Tales of Gambia
An update on the trials and travails of my Gambian friend | yet more slagging on Star Trek | announcing the RCB store
“What is candy?”
This was a question my Gambian friend, Patrick Mendy, wrote to me a couple days ago while I was explaining Halloween to him. You may remember Patrick from such events as the time we bought him a Chromebook, which I am glad to say arrived safe and sound and predicated an adventure to the city of Serrakunda—his first visit to a place less than twenty miles from his home in the minuscule village of Penyem.
If there are any lingering doubts about the veracity of Patrick’s identity—any concerns that perhaps this whole business is an elaborate Pigeon Drop—let us now stuff them in the trash; nay, let us stuff them in the neighbor’s trash, or drive them to an altogether different neighborhood and fling them in the streets like coffee grounds and shredded bits of diaper. It would take Oscar-worthy authorship to conjure a line like that—what is candy? It’s a question that fairly vibrates with the melancholy of a lost childhood, and if it’s fiction it’s as good as reality and deserving of a paycheck.
Anyway, we have these moments of discontinuity every week or so. He asked if we cooked our Thanksgiving turkey over a fire. He never fails to be surprised that I can find out what the weather in Gambia is like. He asked whether we would have to deal with potholes or animal crossings or reckless commercial drivers when I drove to Nashville to see my family. I mean, yes to all of those things, but it’s a question of degree—there’s a reason I can drive the 250 miles to Nashville in half the time it takes to get from Penyem to the equidistant and rhythmically named Senegalese city of Tambacounda.
Our idle conversation has been enlightening and pleasant; we have both learned a great deal and I think we both look forward to our next chat. The circumstances under which he lives his life, however, have been harrowing. Much has happened since I last wrote about him, mostly bad.
First, Patrick completed his application to Gambia College in Brikama, but he did so at a disadvantage. Covid virtually demolished his 12th grade year, and while he did well on most subjects in his West African Senior School Certificate Examination (an African version of the SAT), his math and science scores were not good. He was optimistic, telling me that he knew others with similar scores who had gotten in, but he also remarked that corruption and nepotism were rampant in the admissions process. I’m not sure why this seemed more serious to me than it did to him, but it’s a moot point. He was not admitted and was unable even to get an interview to explain his circumstances.
Patrick was crestfallen, but to me we’d reached a moment of clarity. Math and science are strong subjects for me, and I knew he could remediate using Kahn Academy and reapply next fall. He was excited by the plan and so we set about evaluating his capabilities. Problem solved, as far as I was concerned.
It was about this time that he disappeared for almost a week.
This was highly unusual—I hear from him daily. Once before, near the end of October, he’d gone silent for about three days. When he resurfaced, he told me that his grandmother, who is asthmatic, had suffered an attack serious enough that Patrick had no choice but to load her into a donkey cart and take her to the hospital in Brikama. What, I wondered, could have happened this time?
A week or two before this Patrick had related to me an alarming piece of information: The land where his house was located was not owned by his family, but by the village chief. This august personage had been friendly with Patrick’s grandmother, but he died a year or so ago and his son became the new chief. His brother was getting married and wished to move back from Brikama to Penyem—into Patrick’s house. If this happened, the family would have no place to go.
I believed I had a solution. In response to my first missive here in the pages of Red Clay Bestiary, I was contacted by a man named Alieu Nyassi, president and founder of a non-profit called YES Africa Foundation which aims to provide opportunities to young people in The Gambia. Alieu grew up in Penyem himself, as it happens, before immigrating to the United States. We emailed back and forth for a while, and he told me he was returning to Africa for a couple of weeks beginning in late December.
I spoke to Alieu on the phone for the first time just hours before he departed. “Fletcher Moore!” he boomed upon picking up, “I feel like I’ve known you all my life!” We spent thirty minutes talking about The Gambia and Patrick and Alieu’s charitable work. I told him both about the housing problem as well as Patrick’s failure to be admitted to college, and he assured me he could assist with both. It seemed to me that benevolent forces were now moving beyond my feeble power to intervene, and that a resolution to this catastrophic puzzle was in our grasp.
Little did I know Patrick was already gone from Penyem.
When he finally reappeared he was completely distraught. He and his family had been turned out just before Alieu’s departure. They were forced to store their things at a neighbor’s house, while they rented a single room in a village several miles to the south. In his messages to me he lamented that he literally didn’t even have a pot in which to cook meals.
I sent him money to rent a truck, and a day later they were reunited with their meagre possessions in an apartment in the village of Kerr Amadou, on the far side of the Gambia River. Alieu spoke to Patrick on the phone but the village was too distant for him to visit.
He told Patrick he would contact him again in a couple of weeks. I still hold out a hope he can help with the college situation, but altogether his prospects seem much dimmer now than they did just a few weeks ago. Patrick’s resources have always been extremely slim, but at least he had reasonable access to a sizable town. Barra, the nearest town now—a tiny fraction the size of Brikama—lies an hour’s drive away and is virtually unreachable on foot.
And so it goes. In the time he’s been in Kerr Amadou, there have been a few small tidbits of good news. Patrick has been able to find a little work in Barra—he walks an hour to a road junction and gets a ride to the taxi garage in the town, where he washes cars for fifty delasi each. That’s about ten cents. Yes, a dime is barely worth picking up off the ground here, but in The Gambia a pound of rice costs about fifteen delasi, so a dime is a few meals. Moreover, food is somewhat cheaper in Barra than in neighboring villages since it hasn’t been marked up by traders. I’ve told Patrick he should buy extra and sell it on his way home. He’s game but it hasn’t happened yet; I reckon he’s still struggling to get back on his feet.
