Relationships between developing countries and their outside partners have multiple dimensions. The giving and receiving of development assistance has given rise to an elaborate set of contacts, processes, institutions, and personal interactions, some highly productive, some fraught with tensions and misunderstandings. Largely because of their high aid dependency, African counties face special problems vis a vis their aid partners, and the converse is also true: aid institutions confront special difficulties in building effective partnerships in Africa. The Gambia, a small African country highly dependent on external aid, faced a long gamut of issues with its aid partners in the early 1990s, from uncertainty on future aid levels, mixed but generally mediocre aid results, tensions around technical assistance, subdued rumblings about corruption, and general dissatisfaction with the aid agencies, masked under a polite facade. A meeting between the Gambian Goverment Cabinet and a World Bank team in 1994 aimed to address these related issues. This "insider" narrative of that encounter and the events that preceded it illustrates the multifaceted nature of aid relationships and suggests ways to address buried issues and to achieve better results from development assistance.