Hail Fellow Well Met
Talking it up in Tunisia

Article by: Michael Grosberg, December 2006

The Pick-Up

I was driving a bare-bones Fiat Uno through one of the hottest places on the planet, researching Lonely Planet's Tunisia guide. I was pulled over by a National Guard officer on a road outside the oasis town of Tozeur in southern Tunisia, and my first reaction (a little different from my feeling when I'm pulled over in New York City) - was 'Not again. Don't these guys have cars of their own?'

It was the third time in the space of a week that I was asked to give a lift to a stranded person of authority - police, army and National Guard - while driving in the desert. Because I was one of the few people driving solo and with the window open, I was hitchhiker fodder. Not that I minded picking up strangers in need of a lift. In fact, in addition to the men in uniform, I had already given rides to at least four other people.

The Conversation

We quickly moved past mere pleasantries in French when Mahor, the officer, learned I was from the United States.

This time, however, we quickly moved past mere pleasantries in French when Mahor, the officer, learned I was from the United States. He switched to fluent English and began reciting arcane facts of congressional jurisprudence and passages from Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech.

It turned out that Mahor had studied British and American politics in university and that before becoming an officer in the National Guard he had toyed with the idea of becoming a university professor like a few of his friends. 'But in the end I realised I wanted a steady pay check and didn't want to wait years and years for this.'

We talked about America and the war in Iraq and he was much less critical of the Bush administration than I was. In fact, his views were positively Republican compared to mine, and in a strange way I was encouraged by this. It was a kind of proof that my country's actions hadn't alienated everyone in this part of the world - even if I thought he was wrong. We had a civil debate about politics, each of us excited for our own reasons to be carrying on this kind of conversation.

I assumed he had travelled some, at least to neighbouring countries - he was so sophisticated and worldly - and was surprised to learn that he had never left Tunisia. 'Once I saved up enough money to take a trip to Egypt but in the end I decided to buy myself a new motorbike,' he explained somewhat sheepishly. When I asked whether he thought he would travel someday he replied, 'Tunisians are simple people. We're not dreamers. Like most people around the world we only want a job, a place to sleep and food on the table.'

Tunisia has had only two leaders in forty years as an independent country. I asked him whether people were unhappy about that.

'There's not enough dissatisfaction or things going wrong to make people want to change,' he explained. 'I don't think there will be anything different if you come back in another five or ten years.'

By this time I felt a glowing sense of cameraderie and was jolted slightly when the conversation took another turn. 'But we both know that the primary cause of problems in the Middle East is because of that one, small disgusting country that I can't even say the name of.'

'I think I know what country you're referring to,' I said, 'and I'm actually Jewish and I've lived and studied in Israel.' Immediately I worried that everything would sour, but when I looked over at him he seemed unperturbed, and his expression was as friendly as ever.

The Regret

We talked about America and the war in Iraq and he was much less critical of the Bush administration than I was.

We continued our talk at a coffee shop in the town of Nefta, where I was to leave him. I wanted to give him a token of my gratitude for his hospitality, and further his conversation with the West, by leaving him a book. I gave him the Martin Amis novel London Fields. It's an ambitious novel full of literary high jinks and humour and sex. It was a book that could provoke longing for a larger, more diverse world.

But as soon as we said our goodbyes, I realised I had made a mistake. I thought about how I had bashed the US government's foreign policy in the region and that while I may have overdone the rhetoric slightly - though not the substance - in order to convince him of my own personal (and by extension my culture's) goodwill, I had inadvertently missed an opportunity to provide examples of it. I had just read a book called Mountains Beyond Mountains, a non-fiction account of the almost saintly efforts of the American infectious disease doctor Paul Farmer to provide health care to under-served communities around the world. It describes an incredibly ambitious life, one that by its very scope and idealism serves as a rebuke to most others, mine included. I thought of the slow, almost glacial pace of life in the desert, the cafe culture that turns afternoons into evenings. This kind of life seems wonderfully romantic and inaccessible to the average Western city-dweller, but doesn't seem so wonderful when measured against Farmer's kind of life. I didn't want to rebuke Mahor personally, but to provide some kind of window onto an entirely different type of existence.