$27.50 in Canada; ebook $9.95 US
Copies may be purchased at any bookstore in Canada
or ordered directly from the publisher: New World Publishing, Box 36075, Halifax, NS B3J 3S9 1-877-211-3334; www.newworldpublishing.com The Gambia Saga as an ebook may be ordered at www.amazon.com at $9.95 US and at www.amazon.ca at $13.95 Cdn. |
The Gambia Saga
The inspirational story of the 34 year history of the Nova Scotia - Gambia Association An odyssey of adventure and achievement, risk and resilience, luck and learning Unique perspectives on international development & lessons learned . . . . sometimes the hard way Creative programs based on education for good health and the prevention of disease A methodology for mobilizing villages for self-development A development worker's memoir The rise and fall of Yahya Jammeh |
You are invited to "The Gambia Saga" reception & book launch on Thursday, May 30, 2019
at the McNally Aud, Saint Mary's University
Reception & Social 6:30-7:30 PM
Book launch: 7:30 PM
Books will be sold at publisher's discount price: $25
Author and publisher will donate $5 from each sale to the Nova Scotia - Gambia Association
at the McNally Aud, Saint Mary's University
Reception & Social 6:30-7:30 PM
Book launch: 7:30 PM
Books will be sold at publisher's discount price: $25
Author and publisher will donate $5 from each sale to the Nova Scotia - Gambia Association
10. The Hungry Season
[A chapter with passages accidentally left out of "The Gambia Saga"]
[Gambian] farmers tend to sell [their produce] immediately after harvesting, usually at give away prices. During the ‘hungry season’ they buy back at exorbitant prices the very produces [sic] they sold cheaply to the local merchants. For the purchase of food items during this period, farmers may [borrow] money from local moneylenders against their next crop income. This practice is not sustainable. . . .
Dr. Somé Bonaventure et al, 2010[i]
We had arrived in Gambia at the commencement of the annual rainy season, which, in a good year, runs from June to October. The rains usually begin in the eastern end of the country in June but don’t reach the coast until mid July, and then peter out in September. It may not rain again for seven or eight months. For subsistence farmers living from hand to mouth, and for poor people in the urban centres, the rainy season is also known as the hungry season: food stocks from the previous year’s harvest are virtually gone and the current year’s crops have yet to be harvested. People have literally nothing stored for the proverbial rainy day – which for them is a whole season.
In 1982 there was a convergence of events that made that year’s rainy season more difficult than most. First of all, the rains came late and the humidity rose to an intolerable level, sapping everyone’s energy. Second, the country had experienced several years of low rainfall, further diminishing its generally low level of agricultural production. Third, the urban merchants of Banjul and Serrekunda had not yet recovered from the devastating impact of the failed coup of 1981 – particularly the Lebanese, whose stores had been ransacked and inventory stolen or destroyed, not only by militants involved in the attempted coup but by normally law-abiding citizens who seized the opportunity to make off with radios and appliances, as well as foodstuffs and other consumables. A year later, many shopkeepers were still unable or unwilling to re-invest in a large inventory of food stuffs. Consequently, stocks remained low; prices were high. Even in the CFAO supermarket, shelves were faced-up with canned goods only a row deep. The freezers and refrigeration units lay dark and empty.
Three other factors exacerbated the situation. The butchers had gone on strike against government-imposed price controls, the fishermen were reluctant to go to sea because of unusually high winds and heavy storms in the Atlantic, and the Holy Month of Ramadan had begun on July 3rd – which meant that Muslims, who made up ninety percent of Gambia’s population, were fasting from food and drink throughout the longest and most humid daylight hours of the year, but feasting, as far as their finances would allow, every night. Unlike many Arabic societies in which Ramadan was a season of austerity, with fasting by day and only moderate consumption in the evening, Gambian Muslims tended to engage in excessive feasting at the end of a day of abstention, as if successful fasting required a nightly celebration. It was a running joke among Gambians that they always put on weight during Ramadan.
