Inching Toward Cashews
Me again. Again. I have every confidence that eventually this blog will once more feature something of Patrick other than my reflections on his travails. But reality is a hard mistress—harder than I would have given her credit for given my own struggles, which as often as not are variations on “what shall we have for dinner tonight?”
Patrick is back in school. He’s taking ten courses and started every one of them in a hole since he wasn’t able to get back to Brikama before the semester started. There’s a certain masochistic bravado in his attitude toward school but there’s no doubt he has his eyes on the prize. For the last several weeks the difficulty level has been especially high as he’s been spending seven hours every Friday and every Sunday traveling back to the wee remote village of Kerr Amadou to check in on his siblings. Seven hours seems like a great time to get some studying done but this is seven hours on bumpy roads, in loud vehicles full of louder people, not to mention frequent changes of mode as bus gives way to ferry which in its turn gives way to taxi. There may have been a motorcycle or two in there as well. The transportation network in The Gambia boggles the mind.
Fortunately there’s other good news. Finally, after four months spent trying to find living arrangements for the whole family in Brikama, an opportunity finally emerged. Two opportunities, in fact, though the better of the two is just out of reach. A multi-room apartment with indoor plumbing and electricity, located in the same district as the university. Really almost worth the extra price, but that price is two and a half times what he’s currently paying, and even with my help and that of readers such as yourself, it’s just not feasible.
I guess I should be delighted he has a place at all but for all the work he’s putting in I feel like he deserves a lot more. Nevertheless, it will be a happy day next weekend when he settles his four siblings in their small one-room apartment just to the west of where they’d lived in Brikama before. It’s a twenty or thirty minute walk to the market and about the same length of bike ride to the university. No electricity and certainly no indoor plumbing, but it solves another problem and grants back fourteen priceless hours every weekend.
I don’t have enough photos from Patrick to illustrate this update with anything trenchant, but scrolling through the images he’s sent in the past I stopped on this. If you don’t know, those are cashews. I’m not sure I’d ever seen a cashew before Patrick sent me this photo. It’s stuff like this that made me think this whole blog thing could be a good idea—a window into a different world. Like, really different. As penniless as Patrick is, he sees things I never do. I’m reminded of the story of the rich man who challenges a poor man to a bet that he can’t produce any item the rich man doesn’t already have. The poor man brings out a chipped cup and wins the bet. Patrick wins the bet all the time and isn’t even aware of it. It’s a big part of what I treasure about our friendship and I’m counting the days until I get another photo like this one. Enjoy it.
— Fletch
