Well the Director of Education in Region 6 is now back, after having been away in Kombos for a month.  The office had been fairly quiet without her. All of a sudden it’s a beehive of activity again! I was away on trek when she returned but was summarily summoned to her office on my return from Wulli West. She was having a meeting about the Regional Teachers Awards. I was informed that I was in the team to verify the North Bank nominations and was to leave on trek with Kinteh, one of the senior education officers and Waddeh, education officer, the following morning! Wonderful, even better when told it involved an overnight stay. Don’t think Kinteh was too pleased either as tried to use me as an excuse saying I wouldn’t get a bed because I was fair skinned!! We drove from Basse to Fatoto, crossed the river then zig-zagged our way across the North Bank visiting 17 schools in 2 days. Thorough job is not the word to use to describe our verifications! We spent the night in some teachers’ residence crawling with bugs and no mosquito net or fan to keep me cool. What made me feel even worse was the fact that we decanted these teachers out of their beds into sharing with colleagues. The roads are also appalling on the other side of the river, although as the rains have only just started they apparently are rather good! It didn’t help that August, our driver, thought he was a rally driver. Thank God for mobiles! So much so he thought he could take a ditch at speed. Ended up stuck for an hour while Kinteh and Waddeh tired to push and shove branches under and I stood and recorded for posterity. In the end Kinteh phoned a nearby school for assistance. Thank God for mobiles! Definitely not two days I want to repeat in a hurry!

Yesterday was supposed to be a public holiday in The Gambia, African Liberation Day! However, not for Sarah or I. We were told to be at the office for 8.30am for a Cluster Monitor meeting. We duly turned up at 8.30 to find 1 cluster monitor waiting. Gradually others began to arrive, then we find out it was agreed to start  at 10am, but as usual no-one thought to inform us VSOs. In the end it didn’t start till 11am – GMT (not Greenwich!). The meeting went on till 5pm, things being discussed and argued over again and again, going round and round in circles. Although I was finally given something to do by the Director. One school was torn to shreds by her in the meeting. Every aspect from school grounds, buildings, classroom, staff, head teacher to record keeping. She wants me to go into the school and do some staff training with them on lesson planning, short and long term. It is good she has given me something but at the same time means I can no longer go and visit my schools in Wulli West and I had just started building good relationships with the schools over there. That will now need to be put on hold for the time being.

On a lighter note, I learned to make Lait the other day. It is amazing, tastes rather like condensed milk but thinner so much easier to drink. It will be so good to have on cold days back home, Sarah and I both agree that a mug of the stuff on a cold day, wrapped in a blanket would be sublime. Some friends came over and showed us how to make it and we drank it all ourselves. After they left my landlady was teasing me about not offering the compound any. She was quite right, it was very rude of us. But Lait does that to you! I did make it up to her and made some last night for the compound, but didn’t seem as easy as I remember it being the first time. The pouring from barada to glass and glass to glass is definitely an art form, one which I have yet to master!

My way

The right way

The Wulli East to Sandu Rally

Last week I had to go to Kombos for our residence permits and a VSO meeting. What can I say about that, not sure the 11 hour trip there and the 10 hour trip back was worth it. Although catching up with all my intake of volunteers and the best pizza in The Gambia may have made it better!( By the way if you plan to come on holiday to The Gambia, the best pizza can be found at Paradiso’s in Senegambia!) My trip back involved hitting a donkey, several police check points (not unusual), everyone dismounting at one as the front passenger wasn’t wearing his seatbelt and the police wanting to charge the driver and fine him 1000Dalasi! Not to mention the 2 hour ferry crossing at Barra and another one at JJB! I was never as glad to get back to Basse, even with the hot. Mind you I got back to find the power had gone on the Monday evening, this was now Wednesday. Then the water went off. Welcome back! For those of you who are concerned, power (such as it is) has been restored and water is now flowing again!

Last Saturday was cup final day in Basse, Mansa Jang vs Security (army, police and immigration). Mansa Jang is the suburb where I live, so naturally my support lay with them. What a game, the captain of Mansa scored the first goal, the crowd erupted. A few minutes before half time security equalized. Nail biting stuff, Mansa Jang got a free kick and.......... GOOOOOOAAAAAAALLLLLLLL! Mansaju won the cup!! The crowd poured onto the field surrounding the players. Smiles all round at home. After the presentation, the cup was spirited away by a large crowd of supporters and taken through the street of Basse on its way to who knows where! I am informed that the cup did eventually end up at the house of the manager.

