Mail: Expanded
>Okay, here's how the mail system works... for the time being. THIS IS
>SUBJECT TO CHANGE (although it will take some serious restructuring for it
>to actually change...). We have a post office box in Banjul. ALL of our
>mail goes there. People (ie peace corps volunteers) periodically pick it
>up and bring it to the Peace Corps office, where we have a volunteer
>lounge where we have mailboxes, and where I'm sitting right now, sending
>this email. Once a month, two volunteers and a driver go on "MAILRUN."
>They gather together all of our uncollected mail, all of our packages, for
>all 100+ of us (well, minus the people in the immediate area I think,
>because they can pick up their own mail here pretty easily) and do a
>several-day tour around the country dropping each person's mail off at
>their individual houses. So... a) our mailing address stays the same the
>entire time we're here and b) you don't need our Gambian names. I think
>that just about covers the essentials of it. -sarah
I thought I would expand upon Sarah’s comments about the mail system. Every Monday and Wednesday a staff member goes to Banjul to get the letters from the Post Office Box. This is primarily for business purposes as business material for Peace Corps / The Gambia and its employees also use that mailbox. Mixed in with the business letters are personal letters from back home for the volunteers and package slips. The driver sorts out the business letters from the personal and sets our letters and package slips in the volunteer lounge where a volunteer sorts through them and puts them in the corresponding box. As such, most letters get to the office pretty quickly (That is, under the assumption that more letters can fit in the PO Box, as every time we’ve checked it’s been quite full.)
The package slips accumulate throughout the week. On Fridays a current volunteer, along with whoever wishes to help, requests a driver to pick up the packages. I volunteered for the task each week and I get a lot of help. This is supposed to happen in the morning, around nine o’clock since it takes a few hours. Here’s what happened today:
Arrived at the Peace Corps office at a quarter to nine. The drivers and staff are having a communal breakfast outside. I wait. A little after nine after checking to see which driver would take me - find no drivers are available. The regular driver for package run is in Basse and a replacement won’t be back until noon. After checking e-mail, reading a book, and other time-consuming activities noon arrives. Still no driver but no worries, the Post Office is closed everyday from noon to two anyways for their lunch break. At noon I knew it would not be until two before we leave. Continued trying to solve a crossword puzzle. This boredom is also enriched by it being Friday, the Muslim holy day, in which everything closes around noon anyways. Except for the Post-Office, which will open up again in two more hours. Help arrives in the form of Bear who volunteers to go with, when we do actually leave; again we wait.
Finally a quarter before two the drivers show up and can take us, however they must wait until after the two-o’clock prayers. At 2:45 we leave! Six hours of waiting in which is not at all atypical in The Gambia.
The Driver, Bear, and I drive the twenty minutes to Banjul to the Post
Office. We check the Post Office Box again; more letters and more package slips. There are now 33 package slips in which each one we have to pay D10 in order to collect. We drop off the outgoing mail, and head inside to buy the stamps for the collection fees. Each package slip includes the volunteer’s name, along with what package number it is. We wrote most of these down ahead of time, of those slips that arrived during the week, for Peace Corps to collect from these individuals later. Peace Corps reimburse us for this cost. The new slips we quickly write down at the Post Office to add to the master list.
Handing the package slips, along with D330 to the teller she gives us 33 stamps. We must lick and put each stamp on the back of the slip and write our name, Peace Corps ID number, and expiration date on the back of each one; and on the front sign and date them. The next teller takes the slips, checks if each one has a stamp and is signed for, and starts to write the package numbers in a big book. We wait. After he’s done writing the package numbers down he flips through all the slips and marks up the stamps on the back stating they’ve been written down and recorded. He disappears into the back room. We wait more. The driver is outside keeping the Peace Corps van close by and occasionally has to, by police order, move it out of the way. A few minutes later he’s back by the door, or across the street. Note: The Post Office is (in)conveniently located in the middle of the busiest street in Banjul, where the market is located.
Three by three the packages arrive to the front counter. As the guy is walking to the counter he’s yelling out what the Package Number is, written in bold letters on the box itself. By the time he gets to the counter the teller has crossed out each number on the sheet and we can move them out of the way. I move them across the room onto the floor, in time to get the next three on the counter; when Bear is moving them out the door to the van in time to get the next three on the floor. Continual movement. A pause. We check the Post Office Box again, just to be sure, and find two more package slips have newly arrived. We buy the stamps, sign the papers, and hand the papers to the teller during the pause. More packages arrive. Two packages were disputed, as they were not on the list. Those were the two that we just found the slips a few minutes before. When all packages are accounted for, we must sign the big book on the margin for each package saying we received them.
