Why is Madeleine dressed like a gypsy, and why is she standing next to a giant banana? Weird things have happened this week, the weirdest not necessarily being Madeleine frolicking with a giant banana.
Income tax...what's that?
I think it was Benjamin Franklin who once said, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Tuesday was the day the government tax people showed up at school informing me that up until last week, they had not known that there was an American School in Guinea, (the school’s been around since 1962), and that how could it be that we had gotten away with not paying any payroll taxes for the past 49 years? Good question, I said, after which I then attempted to answer their question with another simple enough question... how could that be? How can an institution like ours exist in this country for close to 50 years, without there being any official government registration or documentation stating that the school exists? I was cool, calm, and collected, which is unusual for me when I’m around tax people, and, come to think of it, border guards, especially 14 year old border guards with Kalashnikov’s AK47s. I digress, back to the tax people in my office...
I managed to keep my cool up until I kind got the idea that they were insinuating and going in the ‘the school has been evading paying taxes since its creation’ direction, to which I quickly, and I admit perhaps not as tactfully as I should have, retorted that I was in full agreement with what they were insinuating, that there surely was incompetence and even corruption at play here, and that this was not new to any of us around the table, and that another thing that every one in this room was sure of was that this incompetence and corruption had not come from my side of the table, and finally, that if this conversation was to continue, it would have to go in the direction of finding a solution and not putting blame on some smuck that is either dead or living the good life in a villa in southern France. They may not have understood what I meant by smuck, but boy did the tone of our conversation change for the better after my little tirade. To be continued...
Eh, le blanc...
And then there was the day that the police ‘stole’ our school’s vehicle registration papers. I was coming back from my regular mail run to the US Embassy and got flagged down by a gendarme at the carrefour close to the school. There were about six of Conakry’s finest standing around and flagging down the occasional car. Bivan obediently rolled to a stop as a smiling, short and stocky man in blue approached the driver’s side of the car. Unlike all the other times when Bivan would be the one handling the situation, this scenario initially started out sans Bivan with the gendarme completely ignoring him. Bonjour le blanc, ...50 euros.
Taken aback by his classless audacity, I laughed. I said no, I don’t pay. Bivan immediately said, He doesn’t pay. The gendarme’s smile turned to a smirk. He demanded the car’s registration papers. As Bivan was rummaging through the glove compartment for the papers, the gendarme told me that he hoped that I knew that he was ‘just kidding’ about the 50 euros. I responded with something like, yeah, right. I wasn’t smiling. Neither was he, any more.
He took the papers, and without even perusing them, said that they were fake, and walked away. Bivan turned off the ignition, got out of the car and went to where the other five gendarmes were assembled. He came back upset with a disgruntled look on his face, got back in the car while muttering ils sont méchants, (loosely translated from Bivan talk to English: ‘they are assholes’). I told Bivan to get me to school because I had things to do and that he would have to fix this later.
Back at school, we told Djeina our business manager the rundown of what had just happened at the carrefour. Djiena was fit to be tied. Turns out she wasn’t upset at the lost of the car registration, but mostly about the ‘le blanc’ comment of the gendarme. Bivan went back to retrieve the papers, only to be told that we would have to pay to get them back. Bivan went back and forth between the carrefour and the school about three times in the course of the afternoon (or rather between the carrefour and an overly irate Djeina), every time with a new proposal (amount) from the gendarme that would get us back our registration papers. Djeina was getting more and more upset and angrier every time, to a point that I thought she would explode. As far as I was concerned, the whole thing had become a farce. It kept getting weirder and weirder, a bit like LOST, season 5.
We still don’t have our registration papers, Bivan is very upset, and Djeina is on the warpath ready to take on the whole guinean judicial system. It’ll be interesting to see how this whole thing plays out this week...
Oh yeah, by the way,...about Madeleine and the banana. It was Hallowe'en at school. Madeleine dressed up as a fortune teller, while Dave, our humanities teacher, dressed up as a banana. Again, weird week.
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