Lamin and the Rain
Lightning was tearing open the morning sky somewhere beyond the Senegambia Hotel.
Every few seconds, another brilliant white fork split the dark clouds out over the Atlantic Ocean, briefly illuminating a landscape which, until that moment, had been doing its best to pretend that this was just another perfectly ordinary morning in The Gambia.
I was enthralled.
Nobody else appeared to have noticed.
We were sitting beneath the sheltered seating area outside the Three Chicks Bar and Restaurant on the Senegambia Strip. Three Chicks itself was closed. It was far too early for anyone to be serving drinks or food, but that had never prevented the place from becoming an unofficial early-morning gathering point for some of The Gambia’s Official Tourist Guides.
I have spent a lot of time sitting with the Official Tourist Guides over the years.
I have known many of them since my first visit to The Gambia in 2011. Faks and Mo (now sadly passed away) were there accompanying my original group of teachers right at the beginning. Peter and Bamba came with me during some of my first explorations of the country. Alex was the guide who accompanied me to a police station on my very first day after my enthusiasm for photography upset somebody working at a peanut factory.
It was an impressive start to a holiday.
Over the years, sitting with the guides has simply become part of being in The Gambia.
Whenever Lamin and I have a little downtime, we will often drive to the Senegambia Strip and settle ourselves outside the Official Tourist Guide hut.
It gives Lamin a welcome opportunity to have a short rest from me.
It gives me an equally welcome opportunity to sit amongst a good group of people, listen to the conversation and pretend that I understand considerably more of it than I actually do.
Most of the banter will be in Mandinka or one of the other local languages. I will sit quietly listening for the occasional word I recognise, seize triumphantly upon it and then attempt to reconstruct an entire conversation from perhaps three nouns and somebody laughing.
It rarely works.
When I arrive, somebody will usually pull up a chair for me.
Sometimes I will be offered attaya — the strong, sweet tea prepared in a very particular West African manner which deserves an explanation of its own another time — or I will wander to one of the nearby shops and buy drinks for everyone.
And by drinks, I mean cans of fizzy pop, Malta or fruit juice.
This is, after all, a predominantly Muslim country.
If I am particularly fortunate, I will arrive at exactly the moment food appears.
A large communal dish of domoda or benachin will be placed on the ground and everyone will gather around it. I will join them and eat in the traditional Gambian manner.
Well.
Nearly.
At some point, somebody will discreetly slip a spoon into my hand.
I have always appreciated the efforts my Gambian friends make to preserve my dignity.
The alternative would involve me attempting to scoop rice, sauce and meat into my mouth with my fingers while depositing most of it down the front of my shirt.
Nobody needs to see that.
Directly across the road from the guide hut sits Three Chicks.
Early in the morning, before the restaurant has opened and before the Senegambia Strip has properly stirred into life, the guides will often drift across to its sheltered outdoor seating area.
Some are beginning another day’s work.
Others are beginning another day’s wait for work.
And quite often, Lamin and I will join them.
There would usually be three or four guides scattered around the tables.
One might be sitting with his head resting on folded arms, slowly negotiating the difficult transition between being asleep and readying himself for a day’s waiting.
Another would be examining his phone.
A third might already be scanning the Strip for the tell-tale signs of an arriving tourist: pale legs, an uncertain expression, an unfolded map, or that distinctive look suggesting somebody has finally left the false security of an all-inclusive hotel and is now preparing to embrace THE GAMBIA.
Another still-sleepy guide would almost certainly be eating breakfast.
Breakfast often involved a tapalapa — the wonderful Gambian bread which manages to be simultaneously soft, substantial and capable of sustaining a human being for considerably longer than many British supermarket loaves — usually containing an omelette and occasionally accompanied by something else whose precise origin I found it wiser not to investigate too closely.
Lamin, naturally, would be looking at one of his phones.
Possibly both of them.
I, meanwhile, was watching the end of the world.
Another great fork of lightning ripped across the sky.
I looked towards Lamin.
Nothing.
I looked at the guides.
Nothing.
One of them may have taken another bite of his tapalapa.
I turned back towards the storm.
A few seconds later, the heavens produced another enormous electrical discharge somewhere out beyond the Senegambia Hotel.
Again, I looked around.
