Photo time!

I've got my photos up on Picasa:

Nightmares

Fun day yesterday, it was so hot you could actually watch beads of sweat forming on your skin and the generator exploded. Actually, genuinely exploded – Sarah, one of the MSc students had to put out the fire and in doing so discovered that the fire extinguisher had already been discharged. A miscommunication with the guards sent me and D off yomping round town to try and sort out a problem with the NAWEC (National Water and Electricity Company) that didn't actually exist, and to top it all off one of the kittens is missing and has been for several days, presumed... well not presumed anything good anyway. Just about the only thing going well here at the moment are the sores on Mission's ears – I didn't expect the antibiotic powder to do much but they're about half the size they were when I arrived. He may even be ready for a photo before I go (I know they'll just get worse again when I leave, but at least I can give the poor dog some relief for a short time).

In the evening wrote a long email to my supervisor, summarising how my work had been going (badly) and the internet cut out as I was sending it – I lost the whole thing. So I decided it was finally time for the five tiny strips of streaky bacon the students had picked up for me in Senegal, that I'd been saving for when things got really bad and cooked this:

And incidentally facilitated cannibalism in the process, by unthinkingly lobbing the plate of peelings over the wall to the pigs the way I usually do and forgetting there was bacon rind on there too. So I cut my losses and got an early night.

A few hours later I woke up, needing to visit the toilet to give the mosquitoes their midnight snack. Getting back into bed by the dim illumination of the security lights is always tricky - I don't know if you've ever seen that daft film in which Catherine Zeta-Jones writhes around in a catsuit to dodge laser beams, but if you imagine a mosquito net that has inexplicably multiplied overnight into a dozen layers instead of laser beams and me with a sweat-stained t-shirt and hair like a refugee from the eighties instead of CZJ in a catsuit you'll get the picture. I'd managed to get inside from the waist up and was leaning on my hands to pull my legs in when something largish and indistinct in the feeble light darted across the sheet and came to rest against my hand.

My heart started beating like that of the average teenage audience member watching CZJ writhe in the catsuit, but I didn't move my hand ("Must...not...disturb whatever it is, spider? Baby scorpion? World's largest tick? It doesn't seem to be biting me yet. WTF is is???"). Instead I cautiously, slowly reached for my torch with the other hand, flicked it on and carefully moved the circle of light closer so as not to startle the...... @(**$%@ing rubber earplug that had rolled across the sheet into the depression made by my hand (I keep the box inside the net with me to be easily accessible in the event of enthusiastic mosques or rams, and it had come open). I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry so I settled for passing out asleep instead, falling into feverish dreams in which the person I'd expected to most disapprove of my involvement with Mission was paying to bring him over to the UK and helping me to choose a crate for him for the flight. I think all things considered that if my subconscious is going to torment me with anything I'd rather it was phantom insects.

The people who look like baboons

Whilst making a collection in a family compound today, D got chatting to some of the women and soon the whole group was doubled over in laughter. Feeling a little left out I asked him to translate the joke for me.

"These people come from the South Bank, so they are Jarankas." He explained. "I am Nionka and I was telling them that their old people look like baboons."

I was momentarily stunned, seeing as this wasn't really the sort of thing I was hoping a diplomatic fieldworker would be saying to a family helping with my study. But everyone seemed quite happy, so on the way home I pressed him for further information.

D explained that many years ago, the Nionka man and the Jaranka man were brothers living in a village on the north bank who decided to set out to seek their fortunes. The Nionka man went first and was able to find a lot of food on his way so did well. The Jaranka man came after him, but he wasn't so good at finding food and in any case the Nionka man had already taken most of it so he quickly became very hungry. One night the Jaranka man came across the place where the Nionka man had crossed the river and set up camp. He found his brother getting ready to eat, surrounded by good food and clean water. The brothers greeted each other and the Jaranka man asked for something to eat, complaining of how hungry he was.

"Of course you can share my food" said the Nionka man "but first please go into the bush and fetch this thing (some sort of seasoning?) so that we can enjoy our food together."

The Jaranka man (who seems to have been a bit of a proto-bumster) pleaded that he didn't know how to find whatever it was, couldn't his brother see how hungry it was and didn't that show he was no good at finding food? The Nionka man agreed to go looking for it instead, and while he was gone the Jaranka man ate all the food and drank all the water.

When the Nionka man came back he was furious and hurled insults at his brother. The Jaranka man tried to calm him down, saying that he had been starving and if he had not eaten he would have died and never seen his brother again, but the Nionka man would not accept this so they ended up fighting. The Nionka man was tired and hungry after hunting in the bush for that time's equivalent of Maggi cubes, so he lost the fight to his well fed brother and went home to his village in disgust.

Many years went past and the Jaranka man prospered in his new land, marrying and having lots of children. But he started to feel bad about the way he had treated his brother, so he made the long journey back to the village where he had grown up to find that his brother had also prospered: he was now headman of the village, with many wives of his own. At first the Nionka man was angry with his brother and insulted him, which made him angry in turn and he insulted the brother that he had come to apologise to. But eventually they remembered that they were children of the same mother and that if they hurt each other they also hurt themselves. In this way the brothers were reconciled, and the Jaranka man returned to his new village on the south bank, which became Jarra. All the people from that area now call themselves Jarankas. The area where the Nionka man stayed became known as Nioni, and all the people from that area as Nionkas.

"So now" explained D "when a Nionka meets a Jaranka we must always insult each other, but it is a joke. The Nionka and the Jaranka are brothers. If a Nionka is hungry the Jaranka must give him food, if a Jaranka travels abroad the Nionka must pray for him. A Nionka cannot steal from a Jaranka or a Jaranka from a Nionka because it would be like stealing from yourself." Wouldn't it be great if all regional and national rivalries operated on the same basis?

Greetings from The Gambia!

Hi everyone, just to let you know that I've arrived in Farafenni and just to confuse you all am going to upload my Farafenni blog posts out of sequence. If anyone who talked me down after my little freakout over the generator is reading this, just to let you know that it has now been fixed and it turns out that it wasn't actually me who broke it – apparently the guards broke it a couple of weeks ago and got one of their dodgy friends to patch it together with bits of rusty wire (Firefly fans think Serenity's engine room, but not rigged up by a genius) and the generator just chose my watch to finally say Do Not Want.

7/7/10 – Hopeless Mission

If you get upset by animal suffering then you probably shouldn't read this post.

