Gambia Barcelona England

I left Gambia at 00:01 this morning. I caught a flight and flew to Barcelona. It took 4.5 hours, and we arrived at 06:30 because Barthelona is two hours time zone east of Gambia. We flew at 10,000 meters and the air temperature was 45 below zero. There was rain in Spain, and no flights to America under 1000 euro. So i flew to London in two hours and sat next to Lourdes, the wife of the Peruvian Ambassador to Spain, a diplomat herself. She was reading a commentary on the book series "A Course in Miracles" so we talked about the bible and god for 2 hours. She was raised Catholic in Puira and Lima but never actually read the bible. Another body to whom to preach the gospel of liberation from oppressive spiritually upside down religion. Puira is where my auntie's husband is from, and Lourdes recognized his last name of Houghton.

I got into Gatwick around noon. One krispy kreme donut at Gatwick airport costs $2.40 USA money. Everything in England is roughly twice the price of the USA. In fact today's newspapers reported that the English pound reached a new all time high against the Dollar @ now over two dollars to the pound. Look out US economy...can you smell the edge of the cliff? Can you see the smoke? The British one pound coin is tossed around freely like an American quarter, yet it's worth two dollars. Scary. It's a heavy little beast of a coin, with jagged edges.

I Be Here Now, in England, hoping to catch a flight to SFO for no more than 250 pounds. Good luck in July! I'm in Brighton, the end of the train line from Gatwick. My English friend Jocelyn from America is putting me up. She's a fabric/hemp person. I brought some lovely indigo colored tye dye batik style cotton fabric from the Serrakunda market. It cost 2 pounds for a two yard piece. I can probably sell it guerrilla marketing style for 10 pounds or more somewhere in London. 10 of those pieces sold will pay for my plane ticket from Spain to here, and i will get to enjoy England for a bit. Unless the market is saturated with Gambians selling fabric.

Goals in England: Go see a tennis match at Wimbledon all grass courts championships. Go to some old churches, maybe a museum or two. On the plane coming in i saw the White Cliffs of Dover. Checked that off the list. Just ate fish and chips. Check that off too. The food was from Sing Lee fish and chips, and for 8 bucks i had a soggy greasy mess of fatty starch and deep fried frozen fish flesh. Yuk. The sexy Slovakian woman behind the counter at this internet cafe just told me she likes my English accent because she can actually understand me, unlike the Brits who can sound like they have marbles in their mouths. Traveling teaches you to E-N U N-C I-A T E.

Why are 50 percent of Americans and British overweight and 99 percent of Africans not? Yanks and Brits eat too many calories and Africans don't, that's the pure science of it. But the WHY is that Africans eat mostly starch (complex non sweet sugar) and protein, with very low fat and very low sweet sugar in the diet. Fat and sweet sugars are the densest calorie rich foods, and we eat WAY too much of it. And we sit behind desks and steering wheels and Africans chop firewood and carry water. So that's the answer to that question.

I have come to realize that the statistics on average life spans are totally skewed. There is a phenomenally high rate of infant and small child mortality in West Africa. One of the big killers is malaria. Major Dave told me that malaria kills three times as many people in Africa as does AIDS, yet AIDS gets all the attention. Out in the villages where people work hard, and get lots of fresh air and water, it is said that it's common to see folks live well into their nineties, and they aren't infirm either. Still pounding the mortar and pestle, still carrying a great or great great grandchild on the back...still kicking it brewing attaya...

Another difference between Africa and Europe: In Europe the visible culture is modern and new, but there is a visible architecture which is fairly ancient. In Africa the visible architecture is fairly new, but the visible culture is ancient. Does that make sense? Being in England is so much like the states. Way more people than in Africa, but people are way more isolated. In Africa people live in compounds in extended families. The social interaction is ceaseless. Here people are packed together in the work place, on the trains and highways, in stores, but they go home to their nuclear family or to no family at all. More people, less interaction. More adults, less children.

Still, England intrigues me. The United Kingdom is mythical and full of some kind of magic...The Lord of the Rings, the Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter and all that...on the train ride here i saw a gorgeous rainbow winking at me across an emerald meadow...The UK is a green and isolated little island resting unobtrusively in the North Sea close up against the bosom of West Asia...cool and misty and quiet, yet it contains an electricity and dynamism that is intoxicating. It's a fabulously wealthy little island for one thing. The per capita net wealth of its citizens (including Scotland and Wales) is probably higher than just about any other country on earth. It's not only a mystery to the rest of the world how these pasty dry humoured people turned half the world into their historical empire, it's a modern mystery to the British people themselves! They hold their history with a sort of half bashful pride and half outright shame...they enslaved people on the one hand, and liberated people on the other...(for example, the British ruling class of India outlawed the Indian practice of murdering widows by burning them alive on top of their deceased husbands funereal pyre).

