Sidi, i must say I am quite shocked at the mention of both Batch Samba Njie and Baboucarr Mbowe as being late. How could I have missed that? Batch was a good friend actually, and folks, this is why it is not good to be away from home for so long, becuase even withthe frequent visits i made, i stil missed this.. Mbowe was in Ohio, and he and i used to talk sometimes, and he would tell me how each dorm at his school had their "resident curiosity", an African student, and we would have a good laugh about that. I came in 1968 after Ousman Sallah and Ebou Jobarteh had graduated from Princeton, and Felix Downes Thomas from Yale, and all of them were working at the U.N.I think Soloman Gomez had also graduated from Harvard, but i do not remember if he was with the U.N. I definitely remember that the following people were around because i met all of them, Omar Sallah, Omar Secka at Penn State, Sara Janha at Lincoln, the late E. Mbenga at Howard, Matarr Njie, Joe (cannot remember his last name), and Francis Njie at Columbia, Lena Manga at a college in Upstate NY which name i do not remember, Ray Sock, Tijan Njie had graduated from Long island Univ.and was married to Charlene and living in Brooklyn.Adi Njie, Peter and the late Dan Goddard, Emmanuel Goddard, Mambouray, Pa Njie Girigara, Babou Saho. There were also Badou Samba who i think came at the same time as Ousman Sallah and co.and Mustafa Faye who was in Russia but later came here.I met all these guys in new York, or in D.C at ALD.It was at one of these ALD's that Babou Saho invented a whole new dish, "Domoda with curry powder in it, and i am sure Habib Gahnim Diab will remember this one. We died laughing the first time he cooked it, but do you know that this dish became a standard among the Gambian brothers. Most of these guys had never cooked a day in their lives, and suddenly, they had to learn how. Babou prided himself in being a good cook, and he would have all of us over during ALD and cook up a storm. Pa Njie Girigara, my inlaw could also cook well, and they always insisted on cooking and not letting the ladies get into the kitchen at these gatherings. Then of course there was the Atlanta crowd in the mid 70's whom i have already mentioned. It's Ok to butt in Yus. We were here during the latter part of the Vietnam war, the hippie movement and the civil rights era. Things were never dull i can tell you. Of course we heard things about the South, and lots of them were true, but it is amazing that one does not always get a real perspective of things on a college campus. For example, during my stay at the Univ. of Georgia, i do not remember one single race related incident, but i do remember being stopped in Columbia, South Carolina while driving through there. I was driving with Pa Sulay Jallow and we were 5 miles over the speed limit. This Highway patrolman stopped us amd told us we had to go with him. In 10 minutes, they had brought in a judge and held a makeshift hearing and told us we had to pay $75 or go to jail.For all we know, he may not even have been a judge. I could not believe it.Well, i was so mad, i started to argue with them, expressing my consternation about a speeding ticket warranting all that, and he told me that if i do not keep quiet, he will just put us in jail period. We believed him alright, so we had to put our last money together and give it to them. When i first came, i was actually in upstate New York, at Elmira for a couple of years, and i must say that there also, i never encountered any problems. Infact, the only problem i had was that i had everyone wanting me to go home with them over the breaks, and i was in a bind since i did not want to hurt anyone's feelings. On the political scene, it was the time that the youth in America were challenging the establishment, and Black folks were fighting for equality, and the college students of the era were right in the thick of it all. The changes that are most noticeable now are that the youth seem to be quite compalcent. All they seem to worry about are material acquisitions.I am not saying the youth do not care, but in those days, people actually got up and did something about the issues they cared about. Jabou Joh In a message dated 2/18/00 12:20:33 PM Central Standard Time, [log in to unmask] writes: << I hate to butt into your discussion here, but you folks came to this country at a very critical juncture in its history. For this reason, you must have a very interesting perspective of how things have evolved. Supposedly, things weren't as bad in the North as they were in the South Anyway, you were the trail blazers for future generations of Gambians to come. In other words, you paved the way for us. Yus ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------