Finding quiet among the Baobabs

Where on earth can we find quiet these days?

We’re flying home now, as I write, after a hectic schedule of six days shooting in The Gambia, and the image that remains with me now is that of a quiet rural night sky with the stars fixed around a silhouetted baobab tree. A total calm in the night that I rarely experience. A balmy breeze blowing after a hot day on the Sahelian landscape.

During our two week journey on this short film project we spent most of it in urban areas. Of course it was the people — not necessarily the landscapes — that made the trip fascinating, fun, and frustrating at times. Days were dominated by the new noises of so many local languages, morning birdsongs, taxi traffic, goats and busy markets and occasional bits of West African music on radios, or the muslim call to prayer - oh, and the endless ringtones as our fixer juggled two cell phones, and we juggled the shifting priorities of our shoot. That was the West African wallpaper of our days as we tracked six characters in locations ranging from the busy offices of Africell, the cell phone company, to carpentry shops, to the Gari forest of Abuko Nature Reserve. And there were times when it amazed me how I got acclimatized to the noise surrounding us. Whether it was traffic, or the curious kids getting our attention yelling “Toubab!” (white man), or the NSGA local staff laughing and teasing each other as we drove in the van, it was pandemonium at times.

It was towards the end of our shoot in The Gambia that we finally created the opportunity to head out of the urban area and up the river, or “up country” as the locals describe it. During our shooting, we realized that all our characters had connections to smaller home villages in the hotter, drier rural areas of the country. We wanted to make a place in our film project for this part of the country. We decided to ask young Abbie Barrow, 20, if she would consider taking us back to her home village to meet her father and family. She lives in the urban centre of Serrekunda now, plays volleyball, works as a member of Nova Scotia Gambia Association’s Drama Troupe, and studies communications. And she’s addicted to her cellphone. And she shyly agreed to have us along.

After a long and bumpy 5 hour ride along the red sand of the South Bank road, it was a relief to reach Mansakonko, to pull into the compound of her father, and shut off the engine of our Toyota van, and find ourselves in the calm of the night. Her father and step mother (her father’s second wife) and other extended family, were all sitting or lying on mats atop a raised concrete pad, underneath one of the seven mango trees in the yard. Abbie and her father quietly spoke, in a volume that I had rarely heard from Abbie the short time I had known her. She is usually boisterous - constantly laughing and joking and teasing and exclaiming and protesting. As we hoped, there, in the setting where she grew up, she settled into another mode, and so did I.

We spent some time recording for the camera some of the conversation between Abbie and her father, and lit the scene quite sparingly with some flashlights. The low exposure pushed the limits of the Sony EX-1 camera, but I think it make for a good contrast to the rest of the footage we did in town, and with Abbie. I’m hoping the sound of the night insects, and the odd village dog barking in the background will match the night quiet imagery.

After our brief introduction to the family, the crew checked into a local lodge in the village. I had a very simple round concrete hut that was decent and clean with red painted floors and mosquito netting over the bed. After making some notes for the next day’s shoot with Abbie, I took a chair and sat down in the lodge’s garden on the edge of the compound facing the bush and the sharply clear night sky. I savoured the night sounds, and wished I could have access to this more often.

Whether in Halifax or in the urban streets of The Gambia, noise and light pollution are a constant in our modern lives, and it’s just good for the soul to be immersed in that calm. We woke in the morning to a variation on the quiet with birds coming to life and lodge workers sweeping the grounds. I kept thinking that it shouldn’t be so difficult to get this quiet.

The next day we shot some great moments between Abbie and her dad, discussing the Mango trees and the Baobabs.

Mr. Barrow invited us to stay for lunch and it really pained us to decline, but we had to get back to the city for more shooting. Oren and I both had the feeling we just didn’t want to leave this remote corner of West Africa.

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