The last bin bags

On Sunday 29^th December I went into a local supermarket and bought a few essentials/essential luxuries. I had run out of fruit juice, butter and bin bags. I was also about to say goodbye to Mags until I get back to the UK, who was leaving with a picnic for the plane and about two kilos of churra gertes (peanut rice pudding). Mags is the person who encouraged me to buy toilet paper based on price per sheet rather than overall cost and unfortunately the tendency to stand for a long time trying to do what is pretty simple numeracy (I was always better at algebra) in shopping aisles has spread to other household goods. Bin bags in particular, which have the added quality complication of being strong enough to be carried 500 yards when full to the trash man.  As I picked up a roll of ten I thought, “OK, these are the last ones. I have about twelve weeks left, so the last couple of weeks we can manage with carrier bags.”

As Mags was sorting the last elements of packing I tried to distract myself. Her flight didn’t include a meal so I had made her some packing and, as we’d eaten a mountain of plasas (potato leaves, fish and oil) and rice, I pulled an afternoon tea together. We sat with coffee and the last of the stollen. I squeezed the rice pudding into her case, and then tried to fill a sad time. I thought I’d see when my bin bags would actually finish. And as I did so I realised they would see me out, I had nine weeks left not twelve.

Suddenly I was thrown in to the future, a blank space after March 7^th when my life in Gambia would be over. I would probably never see many of my friends here again, never know which children got through school and who dropped out, catch only brief glimpses of what happens to the place I work from minor news reports on occasions I bother to check certain websites.  And those are the big things, the mundane small things, the everyday, will never be known to me again. All those adaptations I have learnt, getting the bakers on my street to drop bread to my house as it’s not yet ready, automatically finding the firm part of sandy roads to walk on, trusting my instincts on when to accept a lift from a stranger and when to rudely ask them to leave me alone, when to tell someone my real name and when to make one up, walking everywhere, knowing that though I might want something complicated a boiled egg in a piece of bread from a local shop keeper will actually solve my hunger pains just as well.  

I came here to live, not as a tourist, a traveller or multi-national expat but as a volunteer, working in a Gambian organisation and making Gambian friends.  Still a fish out of water but perhaps getting close to becoming a grebe, able to dive into the water every now and then. But that is the point, my life will move on and I will leave this behind. I won’t be mourning the loss for years because I will be doing something else in those years. And so it is right to mourn it now, to know that these things will pass and that there is sadness in that passing, even if there is joy in the future, because now is the time I have to mourn. And apparently the focus of that mourning is not a person or an experience but instead that marker of weeks gone by, the humble bin bag. 

Do they know it’s Christmas?

In mid-November I updated my iPod to start playing Christmas tunes, at first occasionally popping up on shuffle but then with a dedicated playlist. I have often heard “oh, it doesn’t feel like Christmas when it’s warm” from those who’ve spent it abroad and wondered if that was true. Does it really take a robin bob-bob-bobbin through the snow to feel like Christmas? Certain charity pop songs have it that, what with poverty, “the burning sun” and the “bitter sting of tears” it is particularly difficult to appreciate the season of goodwill in a very poor African country. As my birthday falls on Christmas Eve experimenting with the presence of the Christmas spirit was a bit of a high risk gamble but we can but try.

When people say “it doesn’t feel like Christmas” they mean the atmosphere. So what makes Christmas?

Religion

Though for not all, Christmas is first and foremost a religious feast. Even some of those who wouldn’t dream of making church a feature of a normal Sunday morning think getting to a church at Christmas is part of the season. Of course, my church prepared in the way prescribed under canon law, and the practice of Advent with purple and pink candles lit around a wreath each week, sermons about preparation and meetings about the liturgical accuracy of various elements.  For years I have celebrated my birthday on 23rd (Birthday Eve) so that friends and family can attend the vigil Mass. This year I had to shut down my birthday party early so that Mags and I could get to church in time for carols.  We were at church from 9 until 1am. Decorations had been added, the crib was out and weirdly contained a stuffed donkey, a camel with a missing leg and models of various shapes so that “baby” Jesus was over twice as big as his mother. Religious Christmas was fully ticked.