Still nothing.
There are moments when you desperately want somebody else to acknowledge what you have just witnessed.
Did you SEE that?
Nobody said it.
Nobody even looked as though they were thinking it.
I have always loved thunderstorms.
As a child, I loved them enough to record them.
This was long before mobile phones, digital recorders or any technology remotely suited to the task. I had a cassette recorder with a single tape deck, a built-in microphone and one tiny mono speaker. Whenever a thunderstorm arrived, I would place it near an open window, press Record and preserve the awesome elemental fury of nature for posterity.
Unfortunately, playing it back later through one small, tinny speaker reduced the terrifying majesty of a thunderclap to something resembling somebody dropping a biscuit tin in the kitchen.
Nevertheless, I persevered.
Thunderstorms fascinated me then and they fascinate me now.
And the storm unfolding across the Atlantic that morning was magnificent.
To me, it was nature putting on a performance.
To Lamin and the tourist guides, it was Tuesday.
Or Wednesday.
Or whatever day it happened to be.
More importantly, it was the rainy season.
The lightning wasn’t entertainment.
The rain wasn’t scenery.
And while I was sitting there hoping for another enormous fork of electricity to split the sky in half, the people around me understood something about that storm which I did not.
Rain in The Gambia can be spectacular.
It can also be inconvenient.
It can flood roads, damage homes, bring businesses to a standstill and make journeys which are straightforward for most of the year suddenly almost impossible.
But for somebody like Lamin Barrow, rain can mean something much more important.
It can mean maize.
It can mean rice.
It can mean watermelons.
It can mean whether a field produces a crop at all.
I was watching the lightning.
Lamin was living with the rain.
2019 was the glorious year in which I managed to visit The Gambia three times.
Once in April.
Again in July.
And then, because apparently two visits in four months were insufficient, I went back again in August.
My July visit should perhaps have discouraged the August one.
It did not.
Despite suffering a particularly enthusiastic attack of what is usually known, with suspiciously cheerful alliteration, as Banjul Belly, I arrived back in England, switched on my computer and almost immediately booked another flight for the following month.
These were the wonderful days when Thomas Cook still existed and flights to The Gambia continued throughout the year, including during the rainy season.
I miss Thomas Cook.
For the July trip, I had travelled with a small group of friends: charity trustee Mark, his daughter Helen and another Mark, a fellow lecturer from Newman University Birmingham.
We had spent the first few days travelling inland to Janjanbureh.
That particular expedition deserves a story of its own and, one day, it will get one.
But because it was July, we had arrived just as The Gambia was tipping into the rainy season.
Tipping is an appropriate word.
Because when the rain came, it really came.
“Tipping it down” barely begins to describe it.
My first proper encounter with Gambian rain came one night while I was standing on the balcony at Sally’s Holiday Apartments.
Fortunately, the balcony was sheltered.
Had it not been, I genuinely believe there was a reasonable chance I might have been washed off it and discovered the following morning somewhere near the coast.
There was almost no wind.
The rain simply fell vertically.
And relentlessly.
It didn’t seem to fall in drops so much as in great continuous columns of water pouring straight out of the sky.
Until then, I had seen photographs of the damage Gambian rain could cause. I had seen compounds where walls had collapsed and corrugated aluminium roofs had finally surrendered beneath the weight and force of repeated storms.
But photographs hadn’t really prepared me for the sheer volume of water.
Standing there, safely beneath the balcony roof, watching it hammer down into the darkness, I began to understand how something I found utterly magnificent could be viewed very differently by somebody whose home, business or livelihood happened to be underneath it.
And then there was the humidity.
The humidity deserves its own paragraph.
Possibly several.
Unfortunately for me, my July 2019 visit also coincided with one of the relatively rare occasions on which my digestive system decided that it no longer wished to participate in the holiday.
I had Banjul Belly.
For reasons of taste, dignity and the continued well-being of anybody reading this over breakfast, I shall avoid unnecessary detail.
Suffice to say that, following an occasion at Solomon’s Beach Bar when I came perilously close to passing out, I retreated to my room at Sally’s Holiday Apartments for the next day or so.
My priorities became very simple.
Bed.
Water.
Toilet.
Preferably with as little distance as possible between the three.
The problem was the humidity.
