Abidjan--National Lampoons Tries to do a Conflict Assessment

The past few days have been on par with a Salvador Dali painting—surreal. I'm going to preface this entry with the knowledge that a blog cannot express how BIZARRE the last 48 hours were. When I return stateside, I'll do my best to relay the information. As another word of caution, this is an extremely long post. I didn't post yesterday because I knew that there would be so much more to add today.

In any case, we went from one extreme to the other. Our first meeting yesterday was at the home of the electoral counsel. It was a palace--armed guards, beautiful winding staircases, tables with lapis lazuli inlays--the works. I literally almost ran into the British Ambassador, who had a look on his face like "Dit quoi?!" "Say what?! Who are these two little white girls?" At this meeting, we sat with the entire senior leadership of the electoral counsel who are some of the most important people in the country. I was extremely nervous. To make matters worse, they switched up the system of questioning such that I read all of the questions at once instead of a back and forth kind of thing. I got totally flustered and made a semi-fool of myself. No harm, though. He and his team took a picture with us in the end. They were extremely nice and their meeting room was delightfully well air conditioned. Anything that is well air conditioned is a.o.k. in our books.

Now, the surrealism started after our meeting with the electoral counsel. We went to the other end of the richesse spectrum to the local college dorms. Yuck. I'll post some pictures later. Earlier in the week we had mentioned that we wanted to meet with some students and some of the questions that we came up with pertained to a militant student organization. So, our nice Ivoirian hosts asked if we wanted to meet with that organization. We thought, sure? Why not? We'll be relatively safe. The team worked on it and set up a meeting with the second in command of this organization for yesterday.

When we arrived on campus and got out of our taxi, everyone was either giving us the stink eye (especially the women) or the "Dit quoi?!" face. Mostly, the students are very suspect of foreigners and DESPISE the French, so seeing us was kind of a shock. In any case, we stood under a tree for awhile until a street urchin like child came up and spoke with one of our Ivoirian counterparts to tell him that the secretary general was ready. We had no idea what to expect. As we were walking up toward the dorm, I saw a group of about 50 students sitting outside and I immediately thought that we were going to have to go to some sort of counsel and be grilled by these people. It was going to be like Blood Diamond right there on the college campus. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), the urchin took us up to a random dorm room where a group of about 6 extremely buff 22-30 year-old guys were standing. One of them stepped forward and introduced himself and led us into his room.

Now, this dorm was somewhat like an American dorm. For the U of I-ers, kind of like a room in the Six Pack. But, envision a room in the Six Pack that had not seen a good cleaning or a single repair since 1960. Then picture it with unreliable electricity and no computers and you have the dorms in this building. Our host had his own room, but the tiny rooms sometimes hold 5 people. No good. Needless to say, there wasn't a ton of room in this place. So, poor Amy had to sit on this guy's bed. It was creepy to the max. One thing I will say is that this leader was not creepy in the least. He was tall, buff, handsome and charming--almost disarmingly so. If I didn't know that he had ransacked several offices in the previous year, I would have thought he was your average passionate student leader. Who knows what else he had done? Amy said that as she brushed arms with this guy and looked at the Valentine that he had posted on his cork board that she couldn't help but wonder where this guy's small cache of weapons was. I was astounded by the number of cell phones that he had. There were at least 6 in plain view.

During the whole preliminary interview, I tried to maintain eye contact and both be as unthreatening as possible (not a difficult task for me) and as confident as possible (slightly more challenging when you're facing a thug). For the most part, the pre-interview went well except for a slight bobble when the SG asked our partners if they were Ivoirians. They quickly responded that they were because this organization has been known for their violence against non-Ivoirians. At the end of the meeting, we set up a time to have the formal interview for the next day (today). This would give the SG enough time to call his superior and ensure that our questions were ok to answer and prepare somewhat official answers.

After the meeting, the SG was kind enough to walk us out and get a cab. Let me tell you, our reception on campus TOTALLY changed. There were no more stink eyes. There were some "dit quoi" faces, but they looked at us in a totally different light. Amy compared it to walking with the star quarterback. When we got to the street to flag down a cab, several young men came up and bowed and saluted the SG. That creeped me out and I kept thinking, "Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore." As we were leaving, we couldn't believe that we would have to come back the next day.

Last night, I had not a very good night's sleep. Partially, because the power went out and the air conditioner stopped running, but partially because I was nervous about our meeting today. I didn't know who I would be meeting with and what they might have done. In any case, we were supposed to meet with the SG and his group at 11. However, 11 came and went with no word on when the meeting would happen. This was a power play on their end to show how they could manipulate us and push us around. Noon came and we were getting hungry so we ordered food. About 10 minutes after we ordered food, the call came that it was time to meet with them. We wanted to make sure that we ate so we did our own "power play" back and were a little bit tardy.

This time, we knew where we were going and called up before heading to the dorm room. I still cannot believe that we were meeting in a dorm room. Today, when we got up there the SG had a random girl sprawled across his bed, which ended up being a good thing so that no one had to sit on the bed with him. The unprofessionalism continued with them keeping the TV on (on mute) while the interview was going on. It was totally bizarre. My interviewing skills had improved by this point, so I was able to make connections and light conversation instead of simply reading my prepared questions. It was all-in-all very bizarre, though. We got our information and left in one piece.

You would think that the surrealism would end after meeting with the militant student organization. But, you would be wrong. After we had finished our second interview of the day, one of the directors of our partner organization informed us that the ruling party in the country had asked us to a night "out on the town" with dinner and dancing. This was problematic for many reasons, not least of which was that we had (and continue to have) nothing that would be appropriate to wear to this event. Other problematic aspects were that this could be a potentially dangerous outing and could jeopardize our mission of writing a fair and impartial report of the conflict here. When the director told us this, Amy and I went into a little bit of a panic. I didn't want to be rude to the party but I thought that this was a terrible idea. Amy was trying to figure WWUSAIDD, What Would USAID Do? There were a frantic 20 minutes when we couldn't get a hold of our chief of party. Amy finally called our Gambian colleague to get his take on the situation. He agreed with us that there should be no reason why we would go to this soiree. Therefore, I politely called our director and told him that we were very grateful for the offer, but would have to decline. It was crazy.

You might wonder why we started panicking at this offer. This offer was not a sincere, "Let me show you a nice time in Abidjan." The politicians basically wanted to show us the riches of Abidjan and how wonderful the work is that they are doing. Yeah right. It was crazy time.They were were going to use us as a propaganda machine again and try to influence us to say nice things about all the progress CI has made under their regime in our report. You used us as pawns once, ruling party, but not again!

Instead, Amy and I went back to our hotel, ate some pasta and drank some Flags (which have thankfully been replenished). As an indicator of how crazy our day was, when we told one of our interviewees that we met with the militant group, he gave the "dit quoi" face and looked at us with shock. This was from a man with a PhD in statistics. This whole day was like National Lampoons tries to do a Conflict Assessment. Thankfully, this time next week I will be sitting on my couch watching TV and eating all the American food I can stomach. I'm one tired puppy and am ready for some boneless, skinless chicken.