Waiting... Waiting... Waiting...

Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez has made a career weaving stories about the magic in everyday life in the villages along Colombia’s Caribbean coast. In his story “No One Writes to the Colonel,” he recounts the tale of a retired military official who spends over twenty years waiting for his pension check to arrive. Throughout the time, the colonel remains convinced that the check will come in the next day’s mail. It is a story about the indomitable human spirit, about resilience and hope in the face of inefficient, corrupt and crumbling social institutions. It is also a story about the tedium of waiting.

We have become intimately familiar with this aspect of life in a culture where time is measured in days and seasons rather than in minutes and seconds. In a previous post on this blog, Wally has dubbed this “wongai time,” wongai being the Suissui word for “let’s go.” Whenever we are trying to get organized to go somewhere, there is a long period of “hurry up and wait,” of “wongai! wongai!” and then standing around waiting for an hour or two before we finally get going. And in the last few days we have become familiar with an aspect of wongai time that is closer to that faced by Garcia Marquez’s colonel.

Last week a couple of our group’s leaders had a chance meeting with the vice president of Guinea in a restaurant. They told him about our drumming course, and he was appreciative that our group had chosen Guinea and offered to help in any way he could. Our leaders decided it would be good for our group to meet the vice president. And the waiting began.

Now, of course the vice president of a country is a very busy man. While I know nothing of his daily schedule, I can imagine it is filled with meetings with diplomats, other politicians, leaders from cities and towns all over the country, business leaders and the like. And, like politicians everywhere, I am sure he also meets with his constituents and with private groups such as ours on occasion, in recognition of the important things ordinary people are doing in the country and also as a photo opportunity (although the value of a photo opportunity in a country with little press is debatable). But his time is valuable and getting a piece of it is not easy. Thus, we have been told for the past several days that we are waiting for a telephone call that will announce our visit with this important official.

On Friday we even went over to the military barracks where his residence is located to meet with him, but after waiting (in a comfortable room with air conditioning and a very emotional West African soap opera on the TV), we finally learned he would not be available and left. Since then we have been waiting for the call. Will we ever meet the vice president? Perhaps today…