special treatment

Today at our "malian" picnic, I had some more unrestful feelings come up, as well as the team did.  As an American, many countries (I don't think all) are given privilege.  We are given sort of a special treatment in whatever we do, in many ways.  Today especially sort of bugged me.  We went to the picnic in this small van that packed in over 20 people sitting on wood benches in the back of the van.  It was so much fun and I was laughing so hard I was crying, and all the girls were asking me why I was crying!  Every time we hit a bump, our wooden bench would come up or move so we started going forward onto the people from the other side.  It was very interesting.  We loved it!

When we left, we were given privilege to leave first (I think its because we also looked really exhausted), but they had this nice 4-door pickup Toyota (i think) for us to ride back in.  I'm talking, an American pickup, except it was stick.  The thing is, we didn't want that, that was to easy for us.  Instead we wanted to ride in the van with all the others.

Another issue that has bugged me a bit is that because we are Americans, we are considered "rich" of course, so when big events happen like this they expect us to pay more than our share!  So for gas to get us to the picnic, they made us 4 toubabs (white person) pay for HALF of the total gas out of all the 20-30+ people!  In many cases we find people asking us to pitch in or to help this person, but its more of an expectation that we will, not just a question of "you don't have to, but you can't".

At first it wasn't a big deal, because yes we have alot more money than them, but then again we are on a strict budget as a team (according to what we raised) and barely have any money left at the end of the month to buy groceries.  It has become more irritating now, as it continues to happen in small ways.  Because of the language barrier with some people as well, we sometimes don't have a choice in what we say and end up going with the flow.