Things I’ll Miss in Abidjan

I leave Abidjan this evening.  Some of the things I’ll miss:

• The daily sense of adventure from life in such a strange and vivid place. 
• Speaking French – I’ll never be as good as I would like to be, but I’ll always enjoy the challenges and delights of learning all the little nuances. 
• Tennis nights with Christophe and Lauren – sometimes at the end of yet another epic match with Christophe, the termites would start flying onto the court, buzzing around our heads, and the once-beautiful, but now run-down tennis courts at Hotel Ivoire would feel like a scene in some dystopian futuristic world where the only remaining activity was to try to summon the energy to return one more volley.  Then afterwards, we would cool off at La Dolce Vita with Tuborgs and chorizo pizza. 
• Wednesday evening pick-up soccer at Le Temple du Foot 
• Mangos – cheap, delicious and twice a week our housekeeper Sarah would go buy them and leave a bowl full of chopped up mango for me. 
• Il Solé Mio in Assinie – the most idyllic place in Cote d’Ivoire.  Tropical bed and breakfast on the beach.  To get there, Sheila and I would take a shared bus to Bassam and then a taxi to Assinie and then a water taxi to the village from which we would walk to the inn.  Assoundie, the ocean beach neighborhood of Assinie, is adorable.  An African village on the beach, it’s a decade away from becoming a full out tourist trap, but for now it remains undeveloped enough that you can see the vestiges of pre-colonial life.  Groups of men chanting while they tug in old wooden fishing boats at sunset; and kids running wild everywhere, turning back flips and playing in the ocean.  At the inn, there are hammocks, beach chairs, a long stretch of beach to explore, big waves to frolic in, seafood and pasta dinners with wine, and a neverending supply of adorable, unsupervised children. 
• Frisbee Sundays at the Lycée Classique – two hours of sprinting around in hot afternoon sun with a bossy Italian, a bunch of Ivorians and a few ex-pats; yelling at each other when the other team scores and celebrating touchdowns with elaborate dances; and then water and lying in the grass dripping with sweat while the sun sets. 
• Will, Dexter, Manu, Marius, Flor, Priska, John, Florent, Micah, Gregory, Diego and the rest of the Frisbee guys  
• Cracro for lunch at work with Dom Dje, Noelle, Ghislaine, Toure, Madame Yapi and Professeur
• Ivorian food – Poulet braisé, alloco, banane braisé, Fanta cocktail, Tuborg beer 
• French food – Yop, salted butter, brochettes de mérou, fondant chocolat, the tarte aux mangues at the Hotel Pullman 
• Cheap taxis with fast, efficient drivers who have complete mastery of their vehicles.  My first week I thought that they were reckless and that I would die in a car accident here.  I gradually came to realize that they are driving grandmasters; they have 10,000 hours of experience hustling through tight spaces in terrible traffic.  Now I get impatient when I have to ride with mortal drivers.  I’m tempted to pitch a reality show that would pit NASCAR drivers against West African cabbies. 
• Taxi rides along the lagoon 
• The rainy season (applicable only for rich people) – they have fantastic rainstorms here where it just pours for 24 or 36 hours in a row.  It’s magical and beautiful, if you have a comfortable shelter and you’re not foregoing your meager income because of the rain. 
• Eating fish and seafood – I learned to eat fish a couple of years ago, but I learned to actually enjoy it here.  I'm excited to eat it in the U.S. at places where they take the bones out and use marinades and sauces; not excited to pay five times as much. 
• Not craving food at every instant – food just isn’t as good here, so I think about it less.  Unlike the U.S. where I spend my work morning looking forward to lunch, here I don’t think about lunch until I physically have trouble concentrating on work. 
• West African music – it’s upbeat, it has a nice beat, and it is now familiar, yet still pleasantly exotic. 
• Slower pace of life – no smart phone, no twitter, nothing to do on my morning commute, but sit and think.  Everything takes longer here, so there isn’t much point in being in a hurry.  Life here is inherently inefficient, so you just get used to things not working and the fact that each task is a self-contained action, not one link in an endless list of things to accomplish.  

Up next: Things I won’t miss from Abidjan. 

Abidjan Observations - Ultimate frisbee, soda pop and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Sheila left Abidjan a few days ago, so I should have a bit more time for blogging these last several weeks in Abidjan.  Some initial observations from the past few months: 

Ultimate Frisbee – This has become my favorite activity in Abidjan.  I still feel pretty blah about the sport of frisbee, but the weekly habit of it here is great.  It’s organized by Diego, an Italian who works for an international NGO here, and there are a few other westerners who attend, but the most religious attendees are the Ivorians.  There is a core group of about 10 regulars, mostly guys between 20 and 30 years old, although there is one young woman and one kid.  In recent weeks, they’ve discussed creating a national Ivorian frisbee federation, and I’ve been having fantasies about making a Cool Runnings type movie or book about them. 

