Saint-Louis

It's over a week into the Christmas break and I'm just starting to get
down to work. Yesterday I arrived back at BCS after four days away in
Saint-Louis in the north of Senegal.

Saint-Louis is a unique place in many ways. The French developed it
heavily as one of their major centres of business due to its position at
the mouth of the Senegal river and close to the border between Senegal
and Mauritania. It's a very odd place geographically. It is split into
three parts, two of which are islands. From the first part of the town
on the mainland you cross a bridge onto the first of the two islands,
long and thin running parallel to the coast. This first island is the
main tourist centre and retains the most of the old French colonial
style. The second island is parallel to the first and a similar shape
but further out to sea. It is this island which was once joined to the
long strip of land where I stayed a few weeks ago for the men's weekend.

We travelled up on Monday, walking the 2km from the school to Sindia and
catching a minibus into Thies for just 60p each plus £1 for our
collective baggage. From Thies we sought similar transport up to
Saint-Louis. A group of white people in the gare-routiere soon attracts
a crowd and we had many people offering ridiculous fares to Saint-Louis
in their taxis. Eventually a guy came and asked where we were going and
offered us seats in his minibus at £2.50 each plus the usual £1 baggage
charge. We took it and soon found ourselves seated in a fairly empty
medium sized minibus waiting for it to fill up with other passengers.
When we eventually set off, after not too long a wait, the journey was a
fairly comfortable one considering the circumstances and we arrived in
Saint-Louis somewhere between one and two o'clock in the afternoon. A
taxi took us from Saint-Louis gare-routiere to our hotel without any
problems.

The hotel was a nice one. We were in the cheapest rooms which were dingy
but adequate including en-suite facilities and a continental breakfast
in the mornings at the bar/restaurant. After getting thoroughly confused
with the hostess about what board we were on and the price we would end
up paying we settled ourselves in the restaurant for a late lunch. We
all had the hotel's speciality omlette which was very tasty and very
filling and subsequently retired to our rooms for a siesta.

In general the week included lots of siestas, walking around the town
looking for restaurants, and eating great food. It was great to get away
and do nothing! On Wednesday morning we made an excursion to Parc de
Dioudj, one of the national parks, where they've created a wetland
habitat to attract all kinds of native West-African birds. We were
picked up by our guide at 7am from the hotel and made the 70km trip to
Dioudj by taxi where we drove into the heart of the park and took a one
hour cruise on the main lake in a pirogue (narrow wooden boat). Tracey
and I took about 300 photo between us. We saw loads of birds and even
some baby crocodiles. Hopefully I'll get on ADSL again before the end of
the holidays and upload some of the pictures.

We decided to cut our break short due to the Muslim festival of Tabaski
today which would have made travelling impossible so we paid up at the
hotel yesterday morning and made our way again to the gare-routiere.
This time we caught a proper car-rapide. If you don't know what one is
then imagine an old mercedes sprinter minibus, older than me, which
looks like it will fall apart after ten metres. The interior is fitted
with bench seats and it is crammed full with over fourty people. The
roof is often laden with luggage piled high, including at this time of
year sheep and goats (live). We were the only white people on the
vehicle, not surprisingly, and doubtless quite a novelty to many of our
fellow passengers as you don't get many 'toubabs' on car-rapides. Public
transport was very busy yesterday as everyone was travelling home for
tabaski. The guy next to me was trying out his English and I found out
he lives in Dakar and was going home for tabaski too.

When we got to Thies we stopped at Les Delices for a bite to eat and a
seat with a little more leg and bottom room which didn't vibrate. I
nipped in to the little supermarket for some groceries and left Ruth and
Tracey to relax with a soft drink. Being so close to home we were able
to relax a little and look forward to putting our feet up. Little did we
know what our next leg of the journey would bring.

