Wednesday 24th July 2019
It’s exactly eleven months today since we first set foot in Africa!
We stepped off the Royal Air Moroc plane onto the tarmac of Yundum Airport in The Gambia in the wee hours of the 24th of August 2018 exhausted after a gruelling 30 plus hours of travel but filled with excitement to be on a new and unknown continent and quite some trepidation about what life would actually be like here.
It has been a wild ride with this country’s ubiquitous power cuts, lack of running water due to a variety of causes (small water tank, broken water pump, burst pipes, leaking cisterns, water cuts – you name it, we’ve gone through it!) which occurred on average about once a month and the recurrent shortage of necessary food items.
Yet we have been blessed with near perfect weather for nine of the past eleven months (cloudless blue skies and constant cool breezes!), a large rundown old house that we have come to love and appreciate, the hospitality of warm-hearted Gambians (no wonder this country is known as the ‘smiling coast of Africa’), the friendship of neighbours and colleagues hailing from different countries in west Africa (including Nigeria, Sierra Leone & Ghana) and the wonderful sense of freedom that comes from living in a safe country where the 95% of Muslims who live here enjoy a peaceful co-existence with the tiny Christian minority.
And tomorrow Jordan, Rai and I leave for a month’s holiday in Sri Lanka while Paul goes to the UK to visit his mother for two weeks……