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."
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My latest is Notes From a Very Small Island.
My email is ivanaplus@hotmail.com.
Regards,
Anthony Stancomb