I can now carry a full bucket of water on my head without spilling a drop. It is actually much easier than waddling the few hundred meters from the tap to my compound with the bucket awkwardly in-hand.
My teenage sisters wanted to say goodbye to me with swagger and style, to give me something I would never forget. So, they arranged a “meet and greet” with the village dance crew, “The American Boyz,” who performed a private show for me at our family’s compound.
I don’t think the beauty of this place will ever wear off. In the midst of rainy season, everything here is green. Half the red sandy roads have vanished under wild green grasses. There’s cashew orchards and rice fields and groundnut plantations in perfect green rows. There’s green sprouts that will soon grow into watermelon with green rinds. There’s little green trees with green little limes, and bigger trees bearing oranges with green skin. And then there’s the tallest green trees in all the Gambia that tower over it all, a village just south of the river – Sibanor — my new home.
As we dressed for the cultural show, my mother draped strings of beads around my neck and across my chest in a traditional Jola fashion. She stood back, looked at me and sucked her teeth. “Ahaaaaa,” she said. “Nice, nice! My toma will be first.”
Every time I cook with my sisters, they ask: “Do you eat this in America?” Time after time, I stare into the pot: fish heads bobbing in a red sauce, green curd-like paste made from leaves off our tree, spaghetti with mayonnaise, rice with palm oil. “No,” I shake my head. One day, my sister Sainabou finally exclaimed, somewhat perplexed: “Well, what do you eat in The Gambia?” I promised to show them one day.
Since Day One, my sisters have been offering to arrange my marriage to a Gambian husband. With each new person I meet, it’s more of the same — a flood of questions about why I lack a husband and child. In a culture where family life plays such an integral role and people are expected to get married and have babies, Gambians don’t understand how a 25-year-old woman could not only be single, but also say she doesn’t want a husband. I’ve tried various tactics to deflect the interrogations and marriage proposals, many of which have been less than successful.
