Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune

It pains me to convey this news but after a year of almost uninterrupted daily conversation with Patrick, the line has gone silent. Literally—about a week ago I received a message from him which I at first attributed to an accidental tap on his phone screen. It was a couple minutes long and other than the occasional scratch of what sounded like something rubbing against the microphone, it was silent. I didn’t think much of it until I received another, similar message a few hours later. I left him a message asking whether he’d left these by accident, and his reply was over three minutes of the same such silence. With my phone turned up all the way I can vaguely hear his voice but I can’t make out the words.

Things have been headed south for a long while now. Getting kicked out of his apartment in Brikama was just the beginning of a long slide. I’ve already told you about his granny’s death, and how his phone was damaged by water, making texting impossible. Using money gathered from the writing he’s done herein, I bought an iPhone 11 and shipped it to him. It took weeks to arrive, and to my great chagrin, when he went to pick it up at the Gampost office in the capital, the box was empty. Some heartless cretin, probably at the Gampost office itself, simply opened the package up and stole the phone.

I honestly cannot imagine what a heartrending experience it must be to be poor and live in the Gambia. Being poor is bad enough, but I’ve never known or perhaps even imagined a society as dysfunctional as the one I’ve spent the last year learning about. Nothing works—nothing. Business within the country operates almost entirely on the basis of bribery. It costs the equivalent of about $25 to go to a clinic—before any treatment commences. It costs about $25 to file a police report. There’s almost nothing one can do that doesn’t cost $25, the base rate for day-to-day corruption apparently.

I’ve sought out assistance from groups in country and here in the U.S. only to find their email in-boxes are dusty, unused places filled with spiders and dead letters. The various arms of the Gambian government have websites that promise various services but none of the communications options are functional. The U.S. embassy in the Gambia does not answer even the simplest information requests. The so-called Gambian-Christian Organization of Atlanta gave me only silence. The one live contact I’ve made outside Patrick himself, a Gambian ex-pat who was excited to discover my initial post on the subject, ghosted me when it became apparent I was actually bent on solving real problems.

It’s deeply frustrating and I don’t even live there.

I think what appealed to me about Patrick in the first place were two things: 1) after my initial distrust and suspicion passed I realized he was a smart, thoughtful kid who was just looking for human connection and expected nothing from me other than a conversation, and 2) when I began to understand the nature of the problems he was facing it seemed to me that they could be solved easily with the application of just a little money—less money per month than I was spending on my phone bill.

The illusion I carried with me was that given a certain sum of money one could simply buy the solutions—that’s more or less how it works in the U.S. But there every action is met with corruption, unexpected and often existential physical dangers, and sheer bloody-minded ambivalence. I tried to hedge against the crises that loomed up periodically from unwatched corners only to find new ones I hadn’t anticipated. It’s incredible that anyone survives.

I really believed this blog was the answer to many of Patrick’s problems. As a relative outsider—he is a Christian in a country that is 95% Muslim, as well as a Manjago in a country where less than 2% of the population is of that tribe—he lacks the connections necessary to get anything more than the most menial of jobs. His status as an orphan and a villager means people see him as backward and, to put it as succinctly as I can, worthless—human flotsam. He’s not, but the systems in place in the Gambia are weighted heavily against him. This blog, however, existed outside Gambia’s weird time-space continuum. All it required was a functional communication line from him to me. Which is now gone.

So here we are. I’ve run out of material and I have had no communication from Patrick in several days. I suppose I have no choice but to suspend Chankan Ouwass until—unless—I hear from him again. He’s on his own for now. There’s reason to hope; he was on his own for many years and managed to survive and drive his education to a certain point, but the thread that attaches him to civilized society is incredibly thin. Barring another catastrophe I expect he will eventually secure another phone and we’ll restart our conversation.

But of course there’s absolutely no guarantee that another catastrophe won’t be forthcoming. Keep him in your thoughts.

If you’re a paid subscriber to the blog I’ll suspend payments until such time as he resurfaces. I’ll be restarting my own blog, Red Clay Bestiary, next Tuesday, so you’re welcome to read my stuff there. If there’s any small news about Patrick not sufficient to fill a blog post I’ll write about it there.

Thanks for your support to this point. I believed deeply in this cause and was shocked at the apathy I found when I tried to interest others, but y’all stepped forward and I’m deeply thankful for that.

Cheers,
Fletcher