its nice to be nice

Back here in Bamako, to the familiar smell of burning trash and fried plantains, the endless traffic sellers pushing phone credit up to the window. I've just come back after two weeks of travelling through Senegal and The Gambia: 70 hours of bus rides, street sandwiches of Maggi roasted goat meat and hard boiled eggs, gorgeous beaches and softball games of volunteers running around with drinks in their hands. Me and about 90 PCVs from Mali boarded two buses destined for Dakar, the beautiful beachside city on the Sengal Atlantic Coast, where the annual West African Invitational Softball Tournament is held. After a sweaty 30 hour ride we piled out of the bus and into the Club Atlantique, a shimmering oasis of America in the depths of West Africa. We were all overwhelmed at the incredible infrastructure in Dakar - sidewalk lined streets, tunnels instead of the infuriating traffic circles of Bamako, restaurants offering sushi, indian, thai, tapas! Heavenly. We met up with hundreds of volunteers from Senegal, The Gambia, Ghana, as well as the "refugees" from all the recently evacuated countries of Madagascar, Mauritania and Guinea. It was rambunctious as we had tons of energy bottled up from weeks in the African bush to expend, and that we did. We met some sweet young Moroccan med students and me and my friend went with them to Goree Island, one of the old slave ports of the Atlantic Coast. We sat on the beach with the boys as they played Moroccan music and 90s rock songs on the guitar, jumped off the boardwalk into the freezing cold bay. The place was filled with artists selling bright cloth paintings and sculptures of old pieces of plastic and metal. In the middle of the really lovely city of sandstone and a huge "castle" on a hill (built by the rich slaveowners)was the small slave house - a few rooms dark and cramped, with a tiny door that opened onto the sea. You imagined the men and women and children pushed out of their crowded rooms to line up at the small door that looked out to the ocean, where the boats waited destined for New York. Above the door was inscribed:

"De cette porte pour un voyage sans retour ils allaient, les yeux fixes sur l'infini de la souffrance."
This is the door for their voyage without return, their eyes fixed on the infinity of suffering.

As the tournament ended we hooked up with a group of volunteers from The Gambia, a sliver of former English territory in the middle of Senegal. After hours of waiting for the ferry we heard news that was was leaving immediately, and we ran with our bags and arrived in Banjul, the island capital where all the signs were in english and there is a whole strip of restaurants and clubs. We stayed in their Peace Corps house and we went to the beach down the street each day, as the male prostitutes in rastifarian attire, known as "Bumpsters," tried to pick us up with lines like "its nice to be nice!" and "can I make you happy?" It sounds strange but its one of the key draws to The Gambia - all along the beach you could see middle aged women with their muscular Bumpsters, sipping mango juice. We rented body boards and picked up shells to give as gifts to the children in our village and envied their ocean in dusty landlocked Mali.

A few of the Mali volunteers were going to a smaller island, so I tagged along. We hopped on the ferry back to the mainland, and found a jeep to take us through the brush. We blazed through the seemingly hidden path and got to a little cove on a river, where a few Gambians took us across on their brightly painted boats of hollowed out trunks. We had the Island to ourselves, and hung out with the Gambian farmers some of whom spoke Bambara and played us their drums, and we played in the huge waves on the rockless soft beach. Finally it was time to go home, and we boarded the bus destined for Bamako still dizzy with the bright day on the beach.