Business centers and punching camels

I know, it’s been a while again. This once every two months thing won’t get to be a habit, don’t worry. I’ve just been very, very busy. Things in Kerewan, my new site, are going great. Hectic, stressful, and often surreal, but I’m finding that’s the way I like it. I’m a teacher, a bureaucrat, a DJ, a small business owner, and a building contractor. I wear so many hats I sometimes get rug burn switching them. I’m learning more about the realities of business and government in developing nations than I ever thought I would (or should).

The big project I’m working on these days is building a business center / rest area just outside of town. Twenty or thirty years ago Kerewan was a thriving economic and cultural center, with restaurants, shops, a huge street market, and even a bar. Its place on the main road, in the center of the North Bank District, made it a popular stopping place for travelers and tourists. Now the bar is closed, the market has shrunk and split in two, and the restaurants have all closed but one (and that one struggles to make ends meet). Vehicles passing on the road blow straight through on their way to larger cities, without ever spending a Dalasi.

So I’ve been working with the local area council on plans for a center where local businesses can cater to travelers. There are some abandoned building on the edge of town that are perfectly placed, with space for shops, food vendors, and craftsmen, with an open area for cars and buses to park. One of the buildings even has a few broken toilets, and I should be able to get the utility company to reconnect them. As I indicated in my last post, toilets are incredible luxuries here. There’s also a large building in the back with a kitchen and dining room that would make beautiful restaurant, with a cathedral ceiling and large windows overlooking the river. We could sell condoms at the bathrooms for almost nothing, which would be great, since truckers moving across country are among of the biggest contributors the spread of AIDS. I’ve been talking with local suppliers and builders, and they’ve agreed to some deals that would keep the price tag below 125,000 Dalasi, or about $5,000, easily doable with grants and loans.

This is the point where I have to be careful, though. All too often well-meaning NGOs and charities dump loads of money on a really cool-sounding project without ever consulting the community they say they’re helping or taking the realities of life in the country into account. So if I’m going to get the money together for a project of this size, I need to talk to community leaders, business owners, bus and cab drivers, tourist companies – everyone who will actually use the place, and make sure they actually will. So that’s what I’m working on now.

I’ve been finding this work very rewarding, which is strange, because I never pictured myself as the middle management type. But I’m shocked to discover that I like meetings and memos, and smoozing politicians and businessmen. I like working with people who have power and getting them to use that power to help me. Convincing Gambians to do anything that requires labor or concentration is often difficult, which drives most volunteers crazy, but I’m finding it an interesting challenge. And since they are generally so passive, I can get them to agree to a lot of things if I speak quickly and give the impression I know what I’m talking about.

The only person that hasn’t worked on is the governor, because he uses exactly the same tactics on everyone else. He and I have had a few run-ins, and in the beginning it looked like he was going to be the main obstacle to almost all of my projects. He’s a powerful personality, and he’s used to bulldozing over people, and when I wouldn’t just buckle under it caused some friction – our first three meetings were mostly screaming matches. He threw a stapler at me once, left a bruise. But I actually found it refreshing, because he was the only guy I was working with who will give me a straight answer. Most people, if I ask them if they’ll do something, they will say yes, but mean no. Or they’ll say, “yes, Inshallah,” an Arabic phrase that literally means, “if God wills it,” but here actually means, “not a chance in hell.” Working with the governor is great, because if he isn’t going to do something, he’ll just say so. He has no desire whatsoever to please me. On his end, I think I’m the only person he works with who isn’t afraid of him, which he kind of likes. So although I’ll never invite him over to paint our nails and gossip about boys, I think it will be a good working relationship.

On top of my work in Kerewan, I’m still heading up the Regional Strategy Plan in the North Bank. For those of you who found it too boring to remember from my last post, this is an idea I picked up in Senegal to get all the volunteers in my region together to work towards some common goals, share skills and resources, and get some hard data from the ground level about how close we are to meeting those goals. It’s been an incredible headache. Getting Peace Corps Volunteers to do anything together is like herding ADD cats in heat. But we’re making progress, at a faster pace than I’d originally thought, and most people are getting pretty excited about it.

In the last meeting, as we were going over plans for a village survey that each of us would conduct, a difficult and time-consuming job, one of the newer volunteers finally called bullshit on me and asked me to explain exactly how all this work would actually benefit her service. I’d been expecting and dreading that question for a while, because I didn’t have a perfect answer to give. This whole project is experimental, and even though I’m the one who’s supposed to have the vision, I can’t say for certain what the real outcome will be. But I discovered something interesting about leadership: if you do your job right, you don’t ever have to defend yourself. As I was struggling for an answer, all the other volunteers, whom I’d been cajoling and pushing in this thing for weeks, jumped to my defense with arguments that were much better than anything I could have come up with. And when they were finished, and the criticizing volunteer was slightly mollified, I told everyone straight up that I had no guarantees that this would work or that all their work would be justified, and that even if it did help our service I wasn’t sure what form that help would take. Oddly enough, they all seemed happy to hear that. People are strange.

