expat disease number 3: they don't scream

the third and most insidious expat disease is:
is...I'm afraid to spell that word,
but is: racism.
there are two different shape of racism.
The first one, and the most simple to explain, is the racism against institutions. If you work in Tibet you end up hating Chinese government, that all see and preview, and if you work in Palestine, at the end you hate the government that prevent you to give basic service to women and children.

The second one is more difficult to explain. Maybe because, fortunately, I'd never fell in that trap.
Let me try to explain: you come from a so called developed country. You have social security, free education, democracy, newspapers, hundred of choice for university, motorbike with compulsory helmet, traffic lights, and credible policemen. And you have the right of all this.
You arrive to a country where there is not even water. Where communities are left alone to solve their basic problems because government cannot, economically, take care of them.
And then you start to visit the communities to identify the felt needs, and they tell you they are missing water. And in the meanwhile it's raining cats and dogs.
And so you simply ask: why you do not put a bucket now, to harvest enough water at least to cook and wash dishes today?
And the answer is: Ahhhh!
But then they don't.
Why?
Why the hell Masaai do not put a fucking bucket to collect water when it's raining?
The fact is they are not really waiting for the Mzungu to come like an Harry Potter and waving the stick, solving the problem.
The fact is that life is like this.
Always been.
Since centuries ago.

And whites are coming spreading incomprehensive circumlocutions about cooperation and community building.
And if at the end, they have a tap close to their house, they say: thanks god. Of course, thanks to the NGO, but thank god who brought the NGO to us.

This kind of racism, the one who make you think that some communities are hopeless, usually come to people who lived for more than ten years in the same developing country, in this case, in my mind, Tanzania.
They see the infinitive possibilities they have, and they see them not taking advance from them.

You loose hope, and you start to hate them for what they are loosing.

I saw a girl, the day before resign, saying 'bloody monkeys' to a community. She was definitely burned out, and,
she was crying.
She could not understand.

For me, I was lucky.
I understood all the day I saw a woman deliver a couple of twins in a Masaai hut.
They called me to drive her to an hospital because she was too far in pain.
I was waiting out of the hut, at 6 in the morning, and then the father came to tell me that was all gone, and everything went good, and I could go to work.
The thing that surprised me?
She never screamed.

first bucket of water celebration

in the car

The car is you first home, first office.
You spend more time in the car than in the bed.
doesn't matter how close is a village in kilometers, in rural areas you can also spend seven hours to make 30 km.
That actually was my record, and that day I was driving. Rainy season in Tanzania.
You can imagine that, once arrived, was too dark to do anything.
I almost cried thinking on the way back.
It's never entertaining get stock in the mud in the savanna by night.
Alone.
With a water war ongoing.
And your car, white, with a huge logo of the organisation working in water.
Fucking visibility.
And a crazy elephant in the surrounding killing people, so that they were organizing patrols to kill him.
So everybody was already armed.
But that is a border case.
For example, Tajik people are not famous to be cheerful, so in the long hours to the villages listen to so much music that I could not stand silence anymore.
In Tibet we were chatting all the time, sharing stories.
In Nepal, so far, road are quite good, so I work. Reading stuff I've never time to read.
In Haiti, everything but watching outside. Half naked people living in moldy shelters and you knew that 70% of them had AIDS and almost the totality of women were raped since after the earthquake.
The car.
When it's broken you feel lost, worst than a tragedy. All your plans become ash. you held improvised and nervous meetings with the staff in order to get the car ready yesterday and try to stick with the plans.
Once I almost deliver some pipes with donkeys, just because the day before, after a almost violent arguing with a chairman, we ended up like this:
"I do not gather the people to dig the trenches because I do not trust anymore Mzungu (whites) who come here to help us"
"So tomorrow you will have your pipes and then you will explain your people why they are not having an aqueduct. I swear on my mom"
Of course the car brake.
And when I start to rave about donkeys, my driver told me about this car of a relative.
Saving a donkey.

Now I love to stay so many hours in a car. In Nepal I have a driver, I didn't drive yet myself, maybe because it's too crowded and messy, between cars, monkeys, cows and chariots, so I sit and think.
Hours a day to think.

About future and about past.
Missed opportunities and improbable developments.
And still I like it.

limit case...but also happened. Tajikistan 2006. The car is a Niva.

Fishing (expat disease number two)

Burning out is when you are so stressed, so under pressure, so exhausted that you lose the north, and you start to make reasoning that doesn't look fool only to you.

Is not a pleasant situation.
You do not sleep, you do not eat, you do not have sexual impulses, you get hungry for a trifle, simple problems appear like insurmountable peaks that drives you in a blue and dark deeep hole.

It's more frequent in places where the word 'airiness' is a dusty fossil, like South Sudan, Iraq or the refugees camps, but the Burning Out is like the devil rabbit of Donnie Darko. It's pops up whenever you are not ready for.

Not funny.

Even if some funny stories comes from this.
Like this man, so exhausted but still too proud to resign, first he purchased a gun because he was sure the logistician wanted to kill him, then went for a weekend on the sea side trying to relax, and finally he tough was a good idea to use the gun for fishing and shoot his feet. The last drop.
But he won a long holiday.
Nobody knows if he shoot himself in purpose to run away, I was told that he confessed so once.
But maybe because, when is mind came back on the straight way, he realized the idiocy he made, that he felt ashamed.
That was his last mission forever.

Expats has an expiring date.

Expat diseases number 1

I just read an article ten minutes ago.

Expats are subject to alcoholism, pedophilia and burning out.

Alcoholism it's true. when you go home and you have to digest all the work you have done is felling apart, that you built an aqueduct based on community cooperation , and now people is chopping neighbor fingers off with a machete to have some more drops of water, you drink.
You are stressed. You work 14 hours a day and then you go home and still you have to reply emails, then you go to sleep and you think about all the problems waiting for you tomorrow, and to escape from all this, you drink.
You pass all your week in the field, with no water, no electricity, no girlfriend, you come back to the city and you drink.

You often live in places with no cinemas, no theaters, no TV, no bookshops, no parks, so you meet with the few friends you have (temporaries and selected by necessity), and drink.
Moreover alcoholism is a wide spread problem in most of the ex-violent or still-violent countries. Drunk men do not do the revolution, at the most the beat up wives and children. But those categories are not famous to have their right recognized. So alcohol is usually very cheap. And very bad.
And because not everybody has time to open a bottle and share with good friends, they often sell surrogates of gin or whiskey in plastic mono-dose bags. If you have a couple of coins in your pocket, you can drink at least a sip. You have no ideas of the thousand of those small plastic bags sold in the last small village lost in the savanna. So everybody drinks because it's easy.
But the alcoholism of the in-country people is different and much more bitter than the expats' alcoholism. Expats run away from the stress, people run away from their lives taking the only path available.

You don't care if you turn yourself into a sub-human monster unable to speak clearly and to walk to the toilet. In a year or two you will change country and you can start fresh to ruin your reputation again.
Or, worse, become the king of the expat social life.
I was unable to drink before starting this job. My friends made fun of me saying I was getting drunk with a coke.
And then happened Tajikistan. At the beginning I though was funny to be received in the villages always with a vodka. At the beginning.

Everything it's funny at the beginning.