Just to give you sense of how insular the life is here . . . I walk out my door at about 8:45, hop into a UN vehicle with a UN driver (from the Central African Republic), and he drives me to work (which is literally only about a 20 minute walk away).
Most people in CAR walk when they want to go somewhere. Most western NGO employees tend to take taxis or have cars. The lives the the NGO staff and the regular work-a-day Central Africans are polar opposites: there isn’t very much “formal enterprise” here, in the sense that people can work for anyone or any larger business. Even people who have been in other African countries are bit surprised by how little is being done (in the ways of commerce) here. I talked to an economist from Burkina-Faso today and he just described the Central Africans as being plain old lazy: “they just don’t want to work.”
This pretty much typifies a certain view of CAR. Some just think that they’re not interested in development. A simple example is right outside my window: they’ve been “paving” a road outside of my office for the past month now . . . and even according to people I work with, they seem to only be pushing around dirt, day after day.
That said, there tend to be a few types of people that I work with: those that think it’s horrible here and see no way that it’ll improve without serious intervention (of the kind that the UN cannot provide), those that think that it’s a gradual process and you just do what you can with what you’ve got and hope you’re making forward progress, and those that are doing a tour-of-duty and cannot wait to get out (and try and spend as much time outside of CAR as possible). I have to say, I feel like I understand all three positions pretty well after only being here a week.
