Somebody cut me!

Well, last time I posted the Gators we were just about to dominate on the BCS and take the national championship. When your number one there’s no reason to gloat so I will just leave it at that and move on.

I still owe you at least one story from last December’s trip. This particular episode didn’t actually happen in Guinea but took place on our return trip from Basse to Banjul as we made our way back through The Gambia. In the entry about our trip to Guinea I said “The trip from Basse back home is a story for another day…” Well this is that story and this is another day.

We had a pretty ambitions plan to get from Basse to the capitol all in one day. Under normal circumstances it would not be too difficult to manage but we wanted to stop in a small village called Wassu on the way down country. I’ll get to our motivation for this stop later but logistically it meant turning what could have been a single car, eight hour trip into about a six car, seventeen hour journey. But seeing as how we just managed several 34 ish hour trips in the past few weeks it didn’t seem too daunting.

We got an early start from the Basse transit house, making our way down to the car park by around 6 or so. Pretty quickly we got a bush taxi to Bansang which is a small town on the south bank about two hours from Basse which serves as a small transport hub for the area. No major foul-ups on that trip and when we arrived in Bansang we again didn’t waist much time getting another car onward to the island of Janjanbureh, often referred to by PCVs in its condensed form, JJB. This island sits in the middle of the river and was a pretty big settlement back in the colonial days but is now just a lazy town in the provinces. The ride from Bansang to JJB is pretty quick but when you arrive at the south bank you have to get out of the car and wait for the ferry to get into action. This takes a bit so we just kind of hung around and after a little while we hopped on for the quick 5 minute trip across the river. Once across we found another car to take us across the island to the north bank where we got to hang out and wait for another ferry. Ferry by the way, in this case, means small barge that might handle two or three cars and a few bunches of people. It is powered by a single engine on one side and is guided across the river on a steel cable that runs from bank to bank. The most entertaining scenario occurs when the engine isn’t working and all the passengers have to collectively pull the barge across the river by heaving on the steal cable. The upside of this is you can save your eight cents in fare because they don’t charge when the engine’s busted. So we make it to the north bank without much delay but now we have to wait for another car to take us to Wassu. The problem with waiting for cars in some of these smaller places is you have to wait forever for cars to fill with enough passengers so the drivers deem it profitable to make a run. After sitting around for an hour we thought we were about to leave with one guy but managed to get in the middle of a big argument between some of the drivers over whose turn it was to take passengers. After a bit of yelling and jumping in and out of moving vehicles we were once again sitting on the side of the road waiting for another car. Luckily the driver who won the argument decided he didn’t want to wait around much longer so we were on the road again in about twenty minuets. Another hour down the road we hopped out in the village of Wassu.

Everything I have told you so far is to distract you from the main point of this story. Wassu has one claim to fame which is The Wassu Stone Circles. Some ancient rocks arranged in… circles. Anyway, I had already seen those and they weren’t too exciting to be honest so that was not our objective. A lesser known reason for going to Wassu is to meet a woman by the name of Fati Ceesay.

Fati Ceesay has played a small but interesting part of PCV’s lives for quite a few years now. I’m not exactly sure how long. A small but significant number of volunteers over the years have made their way to Wassu to get what are sometimes called Fula scars. Fula scars are something like a tattoo but sorta different. They are common among the Fula as a mark of their tribe but have also been adopted by non-Fulas as well. Lydia and I decided that we would like to get them as a reminder of our time here but also just… well…just because we thought they looked sweet dude! I realize I haven’t told you exactly what a Fula scar is but just be patient.

Once we jumped out of our bush taxi we set about finding Fati and her compound. We had very vague directions from another volunteer. Directions here tend to only really work when you already know where your going because it’s always something like “Turn at the third big tree, walk past two dirt paths, take a left near the smaller mosque, it’s the compound with a grass fence” Those directions could pretty much describe any place in The Gambia. One great advantage you have here over the States is that pretty much everyone knows each other so you just start asking random kids playing in the street and soon you’re on the right track with 20 or 30 personal guides. So after wandering down a few paths we found the right kid and were off on a short walk through the village to Fati’s compound. We arrived to find several older men sitting in the compound under the shade tree chatting away. They were happy to see us and knew why we had come but informed us that unfortunately Fati was not home. She had gone out to the rice fields for the day, but without skipping a beat one of the kids was dispatched on a bicycle to inform her that she had visitors from America! That’s right, were from America. So we just passed the next hour or so enjoying the shade of the tree and chatting with the Ceesay family. We finally met Fati when she arrived from the rice fields, she was a quiet older woman and she invited us into the house to begin the proceedings.

We went into the house and back into the bedroom where we were offered a seat on the grass mattress while she went and gathered her things. Lydia and I had already decided where we were going to get our scars ahead of time. Many of the Fulas get them on their cheeks or just below their eyes and it looks pretty cool but for obvious reasons that wasn’t a good option for us. I decided to get them on the right side of my chest on my ribcage and Lydia opted for the hip to counter balance her surgery scar from years before on the other hip. We explained this to Fati and she seemed to think those were good options. As you can imagine a hut in a small village in Africa is not the most sanitary environment to get a tattoo but we tried to minimize the possibility of infection in various ways. If I was me I would say we minimized our exposure and took a calculated risk. The process of getting a Fula scar is not particularly complicated and only requires several tools and ingredients. First off a razor blade which we bought at our local shop for four cents and brought with us so we could make sure they were new and clean. These razors are a bit flimsy and only slightly stiffer than a sheet of paper but good enough to do the job, what do you expect for four cents. The second necessity is peanut ash which Fati provided. Together those make up about 10% of the requirements. The other 90% consists of someone willing to get the scars and someone willing to give them.

