Originally, I set up this website to host and archive the email messages I sent out from far flung destinations, so now I’m going to have to come up with a new premise since living overseas is moving from present to past tense. I’ve come back to DC and moved into a town house in a coop and I expect to be here for the long haul.

Just like Dorothy I took this place for granted when I lived here, and it’s only in coming back to visit the cleverer friends who settled here long before me that it started to dawn on me how great this place is. The mall, the Smithsonian, excellent transit, manageable scale, and the most diverse major US city except New York.  

Also like Dorothy, I’m looking forward to living in technicolor again with better work life balance than I’ve achieved in the past. I’m looking forward to taking advantage of the CWS – compressed work schedule and working 10 hours a day for four days a week and taking every Friday off. I’ll be working for the Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae) that guarantees mortgage-backed securities issued for government priority home ownership programs that include lending for veterans and active-duty military, rural communities, public and Indian housing, and other underserved borrowers. Nothing can make up for the travesty of redlining, but at least today’s programs are on the right side of financial inclusion.

Wishing everyone a good back to school season and the first one in a while when I’ll be able to enjoy the changing of the seasons from my own back yard. If you like figs, come on over I’ll be happy to share.

Started thinking about this when my friend’s son took a semester off from university to come home and work, one of the jobs he picked up is in landscaping. I felt a twinge of jealousy – working outside every day, helping to make things grow, work that is active and physical. What an excellent way to spend your day, especially as compared to being stuck inside all day. For him, in classrooms, for many of us, in front of computer screens and in meetings (or zoom calls). Tying this back to the cliché that is the title of today’s post, my friend’s son is literally working in greenery – much greener grass than most of us. And I am green with envy, pun intended.

Some of my happiest moments are when spending time outdoors in nature. So how did I put myself on a path where that can only happen in my time outside of work? My cousin’s son (which makes him my cousin – don’t know why I’m not calling him that?) is getting his PhD in microbiology in Australia after studying, living and working on coral reefs in Guam. What an excellent path he’s on! Really excited for him! Why did something like that never occur to me? Doesn’t that sound like a better career than what I’ve chosen? I love scuba diving on coral reefs, and go to a lot of trouble to be able to do that on vacation. Wouldn’t it be great to get paid to do it rather than pay (a lot) to do it?

Half of my career has been in finance, half has been in overseas development/humanitarian assistance, and lately I’ve been working in the sweet spot of those, impact investing in Least Developed Countries (LDC). It’s a pretty cool gig! Exactly what I aspired to in my idealistic youth. But is it just me or does the road not taken have a sneaky way of making us second-guess ourselves and our choices?

There are some obvious fallacies involved in this line of inquiry. Traditionally, and still for most people in my circle, we do full-time work that has a ton of rigidity and inflexibility built into the regime. And I would posit that anytime we introduce a sense of obligation to do them at least 40 hours a week, even the best things no longer spark joy. Need to check with cousin Colin if all his time at work on the reefs in the tropic has been following his bliss (Joseph Campbell reference for those paying attention.) Not be too crass, but wouldn’t there be more gigolos and prostitutes if it were really true that doing what you loved meant you’d never work a day in your life?

So when it comes to some of the major pain points of working full-time, including commuting and spending an inordinant amount of time in the office, that was turned on its head during COVID when so many of us ended up teleworking, and all of a sudden we realized we could still get things done even it we weren’t in the office. For a while the press coverage was good – like everyone was piling on to this epiphany – teleworking isn’t just a euphemism for slacking!

Time Savings When Working from Home “Workers allocate 40 percent of their time savings to their jobs and about 11 percent to caregiving activities.”

https://www.nber.org/papers/w30866

But lately the press coverage has changed and it seems like we need to get our lemning back on and into the office.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post calling on the federal government to enforce a stricter back-to-office approach.

“The pandemic is over,” he wrote. “Excuses for allowing offices to sit empty should end, too.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/04/white-house-urges-federal-workers-return-office-this-fall/

For what it’s worth, my own point of view is that when we give motivated, responsible employees agency to determine when and where they can be most productive and add the most value, they will do the right thing like prioritize the right in-person meetings and travel and show up, and the organization wins. When we set arbitrary rules about where to clock in, there’s always inefficiencies and it can reduce productivity and be demoralizing and everybody’s a little (or a lot) worse off.

The guys harping on showing up in the office seem like grumpy old men who are woefully out of touch. And are probably so privileged the can’t relate at all to what these decisions mean to the everyman and everywoman who make up the ranks of their organizations.

Granted I know I am the pot calling the kettle black in the sense that I am among the privileged to have a service job that can be done remotely, and that there are a lot of jobs that have to be done in person, and many of those are compensated through hourly wages that are woefully inadequate to provide for commute, childcare, social safety net, etc. costs. But don’t worry unions are making a comeback and those workers’ rights and wages are bound to improve since Americans are always willing to pay true prices that capture external costs that reflect our ethics and values. Right?!?