I only see most of them once a week, but these are probably the most meaningful relationships that I’ve formed with Ivoirians.  It’s a good group of people, and it’s been fun to get to know them through the medium of sports.  Sports are such a great leveling force where differences of class and culture can be mostly wiped away for a couple of hours of running and throwing and yelling at each other and celebrating touchdowns. 

There is a gulf in culture and social class that can’t be entirely overcome of course, and the frisbee gang are definitely a different social class.  They seem mostly lower-middle class for Cote d’Ivoire (which would qualify as very poor in the U.S.).  I’m not even sure what many of them do in life, but that’s mainly because most of them don’t have formal jobs or stable incomes.  One is a grad student, another a bouncer, but most seem to be drifting, surviving in that fuzzy grey area of a society with few formal jobs or opportunities for a stable, sufficient income. 

In any case, I’m happy to have passed through their lives for a few months.  It’s already my favorite memory from Cote d’Ivoire – Sunday afternoons, laying in the grass after frisbee, drenched from running around in the African heat, laughing and passing around water bottles while the sun sets on another week. 

Soda pop – I don’t normally drink soda in the U.S., but it is glorious in West Africa.  I drink a few per week now, especially after soccer, frisbee or tennis, but sometimes just because it’s hot and humid and I’ve been sweating all day, and soda is cold and sweet and hydrating.  Also, if you get it from a maquis, they serve it in glass bottles, like out of 1950s America.  I highly recommend the Fanta Cocktail. 

French lesson – The word for "stoplight" in Ivorian French is "tri-colored fire."

Global Problems, American Solutions – A couple of nights before Sheila left, we were at dinner with some friends, and we got to discussing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  A couple of people hadn’t heard of it, so those who had were explaining what they knew about it (it’s twice the size of the continental U.S.!).  Then we started discussing what could be done about it, and one woman, an American Foreign Service Officer, suggested that we should just bomb it.  Such a fantastically American response.  Is it a problem?  Yes.  Okay, let’s bomb it. 

Abidjan Observations: Life at the Office

Like all offices, my office has (eventually) become a comfortable and familiar place over the past few months.  Upon arriving at the office, everyone goes into each other’s offices for handshakes or bisous.  My coworkers are nice people and friendly with me, and I’ve begun to get to know them on a more personal level.  For their part, they’ve gotten used to having me there.  They’re no longer that intrigued by me, although they still enjoy telling me about how things work here and they get a kick out of me eating local food. 

The office is not always a well-oiled machine however.  Some recent logistical problems: 

• The door handle to my office is broken and has been for three months now.  It’s not totally broken; you can jam it back onto the protruding piece of metal, and it will open and close, but you’re always one forgetful moment away from yanking it off the door and having to re-jig it onto the door. 
• A few days ago there were three baby mice or rats running around my office for most of the afternoon.  Not pleasant. 
• Our internet doesn’t work.  A neighboring office in our building does have internet and their internet usually works, so we often use theirs.  But this puts us in the position of relying entirely on them for internet, so if they show up late or leave early, we are out of luck.  Our internet was working the first few weeks when I arrived, but it soon went out and it hasn’t been back.   

On the positive side, I’ve been eating lunch with a colleague or two most days now.  We usually eat braised bananas and roast peanuts, which we buy for dirt cheap from a lady near our office.  It comes out to about 30 cents per person, and I quite like it as a light lunchtime meal. 

A Day at the Beach in Cote d'Ivoire

Observations from a recent trip to Grand-Bassam:

Renting a car -- Sheila and I decided to go to the beach a couple of weekends ago.  We’d been once before, but had gotten a ride from an embassy staffer with a car on that occasion.  My bus ride to Yamoussoukro aside, we’d yet to leave Abidjan on our own.  I’d heard that renting a car was the way to go, so I asked a couple of co-workers, and one told me that he had a friend who did car rentals and he could get me a good deal.  I asked whether the car came with a driver and he said that it was customary for it to come with a driver.  I called him the day before to confirm, and he told me that he would bring the car over himself at whatever time we wished.  At 8am the next morning, my coworker did indeed show up with the car, and only then did I realize that he would be serving as our rental car driver for the day.  It’s probably worth noting that this colleague is a mid-level official in our office.  More worryingly, he was also the driver for the return trip from Yamoussoukro, who you may remember from this previous post.  He was surprisingly professional though.  He drove us to Bassam, went off and did his own thing for several hours while Sheila, Will and I lazed about the beach, and then drove us back to Abidjan.  Cote d’Ivoire… a beautiful and strange land where government health official moonlight as rental car drivers. 

La Maison de la Lagune -- The beach itself was quite nice.  We went to La Maison de la Lagune, a few kilometers outside of Grand-Bassam.  La Maison de la Lagune is owned and managed a by sweet, older Frenchwoman named Catherine.  It was beautiful, with views of the lagoon on one side and the Atlantic Ocean/Gulf of Guinea on the other.  Sitting on beach chairs for the day is free so long as you get lunch; and lunch (merou (grouper) brochettes, ratatouille, and Fanta Cocktail) was excellent.  We've been fed a steady diet of stories about ex-pats getting pulled away by the undertow and drowning, so I'm terrified of going in too deep, but we waded out to waist height and even body surfed a bit.  All in all, it was one of the nicer days we've had so far in Abidjan.  

