Country Roads

It’s hard for me to believe it but Patrick has started the exam period for his final semester at Gambia College. I’ve been mildly concerned about what happens when he finishes—I thought he might still have issues with being a double minority (tribe and religion) and lacking the connections that other Gambians might enjoy, but he tells me:

“We are told after completing the college exams without any failures we will be given a competency assessment by the government. When we pass we will be employed directly by the educational system as elementary teachers. Then after two years we have the option to go back to study for high school teaching.”

Gambia doesn’t get much right; it will be great if this all works out as planned. Graduation, assuming he does well on his exams, comes in August. He could be working by December.

It’s been a long road for me, sitting here in the luxury of my own house in the middle of a large American city, drawing a good paycheck from the University System of Georgia. It’s hard to imagine what must be going through his head. In the time I’ve known him he’s had to move across the country five times, often to primitive little villages without so much as a market or running water. His granny died. He’s suffered boils and parasites and malaria. All of this while taking care of four younger kids. Before I knew him of course he dealt with the deaths of his mother, father, and older brother. It’s delightful to me to see him nearing the finish line; to him it must just be miraculous.

And all because he sparked my interest with a weird little direct message about animals on Twitter. How did he pick me to message, even? He wrote to me about this last November:

“Oh, today was the day I met you on Twitter. With just a long message of mine which you read and tolerated. You have changed my life after years of continuous grief and persistence. I just want to thank you for everything since that first day we met and am sleepless and my day is so emotional. Just can't forget this day in my life.”

That’s something isn’t it?

So as I noted last time, I asked him for photos of his route to school and he sent me like sixty. I’d like to honor the nearing of the end of his journey with a few images of the wilderness he has to pass through to get from his village to the city. It’s a ready made metaphor.

There’s some irony in this photo—I sent him a similar image which I took whilst on my way to a brewery on the west side of Atlanta. My photo was of the unfinished BeltLine, but honestly, aside from the color of the soil, you can barely tell the difference. I guess it’s all about where you are and where you’re going.

Not much irony or metaphor here, just an enormous termite mound. There are a lot of these around apparently.

Gambia is mostly about subsistence farming. What people do who don’t have land I don’t know. Contact interested Americans I guess.

It’s a great place to be a goat.

There is a certain stark beauty to the landscape.

Lastly, the scholar in transit.

I’ll probably post two more sets of images from this monster batch, at which point I hope and frankly expect to be able to post graduation images. Godspeed, Patrick!

Side note: I accidentally made the Brikama art market post inaccessible to most of you. If you haven’t yet read it, you can do so now.