"Are you going to blog about this?"

Rumor has it that the Roads Authority is paving the road outside our office. This is, ultimately, great news. For now, however, it means that the road leading to our office is dominated by tractors and rollers, and no one is allowed to drive or park on our road, so I've reverted to taxis as my commuting vehicles of choice. Yesterday afternoon, on my way home, I was sitting in the back seat of a yellow taxi, feeling hungry, sweaty, and tired, looking forward to getting home and taking my second of three showers of that day. When the driver pulled over to let out a passenger, I was surprised when the man in the front seat turned around and asked me, "Do you mind if I stop here for a few minutes? I need to go there and pick something up." He pointed across the street at the secondary school.

Keep in mind that these are taxis that run on scheduled routes: they'll pick you up and drop you off anywhere along the route, but that's it. If you want to deviate from the route, or loiter for any length of time, you get a Town Trip, i.e., you pay for your own taxi to take you wherever you choose. Thus my surprise and annoyance at the man's request to stop.

I was quiet for a moment, debating how annoyed to be in my reply. "No, I need to keep going," I said. He apologized and said it would just take a minute, and I sighed, preparing myself for some sort of interminable stop. Yet before I could settle too deeply in my cocoon of self-righteous annoyance, Mr. Quickstop was back. He had merely popped across the street to buy a bag of groundnuts from the old woman sitting on the side of the road. I could feel my little grey cloud lift as our taxi pulled back out into traffic.

As we proceeded along Kairaba Avenue, I half-listened as the man and the driver talked in a local language. From what I could tell, they seemed to be discussing how much money the taxi driver makes in a day, although I could only understand the few English words they sprinkled in their conversation. When the other back-seat passenger hopped out, the man in front turned around again to ask me, "Are you Peace Corps?" which is a question I hear a lot. I said no. He asked me if I spoke Mandinka, the language they'd been speaking. I told him that no, I only speak a little Wollof. "All the Peace Corps people these days, they all seem to speak Mandinka, so I thought maybe you could understand, sorry," he told me, apparently a bit concerned at having excluded me from their conversation.

Then he surprised me further by apologizing for his earlier stop. "I'm sorry about that," he said. "It's just that I promised someone I would bring groundnuts, and I forgot. Are you going to blog about this on the Internet?"

"No. Why?"

"It's just that, I didn't want to trouble you, that's why I asked your permission. You know, these Peace Corps people, any time something happens to them, they write about it in their blogs, and I don't like it when I'm reading there on the internet, and they're saying things about all of the bad things that have happened to them here." I assured him that no, no, I wasn't upset, that he had been very quick during his stop, that it wasn't a problem. Then, as we approached a mosque, he asked me whether I had ever considered becoming a Muslim. Again, I said no, not really, I don't know much about it, and he encouraged me to read the Qur'an.

Of course I need not point out the irony of blogging about a situation where I specifically told someone I wouldn't blog. And in some ways, I feel a bit like I've betrayed him by sharing this story. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt struck by the man's question, and I wanted to reflect on it. Even though I know that the Internet breaks down walls, and that there is nothing (save money and access to computers) to stop Africans from reading blogs written by Peace Corps volunteers and other sojourners, I still didn't really consider the possibility that non-Westerners were reading these cross-cultural chronicles, let alone moderating their behavior because of them.

While the man didn't actually go so far as to stay in the taxi when I told him that I needed to keep going, the fact that he bothered to ask permission of me, and not of the other passenger in the car, makes me realize that my presence here affects other people in ways I have not even imagined. Since our move here, I have been hyper-aware of all of the ways in which living here has changed me, but I never stopped to think about the ways in which my living here may affect Gambians. Sure, there is the obvious effect, I hope, of improving the lives of people who buy our lights. But I can't help but wonder, in what I hope is not too inflated a sense of self-importance, how else my presence affects the cultural climate, for better or worse. I can only hope that I will find out more as we go along.