I'm not French

Never has not being French been such an advantage to me. While yes it means that there are idioms I don’t understand here and makes my professional life a little harder, it makes my social life (by the most generous definition- as in people I talk to, ever) much easier. All the Obama lovers instantly like me. Once they know I’m not French, the instant topic of conversation turns to what people don't like about French people. Amazing.

Every day I ask a cab driver to teach me how to say something in Bamabara or Peuhl. Today I learned "Neh-tay-too-ba-boo-yay". Guess what that means?

Who Needs Electricity Anyway

For the second night in a row there is a 'coupure generale'. Basically most of Bamako is without power. Certainly everyone within eyesight of my hotel. It was sorta exciting yesterday but tonight I'm over it.

Yesterday the power went out at like 8pm (conveniently just after the sun went all the way down) and stayed out until 1am. So the major problems with this are:

a) Every device that makes my room inhabitable requires power (fan, air con...). I basically sat in a pool of my own sweat for hours (and taking a shower in the dark is really really scary).

b) The mosquitoes have the upper hand because they find you by smell, you can only kill them with the help of light.

c) I had just fallen asleep when suddenly every single electrical thing in my room turned on at once which put me in a little bit of a foggy panic.

So today I was mid- bite into my dinner when the electricity went out and it was absolutely pitch dark. I mean it's better than me being in the pool when the power goes out or being out in the street, but mid bite is just really annoying. It took me a while to find my phone which I used as a light to find my mini-flashlight (which requires that I hold down the button for it to stay on). I realized my best bet was to turn my computer on and eat my dinner by the light of my screen. For those who this happens to in the future, make sure you know a good site with a mostly white background... Now I have 45 minutes of battery left on my computer so I have to be a little strategic (AKA no more blogging).

The Fear Shame Shift

Fear is so annoying. I don't travel in the safest parts of the world but I also hate when people assume that these places are automatically frightening. However, once in a while during trips it occurs to me that maybe I AM in an unsafe situation... maybe something COULD happen to me. Which is then immediately followed by self-loathing for not trusting people just because I'm in a different cultural context... but then the fear comes back a little and I start planning what I would do just in case...

I really hate this but it is a distinct part of my travel. Perhaps it needs a good name, one more eloquent than those "shit, I guess I really AM in Africa" or "worst case scenario is looking pretty bad right now".

So I've had this twice in the last two days and both times involved being alone in a taxi with a driver in a city I didn't know at all. The first time, the driver was just really shifty. He was doing what I imagine was driving in circles which makes no sense here because the fare is flat. It doesn't help that I have no sense of the Bamako geography. Usually in these situations I take comfort in my phone where I always have the embassy programmed in, except this time my phone was out of credit. I went through how long it would take someone to know I was missing (a really long time). Eventually he let an old lady in the cab too and then I exhaled and felt totally safe... and then cursed myself for being scared.

But on my way home tonight the driver went in what I am sure is the opposite direction from my hotel and then turned down a dirt road. Alarm bells started going off. This time I had my phone but also had a fresh layer of shame for having overreacted (even if just in my mind) during the last taxi ride. I spent the whole ride home (where I got eventually) alternating between fear and shame.

I wish I truly was a fearless traveler... instead I have all the fears but just feel to ashamed to let them dictate my behavior... sounds healthy, huh?

Flying/shoving/intellectualizing etc.

Well I'm back on the road (in the air) . After a crazy November with a four-stop trip I relaxed in New York for a couple months but the business trip has been calling my name so Mali it is.

I was sitting on the Paris-->Bamako flight (decidedly NOT in business class) and realized just how incredibly steeped in culture things like airplane behavior really are. I was truly amazed at how the man next to me acted, and mostly in an 'anthropologically curious' sort of way but definitely there was a bit of 'super annoyed person in uncomfortably close proximity' layered on top.

I took the overnight NYC to Paris flight which is just full of business people who travel all the time. Everyone had their routines. Everyone knew whether they wanted the express dinner or to be woken up for breakfast. On auto-pilot everyone immediately reclined their chairs the moment the plane leveled off after take off. It was a well-oiled machine of professional travelers.

The aforementioned Paris-->Bamako flight was another story. Now the thing about flights to and from Africa is that a lot of the people on the plane are first-time plane travelers. They also tend to be people coming from places where public transportation accords you much less personal space than I am used to.

If anyone who abides by 'see something say something' was on my plane, they would have called the police 10 times minimum. There was so much seemingly sketchy stuff going on. The guy next to me had a metal suitcase that was wider than his seat that he insisted on keeping on his lap. For the first hour he got up to talk to other people in various locations throughout the plane every 10 minutes or so (which necessitated me getting out of my aisle seat to let him pass). There were a lot of exchanges of small brown packages. What's inside? Who knows? Then the guy next to me just stared in front of him for the rest of the trip. There were personal screens with all sorts of entertainment. There were free headphones with a wide selection of music. There was a pillow and a blanket if one wanted to sleep. But this guy just wanted to stare. So creepy.

But that's the thing- creepy is culturally bound. He didn't make sense on the NY--> Paris flight I just took, but he made perfect sense here. Everyone else was doing the same set of bizarre activities. So I'm the bizarre one in this case.

I'm pretty good at intellectualizing things that annoy me and putting them in my "oh, how interesting" category other than my "grrrr" category. However, disembarking the plane was a bit of a test. I had to tell myself things like "maybe that guy comes from a village where the bus only stops for a few moments at every stop so if you aren't the first person out you can't go home" or "maybe that man is on a plane for the first time and is rushing home to see his dying grandmother" or "maybe he's used to being around people who don't bruise easily". But there is really only so much I can tell myself and I got to the end after the two men on the inside seats actually stepped over me before the plane had finished taxiing, worried that i wasn't going to get out quickly and then proceeded to hit me on the head with both pieces of overhead luggage.

But you know what? I got through customs first bc my inner traveler knew to have a pen, my boarding pass, and my passport handy to quickly fill out the customs card :) So take that iron-elbows! (and I leave the option open that your iron elbows are an adaptation born of necessity).