Sesame Field

No, I never saw sesame flowers. I don’t even know what sort of plant they grow on. So, the farmer and I rode Timpa Marong, my F650GS, off down increasingly narrow, sandy tracks, past fields with millet growing 15 feet tall, fuzzy heads like impossibly gangly cattails. The occasional red bishop flitting out into the grass. These small birds are red like some hallucination of red. Like a red you could never have imagined.
And we arrived at a field of plants about two feet high with dull, green leaves, and every here and there one would have tubular flowers of the palest lilac. In a month, he said, you could hide in this field standing up and the flowers will cover everything. This is white sesame. Very marketable. There will soon be a plant for processing the seeds into oil. Now, do you want to see the clinic? So, off we rode to see the clinic. The second clinic I’d seen today.
I’d woken at 3AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. Eventually, I hauled my bones out of bed, packed the panniers with the few items I was taking for myself plus a dozen new scrub-shirts for the clinic at Sintet Village. By the time all was in order it was beginning to lighten in the east. Binta was up to open the compound gate and I slithered out into the deep, sandy lanes that feed the main coast road. Lots of people by the highway this time of day; going to work, going to school. Waiting for taxis or “local transport”, the (mostly) dilapidated vans that comprise the main means of transportation in this country. Cops and secretaries, and Army guys in camo, and government workers, and school kids in uniform, all trying to get someplace at some time approximating when they are supposed to show up. Employers here make allowances for the unpredictability of transport. It is also used as an excuse for many abuses.
I gave a ride to a police sergeant. Dropped him at the Yundum junction near the airport and continued south past Busum Bala (Bosom Buddy?), Brickama and along the Trans-Gambia Highway south of the River Gambia. The road east from Brickama is paved for about 35 kilometers and is delightful. Black eagles soar into the huge trees. Plantations of oil palms rise out of psychedelic green rice fields. The air is fresh and sweet, redolent of growing things and soft earth. This south bank of the river is green, green, green. There is little traffic and the bike is happy as a cat in a sunbeam. Donkeys and baby donkeys, goats and baby goats wander across the road and graze or browse the verges. I slow through villages of mud-brick houses with rusted corrugate roofs, men and women with hoes or axes on their shoulders heading for the fields. Woodcutters chopping and bundling firewood by the road. A large mosque with half its roof gone, the interior in ruins. I see no wildlife except birds.
There are police checkpoints but most aren’t manned. The ones that are wave me through with appreciative stares at the bike. The bike gets attention everywhere, whether stopped or in motion. People love it. I should say men and boys love it. Most of the women could care less. Women have more important things on their minds than hardware. If I park it somewhere there will invariably be at least one man standing near it, admiring it when I return. Often there is a crowd.
The pavement ends abruptly at a barrier and I’m shunted off to the right and down. Now the road is the ubiquitous, corrugated, dusty, red laterite that seems to be the norm in Sub-Saharan Africa. Every ten minutes or so I overtake a van or a big truck trailing a cloud of dust and before long the bike, my goggles, my helmet, my mesh gear, gloves, boots are indistinguishable red. When I finally get home at night I’ll bathe red mud off my body.
Timpa Marong handles this like a war horse, scudding along over the bumps at 80 kph without a rattle or complaint.
A gingham-shirted schoolgirl flags me down. She climbs aboard and in few moments we are passing a gaggle of her friends – or should I say a giggle? She waves to them gaily, knowing that she’ll be the talk of her class for the day. I drop her off at her school a few clicks down the road.
By now I’m both hungry and thirsty and ready to stretch my legs. As I pass through the next couple of villages I watch for a woman sitting at a table with covered bowls in front of her. This means she is selling something to eat. The village of Sibanor finally yields one such. I pull over, put the bike on its sidestand. There is the woman and four or five men sitting by in front of a bitiko, a “corner store” selling items everyone needs for everyday use. Bitikos are as alike as filling stations. Each sells the same assortment of goods and food.“As salaamu aleikum”, I greet the men. They all chorus back, “Wa aleikum salaam”. I shake hands with each of the men, then go over to the woman. We exchange greetings in Mandinka and I ask her what she has. “Bullets,” she tells me, “accara, and nyebbeh”. Bullets are fish balls. Accara are puffy, deep-fried fish fritters, and nyebbeh is beans cooked with onion and a bit of hot pepper. For five dalasis (about 18 cents) I buy half a baguette of chewy tapalapa bread which she spoons full of nyebbeh and I eat it standing by the scooter. In the bitiko two dalasis (7 cents) buys me a 16 oz. sealed plastic bag of cold, pure water.