I have been getting out on my bike alot, visiting lots of schools and doing more observations. I am becoming an expert at finding these schools now and even finding short cuts through the bush to reach them rather than taking the highways. I really enjoy getting out and about and observing lessons. Everyone is really nice and some teachers are very receptive, whilst others are a bit unsure still. I hope the more they see me, they will take on board my comments. However, I have found 1 teacher whose class I really enjoy going to. He always has active lessons and is such as smiley, friendly chap. He never gets cross with the children and they all really respond to him.

Also, Sarah has returned to Basse this week. She’s the other VSO in Basse but has been down in the Kombos working on ECD workshops with another NGO. It’s nice to have her back and think she’s glad to be back too, even though its hot, hot, hot up here. The rains have also started. Thursday 3am with a bang! I literally thought the roof was about to come off. That was without thunder and lightning!

For those animal lovers among you, the donkey got up and walked away unharmed!!

Just a short post about Workers’ Day. The day started off with marching bands through the streets of Basse and Mansa Jang, followed by gaggles of children.....and myself! After which everyone headed to the local sports field for, yes you’ve guessed it.....a day of sporting activity! I arrived looking for the Education Department who I was told were around. Unfortunately, I could not find them. Instead, Gamtel/Gamcel, (Gambia’s version of BT) invited me to join them for attaya which was very enjoyable. I passed a pleasant hour or so in their company till my colleagues all arrived. Then it was on to the sports events. There were various Government departments involved; police, immigration, revenue, health, education, army, various banks and others. There was scrabble competition, the tug of war (which Education lost in the first round to the Police), greasy pole, basketball and various running events. I represented Education in the 100m!!

The other female competitors and I lined up. The tension was palpable, the crowd were ready, the marksman was ready, we were ready!! Who would take 1^st and do their department proud? The crowd went quiet, waiting for the race to begin. BANG! Off we went, running full speed down the track, jostling for position, all trying to cross that line first...................................Well I say we were jostling, what I really mean is the other 4 girls in the race were. I was so far back I was only half way by the time the race was won! It was quite a sight, the only toubab taking part in any event and failing miserably. It gave the locals a good chuckle. My compound brothers found it hysterical at least! There’s not many people in Basse who haven’t heard about my exploits.

I have been getting out on my bike visiting schools on a much more regular basis now. I jump on, cross the river and head to which ever school I can find! Well, maybe not quite as random as that. There is one school that is eluding me. I’ve tried a few times to find it on my own without any success. I’ve finally given in and asked Malick, the cluster monitor for Wulli West to take me again! Other than that I’m getting to find my way round pretty well and even riding through the bush without getting lost and not only that but actually ending up where I plan to!!

As for the schools themselves, they are so different to the UK. Not much in the way of wall displays and those that are up are old and tatty. No electricity so no computers and the like. Old, and in some cases, furniture that is falling apart. The desks and chairs remind me of the furniture from 1950s picture books. In fact they probably are! The staff vary dramatically. There are some teachers who are really good, but could be great given the proper resources and training.  The major problem, well one of them – there are many - in Gambian schools is blending. Children find this very difficult and in some cases are unable to do it, even if they know the sounds. The teaching is sometimes good, other times painful to watch. As I mentioned before, in my area we have GATE training teachers in Jolly Phonics. They do not seem to provide the teachers with any ideas of practical activities the children can do to improve blending, unlike the other NGO working on phonics in Region 6, FIOH. The lessons, no matter the curricular area, are very much chalk and talk. It has been very interesting observing lessons. In the UK, I observed my colleagues lessons as a peer, which had a very different feel and focus to it. The first time I observed a lesson and fed back was quite difficult. However, I am now passed that and the teachers are actually really positive about it and say they’ll try and work on their areas for development, so hopefully they will. After feeding back to the teachers, I then have to feed back to the Head Teachers. How different they are to the ones in the UK. For a start, they are all class committed as they have less than 750 pupils in their school. One particular school I visited, the Grade 1’s class teacher was ill and had not turned up for work. The children were sitting in the class, with the koranic teacher, doing nothing. Some of the children were fast asleep. Mind you the temperature was about 40 degrees! However, I came out of observing a Grade 3 lesson to find the Grade 1 class in its state and the HT asleep on the veranda. That was a bit nerve-wracking trying to tell this HT that it was not acceptable to leave his Grade 1 class without work, but I had to do it as there was no point in them being there as they weren’t learning anything. Attendance is a huge problem for him and this would just make their parents even more reluctant to send them. I don’t think he really listened to me though, I mean what does a female tubab know!!!!

