. As we surveyed the summit, The
Runner doubtless imagining the view from the top, Michelle and myself
considering feigning malaria, a silhouette passed across the skyline.
Then another, then another, then another with a youngster on its back.
"Baboons!" I gasped and Michelle started counting breathlessly
"sixteen...seventeen...eighteen". She soon lost count. We stood
mesmerised until the last of the shapes passed behind the trees and
the evening was still once more. "Let's not disturb them" said The
Runner to heartfelt agreement and we headed back to the canoe,
discovering on the way that there were quite a number of large trees
on the river bank.

Rowing back as the sun set over the river I felt a sense of great
peace descend around me. Life will be tough here, but there will be
compensations.