Let’s Get Cynical

May 23, 2008

I have just come back from a really lovely dinner at one of Ngor’s most pleasant restaurants, a little place called Sao Brazil. Picture solid wooden tables and chairs in a garden setting, bougainvillea everywhere, even white wine and ‘real’ ham (meaning made from pork instead of beef, always keeping in mind that Senegal is a predominantly Muslim country). A great place to unwind, except for the fact that during dinner, my colleague looked at me and shook her head, warning me that I really ought not to be so cynical about every aspect of my life here in Senegal.

“Are you kidding me?!” I protested. “Let me tell you a story,” I continued. “The other night, I was walking along with another colleague and two women approached us. They were overwhelmingly friendly, greeting us with the warmth of friends you know intimately. Neither one of us had ever laid eyes upon them before, and as it turns out, the ladies desperately needed a little contribution from us for a wedding/baptism/funeral/fill in the blank.” Any toubab who has spent any length of time at all in Dakar will be able to cite numerous instances of such cunning and manipulative behavior, see also http://www.traveling-stories-magazine.com/the-taxi-man-can-and-will/

My friend nodded sympathetically but I could tell she was not entirely convinced.

“OK, so here’s another story. My kids were supposed to turn a homework assignment in on Monday. I forgot to collect it and gave them a reprieve until Tuesday, but instructed the class prefect to bring the work to me on Tuesday morning. Tuesday morning around 9 or so, I see the girl, who tries to avoid me. I ask her about the work and she informs me that her classmates have asked her to bring me the work around 10. “When was the homework due?” I asked. “Yesterday,” she admitted. “But you didn’t say what time this morning we needed to bring it to you, and it is still morning.”

Indeed.

These kids are clever, no? (Of course, they also read African trickster tales during their formative years as opposed to stories of Honest Abe walking miles to return change to a customer.) Ergo, I am cynical.

This in turn reminds me of another incident in which my students moaned and groaned and complained that I was giving them far too much to read for the lit part of our course. I decided to see just how hard-working they were, and looked at their notebooks a day earlier than they had expected in order to see who had even BEGUN the assignment longer than 24 hours before it was due. Almost no one had, of course, so I explained to them that since they could apparently all read 40 pages in a single night with no difficulty whatsoever, I could hence give them 200 pages to read in 5 days if I felt like it – clearly I had not been assigning them nearly enough work. Ah, sweet was my revenge: finally it was I who had left them speechless!

Then, in between grading papers and collecting the kids’ grammatical bloopers culled from their essays, I get a phone call. Some gentleman is interested in recruiting translators from French into English, Spanish, and other European languages. Having done translation work before, I ask him what type of business he represents, as technical translations can be exceedingly time consuming (and a bore besides). First he tells me he is with an IT company and then suggests that anyone interested should send him a resume. When I tell him I need to see some sample text to show to my colleagues to see who might be interested and also to determine what rates we might charge, he stammers and stutters and tells me that he does not as yet have any texts, he is simply looking to recruit translators. To cynical lil’ me, this would be a perfect way for unscrupulous persons to get the resumes and contact info of presumably rich Europeans for nefarious purposes.

A propos, I have mentioned elsewhere in this column, have I not, the slews of marriage proposals any toubab in Senegal will receive? But beware: whereas your intended will generally know for certain the color of your passport, he may be a little shaky on the color of your eyes.

Am I truly cynical, or have I simply been here too long? The favor of a reply is requested.

(Photo by author)

About the Author : Tamara-Diana Braunstein brings us her stories from Senegal every week. She was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is a restless wanderer who earned an MA from the University of Freiburg and has worked in a youth hostel in the French Alps, a law firm in Montreal, the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as in university press publishing. At the moment her home base is Dakar, Senegal, where she is supposed to be teaching but is doing far more learning, as you will see by reading her blog at www.senegalschoolmarm.blogspot.com