A Step To Make To Kick Start Things

Where I live, it's not likely to catch sight of people warmly shaking hands when they exchange their morning hello and rush their ways. Such sights are a rarity, and if you're lucky enough to witness one make sure to have it recorded on your video camera. The next day the same luck won't be in store for you. An explanation that comes to mind for this weird habit is that people are too busy to have any time to spare on social formalities. Yet in spite of their hardworking nature and their strict ethics of work, people here are mindful of manners and social decorum. You don’t need to shake hands and bow in respect to your boss to move up in your job. The same way you don't need to go through that painful ritual to win the favor of a girl friend. And, to my mind, if you can secure a stable income and a warm bed you will never feel under pressure to do anything against your will. (lol). Guaranteed. Take my word for it. So, what has gone wrong? Why diligent and caring people fail what is for us, Mauritanians, a basic test of hospitality and openness? The answer lies in some other more subtle layers of this complex Western self. It has to do with their individuality and the network of attitudes that follow from it. But without going down that philosophical road, I would said that these people don't associate on a random basis. I mean, it's not because we crossed each other around some street corner or sat down in the same down-town coffee that we have to be friends and exchange stories and family photos. In the West, it doesn't work that way. People don't associate with foreigners but with those with whom they have something in common. Doctors hold the company of doctors, policemen with their work colleagues, lawyers with lawyers, and prostitutes with their kind. Any mix would be explosive and doomed. These professional categories are worlds apart and if they intermingle "Inna lillahi wa inna ileihi rajioun" (lol). The point is that individuals are dedicated to what they chose to do in life, and dedication means devoting time and energy to one's plans. If it happens that you find a doctor who is involved with some law enforcement business, have worries that something wrong is going on, and so on. Go and call the law enforcements, don't call the hospital services (lol). In the West these professional communities have taken the place of traditional categories like tribe, ethnitcity, region, gender, etc. You don't introduce yourself as John from the Vikings, or Jane from the Celts, and so on. Instead you are known for what you do not for what your ancestors did, and by the same token you move up or down in society according your success of failure in what you do. We call this social mobility. About time to see how the story unfolds on the other side of the Atlantic, at home, in Mauritania.

I'm not going to spend more time telling you how and why we shake hands. Yet, it'll do good to endure the embarrassment of failing your expectations. We shake hands, because we don’t know why. To us, it's just because it's the right thing to do. If you don't share this abrupt conclusion go and organize your own polls. The result would be 50 percent of thinking Mauritanians never thought about the question, and the remaining fifty percent find it too obvious to ponder. So we don't know why. I have to retrieve some scenarios from the day to day life in order to refresh your memories and help you fathom out the gravity of the issue before you make up your minds. It's commonplace in the National Hospital to see a patient being rushed to the emergency department while the doctor on shift is busy performing some handshaking at the far end of the passageway. Shocking as it is, the doctor will observe social manners, mindless of his professional duty. The social voice inside him is capable of suppressing and silencing that of the doctor, never mind the cost is the life of his patient. Out in the street where you are spared the trouble of looking too far to find another example. At the nearest roundabout, you will find a heavy-bearded, tall and flyweight policeman grapping someone else's hands with his own. The traffic jam is awful, as expected. You start wondering where is the policemen and why it's a mess on our poorly paved roads? The answer will be something like a returned question: where's the doctor and why we lose our lives only in hospitals. Why don't we change the name of hospitals to cemeteries and save the financial cost of treatment? And so on and son on, the list is too long to name. Our teachers are involved in politics and the business of "tsamsir". Our Imams perform their daily fife prayers and go to attend their overnight tribal meetings, and I let you draw your conclusions. Our ladies who hold high positions in the administration have been high on our ministers' entertainment list before they make it to the public spotlight. Example are too many to count.

No wonder then that nothing works the way it should be in this land of ours. No wonder we're a world apart. You earnestly ask yourself why the pervasive tribalism, the rampant racism and all sorts of evils that are turning the country into a real quagmire. It's indeed mind-boggling. One likely answer is that we still shake hands, we still have a long way to go before we behave in professional terms and organize in professional communities. As long as we exchange the question "Ente men ey lekhoutt" when we first meet we will not be able to perform efficiently in the workplace. Everyone of us will be the sum total of everything, which means that he is nothing. We have to change if we want to see things moving forward in the this country.

I hope the day will come when I go to "Marsatt Capital" and be able to tell the lawyer, the bank-manager, the "decent-looking" prostitute, the professor, the "teifay", the Immam, to tell these people from each other. Now, no way I can. All look same to me.

mom