Louanne and I had little knowledge of local customs at this time, but we too were concerned about putting food on the table for our family. Fortunately, our maid Martha knew of a butcher operating a clandestine business just off the New Town Road, a five- minute walk from our house. “He brings fresh meat every day, but he has no fridge, so we must go early. . . . And he doesn’t have bags. We must take something.” It sounded to me like a speak-easy for contraband meat, possibly brought in from Senegal. But Martha declared that it was just local meat from the government abattoir, which he was selling “at his own price”.
Louanne and Martha went to the butcher’s together. Martha knocked robustly on a windowless wooden hatch alongside of a garage door on a sandy side road. There was nothing here to suggest the presence of a shop. But after a few moments the hatch was lifted back from inside and there appeared the head of a dignified middle-aged Gambian man. He had a deep voice like a trained Shakespearean actor and spoke English like a scholar. He outlined the choices of meat, weight and quality: Louanne chose beef – two pounds with bone, for maximum flavour in a stew. Martha dropped the chunk of freshly hacked beef into an aluminum pot that she had brought from the house and put the lid on firmly. Back home, Louanne jammed the meat into our refrigerator’s small freezer compartment for a few days to age and tenderize it. It made for a tasty stew – but tender it was not.
Even when our five missing suitcases finally arrived, three weeks after they had gone astray, and we retrieved our pressure cooker and a sturdy manual meat grinder from one of the errant bags and applied them to the problem, the local beef did not go down without a struggle. It had its own store of African resiliency.
<>
Drawing upon our experience fifteen years earlier in Nigeria, we had told the kids before we left Canada that certain pleasures of life which they took for granted at home might not be available in Gambia.
“Like what?” one of them asked.
“Well, like ice cream,” I replied. Their eyes widened – then seemed to harden.
But during the sultry late afternoon of our second or third day in our house on Pipeline Road, the kids were lounging about in the living room, bored and heavy-eyed from too much reading, when they heard the tinkling of a bell. They went to investigate and found a Gambian boy riding a three-wheel Dickie-Dee ice cream wagon. They bought ice cream in cones and Matthew the Organizer booked the young man to return every day at the same time.
So during our first few weeks in Gambia, meat and vegetables and – as we soon discovered – eggs were in short supply, but ice cream was plentiful.
Also plentiful was the produce from our many fruit trees: mangoes, papayas, passion fruit, grapefruit, and nearly seedless oranges. When school started, our kids would climb the orange tree each morning to pick an orange to add to their mid-day lunch.
<>
When I was growing up in post-war Halifax, some of the necessities of life were delivered to our door by horse and wagon. Six mornings a week the milk man dropped off a quart bottle of pasteurized milk with two inches of cream at the top. Every second week the ice-man appeared with a new block of ice just as the old block had almost melted away. He lugged the ice with steel pincers through the front door, across the living room and into the kitchen, leaving a trail of water behind him, and lifted it into the upper chamber of our old ice-box. And every Friday during the summer months, when the mackerel were running in and out of the harbours and coves of Nova Scotia, two husky fishmongers drove their team up Bayers Road taking turns crying out a simple guttural refrain: “Mack-er-el! Fresh mack-er-el!”
In Gambia, however, the fish man came on foot and never shouted his wares. He would come softly right to our door with a whole ladyfish or barracuda directly from the sea, and once we had agreed on his price – which was always fair – he would meticulously gut and fillet the fish right on the spot. In manners (impeccable), quality of product (exquisite) and personalized service (it couldn’t be better), he was both more professional and more considerate – though less gregarious – than the rough and ready guys who had peddled fish door-to-door in Halifax in the old days. But we came to view our trusty Gambian fish man with mixed feelings of appreciation and dismay – saddened by the perpetually despondent expression on his face and dismayed by the horde of flies that always accompanied him, swarming round and round above his head like a volatile dark cloud. I cannot believe the two phenomena were not related – the wretched flies and his unhappy, un-Gambian demeanor. The first time he came onto our compound we invited him into the kitchen to fillet a two-foot long barracuda on the counter beside the sink. That was a mistake, for the cloud of flies entered the house with him and, when his work was done, half of them peeled off from the flock and stayed behind. It was a day’s work getting rid of them. The next time he came by, we identified a large block of cement in a shaded area a reasonable distance from the kitchen door, which served thereafter as a perfect filleting table.