The last time I was here at the Roman Catholic Mission the guards had a little puppy unimaginatively named Mission, who they planned to train as a guard dog. Unfortunately this training was done in the traditional Gambian way, with kicks and beatings with a stick. I did my best to ignore him and keep my distance, Gambian dogs being vectors of all sorts of horrible things, and though it was tricky because he was quite frankly adorable and because I could hear him yelping whenever he was "disciplined" I managed to keep this up for the first three weeks. Then one night I found myself sat outside the mission, waiting for my fieldworker to bring me some crucial item (the identity of which I've now forgotten) and trying desperately to tune out the sounds of a particularly savage beating which eventually stopped after what seemed like a decade. A few minutes later Mission staggered out of the shadows, limping and shivering in spite of temperatures in the high twenties. He came straight towards me and in his pitiful state I couldn't bring myself to practice good vector avoidance and shoo him away. I don't know how but he must somehow have sensed that this was one person who wouldn't hurt him, and he came up to me and just rested his hanging head against my leg. Gently I rumpled the loose skin on his neck, telling him he was a good dog, and slowly he stopped quivering and even began, hesitantly at first, to wag his tail. After that we became friends, vector avoidance be damned. We played with sticks and, though I found him to be entirely untrainable (after learning that punishment meant a beating, any verbal reprimand was just met with a cocked head and a look that said "I know you're just fooling") I did manage to partially cure him of his habit of snapping at shoe laces by soaking mine in Listerine. This is what Mission looked like as a puppy:

Fast forward six months and, while I was in the UK, the mission guards were fired after some food and computer equipment got stolen from the mission. They left Mission behind, like some piece of obsolete rubbish, and he became just another Gambian stray. "He's not nearly as cute as he used to be" warned Emma, and I vowed, this time to be sensible and steer well clear, which should after all be easier now he was no longer a cute puppy and no longer actually in the mission grounds, right? He probably wouldn't remember me anyway. I knew he'd be in a bad way, but i was sure I was prepared for that.

It didn't quite work out like that. Opening the mission gates this morning I saw a filthy dog lying in the road. He had patches of fur missing and was covered in scabs and sores with a particularly nasty one on each ear. "Mission?" I gasped, not wanting to believe it, and any hopes that I had that he'd have forgotten me were dashed when he lumbered up to me and rested his head against my leg, exactly as he had done that night six months ago. Gingerly I stroked the back of his head, the only clean part of his body, and he wagged his tail. And I burst into tears, right in the middle of the street, and a passing boy rushed at him shouting and scared him away.

"Give me ten dalasi!" Demanded the boy, clearly seeing himself as my rescuer.

"No!"

"Give me five dalasi!"

"No!"

"Give me one dalasi!"

"No!"

"Give me your watch!"

"NO!!!!!"

And it took all of my self control not to scream "You horrible child, I didn't want you to scare him away!"

But now I've had a chance to think about it rationally I think the boy probably did do me a favour, there's really nothing I can do for Mission, and seeing him can only upset me. Even if we were in the position to have a dog at the moment, which we're definitely not, and even if I had the money it would take to bring him to the UK, which I don't (and if I did I could benefit a lot more dogs by just giving it to a UK dog charity), he's a Gambian outdoor dog and would be miserable in quarantine and miserable in a house in the UK and utterly impossible to train. I've already had my heart broken here by a little girl with a crippled hand and a little boy with HIV, in this country of broken children to lose my heart to a dog would just be decadent.

11/7/10 - Consent

There's a bit of a perception among the general public* that scientists are a pretty immoral bunch, merrily stuffing haddock genes into turnips, feeding nail polish to kittens, cloning dead dictators and recklessly creating Earth-engulfing black holes for a laugh when there's nothing on telly. Obviously nothing could be further from the truth and I am definitely not breeding an army of mutant super flies with which to take over the world cough. But in all seriousness there's at least one area where medical science is ethically in advance of society in general, and that's the principle of consent.

For a scientific study to be approved by an ethics committee, anyone participating in the study in a way that carries any conceivable risk or inconvenience to them must give consent, which at its simplest means they must sign a form to say that they are willingly participating. But there's far more to it than that. The consent must be informed – people must understand the purpose of the study, how their samples or information will be used and the possible risks to them in participating, and it must be freely given – people must not be coerced into participating by an authority figure or for fear of loss of some benefits, and while they can be compensated for any inconvenience participation may cause them (for example having the cost of their transport to a hospital where samples can be taken paid for) they cannot be paid or given gifts for participating. Not paying participants is probably the most important, because it ensures that the study doesn't exploit those in the greatest financial need who might be tempted to take part in the study for the rewards rather than making a free choice to do so having weighed up the risks to themselves against the benefits to science.

I do wonder whether we'd be better off if the principles of consent could be applied to society at large, if people should not be offered money to submit to any procedure that carries a risk to them. Project Prevention, a deeply disturbing scheme being piloted in Glasgow in which drug addicts are offered money in exchange for getting sterilised, would certainly not be permitted if strict principles of consent were applied. And some interesting issues would arise if it were applied more widely – not permitting money to be given to someone in exchange for doing something which carries a risk to them would put an interesting spin on the perennial feminist debate on prostitution, and the practice of offering soldiers free university education in exchange for risking their lives and health in war would start to look extremely dubious.

So that's how consent should work in theory. The reality here on the ground in The Gambia is inevitably slightly different, as I discovered today when all five of the children in the compound where I usually collect human faeces to bait my fly traps with had diarrhoea. We had done the consent procedure in this compound by the book, with my fieldworker reading out a translation of the information sheet to the heads of the household, and while it is of course impossible for me to tell how accurate the translation into Mandinka is, both fieldworkers I've used are very reliable, and I've worked with this family for quite a while now and from the questions they've asked me they seem to have a fairly good idea of what I'm doing and why. Unfortunately with no, umm, material of a suitable quality available it was necessary to find an alternative compound within the next two hours, before it was time to replace the traps. "Do not worry!" proclaimed D my fieldworker. "God is great, we will prevail!" which I found a rather encouraging attitude towards the whole enterprise.

I had had an agonising choice of two possible fieldworkers, both equally qualified and equally desperate for work. Emotionally the balance lay rather in M's favour, as D had a job already but was eager for one that paid better than a government salary (I carefully explained that this work was temporary) whereas M was unemployed and was the nephew of a senior fieldworker so was probably the better political choice, but eventually I decided on D whose English was fractionally better. The choice has really paid off – in such a highly connected society personal relationships are so important and I was extremely lucky to discover that D used to live in Farafenni. D led me to the compound of a man he used to work with.

"But now he has been..." he paused "what do you call it when they sack someone when they get too old?"

I considered. "Discrimination?"

"No, the other thing."

I tried thinking laterally "Umm, retirement?"

"Exactly, exactly".

Sacked or not, D's former colleague seemed to have done rather well for himself and was apparently the landlord for the entire block of compounds, probably the equivalent of the village Alkalo or head man. D greeted him warmly and explained why we were here, then when his friend ducked into the house explained to me that all of the children in the compound had already been to the toilet except for one small girl who was still asleep. As he told me this the landlord reappeared carrying the girl in his arms, still blinking and fuzzy from sleep. He deposited her in front of me and whispered something to her, presumably explaining that this big scary white woman has come all the way from the UK and wants you to do a poo for her. The little girl did what any rational person would have done on being woken to be confronted with this information, and burst into tears. We waited a while in the compound, D catching up with his friend and me sitting in the one chair being eyeballed nervously by the little girl who had had the worst awakening ever, but with the deadline approaching and no poo forthcoming we decided to try another compound.

At this point things got a little complicated. The landlord was either so impressed by our study or so pleased to see D again that he decided to come with us, encouraging people to help out. How freely consent can be given when your landlord is encouraging you to participate is something I'm not sure about, but at this stage the issue was fairly academic as all of the children had already been to the toilet and, impressively, it had been hygienically disposed of in the latrines. At this point we had acquired quite a horde of hangers on: the landlord, a crowd of laughing women grateful for some respite from the monotony of daily chores, another long lost friend of D's who chatted delightedly to him before rushing off and of course the ubiquitous gaggle of Gambian children who appear spontaneously around any toubab who might possibly give them sweets or do something amusing like falling over (there is nothing a Gambian child finds funnier than a toubab falling on her great white arse). But with collection time fast approaching poo was, it seemed, scarcer than bacon in this country.

