It’s been three weeks since I came to The Gambia. I would like to briefly summarize each week and introduce what I have bene up to.
First week - my focus was to get familiar with the geography, culture, and climate.
From where I stay to the office where I work, it takes between 30 minutes to 60 minutes. It totally depends on how smooth I can get a taxi. In The Gambia, there is almost always very much traffic and getting a taxi is quite a challenge. So I always make sure to leave my place earlier than my expectation. It costs 12 dalasis (about 0.2 USD) to the office one-way. Everything is very cheap in The Gambia and especially after one year in Sweden, this is very nice for a almost broke college student.
Once I get to the office, first I clean the office. A lot of road here are not fully paved. Therefore, the air is dusty and inside can get dusty and dirty too.
My main task for the first two weeks was to redesign the website of the company. I am not very experienced in web designing, but I taught myself by watching and reading online. It has not yet done, but my coworkers have liked the progress so far, so I would like to share it here once I finish.
In addition, I have been learning a lot about photo/video editing. When we do not have any filming, we edit out footages in the office. My coworkers sometimes teach me and let me try some editing. I also watch some videos online to learn more about it.
Second week
We went to various locations for different types of shooting. We do music videos, commercials, short films, and documentary films. For music videos, we mainly work with several Gambian singers. Personally, I do not listen to a lot of rap music or hiphop music, but those genres aer very popular in The Gambia, and the artists who we work with are very famous. At a location we went for filming, the local kids saw the artist, surrounded him, and made the filming difficult. For a documentary film, we went to the Gambia Port Authority and filmed the workers there. It was a good experience to see the people come and go, using the ship at the Gambian port in Banjul.
Third week
For this week, I am working for YMCA The Gambia. The idea behind this is to gain an inside perspective of the organization and later I will make a proposal for a documentary film. My boss told me that if the proposal is good enough, we are actually going to make it into a work. So I came to YMCA The Gambia. They have several programs/courses for the youth in The Gambia. One of the most popular one is catering program, where students learn skills for catering/serving at restaurants and hotels. Students also attend several sessions, where they learn about drug use, sex education, and other important things to grow and be a responsible adult. On Friday, I facilitated a session for After School Program. I talked about mental health based on my own experiences and some articles I found online. Students were engaged and active in talking about their opinions and stories.
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