Recent Stories

One thing I still have yet to figure out is what to do with my trash. With no waste management system in the villages, it…

If you missed the bees, you would have mistaken us for one of the teams who had swarmed the region in the wake of Ebola just a few months earlier. Mesh face masks, red rubber gloves, black rubber boots and bulky jumpsuits exposing nothing, hiding even the fear. But there was no missing the bees

In The Gambia, it is culturally inappropriate to talk about menstruation. Even mothers rarely discuss it with their daughters, bolstering myths and stigmas that have lasted for generations. Islamic tradition dictates menses as “dirty” and bans women from touching the Koran or praying when they are menstruating.

Although it is commonly known in the village as “the poor man’s food,” mbahal is one of my favorite Gambian foods. I like to think…

In The Gambia, monsters don’t just live in children’s nightmares – they’re real.
Marching through the village, kankarangs “roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth and roll their terrible eyes and show their terrible claws” … and … clang their terrible machetes. Then, with the help of a posse of teenagers, the masquerade known as a kankarang snatches the little boys up and takes them out to the bush for circumcision.