Lamin and the Sports Day: Finding Alasanna
There are some things in life which really shouldn’t be difficult to find.
The Eiffel Tower.
The Atlantic Ocean.
Several thousand excited Gambian schoolchildren taking part in a sports day.
And yet, somehow, that was exactly the situation in which we found ourselves.
It was February 2014, and Lamin Barrow and I, accompanied by teacher friends Keith and Hannah, had spent well over an hour driving around the villages of western Gambia searching for a school sports day that appeared to have vanished completely.
Lamin frowned.
This was unusual.
Lamin normally knew where he was going.
Or pretended that he did.
Even when he plainly didn’t.
Every few minutes he’d slow the battered green taxi beside another passer-by, exchange a rapid-fire conversation in Mandinka, thank them warmly, nod confidently… and drive off in what I sincerely hoped was the correct direction.
To me, every road looked identical.
Every dusty junction looked identical.
Every sandy track looked identical.
“We’re lost, aren’t we?” I would ask Lamin.
“No,” came the firm reply.
A few more minutes would pass.
“We are lost, aren’t we?”
“No.”
More dusty roads.
More identical junctions.
“Lamin…”
“Hmm?”
“We’re lost.”
“No.”
More silence.
More driving.
Then…
“We are lost,” Lamin suddenly announced.
I never quite understood why it took him fifteen minutes to reach exactly the same conclusion I’d reached fifteen minutes earlier.
But, once he’d accepted we were lost, he immediately became remarkably good at finding where we were supposed to be.
Lamin seemed to possess some mysterious internal Gambian satnav. Even when we appeared hopelessly lost, he never looked remotely concerned.
Eventually, after what felt like an expedition worthy of its own chapter, we pulled up by a single gateway in a high wall.
We climbed out of the taxi.
The moment we stepped through the gateway, I realised our search had finally come to an end.
The place was enormous.
School children stretched as far as I could see.
Thousands of them.
Everywhere I looked there were colourful sports kits, teachers attempting varying degrees of crowd control, whistles, laughter and the constant buzz of several thousand young people enjoying a day away from the classroom.
It was exactly what you’d expect from a Gambian school sports day.
Warm.
Chaotic.
Joyful.
And absolutely magnificent.
Somewhere amongst those thousands of pupils, I was hoping to find one particular young man.
His name was Alasanna.
He was seventeen years old.
And he’d invited me to watch him race.
Keith, Hannah and Lamin sensibly headed for the shade of a nearby marquee, where they appeared perfectly content to sit and watch the proceedings while avoiding becoming medium-rare in the already ferocious Gambian sunshine.
I, meanwhile, set off into the crowd in search of Alasanna.
How difficult could it be?
Very, as it turned out.
The problem wasn’t simply the number of people.
It was that almost everyone I was looking at appeared to be roughly the same age.
There seemed to be hundreds of seventeen-year-old boys.
All of them mingling amongst thousand of school students.
Everywhere I looked, another possible Alasanna appeared… before immediately turning out not to be Alasanna at all.
I briefly considered asking somebody.
Then I realised that beginning every conversation with,
“Excuse me, have you seen Alasanna?”
was unlikely to narrow things down very much.
I began weaving my way through the crowds.
The more I searched, the more impossible the task seemed to become.
A horrible feeling slowly crept over me.
I wasn’t going to find him.
He’d invited me here.
He wanted me to watch him compete.
And despite managing to find an entire sports day containing several thousand people, I somehow wasn’t going to be able to find the one person I’d actually come to see.
Then I heard someone shouting.
“Peter!”
I stopped.
“PETER!“
This time it was louder.
I turned towards the sound.
Halfway up a boundary wall, balanced rather precariously and waving enthusiastically with one hand, was Alasanna.
Even from a distance I could see the enormous grin on his face.
Around him gathered hundreds of other students.
But somehow, amongst all those faces, he’d spotted me almost immediately.
Looking back, I really shouldn’t have worried.
Finding Alasanna amongst several thousand Gambian teenagers was almost impossible.
Finding me was considerably easier.
There are, after all, not many slightly sunburnt, bald Englishmen wandering around Gambian school sports days.
I wasn’t exactly a needle in a haystack.
I was more like a lighthouse.