After about an hour at the office we are ready to leave. The van is full of 33 packages ranging from big envelopes to cubic-foot size boxes. Plus, two M-Bags. The M-bags are what our Newsweek’s come in and are cheaper for bulk mail. A few weeks ago 11 M-bags arrived, in addition to the weekly packages, since someone was sending a small library of books to a volunteer for their project of building a library here. Arriving at the office more volunteers help unload the boxes and sort through the letters into the proper boxes at the lounge. The packages are sorted as they are unloaded: Kombo, Med. Unit, and ‘Village’. The Kombo packages are brought into the lounge to await their owners to come in and get them. The Med. Unit packages are walked over to the Med. Unit, if volunteers are there and have received packages. The ‘village’ packages are placed in the Package Room to await mail run. (Or, if their owner comes into Kombo for business and/or pleasure and can pick them up sooner.)
Mail Run occurs the Friday nearest the middle of the month. Not an exact science and can vary from one Friday to the next depending on when the volunteers who signed up for that month chose to go. This month’s Mail Run is next week Friday. Those volunteers go through everyone’s mailbox and put everything in a plastic bag with their name written on it in marker. The bags are brought outside, matched with any corresponding packages, sorted by village and/or general location, and are placed in a big van in order of delivery. The general route is to go north to Banjul, take the ferry across with the van and start on the North Bank. Dropping mail off as they go they head East to Basse and then start heading West towards Banjul again. The whole country route takes four to five days. Mail Run has volunteers signed up in advance all the way up to June 2005.
A bit about timing: Mail from the US to Banjul can take anywhere from a minimum of a week (for a letter) to two-three weeks for packages. Maybe even close to a month on occasion. On some occasions they might even sit in Banjul for another week since the package slip for that package arrived in the box after we collected that weekly run of packages. We try and prevent that from happening but sometimes, when they are rushed, they give us Santa-Claus size bags full of packages, forget the D10/package dues, and just hand them all to us at once. Only when we get the bag to the Office and sort through all of them do we find package slips mixed in with the regular mail for packages that we could have picked up that day, but must wait another week for the next package run. This has happened twice so far.
When sending a package, the perfect timing would be to send it three weeks before the middle of the month. Theoretically it should arrive right before Mail Run and be picked up right before they leave to deliver the packages to the villages. The ‘perfect’ timing is dependent on many variables and can be quite unpredictable, and might even be the luck of the draw. The worst timing is one week after in which they must wait another month to be sent out, unless the owner happens to visit Kombo in the meantime. In other words, send packages very early for a special occasion in which timing is relatively important.
Hope that helps.
-Mike
>SUBJECT TO CHANGE (although it will take some serious restructuring for it
>to actually change...). We have a post office box in Banjul. ALL of our
>mail goes there. People (ie peace corps volunteers) periodically pick it
>up and bring it to the Peace Corps office, where we have a volunteer
>lounge where we have mailboxes, and where I'm sitting right now, sending
>this email. Once a month, two volunteers and a driver go on "MAILRUN."
>They gather together all of our uncollected mail, all of our packages, for
>all 100+ of us (well, minus the people in the immediate area I think,
>because they can pick up their own mail here pretty easily) and do a
>several-day tour around the country dropping each person's mail off at
>their individual houses. So... a) our mailing address stays the same the
>entire time we're here and b) you don't need our Gambian names. I think
>that just about covers the essentials of it. -sarah
I thought I would expand upon Sarah’s comments about the mail system. Every Monday and Wednesday a staff member goes to Banjul to get the letters from the Post Office Box. This is primarily for business purposes as business material for Peace Corps / The Gambia and its employees also use that mailbox. Mixed in with the business letters are personal letters from back home for the volunteers and package slips. The driver sorts out the business letters from the personal and sets our letters and package slips in the volunteer lounge where a volunteer sorts through them and puts them in the corresponding box. As such, most letters get to the office pretty quickly (That is, under the assumption that more letters can fit in the PO Box, as every time we’ve checked it’s been quite full.)
The package slips accumulate throughout the week. On Fridays a current volunteer, along with whoever wishes to help, requests a driver to pick up the packages. I volunteered for the task each week and I get a lot of help. This is supposed to happen in the morning, around nine o’clock since it takes a few hours. Here’s what happened today:
Arrived at the Peace Corps office at a quarter to nine. The drivers and staff are having a communal breakfast outside. I wait. A little after nine after checking to see which driver would take me - find no drivers are available. The regular driver for package run is in Basse and a replacement won’t be back until noon. After checking e-mail, reading a book, and other time-consuming activities noon arrives. Still no driver but no worries, the Post Office is closed everyday from noon to two anyways for their lunch break. At noon I knew it would not be until two before we leave. Continued trying to solve a crossword puzzle. This boredom is also enriched by it being Friday, the Muslim holy day, in which everything closes around noon anyways. Except for the Post-Office, which will open up again in two more hours. Help arrives in the form of Bear who volunteers to go with, when we do actually leave; again we wait.
