Chapter 4. Snippet. Trials Elsewhere.
Serekunda is the largest urban centre in the Gambia and includes the largest market. All told, it wasn’t much different than Banjul market, just more condensed and busier. We crept into the centre of Serekunda on the ruin of a paved road. The pavement was so old and poorly done that the two lanes had eroded into a single bumpy causeway over the mud. Each side of the road looked like a badly torn piece of paper. Peddlers, welders[40] and furniture sellers lined each side. Beyond them, dirt lanes led into blocks of residential dwellings. Most cities I visited in West Africa had residential blocks that were made up of compounds like ours but much smaller and pushed right together, sharing courtyard walls. It gave the impression of a sprawling, single-floor apartment building without a
roof, except for one or two rooms in each unit.
We spent most of the trip rocking back and forth in the rear seat of the taxi as it rolled through the streets. We didn’t speak but watched the passing tableau through wisps of dust rolling through the windows. People squeezed past other people as well as livestock in the streets; sometimes passersby would use our taxi to steady themselves as we slowly penetrated the living mass. It wasn’t hard for them to use us as a support since we were barely moving. Occasionally, a torso or back would lean against the window in order to dodge something in the street, leaving a sweat stain on the taxi or my forearm if I didn’t move quickly. Our taxi was in terrible shape, but I felt like a British aristocrat driving through the streets of Cairo or Delhi at the turn of the 20th century, a speck of foreign matter moving through somebody else’s bloodstream. Some of the looks I was getting told me I wasn’t the only one who thought so too.
The taxi stopped at one of the many concrete stalls lining the street, a large concrete room topped with sheet metal: Bed, Bath & Beyond. It opened onto the street and inside were stacks of yellow foam rectangles, each cut to the approximate size of a mattress: there were doubles, singles, kings and queens to choose from. Each piece of foam was about a foot thick and finished with a floral-print cover. We chose three queen-size specimens from the middle of a pile so they wouldn’t have as much dust, strapped them to the roof and headed home.
Trials Elsewhere: Stories of life and Development in West Africa