Meet the family, Gambia edition

In Serekunda, the largest city in the Gambia, I am staying at the house of Ibraheem Ceesay and his lovely wife Sirah. I went to visit Sirah at the department store she works at today and here is a picture of the two of us.

Ibraheem, who is ED of a small Gambian NGO called Children for Children, is in Senegal right now doing some NGO facilitation/trainings. He'll be back on Saturday, but in the meantime I'm getting to know his household and touring around the Gambia with C4C's Logistics Coordinator, who moonlights as a tour guide on a regular basis (and, critically, has a 4WD).

The next picture (sorry I still haven't figured out how to rotate...) is of Rugi, who is Sirah's sister and lives with Sirah and Ibraheem, and Booboo (Ibrahim Jr), Ibrahim and Sirah's second son. (Their first son, Omar, is with Sirah's mother in Guinea-Bissau for a few months.) Booboo is about 6 months old and has had a somewhat exaggerated version of Kalila's initial reaction to me. Yesterday while Sirah was at work and Rugi (who does a good portion of the child care) was at school, the maid/nanny, Haddy, left me alone for about 15 min with Ibraheem to run some errands. I was sitting across the room, and as soon as she walked out the door he took one look at me and started screaming. I tried everything from singing to him to leaving the room so that he couldn't see me, but he wasn't having any of this whole being-left-alone-with-a-terrifying-white-person thing and screamed non-stop til she got back.

Since then I've been making my best efforts to become friends and he has gotten to the point of smiling at my peekaboo and developing a decided interest in chewing on my fingers as long as he's in the arms of someone he trusts. He still does occasionally, and as far as I can tell unpredictably, burst into tears on the sight of my face, but I'm counting it overall as progress.