Celebrating The Queen's Birthday

The highlight of this week was our invitation to celebrate the queen’s birthday at the commissioner’s house. We arrived at 6.30pm and signed into the visitor’s book and then made our way to the rear of the house. There were already a lot of guests there we shook hands with the commissioner and his wife and had our picture taken, we were then offered a drink. The other volunteers arrived followed by the VSO staff from the office. The local TV station was filming the event as it was to be shown on TV tomorrow evening. There were some important people there Gambian hierarchy all dressed up in their national costume. As before the food and drink was served by waiters who were constantly refreshing there platters with more canapés. The commissioner did his speech and then around 9 o’clock we left for home.

Settling In

We are now getting into the daily routine of boiling, bottling and chilling our drinking water and even the two ring stove is not an issue anymore, managing to create most dishes using less pans. However I got a shock when opening rice to find the odd weevil scurrying for cover, on speaking to other volunteers you just have to pick them out as you get them all the time. The best way is to wash the rice first as it brings them to the surface; it looks as if we are going to get extra protein in the form of bugs. Also there are different size ants the small ones given the chance will get into your food especially the sugar so we make sure everything once open is either put into plastic tubs, emptied into powdered milk cans or they are securely tied. We are also adapting to the many noises we hear on a night the croaking of bull frogs which is very load especially if it is wet, crickets, the morning call for prayer at about 5.00am and the chirping Bulbul bird which wakes us most mornings.

Bulbul

First day back at school for Abigail and Bradley after there week long break with lots of tears again we dropped them off then headed off to La Parisiene to update my blog and use our e mails. The power this morning was terrible it went off on three occasions, each time the generator had to be started then we had to get wireless connection again so I didn’t quite get everything completed.

Picked the children up and then Awo showed me how to make Chicken Benichin. After cooking the chicken in a large amount of oil as is the case with every dish we added garlic, tomato paste, stock cube and a onion and let this cook for a while then we removed the chicken we added some water then to this the rice and let it cook for about twenty minutes finally returning the chicken to warm through. We gave Awo some of the oranges and some lemons Paul had picked earlier and sat down to dinner very delicious I think I prefer it to Domada.

On the evening Georgia was having a leaving party for Emma, Courtney and Paul as they will be going up country tomorrow to Kerewan as this is where they will be based. Georgia has a lovely small two bedroom house with a gorgeous tiled shower room and fitted kitchen area which I was jealous of and a large lounge dinning area. The children played with balloons whilst we drank and chatted finally saying our goodbye’s at around 8.00pm.