Saturday 12 April 2014

10.4.14 Thursday Serekunda Market

We are keeping Omar busy this week, once again he called at the house at 9 this morning.  Steve was going to Kotu to collect Rachel and Tanya who wanted to visit a school, he took them to Nemasu nursery and Senior Secondary school, we loaded the truck with uniform material for the nursery and some sports equipment requested by the senior school.  Omar and I met everyone else at Yashmina and set off for Serrekunda for the market. The first stop was at the Batik factory where Shaun's famous negotiating came into play and several souvenirs were bought and also some tie dye trousers for 3 of us for our up country trip. Anne had brought some money from England to pay for something useful for the schools and so we asked Omar to find us some metal boxes to use for First Aid items for the nursery schools, we followed him through the streets past shops of all kinds eventually finding a welder man who made that kind of box. All the ones he had in the shop were at least double the size we wanted, but he agreed to make 4 for us this afternoon and to paint them red with a large white cross on the top. A deposit was left and arrangements made for Omar to collect them later.  We then went into the market where more of Shaun's negotiating came in very handy for buying jewellery for resale and souvenirs for everyone.  A busy morning and we returned to the minibus with all our purchases.  Next stop a pharmacy for Anne and I to buy the items to fill the boxes.  We had a list of requests from Loumen and tried to buy several of each requested item, we cleared the shop of iodine (they only had 5 small bottles) took most of their bandages and dressing pads and cleared out their small plasters.  (they only had 4 packets with 3 in each)  Everything totted up and receipted, they filled a cardboard box for us and we returned to the minibus before driving a short distance to another pharmacy and repeated the exercise for the items we were unable to get enough of the first time.  Omar then dropped me at Neils bar to meet Steve and to check that they were having a quiz this evening, we loaded the medical items into our truck and then waved the others off till later.  After lunch we returned home for the afternoon.  Neils bar this evening, Anne and Steve joined us for the quiz, it was quieter than normal as many of the ex-pat community have returned home already, so just 3 teams tonight.  This week we came first and when we announced that our winnings would go to the charity, one of the other teams donated their winnings as well, so another 1000 dalasis for the pot. 

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