Field Trip HNDII

Well it appears that I have been remise in updating my blog! The last time I wrote, I was on trek with my HNDIII students. Since then, a month has passed during which I have traveled to the US for the wonderful wedding of my good friend Miss Kat and her new husband Jimmy in beautiful Miami Beach. It was an opportunity to catch up with old friends and meet new ones! See the beautiful picture Derek took of me at the wedding!

I came back to the Gambia even busier than when I left! I have spent the last month preparing lectures, giving lectures, and more than anything else…grading assignments. It always seems like a good idea at the time to give homework and then I receive a giant pile back from the students and regret that decision to the extreme. One of the fun things I have been working on was my second field trip. This trip was for with the second year students and would be going to the same location as before, but discussing childhood mortality and diarrhea. I was determined that this field trip would be different than the last one were we were late to everything we planned. This was the trip that we would be on time. The trip where we would do all the things we said we would do. I started bugging P.S. about the arrangements more than three weeks ahead of the trip. I asked about the transportation. Was it arranged? Was there fuel? What there enough space for all the students and the faculty? What about the sleeping arrangements? Was there enough rooms, enough mattresses? And then I took over the scheduling and time arrangements. I threatened the students with point deductions for any late arrivals to the planned activities. They all agreed to pretend they were American for three days. I even made an itinerary! This trip was going to be different.

But it wasn’t. We left one hour and fifteen minutes late. Not because any of the faculty were late. Not because of the students. Not because of the vehicle or the driver. We didn’t have the keys to the campus where we were staying in Bwiam. We had to wait for the person with the keys to come from Banjul to deliver the keys. So not really within our control. So we finally get started, 4:15 pm rather than 3:00 pm and right away, we have to stop…just a few kilometers from the school to pick up the generator for the film show that we planned for Friday evening. We stopped in Brikama, all the students dispersed to try to buy last minute treats for the trip…luckily, we stopped next to one of the toubaab mini-markets run by Indians. Diet Coke!!!!! I bought all that they had…all 5 cans. As you can see, Diet Coke makes me happy.

Then the second piece of bad news…the generator doesn’t work. So, film show is canceled. Oh well. Guess we will just plan to have a fun evening once we get to Bwiam…or so we thought. We get about 30-40 minutes down the road and the driver stops to look at one of the tires. Never a good sign. But he says we will drive a little further and stop to put air in the tire. This is starting to reminded me of the ill-fated trip Anne Wallis and I took from Mysore to Madurai last April….the one where we had a flat tire (1.5 hours to change the flat), then we got hit by a truck (another hour or so stopped to assess the damage), then we stopped for a couple hours at a police station, then we get transferred to a government bus and what started out as a 10 hours trip ended up taking 17 hours.  I tell this story to Amadou W. Jallow, one of the other faculty, and no sooner do I finish the story and boom….flat tire. I should probably refrain from telling these types of stories in the future since I appear to be lucky! Well, it turns out that we don’t really have a flat since our bus has those big truck tires that lose layers. But still not good that a large chunk of the outer tire is missing. By the way…we are currently limping along the road in order to get to a place where we can get a spare and I was just handed a glass of attaya. My students apparently took the opportunity of the stop to inspect the tire to start making attaya.

But when we decided to keep going further, they just transferred the charcoal stove, hot coals, and boiling teapot to the slow moving bus in order to continue making attaya. Yep, they are brewing tea on the bus. Have I mentioned that Gambians love attaya? Not that I can complain, since I not only enjoy it, but look forward to opportunities to drink it…even if it is on the bus en route to our destination. So not only have we canceled our evening plans, but we will be lucky to get to Bwiam before dark. More updates to come….

We make to the village that supposedly has spares. We were told it was 10 km away…30 km later we finally arrive. It is quickly becoming dark. We will either get a spare or continue to slowly drive down the wrong side of the highway till we get to Bwiam. Yes, we drove 30 km on the wrong side of the road. The roads here aren’t really flat, they are slightly convex. Since the bad tire was on the right side, we drove on the far left of the road to help take weight off that side. So Amadou spent the whole time hanging out the front door signally to oncoming vehicles that they needed to go around us. We had a few exciting moments. Right now, we are sitting on the side of the road in yet another village and I am watching them stand around discussing the tire. I wish I was better at languages, then maybe I wouldn’t feel so lost about what is going on. At least I have a good sense of humor. I keep telling the students that these things happen. That no field trip is perfect and you have to be flexible…within reason that is...being late because students take too long in the shower is completely different from being late due to a flat tire. So this doesn’t mean I won’t be a time Nazi tomorrow during data collection!