Outside Les Delices we tried to hail a taxi. The drivers never know
Kiniabour but I tried it anyway and explained where it was. The first
guy wouldn't go lower than 11,000 and we were aiming for 6,000 so we let
him go. The guard outside the restaurant politely inquired where we
wanted to go and ho much the previous driver had asked for. He then
offered to negotiate a taxi for us for the price we wanted so we took up
his kind offer. The next car he stopped bargained hard and wouldn't come
down except when another taxi pulled-in in front of him ready to offer
us a ride. They settled on 7,000 and we shrugged our shoulders and said
OK, thinking of getting home. As the guy pulled away he asked what price
the guard had told us and I confirmed the 7,000 which he didn't seem too
happy about. At the end of the road there's a junction; this is where
things went funny. The driver took an unusual turning and proceeded in
what felt to me like the wrong direction. I tried to quiet my misgivings
and decided to wait and see where he went next. A little up the road he
pulled in at a petrol station to top up, at which I thought 'ok, maybe
he just knows the guy at this station or something, now he'll turn
round'. He didn't turn. The next junction approached and I saw a
signpost for Dakar to the right which confirmed my internal compass,
'please turn here' I thought... he didn't. According to signs we were
now headed towards Diourbel and I knew that wasn't right so, encouraged
by noises from behind me, I tried to subtly hint at our destination but
unsure of how to go about this, both linguistically and culturally, all
I could say was "Do you know Kiniabour?" and "I've never taken this
route to Kiniabour before!", neither of which provoked a response. Time
went on and we all grew more and more tense and eventually we arrived at
a village called Thienaba at which point the driver made a comment about
there being two places called Thienaba and this was one of them and the
other was just up the road. I was a little puzzled but didn't know what
to say other than to agree with him. When he reached the second Thienaba
he pulled over and asked where we wanted to be set down. Finally we
realised what was going on. Somewhere between our communication with the
guard and the guard's communication with our driver some wires had got
crossed and our driver thought we wanted to go to Thienaba, a place we'd
never heard of before and a region we'd never visited. A long and
draining discussion ensued between myself and our driver which I don't
have the energy to recount but, in short, we realised the error made and
spent some time despairing and asking each other what would happen next.
We settled that he would have to drive us to Kiniabour (should we be
able to find it - he had no idea even how to get to Popenguine) and we
would have to pay him extra for the trouble. Most unsatisfactory for us
who had hoped to be home by then recovering from a long day on the road.
He made protestations all the way back to Thies and seemed to be in a
foul mood for the remainder of our journey which also affected his
driving. The extra price negotiation was awkward. There were long
periods of silence where he would ask how much we would pay him and we
would sit there thinking it over and lamenting our situation. He wanted
too much, of course, and came up with all the reasons under the sun why
we should give him more than we wanted to. Ruth wanted to get home,
Tracey felt he was taking advantage of us and I felt sorry for him (and
vastly inadequate to communicate effectively in response to his
arguments). Eventually we paid him 14,000 which no-one was really happy
with but I don't think anyone could be happy after that experience. We
stopped and unloaded at the gate just so that the school guard was
around should we need someone on our side and walked back down the track
we started off on three days earlier.

Two Wives In Three Days

Term is finally over and I'm currently in Dakar for a couple of days, chilling out at the guesthouse.

Wednesday was the end of term and it started in the morning with the Christmas production, 'Are We Nearly There Yet?'. After lots of last minute stress and anxiety radiating from Alison and Ruth, the key players in the whole affair, it went off very well and the kids gave one of their best performances yet. It was a very full morning with not just the play but also some carol singing, the new school choir, two mini-plays written by the top-seniors and a performance by newly named 'Linko', a band formed by the Kingfisher dorm boys. I played drums for
the band which I enjoyed very much. The drum kit had been borrowed from someone in Dakar, a friend of the Gomez boys who are the main musical force behind the band. The name came from the drum kit. They thought they'd look more professional if the name matched the kit and seeing as
the bass drum skin says 'linko' on the front then that had to be the band name (at least for that one gig anyway). I've never heard of linko as a drum kit manufacturer, probably because it was a nasty drum kit (the bass drum pedal was particularly bizarre).

I also finally bought a djembe (african drum) on Wednesday. The guys from Malika Monkeys were there with their wide selection of wood and metal craft (http://malikamonkeys.blogspot.com/) and after trying all the drums they had with them I settled on one of the middle sized models. While I was browsing the stall there were others too looking at the various products and I was chatting to Michelle, the woman I was filling in for last year as ICT teacher, about the pens which she was
considering buying. When I then went to Herma, the stall owner, to enquire about the drum she asked me about what I do at the school and for some reason made the assumption that Michelle (38) and I were married, that was wife number one. To add to the amusement I then had to borrow some cash from my new wife to pay for the drum.

On Wednesday evening we went out for our end of term staff meal. It was really nice especially to have more kids around this time. The MacLaren
family have just joined the staff, the kids having been boarders for the past few years. They had been working in the Gambia but now they felt that God was directing them to move to BCS as staff members. We also had a few other school families around who had been unable to get flights home that day and so we were a very large group. I think the staff kids especially appreciated having more kids around.

