Spelling bee!

One morning after class I return to the teachers’ table and discover a shiny black truck parked outside the school next to piles of complicated electronic equipment. Several people in Q-Cell shirts are milling about, including a woman in tight checkered pants and a pony-tail. I soon hear they've arrived for the spelling competition Q-Cell will be hosting.


Students start to swarm outside, relocating chairs from classrooms to the auditorium. A man who’s with the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education introduces himself. After the students have finished the chair-relocation, one of the teachers says, “Let’s go,” and I follow him into the auditorium.

The auditorium has been transformed. The stage is overflowing with five large tables draped in orange tablecloth and a large plastic poster behind it says “Q-Spelling Test” or something like that. In front of the stage are a pair of large speakers and a man testing a microphone. On the right- and left-hand walls of the auditorium, the maps of The Gambia and the world, painted by a former Peace Corps Volunteer, have been covered by enormous posters reminding us that Q-Cell is The Gambia’s only 3-G network and also has the cheapest tariff.

Two men start to distribute Q-Cell baseball caps and pens to all the students. The students immediately don their caps, even the girls, who place the caps on top of their head-wraps and veils. The man with the microphone gets everyone calmed down and we hear speeches from the principle, the man from the Ministry of Education, and a representative from Q-Cell. Then the lady in checkered pants explains the rules and prizes. The rules were pretty straightforward; the only kink was that British English spellings only would be accepted. This made no difference for most of the words, but for all the students’ talk about rubbers and cellotape, they refused to spell “demobilise” without a zed. So would I.

I think I could have spelled all the other words, though, except for annihilate (which I now can spell), opulent (I think it deserves two p’s) and abominable (every time the pronouncer repeated the word “abominable,” I heard “abominator”).

[Unrelated aside: is it only Gambians, or do British people also pronounce the “ch” in “architect” as you would the “ch” in “charcoal” and not as you would the “ch” in “school”? Because it grates on my nerves even more than the British pronunciation of “schedule,” no offense to people fond of those pronunciations.]

At the end of three rounds, prizes were distributed and all the teams had their photos taken with the lady in checkered pants. The man with the microphone shouted “Hip, hip” and all the students shouted “Hey!” because even though the twelfth graders know the definition of “hooray,” I did not expose them to the word in that context.
Then one of the women’s groups from the village came to the front of the auditorium and said a bunch of stuff in Mandinka that must’ve been hilarious and then they started singing, drumming, and dancing. Before they walked away the man with the microphone gave them Q-Cell hats. Then everyone left the auditorium to buy bean sandwiches or cooked cassava.

And that's how my first-ever spelling bee went.