So that was March. In April I didn’t get much done at site, because I was gone for most of it. The first week and a half was taken up with IST, or Inter-Service Training, which was a chance for my training group, six months after swearing in, to come back together and talk about what we’ve learned since training, what we’ve accomplished, what problems we’ve encountered, etc. We had some sessions on various education-related themes, like non-formal community teaching and classroom discipline. The highlight was a session I taught on drama groups. I went over the best ways to form a group in the Gambia and put a show together, then took everyone outside for some drama games and warm-ups. Sotl-ites will be happy to hear that I taught them “Lion Face / Lemon Face” and “Mother Pheasant.” That last one was fun, because it’s a tongue twister that sounds dirty but isn’t, and the house we were using was right behind the US Embassy. If having a dozen Peace Corps Volunteers screaming psuedo-profanities at the US Embassy is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.

Then came the Morocco journey. This was a trip that had been planned by a group of my friends months ago, and they were able to get tickets dirt cheap. By the time I decided to go, the price had moved out of my range. But I heard rumors that it was possible, although extremely difficult, to get there overland. I had thought that it wasn’t allowed for Americans to travel through the area of the Sahara south of Morocco, but apparently there was one route along the coast that held only a mild chance of being abducted and murdered by desert nomads. I did my research, and found that it would be four or five days of dirty, uncomfortable travel, in fruit trucks and bush taxis, through countries that don’t speak any languages I’m familiar with, some of which are actively hostile to Americans, and I would be doing it alone.

So I figured what the hell.

The only difficult part of the preparation, aside from convincing an understandably reluctant admin to let me go, was getting a visa for Mauritania, one of the countries on the way. I had been told that I would be able to get one at the border, but two days before I left I found out that wasn’t true. This was on Friday, and I had to leave on Sunday if I wanted to meet my friends. Friday is a holy day, when everyone stops work to pray at one pm, so I sprinted downtown to the Mauritanian embassy at twelve forty-five, ran breathless into the lobby past the crack security team out front, and stopped the Mauritanian ambassador as he was walking out the door. I was… extremely persuasive, and so I got my visa processed, a procedure that normally takes at least 24 hours, in ten minutes.

The trip itself was just as difficult and uncomfortable as I expected. Getting through Senegal was relatively painless, and only took a day, but transportation through Mauritania was slow, frustrating, and often insane. There were guard stations every twenty miles, and each one took an eternity as I gave them my passport, answered a series of bizarre questions in French (my grasp of the language improved remarkably on this trip – that is, from none whatsoever to the ability to say “I have no cocaine or pornography”), then they carefully looked over every single page of my passport, slowly wrote down all my information, and let us on our way.

A quick side note – the new American passports are gorgeous, with beautiful pictures and famous quotes on every page. I hate them. Every goddamn person that examined mine had to look at every single pretty picture in the goddamn book. I think at least three or four hours of my trip were taken up waiting for random guards to admire the images of George Washington and the moon landing.

It was in Mauritania that I ended up chasing the camel. I was in a small car, only the driver and three passengers, at midnight, trying to get to a town on the border. The driver got a call on his cell phone, spoke for a minute, then turned the car off the road and into the desert. This was the Sahara, just like you’ve seen in the movies, sand dunes and all. He switched off the headlights and we just coasted through the sand. After a while I saw the dark silhouttes of camels near the car. A few dozen of them were walking in a loose line in the night, and we coasted among them for a while, like a ship floating past icebergs. There was no moon, and the stars were like white embers. It was surreal and beautiful, and only slightly marred by the fear that they were taking me out here to kill me. Eventually I saw a man riding on the lead camel, oblivious to us. The driver silently maneuvered behind him, then flicked on the headlights and honked the horn at the same time. The guy whirled around, stared at us for a second, then started to run.

So of course we chased him.

If you’ve never seen a camel gallop, it is hilarious, like a giant hairy slinky on toothpicks. But the car was driving in sand, and we couldn’t go very fast, so it was actually a real chase. The driver stuck his head out the window and screamed at the guy, and after a second the passengers in back stuck their heads out and started screaming, too. So I figured what the hell, stuck my head out the window and screamed.

“You better run! We’re gonna cut you up, man! We’re gonna feed you to your camel!”

Finally we caught the guy, and the driver got out to go yell at him. They shouted at each other for a while, then the driver turned and punched the camel. This was not a light tap. I heard it from inside the car; it rocked the camel back a few steps, and this was not a small animal. The driver walked back, looking satisfied with himself, and we drove back to the road.

“What the hell just happened?” I said.

He smiled.

The next day, on a twenty-four hour bus ride through West Sahara, a Frenchman got on and sat right next to me, although there were plenty of empty rows.

“Hello,” he said, in broken English. “You smell very bad.”

“You’re French,” I said.

“Yes! And you smell very bad.”

