Waiting

We are winding down here.

We are down to two more times at church, two more times to tutor, two more long prayer times, and two more weeks.  We are ready to come home.

Sally has been working on the final hour-long prayer time she will lead on the 9^th, the day we leave.  She is doing it on the concept of “time”.  Her thoughts are quite poetic and profound; mine are more cynical.  Let me share mine first.

I need to modify the line, “Everything takes time in Africa,” to “Everything takes a long time in Africa.”  Let me give you a couple of examples.

Every so often we drive up to a place for brochettes, small shish kabobs, This place is out of doors so you can drive up to order. They are cooking on a grill that is right out by the street.  Don’t think of a drive up window.  It is not McDonalds.  To me it is the symbol of African time.  One night I spent more than 45 minutes waiting for my over cooked food.  I learned that if you don't order French fries with it the wait could be cut down to 15 minutes.  Fast Food, I don’t think so?  

Along this line, I go to the bank with the Finance guy (Stan) to get cash to pay the employees, for expenses, and for cash withdrawals for people like me.  He calls ahead and tells them how much cash he needs. We go to the bank and the first thing he does is to get a signature from his account manager.  Then he has to get a signature from one of the customer service people.  After many trips, we worked out that while he is doing this I get in line.  Often there are 5 or fewer people in line.  Three windows but only one is open.  We have waited over an hour many times.  Even when he gets to the window, with his two signatures, it still takes the teller 10 minutes or more to get the money.  We have no idea what she does during this time because there is no customer communication.  Since she is doing us a favor by giving us the Bank’s money she does not have to be nice about it.

Talk about waiting, add the Internet speed or often no speed to these two examples and you’ve got days of accumulated time spent doing nothing but waiting. 

However, many people here would say they much prefer the pace of life in Africa better than that of the United States.  Slower is good.  Hectic is bad.  I buy that   But I have to say too slow is not good and hectic once and a while is not all bad.  Showing just a little awareness of people waiting and waiting would not be all that inconsiderate.  Instead waiting time has gone the way of plastic bags in the streets, you just get used to it.  Well, not everybody gets used to it. 

Then there is the concept of “meeting time.”  Our prayer time is at 9:45.  At 9:45 there is Sally and I.  Then at 9:50 or so the other expats arrive.  Sometime between 9:55 and 10:05 the locals wander in.  Prayer time takes about 20 minutes so we break for the 10:00 break time around 10:20 or 10:30.  We are even late for coffee. 

Doesn’t matter.  They don’t worry about time here.  If you are talking to someone and are supposed to go to a meeting, you finish with the person first.  They live in the present.  What a dreadful thing to do when you could live like I do, in the future.  Always worried about the next thing to do.  Even the lady with 8 kids doesn’t let herself be a soccer mom.  She gets tired but she doesn’t get harried. 

Lastly, you can’t take time seriously when you’ve built in a thing called “nap time.”  Shutting down for two hours in the middle of the day is so inefficient.  I just hate having to participate in this ritual… but I force myself to go with the flow so to speak.