As a human being, I have to admit that I am a creature of habit. We all seem to thrive on pattern and our ability to predict and recognize them for emotional and physical survival. I remember my statistics professor at Hunter College in New York city telling my class that the human species has evolved successfully because of this ability, so don't be surprised if you find some patterns in your scramble to derive meaning from the jumble of statistical data in your social science research. Hey, it was the 90s! Anthropology was trying to justify its existence as a science by backing up its claims with hard, crunchable numbers. Fun times actually, but, as it turns out, a questionable use of our time.
Then, fast forward a couple of decades.
In the past few months a new pattern has emerged. I come home at 7pm or so. I make dinner, get settled to eat and watch a film on Itunes or break open one of the many peacebuilding books that made the voyage with me. Most of the books are from the Lynne Rienner Publishers series - great publications by the way. Stellar really empirical stuff that lays out the findings of other practicioners and should be required reading for any budding or seasoned peacebuilder. No sooner than the opening credits start to roll or the chapter contents start to flow in my mind, do we experience a power cut. Unlike the capital Dakar where these outages are scheduled, ours come unannounced and last for an undetermined amount of time. Sometimes 4 hours; Sometimes 6 hours. I can imagine the agent with his hand on the master switch trying to guess how many hours it will take to get almost everyone to go to bed and stop putting a drain on the limited power grid here. It is getting to be quite amusing. Instead of giving up, most people in Ziguinchor have adapted coping skills that include taking naps or gathering outside in the cool night breeze for casual or heated conversations about everything from wedding and funeral plans to why we continue to support a government that can give tens of millions away to build an inspirtional statue or to reward a champion wrestler but will not fix the power grid. And why some neighborhoods never get power cuts. The point is that the local population seems willing to put their lives on hold and wait out that master switch for as long as necessary. A bit of one upmanship. And that pattern is spreading.
Election season is just 5 months away and we are already starting to get visits from prominent politicians to rally voters under the party banner. Mind you, these visitors are actually locally elected mayors, deputy mayors and the like, so we would normally see them on a regular basis, but here - as in many French-systems of government - it is possible to hold many different posts simultaneously. So the mayor is also the minister of industry, the minister of defense, or the interior. It is not hard to imagine which position takes precedence. Most constituents never see their representatives at all until election time rolls around. Recently the mayor came to present his party's platform and not 10 minutes into his presentation, the city power went out. It was in the middle of the day, so it seemed to be timed specifically to stop the rally's sound system for the fancy bands and high-profile speakers from being heard.
Today we got our first real downpour, after 8 months without a drop. I am told that classrooms will likely be nearly empty and absenteeism will reach a record high this week as families rush to prepare their fields for an early rainy season. Casamance is the breadbasket of Senegal and everyone here has crops that need tending and rize fields to mould and plant. It will be interesting to see if we manage to retain the participation of community members with such a compelling distraction competiting with our unreasonable schedule.
Today the president pushed through a bill that would mandate that the next presidential elections feature presidential and vice-presidential candidates American style. Opposition leaders have long accused the president of trying to usher his son into the presidency, suggesting that he was grooming him for power when he was appointed the head of half a dozen ministries, when he failed to win the mayoral race in the nation's capital. Today's news shook the political pundits and made everyone wonder if the old man would actually dare to run on a father son ticket. Others posited that he would find a loop hole to get his son into the presidency by having a puppet vice president step aside. It is all smoke and mirrors here in Senegal at the moment. The President traveled to the G8 summit and managed to get his son in a room with Obama at a meeting reserved to heads of state and staged a highly publicized handshake. Shortly thereafter the president of Senegal is meeting with the rebel movement in Libya and asking the Libyan leader - and former best friend - to step down from power. It is difficult to tell fact from fiction. But I am starting to see a pattern...
Enjoy the rain. I am.
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