Transportation Gambian Style

Envision this: You are a Peace Corps volunteer living in a remote bush village. You wake before sunrise to begin your journey into the city.  Loading up your backpack and hoisting your tired body onto your bicycle, you make your way up the deep, sandy path leading to the paved road. Stretching your headlamp over your bike helmet to illuminate the last moments before dawn, you pedal through the sand, cautiously monitoring the world around you for any stray hyenas not yet aware of the morning’s arrival. The air is crisp and cool, and although the heat from your baggage builds and the weight burdens your back, somehow you enjoy it — this precious moment of quiet calm before the storm — the unknown, unpredictable storm that is traveling on public transportation in The Gambia. 

Regardless of whether a volunteer lives north or south of the shallow river that divides the country, whether they live 10 or a mere 3 kilometers from the road, the challenges and joys of using public transport are unavoidable. From gele gele to bus, citizens and travelers alike come together for hours on end, cramped into the closest of quarters, in order to reach the metropolitan region of The Gambia known as the Kombos. Without much space to spread out, passengers quickly become familiar with one another. Babies are handed off to strangers so that their mothers are able to gather luggage and heave themselves into the automobiles. People repeatedly shuffle in and out of their seats, assisting others in safely affixing their sheep and goats to the roof racks of the vehicles. “We become a kind of team when we travel,” said Cameron Hatlevig, a health volunteer residing four kilometers off the main road. “One time I had an old woman take groundnuts out of my hand and actually shell them for me because I let her granddaughter sit on my lap.” 

Though special moments like these do happen, volunteers don’t often think of travel as a pleasant experience. The vehicles are in all states of disrepair. The seats are usually ripped and even missing the necessary hardware to hold them up; the A/C is not only broken, but is, more often than not, actually emitting blasts of scalding hot air . The combined body odors of the passengers make for an overall undesirable aroma, and as one volunteer put it, “People seem to think it’s normal to encourage your small child to pee on the ground even though they’re in a confined public space.”

Lia Killeen, a health volunteer, remembers a late afternoon ride home she took alongside members of her extended family. After hitting a dip in the road, the truck became stuck in a vertical position, women and their wares sprawled in every direction, and goats were thrown into the glass which separated the bed of the truck from the front seats. “The men sent me to get my host father and his horse cart to come and pick up my family and their baggage. When I returned, I walked up to see all the women in their fancy completes (traditional West African fashion), pushing the truck out of the muddy ditch,” she said. “I was impressed.  Their natural reaction wasn’t to complain about the situation, but to laugh it off and just solve the problem.”

Stories like this are common threads stitching the travel experiences of many volunteers together.  Some are lucky to find inspiration and kindness where they least expect it, but others have a vastly different perspective.  One volunteer living on the reputedly inconvenient north bank of the country shared details from her most recent trip to the city. After an estimated nine hours of biking to, waiting for, and riding on a gele gele, Alexandra Hooper was shocked and devastated when a fellow passenger, thought to be asleep, was found dead by relatives upon arriving at her village. They pried her body from the vehicle and collected her baggage as the vehicle doors closed; the seemingly unfazed passengers simply continued on to their final destinations. “I felt that there was a degree of acceptance that I just couldn’t understand,” Hooper explained. “My gut reaction was to check her pulse, console her family members, anything … but the Gambians just knew she had passed, and knew they had to move on.”

Other volunteer experiences don’t fit into either category, but stand out simply as bits of comic relief from the exhaustion of travel. Education volunteer Dan Tanner, having passed through a police checkpoint on the main road a few weeks prior, was recognized by an officer while waiting for his vehicle to be waved through.  Upon entering the gele gele to review the passenger IDs, the officer immediately recalled the volunteer’s fully grown beard, grabbed ahold of it and announced, “Bora ba!” (or “big beard” in the local language of Mandinka), before turning to exit. Tanner and his fellow passengers exchanged confused glances and continued on in a state of amused disbelief. 

Although volunteers travel the same roads with the same population of people, no two experiences are ever the same.  Some have been offered free rides from sympathetic drivers, others have struck up conversations to find they have family in the same city back in America, and still others have made connections with locals that will last far beyond the end of their service.  The adventure of using public transportation in an unfamiliar country and culture is one full of bittersweet moments, but it’s what makes The Peace Corps unique. “I’ve had people give up their seats for me on the bus, share their last piece of watermelon, and trust me to hold their child,” Hatlevig said. “That would never happen back home.”