Howard Buffett comes to The Gambia

Last week was a rather interesting week at the WFP.  Howard Buffett, the son of Warren, came to town.  He has a farming background and has been a WFP Ambassador Against Hunger for several years and visited The Gambia as part of a multi-nation tour of Africa.  Needless to say, the WFP office here was in a tizzy before he arrived.  We had to choose three schools with decent school gardens that were relatively close to  airport so we could get him back to the airport after a whirlwind visit, less than 24 hours. I was not invited to the dinner the evening before or the meeting at the vice president's office.  Even though I was not there I thought I would include a picture taken in the her office.  She is the woman in white in the picture.  I recently discovered that if you double click on the pictures in the blog, it will bring them up in bigger format.  I would recommend doing it with this one just to see the detail in the picture.  At the back of the room you can see a picture of President Jammeh. 

I had to throw one more vice president picture in because I got a kick out of it.  In this picture Vitoria is presenting a computer to the vice president to represent the equipment we will be presenting to the regional office.  Everyone in the picture is looking at VItoria and the VP except Mr. Buffetts new assistant who is looking at the camera with the stock Hollywood glamour pose.

The remaining pictures were all taken during the part of the visit in which I was included.  We ended up going to two schools with good school gardens.  We had to tell the third school we would not make it. When we arrived at the first school the student body was lined up along the driveway singing a welcome song and clapping to the music.  The girls were all on one side and the boys were on the other so Mr. Buffett went down both rows slapping the girls' hands and fist bumping the boys.

Then he and one of the teachers held hands and kick stepped their way back.  As you can tell he is not a very formal kind of guy.

The first place we went we got to the school was the school garden.  One of the first things that Mr. Buffett did was to grab a handful of dirt, rub it through his fingers, and smell it.  He was not very impressed with the dirt -- needed more organic matter.  That made me smile because I had recommended composting at every garden I visited in December.

In the picture below, our WFP country director Vitoria is with Mr. Buffett.  She recently cut all her hair very short but used to have elaborate braids etc.  Since having the braiding done takes hours, I would probably do the same if I was in her place.  The stick that has leaves on the top of it, in the lower left of the bed they are looking at, is cassava.  To harvest it they cut the plant down and eat the roots.  But then they cut the woody part of the plant into pieces and stick the pieces into the garden.  They root and create more cassava plants  The one in the picture has just started the process of growing into a larger plant after having already been part of a larger plant.

In my post on my trek I showed you a school kitchen that was not being used. This one is in full swing-- the cook was making benecin, a Gambian dish with rice soaking up a sauce -- a Gambian verson of dirty rice.  Mr. Buffett and Vitoria both took turns doing the stirring and then turned it back over to the cook.  As you can see she has some good muscles in her arms from stirring these giant pots.



Here is the school store of WFP food and equipment.  The rice is front and center, the peas at the back right, the salt in the middle of the back and the oil is in the boxes.  These pallets are the latest and greatest WFP version -- not enviromentally sound but won't break and allows lots of air flow around the food.

We visited math class and Mr. Buffet sat himself down in one of the children's chairs which the children got a big kick out of.  They had were doing fill in the blank number math problems and, on the most complicated one, kids were doing random guesses.  Mr. Buffet stuck up for the student sitting next to him and called the teachers attention to the fact that the boy had given the right answer.  The man in the blue robe is the Minister of Education who came with us on the visits.

Then it was time for a program.  The children performed a drama (they love dramas) that was focused on school feeding.  The boy in the suit at the end of the table is playing a man from the WFP giving the parents and children the news that they will be receiving WFP school feeding.

The drama ended with the kids getting a food bowl with Vitoria joining in.

The PTA made a short presentation and then began to dance accompanied by drums.  If you look at the left of the picture you can see one of the drummers who has a whistle in his mouth.  Blowing a whistle while drumming is often done in group performances.  As you can see, Mr. Buffett jumped up to participate.

When the festivities were over we hurried off to another school.  This one had a beautiful school garden and also a banana orchard.  But they are no longer receiving school feeding.  WFP does not have the funding for their region.  The dirt was not good there either -- more composting needed.

Here is a Gambian teacher at work.  He was doing phonics and it was pretty interesting to watch him.  He had a string suspended across the classroom with different letters on it.  He would arrange the letters into a word, have the children sound out each letter and then sound out the word.

In one of the classrooms Howard noticed 3 children who had US Flag school bags.  He had them walk out into the yard and took pictures of them with the bags.  I have no idea where they got the bags but it does make a cool picture.

Some singing and dancing by some boys and girls at the school.

As part of the festivities some of the boys bought up a present for Howard.  When he opened the box they had given him a giant papaya they had raised as well as some bananas from the orchard.

Below is the WFP crew who went on the school trip along with Mr. Buffett and one of his assistants(the one in checks).  The background is a map of The Gambia painted on the side of one of the school buildings.  After this was taken we were off again --  some of us to the airport and the rest of us back to the WFP.