With just 20 minutes to collection time our saviour ran towards us up the road, D's long lost friend with a plastic bag of child's shit. Reverently we scraped it into the pot on the scales, but disaster! Only 27 of the necessary 50 grams! The clock ticking, the landlord summoned two of the small boys following our party and handed them each 5 dalasi. I had completely lost control of the situation, money was changing hands, I didn't know if their parents had been informed but as I was trying to work out my next move they pulled down their trousers and squatted in the street whilst all around them their friends laughed and clapped, cheering them on. As the first deposit hit the ground D let out a triumphant cry of "Praise God! God is great!" and all the adults started congratulating one another heartily as the children whooped. So all in all I'm really not sure if I did anything properly or right but it worked out and everyone seemed to come away happy, and I'm increasingly coming to realise that out here that's probably the best possible outcome. I gratefully accepted the sample – it would have been churlish not to as it was, after all, a gift from God.

*And by "general public" I mean "my Mum", but I know she loves me really.

Frustrations and a Mission update – 12/7/10

A blog I'm rather enjoying and sympathising with is http://whatsgambianforbluescreenofdeath.blogspot.com/, maintained by a VSO volunteer trying to get various virus-riddled Gambian computers into some sort of working order. He perfectly captures the frustrations involved in trying to get anything done out here, where everything is a little bit more complicated than you expect and nothing quite goes according to plan.

A perfect example of these difficulties is the little saga of the water tank, which concluded today. The Catholic Mission's water tank is supported on a platform three metres or so in the air, to produce enough pressure to get water through the taps and showers and so the sun can warm the water to the perfect temperature for the breeding of assorted nasties – shower with your mouth closed please. When he was up here last week The Professor noticed that the planks supporting the tank were nearly rotten and decided to get them replaced before they gave way and the falling tank made someone considerably shorter. This involved contacting a carpenter, to replace the planks, and a plumber, to drain the tank so that the carpenter could reach the platform.

The plan was for the plumber to come on Saturday morning and for the carpenter to come on Saturday afternoon. The plumber did not arrive on Saturday morning. Saturday afternoon brought a carpenter but no plumber. The carpenter cut the wood and hung around while the plumber was contacted, said he would come and failed to do so, and eventually went home after being told that we would contact him when the plumber had arrived. Late on Sunday, by which time it was too late to contact the carpenter, the plumber arrived and did....something. We're not entirely sure what because when the carpenter arrived this morning he found that the tank had not been drained. He was understandably quite angry about this and demanded that we contact the plumber. Surprisingly he came only an hour later, at which point I showed him round to the watertank and discovered that the carpenter had already erected the platform. I was a little surprised and asked how he had done this, hadn't he needed the plumber after all? It turned out that the carpenter had, rather enterprisingly I suppose, sawn through one of the water pipes to drain the tank himself so it was lucky that we now had a plumber to fix this.

So we now had a completed platform, which in the UK would have been the end of it. The carpenter wanted paying, which shouldn't have been a problem as I had the money and it looked to me as though he'd done a pretty good job, apart from his little bit of improvisation with a saw. Unfortunately, as the repair would be paid for with MCR funds I needed a receipt to account for them and this was where the trouble started. The carpenter wanted the money but did not want to give me a receipt. I tried to explain that I was quite happy to give him the money but I needed a receipt. I didn't raise my voice, was reasonable but firm. The carpenter got angrier and angrier. The guards joined in to harangue me "This man does not make receipts. He has done the job, why will you not give him the money?". Sirra the Mission cleaner joined in, as far as I could tell on my side (sisterhood ftw). The carpenter said he did not have a receipt book, so I gave him a sheet from my notebook and told him to write me a receipt on that. And then, horribly, it emerged that the man couldn't write and I'd just shamed him in front of the substantial audience that had built up. So I paid him and wrote the receipt myself and one of the guards signed it.

And that still wasn't the end of it. The carpenter had bought and planed eight timbers for the job but had used only seven of them. Technically we had paid for the extra timber, but I couldn't see MRC using it whereas a carpenter probably could so I told him he could keep it, trying to make a bit of a peace offering after the receipt business. Unfortunately this was taken as a signal to launch into a speech on how hard it was to be a carpenter in The Gambia when materials were so expensive, could I provide him with more materials? No. Why not? You are a toubab and you have so much money. I am a student and I don't have much money actually, and there are a lot of people in The Gambia who need help and I can't help everyone. But when you have studied you will have a good job and you will be able to help me. No, just no, I'm so very, very sorry but I get this from every single person I meet and I can't help you. Also I need to check my fly traps. Sorry, goodbye.

Just to complicate matters while all this was going on I was also trying to arrange for the MRC mechanic, (who shares a name with a member of the Adams family and damn it's appropriate) to fix the generator which broke yesterday, having to contend with dodgy reception and his complete unwillingness to spend any of his credit calling me, and of course to carry out all my experiments which aren't working so well at the moment. Luckily the students went to Senegal on Sunday to watch the world cup and have returned with what in Britain would be a very nasty bottle of rosé, but which will I have no doubt taste like the nectar of the gods out here so I plan to accompany tonight's instant mash and packet curry with a glass of that.

And a quick update on Mission – I think I spotted him once in the distance, loping along with a scrawny brindled creature, but yesterday whilst spending a brief peaceful moment sulking or skulking in my room I heard the unmistakeable flapflapflapflapflap that any dog owner will recognise as a long-eared head being shaken. I went out to investigate and there under my window was Mission. I've been trying to convince myself that he can't really remember me, that the encounter in the street was just a coincidence, but that belief is becoming increasingly untenable. For a start he had chosen my window over all others to sleep under, possibly because he could smell me (and believe me you don't have to be a dog to smell me out here, I hum) but rather more conclusively as soon as he saw me his tail started thwacking the ground and he rushed up to me, squirming with pleasure.

So at this point I decided to say sod sensible and went and found a pair of latex examination gloves so I could touch him and the antibiotic skin powder one of the students had bought and started trying to treat the sores on his ears, which was made rather more complicated by the fact that all this little dog wanted to do was roll on his back sneezing in ecstasy while the nice toubab tickled his ears. And actually after the initial shock I realised he didn't look quite as bad as he had first appeared – under all the scars and scrapes and sores he isn't nearly as thin as some Gambian dogs I've seen. I'm still not going to put up a picture of him because I think some of you might find it too upsetting, but if his ears heal up maybe I will.

So I'm going to try and fix the worst of the sores with the antibiotic powder, and maybe if I come back to Farafenni look at getting him castrated and vaccinated, but I think all in all Mission is probably happiest here- he's obviously getting enough food and has a little friend to run around with. I must admit that after my first encounter with him I did have a moment of weakness and start googling the procedure for bringing Gambian dogs into the UK. This only served to convince me of how thoroughly impractical the whole enterprise would be, but did turn up this rather interesting charity - http://www.gambicats.org.uk/ - a group of vet volunteers who come to The Gambia to neuter and vaccinate stray cats and dogs.