So we had everything laid out and ready. We sterilized the razor blades with alcohol, washed everybody’s hands with sanitizer, etc. etc. We decided that Lydia should go first because there was a good chance that she would take off running and bail on me if she had to see it before she did it. We took a marker and marked the spot where she planned to get hers and then she lied down on the bed. The next few minuets consisted of Lydia squeezing my hand to the point of near fracture and a lot of asking “is it over yet, is it over yet.” The traditional configuration of the scars is two parallel lines about an inch or inch and a half long each so were not talking huge. The basic procedure consists of cutting into the skin with a razor blade where you want the marking to be and then rubbing peanut ash, which is a very fine black power, into the cut. The peanut ash is kept in a cow horn which looks a lot like a powder horn used with an old muzzle loader. The peanut ash has to be rubbed in pretty well so that it wont all come out as the cuts heal. So after a painful few minuets Lydia was done and still completely alive so we bandaged her up and then it was my turn. O ye and we got it all on video!

I was instructed to take off my shirt and sit on the bed so she could make the cuts. The cutting part wasn’t too bad overall. The blade was sharp so that helped but there was defiantly still a pretty sharp pain when the cuts were actually being made but it didn’t take too long and as soon as the cutting was over they pain pretty much disappeared. Like I said you have to rub the ash in pretty well so she started to pour on the ash and rub it in but she apparently didn’t think it was working too well because she asked me to kind of bend my whole body over so I could stretch the cuts open and she could pack some more ash in. Lydia thought this was a bit much and was grossed out, but if your gunna do it, might as well do it right. That was that and I got all patched up and it was finished. We thanked Fati and gave her the customary four dollars for her work (actually quite a lot of money here) and we were back on the path to the main road. Another good experience under our belt (more literally under our skin in this case) which we will certainly remember forever.

At this point it was about 3:30 in the afternoon and we were thinking the hard part of the day might be over but such was not the case. We got back up to the main road and hung out waiting for a car for a little while and managed to get a lift on a bush taxi going to Farafenni. As soon as we got out of town we thought it was going to be a quick ride but we turned into a road side sawmill and spend the next forty-five minuets sitting while they loaded up a bunch of wood for a carpenter. The sitting wasn’t too bad except for the sweat dripping down into our newly acquired wounds, particularly for Lydia who had the cuts on her hip sitting was painful. Underway again we made a bunch of stops to pickup and drop of people and things and then another stop to drop off the carpenter and all his wood. We made it to Farafenni in the evening and hustled it across this busy border town to the other car park to get a car to Barra which is where we could catch a ferry to the capitol. This is when things started to go…less great…we get to the car park and there is a car that they say is “about to leave” to Barra (they always say that) so we get in and sit down waiting for the car to fill and leave. Not much is happening initially but at some point our driver and another driver get into the second battle for passengers we have been a party to that day. This one was a bit more sketchy and consisted of two bush taxies jockeying for position down the main road and trying to cut each other off. Everybody got out of both cars about five times in between these road rage incidences and yelled and several other cars would stop and join in the yelling and one particular lady that ended up being in our car managed to, in an extraordinary display of stamina, keep yelling at the driver until we reached Barra at 10 o’clock that night (this woman managed to give Lydia a very big headache for which she was not thankful). So after we all almost die several times and a few hours pass things are sort of worked out and all of the passengers get into the most decrepit of the two vehicles. Off into the night we go. But, the car keeps breaking down and one particularly interesting ailment is the tendency of the headlights to go out at random, and when they do work they are less than blinding if you know what I mean. After several hours of this we almost run over a policeman/army man at a checkpoint and this begins another long roadside debacle. The police want to confiscate the car and leave all of us ride less, but as with most things in Africa things are open for “discussion”. Even way out here in the bush we managed to find some people we knew, some of Lydia’s former students from the college, to talk to while everything was sorted out. Lydia made the most of the situation and used our unscheduled stop to find a ditch to go to the bathroom in, when life gives you the near death of a police official make the most of it she says. Another hour or so later we reluctantly got back into the car and went down the road a bit more slowly this time.

Our rush was to make it the ferry before it stopped running to the capitol. There is no firm closing time and it can be anywhere from 7pm to 12am so you never know what your gunna get. We really didn’t want to spend Christmas Eve in Barra where our only lodging option would be the front steps of the police station or a brothel disguised as a guest house. So the whole day that was our biggest worry, if we would make the ferry or not. We thought we were screwed for sure after the near running over of the policeman incident. As luck would have it we rolled into Barra at around 10pm and the ferry was still there in all its glory about to leave the dock. We sprinted down the dock and were very happy to finally be sure we were going to have a good place to crash on Christmas Eve. We arrived in Banjul, the capitol, after the long cold ferry crossing more than an hour later. We walked toward the car park and past a big catholic church having their Christmas Eve service; it seemed like a different world when we peered through the door. The choir was singing and everybody was all dressed up, after such a trip and rarely seeing a church for the past year and a half I felt like an alien looking upon some strange happening. We pushed on and got a car from the capitol to the PC transit house. We finally arrived at around 12:30am and were thrilled to take a shower and pass out.

Over the next few weeks we carefully avoided washing our scars so that we didn’t wash out the peanut ash. It only took about two and a half weeks for them to fully heal and they look great and didn’t have any problems. Check out the pics for a before, during, and after look into the experience.