Music

For me, like many of my friends, as a life-long chorister music is essential. My sister Katharine will generally sleep an extra five hours on Christmas day after a month in which her five choirs are all performing to the best of their abilities, often with three concerts in a day. New music is learnt and descants are polished until they sparkle. And so, was there music? Well yes. In September as ever I was learning a few new Christmas tunes, singing “waaw, tey la Noel” (“yes, today is Christmas”) into the humid rainy season air. I myself was teaching “Gaudete” and “The Angel Gabriel” and allocating solos and pointing out the music in the book for “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” which had, until then, been passed on by ear.  I had a visitor to the choir and had to wear the dreaded asobi again, managing to give Mags a shorter version which made her feel like Sister Mary Roberts, the novice in Sister Act.  There was the predictable last minute switching of a solo and the under-prepared soprano ‘star’ messing it up to be out sung by me with the correct pitches in the choral sections.  The addition of a competing soloist row definitely made it Christmassy music wise.

Family

Christmas is a time of friends and family and it is this that is obviously the hardest to make up for when away from home. I luckily had a sister to stay, bringing traditions and presents from afar, like the original gifts symbols of something intangible about who I am to them and they are to me.  We opened gifts on Christmas morning, sang along to the Muppet Christmas Carol and ate bacon butties. It was ever thus. Yet even without Mags, I had the family spirit around me. I had been invited for Christmas lunch in October, I had small stocking like gifts for those who have cared for me this year, sweets and balloons, reading books and colouring pencils for the children and cake, photos and wine for the adults. We visited the Assine family, ate there, then rushed to the original invitation with Auntie Cor, ate again (oh yes, we ate too much in seasonal style) then on to the Mendys for a quick greeting. We missed the VSO party because it was in the afternoon and we had too many families to visit, and instead we went to a traditional Christmas day masquerade. Eventually we got home and, with our first glass of wine of the day, skyped Dad and Katharine and had a stilted chat. There was so much family that too many were missed (Gran and Grandad, Mum, Irene, this especially means you). So far, so Christmassy.

Parties

I love parties at Christmas. Everyone is looking forward to them and in the mood for some good cheer. Christmas parties almost organise themselves. And my birthday is amongst the best.  For years I have had a dinner with select friends but my 30^th topped that off in spectacular style. I wanted a change so had a house party. Mum sent a Birthday present of cash to pay for food and drink, and a new dress. Mags toiled in the kitchen, Natalie circulated and pitched in, I meandered around feeling glamorous.  So many people came and I was thrilled. By Boxing Day another party was in full flow, this time a beach BBQ. We played touch rugby and swam in the sea before breaking off some cake, pouring a good whisky and watching the sunset as green phosphorescence lit up the ocean waves.

Decorations

Do they know it’s Christmas? I think the power bill of my local supermarket must have doubled. It’s covered in lights, there’s tinsel on every surface and every window I covered with plastic friezes of Father Christmas and snowmen and stars and trees. Every Christian house you visit has balloons on the ceiling, foil garlands hanging overhead and shining baubles around the place. Decorations are not a problem. Mine seem very tame in comparison, despite one VSO who was amazed at seeing tinsel on my dining table. Even the VSO Christmas party had a tree and various shiny things, collected by VSOs gone by to add festive cheer.

Weather

Ok, so it is hot and sandy and you can go out without a coat. But if the cold, rainy or snowy weather that makes you want to be inside in the warm was the only thing that made Christmas it’d be Christmas in Manchester on at least 178 days every year. And this year we got to swim in the sea, is there a better Christmas present?

Christmas is what you make it. If you see it as a festival of hope and light in a dark world, why would your poverty stop you celebrating? Poverty doesn’t stop people being human, though it severely and cripplingly limits how you can express that humanity. For one day, your faith says “there is something different” and, for Catholics at least, people should be working to make that difference every day.  But to wish well for others, to save what you have and do something to mark a time that is special to you through your faith or family, everyone knows what that is. And it’s not the weather that stops it feeling like Christmas, it’s forgetting how to hope and work for the best, not being happy that you are alive, and failing to celebrate being human together.  None of that was missing in my Christmas. But knowing that another Christmas is here, with the promise of change for a more equal society but that it’s a promise still unfulfilled from last year, well, that is what makes us try to make a difference every day.