If I can't do much for Mission I can help dogs like him and I will be making a donation to Gambicats – while it may seem selfish to care about animal welfare in a country where children are going hungry, it really isn't any more selfish than to care about animal welfare in the UK while children are going hungry on the same planet. If you want a justification in terms of human welfare, castrating strays to reduce their numbers in a humane way will reduce transmission of worms and vaccinating strays will reduce transmission of rabies. I can even justify it in terms of my project – dog faeces breed Musca sorbens and cat faeces certainly seem to attract them, so fewer strays should lead to less breeding material in the environment. But to be honest I care about the animals here – Mission and the cats Claire and Vassie and Vassie's kittens, provisionally named Smoky and Midnight – for my own selfish reasons. When you and everything around you is filthy and dusty and your clothes stick to your body and there's grit in your bed it's so nice to have something soft and silky twining around your ankles, chirping prettily, and in a country where it can so often seem that people are only interested in you for your estimated bank balance and perceived power to secure a visa, to have Mission genuinely pleased to see me just because I once showed him a little kindness really makes a difference. I have given gifts and donations to people here and to be honest donating to Gambicats feels a lot less morally ambiguous – I don't need to worry whether I'm encouraging dependency and the patronage system or only giving to those who are already advantaged enough to be able to explain their needs to me. In short, I'm doing this because it makes me happy and I don't think I need to justify myself beyond that.

I do, however, need that rosé.

020609 - I've had better days

There is a species of wasp (I've forgotten the name but I'm sure
someone reading this will be able to provide it in the comments) which
buries a cockroach in its burrows for its developing larvae to feed
on. It's a small wasp though , and a cockroach is a large insect, so
dragging a dead cockroach into the burrow would be impossible.
Instead of killing it then, the wasp stings the cockroach and injects
a very special toxin which doesn't paralyse it but destroys the part
of its brain that gives it volition (if that word can be applied to a
cockroach). The cockroach loses any desire to move of its own accord,
but if the wasp seizes it by the antennae and gently leads it towards
its burrow it will walk, unresisting, to its doom. There it will
remain alive as the young larvae feed on it, devoid of any desire to
escape.

In this heat I feel like that cockroach, capable of completing tasks
if led to them but not really in any fit state to plan a study. The
rains aren't due for another fortnight or so, but yesterday I saw
clouds in the sky for the first time and last night the heat felt like
a solid thing, heavy and smothering in the darkness. Sitting in the
village to catch flies I could feel the sweat pouring down my legs,
and when I got home I discovered a livid sweat rash between my tits
(in a way this is quite gratifying, as I didn't think my tits were big
enough to sweat between). To replace the water I'm drinking about
four litres of water a day, with a couple of sachets of dioralyte.
Fortunately knowing Lou has prepared me for that fact that for doctors
no bodily function is an unsuitable subject for polite conversation,
but I was still a little unsettled when Shivonne asked me how many
times a day I was going to the toilet. I was even more unsettled
when, after a brief stop to irrigate a nearby palm field (no ants this
time) Shivonne gave me an encouraging little smile and said "You're
not doing too badly for hydration!".

In spite of the heat we got some good flycatch data in the morning,
but things started to go wrong after lunch when we returned to a
village we'd screened last week and found to have a high incidence of
trachomatous infection. I could tell that something wasn't right as
soon we pulled in to the village - usually we are greeted with smiles
and shouts of welcome, but here the people looked sullen and were
reluctant to talk to Smauel L. It turned out that the day after we
had inspected the childrens' eyes there had been an outbreak of vernal
conjunctivitis (an eye infection different from trachoma) in the
village, for which the villagers were blaming. It's not impossible
that we caused this, but it seems very unlikely - when screening
Samuel L and the Professor followed the standard hygienic procedures
between eyes, this hadn't happened in any of the other villages we'd
screened and outbreaks of vernal conjunctivitis amongst children are
not uncommon that time of year in the normal course of events. What
mattered in this situation though was not what had caused the outbreak
but that the villagers believed that we had.

We gave out tubes of chloramphenicol to the mothers of the infected
children, and as a PR excercise gave sweets to the Alkalo for all the
village children, but they didn't want us to take samples. Suddenly a
furious mother confronted us with a sobbing girl with blood red
corneas and swollen eyelids coated in a white powder. It turned out
that she had conjunctivitis and that her mother had attempted to treat
this by crushing a packet of paracetamol tablets and pouring it into
her eyes. There's a bit of an attitude here that if a medicine treats
one thing it'll treat anything, and the more the better, but I think
even Shivonne was shocked by this. She washed her eyes out and gave
her some ointment for the infection, but there was nothing she could
do for the irritation.

If that wasn't enough, just as we were preparing to leave a shout went
up and a man came running up to the bantaba with a small girl in his
arms, blood pouring down her face. Once Shivonne had cleaned it up it
turned out to be a very small cut that had just been bleeding
profusely, but as she had done it on a rusty iron sheet Shivonne was
worried about tetanus. The child had no clinic card and noone knew
whether she was up to date with her vaccinations, so Shivonne told the
parents to take her to the nearby hospital for a vaccination - of
course as a trachoma screening team we had no vaccinations to give
out, but the villagers had a hard time believing this.

Driving home, Samuel L was uncharacteristically quiet. He eventually
explained that we would be going back to our own countries but these
were his people, whose language he spoke, and he had friends in nearby
villages - could we be absolutely certain that he hadn't given those
children conjunctivitis? We tried to reassure him, but "correlation
doesn't imply causation" is a nice pat phrase beloved of sceptical
bloggers but doesn't provide much comfort in these situations.

We stopped off at the Kaur weather station to ask for temperature,
humidity and wind speed data for the region over the sampling period.
All was going well until the station operator explained that providing
this information was complicated and that many people made a small
payment to help cover expenses. As he was paid a salary to collect
the data anyway I couldn't see that the expenses involved in providing
it would be much more than the cost of a pencil and paper, but by that
stage I would have given both kidneys to get the data and get home to
a cold bucket bath so I agreed to give him a "small present". I did
feel bad afterwards, knowing that by giving in I'd made things that
bit harder for the next researcher to come by, but screw it, I think
I'm accruing enough good karma just by being here and washing out of a
blue plastic rubbish bin every day to balance it out.

We stopped again to buy cold soft drinks and I was briefly amused by
my can of inaccurately named "Real Orange" (the only plant-derived
ingredients being sugar and, bizarrely, esterified wood-resin). My
mood was still sufficiently dark though that when Shivonne pointed out
a huddle of children around a well by the road I said the first thing
that came into my head, which was "One of them has probably fallen
in". She looked slightly shocked and said she thought they were
probably telling stories.

The thing about fieldwork though is there's no time or headroom to be
miserable, you just have to try to get some sleep and go out and do it
all again the next day. I hope tomorrow will be better, Inshallah.

030609 - Who watches the watchmen?

Last night, in the stifling heat, I had a lovely dream about cool
waterfalls then woke up to find I could still hear water. Still half
dazed I assumed that someone had left the tap on, and that Jeff would
go and turn it off in a minute, and it was quite some time before I
was alert enough to realise that not only was there no Jeff here,
there shouldn't be any water either. My room is one down from the
shared bathroom (making me convenience food for the mosquitoes
breeding in the toilet there) and this seemed to be the source of the
noise, so I found my torch and went to investigate, Nancy Drew style.