[i] Dr. Somé Bonaventure et al, Pre-Harvest Assessment of the 2010/2011 Cropping Season [in The Gambia], (Banjul: Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in The Sahel (CILSS), October 2010).
[A chapter with passages accidentally left out of "The Gambia Saga"]
[Gambian] farmers tend to sell [their produce] immediately after harvesting, usually at give away prices. During the ‘hungry season’ they buy back at exorbitant prices the very produces [sic] they sold cheaply to the local merchants. For the purchase of food items during this period, farmers may [borrow] money from local moneylenders against their next crop income. This practice is not sustainable. . . .
Dr. Somé Bonaventure et al, 2010[i]
We had arrived in Gambia at the commencement of the annual rainy season, which, in a good year, runs from June to October. The rains usually begin in the eastern end of the country in June but don’t reach the coast until mid July, and then peter out in September. It may not rain again for seven or eight months. For subsistence farmers living from hand to mouth, and for poor people in the urban centres, the rainy season is also known as the hungry season: food stocks from the previous year’s harvest are virtually gone and the current year’s crops have yet to be harvested. People have literally nothing stored for the proverbial rainy day – which for them is a whole season.
In 1982 there was a convergence of events that made that year’s rainy season more difficult than most. First of all, the rains came late and the humidity rose to an intolerable level, sapping everyone’s energy. Second, the country had experienced several years of low rainfall, further diminishing its generally low level of agricultural production. Third, the urban merchants of Banjul and Serrekunda had not yet recovered from the devastating impact of the failed coup of 1981 – particularly the Lebanese, whose stores had been ransacked and inventory stolen or destroyed, not only by militants involved in the attempted coup but by normally law-abiding citizens who seized the opportunity to make off with radios and appliances, as well as foodstuffs and other consumables. A year later, many shopkeepers were still unable or unwilling to re-invest in a large inventory of food stuffs. Consequently, stocks remained low; prices were high. Even in the CFAO supermarket, shelves were faced-up with canned goods only a row deep. The freezers and refrigeration units lay dark and empty.
Three other factors exacerbated the situation. The butchers had gone on strike against government-imposed price controls, the fishermen were reluctant to go to sea because of unusually high winds and heavy storms in the Atlantic, and the Holy Month of Ramadan had begun on July 3rd – which meant that Muslims, who made up ninety percent of Gambia’s population, were fasting from food and drink throughout the longest and most humid daylight hours of the year, but feasting, as far as their finances would allow, every night. Unlike many Arabic societies in which Ramadan was a season of austerity, with fasting by day and only moderate consumption in the evening, Gambian Muslims tended to engage in excessive feasting at the end of a day of abstention, as if successful fasting required a nightly celebration. It was a running joke among Gambians that they always put on weight during Ramadan.
Louanne and I had little knowledge of local customs at this time, but we too were concerned about putting food on the table for our family. Fortunately, our maid Martha knew of a butcher operating a clandestine business just off the New Town Road, a five- minute walk from our house. “He brings fresh meat every day, but he has no fridge, so we must go early. . . . And he doesn’t have bags. We must take something.” It sounded to me like a speak-easy for contraband meat, possibly brought in from Senegal. But Martha declared that it was just local meat from the government abattoir, which he was selling “at his own price”.
