One thing I have noticed since moving to Guinea is the increase in my perception of metaphors. I now see everything as a “metaphor for Africa,” which is kind of unfair to Africa as a continent, as I have only been in Guinea for 6 months, Benin for 4 days, Senegal for a week, and Ivory Coast for a week. And in all that time, I have only ventured outside of the capital cities in Guinea and Benin for a combined total of maybe a month.
It bothers me that I am prepared to see pretty much anything, like a dirty teddy bear face down in a broken satellite dish, as a metaphor. Or when a woman, when asked her age, asks the health worker to ask her husband. Or when well-known thieves finally get caught because they take the camera of someone who promised to give the villagers photos.
I was thinking about this post when I was just walking around in the Labé market. I’ve recently developed an allergy to yellow mangoes (tried 4 times in various quantities, green/red mangoes are not yet tested). I am a vegetarian, so eating in Guinea is challenging, thus I almost always cook for myself. Ergo, I was in the market with an eye for 2 days of provisions. In my waspy thin plastic sack, I had collected one avocado, one bunch of lettuce, a kilo of tomatoes and a bundle of mint. Eyeing the mangoes, I tried to set my heart on another fruit. A girl walked by with cut up papaya and I thought YES - that is the fruit for me (note, I find that papaya alone tastes kind of yucky – a woman compared the taste to something inappropriate on a vacation once, and I never fully recovered, but if you add lemon or lime juice, it becomes a delectable fruit option).
Bending to my sense of self preservation, I did not buy the cut up, hot, possibly fly laden fruit on top of the woman’s head. Plus, that fruit had no lemon. So I set about trying to find a papaya.
In Conakry, most people speak French to some degree or another. In the interior, the French can be somewhat…less pristine, depending on the segment/gender of the population. I started asking vendors where to find papaya, and some of them had no idea what I was saying. I might as well have been asking, “I’m a magic donkey would you like a ride?” Finally I came to a used sock stall, where the owner was called upon to decipher my French. A local language conversation ensued, with a lot of questioning faces, and at last I was sent on my way with two adolescent boys as guides.
They seemed to be leading me out of the food section, into the bread section, and to the automotive section of the market. 10 minutes in, the thought that I might be being led to slaughter crossed my mind. Just as I got to the second iteration of “it’s really not a big deal if we can’t find a papaya,” we found a lady selling tomatoes, limes, pepper, and one papaya. Seeing the sorry state of said papaya, I asked if she had another one, and she said no, but she really meant yes, she had a bunch in the basin next to her. So I found a papaya, and then shuffled back through the market.
I think that this is perhaps how human brains work, whether I like it or not. Thanks to our frontal lobes, we see patterns and try to make connections and generalizations; we try to predict the future. I am trying to maintain my suspension of judgment and generalizations, but it is a tricky task.
I seem to have the impression that no matter what we do sometimes, things, globally, will never really change. But tell that to my grandmother who was born in the 1930s. I bet she thought the same, and I would hazard a guess that things are slightly different.
It bothers me that I am prepared to see pretty much anything, like a dirty teddy bear face down in a broken satellite dish, as a metaphor. Or when a woman, when asked her age, asks the health worker to ask her husband. Or when well-known thieves finally get caught because they take the camera of someone who promised to give the villagers photos.
I was thinking about this post when I was just walking around in the Labé market. I’ve recently developed an allergy to yellow mangoes (tried 4 times in various quantities, green/red mangoes are not yet tested). I am a vegetarian, so eating in Guinea is challenging, thus I almost always cook for myself. Ergo, I was in the market with an eye for 2 days of provisions. In my waspy thin plastic sack, I had collected one avocado, one bunch of lettuce, a kilo of tomatoes and a bundle of mint. Eyeing the mangoes, I tried to set my heart on another fruit. A girl walked by with cut up papaya and I thought YES - that is the fruit for me (note, I find that papaya alone tastes kind of yucky – a woman compared the taste to something inappropriate on a vacation once, and I never fully recovered, but if you add lemon or lime juice, it becomes a delectable fruit option).
Bending to my sense of self preservation, I did not buy the cut up, hot, possibly fly laden fruit on top of the woman’s head. Plus, that fruit had no lemon. So I set about trying to find a papaya.
In Conakry, most people speak French to some degree or another. In the interior, the French can be somewhat…less pristine, depending on the segment/gender of the population. I started asking vendors where to find papaya, and some of them had no idea what I was saying. I might as well have been asking, “I’m a magic donkey would you like a ride?” Finally I came to a used sock stall, where the owner was called upon to decipher my French. A local language conversation ensued, with a lot of questioning faces, and at last I was sent on my way with two adolescent boys as guides.
They seemed to be leading me out of the food section, into the bread section, and to the automotive section of the market. 10 minutes in, the thought that I might be being led to slaughter crossed my mind. Just as I got to the second iteration of “it’s really not a big deal if we can’t find a papaya,” we found a lady selling tomatoes, limes, pepper, and one papaya. Seeing the sorry state of said papaya, I asked if she had another one, and she said no, but she really meant yes, she had a bunch in the basin next to her. So I found a papaya, and then shuffled back through the market.
I think that this is perhaps how human brains work, whether I like it or not. Thanks to our frontal lobes, we see patterns and try to make connections and generalizations; we try to predict the future. I am trying to maintain my suspension of judgment and generalizations, but it is a tricky task.
I seem to have the impression that no matter what we do sometimes, things, globally, will never really change. But tell that to my grandmother who was born in the 1930s. I bet she thought the same, and I would hazard a guess that things are slightly different.