Sure enough I was shocked to see that one of the taps had been left
turned on and water was cascading into the basin (my first impulse, I
must admit, was to stick my head under it). Those blessed with UK
plumbing will no doubt be wondering why seeing water coming out of a
tap was so startling, but here at the Mission although in theory we're
meant to have 24 hour water from the storage tanks, in practice the
guards empty them whenever they fancy a brew and I knew for a fact
that the tanks had been empty when we'd come back from the field the
previous day. The only was for them to have been refilled would have
been for the guards to have turned the pump on again in the middle of
the night, something they certainly shouldn't be doing as turning it
on more than twice a day doesn't give the well long enough to refill,
causing the pump to suck up sand which damages it.

Hell hath no fury like Julie needlessly deprived of a shower, so I
stormed up to the guard station to demand an explanation. There
should always be at least two guards on duty but only Elderly
Nightwatchman was present. He at first categorically denied that the
pump had been switched on, but changed his story after I escorted him
to the pump (which was on) and switched it off. Apparently Young
Nightwatchman had turned it on to have a shower, and now he had gone
to the village. When would he be back? "Soon, soon." I decided this
was more than I could handle alone and knocked on Emma's door, but she
was too soundly asleep to notice so I decided she deserved her rest
and sat down to wait.

At this point the righteous indignation fizzled out and I began to
have some doubts about my course of action. I had just caught Young
Nightwatchman out deserting his post, turning on the pump when he
wasn't supposed to, wasting electricity and wasting water, and Elderly
Nightwatchman covering for him. I began to wonder if he'd left the
tap running on purpose to empty the tank again and cover his tracks.
There were two of them and one of me, and while Elderly Nightwatchman
would probably fall over if I poked him with my little finger Young
Nightwatchman was a rather more formidable presence. Just as I was
considering bolting back to my room and locking the door Young
Nightwatchman returned.

In the event I needn't have worried. When asked where he'd been Young
Nightwatchman intially, rather ingeniously, claimed that he had gone
to turn the pump off. When I explained that this was impossible as I
had turned it off myself they both just started laughing and said "No
problem! No problem" when I tried to explain why they shouldn't turn
the pump on more than twice. Eventually I gave up in disgust and went
back to bed, vowing to call down the wrath of Emma upon them the next
day.

Two hours later I was woken again by a roaring noise. My first
thought was that the generator had broken, and I rushed to the window
expecting to find the compound on fire but saw only backness. To my
horror I then noticed water cascading down the veranda - the guards
must have broken the pump after all, and now they couldn't switch it
off and the tank had burst! It was only when I remembered that the
water tank was on the other side of my room that I realised what it
was pounding on the flimsy tin roof of the mission.

The rains have come early this year.

010609 - No flies on us

One of my non-science related goals for this trip was to see some of
the famous Senegambian stone circles which dot the countryside between
the River Gambia and Senegal's river Saloum. They consist of between
ten and twenty four squat laterite cylinders enclosing a burial area.
Their original architects are a mystery, vanishing from the region
over a thousand years ago before the area's current inhabitants
migrated in, although the decorative tooth notches shared by today's
Jola tribe and the skeletons unearthed within the circles suggest some
continuity of culture. I find it fascinating how so many ancient
civilisations across the world all independently arrived at the idea
of building these monuments. There's obviously something very
deep-seated in the human psyche that has driven wildy disparate
cultures to impose some sort of order on the world around them by
arranging stones into complex geometric patterns. Either that or a
deeply ingrained urge to say "Look at me, I can afford to have bigger
stones dragged about than that bastard in the next village can".

I hadn't expected to see any of the circles until I reached Wali
Kunda, but as we drove out to screen on Monday morning we spotted a
ring of red pillars out of the landrover window. We pleaded with the
driver to stop and take photographs, but he grinned and said just
wait. We pulled into our first screening village, Sinchu Demba, and
as Samuel L requested permission to screen from the Alkalo Shivonne
and I went to have a look at a curious building we'd seen on the way
in - brightly painted, tin-roofed and situated in a large wire-fenced
compound with its own water tank and mobile phone mast, seeming quite
out of character with the rest of the village.

Although none of the villages we'd visited seemed especially affluent,
Sinchu Demba looked like a village that had fallen on hard times.
Most villages are aranged around a bantaba, a wooden platform shaded
by a large tree or thatched roof, upon which the men lie during the
hottest part of the day to snooze, talk politics and brew tea (the
women, needless to say, keep pounding grain whatever the temperature).
Although the shade tree was still standing in Sinchu Demba, and we
could see the struts that had once supported the bantaba, the platform
had long rotted away. There seemed to be fewer animals here than in
the other villages; no sheep or goats, just a tired donkey and a few
mite-ridden chickens, and the childrens' hair was fluffy and
unbraided. The Alkalo was a quiet, dignified man, but unsteady on his
feet and with a hacking cough. The only other men in the village
seemed to be the thinnest elderly man I'd ever seen and a youth of
nineteen who fancied himself as a bit of a ganster with his
much-darned JaRule T-shirt, patched adidas trousers and fake Ray Bans.

But right next to it was something that in any other country should
have been bringing prosperity to the village. The Alkalo explained
that a toubab had come from London and built the compound, but when he
had finished it the government had taken it over and were now using it
as a regional administrative post. He said the administrators weren't
there at the moment and offered to take us in through a gap in the
fence. From his description it sounded like the toubab had been
building a house here, and it was only when we got closer that we
realised what it really was; a museum of Gambian culture, with the
Kerr Batch stone circles in the grounds. The government had moved
into the offices, the museum itself was abandoned, the keys still in
the swinging door.

The whole place made me very sad; sad for the mysterious toubab, who
had obviously put a lot of love into designing the museum, choosing
and explaining the exhibits and commissioning paintings and dioramas,
only to have it taken from him and left open to the wild dogs and
dust, but also sad for the villagers who seemed to feel so little
connection to this place, this museum an outsider had built to their
culture, and who had derived so little benfit from it. The stones were
smaller than I had expected, though still majestic in the early
morning stillness, but these too seemed removed from the villagers,
fenced off as they were in the grounds of this museum to a museum.
Suddenly I noticed that one of the stones had a number of smaller
stones precariously balanced on top of it, certainly not looking as if
they had stood there as long as the stone pillars themselves. For some
reason this made me shiver - maybe the stones weren't as removed from
the villagers as I'd thought.

The Alkalo led us to one of the circles, explaining through Samuel L
that if you prayed here you would get whatever you wished for. I
looked at the Alkalo, wondering if that sad, noble man had received
everything he had wished for here, and it seemed only right to kneel
in the dirt and pray too. I prayed for successful fieldwork and for
my grandmother, then felt slightly guilty that I'd done it in that
order.

Finally the Alkalo showed us a slightly raised mound with a slab on
top, warning us not to smoke on the mound and not to tread on the
slab. He said that there was something here, a shape that you could
see when you were far away, but it vanished when you got close to it.
The morning was clammy and grey and I was developing a major case of
the creeps, so I was glad to get back to village and get involved in
the usual pandemonium that ensued when trying to sample a horde of
squealing children. Particularly memorable was the tiny girl with the
cheeky smile who giggled every time Shivonne tried to take a nasal
swab.