Anyway, I am really enjoying myself and making lots of friends. I attended an FIOH workshop and was chatting away to one of the Christian teachers who was shocked that I had not been to church since I’d arrived......I know it is terrible! Anyway, she made a deal with me that if I attended her church, the catholic one, the next day then she’d come with me to mine the following Sunday. I duly took her up on her offer. No idea what was happening in the Catholic service but was very nice all the same! The next week we went to the Anglican Church in Basse, St Cuthbert’s. It is a very small church, infact there were almost as many children as adults. Our numbers totalled 14, including the minister. I was asked almost, or told really, to read the first lesson. Nothing like being thrown in at the deep end! It lasted 2 hours and although some parts were very familiar to my own, others were very different. Almost  evangelical, with testimonies and members being blessed by the pastor for healing. He’s very fiery and was quite scared of him....he kept looking directly at me all the time. He really doesn’t like Basse much, thinks there’s not much love here. I don’t agree and rather like the place. I am much happier I am up here than somewhere else. We’ll see what happens next Sunday!

Today is Workers’ Day, a public holiday in The Gambia. Schools are closed so no work, although all my colleagues will likely be in the office as they always are, evenings, weekends. They’re not really working just hanging there!! Mind you they don’t really have much else to do in Basse. They are all from Kombos and that is where their families are. Kombos is about 6/7 hours travelling time away so not really somewhere you can just pop to for the day, even the weekend is not really a possibility. All over the country sports event are being held to celebrate and I’ll be off to one later myself!

As in true Gambian style, well perhaps that’s a bit unfair, our trip to Banjul for our resident permits was cancelled at the last minute as the immigrations department had not received the vouchers from finance for us!! So another trip to the kombos beckons in the not too distant future.

However, Gambia has gone Taiwan crazy in the kombos. Gambian and Taiwanese flags strung up to every lamp post and cross roads. Pictures of President Jammeh and President Ma also attached to aforesaid lamp posts. Billboards welcoming President Ma to The Gambia prominently displayed along the main routes from the airport. You may wonder what this is all about. Well, President Ma made a state visit to The Gambia last week. Taiwan are investing millions, if not billions, into The Gambia and funding all sorts of educational and various other projects. One of which some VSO volunteers are working on, but that’s a whole other fiasco...sorry, story! I just happened to come out of a cafe onto Kairaba Avenue, think Great Western Road and you get the idea how busy it is, at 5pm to find it deserted. The road had been closed to traffic with police and army lining the street and telling people to keep back. Soon enough President Jammeh passed by accompanied by President Ma, standing up through the sun roof waving to those watching in the street. It took several minutes for the convoy to pass by. First we had the secret service, through whose open doors I glimpsed some AK47s lying on the back seat. Then came the press cars, fit to burst with TV cameras and photographers, followed by motorcycle outriders with President Jammeh behind. I got it on video, but it’s blink or miss it stuff. Look out for him dressed in his obligatory white! After the presidential convoy, came gellis full of APRC t-shirted occupants. I think every gelli in the kombos had been hired out just to follow him. The procession of these gellis must have lasted at least 5 minutes if not more.  It was quite a sight...not sure I could see many buses following Cameron on a state visit! Quite enough excitement for one day I think!

Now I am back to the hot of Basse....and boy is it hot up here! I left Banjul on the first ferry at 7am and got straight into a sept-plas at Barra.........7 hours later I arrived in Basse! The exciting news is that the tarmac road has now reached Basse, you’re not allowed to drive on it yet....but it’s come!!! No more bone rattling, head knocking dirt roads to contend with soon!

Well I managed to get back to Basse from the bush with only getting slightly lost. It was good to finally be able to visit schools on my own. The only problem was that as the Easter Holidays were looming there was not many lessons going on and the schools I visited were on end of term tests, but the less said about them the better!!

