Fits, Starts and A dark view...

I have now been out here for just over eighty days, days which have sometimes felt like they have been punctuated by starts and stops. There were the two weeks of self-quarantining in which nothing seemed to happen, then a two day week occasioned by the Eid al-Adha holidays, and most recently a three day week for the National Day Holidays. Though somewhat an accident of timing, I have been grateful for the opportunities to break the monotony of work;  up by 4 am, on a bus by 6 am, back home by 5 pm wash-rinse-repeat, and the gifts holidays sometimes bring, like a large tray of meat I got during the previous Eid holidays.

Coming from the ‘Deen where what bank holidays we got were added to our annual entitlement, it is a strange feeling for everything work-related to shut down and for everyone to eschew emails and work phone calls completely. It does bring back memories of working in Nigeria many years ago. For what it is worth, I will not be complaining about forced breaks from work, given these are days I would have been loath to take off, being the new guy and all.  Unfortunately, the borders are still not open, and all the holidays have meant delays to my paperwork (I still don’t have a drivers licence yet), so the free days are lost on me, although they have helped me catch up with friends and family around the world and reduce my sleep deficit.

A consequence, surely intended one suspects, of the dawn to dusk routine and the lack of mobility - besides iffy taxis - is that the eighty days have been spent very much in a bubble with little interaction besides the immediate locale. As such I have not had much opportunity to dispel or confirm the notions of the country I have in my head. Speaking of notions, there is a narrative that is often repeated which paints the West as bastions of personal freedoms, opportunities and the rule-of-law and elsewhere as somewhere between a backwater and a shit-hole. Each new revelation of what is at-best underhand, and at worst kleptocratic with regards to the UK’s handling of COVID related contracts makes me wonder if every country is not only a group of bumbling idiots  - and failed checks and balances - away from the precipice of self-destruction and avarice.

All of this makes me wonder what the trajectory of human existence is. The last few years seem to suggest that perhaps all the gains of the 19th and 20th century - and there have been great gains as the RBG eulogies show - were an aberration and that we are reverting to our darkest, basest means again. An altogether dark view perhaps, but on the evidence of 2020, one that is not inconceivable.