In any event I was fortunate enough to have another epic vacation this summer that also provided a perspective on where the grass is greener. In fact the places I spend time lately rarely have much green, so my expectations were for not for a hot girl green summer but a hot and dry (old hag LOL) summer, but lo and behold there was more greenery than expected in Spain, which apparently got some decent rains earlier this year. Spain made a better impression on me this time than my previous visits. Seville, Cordoba, Barcelona are imbued with and exude their history and also great tourist havens. Madrid is a lovely, eminently livable European capital with a great standard of living. How lucky Kathrine was to live there for the past few years! And how great it was to see her there and meet Astrid!

Morocco stayed at the same level for me as previous visits except when we went ballooning over Marrakesh and that was literally uplifiting

Wishing you excellent summers and hoping to catch up with you again soon on a green patch of grass somewhere in the world!

In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet it was suggested that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet and the implication was that even though he’s a Montague, Romeo was still the object of Juliet’s affection, that if he had any other name it would be no problem for them to be in love. The message being that names of things do not affect what they really are.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet

I have contemplated this against the backdrop of the variety of names used for me as an outsider in other cultures: “gringa”, “mzungu”, “blan” and other words for foreigner, with varying levels of pejorative connotations attached.

The first time I lived abroad was in the late 80s in France where I was l‘étrangère, l’américaine. I lived in a 3^rd tier city where being an American was à la fois a novelty and an object of both derision and envy for our eating and drinking habits (fast food and Coca Cola), attire (Levi’s jeans) and movie stars and rock and roll. And I was often asked to justify our abominable treatment of native Americans and the HIV+ and AIDS sufferers, which felt like a heavy mantle to bear at age 16. I liked it better when my classmates asked me to translate popular song lyrics for them.

In Japan in the early aughts I was my department’s token gaijin, a culture carrier from the main office meant to ensure our American standards of rigor and productivity in a flat organization that prizes efficiency. Which was tricky in the Japanese professional culture of face time and devotion to hierarchy. Being called a gaijin didn’t come across as derisive to me, it felt pretty neutral. But that might be because Japanese culture is so impenetrable, especially as a short-term (one year) resident, so maybe I was just blissfully ignorant of the underlying méprise they might have really had for me and my ilk.

外人 = gaijin

In Haiti, and now in Senegal, I am frequently subjected to prix blanche and prix toubab, inflated tourist prices, among other distinctions. But it isn’t so much disdain as opportunism. I could be projecting some post-colonial guilt onto the words, but I sometimes feel a wash of resentment when I am addressed as such, and something ranging from curiosity to animosity, depending on the encounter.

Being a blan makes direct reference to the fact that you are a white foreigner. Blan literally means white in Haitian Kreyol, but even if you’re a brown or black foreigner you’re still a blan, so that’s some cultural whitewashing, some unsolicited reverse cultural, or at least color, appropriation. While gaijin is specifically applied to foreigners of non-Japanese ethnicity, it is sometimes even applied to Japanese diaspora who are not citizens, and in vernacular usage is broadly applied to non-East Asians in Japan. However there are discrete words and kanji, the Japanese characters, for white foreigners: 白人 hakujin, and black foreigners: 黒人 kokujin, which literally combines the words and kanji for the color white 白 + person 人, and the color black 黒 + person 人.

Words like the Swahili mzungu (East Africa) and the Wolof toubab (West Africa and specifically Senegal) are taken from words for travelers, wanderers, but have evolved to signify white foreigners. In Senegal, hearkening back to the French colonizers. So back in the day being called a toubab had a certain edge to it that is less cutting today, and even less so when applied to me as opposed to French expats here, where there are still some bad feelings that are exacerbated by perceptions of the current government being too beholden to France and French interests. Whereas the opposition party actively French-bashes, leading to French grocery stores being looted and burned during demonstrations, and protests and blockades of the toll road, built and operated by a French company, snarling the already mercurial Dakar traffic.

­­Opposition party to the French in Senegal. Inspiration below.

But as the meaning of the cliche suggests, when I am called toubab, I don’t feel any different. I’m still good ol’ me underneath, right? In Exodus 3:14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am,” which some theorize means something like his/her/its nature cannot be declared in words, cannot be conceived of by human thought. God exists in such sort that his/her/its whole inscrutable nature is implied by its mere existence.

So that sounds about right to me, we mere mortals have intellectual capacities that are far too puny to understand what is behind the miracle of the creation of the universe and Earth and nature. The proclamation “I am who I am” seems meant to be awe-inspiring and exudes immovability and eternalness. I’m not sure that any human’s sense of self is that fixed or permanent.