The holidays came early due to the parliamentary elections and the President declaring the Thursday of the election and the Friday after public holidays....not sure I can imagine Cameron doing that! Anyway, Basse had been going election rally crazy in the lead up. A lot of political rallies were being held, including a very significant one in the education offices. Basse was one of the few constituencies to be contested, the rest only having the ruling APRC candidate as the only candidate. In Basse, the local party’s choice and peoples’ favourite to be candidate for Basse was overruled by the President and the incumbent chosen instead. The  decided to run as an independent and there was a huge meeting at the education office to try and persuade him not to run. However, he decided to ignore this and run anyway. So Basse went election crazy with rallies and marches all over the place. Ultimately, he won so Basse is not in the hands of the ruling party anymore. Around my village, cheers came up from around the neighbouring compound when the results were announced. The elections results show was also very strange. No visual graphics or Swing-o-meter. Just various people sitting around a studio giving the results first in English, then Mandinka, then Wolof, then Fula and then in a further 3 languages!

The following Saturday, the winning candidate had a procession through Basse to say thank you to the people for electing him. It was quite surreal...first there were horses and donkeys, then motorcycles, then trucks and jeeps riding past with people cheering and waving. It was quite a sight, sadly I’d left my camera at home! A Gambian I’d been speaking to was asking how our candidates thanked us for electing them, he was quite surprised when I said we didn’t really celebrate like this. “Oh I suppose you write letters of congratulations to the candidate then!” he replied......I’m sure some people must. I don’t know any but there must be!!

Now it’s the holidays and I am down in kombos, relaxing by the beach and spending an absolute fortune. In the few days I’ve been here I’ve spent about as much as I do in a whole month in Basse!! First I must tell you about my journey down. Ok so Basse is only 2 or 3 hundred miles from the coast. Beth, a fellow volunteer in Janjanbureh, and I decided to travel together for the first time. I was to go to hers on Tuesday. I went to get the gelli at a reasonable time in the morning. Some might say stupidly, I got into an empty gelli to JJB. Others would probably say the same...I waited for 3 hours for the gelli to leave! They have no timetables and only leave when they are full, so the rule of thumb is never get into an empty gelli. I’ve learned my lesson the hard way! So I left my house about 8.30am and got to JJB (60 miles away) at about 2pm! The next day we were going to get the bus to the kombos. However, as we were walking towards the stop it drove past us, full to burst! Instead we got a sept-plas, the only way to travel in this country. They are estate cars with 3 extra seats squeezed into the boot. They ply the North Bank road, up and down from Barra to Basse. Barra is usually where the problems begin. This is the ferry terminal to Banjul. It can apparently be hit or miss. Beth and I were very lucky and arrived in Barra just as one had arrived so our crossing was very easy and problem free. Not sure that will happen again from the horror stories I’ve heard from others!

 Some of my fellow volunteers have been putting me up and it has been very nice coming from up-country into proper houses with running water. Although I am a bit better off that most up-country volunteers in that I do have a flush loo and shower, instead of a pit latrine and bucket shower. Still, very nice! Over the Easter weekend, we had a road trip down to Kartong in the south. Most of the volunteers in the Gambia went too. We stayed at the beautiful Boboi Lodge on the beach. With white, sandy, secluded beaches, it was stunning and very nice and relaxing. After a day on the beach, we had a wonderful buffet and finished off the night with a bonfire on the beach. Then off to sleep listening to the ocean.....Ah this is the life!!  On the way back the next day some of us stopped at Tangi, the local fishing village to buy some ladyfish! The beach was mobbed and the smell overwhelming. Not just of fish, but mixed with sewage. Not as nice a combination as you might think! Still, it was a place I’d wanted to go to for a while and was great to see a local industry in action. That night some of us had another camp fire on a beach and cooked the fish on a charcoal stove while we wrapped ourselves in blankets being buffeted by the wind!