* Thanks to Natalie Smith for a few of the photos

Oh, you have a stranger

My sister Margaret has had a rather adventurous year. Alongside her usual growing achievements at work and glamorous city centre life, she spent a quarter of the year travelling South America, leaping rusted engines, climbing ancient treks and dancing the night away in . And yet, clearly, this was not enough.  My sister was coming for Christmas. And so I entered December with a growing level of excitement, booked leave and, on a day without any power, made a plan so that we didn’t waste the time without sight-seeing.

As I booked the taxi I was surprised that church friends wanted to come to the airport to greet her, I’d planned a quiet reunion and slower entry into Gambian society. But come along they did. Mags came through the gate and I was overjoyed to see a face that I have known almost all my life. A quirk of the Gambian English teaching leads visitors to be referred to as strangers. So here was my “stranger”, a person who I helped to name and who knows things about me that I probably don’t even know myself. We had technically already celebrated Christmas together in July and part of the challenge of this year for me was to be away from home for the festive season.  But Margaret knows how to make an event work, how to create a celebration, and obviously we have so many shared traditions.  She was laden with bags and parcels, including unopened crisps from her in flight picnic which she immediately donated to a grateful sister.

We got home and had a night of chicken salad and white wine. Mags was a bit shocked by the requirement to say grace before meals, and the way of being almost dismissive about the food being served; the lads with us continued to play on their phones and camera while we sat down to eat. And through her eyes I could see that it is an odd contrast. I have already ensured every grace I say thanks those people involved in the growth and preparation of the food, not just God. But this was the first small sign that Margaret would bring much more than crisps, her perspective would add an important element of reflection and consideration to a society that I missed when I started due to the need to integrate. Not only that, but she gave me a good excuse to see everything I would otherwise miss.

We started with Christmas decorations, getting a few twigs to act as a tree, adding lights and baubles. There were paper chains and hanging decorations and of course snowflakes everywhere, tartan in deference to the hot climate. Presents from home appeared under the twigs, and an angel who looks like me apparently. But this was a tropical Christmas and the next day was filled with watching a crocodile lumber back into the sun less than a metre from our feet, with haggling at the fish market and wandering the sandy streets. We spent a day at Serrekunda market, which is far too long, and I got us caught up on a hunt for fabric which took us into the depths of the meat market where Mags had to batter flies away from her face and back onto the piles of brains.  We met Gambian friends and were invited for mbahal (a kind of rice studded with nuts and beans and laced with oil), we held a birthday party for me which included baking a pineapple cake on top of the gas ring. And, from a different meal,  I got food poisoning leading to Mags having to eat the ice cream pudding of our posh meal out in the local clinic.

              

My stranger made Christmas. I almost cried when the liquorice allsorts came out, I had jam from my best friend for my birthday breakfast, we set off screaming rocket balloons to amuse children and ate stollen for breakfast (“was it a gift?” “no, it was stollen”). A hamper of treats to last the rest of my stay was produced, and we watched the Boxing Day sun set over a tropical ocean while drinking a whisky. But most importantly my sister was here. She talked sense and cast her eye over how I am fairing. She said I seemed very frustrated, and helped me think through a few challenges around leaving. The day after she left I woke up in the morning with a pit of emptiness. “Margaret went home” I thought, “she isn’t here”.  But I was grateful she had come. I had become unknown to myself, too busy adapting and coping to think and feel and react to what is happening around me. My sister had left, but it was never her who was the stranger, it was me. It just took a visitor to see that clearly.