We have a work retreat coming up later this month, and our team has been assigned the task of taking the Meyers-Brigg. Again. For me this will be the third time. I took it when I was 17 and a freshman in college. Then my score indicated ENTP, with a borderline P/J score. When I took it again in my 30s, I was ENTJ, with a borderline E/I score. In the years between the first MBTI and the second, did I change, or did my recognition of who I really am change?

I still feel really in touch with my little kid self, who had to be pretty independent when I was being raised by a hands off single mom who was preoccupied trying to make ends meet. And had to become even more independent, in different ways, after she died when I was nine.

According to this recent article in the New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/10/are-you-the-same-person-you-used-to-be-life-is-hard-the-origins-of-you, I’m a continuer.  One of the passages I liked in the article was this one:

“Sticking with any single account of your mutability may be limiting. The stories we’ve told may become too narrow for our needs. In the book ‘Life Is Hard,’ the philosopher Kieran Setiya argues that certain bracing challenges—loneliness, failure, ill health, grief, and so on—are essentially unavoidable; we tend to be educated, meanwhile, in a broadly redemptive tradition that ‘urges us to focus on the best in life.’ One of the benefits of asserting that we’ve always been who we are is that it helps us gloss over the disruptive developments that have upended our lives. But it’s good, the book shows, to acknowledge hard experiences and ask how they’ve helped us grow tougher, kinder, and wiser.”

I’d like to believe that the me that I have been and will continue to be is, most of the time, a fundamentally good, kind, funny person. But tell that to my colleague* who, several years ago now, submitted to me, for the nth time, after suggesting changes at each previous rejected submission, the identical incorrectly completed sole-source requisition form, leading me to stand up, angrily rip the offending form into small pieces and throw them in his face while ushering him out of my office. File under I am who I am when I’m sleep deprived, and best to avoid that version of me until she gets caught up on sleep. Which I hope we will all get to do this weekend.

* He’s pictured above actually in the “find the toubab” pic.

The first time I heard the expression “you have the watch, but I have the time” I was in Mali. I was surprised that a colleague in the military (part of the peacekeeping forces) didn’t wear a watch. It kind of blew my mind, our bosses were military and timeliness was an important part of the work culture for our team. Being late to the daily 8 AM team meeting meant you were subject to withering stares at best and a public shaming at worst.

But while I was perplexed at the absence of a timepiece on his wrist, he was unfazed. When I inquired in a dubious tone about his choice in (clearly haphazard) time-management, implying it could only be a recipe for disaster, he gave me a patience-young-grasshoper kind of look and sagely retorted “You have the watch, but I have the time.”

Granted, it still didn’t answer my question how as to how did he manage to manage his time. I mean, probably with his phone – it was 2014 so as we all know they were already practically appendages at that point. But it did give me pause.

I stopped wearing a watch regularly in Costa Rica, where thanks to COVID and pura vida there were fewer reasons to need a watch so I didn’t find it that hard. And still don’t. These days most of my fixed engagements are on my computer, in front of which I’m perched most of the time, and which has the time prominently displayed in the corner. And I’m always grateful for those pop-up reminders for impending zoom or Teams calls that only occasionally fail me when I’m completely in the flow of something else.

Subsequently I’ve heard the expression ” you have the watch but I have the time” a few times in Senegal, which is apt, since you really must be patient here for all things (note previous whinging about the bureaucracy), and where notably appointments and meeting start times are completely aspirational and subject to change at any time if they are not disregarded completely.

Speaking of needing to be patient in Senegal, this goes for doctor’s appointments and procedures, even at the military hospital in Dakar. So even patients need to be patient. Anecdotes from my recent ordeal in routine preventative health care could fill several blog posts, but not today’s. Too soon. Just glad it’s behind me. (Ha ha! It was a colonoscopy.)

It is a fallacy that I keep assuming that military outfits are going to be more “ship shape” and have stricter adherence to schedules. I did know of a colonel in the Nigerien armed forces who was known to close and lock the door to his meeting rooms one minute after the meeting start time, but he seems to be an exception not the rule, even in the military, at least in West Africa.

I most recently heard the expression “you have the watch but I have the time” when I was on a work mission in the North region of Senegal in early December. It was nice to return there and see the city of Saint Louis was bustling and vibrant, as it is meant to be. When I was there last Christmas it was doleful, a testament to the devastation caused by COVID. Happily it seems somewhat more business as usual this year.

Hope you are making good use of your time this holiday season! Best wishes for 2022!

That’s what the gendarmes and traffic police of Senegal seem to think when they see me, driving alone (or with a dog as the only passenger (heads up: foreshadowing!)). I thought my green diplomatic plates made me impervious to being stopped, but apparently if you’re the diplomat who’s compliant enough to pull over here, these guys will take advantage.

