The Gambia
The Gambia
The dust was like a thick red fog and just hung in the air, and heat waves shimmered and bounced off the hood of the Suburban. I saw activity on my left, and stopped the truck and got out to see what was going on. There was a large pit and a lot of men working in the pit. They were digging with shovels and then throwing the shovel load against wire mesh stretched around a frame.
Off to one side was a pile of gravel. They were digging gravel by hand, throwing each shovelful against the mesh to separate the sand and dirt from the gravel. The gravel was then piled to be moved up to the road for trucks to pick up. The gravel was for building or repairing roads. The main road through the country, which is totally surrounded by Senegal, is a two lane well worn, pot holed, you got to be kidding me, this is the main highway through the country.
I got back in the truck and drove into the village. It was like I had stepped
through a door in time and had gone back to the 1800’s.
NASA had selected Banjul, The Gambia as one of the prime contingency landing sites for the Space Shuttle. This site was chosen after they decided that Dakar Senegal was no longer a viable site. This decision was based on the determination that the runway at Dakar International Air Port did not have sufficient landing overrun capability
Banjul is the capital of The Gambia, the airport and our work site was in an area called Yundum, but actually the small town of Serra Kunda. There was a village just outside the airport where the electronic landing aids for the Shuttle were set up. As the NASA security representative, security of those landing aids was a part of my job.
So at least twice a day I had to drive around the airport and open a perimeter gate and drive through the village to the location of the landing aids which were 3500 feet from the end of the runway. While I thought the airport and airport facilities were more than rundown and quite primitive, going into the village was almost a culture shock. If I had not been to Dakar before coming to Banjul it would have truly been a culture shock.
There was a cluster of thatched roofed mud huts, but scattered amongst them were several huts with corrugated tin roofs. Those were the result of English influence when The Gambia was a colony. I have been told that the traditional thatch roofs provide more insulation against the heat.
There were women outside the huts using a mortar and pestle, consisting of a long heavy stick with a rounded end and a hollowed out wood stump, to grind millet for the mid day meal. Other women were coming and going from the village well with plastic buckets of water balanced on their heads.
Things you don’t expect, I mean this is 1993, and these women have to do this on a daily basis for their families? But they were smiling, they were laughing, their clothes were clean and pressed.
Off to the left was a man sitting in a palm frond hut in front of a fire. He had an animal pelt in his hands and he was raising and lowering his arms in a steady motion. As I got closer I could see he was the village blacksmith and was using the pelt as a bellows. The coals were almost white hot and he used tongs to pull a pick head from the forge and then using a hammer and anvil, he began the task of reworking the pick head.
Further into the village I could hear music coming from a small hut serving as a small shop with a storekeeper. This was the local version of the 7-11. An old man, I assume the village elder, was standing outside the shop holding a bicycle inner tube. He had come to the shop to buy a patch for the inner tube. Around to the backside of the shop was the village tailor and he was industriously working with a peddle- powered old Singer sewing machine.
By this time the fact I was in the village was no secret and a parade of children were running toward me chanting “CANNDEEE, CANNDDDEE “. I had brought a bag of individually wrapped candy for the kids and tried to see that all got something but frankly it was like feeding a pool of piranha. They actually tore at my hands. One little girl will always stay in my mind. I found out that she was 9 years old. She had her little brother strapped to her back in a sling like arrangement, so common in Africa. Her responsibility was to care for him, and carry him on her back all day. However, she like all the people in the village was smiling and seemed to be happy. I will not forget her, her eyes were bright and she was smiling, and all I could think of was, “how does this child handle this responsibility every day and be so cheerful?” It was obvious she did not consider this a burden, her little brother smiled sleepily and dozed as she ran with the others to the suburban for the candy I brought for them. Some of the younger children did not know what it was I was giving them so they pushed the wrapped pieces in the dirt and made noises like a car. I unwrapped a piece of candy to show them what it was.
When I got to the site of the landing aids there were guards there that worked for the embassy through Wackenhut. The Wackenhut contract with the Embassy meant that they would provide around the clock security for the landing aid equipment and generators at the site. The Wackenhut manager, Mike, had been in Banjul for almost a year and prior to that he had been in Monrovia during the rebellion. He had been there with a retired Marine Colonel who formerly served as the head of Security for the Embassy in Dakar. They both got out of Monrovia during the rebellion and coup, in which the heads of officials of the Doe government were ceremoniously set on the palace steps, and the household staff’s of both were murdered by the rebels under Charles Taylor.
The Colonel would end up serving as the head of Wackenhut Facility Management for NASA at Ben Guirer in Morocco.
Back at the landing aids site in Banjul, there were several more children there and more candy to pass out. I noticed a boy with large ulcers on his legs and made a note to tell the Doc about it.