His grandmother is sick again and he is complaining of a boil on his neck. I can’t help but feel that these people have a massively outsized portion of difficulty and that every step forward is followed by a devastating blow from some unlooked-for direction. I solve problems for a living, but I do so from a stable platform—there’s not much chance of the floor collapsing beneath me while I repair leaks in the ceiling. But Patrick… well, he’s a poor orphan raising four other orphans and tending a sick elder in a poor country.
Let me digress a moment to tell you about a videogame called This War of Mine. It’s a survival game set in the midst of an extended Sarajevo-style siege. Players control a group of civilians living in a dilapidated house, where they must prepare food and medicines and equipment preparatory to venturing into the city at night to gather supplies. The problems of material and weather and hostile strangers must be dealt with using very meager means, and they tend to pile up until the situation devolves into a stream of crises ending in the death of all your characters. It’s a sobering model of life in dire circumstances, and I can’t help but think about it as I think of Patrick. Here I sit, at a great distance, pointing and clicking, while he suffers.
But I am eternally the optimist and I feel that there simply has to be something good for Patrick around the next corner. He recently told me he doesn’t have any hope left. Fortunately, I have plenty to spare. If I’ve learned anything from him it’s the extent of the luxury in which I live. A luxury not necessarily of material goods, though I have my share of that too. Rather, a luxury of hope.
FYI, I collected no less than $620 in my initial call for help. That paid for Patrick’s Chromebook, an adapter which he bought in Serrakunda, his college application fees, and a significant amount of food. I don’t want to pester you, dear readers, for cash, but the teller window is still open. If you feel moved to help, Paypal me at fletcher@superflet.ch or Venmo me at @Fletcher-Moore-3. In the meantime, I’ll keep doing what I can do for Patrick and periodically I’ll report back here. Thanks.
Dagger of the Mind
It seems silly to turn back to this stupid show but I’m determined to keep on at least until I get to an episode I can wholeheartedly endorse. This is not that but it’s also not the worst episode I’ve ever seen, though James Gregory is more like a jar of mayonnaise than a villain. You might remember Gregory as Senator Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate—the 1962 original mind you—a role that wrapped his middle school vice-principal countenance like a cloak around Angela Landsbury’s cunning kingmaking. Imagine Gregory’s agent calling him at ten in the morning as he stood in his home bar chain smoking cigarettes and guzzling Manhattans out of tiki-themed glasses. “Jimmy,” says the voice on the phone, “I got you a guest part in a little show about spacemen.” And, needing more money for bourbon, he took it. Star Trek is full of surprises.
“Dagger” takes its title from MacBeth—“is this a dagger I see before me?”—and its plot from A Clockwork Orange. Gregory plays Tristan Adams, the director of a penal colony; a mad doctor intent on rehabilitating criminals by scouring their minds with a device that is equal parts shower head and strobe light. The freshly laundered minds are tabula rasa for Adams’ suggestions, which are generally some variation on the theme of: keep committing crimes and you’ll suffer horrible pain.
The reason this works for A Clockwork Orange is that the book/film actually addresses the question of whether a person compelled to make the moral choice is really making a choice at all—this is the meaning of the title: an organic object containing a clockwork mechanism isn’t an organic object at all. Star Trek fails to ask the question. The story is initiated by an escape, and the escapee is not a prisoner at all—it’s Adams’ assistant, whose mind has been demolished by the device. Why did Adams decide to dice up his assistant’s persona? That’s never made clear, but it’s the mental anguish of a non-criminal that serves up the plot. The actual criminals get very few lines and nothing like a real back story. What’s the point of that, I ask you.
That’s typical Star Trek for ya. Grab a big hunk of philosophical meat and boil it until it’s got the consistency of shoe leather. Equally typical: the resolution of the story emerges from Kirk’s superhuman qualities. Subject to the full power of the device, Shatner writhes around and makes a big show of resistance in spite of the fact we’ve been told several times that the machine will make scrambled eggs inside your skull. So it’s not enough that we’re not given a bite of that juicy steak; we’re also denied a resolution with which we can identify. It’s just Kirk being a tough guy.
For what it’s worth the episode also features another of his countless sexual dalliances, this time with Marianna Hill, playing a psychiatrist who beams down to the planet with Kirk, ostensibly to evaluate Adams’ methods but really to give Kirk the opportunity to make bedroom eyes at her and naturally the plot wends and lurches toward that inevitable moment when he slobbers all over her face. We’re spared, for once, of his seemingly intrinsic inability to keep his shirt on but one can’t help but think that this man really ought to be brought up on charges of sexual harassment already, and maybe, had the show lasted one more season, we would have been treated to a four-part treatment of his court martial.
Introducing the RCB Store
Do you want to look like a million bucks? Well you’re in luck. The Red Clay Bestiary store opens today with a single, super-booshie product: shirts. Red shirts! But not the kind of red shirts that mark you for death in a Star Trek episode, oh no; Super comfy Tri-blend red shirts imprinted with the stylin’ logo conjured for me by one James Palmer. Available now to the general public for the FIRST TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY! Get one now before an asteroid strikes the earth.
Additional goodies will be available soon. In the mean time, why don’t you run go take a look?
And that about wraps it up, folks. Hope your year gets off to a slap bang start, free from any coups d’etat or thousand-year weather debacles. Until next time, take care!
