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.

Shaken and stirred

It's something of a cliche to say that travel in developing countries
makes you appreciate things you had previously taken for granted, but
it's said so often becaus eit happens to be true. Clean water.
Internet access. Roads with more flat surface than pothole. The road
to Dakar had so many potholes in that leaving it altogether and
driving cross country would probably have been a smoother.

I went to Dakar in search of solvents - another thing that I have come
to appreciate is things turning up when people say they're going to
turn up, as the six litres of hexane I had ordered a month before
coming had somehow failed to materialise at MRC Fajara. Such things
aren't available in The Gambia so I got to see two west African
countries for the price of one and head to the Senegalese capital
Dakar, where The Professor remembered a shop selling lab supplies and
reagents. I found this quite remarkably as I don't think there's
anywhere in London where you could just walk in off the street and buy
a couple of litres of analar grade solvent.

I'm still accompanied by one of the world's leading experts on
trachoma, over whom I fortunately failed to vomit on the flight. I'd
met him in the UK before and found him rather shy and awkward, but the
transformation here is amazing - he seems far more at home in The
Gambia than he did in London. Everyone here calls him Professor. At
first I assumed that they called all white people that, but I have
since realised that he does actually know every single person in The
Gambia personally. So I'm calling him The Professor in this blog too,
mostly so he never finds out that I called him shy and awkward.

Dakar appears to be one huge traffic jam with a city wrapped around
it. The locals see this as a business opportunity rather than an
inconvenience though, attempting to flog sim cards and cheap watches
to the vehicles' captive occupants. We arrived at twelve to discover
that Fermon, the lab supplies shop, didn't open until three, so went
for some lunch. We got chatting to the restaurant owner, who asked
where I was from. She was very surprised when I said I was from
Britain, and said she'd never have known I was English from my accent.
I felt very flattered that my French was so good until she added "I
thought you were German".

Dakar is a curious blend of French elegance, vibrant African
streetlife and abject squalor. We visited an air conditioned, marble
tiled patisserie that wouldn't have looked out of place in Paris and
were served by elegant women in crisp uniforms, then stepped out on to
a street lined with beggars, most of whom seemed to be missing at
least one appendage. My headscarf, which had worked like a charm in
The Gambia, suddenly meant I got the worst of it.

I've been wearing a headscarf since I got here, not only because it's
a Muslim country but because it keeps the sun off my ears and neck. I
put it on at the airport and it was like flicking a switch,
immediately stopping men from hassling me. It's also gone down very
well with the local staff, who The Professor says are very impressed -
certainly everyone's gone out of their way to help me. There are
downsides though, I'm tying my scarf the Arabic way rather than the
West African way just because that's the only way I know how to do it
but I've discovered that here wearing it this way apparently means
that I've been to Mecca. The Professor finds this hilarious and tells
anyone who asks that I have indeed been - I'm dreading the day when I
meet someone who speaks enough English to ask what it was like. There
are also certain things that the local people would forgive a "toubab"
for, but expect a "Muslim" to know better - I got a filthy look off a
woman for handing her the hat she had dropped with my left hand. And
in Dakar the beggars expected more charity from a "Muslim" than from
the others, following me down the street tugging at my headscarf and
shouting at me to remember my obligations.

We returned to Fermon at three, and over cold Fantas purchased a
bottle of solvent for the equivalent of seventy pounds, more than
twice what we would have paid in the UK. I hugged it on my lap like a
baby all through the bone-rattling ride home.

MRC Fajara

I'm accustomed to waking to the Hounslow dawn chorus; the scrape of
metal on metal of the next door shop's ventilation fans, punctuated by
the sporadic roar of planes overhead and with a baseline provided by
the rumble of traffic. So it was a pleasure this morning to wake up
to the hoots and shrieks of Fajara's exotic birdlife. Some of the
calls didn't even sound like birds; it took quite an effort to
persuade myself that there are no monkeys here, but I'm certain that
there are no squeaky wheels or wobble boards in the mango trees
outside my window, however insistantly my ears may tell me otherwise.

Today is a public holiday in The Gambia, giving me a chance to settle
in before starting work in earnest. (Tomorrow may also be a public
holiday but this hasn't been decided yet - presumably it depends on
how hard the people who make these decisions party today.) My main
task for the day was therefore to change some money and to this end
one of the MRC drivers, Omar, picked me up at ten in the MRC jeep.