I went on a long road trip to the north of Senegal over Christmas and went through countless roadblocks but was only stopped once. The gendarme rifled through my paperwork (woefully incomplete thanks the overly bureaucratic process for my carte grise or car registration that is STILL ONGOING eight months since purchase of the car and countess stamps, ministries and mystery payments being made. Very recently my car was inspected by the bureau de mines which I still can’t understand what role they could possibly have in the car registration process but I’ve stopped asking. Although the obvious answer is that they’re mining my wallet and patience.

The first time I was pulled over in the north, the gendarme listlessly sorted through the worthless stack of papers I presented, and then waived me on. But I was not so lucky in subsequent encounters, including on my way to Toubab Dialao earlier this week.

Earlier this week I was pulled over close to home as I left Dakar for Toubab Dialao on my way to an Airbnb in a fishing village that feels overpopulated yet secluded at the same time, its usually burgeoning tourist-inflated economy put into deep freeze by COVID and the artisans and hawkers a shadow of their former selves, wraith-like, desiccated by what the pandemic has done to their once easy, enviable livelihoods. It reminded of an episode of the Brady Bunch where they visit a ghost town on their way to the Grand Canyon. But less kitschy and more heartbreaking.

In Toubab Dialao the hospitality community and artisans are feeling the pinch, but the fishermen on the beach are still working hard as they have for generations, regularly launching their pirogues after sunrise and returning before sunset, in the Senegalese version of punching in and out at the factory, except their hours are tied to the tides and the sun and the moon not the production schedule.

Tuesday was the second time in a few weeks that I’ve been pulled over, the time prior to that it was on my way to the office, one of the few times I’ve headed in since I arrived in September. I was taken off guard when the cop waived me over in the rond point Medina, but my knee-jerk reaction as an American rule-follower is to stop and see what’s going on. The cop presented me with bogus charges and then asked to see all my docs. He astutely noted that the stack of papers I handed over did not include the registration, just an assortment of officiously stamped and embossed papers required on the way to getting the registration, and that my international driver’s license had expired. The international drivers license is only good for one year, and I usually get a new one on a trip back to the US, which up until now had happened on at least an annual basis. It’s been 16 months since I was on American soil. Thanks, COVID. I have ordered a new one, but mail delivery and international courier service here has been decidedly hit-or-miss, with emphasis on miss. The UN has diplomatic pouches but it’s not for mail service for humble servants like yours truly.

Back to ront point Medina, after about 20 frustrating minutes of back and forth in a busy roundabout where I was holding up traffic, it ended up with me paying the traffic cop a ~$20 bribe (I didn’t have smaller change than a 10,000 CFA note) and I went on about my business.

Earlier this week when I was pulled over, it was because the dog in the seat next to me caught the gendarme’s attention. He waived me over, and told me angrily that animals weren’t allowed to be in a passenger vehicle, it was prohibited and what was I thinking?! Gendarme Fall looked through my useless paperwork, but didn’t zero-in on all the legitimate issues he could have taken up with me, as he had already decided on his made up one of the dog riding shotgun.

This exchange also took about 20 minutes and had threats of being sent to the brigade HQ to sort it out. (It also involved fruitless requests for my phone number which, even though getting hit on happens less and less the older I get, it somehow never becomes less irritating. We had already discussed that he had a wife and daughter, and this guy definitely couldn’t afford me as his second wife!)

This exchange ended with me paying a ~$10 bribe. Gendarme Fall made sure I understood that he was letting me off easy that this Real Infraction had a penalty of 6,000 CFA but he accepted my 5,000 CFA note and made me a gift of the~ $2 I was short.

Just bummed out that I’m now a mark for traffic cops looking to supplement their income, and not sure when I became the pushover who pays the bribes. When I was younger I had more backbone, or time to spare, or less disposable income, or all of the above I guess. When I got pulled over in random parts of the world, and when they tried to get a bribe out of me I played chicken and said let’s go to your HQ or to your supervisor now and see what they have to say, usually with a heavy dose of righteous indignation like how dare they try to bend the law with me – they picked the wrong gringa!

Not sure where that defiant, moral highroad occupying person is nowadays. Apparently, she’s too put out to make a stand. Or simply accepts that the payment is a better use of time and money than going through the proper channels that will require navigating the fine payment and recovery of my seized documents from some obscure hard to find facility on another day in the bowels of the Senegalese bureaucracy.

Lesson learned: don’t make eye contact with police and gendarmes, and keep on driving if they try to flag me down. Wouldn’t have worked out great in the last situation because traffic was at a standstill, but I think nevertheless I’ll try to power through next time. Hopefully it won’t turn into this kind of standoff.

Sadly there are NOT plenty more fish in the sea thanks to overfishing, illicit practices, and climate change, among other things. But just go with it, read on and you’ll see that in some ways it is an apt cliche to introduce this woman, Madame Diouf, known to her friends as Yayi, who I was fortunate enough to meet yesterday. She is a beautiful soul, a feminist, a natural storyteller, whose personal tragedy propelled her to take action.

