The Gambia Diaries - July 2016 E-Book

Mark Williams

• Herausgeber: Mark Williams
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The Gambia Diaries – short essays on life in The Gambia, West Africa, from the perspective of British ex-pat Mark Williams, international bestselling author writing beneath (mostly) picture-postcard blue skies in his personal paradise.

Leseprobe

Gambia Diary : July 2016 – Watching The Skies

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While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

THE GAMBIA DIARIES - JULY 2016

First edition. September 5, 2016.

Copyright © 2016 mark williams.

Written by mark williams.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

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1.

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Step outside at this time of year and you’ll see people casting anxious glances at the sky.

It’s the pre-rainy season period, when the local micro-climate is a battleground between the Atlantic/Saharan weather systems in the north and west fighting a losing battle against the advancing summer storms from central-east Africa.

We’ve only had a handful of token showers so far, but that’s enough to make some roads temporarily impassable without 4WD vehicles, and going shopping in the local markets involves leaping from rocky outcrop to rocky outcrop to reach the sellers with their rickety stalls precariously balanced on tiny islets amid mud and pothole pools of water.

Push-push boys are busily carting wheelbarrow-loads of rocks and throwing them into the mini lakes to make stepping stones and more tiny islands, but of course displacing water with rocks just raises the level of the water overall. And splashes muddy water everywhere – notably over the legs and shoes of careless shoppers like me.

And yes, some probably did it on purpose. As one of the few “white” faces to be seen around at this time of year (the tourist season runs roughly November until April) I make an easy target, standing out like a cueball in Harlem, to quote that memorable line from Live & Let Die.

On the other hand there’s the Cheers factor. For those unfamiliar Cheers was an American sitcom of yesteryear, set in a bar “where everybody knows your name.”

It feels like that here sometimes, where everybody seems to know my name but I’m still struggling, after all these years, to make sense of many local names which defy my westernised brain’s ability to process.

While there are many common Muslim and Judaeo-Christian names here – it seems every other girl is called Mariama or Fatou or Fatimah or Isatou or Awa and every other boy is a Lamin or a Modou or a Mohammed or a Musa – other names simply don’t easily roll off the western tongue.

Among my neighbouring girls is an Incha, an Abyss, an Ndey (you might have guessed from the indefinite article there that the N in Ndey is pronounced like the n in gun), a Binta, a Jainaba, a Ramatoulie, an Oumie, a Sainabou, a Haddy, a Halimatou, a Kumba, a Hassatou and an Aja, while boys go under names guaranteed to give tourists a headache like Ablai and Bopaya and Kebbeh, and even such improbable monikers as Doodoo Boy, Daddy Boy and Couple.

And to complicate matters further many children take on a given name and their mother’s first name (for boys) and a given name and their father’s first name (for girls), so we have a Modou-Aye and a Momadou-Hawa, for example.

And then there are the utterly confusing compound first-last names. Mbaye is a common surname here and Hoja a common first name for girls, but a Hoja Mbaye is known as (my best guess at spelling as it’s only spoken, never written) Hu’llumbaye, while a Fadi Mbaye is a Fa’llambaye.