Hopefully we figure the tire out soon and get back on the road!

Well, the decision was made to continue with the tire as is and continue to make our way slowly to Bwiam. Since night had fallen by the time that we made this decision, it made for an interesting ~15 km. All in all, we ended up driving 45 km with the tire in what could be described as less than ideal conditions. After dark, we didn’t dare stay on the wrong side of the road since it would be too dangerous, instead we just drove down the middle of the road. Getting over when needed. It was a fun time. Sort of. Anyways, we arrived in Bwiam at 8:30 pm, 4 hours and 15 minutes after we set out from Brikama. It should have taken 1.5 hours. I arranged for the food to get to the kitchen, asked one of the girls to inform the cooks that we hired as to what to make and then started to get the students settled. 45 minutes later, I went to check on dinner and the cooks were just sitting there! They said they couldn’t make what we had planned! I ran back to grab the class captain, Jomma. She quickly settled the problem but now it is after nine pm and dinner hasn’t even been started. It is going to be a late night. We eventually ate sandwiches with boiled eggs, potatoes, onion, mayo and salad (lettuce) for me and the addition of sardines (gross) for the rest of the group around 11:00 pm. Needless to say, it was a late night, and with three to a room (sharing two beds pushed together), not the best night’s rest I’ve ever had.

I was up early Saturday morning due to the fact that everyone else was also up and I am unused to so many people being around in the mornings. My goal for today was to get the day started on time! Breakfast (according to the itinerary posted on the doors and with each supervisor) was scheduled to start at 7:30 am…when I went to the kitchen at 6:30 am, not a cook in sight. Slightly panicky, with my entire day’s schedule hanging in the balance, I make Fatajo call the cooks. Call the bread guy. Call again. The girls save the day and start getting the beans cooking and cutting up the onions. The cooks arrive and I start haunting the kitchen, asking how long? When will it be ready? They keep saying almost. People always say almost when they don’t want to tell me how long it will really be. I ask, can I help if it will go faster? No. I start sweeping, just to do something. They take the broom away from me. I get it, I’m not allowed to help and since I do not have the power to make the beans cook faster, nothing to do but wait. We eat a little after 8:00 am and it was like a plague of locusts descending on a field of crops. They ended up eating so fast that we actually ended up ahead of schedule! We break into groups and head out to canvass Bwiam on foot. I took a picture of my group in the hopes that I would be able to recognize them and maybe, just maybe learn their names. 

The original plan was to head out to some rural village, the same that we visited during the first field trip, but without a vehicle, we had to alter our plans and remain locally. Data collection goes well, even faster than expected. The students finish early, having done all the assigned surveys during the first data collection period. Which is good since we needed a vehicle to get to the village where we planned to do the afternoon data collection so that wasn’t going to happen either way.

Now we get to kick back and relax after a wonderful meal of chicken benechin. I saw dinner and it also involves chicken, so I am looking forward to enjoying that meal too! The students organize a football tournament among the four data collection groups and it was fun to watch the impromptu game with rocks for the goal, a tree in the middle of the pitch, and elevated rock path in the middle. I’m always amazed at how well Gambian’s play with whatever they have available. Some play in flip flops, others in their bare feet. Which doesn’t stop the ferociousness of their play at all. A dance party is planned for after dinner so it should be a fun (although not an early) night! Out transport back to Brikama in the morning is still up in the air, so it will be interesting to see how we get 46 students, 4 faculty, and one bus driver back home on a bus with a bad tire…still not fixed.

Sunday was a nice rest day. We verified all the questionnaires and had breakfast and then headed back home to Brikama. The driver had the two bad tires rotated so that they were on opposite sides and he thought that would be good enough to get us home. The trip involved a lot of singing, dancing, and of course…attaya. How could a trip on a bus be complete without attaya!

I arrived back on campus, tired but feeling great about how this teaching trip went. I hope the students got as much learning from the trip as they did entertainment. I’ll have to put my foot down the next time they decide to have a dance party till 2 am! This girl needs her sleep! As we pulled up to the building and exited the bus, the bus driver promised me that the next trip will have good tires, a spare and a tire iron! So one more field trip to go…let’s see what adventures that one will bring!