And now, a story about how to flush a third of your months salary down a toilet
I dropped my cell phone in the latrine on the night of Tabaski (a Muslim holiday I dont know how to spell).
There was a flashlight in my cell phone (something I have praised many times and has saved my butt the world over) and therefore I decided to take it with me in the dark to pee. This makes some sense.
The larger puppy, who has since befriended me, followed me into the latrine, and between all his jumping and tail wagging it fell. The light went out in a pile of...
The next morning I found out that if it had been daytime my nurse would have found someone to fish it out for me, before its electronic gears were clogged in the mess of...
I mourned the loss of my phone more for the fact that it meant I had lost my only alarm clock and only way of keeping time.
Clocks dont exist in village, pretty much. No one owns a watch. Even in the towns, people will put up broken clocks on their walls as a sign of status and decoration rather than an actual useful object.
The fact of this has driven me insane many times.
But the byproduct of this fiasco within a fiasco? I now understand how meaningless time becomes, when you dont have a watch or a calendar. How hard keeping track of your age becomes, or keeping an appointment given to you a month in advance.
Very few people in village know their real and exact age. Birthdays are a thing people do in the west. People die here so often that birth is... almost irrelevant, in a sense.
The problem with all this is that it greatly affects their efficiency. Women dont come for their prenatal consultations or know when they are going to give birth because they have no sense of time. They dont bring their kids on time for vaccinations even when they think they are important or know which ones are free or which they can afford, because they dont have any sense of time. Almost all meetings start at least an hour late, unless it is with someone who is educated, in which case it might only start a half an hour late.
All of this affects their efficiency, their "oh well do it tomorrow" turns into a week, into a month, about everything. And I am left with this hyper pragmatic aftertaste in my mouth. Because I was born in the west where things "work" where people show up on time and mostly try to keep the commitments they make.
I could go on more, but I am tired from the bike into Koudougou. This will have to suffice.
There was a flashlight in my cell phone (something I have praised many times and has saved my butt the world over) and therefore I decided to take it with me in the dark to pee. This makes some sense.
The larger puppy, who has since befriended me, followed me into the latrine, and between all his jumping and tail wagging it fell. The light went out in a pile of...
The next morning I found out that if it had been daytime my nurse would have found someone to fish it out for me, before its electronic gears were clogged in the mess of...
I mourned the loss of my phone more for the fact that it meant I had lost my only alarm clock and only way of keeping time.
Clocks dont exist in village, pretty much. No one owns a watch. Even in the towns, people will put up broken clocks on their walls as a sign of status and decoration rather than an actual useful object.
The fact of this has driven me insane many times.
But the byproduct of this fiasco within a fiasco? I now understand how meaningless time becomes, when you dont have a watch or a calendar. How hard keeping track of your age becomes, or keeping an appointment given to you a month in advance.
Very few people in village know their real and exact age. Birthdays are a thing people do in the west. People die here so often that birth is... almost irrelevant, in a sense.
The problem with all this is that it greatly affects their efficiency. Women dont come for their prenatal consultations or know when they are going to give birth because they have no sense of time. They dont bring their kids on time for vaccinations even when they think they are important or know which ones are free or which they can afford, because they dont have any sense of time. Almost all meetings start at least an hour late, unless it is with someone who is educated, in which case it might only start a half an hour late.
All of this affects their efficiency, their "oh well do it tomorrow" turns into a week, into a month, about everything. And I am left with this hyper pragmatic aftertaste in my mouth. Because I was born in the west where things "work" where people show up on time and mostly try to keep the commitments they make.
I could go on more, but I am tired from the bike into Koudougou. This will have to suffice.