Marlborough Mayor, others arrive today as guests of Gunjur

The Mayor of Marlborough in the United Kingdom, Alexander Kirk Wilson, is to arrive in The Gambia today with an eight-person delegation as part of a weeklong visit to the community of Gunjur.

The coastal village of Gunjur, Kombo South, has had a link with Marlborough for over thirty years, which has seen the exchange of more than 1200 people from both communities.

 “I am hugely looking forward to my visit to Gunjur. I am aware of the amazing work that the people of Gunjur and Marlborough have done together in the past 30 years and the example that the relationship has provided for similar links across the world,” the Mayor said ahead of his visit.

He added: “I am particularly looking forward to meeting the Mayor [alkalo] of Gunjur, who visited us in Marlborough in 2009 and visiting some of the projects on which the Marlborough Brandt Group and TARUD have been collaborating, for example the pre-school and the women’s garden and the classroom block at the lower basic school which my predecessor as Mayor of Marlborough, Nick Fogg, helped to construct in 1985.”

For his part, the president of Marlborough Brandt Group, Dr Nick Maurice, described the link between the two communities as a “remarkable experiment in human relations”.

“I am pleased to say that on Monday 2 April the British High Commissioner David Morley is coming to Gunjur with five members of his staff to meet us and the TARUD and the Link Committee to visit some of the projects.”

He added that this is not the first time that a Mayor of Marlborough is visiting Gunjur. “Our Mayoral system works such that the Mayor changes every year. The current Mayor, Alexander Kirk-Wilson is the fifth Mayor of Marlborough to visit Gunjur,” he said.

The link, added Nick, is not about sending money to Gunjur but about implementing projects that support development for the people of Gunjur and The Gambia as a whole.

“We have been very much involved in quite a major development programme with Tarud, which has included literacy for women, health education, business education, skills training, micro credit and also childhood education.

“I believe that fundamental to development is self-confidence and if people have self-confidence they are more likely to develop. And self-confidence can be gained through partnership. I feel much more confident as a human being because of the time I have spent in Gunjur, which has given me an experience that is now part of my soul.

We see the relationship as fundamental to everything we do .We see the relationship that has developed at the grassroots as absolutely fundamental.”