Sylvia's Journal

Last night I went out with the two Dutch guys who are lodged at the hotel and my Quebec friend joined us at the last minute – a good thing. It reminded me why, all these years ago, I traded in my Dutch husband for an American one. There is something about the Dutch I meet abroad that irritates me. They know everything, they have an opinion about everything (with particularly strong opinions about the US) and they are always right. This I have come to associate especially with Dutch men (former husband included) – although of course I know others, not Dutch, who exhibit some of these traits.

My new Dutch acquaintances are here to work on security issues with the Dutch embassy. They are military men, seconded by the ministry of defense. They are sent all over the world to deal with threats. They just came from Kabul, so we had something to talk about. When I mentioned I had lived in two powder keg places (Lebanon and Afghanistan) I was told that there is a more serious one I had not mentioned: the Sahara/southern Libya/northern Mali and Niger powder keg. That’s why they were here – but they couldn’t say much other that they dealt with ‘special’ stuff. One has been an air marshal in the past. I have never met an air marshal as they fly incognito, but I know they are always on my plane. And so I got to ask the question I always wanted to ask an air marshal: don’t they want something to happen, on these long boring rides, see some action? He laughed but I didn’t get my answer. I think such information is not be made public on a blogsite no doubt.

I had negotiated a price for taking us to a lovely restaurant, just a tad too far to walk. My compatriots, upon hearing what I had negotiated laughed and said I had been suckered into much too a high a price. And then they started to talk about a bad experience they had had with the same driver earlier in the week and how they told him, basically, to go screw himself, implying basically that I was naive. I told him that I had no problem overpaying a bit (it still is small change for me, and surely for them) because the end of Ramadan feast is approaching and everyone needs money and that I didn’t feel I had been taken for a ride. They had some faint excuse that they were here on the Dutch taxpayers account and that therefore they should pay as little as possible (this did not apply to meals and drinks of course). I told them they should take another taxi if they didn’t want to contribute to his overpriced fare. In the end we all piled into the taxi but I noticed an icy silence from the otherwise talkative driver.

When we returned from a fabulous dinner they hesitated about contributing to the fare. I waved them off, no need to waste Dutch taxpayer money on a poorly negotiated deal (a waft of Trump?). But they did contributed something in the end.  The taxi man was very agitated and waited until they had disappeared through the hotel security gates, and then, with only my Quebecois friend and me in attendance started to rant about how they had treated him. He was visibly shaken but I told him I didn’t want to hear anything about his experiences with them and that we were negotiating with him on our terms, a bit more favorable to him. We hired him to take us to the national park, the zoo and museum for a Sunday outing. He agreed as long as it was not with them. I am sure the price we negotiated was ridiculous in the eye of our Dutch military men – but it what fine with us, from the North American continent, proving their general disdain for anything (north)american.

Roadside advertisements here are of a kind that I don’t think you’d see in the US anymore. I think they may have been common in the 60s and 70s, but advertisers probably wouldn’t get away with them nowadays, at least not in the US or Europe. But here all is up for grabs. Advertising that alcohol consumption makes you smart and successful (la bière de la réussite), or that sugar is good for you. One billboard for a line of sugary sodas shows a young boy kid picking up the front end of a small truck with one hand while holding the sugary drink in his other; or there is the one billboard that encourages people to ‘find the lion inside you’ advertising a line of candy. Of course now, because of Ramadan, many billboards wish people a blessed Ramadan showing happy beautiful people drinking or eating specific products, including one of a family eating in front of a Shell station (Shell wishes you…). And women empowerment is not forgotten either: Maggi reminding people that every woman who uses Maggi in her cooking is a Star.

This morning during my morning jog on the treadmill I listened to an NPRs Hidden Brain podcast (This Is Your Brain On Ads) about how ads to which one was exposed at an early age hold sway over anything that the intelligent grown up now knows is nonsense or plain wrong, like nutritious breakfast that consist for 80% of sugar. But those were advertised to the innocent and credulous young mind, with the help of cartoon characters. The message got engraved somewhere deep in our brain and trumps everything we know to be true.

Large electronic billboards are also starting to emerge. They are quite common in the big cities in Asia and I had seen them in Kenya (not always working properly), but last night I saw the best one ever. It is permanently displayed on the main drag near my hotel. It says (most visible at night) in English, in large white on black letters:

• Mouse not found
• Keyboard not found
• Fatal error
• System suspended

It is a frightening message if you don’t know what these words mean.

But the best thing I saw today was the man with a plastic bag that has the picture and name of our previous president on it. He is still on people’s screen. The plastic bag is also, unfortunately, made with chemicals that don’t dissolve in a hundred years, so his picture will be around a bit until the bag starts to fray as it flaps in the wind from trees or fences, along with the millions of black plastic bags that dot the landscape. This way even our honorable last president will eventually contribute to clogged drains. The Rwandan president did well to ban plastic bags (you are told upon landing in Kigali to leave all plastic bags on the plane). But here it looks like such political will is not on the horizon yet, especially if the current president gets his way and stays on beyond his mandate. Malians are protesting many other things the current administration is not doing, and maybe plastic bags are not quite up there with things like the economy, security and transparency.