After our first week here in Port-Gentil Olivier told me he found it "a bit scary"as to how long it took me to get used to having domestic help. In my opinion, though, it's not the getting used to that's worrysome, it's the going back to real life that scares me! We'll have to do all those things everyone hates doing - like bringing out the garbage (or washing your car, mowing the lawn, sweeping up fallen leaves, or even making your own bed..... the list goes on and on!) We have friends in town here who've been traveling the world like this for some 25 years, and they tell me the hardest part for their kids when they went off to college was to understand that their dorm rooms were not the "self-cleaning" type they had always known.
So, this blog is dedicated to two men who have become very important to our family in the short 8 1/2 months we've been here so far - AMADOU and MAMOUD
OU. Since everyone knows how we got here, here's the short history as to how these guys ended up here.Port-Gentil is a small, calm town located on the Atlantic coast, at the tip of what from a distance looks like a peninsula. The land is actually cut off entirely by rivers and waterways (including a beautiful, seemingly limitless bay), making this a very small island (30 miles north-south by 15 east-west I believe) populated by the local Gabonese, the expat oilfield peronnel and their families (us), and a few thousand men from much less affluent African countries, all here to carry out the "non-office" work that the Gabonese refuse to do. And that's where Amadou & Mamoudou come into the picture. They were hired by Olivier's company to "guard" the house, which in some countries I can imagine it's essential, but here it's more a form of providing employment and ensuring your guard mingles with the neighbors' guards and provides a general feeling that all is well and there's not much to steal in our house anyway.
- Amadou (from Mali) works at our house house during the daylight hours. In addition to 'guarding" the front gate, his tasks include pushing the kids on their swings, taking Cilia for a walk to the local store (small shack down the road) to get a lollypop, watering the plants (as seen above), feeding the Koumba the dog, washing our cars, and much more.
- Mamoudou(from Senegal) arrives in the evening and takes his TV set out into the road in front of the house, invites all the other guards from the neighboring houses, and watches the kids play in the dirt while watching TV (World Cup right now). I've learned it's best for me and my nervous system not to actually watch Jourdain and Cilia play out there, but to tell them not to drink anyone else's water, and then give them a good scrub when they come in. I just assume everything is cool if they don't have diarrhea the next day. All I know is they go out looking like little foreigners and come back as dark as the Gabonese kids they play with.
For a map of Port Gentil and its location on Manji Island, click here:
