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Showing posts from July, 2007

One way - the only way

They have told me that I should have anticipated what I came to see in Africa. I must have been very naive if I thought I could understand Africa and live like they do. I ought to have known that. A job for a Danish NGO in the third world can only be colonial. I know everything now and I always thought about every step I was to take, but coming to African was no anticipation. I stepped into a place where I had no clues. I was in a different dimension walking on the moon. What I saw working for a Danish NGO was so much more extreme than I could ever have imagined. We used to make fun of Greenland saying that people go there to make revolution after they didn't succeed at home. You will see the same in Africa. White NGO's go to Africa to realise lost dreams of life using old fashion technologies that we in Europe consider to be graveyard trash. Before it was buildings and machines. Today it is organisational skills, social structures and falling down dreams that can never come tr

Between continents

We change after some years and become black but still bear a burden on our skin. In adopting the behaviours of our brothers and sisters. She begins to have the demands to her boyfriend that her black girlfriends have. She has begun to think like them. They have told me that if I stay in Africa more than 5 years, then I will never go home. I look myself in the mirrow and I am not sure where I am. His wife acts like a bitch and his black friends all tell him that he should not be so soft on her. "She takes you for granted - you'll have to discipline her". Discipline has never been my idea of a wife. Is she my daughter? I begin to forget the reasons to respect her. He will begin to talk hard to the woman next to him and not accept any argument from her, because she does not have anything to say. In the evenings he has begun to do what all black men are doing to ease his mind after days of his wife's bitchy quarrelling. I go out with other women. They will be gentle and

Living in the fifties

Taking care of a woman I do not love. We cannot have sex, because there is no tension between us. She is like a rock in my bed, and I am on top of her for no reason. I am in time machine. Gone back in time. Everything is possible now.