Louanne and Martha went to the butcher’s together. Martha knocked robustly on a windowless wooden hatch alongside of a garage door on a sandy side road. There was nothing here to suggest the presence of a shop. But after a few moments the hatch was lifted back from inside and there appeared the head of a dignified middle-aged Gambian man. He had a deep voice like a trained Shakespearean actor and spoke English like a scholar. He outlined the choices of meat, weight and quality: Louanne chose beef – two pounds with bone, for maximum flavour in a stew. Martha dropped the chunk of freshly hacked beef into an aluminum pot that she had brought from the house and put the lid on firmly. Back home, Louanne jammed the meat into our refrigerator’s small freezer compartment for a few days to age and tenderize it. It made for a tasty stew – but tender it was not.
Even when our five missing suitcases finally arrived, three weeks after they had gone astray, and we retrieved our pressure cooker and a sturdy manual meat grinder from one of the errant bags and applied them to the problem, the local beef did not go down without a struggle. It had its own store of African resiliency.
<>
Drawing upon our experience fifteen years earlier in Nigeria, we had told the kids before we left Canada that certain pleasures of life which they took for granted at home might not be available in Gambia.
“Like what?” one of them asked.
“Well, like ice cream,” I replied. Their eyes widened – then seemed to harden.
But during the sultry late afternoon of our second or third day in our house on Pipeline Road, the kids were lounging about in the living room, bored and heavy-eyed from too much reading, when they heard the tinkling of a bell. They went to investigate and found a Gambian boy riding a three-wheel Dickie-Dee ice cream wagon. They bought ice cream in cones and Matthew the Organizer booked the young man to return every day at the same time.
So during our first few weeks in Gambia, meat and vegetables and – as we soon discovered – eggs were in short supply, but ice cream was plentiful.
Also plentiful was the produce from our many fruit trees: mangoes, papayas, passion fruit, grapefruit, and nearly seedless oranges. When school started, our kids would climb the orange tree each morning to pick an orange to add to their mid-day lunch.
<>
When I was growing up in post-war Halifax, some of the necessities of life were delivered to our door by horse and wagon. Six mornings a week the milk man dropped off a quart bottle of pasteurized milk with two inches of cream at the top. Every second week the ice-man appeared with a new block of ice just as the old block had almost melted away. He lugged the ice with steel pincers through the front door, across the living room and into the kitchen, leaving a trail of water behind him, and lifted it into the upper chamber of our old ice-box. And every Friday during the summer months, when the mackerel were running in and out of the harbours and coves of Nova Scotia, two husky fishmongers drove their team up Bayers Road taking turns crying out a simple guttural refrain: “Mack-er-el! Fresh mack-er-el!”
In Gambia, however, the fish man came on foot and never shouted his wares. He would come softly right to our door with a whole ladyfish or barracuda directly from the sea, and once we had agreed on his price – which was always fair – he would meticulously gut and fillet the fish right on the spot. In manners (impeccable), quality of product (exquisite) and personalized service (it couldn’t be better), he was both more professional and more considerate – though less gregarious – than the rough and ready guys who had peddled fish door-to-door in Halifax in the old days. But we came to view our trusty Gambian fish man with mixed feelings of appreciation and dismay – saddened by the perpetually despondent expression on his face and dismayed by the horde of flies that always accompanied him, swarming round and round above his head like a volatile dark cloud. I cannot believe the two phenomena were not related – the wretched flies and his unhappy, un-Gambian demeanor. The first time he came onto our compound we invited him into the kitchen to fillet a two-foot long barracuda on the counter beside the sink. That was a mistake, for the cloud of flies entered the house with him and, when his work was done, half of them peeled off from the flock and stayed behind. It was a day’s work getting rid of them. The next time he came by, we identified a large block of cement in a shaded area a reasonable distance from the kitchen door, which served thereafter as a perfect filleting table.
[i] Dr. Somé Bonaventure et al, Pre-Harvest Assessment of the 2010/2011 Cropping Season [in The Gambia], (Banjul: Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in The Sahel (CILSS), October 2010).
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