I waited while Alasanna fought his way through the crowd towards me.
A minute later, he was standing in front of me, smiling broadly.
We shook hands.
“N fama,” he said in his native Mandinka tongue.
My father.
“N denma,” I replied with a smile.
My son.
It was an exchange which Alasanna had taught soon after I first met him, and it still makes me smile every time I think about it.
I gestured toward the marquee where Keith, Hannah and Lamin were waiting. Alasanna and I navigated our way through the excitable crowd.
More greetings followed.
More handshakes.
More smiles.
Then I asked what I thought was the most important question of the day.
“So…”
“When are you running?”
I wasn’t remotely prepared for Alasanna’s answer.
But before I tell you what he said, we need to rewind the story a little.
Back to January 2011.
Back to the first time I met Alasanna.
It was in January 2011, on my very first trip to The Gambia, that I met Alasanna Beyai.
While exploring Makumbaya Village.
At the time, he was a pupil at Makumbaya Lower Basic School.
If you’ve followed the charity Building Futures in The Gambia for a while, you’ll probably recognise the name. Long before the charity officially existed, fundraising in the UK helped us build and stock a library at Makumbaya Lower Basic School. But in 2011, all of that still lay in the future.
I was simply another slightly bewildered English teacher trying to absorb as much of The Gambia as possible.
And Alasanna Beyai was one of the first Gambians to make me feel genuinely welcome.
As I wandered around Makumbaya Village, accompanied by my group of teacher friends, Alasanna approached me and started walking alongside me.
I guessed he was about fourteen years old. He was wearing his school uniform – a light mustard yellow polo shirt, long khaki shorts and brown sandals.
Like so many Gambians I’ve met over the years, he introduced himself without the slightest hesitation. Within minutes he wanted to know my name, where I lived, how long I was staying, whether I liked The Gambia, whether my family were well and, naturally, whether I supported a football team.
To British readers, that probably sounds remarkably intrusive.
It isn’t.
It’s simply how conversations begin.
One of the first things that struck me about Gambian culture was how much time people are willing to give one another. In Britain we’ve become remarkably skilled at pretending strangers don’t exist. We avoid eye contact, apologise when somebody sits next to us on a train and often know less about our neighbours than we do about television celebrities.
The Gambia couldn’t be more different.
Stand still for more than thirty seconds and there’s every chance somebody will stop to talk to you.
Not because they want something. Not always.
Simply because they’re interested.
People ask about your family because family matters.
They ask where you’ve travelled from because they’re genuinely pleased you’ve come.
They ask whether you’re enjoying yourself because they hope the answer is yes.
Alasanna walked beside me as we explored Makumbaya Village, chatting happily the whole way.
Alasanna’s Gambian accent was strong, but his English was excellent.
Like many Gambian children, he’d been encouraged from an early age to learn English alongside his own native language. English is the official language of The Gambia and the language used in schools, so by the time many children reach secondary education they’re comfortably switching between several different languages without giving it a second thought.
I found that astonishing.
I struggle with speaking clear English, sometimes.
One of Alasanna’s younger brothers joined us.
He reached for my fingers in a way that suggested he wanted to hold my hand but hadn’t quite summoned up the courage to do so.
As we talked, Alasanna spoke proudly about school.
He loved learning.
He wanted to continue his education for as long as possible.
He explained that, when he left school, he wanted to be a diplomat.
More than anything, he believed education was the key to a better future.
That belief has always been with me…and has been the principle foundation behind my choice of career.
Before we said goodbye, we exchanged contact details.
At the time it felt like one of those pleasant little moments that often happen when you travel. You meet someone interesting, promise to stay in touch and assume life will quietly carry both of you in different directions.
Instead, a few weeks after my return to England, a letter arrived.
It was from Alasanna.
I wrote back.
A few weeks after that, another letter arrived.
Before long we were regular pen friends, separated by several thousand miles but gradually getting to know one another through handwritten letters that took weeks to travel between England and rural Gambia.
Those letters taught me far more about Gambian life than any guidebook ever could.
This first visit to The Gambia had been organised by Newman University and long time friend (and charity co-founder and trustee) Mark Chidler. As I mentioned earlier in these stories, during my initial visit to The Gambia, I was travelling with a group of teachers. Our aim – to explore the possibility of building links between our schools in England and schools in The Gambia.