There was a ceiling fan in my room, but its principal contribution appeared to be moving the same hot, damp air around slightly faster.
I lay on the bed, sweating profusely into increasingly soggy bedding, wondering exactly how a human being could contain so much liquid while simultaneously losing all of it.
The toilet remained reassuringly close.
Every so often, Lamin or one of my travelling companions would appear to check that I was still alive before disappearing again to have Gambian adventures without me.
I bore this with great dignity.
Mostly.
Then, on one visit, they announced that they were going off to try some pedal boats on the River Gambia.
This was something I had particularly wanted to do.
I wished them well.
Obviously.
Several hours later, they returned.
The man operating the pedal boats had apparently demanded what they considered an unreasonable amount of money for the privilege, so they had politely declined and left without going anywhere near the water.
I am not ashamed to admit that my recovery accelerated slightly upon hearing this news.
They hadn’t had fun without me.
Good.
Fortunately, the Banjul Belly arrived towards the end of our visit. With the assistance of Imodium, assorted other medicines and a degree of blind optimism, I recovered sufficiently to fly home without creating an international toilet-related incident somewhere between Banjul and Birmingham.
And despite all of that, I wanted to go straight back.
That, somewhere among the digestive-system-related waffle, is actually the point.
The rainy season fascinated me.
The humidity was oppressive. The storms could be violent. The rain could arrive with a ferocity unlike anything I was accustomed to seeing at home.
But the country was changing before my eyes.
The dust was disappearing.
The landscape was turning green.
And the thunderstorms were magnificent.
So, almost as soon as I returned home from that July trip, I booked another flight.
I wanted to see more of The Gambia during the rains.
What I still hadn’t fully appreciated was that the things I found exciting, beautiful and spectacular were not necessarily viewed in quite the same way by the people who actually had to live with them.
Perhaps that was the difference.
I was visiting the rainy season.
Lamin lived in it.
For most British visitors, The Gambia is a country of blue skies, relentless sunshine, dusty roads and red-brown earth.
We tend to arrive during the winter months, step off an aeroplane wearing entirely inappropriate British clothing, feel the warm air hit us and immediately become extremely pleased with ourselves.
We have escaped February.
The Gambia, meanwhile, has been waiting for us.
But visit during the rainy season and you discover a different country.
The transformation can be astonishing.
Roads which, only a few months earlier, had disappeared beneath clouds of orange dust become dark and wet. Patches of land which had looked almost barren suddenly erupt into vegetation. Grasses appear from nowhere. Trees thicken. Fields turn green.
Very green.
There are shades of green in rainy-season Gambia which I am fairly certain haven’t yet been included on a Dulux colour chart.
And it can happen remarkably quickly.
I have a video showing exactly the same piece of Lamin’s farmland at different times of the year.
On one side, the earth is dry, sandy and apparently capable of supporting little more than dust.
On the other, it is almost unrecognisable.
Green.
Dense.
Alive.
Same land.
Different season.
And for Lamin, that difference matters enormously.
If you have read other Travels With Lamin stories, you could perhaps be forgiven for thinking of Lamin primarily as a taxi driver.
There is, after all, usually a battered green taxi somewhere in the story.
It is being stopped by the police.
It is refusing to start.
It is being driven along roads upon which no sensible British person would take anything more delicate than a tank.
But Lamin is also, fundamentally, a farmer.
During the farming season, much of his attention turns towards Sankandi and the land surrounding his family compound.
This is not gardening.
There is no small shed.
There are no carefully labelled seed packets.
There isn’t a little folding chair from which Lamin can admire his runner beans while drinking tea from a flask.
There is land.
A lot of land.
And there is work.
I’ve watched videos of Lamin and local boys working together in the fields, bent over beneath a hot Gambian sky, clearing, planting and tending the ground.
There is nothing remotely romantic about the physical effort involved.
Yet when Lamin shows me his crops, there is always pride.
As I write this in August 2026, Lamin is growing maize, rice and watermelons.
He is also helping manage Lisa’s Legacy Farm in Sankandi, an agricultural project established on land belonging to his brother Lamin Darboe and financed from England in memory of Lisa, the grandmother of Lamin Darboe’s wife, Michelle.
Lamin Barrow does much of the hands-on management in The Gambia.