                                                       

Care across the seas

For a while there I was seriously homesick in a crippling “but why would I go out of the house” way.  I was tired and fed up. I missed too many things, especially in October. The first weekend I was out enjoying the parish feast, but my heart was in Warrington enjoying my grandparent’s diamond wedding celebrations, though I was still wearing diamonds. The following week I had to deny any knowledge of the day because my good friend Hadders was marrying a man she met on a train and fell in love with. I wasn’t there and I couldn’t even look at the photos because it made me too sad. On top of that, the wedding present had died under the stress of humidity in its final stage and was lying like an overworked metaphor in pieces on my dining room table.   I fell over and my leg became painfully infected, my broken iPhone and a poor internet connection meant the messages from friends and family ran to a trickle. On top of that I spent twice my allowance on necessary things like concert uniforms, eating, parish feast dresses and

I tried to pick myself up. I prepared my Dad’s birthday present for early November then couldn’t muster the energy to post it, so it too lay in its envelope looking forlorn. But things and moods did start to shift. I eventually got someone to take my grandparents’ anniversary present to the post office. I had my leg cleaned and I got the dances to the choir concert under my belt. Asha, a returning volunteer nutritionist from Uganda, insisted on making me eat and I took the “prioritise good food” lesson to heart after I realised how much better I felt. I managed to get internet access for my sister Irene’s birthday and sent a picture of a monkey to her. Things were on the up and I was getting back on track. Not long until a sisterly visit, Christmas preparations and then not long at all till home time. I cheered up.

And was rewarded. After a long catch up with another friend comparing the challenges of ex-pat life I received a lovely parcel in the post. In side were essential items, tea, plasters, make up applicators, liquorice and a face mask. As well as some warm words and a card for my wall. On the same day a square card with familiar handwriting was delivered. My Gran had written to tell me about life. My Gran is a real story teller and has a very sardonic turn of phrase as well as an eye for the joy of everyday life. I laughed aloud reading about new babies, forecast rain, and getting Grandad in from the garden for dinner. It is this, the adventures and interest of everyday life that makes my eyes sparkle and my Gran has long known it. Thanks to you all. A warm word or odd picture or just a comment that something happened today, it may also have happened yesterday but it’s still interesting, is enough for me. And truly appreciated.

Why’s it all about the women?

Prompted by the anniversary of her birthday I have been reading around Simone de Beauvoir. She once said, “to emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other.” Let women be people first, have a say and influence over her life and the running of society and the world will get better, without damaging what we like about having two different sexes, i.e. the passion and romance and fun of it all.

It’s a call that every development agency I come into contact with has a thing about “engaging women”. Why? It is because development is faster and more effective when women are involved. This is not because women are nicer or better people, the old “girls are better than boys” playground taunt is simply not true.  However, what is true is that the more gender divided a society is, the more important it is to have women in decision making roles, involved in projects and in spending at every level.

It took heavy campaigning to ensure that family allowance in the UK was paid to women (or the main carer). This was for the children not for the women, the main carer, usually a woman, understands the needs of the children more and better and is significantly more likely to prioritise them. The principle applies in all community and national development. Women perform different roles in their communities than men so they have a different understanding of their society and therefore different priorities when it comes to spending.  It’s not that women are better decision makers, it’s just that often they have more of the information that prioritises more development orientated decisions available to them through their own experience.  As Beauvoir has it, “Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.”

According to the UN [http://www.undp.org/content/dam/undp/library/corporate/fast-facts/english/FF-Gender-Equality-and-UNDP.pdf] around two thirds of the world’s people who live in poverty are women, women do two thirds of the world’s work, produce 50% of the world’s food but only earn 10% of the world’s income and 1% of the property. Leaving aside the labour rights issues (“fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay”), this means that the people who understand the intricacies of life in poverty are often women.

Often, women know poverty and they know their communities, who can be trusted to care well for children, which streets are safe, which need some sort of intervention.  In my own life I have watched as people lament the “attitudes of youth” to which they occasionally add “women” because the two fall under a linked funding priority. But when I walk in the street it is the women I see finding work, mainly women turning over patches of scrub to feed families, older women with coarse hands roasting peanuts by the roadside, generally young girls selling mint or water while the boys beg for footballs. There is no attitude problem; the women here take up the responsibility for producing food, caring for children, making homes without question and with determination.  At a 30 hectare farm I visited the most productive area is the “women’s garden” where twenty women produce more than the whole farm from one hectare. The men complain that they have the most fertile ground, but I suspect industrious work rather than favourable land allocation.  At another site a man stood with his cash crop of weedy cassava in his farm, worrying about his income, while the “garden” produced food for the whole village as well as a small shared income.