So please, if anyone finds this blog post whilst googling to plan a
trip to The Gambia, visit the stone circles at Kerr Batch. Stop off
in Sinchu Demba, give the Alkalo some kola nuts and see if you can
find someone to make you attaya for ten dalasi (2009). The wannabe
gansta speaks a little French, if the government officials aren't
there ask him to take you to the museum and give the Alkalo a few
dalasi. If the officials are there, buy more attaya in the village
and look at the stones through the fence. These people are sitting on
a fantastic heritage that should be bringing them prosperity but seems
to be only bringing them trouble. Maybe that's Africa all over.

After that we moved on to fly-catching experiments. I'm trying to
correlate the presence of certain chemicals in nasal and occular
discharge with the number of flies attracted to children's faces, and
to do this have to sit the children down on a stool somewhere shady
while Samuel L catches the flies that touch their faces with a
handnet. Fortunately he's extremely good at it. I tend to catch ears
and noses instead. We do this for fifteen minutes, which would be an
impossible amount of time to expect a Western child to sit still for
but attention spans seem to be rather longer here in the absence of
TV's and Xboxes. It's hilarious to watch - the child inintently
watching Samuel L, him intently watching their faces for flies and all
the other kids clustered round watching something a bit out of the
ordinary happening. My favourite fly-catching village was Sare Janko
- the first little boy kept falling asleep, which was adorable, and
the Alkalo spoke English and wanted to know "everything about England
and her agriculture" which was a little challenging but quite fun.
Somehow I got talking about the Eurostar, which amazed him - a tunnel
under the sea that trains go through? I suddenly realised that this
was actually quite amazing, and not for the first time on this trip
felt like a spoilt, complacent twat.

When we got back there was no water. There was also no electricity -
our credit with the power company had run out in a third of the time
it was supposed to. Either someone had been using way too much
electricity without anyone else noticing or the power company was
scamming us. Emma, the woman in charge of the mission, ordered a car
to the power station to sort it out forthwith.

Emma is incredible. She runs the North Bank trachoma survey, runs the
mission, supervises the fueling of the landrovers and luckily has no
ambitions to run an army because if she did half the planet would be
conquered by Tuesday. After a day in the field I just want to wash as
best I can, grab a bite to eat and pass out but Emma spends her
evenings with the fieldworkers checking through the questionnaire data
they have collected, then deals with the administration of the mission
and still has the energy to pay close attention to my work and pull me
up on any points she thinks I may be being sloppy over. Somewhere in
all of this she is also finding time to do a PhD. I haven't given her
a nickname because I'd be scared to. (The same goes for Shivonne
incidentally, whilst planning this fieldwork I was told I'd be
accompanied by a paediatric nurse to take my swabs, so when I met
Shivonne I assumed that she was the nurse. She is actually a fully
qualified doctor, which she lost no time in explaining to me. This
and the fact that she is one of the most incredibly competent people
I've ever met have left me a little in awe of her too.)

In fact, there are quite a lot of things and people out here that are
pretty awe-inspiring.

Setsetal

One of the things a naive European visitor to The Gambia (such as
myself) finds most shocking is the rubbish strewn by the roadsides -
plastic bags, tin cans and other unidentifiable detritus mingle with
animal filth and the occasional rotting cow or horse carcase,
contorted and bloating in the sun. It's enough to make a naive young
entomologist realise that fly control may be more of a challenge here
than she had thought.

The drivers simply fling their used bottles and wrappers from the car
windows. One of the workers here has instituted a rubbish bags in
cars policy, but it does seem a bit pointless as as far as I can tell
there's no rubbish collection here - the cleaners would just take the
bags out to the bush anyway.

The President is apparently also not a fan of litter, but instead of
providing rubbish collection and recycling facilities he has
designated the last Saturday of every month as a Setsetal or clean up
day. Everyone in the country is meant to stop whatever they're doing,
indeed you can be arrested for driving between the hours of nine and
twelve, and clear up litter. I'm not sure what you're then supposed
to do with it, but I saw a lot of smoke and smelled burning plastic on
Saturday.

There is actually a form of recycling in operation here; the children
will pick up anything they can possibly make toys out of. I've seen
broken glasses frames, machine parts, a tin can lid fastened to a
stick with a rusty nail - anything sharp or broken or dirty that would
give a British mother nightmares the kids'll pick up and probably put
in their mouthes. I actually snatched a rusty wire coat hangar away
from a small boy because he was trying to stick the end in his ear,
then gave it back because he'd probably only have gone and started
playing with a razor blade instead or something. This recycling
actually worked in our favour once, when the landrover broke down in a
village. My knowledge of cars doesn't go much further than the fact
that you push the pedals and magic pixies under the bonnet make it go,
but apparently a wire had snapped. OUr driver asked one of the
village elders for help and explained what he needed, the elder
whipped a wire out of the mouth of a passing child and bingo, the
magic pixies started working again.

The problem is I think that Gambians are used to using materials that
do break down when they're discarded; houses are built from bricks cut
from the earth in pits outside the villages, and roofed with reed
thatch or palm leaves. The spiny, grey-purple stems of the same palm
make a goat-proof fence, neatly tied with bark ropes. Halved gourds
are used to serve food alongside the new enamel dishes on woven grass
mats. Gambians are accustomed to using things taht will return to the
earth if left outside for long enough, and simply have not yet adapted
to the fact that plastics will not do the same, but then again it's
not like we've got used to this fact either. When something is built
or made in the west no thought is given to how it can eventually be
disposed of, the only difference is that it goes somewhere we can't
see and don't have to think about. So of course a far more sensible
solution than leaving rubbish lying around the countryside where it
won't biodegrade is to dig a big hole somewhere out of sight and drop
it in there where it won't biodegrade. Because our system is
obviously far more sustainable.

Lumo

Before coming out here I had to complete an exhaustive fieldwork risk
assessment detailing every activity I planned to undertake and how to
minimise the risks that it entailed. When it comes to transport I am
supposed to travel only in well maintained MRC cars driven by a
reputable driver. Travelling by mule cart would not, I expect, have
been an alternative acceptable to Rothamsted's health and safety
adviser.

Shivonne and I had Sunday off and decided to visit the local lumo or
Sunday market. As this is held in a field some distance out of town,
and as our drivers also had Sunday off we went the local way, on a
two-wheeled metal frame to which a few wooden slats had been attached
which doesn't really deserve to be dignified with the name "cart". We
tried to pick one pulled by the healthiest looking mule we could find
- most of the horses, donkeys and mules here are in shocking
condition, emaciated and with open sores on their sides. It seems a
bit silly to care about the condition of the animals here when the
people are living in poverty, but the people look happy and the draft
animals certainly don't.

We hopped up onto the cart and set off, picking up more passengers on
the way. I tried to take a photo of the driver but as I did so he
whipped his mule. The poor beast put on a sudden burst of speed and
the cart lurched, almost making me drop the camera. I decided to
concentrate on holding tight from that point on. After a
bone-rattling ride we reached the lumo and clambered unsteadily down.
I went forward to pay the driver and the cart promptly ran over my
foot. Thank you Roxana, Imogen, David et al., without those army
boots I'm sure I would have broken it but as it was I just felt a bit
sore and like a total tit. Note to parents: I will not do this again.