The journey into town was picturesque to say the least, past scenes
that I'd only seen in National Geographic magazine. Donkey carts
shared the road with trucks seeming to defy the laws of gravity with
impossible amounts of baggage pled on topof them, and with people
dressed in vibrant waxcloth hefting equally improbable loads on their
heads. The buildings appeared to be in the process of either
construction or disintigration and sometimes both simultaneously, but
gaily flapping laundry hanging from balconies showed them to be
inhabited. Splashes of green were rare in that dusty red landscape
but insted sprays of red or purple hibiscus flowers hung over the
whitewashed walls. The smells too were incredible; sunbaked earth,
roasted meat, unwashed bodies, dung, diesel fumes and underneath it
all the tang of the sea. This cocktail should have been unpleasant
but I actually found it triggered pleasant memories, of festivals and
childhood holidays on the Isle of Wight (I'll let you guess which
smells were which).

Sadly I seem destined to be an observer rather than someone who has
much interaction with the local people for some time yet. My
relationship with Omar feels rather awkward - I forgot about the
formalised greetings (a scripted exchange of "How are you?" "Well"
"How is your family?" "Well, praise Allah!" "How is the day?" "Good")
when we first met which must have come across as incredibly aloof and
rude. My subsequent attempts to make small talk foundered against a
wall of either disinterest or incomprehension ("Why is there so much
building work here? Is the city growing?" "A lot of people are
building houses") and I was a little startled by the scope of the role
of a driver; I had assumed that he would simply take me from A to B
but instead he took my money and bartered for the best exchange rate
then changed it for me, and then when we got to the supermarket
insisted on pushing my trolley, packing it for me and taking the
shopping to the car. I felt that the effort he had put in to changing
my money for me went a long way beyond the call of duty - I could
certainly never have got such a favourable rate on my own, so
afterwards I offered him the equivalent of £15, which seemed
reasonable as I had changed several hundred. The reaction was not
what I had hoped for. He seemed shocked, then slightly insulted,
before finally taking the money with a mumbled "God bless you" that
was hard to read. I'm going to be spending quite a lot of time in his
company, so I'm going to have to find out pretty quickly from someone
how to deal with someone who seems more like a manservant than a
driver.

Returning to the compound I met some of the other people sharing my
accomodation block,including the luckiest placement student alive who
was sent out here to work on hepatitis for his undergraduate project,
and two women from the university of Iowa who I recognised from my
flight. I got chating to one of them, who was working with a group
trying to reduce the incidence of female genital mutilation in The
Gambia. This sounded amazing, and I raved about how worthwile her
work sounded before turning to her friend and asking whether she
worked on FGM too. "No, I'm a statistician." she replied. Oops.

Anyway, off to enjoy the comfort of my air conditioned room and
ensuite shower while I have them - I won't get this sort of thing
upcountry. Night all.

Long blog post is looooong

I've only just got internet access, so am going to upload the blog
posts I've been saving individually rather than as a whole novel at
once. Enjoy.

Just passing through

I'm spending the night in Brussels after travelling in by Eurostar, before getting a flight to Banjul tomorrow. I wouldn't really recommend a trip through Brussels to anyone with 46kg of luggage; to be honest I'm not entirely sure if I'd recommend a trip through Brussels to anyone. There are no lifts Brussels Midi station, nor are there baggage carts. I found this difficult to believe, so asked a passerby for confirmation and was rewarded with a Gallic shrug and a tirade about how it was une scandale. I concurred that it was indeed une scandale and proceeded to lug my bags up two flights of steps to the platform, only to discover that the airport express, which you would have imagined would have been designed with the needs of people with luggage in mind, actually has three steps up from the platform to the carriage.

