Not Thinking

I need to not think for a while. Could be that these past two months may have inflicted me with a few herniated brain cells. Or perhaps it was that grueling 33 hour journey Conakry - Vancouver that did me in. But then, always being the chipper let’s-look-at-the-bright-side-irritating-happy-camper person that I am (WRONG!), being wedged in a seat 30 thousand feet up in the air for 33 hours gave me a lot of time to reflect on things.

It’s been quite a ride these past two months, but having Patrick and Nadine with us made it even more interesting. Not only was it neat to have our kids see and experience our lifestyle here in the bleakest of bleak cities of Africa, it was amusing to have them experience for themselves some of the more interesting facets of life in this dysfunctional wonderland which is Conakry. Like, the afternoon they were taking a stroll exploring our neighborhood and just hanging around with their new found bros, and suddenly being stopped, interrogated, and hauled down to the makeshift police station where Conakry’s finest tried to extract some ‘pedestrian tax’ from them. They got out of that one rather nicely...”oh monsieur le gendarme...we don’t have any money on us, but if we could just borrow your cell phone and call my Dad who is director of the American School, or my mom who works for the US Embassy, and they will come right away and pay the pedestrian tax”. Those are my kids.

And then there was Nadine’s near death experience with curdled milk. Nadine’s quest to fully experience Guinea by living and eating ‘like the natives’ made her foolishly decide to eat and experiment all the ‘street food’ she could lay her hands on. Eight days into her pedestrian culinary safari, she got sick, and we’re not just talking puking sick here. I have never in my life seen so many different shades of green on someone’s face. In the end, it was not those fly infested goat meat skewers that got to her, nor was it those deep fried rice peanut butter and sugar doughnuts-without-the-hole thingies that she ate, but rather the alimentary culprit that caused her to become intimate with our guest toilet bowl was none other than that curdled milk on the corn millet mixture delicacy. Oh well, she’ll live.

Anyways, I did get a lot done at school these past two months, not necessarily fun stuff when you’re going through it, but in the end very interesting in its unusualness. You would think that after a year of doing this, nothing in my daily assignment at work would seem unusual any more. I’ve resolved conflicts, I’ve fixed things, I’ve dug a well, and I’ve built a guard house. The measure of quirkiness of my days are measured by how many times I whisper to myself the ‘you’re not in Kansas anymore big boy’ line.

The past two months I’ve reminded myself a lot that I was not in Kansas. Like I said, lots of unusual unconventional things have come to me these past two months at school, like dealing with warped governmental tax people, greedy landlords, and corrupt cops...you know, the typical managing of a school in a failed nation state dysfuntionality stuff. The learning curve has been rather steep at times but I’m proud of what I’ve learnt and in the end, what I’ve come to realize, like there is such a thing as legitimate corruption.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the people that are warped here, but rather the societal system in which they live in. But then, come to think of it, is their system actually warped, or just not what I’m used to. Who am I to judge these people or their system? Is my obscene-materialistic-consumeristic-self-absorbed-spandex-cladded-fat society less deviant than their’s? I would have to give that some more thought. But then, as I started off this posting, at the moment, I need not to think for a while. My jet-lag is back to haunt me.