Size Doesn't Matter!

It may be one of Africa's smallest nations, but the Gambia is up there with the best of 'em for friendliness, culture, natural loveliness, and (my most important indicator) dictators...

(And I am typing this from a non-Gambian computer, so I can say that.)



Food: I didn't get to sample much local food while I was here - having had domoda recommended to me, I kept trying to order it at restaurants, only to receive an apology and, oddly enough, the recommendation that I try one of the other (European) dishes. Oh well. The European food was really good, anyway.. and I did get to try some excellent local fish.

Best Eaten: Magnificent Italian food made by a basket case of an Italian chef, who moved to the Gambia to open a luxurious Italian restaurant currently patronized by the American ambassador, and.. us. Interesting to talk to, but lost all ability to follow a conversation if he heard the sound of wheels crunching outside. Poor dude. I'm not sure if a small Gambian town was the right place for his talents. But his Italian food was, I kid you not, without equal.

Worst Eaten: This is getting harder and harder to think up. Nothing comes to mind at all for the Gambia, despite my assuring myself that there HAS to be a "worst".



New Hygienic Lows: We took a day off near the coast and went to the beach - the sand there was so fine that it was virtually silt. It also felt really, really good on your skin. Always one for tactile experiences, I ended up rolling around in it in my shorts and shirt until I was completely covered in thick muddy dribbles of dark grey silt. It was probably pretty clean silt, but I had to leave behind those clothes anyway. Smooth silty sand on your skin = yes. Fine bits of sand stuck in the wrinkles and trickling out of your pockets for the next year = no.



Quote: You (I) always get a bit nervous at border checkpoints. Bribe demands, medical vacc scams, baggage searches, currency declarations, there's just a host of opportunity there for the unscrupulous official. When I'm not busy humming Criminal, I spend most of my time trying to look as innocent as possible and leave as soon as possible without looking like I'm trying to leave as soon as possible. I usually get by okay, but at the Gambian office I was a bit over-eager and took off out of the control office before I had gotten the stamp. Er, oops.

But if I was worried that this would peg me as a suspicious suspect and win me some unofficial detention - which it would with some zealous officials - I was wrong. One of the first things that was said to me in the Gambia, and I think it's pretty apropros for how friendly the country really is: the border official just took my passport and stamped it with a laugh, saying "Well, I guess you just can't wait to leave and go see the Gambia!"



Worst Experience: Though I did not have high hopes for my relations with crocodiles, not even I was expecting the intensity of my abhorrence upon first contact. To look at a crocodile, I now feel, is to openly gaze into the face of evil. There is no other creature I would work harder to avoid, and no creature I would be less willing to trust. A snake can pull off the same eerie reptilian coldness, but snakes are also cool - they are, in fact, too cool to care. A snake is so cool, he's not going to bother with the likes of you - he's just gonna keep chillin' and keepin' it real in his slithery way. A crocodile, on the other hand, would probably go well out of his way to mess up your face. And, I suspect, thinks about nothing else all day long. Between a room filled with one thousand large cockroaches and one sleepy crocodile, I would take the cockroaches any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

The above sentiments should clarify my state of mind when, to pursue David's religious interests in back-road Bakau, we visited the sacred crocodile pools and were invited to - can you guess? - pat them.

I was less than anthusiastic about even being in a forty-foot vicinity of crocodiles without a high cement wall or electrified wire fence to separate us. From afar, I was happy to take pictures of David patting the massive crocodile, but the experience was not one I was looking to share in a more direct way.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience!!" The eager, pat-happy guide urged me.

I explained to him that I was eager for it not to be my last lifetime experience.

He was unconvinced, and throughout his explanation of the crocodile pools and their local religious significance, kept un-subtly coming back to that point of croc-patting. I don't know what foolishness prompted me to finally agree just as we were leaving, but I did, just a few quick horrible pats. It was indeed every bit as horrible as I imagined. I get the shudders just thinking about it. All I could think about for the rest of the day was taking a shower to wash away the scaly evil that was surely seeping into my very skin despite the liberally soapy hand-washing that followed at first opportunity.

There is a silver lining though - David took the camera for the Moment of Patting, and while the Pat pictures themselves are somewhat anticlimactic he brilliantly captured my reaction afterwards. HI LA RI OUS. I never knew I could contort my face that way.



Best Experience: I managed to meet up with a few former students of a Peace Corpser, and after the initial awkward intro we managed to get on the [taboo] topic of the government. Sirens hailing the presidential cavalcade were sounding behind us, soldiers were lining the streets, and it was pretty much not a good place to discuss freedom of expression. One of the students, though, highly intelligent, managed to say volumes with just a few words in the classic comment I will hereafter associate with the Gambia - "Did you know that.. our president can cure AIDS?"

Another high moment is the calm afternoon we spent on the River Gambia. After a considerable amount of un-success, we finally managed to figure out where the boats were and how to board one. Being on that little boat, conversing with the highly interesting boatman, quietly weaving in and out of calm mangrove trees (and in and out of a typical rainy-season cloudburst), will definitely be one of my favorite moments from the Gambia.

Boys Not Allowed

In our bush taxi from Sokoto to Kaduna, I was thrilled to find myself sharing the 'way back' with two Muslim girls my age who were both friendly and skinny (two precious qualities for seatmates in any Nigerian transport). When naptime came, as it did for all three of us about 20 minutes into the six-hour drive, the girl in the middle settled herself comfortably against my shoulder. The girl on her other side did likewise, and within half a minute the three of us were snuggled up like bugs in a rug - despite not having yet exchanged more than two words. David, looking back to our row, quipped to his seatmate, "It looks like a trio of dominos just went down."