More on England...it's 21:00, nine at night, and its still very light out. We're way up north in Brighton by the sea in the summertime...the air is just like Frisco. People are out and about, it's lively like the Haight Ashbury or Noe Valley...and a pack of cigarettes costs five pounds. 10 US dollars. 250 Gambian Dalasis. In Gambia cigarettes cost about 10 Dalasis a pack. The average Gambian is lucky to make 150 Dalasis a day working hard. But the working stiff in England who makes the equivalent of 4000 Dalasis a day is hard pressed to save a pence, because he turns around and spends it all on beer and cigs, fish and chips and a flick, flowers for his girl and a train ride for two...gas and clothes and rent and phone cards and coca cola and one premier league football match per year and satellite tv and a cell phone and coffee in the morning, doing clothes at the laundry room, batteries for the cd player...a holiday by the shore...and what's left to send the family back in Syria or Bangladesh? A day's salary can buy an acre in India. One gas station attendant can help 10 people live WELL in Sri Lanka if he lives like a monk in a cave and sends it all home.

Non-sequiturs: There are big bomb terrorist scare threats in the UK right now, so don't leave your bag unattended! As i perused my email address book today i was surprised to see that i have 10 English citizens out of 250 people total.

As i came through customs i presented my New Zealand passport. The old codger wasn't impressed by the fact that my passport says
"In the name of her majesty the Queen of England please allow the bearer of this document to pass unimpeded through your gates kind sir blah blah blah..."
We played a verbal game.
"How long do you want to stay?"
"How long am i allowed to stay?"
"Depends on why you are here, how much money you have, your attitude with me, how i feel today, where you have been, where you are staying, what your religion is, and how much you bribe me with."
"How about six months then?" said I.
"OK." he sighed as he stamped my papers.
When i first told him i didn't know where i was lodging for the night because
"Woah man, i'm a free spirit man, i just go with the flow ya know?"
the agent in the booth next door leaned over and said
"If this was America they would just turn your sassy ass around and send you on the next flight out"!
Just for not writing down some stupid fake hotel address on the pathetic little entry card? Anyway i just told him:
"I AM an American you moron!"...no just kidding. Six months. Not bad for all that.

More to write about Gambia...my stay in Gunjur, my visit to Tanjie...the wedding of my Israeli friend to a Gambian woman...my djembe drumming with Babacar...watching Gambian television...the bumsters and prostitutes on the tourist strips...the struggles and dreams of the Gambians to escape poverty (how they take flimsy boats 100 plus miles off the Coast of Gambia to the Spanish owned Canary Islands, hoping to attain political or economic refugee status and be allowed to go to Europe)...how young men told me that it's so bloody grim for them in Gambia that they are totally willing to risk their lives to get out...i want to write about the heat and humidity and the rain and the sounds of the insects...about how the president and his personally owned newspaper claims he is curing AIDS with a combination of herbal remedies, Koranic verses and hands on healing...and how the same newspaper stories make a compelling case for the complicity of the pharmaceutical companies and the biological weapons industry in the spread of AIDS, particularly to Africa (in an attempt to control the population? Could it be a conspiracy? No, because "we know better than THAT")...about the Miss Black USA competition that was held there...about the African Roots festival which attracts many African-American tourists...about the music festival at Kanilai that invites traditional musical singing and dancing groups from all over West Africa...about why Gambia is one of the most peaceful and mellow countries in Africa, and the world as a whole (nothing to fight over except peanuts, literally. No diamonds (see Sierra Leone), no oil (see Nigeria), no valuable mineral deposits (see Congo and Zaire))....about how the "Under 20 (years of age) World Football (soccer) Championship" is the biggest thing happening because the Gambian team actually qualified to play in the tournament, held in Canada. This tournament is to Gambians what the World Cup Football championship is to the rest of the world, because Gambia is never good enough to make it on that world stage. They even made a music video about the team and it's on constant radio and tv rotation...of course the inside joke amongst Gambians is that while the Brazilians and Italians really do only send the actual under 20 years of age football stars, the Gambians send their best players period, regardless of age. They just forge the documents. But they still lost their first game to Mexico 3 nil. (That's 3 goals to 0, for you football jargon impaired).

One and done. As in, One Love, One Heart. As in, Unity, or Inity. I and I. Oneness of all creation. Zakariah Israel signing off...