I don’t remember much from my childhood, but one thing I DO remember is the perpetual focus on how to get out of a burning building successfully. No matter what type of public building I ever had prolonged affairs in, its administrators ensured that I and the rest of my cohort were well averted as to the fire escape routes and procedures. It felt like every other day that we had a fire alarm in elementary school and even now in my office building we just had a fire drill that saw me run down and up 15 flights of stairs. My family even had a whole fire escape procedure with a post-escape meeting place at the end of the property line. I remember practising Stop Drop and Roll, and getting woken up by my safety-obsessed father on Sunday mornings by impromptu fire drills.
I think the fire escape history in Africa is different. You see, my colleague and I were having a nice dinner on a 2nd floor balcony in a decent restaurant in Dakar tonight. We were engaged in silly and interesting conversation and so weren’t much paying attention to our surroundings, until of course I noticed smoke billowing from the floor below us and up onto the balcony where we were sitting. I looked over the wall to the street below and noticed ALL the restaurant staff standing outside, chatting calmly, as if on a break. I calmly called down and said, what’s going on? They replied casually, “You really should come down.” Is there a fire, I asked. Yes, they replied.
So we grab our stuff, walk in the restaurant where there are several other unsuspecting clients eating calmly. I say, apparently there is a fire downstairs. I think you should leave. So we all walk down the stairs into the thick smoke and out the other side into the road. There was no one left in the building but the uninformed clients.
WTF?!!! Was there no thought on the part of the workers to inform the clients that their lives were in danger? They all saved themselves and then hung out calmly while we were directly in the line of vision, none the wiser of the impending doom. No fire alarm. No information strategy. No fire department rolling to the rescue. Later I saw the kitchen staff putting the fire out themselves with dish towels wrapped around their mouth and nose.
You wake up in the morning, not knowing what happened overnight, you look out the winow and are rendered breathless by the pure, unsullied blanket that covers the world. For a few short hours, before the city awakes, the landscape’s diversity, whose usual technicolour reflects all manners of sin, now appears untarnished and limpid, exonerating the summer’s sordid debaucheries and the autumn’s ravaging harvest.
Merely Whelmed 