The lumo seemed packed and chaotic, and it was often hard to tell who
was the customer and who was the vendor. Sacking and tarpaulins were
strung overhead for shade, often a few inches below headheight, so I
spent much of the time stooping.We quickly discovered that there was
an underlying order though, clothes here, homeware there, car parts at
the back, vegetables at the front and next to them the dried fish
section which we steered well clear of because of the smell. I
bought a cooking pot (there was only one in the kitchen), some
homemade local soap which looked nice but turned out to be incredibly
harsh, some veg and a pretty headscarf (I could really get used to
this fake Muslim thing) before finding another cart to rattle us home.
This time we didn't have such a choice of horses and the poor beast
we picked was in very bad shape and farted all the way back, not great
for the passengers downwind.

At least I assume it was the horse, I suppose it could have been the driver.

Sprogs and swabs

On Thursday I finally got to start the work I'd come here to do -
taking samples from the eyes of kids with and without trachoma. The
first step was to actually find some kids with an active trachoma
infection, and to this end Shivonne (the doctor volunteering with the
project, who is the one actually poking the kids in the eye), The
Professor and I drove out to screen some local villages. On the way we
picked up our fieldworker, who is the spitting image of Samuel L
Jackson and so that's what I'm going to call him from now on. This
bloke is incredible; he's been working on the trachoma project for
some time and is able to identify Muscids in the dark and identify the
signs of trachoma from 500 metres. I exaggerate slightly but
certainly he should be the one getting the PhD, not me.

The children were summoned, lined up and the Samuel L turned the upper
eyelid inside out and checked for visible signs of infection. This
isn't painful but it is quite an unpleasant sensation and although the
kids didn't enjoy having it done to them very much they thought
watching it happen to others was brilliant entertainment. Some of the
older boys, unbidden, took it upon themselves to capture their
screaming peers and drag their sacrificial victims to the examining
stool. Some kids fought all the way, some looked resigned, some seemed
to enjoy the attention, some bawled as soon as they looked at us and
one little girls stamped up to the stool, crossed her arms and scowled
at Samuel L through the whole procedure before stomping off again with
a "hmmmph!".

Some of the kids struggled so much they had to be held down, which
made me feel rather uncomfortable. There's a rather different
attitude to discipline here - in Britain a crying child undergoing a
procedure like this would be comforted, here they were physically
restrained and often thumped or hit with switches if they cried, which
apart from being unpleasant to watch was rather counterproductive as
it just made them squirm and fight more. Usually it was the mothers
who held the children down, but in one village the Alkalo or headman
took on the task and performed it with a gentleness that I found very
moving, soothing instead of chiding and gently stroking the children's
eyelids closed with his thumb once they were done.

When not being sampled the kids were great fun, scared at first of the
white people but quickly gaining courage. One little girl in
particular stands out in my memory; four or five, shy at first, when I
smiled at her she came up to me and held out her hand. I shook it
gravely and she beamed, then started dragging other children forward
to shake my hand. As we left she shouted what sounded like "Send me
email!", and as neither Samuel L or our driver knew of anything in a
local language that sounded like that I can only assume it's what she
said. I doubt she could read or write, there was no electricity let
alone a computer in her village and as I have discovered internet
cafes are incredibly scarce here, but someone muct have taught her
that phrase and she wanted to stay in touch.

As we pulled out of the last village I saw two boys playing at doctors
trying to turn each others' eyelids inside out.

Having identified suitable clusters of trachoma, we returned the next
day to actually take the tear samples and the swabs that would tell us
whether the children had an active trachoma infection. (The symptoms
of trachoma can ake a while to develop and so can lag behind the
presence of the bacterium, and may persist once the infection has
cleared, so what you see on the childrens' eyelids may not correspond
to what you see with a PCR test for the presence of C.trachomatis
DNA). Shivonne took swabs by rubbing a cotton bud on the inside of
the eyelid and stciking another cotton bud up the children's nostrils
- I was amused to note that some of the dirty little perverts seemed
to rather enjoy this step. After the procedure was completed the
children got a "mintie", a boiled sweet, and it was amazing to see how
a child who had been crying inconsolably a second earlier suddenly
quietened down when a twist of luridly coloured cellophane was
deposited in their mitt.

Next to one village The Professor spotted a rocky outcrop rising a
good thirty metres into the air, unusual in a country that's mostly as
flat as me in a bikini. He asked the local villagers about it with
rather unsatisfying results ("What do you call that?" "A hill.") and
was informed that some missionaries had once climbed it, in a way that
suggested that this was only one of the crazy things missionaries did.
Not wishing to be beaten by missionaries he immediately decided that
we should do the same.

By this point in the day I had a thumping headache (usually we found a
place to sit in the shade for sampling, but something had gone wrong
in thelast village and we'd spent the afternoon sitting in full sun)
and couldn't think of anything less appealing than scrambling thirty
metres up baking rocks, but The Professor is a very singleminded man
and I don't think anything less than a stampede of hippos would have
stopped him. I reached the top feeling pretty awful and had to sit
for a few minutes with my head between my knees. Then I looked up and
the climb was suddenly worth it - the view was amazing with lush
swampland to the south soaking into the river Gambia and stately palms
rising above the dusty plains to the north, and the the thatched roofs
of villages we had visited dotted all around is.

Coming back down I snagged the back of my shirt on a rock and Samuel L
had to free me. He then decided it would be helpful to hold the back
of my shirt up and out of the way all the way down, so we came of the
hill like a slightly surreal bridal procession.

We set out again the next day and repeated the sampling operation.
More villages, more children, more screaming and smiles, resistance
and resignation. In the last village we met the Gambia's answer to
Richmond's pushy mothers. In Britain this woman would have been the
first to fake Christianity, move in with her sister to get into the
catchment area, anything to get her son into the right school. Here
she was determined that he should be included in our study. She dug
out his clinic card and kept trying to give it to me, and even went as
far as lifting poor little MOhammed onto the sampling bench ahead of
the other children we'd picked - Samuel L would then argue with her
until she took him away to make space for our sampling subject, then
she'd try it again when we changed child. Pushiness works -
eventually we included Mohammed in the control group just to give
Samuel L a quiet life. I took a picture of Mohammed, which I'll
upload when I get somewhere with a good enough connection. I'm
surprised she didn't ask me to print it out and frame it.

Coming back The Professor treated us to lunch at a small shack
restaurant next to the Kerouan bus garage, or rather treated everyone
else as I had no idea how coeliac-compatible the rich, spicy-smelling
stews were and declined. It was pleasant sitting in the shade under a
tree by the garage, even if the diesel fumes were occasionally a
little overpowering, and though the food smelled wonderful I was
really too hot to feel hungry and so didn't feel I was missing out.
In fact as I watched a pair of grubby small boys washing their hands
in the uncovered water bowl used for cooking I was suddenly glad I
hadn't eaten anything.

We have a few more vilages to sample, and then start the fly work on Monday.

The Missionary Position

After a variety of sickly soft drinks containing enough tartrazine to
send a whole class of eight year olds hyperactive, the most popular
drink in The Gambia is attaya, a very sweet, frothy green tea. There
are rituals around the making of it, involving pouring it from glass
to glass to make it foam, and around the drinking of it; the first,
weak cup is for the children, the second for the women and the third,
after it has stewed for some time, for the men. It's not unpleasant,
once you get used to the fact that it's brewed in what is basically a
saturated sucrose solution, and it gives you a welcome caffeine kick
in the soporific, scorching afternoons. The trouble with attaya is
that it's the reason I can never get a bloody shower.

