A time of parting

These days are to us a bit like the weeks following my high school’s final exams. Many expat friends are at the end of their contracts and are preparing to leave. Farewell parties, without exception bien arrosées, abound, and we feel sadness about several people who have become really good friends over the almost two years we have been here. George D., brilliant project manager, and his Philippine wife Manel, with whom A. has gotten really close; François B., no less brilliant, with his big mouth, arrogance and irresistible personal charm, mon emmerdeur favori, who during his last year had to deal with a Minister who had a complex about white counsellors, realised in the end that he couldn’t do without them and who has now created an incredible mess for our aid programming by not renewing a demand for a support unit in time. Then there are Myriam and Jean, my bush buddy, and their children who are close friends of our kids. There are many other people, a bit more in the periphery, but much liked too.

We are almost halfway our own four-year assignment too. A. and the children leave next week, and by the time they come back we will have less than 1.5 years to go. Moreover I am supposed to know more clearly by early 2007 where my next posting, as of summer 2008, will be.

Our second year has been very different from our first. Apart from M.’s surgery and my subsequent illness at the end of 2005, I think the second year was better than the first. Expat life here became much livelier, and consequently our social circle much extended.

Today we had organised an information session, in the local language, by the local Crédit Mutuel for all our staff (9 in all, including five security people who are really employed by an outside contractor) at home in the garden. It was about saving and eventual micro-credit possibilities. They were much interested, there were many excellent questions, a few good laughs, and when I announced at the end that we would pay inscription costs for all of them (about 18 euros a head) as A. parting present, they were over the moon. We had drinks and sandwiches afterwards, and we took pictures, this being one of the very rare occasions where all where present. The staff was enormously appreciative of the whole initiative, and one of the guards, Alexis, whose rhetorical talents I had noticed before, even made a spontaneous speech. We try hard to be decent and kind to them and to help them, without being patronizing. It’s not always so easy, as most of them tend to show the kind of almost submissive behaviour that must date back to colonial times, and that seems typical for this country. If you don’t pay attention you slide into the patronising, colonial mode of behaviour very easily, and I have seen many expats who actually don’t mind at all. It was much less salient or non-existent in the few other African countries I have visited. One example: the fact that a white man here is almost invariably called ‘patron’ (boss), not ‘monsieur’.

(By the way, the title refers to a famous Bulgarian novel, Vreme razdelno, (A time of parting) by Anton Dontchev.