Because apparently managing our nursery school, driving a taxi and farming his own land still left an inconvenient gap in his diary.
When I spoke to him while writing this chapter, he was standing in his field.
He turned his phone around to show me.
Maize.
Rows and rows of it.
Tall, green and growing.
Then he told me they hadn’t had rain for four days.
Four days.
In Britain, four consecutive days without rain during August might lead to excited newspaper headlines declaring a heatwave.
Barbecues would emerge from sheds.
Garden centres would run short of charcoal.
Somebody, somewhere in a Wetherspoons pub would remove his shirt to reveal a sweaty, pale English torso.
In Sankandi, Lamin was waiting for rain.
He wasn’t panicking.
He expected it to come.
But he was watching.
Because crops don’t particularly care what the long-range weather forecast says.
They need water.
And they need it at the right time.
That is the strange relationship farmers have with the rainy season.
You wait for the rain.
You hope for the rain.
You depend upon the rain.
And then sometimes it rains so much that you wish it would stop.
Lamin has sent me many videos of storms in Sankandi over the years.
Sometimes they are filmed from beneath the shelter of his compound while rain pours from the roof in sheets.
The yard disappears beneath water.
The trees bend and drip.
The sky turns almost black.
And the sound is extraordinary.
Rain hammering on corrugated roofing does not gently announce its arrival.
It attacks.
Watching one of Lamin’s videos on my phone in England, I can turn the volume up, admire the drama and think how magnificent it all looks.
Then I can put my phone down.
Lamin cannot.
When the rain stops, he still has to walk outside.
And sometimes what awaits him is water.
Lots of it.
In other videos he has sent me, the land around his compound is flooded.
Water lies between the trees and stretches across areas which, at other times of year, are dry ground.
The crops need rain.
They do not necessarily need a lake.
Again, it is all about balance.
Too little rain brings one set of worries.
Too much brings another.
And the consequences can extend far beyond a field.
Many years ago, another Gambian friend sent me a collection of photographs taken after particularly severe rainfall in Nema Kunku.
I knew him at the time through the Palm Beach Hotel, where everybody seemed to know him as the Internet Man.
However, his real name was Mustapha Jallow.
And Nema Kunku was his home village.
The photographs were poor quality.
The story they told wasn’t.
People waded through brown floodwater which had spread between homes.
A boy tried to manoeuvre a bicycle through it.
A woman walked beneath an umbrella while water surrounded her legs.
Washing still hung outside compounds because, even when the world outside your front door has temporarily become a river, clothes apparently continue to need washing.
And there was a man standing outside his destroyed home.
There is something strangely powerful about ordinary life continuing in extraordinary circumstances.
And then there was one photograph which stayed with me.
A boy stands in the foreground.
Behind him is destruction.
Part of a building appears to have collapsed, leaving broken blocks, timber and corrugated roofing scattered across the ground.
The boy isn’t performing for the camera.
He isn’t pointing.
He is simply standing there, looking towards what has happened.
It is very easy to write the word flooding.
Eight letters.
Then move on to the next sentence.
It is harder to look at that photograph and forget that flooding happens to somebody.
To somebody’s road.
Somebody’s compound.
Somebody’s belongings.
Somebody’s home.
The rain I had stood watching from beneath a safe balcony at Sally’s Holiday Accommodation was the same rain which, somewhere else, could enter a family’s life without being invited.
Suddenly, my spectacular thunderstorm becomes rather less romantic.
The rainy season doesn’t stop at the boundary of Lamin’s farm.
It reaches our school as well.
BFiG Busumbala Nursery School changes dramatically during the rains.
For much of the dry season, the school grounds can look sandy, dusty and slightly unforgiving.
Then the rains arrive.
Grass explodes from the ground.
The bougainvillea comes alive.
Banana plants throw out huge green leaves.
Trees which have spent months looking as though they are merely surviving suddenly remember that they are tropical plants and begin showing off.
Within a surprisingly short space of time, the entire site can look different.
Beautiful.
Green.
Lush.
And in need of somebody with a very large strimmer.
Rain gives us other problems.
The vegetation grows faster than we can control it.
Building work becomes more difficult.
Roofs discover previously unknown places from which to leak.