I am staying at the Catholic Mission in Farafenni, as the missionaries
have all left now and are renting it out to the MRC. The compound
gets water twice a day, in the morning and evening, and this is pumped
into two storage tanks held high above us on scaffolding towers. In
theory this should mean that there's running water on tap, as the
water in the tanks should last until the next time it's available to
pump. In practice however the compound guard station is situated just
next to the tanks, and when they fancy making attaya they open the
storage tank drain tap to fill their kettles rather than walking the
extra ten metres or so to the water tap. As they usually forget to
close it again the water drains away, and then we have no water until
the next pumping period. Apparently there is nothing that can be done
about this, as every other firm of security guards in Farafenni is
crooked whereas ours are just incompetent, but coming back from a
dusty drive to find there is no water is enough to make me wonder how
bad the others could really be.

The guards' other job, apart from failing to open the gate when we try
to get back into the compound, is to switch between generators. We
have 24 hour power here to keep the sample freezers running, but it is
only provided by the grid for a few hours a day. Because of the
timings the guards have to switch on the backup generator at three
ever morning, but they will not do this unless someone wakes up at
three to tell them to, no matter how many alarm clocks they're
provided with.

Staying here is a strange mixture of hardship and luxury. Water is
scarce and the fan in my room doesn't work, so I'm typing this in the
coolest place I can find, the senior kitchen (or rather the "senior
chicken" as it says on the key fob). On the other hand we eat off
fine china and silver tray; the visiting Bishops, coming to check on
how the conversion of the heathens was progressing, apparently liked
their home comforts. I have a fridge in my room, although it's
currently full of dirty dishes that I haven't been able to wash up
without water (it's the only way to stop them smelling). We also have
the amazing Sarah, who comes in to clean our rooms and somehow manages
to leave everything spotless with barely any water, no mean feat given
the thick red dust that settles on everything. She will also take
away your filthy clothes every morning and return then, immaculate,
ironed (no Tumbu flies for me!) and neatly folded, in the early
afternoon. She even managed to get the Deet stains out. I think I
could get used to this.

Driving up to Farafenni I needed a bush, the African equivalent of a
Starbucks, and had no sooner started performing my official business
when I felt a sharp pain in my left buttock. My first thought was
that I'd been bitten by a snake and that I was just going to have to
die from it as the alternative was asking my driver or the Professor
to suck the poison out. Fortunately, or perhaps not, it turned out
that I had simply flooded a red ants' nest and they were now biting me
in all sorts of amusing places and indeed everywhere else. It took a
great deal of thrashing and a fair bit of nudity (luckily it was a
very secluded bush) to dislodge the majority them, and I was still
finding them in my hair several hours later.

The wildlife at the mission is rather friendlier. Jewel-bright yellow
and blue lizards bask on the trees and scuttle across the verandas and
the ground is pitted with ant lion traps. There are three potter wasp
nests on the bathroom doorframe too, but they seem to be abandoned at
the moment. The mission also has two semi-feral cats, Clair (mostly
white with black bits) and Vas (Mostly black with white bits), named
after two previous researchers here. Claire is the friendlier of the
two and keeps trying to get into my room, but I have a policy here of
not getting too friendly with anything that could give me rabies or
fleas and have learnt to open the door very quickly and make a dash
for it before she goes between my ankles. This mode of exiting my
room does of course look ridiculous when there's no cat outside, but I
just have to live with that.

The strange thing about Claire and Vas is that half-starved, scrawny
creatures that they are they're just as fussy about food as a pampered
pussycat back in the UK. The first time Claire ambushed me she did
get into my room and under the bed, and proved impossible to
extricate. I was finally forced to make up some dried milk in a tin
to tempt her out, and although she followed it outside she took one
lick of it then turned her nose up and walked away. She also refused
to eat a perfectly good dead yellow and blue lizard. I know that it
was a perfectly good dead lizard because it was a perfectly good live
lizard until I didn't look where I was going and put my fat hoof on
it.

Anyway, shower time, let's see if there's water today.

Shaken and stirred

It's something of a cliche to say that travel in developing countries
makes you appreciate things you had previously taken for granted, but
it's said so often becaus eit happens to be true. Clean water.
Internet access. Roads with more flat surface than pothole. The road
to Dakar had so many potholes in that leaving it altogether and
driving cross country would probably have been a smoother.

I went to Dakar in search of solvents - another thing that I have come
to appreciate is things turning up when people say they're going to
turn up, as the six litres of hexane I had ordered a month before
coming had somehow failed to materialise at MRC Fajara. Such things
aren't available in The Gambia so I got to see two west African
countries for the price of one and head to the Senegalese capital
Dakar, where The Professor remembered a shop selling lab supplies and
reagents. I found this quite remarkably as I don't think there's
anywhere in London where you could just walk in off the street and buy
a couple of litres of analar grade solvent.

I'm still accompanied by one of the world's leading experts on
trachoma, over whom I fortunately failed to vomit on the flight. I'd
met him in the UK before and found him rather shy and awkward, but the
transformation here is amazing - he seems far more at home in The
Gambia than he did in London. Everyone here calls him Professor. At
first I assumed that they called all white people that, but I have
since realised that he does actually know every single person in The
Gambia personally. So I'm calling him The Professor in this blog too,
mostly so he never finds out that I called him shy and awkward.

Dakar appears to be one huge traffic jam with a city wrapped around
it. The locals see this as a business opportunity rather than an
inconvenience though, attempting to flog sim cards and cheap watches
to the vehicles' captive occupants. We arrived at twelve to discover
that Fermon, the lab supplies shop, didn't open until three, so went
for some lunch. We got chatting to the restaurant owner, who asked
where I was from. She was very surprised when I said I was from
Britain, and said she'd never have known I was English from my accent.
I felt very flattered that my French was so good until she added "I
thought you were German".

Dakar is a curious blend of French elegance, vibrant African
streetlife and abject squalor. We visited an air conditioned, marble
tiled patisserie that wouldn't have looked out of place in Paris and
were served by elegant women in crisp uniforms, then stepped out on to
a street lined with beggars, most of whom seemed to be missing at
least one appendage. My headscarf, which had worked like a charm in
The Gambia, suddenly meant I got the worst of it.

I've been wearing a headscarf since I got here, not only because it's
a Muslim country but because it keeps the sun off my ears and neck. I
put it on at the airport and it was like flicking a switch,
immediately stopping men from hassling me. It's also gone down very
well with the local staff, who The Professor says are very impressed -
certainly everyone's gone out of their way to help me. There are
downsides though, I'm tying my scarf the Arabic way rather than the
West African way just because that's the only way I know how to do it
but I've discovered that here wearing it this way apparently means
that I've been to Mecca. The Professor finds this hilarious and tells
anyone who asks that I have indeed been - I'm dreading the day when I
meet someone who speaks enough English to ask what it was like. There
are also certain things that the local people would forgive a "toubab"
for, but expect a "Muslim" to know better - I got a filthy look off a
woman for handing her the hat she had dropped with my left hand. And
in Dakar the beggars expected more charity from a "Muslim" than from
the others, following me down the street tugging at my headscarf and
shouting at me to remember my obligations.

We returned to Fermon at three, and over cold Fantas purchased a
bottle of solvent for the equivalent of seventy pounds, more than
twice what we would have paid in the UK. I hugged it on my lap like a
baby all through the bone-rattling ride home.