The Outhouse Ruhabi group is an ongoing project between Outhouse, an English jazz quartet and 5 Wolof drummers from The Gambia. Since 2005 they’ve been working together, attempting to blend the different styles into some kind of organic whole. The 3 videos below were filmed in the streets of Banjul in 2007 – the culmination of a 3 week trip undertaken by the Outhouse collective to gain a greater understanding of Gambian music and the sabar drumming style.
If you’ll allow me a rather clumsy metaphor, malaria is something of the elephant in the room when it comes to The Gambia – it has a huge looming presence and yet is rarely talked about in the tourist areas. You take your pills and try and forget about it. But behind the scenes, it goes about its quietly devastating business, taking more lives than you ever thought possible. And the worst thing? It is possible to tackle, and at a relatively low cost. So, whilst a vaccine remains elusive, and prolonged exposure to available anti-malarial drugs a health risk, for as little as £7, a vulnerable child or family member can be provided with a mosquito net – a simple remedy hugely effective in the fight against this horrible disease. Yet those that need them most simply can’t afford one.
Which is why the superb Fresh Start Foundation are trying to raise £7000 by the beginning of the rainy season in July, to take out 1000 mosquito nets to give to vulnerable children and pregnant women in The Gambia. You can find details of the project on their website, and can donate by going straight to their Just Giving page. Here’s hoping they reach their target.
We featured a guest post from Natalia Finfando back in February, about her experiences in The Gambia and her impending trip to volunteer at a local school. The post generated a good deal of interest, with many people getting in touch to ask how they might be able to help out, visit schools, or indeed volunteer in a similar way to Natalia. Today we present Natalia’s account of her recent trip and her time visiting a couple of local schools, with plenty of practical advice on how we can all help. Natalia has also generously given her contact details for anyone who wishes to get in touch for more of her expert advice.
Natalia with grade 4
So the Gambia welcomed me again. This time I visited two primary schools in one of the towns. I think I learnt a lot from this adventure and just thought that I might share some ideas with those of you who want to want to have a similar experience.
First of all, schools are very welcoming and it is extremely easy to visit them. You can do it through one of the trips organized via your tour operator and I am sure it will be a worthwhile experience. Another option, however, if you have a bit more time, is to get in touch with some locals and ask them to take you to a school where their offspring learn. All teachers and headteachers I met were happy to meet me, show me around and talk to me about their school. They were extremely kind and welcoming.
One of the schools offered me a placement and I spent a few days co-teaching with a local teacher. It was a very enriching and inspirational experience. We had a chance to compare our methods and children’s ways of learning. I learnt that maybe here in London we have more resources and teaching gadgets, but in fact teachers all around the world play the same games and use similar tricks to control children’s behaviour!
Natalia in the classroom
What these schools really need are links with other schools and children. We in London need it too! It is great to have a pen pal in the Gambia and I strongly recommend it. Most of the Gambian schools, however, also need sponsors as they are poorly resourced. They need more books, blackboards and quite often simply chairs or pencils and pencil sharpeners as they are not that cheap in the Gambia. As I wrote before (my first blog entry), people have to pay for children’s education and buy all the stationary. When you have many children, this is not an easy thing to do.
Hence, if you are thinking what to take with you for a trip to a local school, I would advise you to buy a few packs of pens, pencils and text books (available in many local shops and often even at your hotels). Go with an open mind and enjoy. Enjoy the eagerness with which children learn and greet you. Their natural curiosity when they ask you about your country. Their kindness when they share with you their lunch and their smiles when they talk about their families.
If you have a bigger budget, think of starting off a library for a school that might not have it (most of them don’t!). Again, ask some locals or existing charities if you need further guidance. I promise that it will be a wonderful and rewarding experience. You could also sponsor a child or a few children and pay £30 per year for their education. That would be an ultimate gesture of kindness and possible life changing experience for children who would not go to a school otherwise. You can make friends for life and you will have a valid excuse to come to this gorgeous warm and the kindest country every year! The best deal ever!