All in all in was a pretty interesting day.  He makes an excellent ambassador for the WFP.  His primary  focus was the kids and he loved being with them.  I had all of a 20 second conversation with him.  He asked me where I was from.   When I told him Portland, Oregon, he asked me if I had ever heard of EcoTrust.  I told him I lived across the street from the EcoTrust building.  He said he used to be on the board.  End of conversation.  I don't know exactly how many countries he had been to on this trip but I know there had been quite a few.  Nice to watch a philanthropist in action.  Probably the most fun thing in our preparation was getting the staff to say his name right.  They all wanted to pronounce it like Boofay.  Luckily we Americans were there to save the day. 

Random Things

I usually have my camera with me wherever I go and if I think of it I will take it out when I see something interesting (to me anyway).   The picture below is a photo of an aid magazine cover.  Kind of dumb to take a picture of magazine cover but it was an incredible picture and even though it is not West Africa it still has elements that ring true here.  First of all this woman is a living skull.  Now I have not seen anyone who resembles here but there is plenty of hunger in the Gambia. Then the men laughing behind her and one of them raising a glass of tea.  I have no idea what was happening when they took this picture but the juxtaposition of the men and the woman is an amazing contrast. The final thing of note is that she is clasping bottles of vegetable oil to her chest.  The amount of vegetable oil consumed here is incredible. A lot of it in The Gambia is palm oil. 

The next two pictures were taken on my walk to the United Nations.  As I have mentioned before Gambia is a free range country.  I regularly see chickens, goats and sheep walking around the hood on my way to and from work.  However, this day there was a herd of cows walking through.  No one was with these cows and they were just walking.   Then about 3 hours later I was on Kairaba Avenue at Traffic Light and the same herd of cows came strolling by, again without anyone tending them.  Traffic Light is one of the main corners in the entire country so the cows literally stopped traffic.

It probably sounds racist to repeat the euphemism "black don't crack" but living in Africa, I have to say it is true and I am damn jealous.  The woman below recently retired from my office at age 60.   She doesn't take very good pictures but take a look at that face and neck.  Arg, she looks better than I would if I had had plastic surgery.

Here is a Konkuran coming down the street of the village I walk through to come to work.  The Konkuran is a red monster who is part of the male circumcision celebration.  I talked about it in the blog about the dancers during my pre-service training.  But I have run into them several times in different parts of town.  In fact I saw one tonight on my way home.  They are always red, hairy and smack machetes together.  I have seen kids imitate them with torn red tee shirts for costumes and smacking flip flops together.  Gambian children are good at imaginative play.  A couple of times I pretended to be afraid of them and people came to my rescue.  I guess I will have to stop that practice.

For the final random photo I thought I would include one of me in South Africa having  a latte, or what is called a latte in SA. (I had to order extra espresso) The only reason I put this in is because I like the way that I look in it.  The woman in the picture is a PCV in Uganda and had thyroid surgery, hence the scarf.  She is back in Uganda and doing fine.

The Incredible Woman Eating Bed

I have already told you in an earlier post about my Gambian bed.  Little did I realize at the time that it is a determined foe.  It all started with minor misbehavior -- I would sit on the side of the bed or lie down to go to sleep and the end of one of the support boards would crash  to the floor, which meant getting up lifting up the mattress to find the errant board and then fixing it.  I was resigned to this until New Years Eve.  I guess my bed wanted to bring in the New Year with a bang -- literally. I got into bed and bang down a board went.  Fixed the board and bang another one went.  Got up and fixed that and then repeated the whole experience two more times.  AAARG!  The bed was defeating me.  At that point I told my woeful tale to Lindsay Roe, my UN co-worker.  She came up with the magical solution to all problems -- duct tape. When I got home that night I carefully duct taped all of the boards to the support boards.  Oh bliss, oh joy, the boards were firmly in place!!

I had tamed the beast.  But I tried to give the bed proper respect.  I tried to avoid sitting on the edge of the bed and would carefully slide into the bed at night, not wanting to anger the bed spirits.  But last week I did the unthinkable and sat on the edge of the bed as I got into bed.  BAM! one of the boards dropped to the floor.  In my  foolishness I decided to ignore it, thinking that the others were securely taped and went to sleep. When I woke up in the morning I was disoriented.  I could not figure out how to get out of bed.  Then I realized that both the foot and head of the mattress were upraised and I was stuck in the middle.  I tried to make my  way to the side but slipped back.  My mind was racing -- was I to remain locked in my house being consumed by a bed -- had any other PCVs been eaten by a bed?  Finally I was able to summon up super human strength and pull myself out of the jaws of the monster bed.  I threw the mattress aside and grabbed my mighty duct tape and wrestled the boards back into submission, applying duct tape as if I owned a duct tape factory.  The beast is tamed for now, but I know that it lies there, waiting for me to make another mistake, so that in can envelope me in its jaws.