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.