Ironically, we were advised not to form a partnership with Makumbaya Lower Basic School.
Communication would simply be too difficult, we were told.
The village was too remote.
Keeping regular contact would be almost impossible.
Ordinarily, that would probably have been sensible advice.
Unfortunately, I’ve never been particularly good at accepting sensible advice.
By the time Alasanna’s second letter arrived, I’d already started wondering whether everyone else might be wrong.
If one determined fourteen-year-old boy could write regularly from Makumbaya, perhaps two schools could manage it as well.
As it turned out…
…they could.
But that’s another story for another chapter.
Through those letters I gradually learnt more about Alasanna’s life.
He loved reading.
He enjoyed playing football with his friends in the evenings.
He proudly supported Manchester United, despite living several thousand miles from Old Trafford.
His favourite subjects were Science and Social and Environmental Studies…abbreviated to SES on Gambian school timetables.
The latter fascinated me.
In Britain, children certainly learn about the environment, but for many of us nature is something we visit at weekends.
For Alasanna, nature wasn’t somewhere you went.
It was simply life.
Families depended upon the land.
Vegetable gardens fed households.
The rainy season determined routines.
Harvests determined fortunes.
Children grew up understanding that the health of the land was closely tied to the health of their own families.
It was a way of thinking that many of us in Britain have gradually lost.
When I first met him, Alasanna was in Grade 6 at Makumbaya Lower Basic School. Eventually he would move on to Kerawan Upper Basic School.
The new school was about five kilometres from his village.
Every day he would walk there.
Every day he would walk home again.
When he mentioned it in one of his letters, there wasn’t the slightest hint of complaint.
He simply wrote that he would make the journey “on foot” with his friends because they weren’t fortunate enough to own bicycles.
Education wasn’t easy.
It required determination before lessons had even begun.
Like many Gambian families, Alasanna’s family had difficult decisions to make.
His father paid for his education, but there were limits to what the family could afford.
Alasanna had four brothers and three sisters.
Not all of them were able to attend school.
His mother worked in the village gardens, and whenever he wasn’t studying, Alasanna helped her. The money they earned helped support both the family and his education.
Alasanna worked incredibly hard.
He arrived at school early.
He completed his homework.
He took pride in his behaviour.
He valued punctuality.
Most of all, he valued the opportunity he had been given.
One sentence from one of his letters has remained with me ever since.
“I really want to learn because it is the only way of sustaining myself and a way to fight against poverty.”
I don’t think I’ve ever forgotten it.
In Britain, education is sometimes seen as an obligation.
For Alasanna, it was a privilege.
He believed that if he worked hard enough, education would allow him to build a better future—not just for himself, but for his parents, his brothers and sisters, and one day, for a family of his own.
Back then, Alasanna believed education would change his life.
So did I.
However, as I was to discover several years later, that early faith Alasanna had in education—and in his country’s ability to provide him with a good and secure future—would gradually begin to fade.
Back in 2011, though, there was no hint of any of that.
During that first meeting, Alasanna never once asked me for money.
That might not sound remarkable, but during my first visit to The Gambia I’d already met plenty of people who, sooner or later, steered the conversation towards financial help. Sometimes the request came almost immediately. Sometimes it came after a lengthy “getting to know you” conversation.
Alasanna never did.
Whether that was because he was too proud, too polite or simply more interested in making a friend than finding a sponsor, I honestly don’t know.
Before I returned to England, I quietly gave him a few dalasis to help buy books and stationery for school. And I would continue to do this on all subsequent visits.
Perhaps that had been his plan all along.
Perhaps it hadn’t.
I never asked.
What I do know is that our friendship became one of the reasons I learnt so much about life in rural Gambia. It also convinced me that building a successful partnership between my school in England and Makumbaya Lower Basic School might not be quite as impossible as we’d first been led to believe.
And so, over the following year, Alasanna wrote letters to me.
I replied.
He wrote again.
Slowly, two people living several thousand miles apart began getting to know one another through envelopes covered in Gambian stamps.
A year later, in April 2012, I returned to The Gambia.
By then, fundraising to build a library at Makumbaya Lower Basic School was well underway. The main structure had already been completed and I was visiting to inspect the progress that had been made.
