Maa ngi tudd Gaberoo

Almost two weeks have passed since my arrival on The Dark Continent. Things are starting to settle in and I guess I’m getting used to living 14° north of the equator. Work is starting to pile up and I’ve made contact with the key players here in Senegal concerning the proposal I’ll be helping them with.

This post, however, is about a specific event. As I have mentioned, I managed to break my camera shortly after arrival. The poor camera has been through a lot with me – our journey together started late 2005 in Hong Kong. It even has gone swimming with me (cheers Karoline) and this is not the first time it needed to go to the doctor. Considering it’s age and the eventual cost, however, I wasn’t convinced that it would be worth getting it fixed and thus started researching possbile replacements. Now, the electronics retail industry here in Dakar doesn’t quite compare to the one back home: everything is sold by very sketchy vendors and at steep prices. I did find one of the two camera’s I decided on (for double what it would cost in Switzerland).

That being said, walked out of the store and decided to try one last random guy in the middle of the Sandaga Market (think Marrakech or the shouk in Yaffo) to see if he could fix my old camera and how much it would cost. Naturally, he immediatly offered to have his brother fix it for some price that magically appeared to him. And, in what must be one of my most daring business transactions I agreed. “Of coooourse, no probleeem. Give me a down payment and Monday morning 8am you will have your cameraaaaa,” he said. He even gave me a receipt, how could I doubt them??
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Remembering the words of a very “wise” friend of mine, “Es git kaini böse Mensche uff dere Wält”, (There are no bad people in this world), and since the value of the camera to me is zero if it is broken and I buy a new one, I decided to believe in the good nature of mankind. I do, however, wonder what your input would have been, had you been standing beside me at that point in time. So, here is a doodle where you can vote on if you think everything will be fine or if i just sold my broken camera for $-20.

Link for e-Mail and Facebook readers (go to my blog website for the full experience).

(I also wonder who actually reads these posts ) I will publish the following events as they occur.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 25th, 2009 at 17:30 and is filed under Senegal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.