So women aren’t kinder or nicer people by some quirk of chromosomes, but the cultural role given to many women often means that they have to think and work harder for changes perhaps only they have noticed, and they see more of the impact. This is why development agencies are calling for women to be more involved and influential in decision making at every level.  But, there’s also an underlying principle, summed up by Beauvoir as “Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being.” The women I see here take that responsibility seriously, and the structures we build as a society should allow that responsibility to be taken up to the fullest by everyone.

Lack of connectivity in a connected world

In the past two months our office has had power for four days. A Skype call to London from the VSO office entails dropping out every ten minutes and eventually resorting to borrowing a staff member’s phone. Weekend attempts to get online involve traipsing around under the hot sun for somewhere with a wifi signal and cheap coffee purchase to access it.  I have sat in a local bar with an internet dongle and watched my battery drain two hours’ worth of power in 15 minutes as a virus wormed its way into my system and made the credit I had just bought useless. Doing anything complex takes an age, diagnosing issues then changing blog host took me over six days, or over a month in real time. Downloading software updates is hazardous and fraught with drop outs. Uploading a video for my sister’s birthday was the worst, five solid days of trying different systems, sizes and very cross international messaging to technical support (my other sister who definitely had other issues on her mind, such as how to make a cornucopia cake).

Yet we live in an interconnected world. There are people who’ve carved entire careers as researchers, ploughing the internet for the thread of ideas on which innovation is built. A friend recently took a tropical illness to a UK based doctor. “hmm, let’s ask Dr. Google” he said, seeking knowledge he knew he needed.  The internet contains the giants on whose shoulders the modern world now stands. And it isn’t just knowledge, it’s ideas, comment, conversation, a society working together and against itself in infinite different ways.  When humanity works together we progress, and when we are selfish we fail. The internet, and wider media, is the field on which this global struggle is played out in our lifetimes.

But a lack of connectivity means many will be left behind, again suffering a disparity of access to the world’s resources. It becomes a mind-set. When a friend asks me how to promote his music, I respond “I don’t know but we can learn, let’s get to a computer”.  His face is generally shocked, as if the impression he had is that we Westerners know everything and everyone innately, rather than keeping it on one massive brain we access through our computers.

Some people lament when a person on a low income choses to spend scarce resources on a television, phone or computer, preferring they increase sanitation or food levels. Yet these tools provide entertainment, information to improve those other areas, education, and are a vital link to society in today’s world. This is a very rational choice; connectivity is a basic need for humanity which is at heart a societal system, not one based on meeting only the needs seen as basic by people who usually have the basics and more met. Lack of access to the information the rest of us rely on is one of the many devastating effects of poverty.

In The Gambia, most of my friends and colleagues have at least one mobile, and usually several numbers to save costs between lines.  There are systems and software used elsewhere that means that these mobiles can be used to send instant monitoring reports, but without learning about them through a culture of internet searching and capacity building through such actions as international volunteering, planners rarely know about them let alone how to implement them. Instead monitoring is done by costly, long field visits.  All innovation is based on pulling ideas together from different sources into something that works right now. Nothing is entirely new. In development we are trying to use what we know to create solutions that push country forward in small but sustainable steps. Development is slowed when it is based on systems and information flows that are themselves slow and unreliable, or even simply too expensive to afford.  Cultural industries can’t develop quickly if no one knows how to promote an artist and they have to learn from scratch, academics can’t analyse international arguments to their theories without waiting for a journal posted and yes, doctors with no experience of a strange set of symptoms can’t google the country they might have come from for a clue. Obviously people and countries can and do get things done without the internet. Past volunteers managed without a spontaneous Skype to their friends three thousand miles away and friends here now manage without hearing from loved ones overseas for years at a time. But it is easier and nicer when you can talk to those you love, when you can find an idea that you are toying with has caught the attention of someone else far away and their ideas can complement yours, when you can find a solution to how to fill in a spread sheet within an hour rather than a year.