It was wonderful to see.
A year earlier, it had simply been an idea.
Now it was becoming a reality.
After spending time at the school, I walked the short distance up the road to Alasanna’s family compound. It was only about five minutes from the school.
His father, Ensa Beyai, was the school’s caretaker, so living nearby made perfect sense.
I’d already seen Alasanna during the school day, but as I entered the compound he greeted me with a broad smile.
“My family has something for you,” he said.
Then he disappeared inside one of the buildings.
I waited.
As I stood there, I looked around.
Like many Gambian family compounds, everything centred around an open courtyard surrounded by simple rectangular buildings.
There was very little.
A few cooking pots.
Some well-used plastic chairs.
Chickens wandered confidently around the yard as though they owned the place.
Off to one side was a small concrete seating area. This was known as a bantaba—a traditional shaded meeting place where family members gather to chat, share news, settle problems and simply enjoy one another’s company.
I had no idea that, over the coming years, I would spend many happy hours there in the company of Ensa and the rest of Alasanna’s family.
Even by Gambian standards, though, the family had very little.
I dislike describing people as poor because it tells you so little about who they are.
But there is no escaping the fact that life in Makumbaya was hard.
Alasanna’s family worked incredibly hard for everything they had.
A few moments later, Alasanna emerged carrying what looked like a bundle of clothes.
I frowned.
It wasn’t a bundle of clothes.
It was a baby.
“This is Baby Peter,” Alasanna said simply.
I looked down at the tiny child sleeping peacefully in his arms.
“My brother Adama and his wife have had a son,” he continued.
“They have named him after you.”
Then Alasanna laughed.
“This is Baby Peter.”
I don’t mind admitting that I was completely lost for words.
After leaving Makumbaya, I returned to The Gambia College.
Lamin drove me there, as usual.
As always, he was happy to leave me to my thoughts. We chatted a little about the library and about Alasanna’s family, but for much of the journey I simply stared out of the taxi window as the villages drifted by. I was trying to process everything I’d just experienced.
We arrived at The Gambia College.
Why, The Gambia College?
Because this was my second visit to The Gambia. I was with a group of teachers organised by Doctor Des and Pam. My friend Jess, who taught alongside me back in England, was also part of the group. Together we were all working with Gambian trainee teachers.
I walked into the main hall where activities were taking place.
Jess saw me almost immediately.
She crossed the room.
“Are you okay?” she asked quietly.
I opened my mouth to answer.
Instead…
I cried.
Everything seemed to arrive at once.
The excitement of seeing the new library taking shape.
The reality of life in Makumbaya.
The warmth and generosity of Alasanna’s family despite having so little.
And the overwhelming thought that somewhere, in a small Gambian village, there was now a baby named Peter.
I hadn’t realised quite how much I’d been carrying around until that moment.
Jess quietly guided me into a room at the back of the hall and gave me the time I needed to gather myself.
It certainly wasn’t the last time The Gambia overwhelmed me.
Over the years, I’ve learnt that this is simply what the country does.
One moment you’re laughing.
The next you’re crying.
And sometimes, if you’re particularly fortunate, you’re somehow doing both at exactly the same time.
The following year, in January 2013, I once again found myself back in The Gambia.
This time I was travelling with another group from Newman University Birmingham and was accompanied by my teacher friend Nichola.
By now, the library at Makumbaya Lower Basic School was complete. One of our jobs during the visit was to help the Head Teacher, Lamin Sanyang, buy books to begin filling the shelves.
Seeing the building finally finished was immensely satisfying.
Only two years earlier it had been an empty idea.
Now it was becoming a proper library.
Of course, no visit to Makumbaya would have been complete without calling in to see Alasanna and his family.
It was also an opportunity to meet Baby Peter again.
Unfortunately, Baby Peter wasn’t nearly as pleased to see me as I was to see him.
As the accompanying photograph clearly demonstrates, he objected very strongly to being picked up by a tall, bald Englishman.
Alasanna, meanwhile, found the entire episode absolutely hilarious.
He stood beside me laughing while Baby Peter protested loudly enough for the whole compound to know exactly how he felt.
The moment Alasanna took him back into his own arms…
…the crying stopped.
