In 2006 I returned from Sénégal, for non PD health
reasons, to my first-half-of-my-life home: Vancouver. I immediately started looking for a job. I’d been a professor of web design and head of the
program in Dakar. I did not expect the same here. And I was in a hurry: I had
no money and I wanted to sponsor my Senegalese husband to join me in Vancouver.
I only found two interesting job prospects in the
first two weeks: the first was in tech support for a software company where I
would work mostly in French. It hadn’t been easy acquiring my level of fluency
and I didn’t want to lose it. After nearly twenty years of living in la Francophonie I felt comfortable in my francophile skin. It was, however, a regimented corporate
environment where supervisors would be monitoring my calls and
timing, and no doubt counting, my
bathroom breaks. It did come with
some advantages: including guaranteed paycheques, vacation pay, and extended
health benefits. After years of
determining my work priorities and structuring my own time, it was a milieu very
foreign to me. I hesitated. (Did I mention work started at 6:30 am out in a suburb south of Vancouver?).
The 2nd job was way more “me”: as a web
content writer for a socially progressive, in-house (literally – the office was
in the directors’ home) media consulting firm.
The interview went really well. As I felt comfortable
in an African print suit, I knew I could be myself there.
The Director (who had just had a baby!) was very
dynamic and encouraging about my candidacy. As my writing for the web had not
been exactly the same type of writing as they required, she asked to read my
other writings. So I sent some less “creative
non-fiction” pieces, including, an art project proposal, and 3 Sounds of where I live, written for a BBC World Service radio competition in
2003, when i lived in Dakar.
Here comes my foot...
3 Sounds of where I live
I live in a quiet place, well quiet for Africa, quiet
most of the time - except for three regular distinct sounds. The first (and
most frequent) is the sound of the northbound airplanes taking off several
hundred meters away at the Léopold Sédar Senghor International Airport. Each
one taking with it the stowaway hopes of too many young senegalese, their eyes
tracing the contours of tiny windows.
If at night a new plane catches me unawares - light off, door open - for that passing moment the bathroom becomes a pulsating, flashing disco...
The second, and less frequent sound at precisely 5 times a day, is the sound of the muezzin calling prayers. Actually, 2 muezzin. Two neighbourhood mosques maintain a polite, if amplified, competition for the attendance of the faithful. They call to mind my "first" - one early frozen pre-dawn in a small mustard coloured hotel room in Jerusalem - before this Intifada, before this Zionist holy war - through a single tiny window high up in the higher than wide wall, the muezzin cast a shivering spell with a single crescent blade sharp star.
The third sound is constant. Water. The crashing of waves several hundred meters away on the pirogue strewn beach of the Lébou fishing village of Tonghor. Or, it is night-long: the old-dishwasher swooshing of our neighbours' dysfunctional air conditioner. But of all of this, it is the (intimate) first-thing-in-the-morning running of the absolution water that consistently wakes me up.
If at night a new plane catches me unawares - light off, door open - for that passing moment the bathroom becomes a pulsating, flashing disco...
The second, and less frequent sound at precisely 5 times a day, is the sound of the muezzin calling prayers. Actually, 2 muezzin. Two neighbourhood mosques maintain a polite, if amplified, competition for the attendance of the faithful. They call to mind my "first" - one early frozen pre-dawn in a small mustard coloured hotel room in Jerusalem - before this Intifada, before this Zionist holy war - through a single tiny window high up in the higher than wide wall, the muezzin cast a shivering spell with a single crescent blade sharp star.
The third sound is constant. Water. The crashing of waves several hundred meters away on the pirogue strewn beach of the Lébou fishing village of Tonghor. Or, it is night-long: the old-dishwasher swooshing of our neighbours' dysfunctional air conditioner. But of all of this, it is the (intimate) first-thing-in-the-morning running of the absolution water that consistently wakes me up.
 |
| pirogues and sheep - Lébou fishing village of Tonghor. |
***
I knew the word Intifada,
but try as I might and in spite of 6 months spent in Israel, I couldn’t find a Hebrew equivalent … so I wrote “Zionist Holy War”.
After much positive feedback from the Jewish director, I was suddenly “not
a good fit” for their firm…
Offered the corporate job, I accepted. A year later
when my undiagnosed condition forced me to stop working there, they offered extended benefits. The
other job had not. I never for a moment thought I’d be gone for good but I knew that some disability income would keep me
alive in the meantime…
SAVED:
By Luck, as
an apparently envious friend dared call my diagnosis of an incurable, degenerative
neurological disorder! I was lucky not
having to work BECAUSE I had
Parkinson’s and received Long Term Disability Benefits until age 65.
or
By Fate
- Putting
my Foot in my Mouth at the Right Place at the Right Time…
Sending her the piece with the ill-judged use of the
word “Zionist” changed the financial reality of the subsequent 19 years of my
life in major way. That must be more than random chance…mustn’t it?