Fifteen years ago, her 27-year-old son went to sea with 47 other young men from his community for a long-haul fishing trip. Their catch was inadequate, and to return home with empty nets would have been shameful. They decided to continue to Europe and try their luck as illegal immigrants. However none of them were ever heard from again. Their boat was found adrift, empty.

In Yayi’s metro-Dakar neighborhood, sons who had successfully migrated and could send remittances back to their families in Senegal raised the prestige of their families as well as their quality of life. Which is why it seemed worth the risk to these 48 fishermen.

By the same token that a son’s success as fishermen with big catches or as illegal immigrants reflects well on their families, shockingly, the loss of these 48 young men at sea was not seen as an unfortunate and tragic accident, but as something that discredits and dishonors their families.

The community stigmatized the grieving mothers of these young men. Yayi was having none of it. She used her voice to sway the community’s opinion, and then to try to find options for local families to find livelihood opportunities to try to reduce the pressure on young men to take desperate measures to find income for their family, and to prevent them from taking the fatal gamble her son had taken.

This remarkable woman intuitively understood, in spite of all cultural markers and societal norms that would have insisted otherwise, that this stigmatization was unjust and that she needed to stand up for herself and the other mothers and wives who lost fishermen on her son’s ill-fated pirogue.

Yayi began a series of appeals to influential figures in her community, and secured the patronage of an influential elder through his third and favorite wife to ultimately secure a license begin fishing, taboo and theretofore unprecedented for women. She established a training center to teach other women and men skills to fish, began mussel aquaculture, and related petites entreprises. The training center is on hiatus due to COVID and lack of sustainable funding, but members are still fishing and farming mussels and other ancillary microenterprises, like canning and selling preserves on the domestic market. They are still 375 members that are in a solidarity fund, saving and providing microcredit within their group to fund their ongoing small business activities.

Yayi understands that fish stocks are under pressure due to a variety of factors, but she remains optimistic that the sea can continue to provide income opportunities to keep men from considering the last resort of heeding the siren’s call of migration to Europe. And to hedge their bets, she’s encouraging and supporting other small business opportunities through the solidarity fund she’s kept going. Because of her, for people in Thiaroye-sur-mer there are more fish in the sea for the time being.

You can read more about her in this recent NYT article.

Today’s topic and the cliché in the title is linked to the oppressive pandemic that recently celebrated its one-year anniversary of subjugation over us all. Just when we thought we couldn’t take it anymore, the vaccines are on the scene. It’s amazing how quickly these vaccines have been developed and distributed, they’ve even made it to Senegal in enough numbers that I was able to get the first shot of Astra Zeneca 11 days ago. Enough time has elapsed that I theoretically have some pretty significant immunity (upwards of 70%), and I’m almost out of the danger zone of 15 days when those whose poor souls whos platelets allegedly get overstimulated by the Astra Zeneca vaccine have had clots/strokes.

Is this very rare but potentially lethal side effect of the AZ shot alarming? Of course. But I’m more worried about COVID than I am about blood clots. Better safe than sorry is my answer to the people who dumbfound me, including many Senegalese, who have vaccine hesitancy.

Dakar has been a great place to be during COVID, all things considered. The weather and infrastructure are such that a lot can be done outdoors, open air, and I’ve been able to socialize at beachside restaurants most weekends, although there was a curfew from 9 PM – 5 AM so that most places closed by 7 PM to give their staff time to get home. The curfew was (not coincidentally) lifted just after the recent round of violent protests against the President’s intimidation of opposition leaders. We had a couple weeks of security lockdowns on top of the COVID curfew. I was so inured to security lockdowns after 2018-19 in Haiti that I barely noticed the woefully underwhelming armageddon doomsday prepping I’d done here so far. I have subsequently added to the potable water supply stockpile (6 weeks’ worth). Almost ran out of beer, but still had plenty of booze. Some of my priorities are in order.

COVID 19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University

The community health center where I went to get my vaccine was not nearly as organized, or serving nearly as many people, as the stadium tours in the US. But what matters is I got that vaccine and a colored piece of paper that will serve as evidence of it and I’m hoping to proudly present that at the border of another country(ies) at some point this year, something I wouldn’t have thought possible a couple of months ago.

Many Senegalese I had spoken to about the vaccine have voiced skepticism and reluctance, but the ones I come into contact with regularly (my physical therapist and my housekeeper) have both come around and to have first round, so that’s a relief.

