Writing is a strange thing. It’s one of those extremely rare and yet at the same time extremely common things in life that is essentially non-linear. The more you push on it the more it pushes back on you. The more you force yourself to write, the more difficult (and likely to turn out absurd) it becomes. It seems that the only constant with these illogical nonlinearities is the aptness of the moment. When the time is right, it just comes to you. No explanation or analysis is readily apparent, necessary and can even be detrimental. Even more baffling is the fact that, when this condition is present, the most difficult thing to do is actually resist the spirit of that instant and NOT write.
This “installment” or whatever you want to call it is more psychological in nature than the other ones I have written simply because understanding the way people think here in Mali has been a constant challenge for me. I’m going to illustrate this using three examples of situations that I have lived or am currently living during my time here in Bamako. Coming to conclusions about these experiences is something that has forced me to rethink various modes of thinking that I seem to have developed by living in the western world. In some ways, I hope that after reading this, you will walk away from it in sheer confusion, which actually happens to be one that I experience on a frequent basis here. However, more than just creating that feeling for you, I hope that it will actually introduce questions that don’t implicate easy answers. If there is one thing I have learned from being here it is that the world is infinitely more complex than I thought it was after I graduated from college. And willingness to entertain hard questions is at the very least an extremely interesting way to pass the time, and it beats watching the easy answers that are fed to people on CNN.
The first situation that has achieved the official status of belonging to this category has been the situation with my neighbors, a Malian family (husband and wife) with several children. I live in an apartment near the downtown area of Bamako in which there are two separated house on the same floor of the same building. Our relationship started out innocuously enough; in general we were very cordial and warm with each other. The mother would include me in her feeding of the children, giving me rice when I needed it. I gave them little gifts from time to time, when the time seemed right. I would play with their kids sometimes. In fact, they have a cute little daughter of about 6 or 7 years that I would jokingly call my “future wife.”
As is often the case in Mali, once money is introduced into the equation you often see different sides of people that are not always pretty. Let me just say first of all that although my rent here is not expensive at all comparative to the prices in the US, most Malians would have a fairly hard time making their rent every month. Renting a place in the price range that I have is not very common here as people with money would prefer to buy land and the rest of the people can’t afford it. In any case, it’s turns out that we shared the same electric meter and we would have to split the bill.
The landlord had specified two things about our electricity bill for us to follow. The first was that my part should be a lot smaller than this other guys (my house is about 1/6 the size of his) and that the money for the electricity should be given to the guardian (all big houses have a guardian who is kind of like the doormen in Arabic countries, does odd jobs for the occupants etc) who would then take it to the electricity people (Energie du Mali). When it finally came time to pay the bill, the husband (Souley) informed me that he wasn’t in agreement with the landlord and that we had to split the bill in half. His reason for this he said, was because computers use a lot of energy. Although I disagreed with him because I was paying triple or quadruple what I should be per month, I finally conceded in order to not make waves. Souley then told me that he didn’t trust the guardian and that we should give the money to him and that he would take care of taking it to the Energie du Mali. There were actually three other people who shared the meter with us and everyone ended up giving him their money too. Things continued like this for couple months without any problems.
One day about three months later, early in the morning I noticed that my fan had stopped turning and that the power had gone out suddenly as I lay in bed trying to sleep. I went outside to see what was going on and I saw a man standing in front of our energy meter fiddling with things. I asked him what was going and he said that no one had paid the bill in other three months and handed me the bill. I looked at it and sure enough, there was about 250.000 CFA (~$500 or ten times my monthly rent) of unpaid electricity that had accumulated.
I went downstairs and entered the small office that shares the meter with me to find that their power had been cut too. I showed them the bill that the man from the Energie had given me and we quickly put two and two together. It looks like for the past three months all the money we had given Souley to go pay the electricity had been “eaten” as they call it here.
Later on that day, we confronted Souley about what he had done. He was adamant in his denial of any wrongdoing whatsoever, claiming that the people from Energie had made some sort of a mistake and that they had wrongly calculated things, etc etc. As do many Malians, Souley has a gift for the oratory and listening to him talk, you really want to believe that he is telling you truth. One of the ways that people do this is through constant references to God, swearing in his name etc etc. In my experience it is very rare to hear Malians admit to doing anything wrong whether it be lying, cheating or stealing. At any rate all of us wanted to believe Souley so we told him to fix the problem with Energie however he could. He confidently told me Erich don’t worry you will have the power by tonite.
Although I didn’t notice any people from Energie come to turn back on the power, he was right I somehow magically had power in my house that nite. However, it mysteriously disappeared very early the next morning and I couldn’t find it anymore. Later on that day I was casually chatting with guardian when I mentioned to him the weird incident with the power last nite. He learned over to me very softly and said that Souley knew some strange method of turning the power back on, without the Energie people.
After hearing that, I started talking to people and found out that its not strange and its not mysterious and a lot of people do it. Evidently the system the Energie people use to cut off the power is not very sophisticated and quite easy to turn back on if you have the proper tools. The catch is that, if you are caught doing this, you will be thrown in prison and fined a minimum of about 1000$ (500.000CFA). The best way to avoid being caught is to do it at times that the Energie people are not active i.e. after normal working hours. What is especially interesting is that the Energie du Mali is well aware of people doing this but evidently has other ways of getting back at the population. For example, it is pretty well-acknowledged fact that they often overcharge people on their bills and it’s virtually impossible to “talk them down” once they have said that you owe them something. The supposed rationalization of this is that they know that people steal from them, so they can steal back.
After about of week this, I kind of developed a system of dealing with it. I didn’t spend much time at home until after dark, basically. At some point, the power came back on again and I was really happy so I didn’t ask too many questions. However, from that point onward, we never gave electricity money to Souley again instead preferring to go with the old plan of giving directly to the guardian.