When we deployed to Banjul we took our own Doctor with us and he had an office with the essential supplies to care for the deployed team. In off hours he would go into the village and take care of some of the things he could. Health care in The Gambia leaves a lot to be desired, we had been informally warned that if we came upon an accident and people were injured, to leave them be. This warning was due to the prevalent thought that if you helped them, then you were totally responsible for their care. Fact or fiction, I don’t know.
The Gambia is the smallest country in Africa and is basically a finger of land that borders the Gambian River. According to local lore the boundaries were somewhat established by how far an English Gun Boat could throw an artillery shell on either side of the river. There is a small town on the east end of the country on the river where the ancestors of Alex Hailey, (the author of “ Roots”) came from. Hailey’s ancestor, Kunta Kinte was supposedly brought to the U.S. aboard a slave ship. While in Dakar I visited the slave house on Goree Island just off the coast. This is where the ships came to carry the slaves from Africa to the colonies, but that is another story.
We stayed in hotels in Serra Kunda, the first in the early days of going to Banjul; we stayed in the Senegambia hotel, which is on the beach. The Senegambia was adequate but still the A/C had trouble keeping up with the heat.
The hotel did have a bar and a disco, so at night we could sit and have a drink or two and listen to the music. Flag beer was the most popular drink, you could of course have a mixed drink, but the problem with that was, if you had ice, you had their water. That usually didn’t end well for those who didn’t think.
We had a more than adequate supply of bottled water at the airport site, but if you forgot to bring some back to the hotel with you, well try to imagine brushing your teeth with a beer rinse.
In 1991 a beautiful new hotel was opened next to the Senegambia, The Kariba. It had several two-story units each housing 8 to 10 rooms. It was a beautiful place. We stayed there for $37.00 per day and that included a fantastic breakfast. It’s hard to put into perspective that the housekeepers, mostly men, were paid $ 30.00 per month. That however was a very lucrative job, because the average yearly wage in The Gambia was $ 250.00 per year, yeah two hundred and fifty dollars a year.
The average life span for a male was only about 38 years and 43 for women. Again I’m talking about 1991. Poverty is a relative word, things we take pretty much for granted, could be considered luxuries there. Someone in The Gambia making our minimum wage would be considered rich beyond imagination.
So does this story have a moral lesson, no? Am I trying to make a point here, no? I’m simply sharing an experience in my life.
The dust was like a thick red fog and just hung in the air, and heat waves shimmered and bounced off the hood of the Suburban. I saw activity on my left, and stopped the truck and got out to see what was going on. There was a large pit and a lot of men working in the pit. They were digging with shovels and then throwing the shovel load against wire mesh stretched around a frame.
Off to one side was a pile of gravel. They were digging gravel by hand, throwing each shovelful against the mesh to separate the sand and dirt from the gravel. The gravel was then piled to be moved up to the road for trucks to pick up. The gravel was for building or repairing roads. The main road through the country, which is totally surrounded by Senegal, is a two lane well worn, pot holed, you got to be kidding me, this is the main highway through the country.
I got back in the truck and drove into the village. It was like I had stepped
through a door in time and had gone back to the 1800’s.
NASA had selected Banjul, The Gambia as one of the prime contingency landing sites for the Space Shuttle. This site was chosen after they decided that Dakar Senegal was no longer a viable site. This decision was based on the determination that the runway at Dakar International Air Port did not have sufficient landing overrun capability
Banjul is the capital of The Gambia, the airport and our work site was in an area called Yundum, but actually the small town of Serra Kunda. There was a village just outside the airport where the electronic landing aids for the Shuttle were set up. As the NASA security representative, security of those landing aids was a part of my job.
So at least twice a day I had to drive around the airport and open a perimeter gate and drive through the village to the location of the landing aids which were 3500 feet from the end of the runway. While I thought the airport and airport facilities were more than rundown and quite primitive, going into the village was almost a culture shock. If I had not been to Dakar before coming to Banjul it would have truly been a culture shock.
There was a cluster of thatched roofed mud huts, but scattered amongst them were several huts with corrugated tin roofs. Those were the result of English influence when The Gambia was a colony. I have been told that the traditional thatch roofs provide more insulation against the heat.
There were women outside the huts using a mortar and pestle, consisting of a long heavy stick with a rounded end and a hollowed out wood stump, to grind millet for the mid day meal. Other women were coming and going from the village well with plastic buckets of water balanced on their heads.
Things you don’t expect, I mean this is 1993, and these women have to do this on a daily basis for their families? But they were smiling, they were laughing, their clothes were clean and pressed.