Immediately.
It was difficult not to take that personally.
The previous year I’d also met Baby Peter’s father, Adama Beyai, who was Alasanna’s older brother.
This time, however, he was nowhere to be seen.
“Where’s Adama?” I asked.
Alasanna smiled.
“He has gone.”
That was all he said.
Nothing more.
There was something about the way he said it that stayed with me.
He smiled as he spoke, but there was also a look on his face that reminded me very much of Lamin whenever he knew something he wasn’t quite ready to tell me.
I assumed there’d been a family disagreement.
Or perhaps Adama had simply moved away for work.
It wasn’t my place to ask.
So I didn’t.
Looking back now…
I wish I’d understood what those three simple words really meant.
But I didn’t.
Not then.
Not yet.
Alasanna showed Nichola and me around the compound.
Once again, I was struck by how little the family possessed.
He proudly showed us the room where he slept.
It couldn’t have been much more than three metres square.
The room was dark.
There was very little furniture.
Just a single double mattress.
“This is where I sleep with my four brothers,” he explained matter-of-factly.
To him, there was nothing unusual about that statement.
To us…
it was almost impossible to imagine.
Next, he led us into another room.
Covering one wall was a huge drawing of the wrestler John Cena.
Not only was Alasanna a fan…
he’d drawn it himself.
It was genuinely impressive.
I’d never realised he was such a talented artist.
Then came perhaps my favourite part of the tour.
Behind the buildings, Alasanna proudly showed us his homemade gym.
If you’re imagining rows of gleaming exercise machines…
…think again.
His prized possession was a homemade barbell.
A thick tree branch formed the bar.
A large rock had been attached to each end.
For all the world, it looked as though Fred Flintstone had recently cancelled his gym membership.
Crude?
Absolutely.
Effective?
Without question.
Alasanna insisted that I should have a go.
Reluctantly, I agreed.
Photographs were taken.
Those photographs will never be published.
Some things are simply too embarrassing for public consumption.
But here’s a photo of Alasanna instead.
Before we left that afternoon, I gathered the family together for a photograph.
Baby Peter continued his determined refusal to look anywhere in my direction.
By then, I had accepted that we simply weren’t destined to become close friends.
Later that week, Nichola and I met up with Alasanna again.
This time it was at a school sports day training event.
In one of his letters, Alasanna had told me that the daily journey between his compound and school formed part of his training.
Every day he ran the route.
Every day he ran home again.
Five kilometres there.
Five kilometres back.
The training had clearly worked.
During the training event, Alasanna ran superbly and crossed the finishing line in first place.
By the end of the race he was utterly exhausted.
Sweating.
Breathing heavily.
Barely able to stand.
Which made it the perfect moment for Nichola and me to surprise him with something we’d been secretly planning throughout the visit.
A bicycle.
In April 2014, I returned to The Gambia once again.
By now, visiting Makumbaya and calling in to see Alasanna and his family had become one of the highlights of every trip.
This time I arrived carrying a surprise.
A Manchester United football shirt.
Alasanna’s eyes lit up.
He disappeared into the compound at remarkable speed and, a few moments later, reappeared wearing the shirt along with a matching pair of shorts.
He looked absolutely delighted.
Naturally, the only sensible thing to do next was to demonstrate his footballing ability.
For the next few minutes, I watched as Alasanna effortlessly juggled and controlled the ball with the confidence of someone who’d spent a lifetime playing on dusty village pitches.
I suspect he was hoping I’d return to England and convince Manchester United who their next great striker should be.
There was another welcome surprise during that visit.
Baby Peter had finally decided I wasn’t completely terrifying.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say we had become friends.
But, at the very least, he no longer regarded me as an immediate threat to his wellbeing.
Progress.
It saddens me to say that this was the last time I ever saw Alasanna in person.
For reasons I can no longer remember, I didn’t return to The Gambia in 2015.
That didn’t mean we’d lost touch.
Technology marched on and letters gave way to Facebook Messenger and, during those early months of 2015, Alasanna and I exchanged messages whenever we could.
But suddenly…
…the messages stopped.
Almost two years had passed before I returned to The Gambia in February 2016.
By then, Alasanna had gone.
Continued in Chapter 13.
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:
