one hundred colours
‘In a desert landscape the trees follow the lines of the riverbed, empty and exhausted. From above, an army marches across the dust, throwing up clouds of sand in their wake, carving their tramp into the edifice of the earth. It gives the illusion of life in a wasted land. The fractal patterns of the desert are like the imprint of a lung, the hollow echo of an object, like the skeleton of a leaf, taking only a last gasp to crumble into dust.’
These are the only notes I made in my trip to Gambia earlier this month working on a volunteer project in a school in Bakau. I made them flying over the Moroccan desert from the relative comfort of a jet plane window seat. I was only there for seven days, none the less I would in any other circumstance have made penned pages of jottings and ideas and fermenting thoughts. It was impossible to do so. Firstly I think because of the culture, secondly the climate and finally myself. Gambia’s culture is one that reaches out and takes hold of you and folds you into itself. I have never met more welcoming people, a community that made more of what it had. This is a country that gained it’s independence in 1965 from a rule that was born in the slave trade and carried through the British empire, a rule that demanded lives and allegiance and was, in all aspects of the word, empire-rule. This is a country whose politics are so complex the current party rely on injunctions instituted by a military coup from 15 years ago and whose incumbent president told his public ‘I will develop the areas that vote for me, but if you don’t vote for me, don’t expect anything.’ There is another world entirely here that I could only grasp at. Yet when you work beside people, every day, when they infect you with their veracious will to live, you get to know them, personally, humanly. When their children run up to you and treat you with such unguarded affection, when you see a hundred colours fill a street of corrugated iron and mud and lacking in a humming night of smiling bodies, you cannot help but feel. They wear their hearts on their sleeves here. Despite the climate that defines the landscape, that defines the way you live and move and breathe and think in such a place, despite the fact I this is a culture I will never be able to fully understand, I still think it was worth it. Experiences change you, and the more extreme the more they do so, and the more we become inexorably linked as a species, the more be understand one another, the more we understand ourselves. I saw humanity light up the eyes of people I knew like I’d never seen before, not least of all dear Isis. As we sat on the steps what was briefly our dormitory watching new friends making their own unique tea Marx said to me: ‘We bring ideas.’ He’s right, and we have to bring them back with us too. There is no ‘…illusion of life in a wasted land.’ There simply is life. And all of us too easily forget it.