On Thursday I came into Dakar with Michelle, Alison and her son Josh.
They were wanting to do some shopping and I wanted to go to the British embassy Christmas party and use the Internet. Yesterday morning we went to the airport to pick up a Christmas parcel for Josh which had got stuck in customs. It was quite an ordeal. First we had to meet a man who
would take us through the whole process, he would charge a fee of £25 but we couldn't do it without him. Finding him was not easy. We were told to go to the customs area and give him a call. When we got there we tried to follow the instructions but couldn't quite work out where we
were supposed to be. We called the guy and he said to look for Air France. Not fully understanding his instructions we headed back to the arrivals area where there was an Air France booth and waited there for a few minutes. He subsequently called us again and we both got thoroughly confused as we were evidently both at Air France bit couldn't find each other. Eventually the guy worked out where we were and told us to ask for 'fret baggage'. We asked a guard outside and he sent someone with us to show us the way. It was in the same directio we'd initially tried but further along. When we finally met Matar, our contact, he led us round
the back of a warehouse to some very cramped offices where we had to get some paperwork. The first papers cost us £22 each and there were two of them. After this we were led back outside to one of many little containers which was converted into a small office. Here Matar proceeded
to calculate the next charges payable. It was at this point we realised something was wrong. The two papers we had just paid for described different packages, one of which was Josh's Christmas presents, worth £130, the other was something entirely different, worth £611! On closer
inspection we realised it was the school order placed at the end of last term which, due to some administrative error, had been shipped out to Senegal instead of to the WEC UK headquarters as usual. Who knows how long this stuff had been sat there as it had no contact telephone number
on it so they couldn't let us know it was waiting for collection. Not knowing what to do next we called the administrators at the guesthouse to ask for advice. They suggested we pick up the school order while we were there, saving another trip at a later date however the fees for
this package would come to over £300 (44% customs plus a standard charge of £110 for a large package). As we didn't have this kind of money on us it was suggested that one of the guards from the guesthouse come out to meet us on his scooter with the extra cash and so I, as the only bloke, was given the task of waiting outside for him. It took him about half an hour to reach the airport however once he got there he was in the same situation as we had been. He had no clue where we were and my French was inadequate to accurately explain to him how to find us and so after 20 minutes of phone calls between him, me and the guesthouse I eventually had to go and find him at arrivals. He was very good humoured about it all and I didn't get sunburnt so I can now look back on it and smile. We exchanged the money in a very shady and secretive way (much to my amusement) and he headed off back to his scooter. When the others got back with Matar they told me of what they'd witnessed in the caged room where the parcels were held. They'd been simply told to 'find their parcels' in a room stacked full of all sorts of packages and luggage
with no apparent order to anything and the packages had then been subsequently hacked open by an over enthusiastic knife wielding customs worker who then suggested he might receive some cash for taping them back together so well.

The ordeal ended with a farcical attempt to find a taxi to get the stuff back to the guesthouse. The first two taxi drivers Matar found for us wouldn't go below 10,000 cfa when the normal price from the airport to the guesthouse with baggage is only 4,000. Eventually Matar convinced one of the customs guys to take us in his van for 5,000 cfa (~£5) and somehow I managed to direct him to the right place.

I didn't gain any wives at the airport but goodness knows the assumptions which the people there made about me with two women and one child.

Last night we went to the British embassy. Michelle managed to sneak in despite being a yank. It was a lovely evening and most of it was spent as a BCS clique in a corner with Lesley and her parents and the Rodda family whose son Charlton is a weekly boarder. We sang carols and the Roddas gave a performance of 'The Twelve Days of Christmas - Senegalese
style' which they'd written the day before. It included, in order, a goat on a bush taxi, two mangos, three guinea hens, four ballophones, five Biskrem, six cobras spitting, seven donkeys braying, eight vendors walking, nine parrots squawking, ten ... (I can't remember the rest but
it was very amusing if you've lived in rural Senegal). Somehow Charlton and Josh were persuaded to sing the first verse of 'Once In Royal David's City' on their own and Josh, rather amusingly, started singing the tune for 'Hark The Herald Angels Sing' by mistake (a mistake I'd made the other way round a few weeks earlier). After the singing the ambassadors wife came over to us BCS people and thanked us for singing so loudly and participating so well and in particular commented on my son's contribution. So now I am also apparently married to Alison and have a twelve year old son!

Today's a lazy day at the guesthouse. We go back to BCS this evening at six o'clock. In the meantime I plan to look up some recipes for things I want to cook this holiday.

G.O.R.

It's a week ago now but I've been meaning to write about it all week so
here it is.

Last weekend I went up north to near Saint-Louis for G.O.R. (Guys On
Retreat a.k.a. the hairy men's weekend). On Friday morning a small group
of us left the school in Jens's Renault estate. We were 6: Jens,
Johannes, Tobi, Josh, myself and Jonathan, parent of some of our day
students. We were sent off with a tupperware box full of burgers and
chips by Jonathan's wife Wendy and Jens's wife Coni after morning break.
I should have been teaching period four but I had scheduled a test and
so it was simple enough to get someone to cover for me, although I got
complaints on Monday when the kids complained I hadn't warned them about
it (it was supposed to be a surprise test but word had got out when some
of them started questioning me one lesson so they suspected it was
coming but weren't sure when).