It was kind of a fluke that I found out where to get it, I had registered with the UN and on a national database and have heard crickets. But I was having dinner at this fantastic hotel in my neighborhood with the extraordinary proprietor, and she gave me the 411. Souadou is terrific example of self-made success that makes you believe in karma in this lifetime. She went to community college in Northern Virginia and paid her tuition by the money she earned as a housekeeper at the Ritz Carlton at Tyson’s. She internalized the ethos of “ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen” and has carefully chosen, trained, and empowered her own staff who are able to provide a level of customer service that is otherworldly. All of her managers are women. She pulled off the impossible and was able to get an unsecured commercial loan to build her boutique luxury hotel on the basis of her commitment and charisma, and she’s managed to pay it off, and, pay the salaries of her staff through 11 months of no guests by selling off personal assets. I’m rooting for her continued success.

Happy vaccining everyone. I feel such joy whenever I learn of one more of us getting stuck. Each jab gets us closer to normal!

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. This is a motto that is relevant in Senegal. In the ease of doing business report published annually by IFC, Senegal ranks 120 out of 190 economies and one of the issues weighing it down is bureaucracy.

“The Ease of doing business index ranks countries against each other based on how the regulatory environment is conducive to business operations. Economies with a high rank (1 to 20) have simpler and more friendly regulations for businesses.” https://tradingeconomics.com/senegal/ease-of-doing-business

It takes 4 processes and 6 working days to register a business here. Allegedly. I have yet to ground truth this with one of the small businesses my agency finances. However I find it impossible to believe after trying to accomplish tasks that have brought me into orbit with some of the hundreds of ministries involved in day-to-day life in Senegal. Even compared with other francophone countries I’ve lived in, Senegal takes bureaucracy to a whole new level.

Where to start? First of all, let’s talk about getting my car registered. The car I bought in October. Of last year. We are on step approximately 1,000 of that process and I’m about to have to shell out another $450 to a customs agent to get the remaining six steps accomplished. One of them involves driving the car to the Bureau of Mines. Why? I don’t even ask anymore what the Bureau of Mines could possibly have to do with my vehicle registration. I am NOT making this up.

Because I work for the UN, the car has green diplomatic plates. I bought the car from another diplomat, who bought it from another diplomat who was the original owner and did all the formalities at the original purchase of the duty-free vehicle, so this should be a less cumbersome process than the normal one. But no. In fact when I purchased the car it was still in the name of the previous owner that the person I bought it from bought it from in January 2020. Because that’s how long the title transfer takes! We have only recently reached the step where the registration has been issued in the name of the person I bought the car from. She left the country in November of 2020. After about 35 notary stamps from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and myriad others on countess pages of documents, we do have a sales invoice that proves she sold the car to me. But that isn’t enough to get a title in my name. Not yet.

I am hopeful that sometime before I have to sell or dispose of the car I will have evidence that it belongs to me.

And the formal bureaucracy seems to have filtered into the informal economy. Which leads me to the topic of apartment repairs. In West Africa the apartment inspection that takes place when you sign the lease is very important. Any defects that are not meticulously captured in this annex to the lease agreement, l’etat de lieu, will be deducted from your deposit when you move out. Several items that required repair were identified during this inspection, all of them minor. On October 8 2020 the landlord agreed to take care of them, theoretically concomitant with me taking possession of the apartment, otherwise shortly thereafter. The landlord sent their plumber and handyman to start ticking through the items.

Unfortunately, each of them would come, I’d explain the issue to them, e.g., water pooling under the kitchen sink, they’d eyeball the situation, decide what the problem was (without investigating or testing it to confirm their hypothesis), “fix it”, do nothing about the other items on the punch list and leave — after they had arrived several hours late for the original appointment — claiming they needed more materials, or had a baptism or a funeral to attend. And then I’d desperately try to get them to come back to complete the work. For days and weeks at a time before they’d show again. In the meantime, I’d discover that the “fix” was for something that was not the problem, and the water would keep pooling under the kitchen sink or whatever, and they’d come back, repeat the same process of “fixing” it without properly diagnosing the problem and disappear again for a few weeks.

The worst was when the plumber was making a minor repair to the glass shower door and shattered it. I’m still finding glass shards under bathroom cabinets. In this case the cure was much worse than the disease, and it took until a couple of weeks ago, in January 2021, to get it finally and completely remedied. After no joke about 6 or 7 visits from the plumber and at least 5 missed appointments. The last of the repairs promised by the landlord was only completed last month, more than three months after the date it was promised. The entire punch list could have been completed by a competent contractor in a single visit in one day, IMHO.

That’s a lot of bellyaching but in spite of its shortcomings on the bureaucracy front, I’m very happy to be living in Dakar. The hot season wound down in November and it is really pleasant weather – sunny (although sometimes smoggy or dusty (Harmattan)) and 65-75 degrees Fahrenheit. This apartment is well-situated and I keep the windows open and hear the birdsong and see the Atlantic ocean from my living room windows and from my comfortable home office have a nice view of the African Renaissance Monument and the lighthouse at Mammelles. I live in a neighborhood that is near a string of beachside restaurants, and my friends and colleagues and I manage to meet outdoors for drinks or dinner at least once a week, even during COVID. Of course we are outdoors, socially distanced and maksed up. So much to be grateful for and almost worth putting up with all the bureaucracy.

