The River Horse Report: Typical

My weekly trip to the grocery store this morning included an experience that is just so typical of our time here in Africa. Overall, it was quite a successful trip. The store had parmesan cheese (which had been out of stock for months, and by out of stock I mean none anywhere in town, rumor is that the one importer in the whole country had his truck stopped at the border, possibly for failing to provide proper, ahem, compensation to the border guards and it was held up for so long that the whole shipment went bad and it took another month or so to get the next shipment) and nice looking eggplant, both of which were on my list. They also had the greek yogurt I like and the little baby bell mini cheeses K likes in her school snack (stocking up for the last week of school next week, sniff sniff, tears). In fact, I found everything on my list and I got in early enough that I beat the crowd and check out lines were short, all of which was very exciting. Then, in the checkout line I noticed that the foil seal on top of the six-pack of small fruit yogurts I picked up for the girls was defective on one of the yogurts. It wasn't sealed properly and was leaking a bit. I brought this to the attention of the check out person and she sent the bagger off to pick up a new one, all of which made perfect sense and was surprisingly efficient. Things went off the rails when the woman came back with another one which was also defective, explaining that "they are all like that." And then they were both surprised and somewhat offended when I said no, I won't be buying the improperly sealed yogurt regardless of whether they are all like that or not!

The yogurt is a small, almost insignificant thing, but it is such a typical example of how things go wrong here. The yogurt is sold under an international brand but is packaged and distributed locally. I have seen their plant in town. So, something obviously went wrong at the packaging level but instead of deciding that it was not appropriate to send out an improperly packaged product the plant went right ahead and shipped out a batch of leaky yogurt. So, fail one for the plant. Then, the store had no issues with accepting and stocking faulty yogurt, fail two for the store. Finally, the staff at the store actually I thought I was the one in the wrong for taking issue with being sold leaky yogurt. After all, they are all like that so they must be fine! Fail three for the store. Oh, and, as I was finishing up a guy at the next checkout line over was having the exact same yogurt experience but in the end he just accepted it and bought, for full price, the defective yogurt. Fail four for the consumer who accepts what should be an unacceptable product. As I said, the yogurt is a small thing, but all of the things that had to go wrong, all of the bad judgement or no judgement at all the contributed to getting to that experience in the checkout line are totally typical and unfortunately are not limited to yogurt. Imagine for a moment when that sort of thinking (or lack thereof) gets applied to business deals, property transactions, policing, the judiciary, and foreign policy. And now how about a collective heavy sigh.....

On a much, much lighter note, the bunnies are rogue no more! Our gardener constructed a lovely little pen for them and they have not managed to escape yet after 4 full days of imprisonment. They seem happy enough (it is honestly a bit hard to tell) and it is nice that the girls can come out and watch them from the porch whenever they want. I am also hopeful that with some time and patience and lots of lettuce and carrots we may be able to get them a bit more comfortable with people such that they could occasionally be petted or held. We shall see.