The drive up to Saint-Louis is about four hours and we stopped en-route
in Louga to meet up with some of the other guys who were meeting for
lunch in a restaurant there. We had of course already enjoyed our
burgers and chips, precariously passed between the three rows of seating
in the car. The school kitchen had been very gracious to us in starting
lunch preparation early so that we wouldn't miss out on what the rest of
the school were getting for lunch (burgers and chips is very rare, it's
rice 75% of the time).

We arrived at our final meeting point mid afternoon where we had to get
a small boat (a pirogue) out to the island where we were staying. It
took too boat loads to get all of us and our luggage across, there were
about 34 of us from all over Senegal. At Saint-Louis the Senegal river
meets the sea but just before it does it makes a bit of a dog leg which
has created a kind of peninsula about 15km long and probably between
300m and 1km wide for the majority of its length. Due to problems with
flooding the river was engineered to go straight out to sea by basically
cutting through this peninsula at the end and making it into an island.
It is this island on which the campement is situated where we spent our
weekend.

I was a little apprehensive before the weekend about spending a weekend
with so many Americans. I've never had any male American friends and
have a bit of a stereotype about them, especially Christians. I was very
glad to have my stereotype shattered as I realised they were actually
quite normal and I was able to get on very well with them.

The actual retreat started with putting us in teams for a competition
which would last the rest of Friday and most of Saturday. At this point
I was again worried by the thought of macho Americans in competition,
especially when I heard the first event would be a group tally of
sit-ups, press-ups and pull-ups. My fears were however allayed when I
met my team who were half from the UK and nearly all geeks in some way
or other. Despite this we did manage to get ourselves into the
competitive mindset and soon set to work on the physical challenge and
also the mental challenge of a sudoku, word search and anagrams.
Strangely enough we actually came out with a massive lead after the
first events, mainly due to a lot of sit-ups. One member, Jonathan,
happened to be a strange breed of athletic geek and did 150 sit-ups, the
most done by anyone, and I somehow managed to push myself to 100,
although I felt it for the next four days every time I got up, sat down
or walked anywhere.

Each team was given a flag which they had to decorate. Our flag was
white and so we decided to call ourselves 'No Surrender!' and decorated
our white flag with a variation on the no-smoking sign containing an
upturned dove of peace holding an olive branch.

As guys on retreat we mainly indulged in two things, competition and
meat. The food at the campement was excellent. Each evening we dined on
a three course meal followed by attaya (Senegalese tea), according to
our waiters, who announced so very dramatically after each meal, the tea
was as follows: "le premier est amer comme la mort, le deuxieme est doux
comme la vie et le troisieme est mielleux comme l'amour" (trans. - "the
first is bitter like death, the second, sweet like life, the third,
honeyed like love"). In fact the attaya was weak compared to what it
should be, probably for the tourists' palate (toubab-attaya). On
Saturday they prepared a barbeque for us with prawns, beef, chicken,
fish, sausages and baked potatoes and on Sunday they roasted two sheep
over a fire and made a broth from it served with couscous.

The other parts of the competition were frisbee cricket, golf and
rubbish collecting (I nearly wrote 'trash' there...). We did well with
the frisbee and not so well at the golf whilst being middle of the road
in trash collecting (some groups picked up concrete and scrap metal
giving them an unfair advantage weight-wise). At the end of the Saturday
afternoon we were still in the lead but only by one point and so it all
came down to the last event, the team song. There were fifty bonus
points on offer for the best team song and we didn't want to lose.
Thankfully we had some very talented lyricists and musicians on our team
and after three hours of brainstorming we had a song to beat all songs
(Eurovision here we come). The songs were performed after tea that night
and I was worried that people wouldn't vote for us, seeing as we were
winning, but people were fair and we ran away with it by a large margin.

I'm still surprised that I was part of a winning team on a weekend for
hairy men.

The Sunday was a more reflective time and we sang together in the
morning and shared communion. One of the guys shared with us about a
part of what biblical manhood is about. We also had a very encouraging
time together on Saturday night after the songs when we had a bonfire
and people shared testimony of what God had been doing in them over the
weekend and over the year. It was great to spend time with other
Christian men, enjoying being men together and enjoying being Christians
together. The fact that we were all missionaries was an extra bonus.

I'm sad that I shall not be here next year for the next one.