And if you were thinking how refreshing it was not to see a political post, well, not so fast. Because the expression in the title also makes me think of Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic-controlled Congress that are impeaching Trump for the second time. A conviction is unlikely, but no one deserves it more than former President Trump.

This week’s entry is an epilogue that feels more like a prologue, sparked by the phrase “women and children first” that came up when I wrote last week, when I said “…it’s not always women and children first. On the contrary.”

While the recent theme of the blog is clichés, and this week’s is ostensibly the law of the sea code of conduct expression in the title, let’s call it what it is: a thinly veiled forensic accounting of memories of my mom that are fewer and less accessible four decades since she died.

Last week I posted about the gender wage gap, and it made me wonder about my mom, and how she would have grappled with the pandemic as a single mom if this had happened when she was still alive in the ‘70s.

Mom was unconventional and struggled for many years to find full and fulfilling paid employment, in an era when it was customary for women’s aspirations to focus on homemaking rather than work outside the home. But I don’t remember her self-identifying as a feminist.

When I ponder the question, “was my mom a feminist” I make a reservation for a pity party, table for one, as I wish that it wasn’t a rhetorical question that I was trying to invent the answer to. (Sorry for ending on a preposition it just sounds way too not vernacular to say to which I was trying to invent the answer.)

Trying to piece together whether or not she was an out or closeted feminist from a jury made up of her own personal patriarchy is even more suspect than relying on my adult filtered take on a precocious nine-year old’s view of her mom. It’s the paltry reconstruction I can pull together from impressions of my mom from the fallible memories of childhood, buttressed by the jaded views of the only people who have on occasion spoken to me about her since her death in 1981: her parents, her ex-husband, her brothers, and her son.

My mom was a square in the beat era, a Minnesota transplant to the Bay Area, living in the Haight a decade before it was the epicenter of edgy. She got there by bus from a Navajo Indian reservation where she had been teaching, until the inebriated father of one of her students got too handsy and she beat a hasty retreat for points west.

When the only place you’ve ever lived is Winona, Minnesota, and your heretofore longest trips were to Wisconsin and Iowa, flinging all your worldly possessions into a VW Beetle and hitting the open road to New Mexico is a pretty bold move. And when it goes tango-uniform, instead of returning home with your tail between your legs, you get on a bus bound for San Francisco, well, that all seems more worldly and adventurous than I remember my mom being. What a badass!

In my reenactment of the critical juncture in my mother’s life when she graduated from college and had to decide what to do next, and ended up high tailing it for New Mexico – which could only have been slightly less alien than Mars – it was because she chafed at the career path she had been relegated to by my grandparents.

She had wanted to be a journalist, but my grandparents thought that was unseemly for a woman, or unrealistic, or both. It was already no small feat that they were willing to send her to college at all, as it was of little use or interest to anyone else in our family (who have been very successful without it).

But mom was different from her family, she was bookish and keen, and to their credit, her parents made college happen for her. However, the caveat was that their largesse would only be extended for studies in subject matter suitable for women: nursing or teaching. Journalism was off the table. She went with teaching.

I had a similar experience with my grandparents three decades later when they co-signed the loans that made it possible for me to go to undergrad at pricey, private GWU. They were staggered by the amounts involved. They couldn’t understand why I would pay so much to go to school “just to be a secretary.” I couldn’t understand why they thought I would be a secretary rather than someone who had a secretary.

Mom was not well-suited to be a teacher. It was abundantly clear the days she would come home from substitute teaching a silent, shriveled shell of herself. She’d head straight to the wing-backed chair with the standing lamp positioned above her shoulder and lose herself in a novel for the rest of the evening, oblivious to everything else, while I made myself a bowl of cereal for dinner.

As a teacher, mom finagled a way to work in school libraries, and unlike teaching, that was in her wheelhouse. We were living in Madison, Wisconsin in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, a three-hour drive from her home town that was still close enough to to access the support she was ashamed to need from my grandparents. She was studying library sciences at the University of Wisconsin. An emerging discipline that dealt with data management and other non-soft-skills stuff. Maybe not feminist per se,  but non-traditional and non-conforming to the gender norms laid out for her.

The night that my mom died in a car accident in a deluge of rain she was driving back from Wisconsin Rapids, 100 miles north of Madison, where she had just been hired to teach *and* be the school librarian. It must have been vindicating for her, after being perennially un- and underemployed to have gotten a full-time job in her professional sweet spot and put her on a path to becoming a full-time librarian. More immediately, we’d be able to leave the housing project we were living in and get off food stamps. She was going to flip the script on being a welfare mom and finally get back on a path to self-sufficiency.

