Night in Tunisia

Les Paraboles

You've already heard me describe the scenery here. It's a bit like the sea, rising and falling walls of freshly painted plaster and crumbling cresting piles of rubble where the old buildings are being pulled appart.

Every once in a while I realize that I've left out an important part of the description of the landscape, and that occured to me when traveling on the bus to Sousse. It was my friend Sami (see the archived picture of my work mates) who pointed to it as we whistled by in our air conditioned bus on the highway between Tunis and Sousse.

There were endless stacks of unfinished, unplastered, concrete and brick buildings in various states of disrepair. Children playing in the dirt before them, and men laying propped on one elbow nearby tending the few sheep the family kept for meat. Clothes were flapping in the wind on lines strung between poles on the rooftop of every grey house. And there they were, poking up from every corner, their smooth white surfaces pointed toward the sky, like a choir singing a song in perfect unison. Les Paraboles! The satelite dishes.

Yes, even in this mess of poverty and decay every family had enough money to buy a satelite dish and access the myriad television programs in French, Arabic, Italian, English and German, all pleasantly designed to distract the mind from life's more real, more pressing problems.

We watched in awe as neighbourhood after neighbourhood trailed by, and the Paraboles there to happily placate the people with their reconstituted international waves of mindless distraction.

What a world, eh? What a place.

posted by tiaraletourneau @ 9:39 a.m.