I sniffed, and he was right. I had been traveling through the desert for days without showering or even changing clothes. I turned back to my book and tried to ignore him. I’d brought James Joyce’s Ulysses, figuring if there was one time in my life I would have the time and lack of stimuli to tackle that massive, incomprehensible tome, it would be this trip. It’s a stream of consciousness, one of the most impenetrable books ever written, and it was taking all my concentration just to follow the plot.

“What are you reading?” my new friend asked.

“Ulysses.”

“Read it to me!” he said. I declined, until he started petting my head and making up his own version of the story. "Once upon a time there was a rabbit..."

“Other hand a sixfooter with a wifey up to his watchpocket,” I said to shut him up.

“Amen!”

“Um… ok. Long and the short of it. Big he and little she. Very strange about my watch.”

“Amen!” He threw up his arms and stepped into the aisle. “Amen!”

“Wristwatches are always going wrong!” I was getting into it. I stood up too, and adopted a Southern evangelist accent. “Wonder is there any magnetic influence between the person because that was about the time he!”

“Amen!” The Frenchman danced up and down the aisle, then took off his hat and started soliciting donations from the other passengers.

“Yes, I suppose, at once! Halleluiah!” That last part was my addition.

We preached the gospel of James Joyce for a while, until the driver made us sit down. We actually collected about ten dirham, enough to split a cheese sandwich at the next stop.

I met up with my friends in Marakesh, and we traveled around Morocco for about a week. It was absolutely beautiful, and I highly recommend it as a travel destination to anyone. The food was great, the people were friendly, the cities and the mountains were beautiful. We met some Moroccan volunteers, who showed us some of the real life in the country that tourists don’t usually see. We had tajines and kebabs, hiked up mountains and through waterfalls, and just generally had a blast.

We even tried out the himmam, a Moroccan bathhouse that’s like a giant steamroom. The idea is that you sweat for a while, then scrub off the sweat, dirt, and dead skin with a rough brush. But the Moroccan volunteers told us that the ritual was fairly elaborate, and that unless we knew what we were doing we should pay someone to scrub us. I was a little dubious, but I figured what the hell. So when I walked in and a giant Arab man asked me if I wanted to pay for a massage, I said sure.

I have never been so terrified in my life. This was not a massage. This was an assault. He twisted me like taffy, grabbing appendages and pulling, seemingly at random, grappling and kneading me until I was a whimpering puddle on the bathroom floor. The worst part was that he kept making sound effects. I think in his head he was a pit crew, and I was a race car, and he had to completely overhaul me in less than five minutes. A sample of our conversation:

“Whoosh.”
“Ahhh!”
“Zip zip!”
“No! I – uhhh!”
“Bam!”
“Ow”
“Bam!”
“Oh, God, why?”

Then he dumped a bucket of scalding water on my head and scrubbed my skin off with steel wool. After the massage, it was fairly relaxing. He didn’t speak point. I felt used. Although I have to say, when he finished, I have never felt so clean in my entire life.

It was as I was leaving that I ran into trouble. I had paid when I came in, but the guy who had given me my towel and brush stopped me and indicated that I should pay him more money for them. Now, at this point I was getting really tired of people claiming I owed them money after the fact. Guys had been trying to charge me after they gave me directions, or I took a picture with them in it, and I was sick of it. If people wanted to charge me money for something, they should tell me before they did it. So I argued with the guy for a while - I’ve gotten really good at arguing with someone without speaking their language. Through an impressive series of pantomimes he told me to perform an act on myself that is physically impossible, so I just started to walk out. At that point he tried to get into a fight with me, but because the floor was so wet and he was a small guy he mostly just slid around a lot. I fell back on years of locker room brawls and flicked him with the towel he was trying to charge me for until he stopped.

Outside I met my friends, who had gone to a separate himmam, one for women.
“How was it?” they asked.
“Interesting,” I said.
“Did you remember to tip the bath attendant?”
I looked away. “Yeah.”

I think karma caught up with me, because the trip back was much worse than the trip there. Nothing particularly exciting happened, just an endless series of delays and irritations. Cars broke down, rides were late. At one point a bus tried to leave without me, with all my stuff inside. I managed to chase it down. The Moroccan police turned my car away at the border, so I had to walk the mile or so from the Moroccan border to the Mauritanian one, which for some reason has no paved road. Walking through the Sahara in the middle of the afternoon is just as hard as they make it look in the movies.

I never thought it would feel so good to be back in the Gambia. Better the insanity you know, I suppose. I’m going back to Kerewan as soon as I post this, and I’m looking forward to being home.

On one last note, a few people have asked me what kind of things I would like in care packages. The thing I need most is protein, so any kind of protein bar or powder would be great, or canned meats. I'm also starved for news of current events, so magazines like the Economist or Newsweek would be great. If anyone could burn some CDs of movies or TV shows, that would be great, as you run out of digital media here pretty quickly. I've written a few people letters, but I don't have anyone's address here, so if you'd like a letter send me your address.