Nightmare on 2 Bob Street

There are no street names or addresses here so we've dubbed our little house "2 Bob St." It works better than 6 tin roofs down from the Welcome to Gambia sign. :)



So last night we spent the evening at Safari Garden. Went for a swim in the pool and had a delicious barbeque. The food was GREAT. We stuffed ourselves and hung out for a while but the week (the kids and the heat!) got the better of us and we headed home before 10pm.

Look ma! No hands!


Melanie, Allison and I (the residents of 2 Bob St.) headed out for our place while the rest jumped in a cab (their place is further). It's pitch dark here at night because of the lack of street lights and we only had my headlamp to guide us. Makes for good star-gazing though. Just as we turn on to our street, this big "thing" jumps out in front of us. He's dressed like Trash Heap from Fraggle Rock and carrying two machetes. Oh yeah. So he starts jumping and making crazy noises and running at us while he's scraping the machetes together. Needless to say, we were pretty freaked out. He didn't come too close though and we could see a couple of guys standing outside a little corner store nearby. I headed for them - figure there's safety in numbers :) - and asked what was going on. Turns out this guy is dressed up as part of their circumcison ritual. He scares away evil spirits so that they don't get the boys who are going to be circumcised. I'm like "Ok, well, tell him we're not a threat!". hehe. So now we're all holding onto each other and heading down our dark street for home. Then a friggin' dog comes out of nowhere and starts barking and growling at us. Dogs are even more scary to me than the Circumcision-Machete Dude because they'll all rabid here. We make a big cirle around him and finally get to our gate. Allison actually runs up and hugs our gate. hahaha. And some little kid, maybe 10, comes over to ask if we're ok. Funny. There's not usually so much excitement in our neighbourhood.

Only in the dark with machetes...