Off to the left was a man sitting in a palm frond hut in front of a fire. He had an animal pelt in his hands and he was raising and lowering his arms in a steady motion. As I got closer I could see he was the village blacksmith and was using the pelt as a bellows. The coals were almost white hot and he used tongs to pull a pick head from the forge and then using a hammer and anvil, he began the task of reworking the pick head.
Further into the village I could hear music coming from a small hut serving as a small shop with a storekeeper. This was the local version of the 7-11. An old man, I assume the village elder, was standing outside the shop holding a bicycle inner tube. He had come to the shop to buy a patch for the inner tube. Around to the backside of the shop was the village tailor and he was industriously working with a peddle- powered old Singer sewing machine.
By this time the fact I was in the village was no secret and a parade of children were running toward me chanting “CANNDEEE, CANNDDDEE “. I had brought a bag of individually wrapped candy for the kids and tried to see that all got something but frankly it was like feeding a pool of piranha. They actually tore at my hands. One little girl will always stay in my mind. I found out that she was 9 years old. She had her little brother strapped to her back in a sling like arrangement, so common in Africa. Her responsibility was to care for him, and carry him on her back all day. However, she like all the people in the village was smiling and seemed to be happy. I will not forget her, her eyes were bright and she was smiling, and all I could think of was, “how does this child handle this responsibility every day and be so cheerful?” It was obvious she did not consider this a burden, her little brother smiled sleepily and dozed as she ran with the others to the suburban for the candy I brought for them. Some of the younger children did not know what it was I was giving them so they pushed the wrapped pieces in the dirt and made noises like a car. I unwrapped a piece of candy to show them what it was.
When I got to the site of the landing aids there were guards there that worked for the embassy through Wackenhut. The Wackenhut contract with the Embassy meant that they would provide around the clock security for the landing aid equipment and generators at the site. The Wackenhut manager, Mike, had been in Banjul for almost a year and prior to that he had been in Monrovia during the rebellion. He had been there with a retired Marine Colonel who formerly served as the head of Security for the Embassy in Dakar. They both got out of Monrovia during the rebellion and coup, in which the heads of officials of the Doe government were ceremoniously set on the palace steps, and the household staff’s of both were murdered by the rebels under Charles Taylor.
The Colonel would end up serving as the head of Wackenhut Facility Management for NASA at Ben Guirer in Morocco.
Back at the landing aids site in Banjul, there were several more children there and more candy to pass out. I noticed a boy with large ulcers on his legs and made a note to tell the Doc about it.
When we deployed to Banjul we took our own Doctor with us and he had an office with the essential supplies to care for the deployed team. In off hours he would go into the village and take care of some of the things he could. Health care in The Gambia leaves a lot to be desired, we had been informally warned that if we came upon an accident and people were injured, to leave them be. This warning was due to the prevalent thought that if you helped them, then you were totally responsible for their care. Fact or fiction, I don’t know.
The Gambia is the smallest country in Africa and is basically a finger of land that borders the Gambian River. According to local lore the boundaries were somewhat established by how far an English Gun Boat could throw an artillery shell on either side of the river. There is a small town on the east end of the country on the river where the ancestors of Alex Hailey, (the author of “ Roots”) came from. Hailey’s ancestor, Kunta Kinte was supposedly brought to the U.S. aboard a slave ship. While in Dakar I visited the slave house on Goree Island just off the coast. This is where the ships came to carry the slaves from Africa to the colonies, but that is another story.
We stayed in hotels in Serra Kunda, the first in the early days of going to Banjul; we stayed in the Senegambia hotel, which is on the beach. The Senegambia was adequate but still the A/C had trouble keeping up with the heat.
The hotel did have a bar and a disco, so at night we could sit and have a drink or two and listen to the music. Flag beer was the most popular drink, you could of course have a mixed drink, but the problem with that was, if you had ice, you had their water. That usually didn’t end well for those who didn’t think.
We had a more than adequate supply of bottled water at the airport site, but if you forgot to bring some back to the hotel with you, well try to imagine brushing your teeth with a beer rinse.
In 1991 a beautiful new hotel was opened next to the Senegambia, The Kariba. It had several two-story units each housing 8 to 10 rooms. It was a beautiful place. We stayed there for $37.00 per day and that included a fantastic breakfast. It’s hard to put into perspective that the housekeepers, mostly men, were paid $ 30.00 per month. That however was a very lucrative job, because the average yearly wage in The Gambia was $ 250.00 per year, yeah two hundred and fifty dollars a year.
The average life span for a male was only about 38 years and 43 for women. Again I’m talking about 1991. Poverty is a relative word, things we take pretty much for granted, could be considered luxuries there. Someone in The Gambia making our minimum wage would be considered rich beyond imagination.
So does this story have a moral lesson, no? Am I trying to make a point here, no? I’m simply sharing an experience in my life.
