R. Matthias's Blog - Posts Tagged "quotes"
Quote from chapter 2
Trials Elsewhere: Stories of Life and Development in West Africa
"The Mauritanian merchants invariably sat inside their stalls in the shade at the back, doing the books at small desks and sipping strong cups of tea. Sometimes they sat in the back on bales of fabric, cuddling together. It didn’t take long to realize the standards of male affection here were very different from what I was used to. It wasn’t unusual to see two men sprawled out together, one preening the other’s hair, or to see two men walk down the street hand in hand. I remember the first time a man grabbed my hand as we walked along. I had been there for about a year; he was a client, educated in the U.K., and we were walking out to his warehouse where he wanted to have a Wi-Fi connection installed. It was a strange thing. He did it absent-mindedly, playing with my fingers while listening intently to what I was saying, and then we were suddenly holding hands. It never bothered me, and amongst my friends it became a good test of new interns’ cultural sensitivity. Even the most self-assured “world traveller” types, displaying all kinds of bravado in terms of food and customs, would panic when you reached across the dinner table and started stroking their hand. One guy even threatened to hit me.
While I wandered, I saw a young man carrying a tray on his head of sandwich bags, each filled with about a cup of water and knotted at the top. People would buy a bag, tear off a corner and suck on it to refresh themselves. But it was his T-shirt that caught my attention. It was black with a picture of the Twin Towers on the front. One was burning, and a plane was frozen near the second tower, moments from impact. In the foreground, an image of Osama bin Laden stared heroically into the distance. Flying off the page in comic book font were the words Freedom Fighter. During the course of the day I saw more shirts and paraphernalia like this, with subtle variations, on sale and on people. This was the land of Islam and people weren’t afraid to fly the flag. Having just come from Washington, D.C., the invasion of Iraq only months old, seeing the T-shirt put me in an instantaneous state of shock, just a second long but palpable.
The few hours we spent in Banjul market left my head spinning. It shook some reality back into my gung-ho attitude. Pretending to be James Bond back by the pool in Senegambia was easy. Life outside of Senegambia, outside the tourist district, was humbling, worse than anything I’d seen, and really, I hadn’t seen much. And yet I’d seen some things during my first week: male prostitutes who specialized in the over-60 crowd, human rights advocates who didn’t seem to care about the common people, the casual commercialization of terrorism. All these things floated around in my head while I tried to sleep that night."
"The Mauritanian merchants invariably sat inside their stalls in the shade at the back, doing the books at small desks and sipping strong cups of tea. Sometimes they sat in the back on bales of fabric, cuddling together. It didn’t take long to realize the standards of male affection here were very different from what I was used to. It wasn’t unusual to see two men sprawled out together, one preening the other’s hair, or to see two men walk down the street hand in hand. I remember the first time a man grabbed my hand as we walked along. I had been there for about a year; he was a client, educated in the U.K., and we were walking out to his warehouse where he wanted to have a Wi-Fi connection installed. It was a strange thing. He did it absent-mindedly, playing with my fingers while listening intently to what I was saying, and then we were suddenly holding hands. It never bothered me, and amongst my friends it became a good test of new interns’ cultural sensitivity. Even the most self-assured “world traveller” types, displaying all kinds of bravado in terms of food and customs, would panic when you reached across the dinner table and started stroking their hand. One guy even threatened to hit me.
While I wandered, I saw a young man carrying a tray on his head of sandwich bags, each filled with about a cup of water and knotted at the top. People would buy a bag, tear off a corner and suck on it to refresh themselves. But it was his T-shirt that caught my attention. It was black with a picture of the Twin Towers on the front. One was burning, and a plane was frozen near the second tower, moments from impact. In the foreground, an image of Osama bin Laden stared heroically into the distance. Flying off the page in comic book font were the words Freedom Fighter. During the course of the day I saw more shirts and paraphernalia like this, with subtle variations, on sale and on people. This was the land of Islam and people weren’t afraid to fly the flag. Having just come from Washington, D.C., the invasion of Iraq only months old, seeing the T-shirt put me in an instantaneous state of shock, just a second long but palpable.
The few hours we spent in Banjul market left my head spinning. It shook some reality back into my gung-ho attitude. Pretending to be James Bond back by the pool in Senegambia was easy. Life outside of Senegambia, outside the tourist district, was humbling, worse than anything I’d seen, and really, I hadn’t seen much. And yet I’d seen some things during my first week: male prostitutes who specialized in the over-60 crowd, human rights advocates who didn’t seem to care about the common people, the casual commercialization of terrorism. All these things floated around in my head while I tried to sleep that night."
Quote from Chapter 3
Trials Elsewhere: Stories of Life and Development in West Africa
"Fortunately, I was the kind of guy to carry traveller’s cheques and stick to a budget. Nevertheless, it gave me pause when I considered these were my financial reserves, my backup plan, and I was dipping into them less than a week after arriving. Retrieving them from my room, I returned to the bank, passed a new crowd of disgruntled tourists, and presented myself to the counter with $600 in U.S. traveller’s cheques. Six-hundred dollars translated into about 17,000 dalasis. They paid me in hundreds and fifties — mostly fifties. The counting machine was broken, so two tellers counted it out by hand, binding each stack of a thousand. I watched the two bored women work with a sense of shocked fascination. They weren’t really going to hand me a huge grocery bag of cash, were they? Twenty minutes later, 17 bricks of wrinkled notes arranged in six stacks — each almost larger than one of my hands — were slapped down on the counter. I felt like I was on a TV show, some kind of Vegas high-roller crime drama; all I needed was a briefcase to slap the bundles into. I picked one up, studying it like some new, exotic artefact. “Uh, do you have a bag?” They didn’t. My hands couldn’t manage it all, so I pulled the bundles off the counter and hugged them against my chest. As I was leaving, an Englishman sitting near the door pulled himself out of his chair and made his way toward the counter. We didn’t make eye contact, but as we passed he said, 'Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.'"