Whilst trying to negotiate these with my bags I tripped (note to parents: at no point was I actually in danger of falling on the track) and the carriage's only other passenger, a young Arab-looking bloke, leapt up to grab my arm. At this point the guard in the carriage, who it should be noted had made no effort to help me up to this point, leapt out and asked the bloke if the bags were his. I said they were mine and he promptly asked for the bloke's ticket (but didn't ask me for mine) and it turned out he didn't have one, forcing him to leg it off the train. The guard them proceeded to harangue me in Flemish, then in English when I was finally able to get a word in edgeways to say that I didn't understand him, saying that I should be more careful and the guy had been trying to steal my luggage. Now the guy was trying to travel without a ticket and for all I know he might have been about to steal my luggage, I suppose the airport express would be the place for baggage thieves to try it, but the whole incident left a rather nasty taste especially when I later overheard the same guard talking to a colleague in French about how he's just known by looking at him that the bloke didn't have a ticket. The guard then told me I couldn't put my bags on the seat next to me because other passengers would need it (as I was the only passenger in the carriage with two minutes until departure this seemed a little unnecessary) and insisted that I put it in the vestibule and sat in a particular seat so that I could watch it in case the guy came back. To be honest I'm inclined to think that anyone who could run off with a 23 kilogram bag probably deserves it. Incidentally two more passengers did get into the carriage. They put their bags beside them.

There was more fun once I got to the airport – Rothamsted has booked me into what its website suggested was going to be a posh airport hotel, with a free shuttle bus to the airport, wireless internet access in the rooms and . I had visions of reclining in a tub of luxuriant bubbles, sipping champagne from the minibar and possibly in my wilder imaginings munching on complimentary gluten-free Belgian chocolates. Sadly it was not to be. I waited an hour for the shuttle bus and then decided I had a travel expense budget for a reason and got a taxi. This turned out to be a good move, as once I got to the hotel I discovered that the shuttle bus only runs during the week – I could have been waiting a very long time. The wireless internet is only free if you pay the 25 Euro business upgrade, which also entitles you to all the pay-per-view movies you can wank over and a complimentary drink from the bar which isn't open at weekends. I declined and am paying for this by the minute. And although in theory it's available in all the rooms, in practice it only works in the lobby, where I am typing this in fear that someone will look over my shoulder and see the word "wank". And someone's eaten my complimentary biscuit and left the wrapper on the tray (I know that I wasn't going to eat the biscuit myself, but it's the principle of the thing).

Even more annoying was the fact that the restaurant is only open during the week, and as the hotel is situated in the middle of a deserted business park there was a good half hour when I though I wasn't going to get any dinner as I wandered past empty office after empty office, desperately seeking an alternative to cracking open my emergency Gambia Lara bars and protein shake. Fortunately I eventually found another hotel with a restaurant and disgusted the waiter by ordering rose with my steak. So now I'm back, contemplating an evening of repacking my Bugdorms and watching Martha Stewart, who seems to have an entire channel devoted to her over here.

The fun starts tomorrow folks.

Hair today, gone tomorrow

I leave tomorrow at ten thirty so I should really be getting ready, but instead I'm going to write a blog post about my hair. It's called displacement activity, folk.

Back in the mists of time when we were freshers at Durham, with little money and less sense, my friend Johny blew his loan on surf wax and economy Christmas pudding and asked me to cut his hair to save the cost of a barber's visit. Why he picked me I don't know, although on reflection there weren't many people on that corridor I'd have trusted with a blade around my face. There followed an (in retrospect) amusing misunderstanding, possibly due to Johny's somewhat unique accent; he asked me to chop two centimetres off, I thought he wanted me to cut it to a length of two centimetres, and of course made a complete pig's ear of it so he had to get his head shaved to a grade one. I don't think he minded too much, because then he got a lot of girls stroking his head and saying "Poor Johny!", but I felt very guilty.

Well this week Johny got his revenge. I have wild, wiry Welsh hair (there's definitely a sheep back in my genepool somewhere) which takes a huge amount of water, shampoo and conditioner to keep clean and behaving itself, and as all of these substances are likely to be in short supply out there it had to go. I had originally planned to walk into a hairdresser brandishing a picture of Julie Bindel, thus becoming the first person in human history to do so, but time and money were pressing so I ended up doing a Britney with Jeff's shears.


My favourite comment so far has come from Ben, one of the other PhD students, who said "There aren't many women who can carry off really short hair". I waited in vain for him to add "And you're one of them".

My Dad would approve

I've only met one of the other people I'll be going out there with, and was a little nervous about what they'd be like. But I've just had an email from one of them, describing Walikunda as "a site for sore eyes".

I think we're going to get on pretty well.