While it might have been creepy to have a strange woman sleeping on my shoulder in an American bus, here it was totally okay, and even normal - an outgrowth of gender-segregation that has produced one of the most (to me) surprising things I've discovered on this trip.



In traditional Islam, men are not really supposed to talk to female strangers and vice versa, a taboo I found startling at first and alarming in theory, but soon came to appreciate. Moving cities every few days makes friendship of any sort difficult to maintain, and since dating is hardly an option for me on this trip I'm not missing any opportunities there, either. Instead, the ban on male-female friendship means that for the first time in my life, I don't have to give the time of day to every yahoo who hollers for it on the street. And the effect, I admit, is liberating. It is a uniquely blissful experience to be able - without violating any code of manners - to just flat-out ignore unwanted male overtures. In fact - and this is the best part - by my rudeness I'm really only following the rules!

(I should clarify, this is typical of traditional Islam as it is practiced in more conservative areas of Africa and possibly the Middle East; I know nothing about Islam as it is practiced in the West, and little of Islam at all that I haven't learned on this trip.)

Moreover, this restriction means that all friendship is necessarily limited to those of one's own gender. In a society where co-ed contact is strictly regulated, social networks will flourish in symmetric but unconnected patterns - and those looking for friendship will scout among their own gender. A friend of mine, visiting her boyfriend in Tunis, clicked instantly with a girl she met there, and the two self-segregated to show off and try out hairdos - a 'no-boys-allowed' procedure for the veiled Muslim girl. In a culture of gender segregation, boys won't be allowed for considerable portions of female social life, and the result can be a delightfully warm, uniquely female social space.

My friend's story is anecdotal, but I wonder if it is in fact typical - and something similar happened to me on my mid-March flight from Dar es Salaam to Paris, where I was headed for the weekend to take care of money issues. While I was thrilled for the unexpected chance to see friends and family, getting on that first plane I knew I was separated from them by fourteen flight hours and a looong overnight layover at Dubai International Airport. In other words, sleep was high on my in-flight agenda.

There's always that tension when you make first contact with your airplane seatmate; locked in for six hours with only the prospect of a bathroom trip to get up, you are deprived of all the normal resources for politely ending an unwanted conversation. Starting to talk at all is seriously a risk. So burned have I been by this in the past that now I typically don't say a thing until the end of the flight; I make use of that otherwise dull taxi-time to discover whether the person next to me all along was a fascinating individual or a sociopath.



When Fatma first sat down next to me on the first flight, this was all going through my head, but we ended up striking up a conversation anyway. In fact, we clicked effortlessly. The friendship that sprang up between us and lasted through the entire transcontinental flight was surely due in part to a natural similarity in minds or temperament or what have you, but I attribute the fact that it sprang up at all to my being in hijab. Fatma was not a terribly conservative Muslim, but that first connection - we're both hijabed - has the most interesting effect of solidarity. We started to talk, at first about the flight, then about ourselves, and finally about our countries - and the information that I'm not actually Muslim didn't alter our connection at all. On the contrary, when I explained that I veil in conservative areas out of respect for local custom, she seemed impressed.

Landing at Dubai International Airport should have been the normal occasion to part ways, but instead we found ourselves just... walking out of the plane together, and then.. going to the main terminal together, and then.. well, it just seemed like the most natural thing in the world to keep hanging out. (Six hours of chat hadn't been enough already.) So we walked around, looking for a belt for her too-big pants or a camera card for me or a watch for her boyfriend, and when we got tired we wandered into the private 'female religious area' (read: mosque) to sleep on the floor amid a set of other tired Muslim women. This was my first time being inside a mosque, and I was very much expecting to feel like a turnip in the carrots.. but I didn't. The same cordiality I had noticed from Muslim women in the past was strongly present here, despite it being a random assortment of exhausted strangers, and walking in behind Fatma I was warmly greeted as 'one of us'. The best part is that there was nothing specifically religious about it - Fatma liked me just as well after she found out I wasn't Muslim; the veiling acquaintance of my friend knew full well she was Jewish; and the other women in the airport mosque were hardly interested in sharing prayer stories with me - it was more an outgrowth out of a group consciousness of space 'just for us'.

This was an incredible revelation for me. I've always assumed that all-female spaces would promote cattiness at best and back-stabbing bitchiness at worst. When alumna of all-girls schools have insisted otherwise, I admit I was never quite able to believe them. I just assumed that they were too popular to have been affected. Even on this trip, I have cynically suspected that the female-specific friendliness I felt from Muslim women was motivated by conversion attempts. I was wrong - I would now rather hazard the opinion that Muslim women are too marginalized by their own religion to give a shit who's a part of Islam and who's not, at least not in the same way that Muslim men do. (I just pissed off a few people there, didn't I.) The friendliness of Muslim women is related to Islam, though - for what better than gender segregation to inspire female friendship?


This, my friends, is the consolation prize for putting up with what few Western women would - share your husband with other women, get no protection from divorce, very little agency in family affairs, DEFINITELY no pet dog, no more cocktails or pork either, and a relative non-role in the same religion making your life a dependent sober petless hell.


But it's a pretty good one.