PS If you need further guidance, I am happy to be contacted on finfando@hotmail.com
I’d been warned about the Banjul/Barra ferry – the ferry across the River Gambia and usual entry point for travellers to Senegal. In fact I’d heard so much about it I was half expecting to walk into something akin to Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. I’d asked people if they’d been on the ferry, and the general response involved a gradual slackening of the jaw and a distant hollow look, before a response along the lines of ‘ah yes, the Barra ferry. Good luck with that.’ I approached with a mixture of tense nervous excitement, and total bloody fear…
Well, I wont say I was disappointed exactly, but the whole thing ran rather smoothly, and I actually found the experience quite calming in its own way. We arrived with the sun around 7.30 – just as a the ferry from Barra came into port. I was with a driver and an older English couple and we’d already found ourselves a huge trolley and loaded our bags onto it, and as we stood in the half-light the gates opened and the ferry’s cargo poured out in front of us. It was a steady stream of abundance – vehicular and human: people carrying wares for market, some with great lurid pillows of material on their heads, others with who-knows-what in rusting wheelbarrows; there were mothers with babies tied to their backs in sarongs, groups of school children in their bright white shirts and head scarves. An open-sided lorry rolled past us with a hammock strung at one end containing a dozing form, an ancient truck, more holes than body, a car with blacked-out windows containing some dignitary or other… As the stream thinned, we started to pick our way onto the ferry, now part of another pulsing ragged company. We climbed up ferric stairs to the upper decks to where narrow seats lined the boat’s alarmingly thing outer walls. Behind us, vehicles had started to board, cramming into the available space and as we swayed on the light swell, it was impossible to tell if the sounds of creaking metal were from the lorries ranged beneath us or the ferry itself. We awaited launch.
From the Banjul/Barra Ferry, sunrise
Not more than 5 minutes into the short journey and I look down to see someone in the fairly intimate act of adding what looks like honey to the end of one of my right trainer. I have no idea how he got there, or indeed what on earth he’s up to. I remove my foot exclaiming ‘oi!’ at him and what is now three crouching mates. ‘S’ok, s’ok!’ he says and draws my foot back gingerly. He draws my attention to the (very) mildly flapping front part of trainer and tells me he has ‘the very best glue in the country’ for the job; and because, like so many Gambian scamsters, he’s made the situation seem like a fait accompli, and one my shockingly stiff and inbuilt sense of politeness simply can’t cope with ending, I let him carry on. He takes another globule of honey on a ragged dishcloth and applies it gently to the shoe, then reaches into his bag (it’s barely a bag to be honest – like the truck we’d seen earlier, more hole than substance) for a needle and thread. I’m, by now, wincing with frustration at my inability to extricate myself from this situation, but resigned to the fact that it’ll be over shortly enough. I barely register a whimper when he starts on the other shoe and one of his mates starts washing my now fixed trainer. I pay up, of course, confusedly humiliated (for me, for him, for the whole stupid situation), but safe in the knowledge that with my ultra-fixed trainers, I could probably walk on that water down there if I wanted.
The rest of the crossing passed serenely. I stood near the bridge and let the sun warm me; I spoke briefly with a male nurse who was about to walk three hours upriver to the hospital at Farafenni; I watched a girl emerge from the skylight in a white bus taking photographs of the approaching shore. There is a zone that I only seem to access on ferry journeys, somewhere between reverie and a kind of watchful mental paralysis. It’s a state I wish I could access elsewhere as it has a peculiar magic about it – alive with possibility and poignancy. As we docked at Barra though, the moment was broken by the sudden upsurge in activity and volume. A great tinny roar over the loudspeaker informed us it was time to depart and as I looked down over the narrowing front of the boat I spotted our bags, guarded by our impossibly tall Senegalese driver. He flashed a wide, wide smile and beckoned us down the steps. We joined the throng and walked along the narrow corridor past the battered vehicles waiting to board. The Gambia/Senegal border was next.