Observations from Abidjan: A Time Machine to the Pre-Google Era

Digital Desert -- My relationship with technology has changed since I've been here.  This, despite having very decent internet connectivity.  Our house has wifi that extends to every room and works flawlessly 96% of the time.  I can maintain email relationships with friends, follow American basketball and European soccer, read my favorite websites, and write blog posts here.

But it's like being able to access this stuff from the Moon.  The internet provides very little added convenience to my daily life here in Abidjan.  Google Maps has a map for Abidjan, of course, but there is very little detail.  Unlike, say, Polson, Montana (population 4,488), where I can look up the exact location of the nearest UPS Store or the lone Mexican restaurant in town, and go down to street level and glance around, there is shockingly little information about Abidjan (population 1,929,000).  There are popular restaurants and bars here that simply don't exist on the internet.  Back in the U.S., Sheila and I like to laugh about the pre-internet days when you had to know exact directions beforehand in order to get somewhere, but Abidjan is a time machine back to that era.  If you make plans to meet a friend at a restaurant you've never been to, you need to ask him for directions as well.

What is more, most streets don't have names here, so there are no addresses.  Directions are given via to landmarks.  To take a taxi home, I tell the cabbie that I live "in Vallon (neighborhood) near the Ghanaian embassy (landmark)."  To go to work, I ask to go to "Plateau next to the Pullman Hotel."  Yesterday, Sheila wanted to go to an African dance class, so she had to call a friend who told her to tell the cab driver that it was near the pre-school in Cocody, and if he didn't know where the pre-school was, to say that it was not too far from radio station RTI.

Google is considerably less useful to daily life here.  At work, I was looking through our office's official Strategic Plan for the year, and one goal was to revise the SNFSCUS.  In the U.S., your first response is to google unknown acronyms, so I tried that.  Nothing.  So I googled "SNFSCUS Cote d'Ivoire."  Still nothing.  "SNFSCUS Cote d'Ivoire Ministere de la Santé."  Nope.  I ended up having to ask my colleague, Dom Dje, but then he couldn't remember either, so we spent 90 seconds trying to puzzle it out.  (Final answer: Stratégie National de Financement sur la Couverture Universelle de Santé.)

Last week, Sheila's iPhone started getting a message saying that her telephone service had been restricted.  In the U.S., the first step would be to google the problem and then to call customer service.  Here, a google search does not turn up any forums or other discussion of the problem, and when you call the customer service line, it says that all lines are busy and tells you to call back at some other time and then hangs up on you.  Our service provider's offices are closed from noon Saturday until Monday morning, so we had to wait until Monday to head over to the Orange office, wait in line and then ask in person how to fix the problem.

If there is one bright side to living in a technological backwater, it's that I've completely kicked my Twitter addiction since arriving here.

Weather in Abidjan -- The weather here is so boringly consistent that people don't even make small talk about the weather.  

Parenting and New Years in the Cote d'Ivoire

Sheila and I feted the New Year at the house of a Colombian-French couple with a bunch of ex-pats.  It was a fun party.  A bit of an older crowd, but that didn't stop most of them from splashing into the swimming pool at midnight for champagne toasts and general merriness.  Salsa dancing was promised, but never materialized, although we left at 1:30am, so perhaps we just didn't stick around for long enough.

Most striking was the laissez-faire attitude of the ex-pat parents.  We came with Diego and Sophie and their one-and-a-half year old daughter Emilie, who was pulled from her bed, bundled off to the party, and then deposited in the back yard in a portable crib covered with a malaria bed net.  Next to the bed net-covered crib of another sleeping baby.  And these were just the sleeping kids.  Any child above three was allowed to stay awake and frolic around playing soccer or video games into the wee hours of the night.  Sheila and I couldn't help but admire this attitude.  We first thought it was a French thing, but a visiting Frenchwoman assured us that it was an ex-pat thing, that it would be unusual in France as well.  I suppose it makes sense.  The type of parents who are casual/selfish enough to drag their kids along to Africa so that they can continue their adventurous pre-child lifestyle are the type of parents who would drag their kids to parties so that they can maintain their pre-child social life.

I don't yet have strong impressions about Ivorian parenting, but the dynamics around age are interesting.  There is a much clearer hierarchy among the ages here, and society just seems to operate on the basic assumption that youths will obey their elders.  When our car broke down on the side of the road on the way home from the village festival, it broke down next to a roadside concrete shop where a handful of teens were working.  My friend Hilaire ordered them to push the car back and forth a few times while we tried to get it started.  At ultimate frisbee, there are often a couple of kids hanging around hoping to play.  If we're short of players, we might invite them to join us, but they are ordered off the field immediately upon the arrival of more senior players.