Finally a quarter before two the drivers show up and can take us, however they must wait until after the two-o’clock prayers. At 2:45 we leave! Six hours of waiting in which is not at all atypical in The Gambia.
The Driver, Bear, and I drive the twenty minutes to Banjul to the Post
Office. We check the Post Office Box again; more letters and more package slips. There are now 33 package slips in which each one we have to pay D10 in order to collect. We drop off the outgoing mail, and head inside to buy the stamps for the collection fees. Each package slip includes the volunteer’s name, along with what package number it is. We wrote most of these down ahead of time, of those slips that arrived during the week, for Peace Corps to collect from these individuals later. Peace Corps reimburse us for this cost. The new slips we quickly write down at the Post Office to add to the master list.
Handing the package slips, along with D330 to the teller she gives us 33 stamps. We must lick and put each stamp on the back of the slip and write our name, Peace Corps ID number, and expiration date on the back of each one; and on the front sign and date them. The next teller takes the slips, checks if each one has a stamp and is signed for, and starts to write the package numbers in a big book. We wait. After he’s done writing the package numbers down he flips through all the slips and marks up the stamps on the back stating they’ve been written down and recorded. He disappears into the back room. We wait more. The driver is outside keeping the Peace Corps van close by and occasionally has to, by police order, move it out of the way. A few minutes later he’s back by the door, or across the street. Note: The Post Office is (in)conveniently located in the middle of the busiest street in Banjul, where the market is located.
Three by three the packages arrive to the front counter. As the guy is walking to the counter he’s yelling out what the Package Number is, written in bold letters on the box itself. By the time he gets to the counter the teller has crossed out each number on the sheet and we can move them out of the way. I move them across the room onto the floor, in time to get the next three on the counter; when Bear is moving them out the door to the van in time to get the next three on the floor. Continual movement. A pause. We check the Post Office Box again, just to be sure, and find two more package slips have newly arrived. We buy the stamps, sign the papers, and hand the papers to the teller during the pause. More packages arrive. Two packages were disputed, as they were not on the list. Those were the two that we just found the slips a few minutes before. When all packages are accounted for, we must sign the big book on the margin for each package saying we received them.
After about an hour at the office we are ready to leave. The van is full of 33 packages ranging from big envelopes to cubic-foot size boxes. Plus, two M-Bags. The M-bags are what our Newsweek’s come in and are cheaper for bulk mail. A few weeks ago 11 M-bags arrived, in addition to the weekly packages, since someone was sending a small library of books to a volunteer for their project of building a library here. Arriving at the office more volunteers help unload the boxes and sort through the letters into the proper boxes at the lounge. The packages are sorted as they are unloaded: Kombo, Med. Unit, and ‘Village’. The Kombo packages are brought into the lounge to await their owners to come in and get them. The Med. Unit packages are walked over to the Med. Unit, if volunteers are there and have received packages. The ‘village’ packages are placed in the Package Room to await mail run. (Or, if their owner comes into Kombo for business and/or pleasure and can pick them up sooner.)
Mail Run occurs the Friday nearest the middle of the month. Not an exact science and can vary from one Friday to the next depending on when the volunteers who signed up for that month chose to go. This month’s Mail Run is next week Friday. Those volunteers go through everyone’s mailbox and put everything in a plastic bag with their name written on it in marker. The bags are brought outside, matched with any corresponding packages, sorted by village and/or general location, and are placed in a big van in order of delivery. The general route is to go north to Banjul, take the ferry across with the van and start on the North Bank. Dropping mail off as they go they head East to Basse and then start heading West towards Banjul again. The whole country route takes four to five days. Mail Run has volunteers signed up in advance all the way up to June 2005.
A bit about timing: Mail from the US to Banjul can take anywhere from a minimum of a week (for a letter) to two-three weeks for packages. Maybe even close to a month on occasion. On some occasions they might even sit in Banjul for another week since the package slip for that package arrived in the box after we collected that weekly run of packages. We try and prevent that from happening but sometimes, when they are rushed, they give us Santa-Claus size bags full of packages, forget the D10/package dues, and just hand them all to us at once. Only when we get the bag to the Office and sort through all of them do we find package slips mixed in with the regular mail for packages that we could have picked up that day, but must wait another week for the next package run. This has happened twice so far.
When sending a package, the perfect timing would be to send it three weeks before the middle of the month. Theoretically it should arrive right before Mail Run and be picked up right before they leave to deliver the packages to the villages. The ‘perfect’ timing is dependent on many variables and can be quite unpredictable, and might even be the luck of the draw. The worst timing is one week after in which they must wait another month to be sent out, unless the owner happens to visit Kombo in the meantime. In other words, send packages very early for a special occasion in which timing is relatively important.
Hope that helps.
-Mike
posted by Mike | 11:56 PM
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