Saying Goodbye: A Mang Easy

Abby Sillah has left the village.

Moving away from rural Africa is different than moving away from your friends and family in America. When you leave for a new place, you know that although your relationship may change, you’ll still communicate with each other. You’ll still be informed about big life events and if the mood strikes you, you can go visit them after a couple hour car ride, or a couple hundred dollar plane ride.

But when I left my friends and family in Nyakoi, I left with no idea of when I would next see or talk to them, if ever. To get to the Gambia is not cheap or easy, and even if I could get back, everything would be different. The kids who I play with would be adults who wouldn’t remember me or want to play with me. My Mandinka will be even more pitiful than it is now, so communication will be difficult. So, visiting them again may not happen.

The internet is growing in popularity, but I fear that the grandmas I live with will not jump on the internet wave and start surfing.

The Gambia doesn’t even have a mail system. If they did, still nobody in my family can read.

So, when I said goodbye, it was goodbye for real. Here’s how it went.

Gambians are weird about goodbyes. For about a week before I went, the people most important to me started to distance themselves. I guess to continue to hang around with me would have been too painful, but it was hard to not hang out with the people I will miss most for the last week.

One of my best friends, Mawdou the tailor, came to say goodbye to me the day the car was coming to pick me up, but he left hours before the car came because he didn’t want to see it. My other best friend, Maimuna, Grade 11 student, stayed until the car came, but instead of hugging me and saying goodbye, she ran into the house and stayed there.

My host mom and a bunch of older women in the village came with me out to the car after it was fully loaded, all shaking my left hand. Normally, left hands are NEVER used for anything except self cleaning. Right hands are the clean hands, so they are the only appropriate hand to shake hands with, eat with, or pass money with. When you’re saying goodbye, you shake left hands, because it’s inappropriate. Gambians think that since the last thing you did was incorrect, you’ll have to come back sometime and make it right. That’s their way of telling me I have to come back.

One thing that I really like about saying goodbye in the Gambia is that everybody asks for forgiveness. In the last assembly of the year at my school, a grade teacher got up and asked every student in the school to forgive him if he had wronged them throughout that year. I thought it was a nice, if a little weird, gesture. But as I made my round through Nyakoi to say goodbye to everyone, everyone asked for my forgiveness. In the opposite spirit of the left handed hand shake, when someone is leaving, they want to make sure everything is right. Thus, everyone asks for forgiveness so that there are no bad spirits left behind when a person leaves.

Maimuna sent me this text message a few weeks before I left: “Hi Yabba. I want you for you forgive me. You Know why? If you are staying with some body for a long time, you should always look Forgiveness to that person Everytime. So That why Iam looking for that from you. You know why I do these everytime? You are coming to live with us here. May be we not see each other for a long time, and when you go it is right. Forgive me?”

So, in a flurry of forgiveness, left handed hand shakes, and minimal tears, I left Nyakoi, for perhaps the last time. It’s been an unforgettable, uncomfortable, unbelievable at times, and undeniably unique experience. On to the next adventure.