When I ride back up the bank to the road there is a man standing with a chicken and a large, covered plastic margarine tub. I ask him where he is going and soon we are headed for Kanilai, the president’s village. En route we stop at another village where his brother lives, waaay back in the bush. His brother’s compound has residences on three sides. The entire compound is immaculate, having been swept by the women. The women do this every morning, delicately removing leaves and trash with their native brooms. We are greeted by the women of the compound who in turn shake my hand and curtsy. Toubabs don’t come here. The women are all delighted to greet the stranger and extend me a most friendly welcome in Jola. One speaks English well and when I tell her my name she exclaims, “Then you are my brother! I am also Marong (my Gambian surname) because I am married to a Marong.”
We leave the chicken and the plastic tub – I have no idea what was in it – with his brother’s wife and head back to the main road to Kanilai. On the way we stop in another compound to greet his aunt, an aging, wizened old lady with a cast in one eye. She shakes my hand and drops a very creditable curtsy for someone who looks like she can barely walk.
From the aunt’s compound the trail back is barely discernable. Almost completely overgrown, there is a gap in the vegetation as wide as my front tire, but no wider. The handlebars thrust aside overhanging branches and leaves and tall grasses. I can’t really see much of the trail ahead and just keep hoping we don’t nose into a big pothole. My passenger knows his territory, though, and we make it back to the road unscathed but with festoons of grass and seeds and leaves hanging from the bike.
“You don’t have to go all the way back to the main road,” he says. “If you follow the road through Kanilai it eventually joins the highway further down.” He volunteers to show me. We motor through the town to a gate in a great concrete wall. Several soldiers in camo, toting AK-47s are manning a checkpoint. My guide explains what we are doing and the soldiers let us pass. On the other side of the gate is a large, screened-off building on one side and on the other is an armored car with a heavy machine gun. Next to it is parked a small tank, and next to it, screened with camouflage netting, another tank. There are many soldiers about, neatly uniformed and well kitted-out. These guys look professional. One, in full kit, helmet and Kalashnikov, flags us down and wants to know what we are doing. My man tells him. They are speaking Jola and I get the gist that we are not going further. As they talk a few soldiers walk past us, heading toward the gate. The last of them is probably of the biggest, best-built man I’ve ever seen. If I were gay I would have fallen off the bike. This guy must have been six-four. He was wearing camo pants and a tight green T-shirt. The man’s shoulders must have been 5 feet wide with a torso tapering in a smooth “V” down to a slim waist. He moved like a leopard and looked like he could have stopped a tank bare-handed. I can’t think of any time I’ve seen such a perfect physical specimen.
Anyway, we weren’t permitted to go further. The area is apparently a secure zone. No problem. I dropped my rider off in the village, headed back to the main road, and before I knew it, was at Sintet Village. The nurse at the clinic greeted me with a smile and a handshake. Malang is an energetic, diminutive man with a soft voice. We talked about how things were going, about the well and the water supply and the stolen solar panels. About getting electricity back into the clinic so they could have a refrigerator for medicine and an autoclave to properly sterilize things and a suction machine. He had done three deliveries the previous week. After a difficult labor, one infant was born not breathing. The people there thought it was dead but it had a good heartbeat and Malang refused to give up. He “breathed” the baby with the only bag-mask unit they have (the wrong size) for two hours until the babe could breathe on its own. “It is doing well,” he said with a shy smile.
I delivered my scrub tops. We cataloged the various light fixtures and scant electrical equipment and talked about the water supply. I’ll need the information to come up with an estimate of the funds needed to purchase an effective solar electrical system and some idea of how to approach the water needs of the clinic. We visited with the alkalo, the village chief, to discuss planning with him.
I headed back at 1. Just before 2PM I stopped at a mosque to join the prayers. Prayers concluded, the men invited me to join them for lunch; typical African hospitality. Rice and domoda, fish cooked in a peanut sauce. It was there I met the farmer with the sesame fields. And surveyed my second clinic of the day. Their water supply is inadequate. Four people from Holland were there; from a town near Nijmegen. They had “adopted” the clinic some years ago and come back yearly to help out; rebuilding pumps, painting, fixing. Nice, nice people. Real people! I met Alex Choi, a soft-spoken Peace Corps volunteer from LA, who has been living and working there for twenty-one months. I visited with some very friendly villagers.
And eventually arrived home in the dark, tired but really happy. There’s lots to do and life can be good!