"Fortunately, I was the kind of guy to carry traveller’s cheques and stick to a budget. Nevertheless, it gave me pause when I considered these were my financial reserves, my backup plan, and I was dipping into them less than a week after arriving. Retrieving them from my room, I returned to the bank, passed a new crowd of disgruntled tourists, and presented myself to the counter with $600 in U.S. traveller’s cheques. Six-hundred dollars translated into about 17,000 dalasis. They paid me in hundreds and fifties — mostly fifties. The counting machine was broken, so two tellers counted it out by hand, binding each stack of a thousand. I watched the two bored women work with a sense of shocked fascination. They weren’t really going to hand me a huge grocery bag of cash, were they? Twenty minutes later, 17 bricks of wrinkled notes arranged in six stacks — each almost larger than one of my hands — were slapped down on the counter. I felt like I was on a TV show, some kind of Vegas high-roller crime drama; all I needed was a briefcase to slap the bundles into. I picked one up, studying it like some new, exotic artefact. “Uh, do you have a bag?” They didn’t. My hands couldn’t manage it all, so I pulled the bundles off the counter and hugged them against my chest. As I was leaving, an Englishman sitting near the door pulled himself out of his chair and made his way toward the counter. We didn’t make eye contact, but as we passed he said, 'Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.'"
Quote from Chapter 4
Trials Elsewhere: Stories of Life and Development in West Africa
"Serekunda is the largest urban centre in the Gambia and includes the largest market. All told, it wasn’t much different than Banjul market, just more condensed and busier. We crept into the centre of Serekunda on the ruin of a paved road. The pavement was so old and poorly done that the two lanes had eroded into a single bumpy causeway over the mud. Each side of the road looked like a badly torn piece of paper. Peddlers, welders[40] and furniture sellers lined each side. Beyond them, dirt lanes led into blocks of residential dwellings. Most cities I visited in West Africa had residential blocks that were made up of compounds like ours but much smaller and pushed right together, sharing courtyard walls. It gave the impression of a sprawling, single-floor apartment building without a
roof, except for one or two rooms in each unit.
We spent most of the trip rocking back and forth in the rear seat of the taxi as it rolled through the streets. We didn’t speak but watched the passing tableau through wisps of dust rolling through the windows. People squeezed past other people as well as livestock in the streets; sometimes passersby would use our taxi to steady themselves as we slowly penetrated the living mass. It wasn’t hard for them to use us as a support since we were barely moving. Occasionally, a torso or back would lean against the window in order to dodge something in the street, leaving a sweat stain on the taxi or my forearm if I didn’t move quickly. Our taxi was in terrible shape, but I felt like a British aristocrat driving through the streets of Cairo or Delhi at the turn of the 20th century, a speck of foreign matter moving through somebody else’s bloodstream. Some of the looks I was getting told me I wasn’t the only one who thought so too.
The taxi stopped at one of the many concrete stalls lining the street, a large concrete room topped with sheet metal: Bed, Bath & Beyond. It opened onto the street and inside were stacks of yellow foam rectangles, each cut to the approximate size of a mattress: there were doubles, singles, kings and queens to choose from. Each piece of foam was about a foot thick and finished with a floral-print cover. We chose three queen-size specimens from the middle of a pile so they wouldn’t have as much dust, strapped them to the roof and headed home."
"Serekunda is the largest urban centre in the Gambia and includes the largest market. All told, it wasn’t much different than Banjul market, just more condensed and busier. We crept into the centre of Serekunda on the ruin of a paved road. The pavement was so old and poorly done that the two lanes had eroded into a single bumpy causeway over the mud. Each side of the road looked like a badly torn piece of paper. Peddlers, welders[40] and furniture sellers lined each side. Beyond them, dirt lanes led into blocks of residential dwellings. Most cities I visited in West Africa had residential blocks that were made up of compounds like ours but much smaller and pushed right together, sharing courtyard walls. It gave the impression of a sprawling, single-floor apartment building without a
roof, except for one or two rooms in each unit.
We spent most of the trip rocking back and forth in the rear seat of the taxi as it rolled through the streets. We didn’t speak but watched the passing tableau through wisps of dust rolling through the windows. People squeezed past other people as well as livestock in the streets; sometimes passersby would use our taxi to steady themselves as we slowly penetrated the living mass. It wasn’t hard for them to use us as a support since we were barely moving. Occasionally, a torso or back would lean against the window in order to dodge something in the street, leaving a sweat stain on the taxi or my forearm if I didn’t move quickly. Our taxi was in terrible shape, but I felt like a British aristocrat driving through the streets of Cairo or Delhi at the turn of the 20th century, a speck of foreign matter moving through somebody else’s bloodstream. Some of the looks I was getting told me I wasn’t the only one who thought so too.
The taxi stopped at one of the many concrete stalls lining the street, a large concrete room topped with sheet metal: Bed, Bath & Beyond. It opened onto the street and inside were stacks of yellow foam rectangles, each cut to the approximate size of a mattress: there were doubles, singles, kings and queens to choose from. Each piece of foam was about a foot thick and finished with a floral-print cover. We chose three queen-size specimens from the middle of a pile so they wouldn’t have as much dust, strapped them to the roof and headed home."