And roads which Lamin drives along without a second thought during the dry season become muddy, deeply rutted and, occasionally, disappear beneath water altogether.
This is where the long-suffering green taxi finally has to admit defeat.
Not often.
Lamin has driven that car down roads I would hesitate to walk along.
I have been bounced around inside it while it has negotiated potholes large enough to have their own ecosystems.
I have watched Lamin approach stretches of road which have made me think,
No.
Only to discover that Lamin’s thoughts were,
No problem.
But even Lamin’s taxi has limits.
And, during the rainy season of 2026, we found one of them.
My phone buzzed.
It was another video from Lamin.
This, in itself, was not unusual.
Lamin sends me videos constantly.
School videos.
Farm videos.
Family videos.
Videos of people doing things I don’t understand accompanied by explanations which occasionally leave me understanding them even less.
I opened it.
For once, there was no battle-scarred green taxi.
There was Lamin.
On the back of a tractor.
He was bouncing along behind it as the tractor pushed its way through a flooded road towards Busumbala Nursery School.
Brown water stretched across the track.
The sort of road Lamin would normally drive along without hesitation had become impassable to his taxi.
So he had found another form of transport.
Of course he had.
There was also a considerable collection of young trees travelling with him.
Because this wasn’t an emergency evacuation.
Nobody needed rescuing.
There had been no dramatic call for assistance.
Lamin was trying to get to the school.
To plant trees.
I watched the video again.
A tractor.
Floodwater.
Lamin.
Trees.
There is something about that combination which seems to sum him up rather well.
The road to the school was flooded.
The taxi couldn’t get through.
The obvious response might have been to wait.
The road would eventually dry.
There would be another day.
But the rains which had made the journey difficult were also the rains which made it the right time to plant.
So Lamin found a tractor and an owner willing to give him a lift.
And went anyway.
The irony is almost perfect.
The rain stopped his taxi from reaching the school.
The rain was also helping everything he was taking there to grow.
I have photographs of those school grounds during the rainy season.
Banana plants thriving along the boundary wall.
Bougainvillea spreading around the gate.
Grass covering ground which, during the dry months, can look bare and dusty.
Green everywhere.
That is the other side of the story.
Rain can destroy.
Rain can frustrate.
Rain can turn a road into a river and a ten-minute journey into an expedition.
But rain also creates.
It fills the fields.
It feeds the maize.
It feeds the rice.
It feeds the watermelons.
It turns brown into green.
It gives a newly planted tree a chance.
Perhaps that is what I didn’t understand properly on that morning outside Three Chicks.
I was sitting beneath a roof, staring towards the Atlantic and waiting excitedly for the sky to split open again.
The guides were eating breakfast.
Lamin was looking at his phones.
Nobody was interested in providing the sense of shared wonder I felt the occasion deserved.
At the time, I thought they were missing something.
Now I realise that I was.
When people ask me about the best time to visit The Gambia, the dry season is the easy answer.
The skies are blue.
The roads are better.
The humidity is lower.
You can travel almost anywhere without first enquiring whether a tractor might be required.
But there is another Gambia.
A greener Gambia.
A wetter, stickier, muddier and occasionally considerably more inconvenient Gambia.
It is the Gambia of dark skies and flooded tracks.
Of crops pushing upwards through wet earth.
Of farmers watching clouds.
Of children wading through water.
Of trees being carried to school on the back of a tractor.
And if you really want to understand Lamin Barrow, perhaps you need to see that Gambia too.
Come when it rains.
Just don’t expect Lamin to stand around admiring the lightning with you.
He’ll probably have work to do.
Read the next chapter
Lamin and the Football Match
Coming soon…
Read the Introduction to ‘Travels With Lamin’ here:
👉Travels With Lamin – An Introduction | Building Futures in the Gambia
Find all the other chapters here:
👉Travels With Lamin: Stories from The Gambia and West Africa | Building Futures in the Gambia
Book Lamin and his taxi here:
👉Lamin Barrow Taxis – The Gambia’s Number One Taxi Driver
And find out more about Lamin’s work with BFiG Busumbala Nursery School here:
👉 Building Futures in The Gambia
And Discover the Gambia here:
👉 Discover The Gambia | Culture, Food, Music, Places & Stories
