siphoning off a few thoughts

Last night around midnight I checked out of my hotel in Dakar.  I’d spent a fair amount of time making calls from the concierge’s desk, coordinating various events.  As I was leaving, the concierge – named Ndiack – said, “Hey man, I like the way you move.”  I’ll take it!

I also managed to keep people laughing during my presentation on data collection.  Of course, an hour after the talk, one of the more experienced participants said, “Dave, I remember I had a great time during your talk, but I don’t remember what it was about.”  Maybe I should work with the Men in Black.

This afternoon I was sitting with several people from Liberia’s Ministry of Education. 

Liberia – quote unquote – is a welfare state.

But where do the quotes go?  “Liberia” – Rejection of colonial borders?  Or “welfare state”?  I always think of Sweden, Norway, and … Liberia 

The next participant clarified:  “Everyone looks to the government.”

I’m in Senegal for a workshop with representatives from education ministries around Africa.  A representative from the Senegal Ministry of Education welcomed the delegation, and Fatu – a young graduate student on our team – translated his comments into English for the Anglophones.

Thank you, Fatu.  My favorite wife’s name is Fatu.

Not what I was expecting.

* Fatu isn’t really her name.  But the story is real.

About a year ago I shared a story about a crazy experience a friend of a friend had at the airport in Lagos, Nigeria.  Here’s another one!  This morning, at the airport in Brussels, I was chatting with a retired Scottish aid worker.  He told about his friend who got on a flight in Lagos to find it completely full…plus one.  One person was standing in the aisle with no seat.  The flight attendants went through and checked that everyone had a boarding pass, which they did.  (Apparently someone had a forged pass; welcome to Lagos.)  The staff then made an announcement that everyone was going to de-plane and that they were going to check everyone’s boarding pass carefully. 

As soon as the first person stepped off the plane, the staff slammed and locked the airplane door, despite the person’s cries and banging on the door.  Problem solved.

I was on today’s 10:30am Bellview flight from Freetown (Sierra Leone) to Banjul (the Gambia). Bellview is Nigeria’s airline notorious for delays, cancellations, and worse. A significant amount of water lies between Freetown and the airport, and there are several ways to traverse this: helicopter (fast, expensive, dangerous), ferry (slow, cheap, slow, slow), hovercraft (fast, expensive, inherently awesome, prone to break down – but at least no one gets hurt), and speedboat.Someone told me the hovercraft left at 8am, so at 7:30 I took a taxi from my hotel and arrived at the hovercraft site. No hovercraft today! Saturday is maintenance day! The taxi man then took me to the helicopter pad. No helicopter today! (If you have a fancy UN passport, you can fly in the UN helicopter, but I do not.)

Taxi man (Daoud) took me back to the hovercraft, where I argued for a long time with the speedboat captain about price. After waiting a half hour to see if someone else might show up to split the cost, I paid a crazy price and sped across the waters.

The speedboat dropped me on the beach of a hotel. First the beach boys demanded money for walking across their beach (No, I said, Do you own the beach? Show me the title! – I was grumpy at this point). Then the hotel proprietor wanted to be paid for walking through the hotel, and after a fight, I agreed, walked through the hotel, walked up a big hill, took a taxi to the airport, and arrived just one hour before my scheduled flight time. Phew!

I walked up to the attendants. Bellview to Banjul? They laughed. Maybe by 3pm or 4pm. I should have taken the ferry. Twice.

Update: The plane finally took off six hours after the scheduled time.  No one batted an eye.  The napkin my in-flight beverage rested on read “Bellview…the preferred airline.”  Perhaps preferred by people whose alternative is a donkey cart.  That said, the flight felt completely safe, for which I am grateful.  And what a view of West Africa!