Unfortunately, I have a few days left in Kombos before I go back to Basse, so more money to spend. Wednesday we are getting our residence permits to allow us to stay and work here. Take care, till next time! x

Apologies for not updating my blog as regularly as I could have, no excuse just good old fashioned laziness really! Since my last post I have been slowly getting to know the way things work over here. I have managed to attend some workshops for teachers. The Jolly Phonics training was organised by GATE (Gambian Association of Teachers of English).  They are currently working in 5 out of the 8 clusters in my region. I finally met some teachers there and talked to them and found out about how they work and find teaching. The workshop was ok, but the vast majority of the day was spent by the teachers making resources for their classroom, with no apparent instructions from the trainers as to how to effectively use them. However, to be fair I only attended 1 day out of 5 so I may have missed that one.

The other 3 clusters in the region are being supported by a Swedish NGO called Future in our Hands (FIOH). They have adapted a phonic scheme especially for The Gambia called SEGRA (Serholt Early Grade Reading Ability). The various pictures and words they use to introduce sounds and rhymes are very familiar to Gambia children and have a relevance to them. I have attended a couple of workshops run by them and they are very good, a much better scheme than the Jolly Phonics one. The trainers are Gambians and also much better and more effective in their training methods. The two regional trainers for my region, Kebba and Cherno, come up every few weeks to run workshops and go out on observations, giving feedback to teachers then heading back down to the Kombos to report and to prepare for the next round of training. They invited me along on one of their trek’s, so I finally managed to see some teaching and to monitor some lessons. It was great to finally see some teaching but at the same time overwhelming to realise the amount of support these teachers actually need in terms of training. It is very chalk and talk, although FIOH are making in-roads to get the teachers to be more active with the children. The teachers can have up to 45 in their classes and have limited resources with which to work. The workshop I attended at the weekend was specifically for making resources for the teachers to use when introducing sounds with their class. The teachers had to bring their own cartons with them to facilitate in production of them, it was a sea of cardboard by the end! The teachers are also paid to attend training, to pay for transport and lunch. It was about D250 which is only about £5 but that would last a few days here.

As Sarah is predominantly working with the South Bank, I am going to be working with the North Bank so when I finally got my motorbike I went on my first trek with one of the cluster monitors for the Wuli West are in Region 6, Malick. I had to cross the River Gambia for the first time. No nice comfy ferry for me to cross on......instead I had to ride my bike down to the river bank, then get off and hop onto what can only be described as a metal tub while the men hauled my bike onto the back where it perched precariously over the side while another man rowed us across. I am glad to say my bike made it without getting wet! I finally met Malick who took me on a whirlwind visit round 9 out the 11 schools in his cluster, through the bush and past many tiny little villages that I have no hope of ever finding my way back to my own! I took my GPS watch with me in the vain hope I could use it to find my way back to some of them. Sadly all it recorded was a red loop as there are no towns or streets in this part of the world to use as landmarks! Anyway, it was really nice to visit so many schools, even though I barely spent any kind of time in any of them. I have at least introduced myself to a few headteachers and I hope to go back this week to some of the easier ones to find and see some teaching in them. The one thing common throughout the schools is the poor wall displays and ineffective use of the teaching aids they have, so this may be something that I can help with. There was one school where the HT wants a library to be set up in his school. He advised that he did have one but that all their books went to another school which was to be set up as a library centre for the cluster. Well, the library in this supposed ‘centre’, was thick with dust, books in no order and some not even age appropriate for the children in the school. Very depressing. There was one school in the cluster that has a fabulous library, although there is Peace Corps based there who set it all up and ensures it is well maintained. The HT was bemoaning the fact that she was leaving in June as her time will be up and they won’t get another one to replace her. He was worried about what would happen to it when she leaves and that there will be no-one to take care of it. I tried to tell him that each teacher could be responsible for it, but not sure he really took it on board.

Last week I also visited a local school to conduct some monitoring in an ECD class. Oh my goodness, what an immense job nursery teachers have here! Both classes I saw had over 50 children in them, with only 1 teacher, no other adult in the class. I was monitoring a listening walk for Sarah. She has written a manual for the ECD classes and had worked with the school to try and implement it. The children were to go on a walk round the school grounds and listen for different sounds. The children were all over the place, in one class the boys were running around and play fighting, whilst the teacher struggled to control them and get them to listen. There was no structure to these classes. I am still trying to get my head round what they actually do with them. I don’t think that they even know themselves and actually try and teach them the sounds that are taught in Grade 1.

Anyway, think I have bored you enough. This week I hope to find my way back to some of the schools in Wuli West, so this may be my last post if I don’t find my way home from the bush!