Was my mom a feminist? I think she’d say no, but I say hell yeah! She may not have been burning her bra, but she wasn’t Phyllis Schlafly either, even if she was politically conservative. If she were alive now, I don’t think the pay gap would sit well with her even if she wasn’t subject to it when public school pay scales are based on education and tenure, not gender.

A brave and wise woman, from a political party that was decidedly not my mom’s, famously said that women’s rights are human rights. My mom, who saw injustice up close and personal on the Indian reservation and in the projects, would have endorsed that, even if she didn’t comfortably or prominently take on the feminist mantle.

What would she have thought about the 2016 and the 2020 elections? I’m afraid that even in my wildest re-imaginings, it’s hard to create a scenario where she wasn’t one of the Hillary haters. But after four years of President Trump I bet she’d be ridin’ with Biden, and even if mom never adopted “San Francisco values” I’d like to believe she would be on board with a strong female VP candidate with Bay Area roots, who, like me, was shaped by the single mom who raised her.

Not wearing a watch much nowadays, but I’m acutely aware of time through the tides, which are more ingrained in my daily activities than ever before, and certainly more so than when I lived in landlocked Niger and Mali, where there’s also plenty of sand, but a bigger payoff here where the sand comes with water. And beaches.

Not long after being here I realized that, like some kind of mariner, I had internalized the tides and had an uncanny, almanac-like prescience of the two times a day that it’s low tide. During the first lockdowns of the pandemic, beaches were closed altogether in Costa Rica. When they started lifting the restrictions , even though the beaches were open for 12 hours per week, that still meant the beach was off-limits to me a few days every other week, because it’s not safe to go in or walk at high tide. At high tide the beach meets an embankment and there’s tons and tons of tree trunk-sized driftwood is crashing into the beachhead, threatening to break your ankles or pull you under altogether, which might sound exaggerated but I’ve had first person accounts of both, so I only get on the beach at low tide.

Since I recognized my nascent old (wo)man of the seas tendencies, I’ve had tides on my mind. Not just debut album of the one time it girl, Fiona Apple. It sparked thinking about cliches related to tides, and I thought of an expression that is on frequent rotation on the capitalist playlist “A rising tide lifts all boats.” So that is obliquely what will be explored in this post. In mulling it over in the context of our current times, when the tide is going out not coming in, I also thought of ships being grounded or in distress. And contrary to the old law of the sea, when boats are in trouble, it’s not always women and children first. On the contrary.

Without surrendering my dyed-in-the-wool capitalist bone fides, I submit that a rising tide litfing all boats is a trite euphemism for trickle-down, “voodoo” economics, a staple of the old fiscally conservative GOP playbook (even though I was surprised to learn from Wikipedia that it was JFK who introduced the saying into the lexicon). Also straight out of the World According to Wikipedia, it means “…economic policy, particularly government economic policy, should therefore focus on broad economic efforts.” But by focusing on GDP growth with out driling down to disaggregate by actors in the economy, we lose sight of some glaring inequalities.

Not all boats are built the same. Some are weighted down by heavy anchors, like generations of pervasive economic inequality. Some are rickety and can barely stay afloat, even in calm seas. And irrespective of tides, a boat can be more buoyant when a man is at the helm. Because if a woman’s captaining the ship, she’s most likely getting paid less than a man to do it.

We recently celebrated Black Women Equal Pay Day, a trimester later than Women’s Equal Pay day in the Spring, which is another trimester past men’s earnings. Fun fact: another trimester and we could make a baby, y’all! A baby that a single mom can’t afford to raise but would be stigmatized for availing herself of pitiful social safety net that is inadequate but may be the Plan C that she was left with given that access to family planning is getting harder and harder to come by.

Holly Corbertt in Forbes tells us “Parental status also impacts the wage gap, with Black mothers making just 50 cents to every dollar a white father makes… The pandemic and social unrest about racial injustice have amplified existing inequities in America. ‘Caregiving duties are falling on women across the board, and Black women are more likely to be family breadwinners and also single mothers,’ says Chandra Thomas Whitfield, journalist and podcast host of In The Gap”

Rising tides don’t lift boats that are in a lock system, where men are getting the highest wages, and women are behind the gates and sluices that keep them below, and black women and single moms are trailing even further behind.

I’m horrified by our congress that is acting like survivors on a lifeboat that will be swamped if we provide more assistance. We can’t wait for the tide to come back in, we need to start distributing life vests (extending unemployment benefits) and making more room in the lifeboats (small business stimulus). Shame on them. Shame on us for letting them get away with it.

The point here is that while we capitalists are all patting ourselves on the back for letting the invisible hand of markets have free reign, the incongruous growth in equity markets is doing nothing for the most vulnerable, many of whom are in essential jobs, at risk so that we can keep our pantries stocked and the garbage cans emptied, and living paycheck to paycheck in the best of times…