Joy Ride

Like most people who can afford it here, I have a guy who I pay to come to my house a few times a week to clean the house and wash my clothes. I'm pretty hopeless when it comes to washing clothes by hand and it's pretty hard to keep things clean with all the dust in the air. (It hasn't rained a drop since early September and now we're in the windy season.) It's a pretty convenient arrangement and it's an opportunity to pay someone for doing valuable work in a country where there are tons of people with no money and no way to earn any. His name is Issaka and he's been very reliable ever since I hired him back in September. You hear a lot of stories of people having trouble with their domestic workers, but it's typically pretty minor stuff--a suspicion that the sugar is running out more quickly than it should be, a missing bottle of coke, some small change disappearing from a countertop, that sort of thing. I never had any problems like this, and because Issaka came through the recommendation of somebody I know pretty well I didn't worry much about it.

Much to my surprise and confusion, I got a call from Issaka last Thursday saying that my car had gotten in an accident. I assumed he meant that somebody had hit or scratched my car where it was parked at my house, but it quickly became clear that he was talking about an accident somewhere in town. Apparently, he had found my duplicate key and decided to impress his girlfriend by taking her in my car to a baptism (baptisms are big social events here). The accident was clearly Issaka's fault and he was pretty lucky that the other car (a military officer and his chauffeur) managed to swerve enough to reduce the impact of the collision, so nobody was hurt. And it turned out--to my surprise--that he actually has a license, so they didn't arrest him on the spot. In all it's going to cost me about $200 to fix the car (my insurance covered the damage to the other car, but not mine), plus the inconvenience of sending my car to the repair shop for a few days and the hassle of spending half a day at the police station, which of course included paying a $10 bribe for the "gas" required for the police to go from the station to the scene of the accident. Issaka doesn't have any money so clearly he can't pay for the damage. And I'm not particularly interested in holding him in some kind of indentured servitude until he's worked off his debt, as a few people have suggested. The police told me I could press charges against him, which would virtually assure that he would go to prison, but that seems unnecessarily harsh. (Take a moment to imagine prison conditions in a country where a sizable chunk of the "free" population won't have enough to eat in any given year.) I told Issaka I couldn't trust him to work in my house anymore and he actually managed to make me feel guilty for firing him. He doesn't seem to understand that the accident itself is less of a problem than the fact that he took my car and he keeps pleading with me that losing his job would be a huge shame for him, his brother (who recommended him to me), and his whole family.

One of the most unfortunate aspects of incident like this is how people use it to reinforce a lot of ugly notions. Issaka is a Tuareg, a minority ethnic group, so most of the Nigeriens I know have reacted to my story with some version of "these Tuaregs, they're all thieves and they never do any honest work". A lot of ex-pats have offered the "these people! You can never trust them" advice. Even Issaka's brother Ismael, when he came to apologize and thank me for not pressing charges, made me pretty uncomfortable talking about how Issaka's problem is that he just doesn't know how to behave according to his own position ("we poor Africans shouldn't get ideas about living like white people"). It's also frustrating because I always try to avoid taking the condescending and suspicious attitude toward Nigeriens that I see in a lot of my friends and colleagues, but an incident like this is a pretty vivid reminder that there are a lot of people here who, given the opportunity, will take advantage of your trust. Some of my friends have suggested, not unreasonably, that because I treated Issaka like a friend and an equal instead of as an inferior, he probably figured it wouldn't cost him his job if I found out that he took my car (not counting on the accident).

I went to check on the car on Saturday and it was an amusing site. It's in the courtyard of the mechanic's house, propped it on its side at about a 45 degree angle. I was supposed to get it back yesterday, but the mechanic wasn't finished. He told me he was done with everything except the paint. He couldn't paint yesterday because it was too windy and dust would have gotten in the paint. I ought to be able to pick it up this evening, insha'Allah.