Random observations....

Since I am still on med hold for my mysterious allergic reaction, I have been getting to know life in Kombo (Banjul metro area) a little bit better over the past couple of days.... and it's weird.

There are definitely perks: cold drinks, swimming in the ocean, movies at the hostel. But there are also weird juxtaposition that you could only find in a developing country.

Yesterday, I was riding home from the beach in the back of my Liberian friends BMW listening to a Phil Collin's greatest hits, his sounds system even has a little video screen mounted on the dashboard so we could watch Phil dance in his music video. Later that night a bunch of us headed down to Senegambia, the tourist section of town, that has a handful of bars, clubs and restaurants targeting the European tourists and rich (relatively speaking) people that live in Gambia. It was a totally enjoyable, but strange day considering that a couple days before I was trying to teach a 4th grade how to read that word "chair".

It is just a strange, surreal feeling to think that I can have a day laying on the beach, watching Phil Collins dance and going out to a bar and that a mere 20 K away is my little village of Njongon where kids are in the fields harvesting coos, many who will in all likely hood not pass their exams to get into high school and will therefore be harvesting coos for the rest of their lives. It's just crazy to reconcile the two worlds that are so close geographically but so far apart in reality. The whole experience has really re-opened my eyes to tourism in developing countries. The tourists that visit the beaches and walk about the city, visiting markets think they have "seen" the real Gambia, but in reality what they experience is all a front. I definitely am not trying to condemn tourism in developing countries and recognize that it brings a lot of very needed money into the country but tourism also is the cause of a lot of the countries problems - sex tourism (for both genders) and gross inequalities between the rich minority and poor masses being the two most obvious. The whole experience has just opened my eyes and caused me to look a lot more critically about how I have traveled in the past and how I will travel in the future and the effect that my presence as a tourist has on the local community.

This is yet another issue in this country that I will prob think about for a long time and never come up with any real solution, but at least I am thinking....right? But that is part of the reason why I am here, to think and learn and hopefully get a handle on some of this stuff before I go back to school. Here's hoping I will be able to sort some of this stuff out in my head in the coming 2 years...