As the only "American" team competing in the 2009 Plymouth-Dakar rally from England to The Gambia, I took it upon myself to inject a little red, white, and blue into the proceedings. Namely, a Hillary Clinton car air freshener than smelled like newly baked cookies and several dozen Obama Hope postcards I printed off at Kinkos before leaving the US.
Most of the postcards I'd stored in the glove box to hand out to kids as we drove across the various African Countries, though I did stick a few in the back windows of the jeep.
By the time I arrived in Dakhla in the Western Sahara, that little mess in Gaza had blown up to epic proportions and the hate for the west was everywhere. So much so that at one of the 100 plus military checkpoints I stopped at between Morocco and Western Sahara, I was nearly refused entry for traveling on an American passport since according to the military official, neither Bush nor Obama were friends of Arabs and would do anything to protect Israel.
After dinner one night, I returned to my Jeep to see Obama's face crossed out with dirt. It got so bad in Dakhla that the German, French, and Spanish teams pleaded with me to remove all the postcards from the windows and hide Hillary. I refused, seeing as I was driving a LHD Jeep Cherokee in Africa, with two people who'd never left America before, who looked about as American as humanly possible, a few fucking bits of flair wouldn't matter much if people wanted to harm us.
But even I took pause after the concerns mounted. Could Africa actually hate Bush so much that any excitement for Obama would be automatically tempered? As the leader of my lead, I had to the make the call. I didn't drive all the way to Africa to hide. Obama and Hillary would stay, danger be damned. And boy am I glad I made that decision.
The switch between enthusiam for Obama was staggering as I crossed from Western Sahara to Mauritania. I couldn't pass out enough Obama postcards. Kids, adults, civilians, warlords. My team even started to use the postcards as potential bribes to cross the various checkpoints and borders. Getting into Senegal was a nightmare, so much so that the group before us, camped out several days on a bridge in protest of the outrageous bribes.
"Wesley Snipes" as we referred to him, was the warlord managing the Mauritania/Senegal border. Dressed in a full silk suit, as everyone else around was covered in dirt, mud, and dust, he wanted several hundred Euro to allow our convoy of 4 cars (including an ambulance) across the bridge. That was on top of the various visa/customs,exit/entry fees everyone wanted. There was even a man who wanted 10 Euro per vehicle just to hold up a gate to let us cross a bridge to meet with Wesley Snipes.
Just to be clear, we were driving these cars across Africa to donate to charity, occuring massive costs along the way. Tolls throughout Spain and France were over 100 Euro alone. And that doesn't account for repairs or major disasters.
But Wesley didn't care. Our chief negotiator (a Brit fluent in French) argued and bartered with Wesley, risking arrest and possibly worse for over 3 hours. When Wesley found out I'd come from America, he laughed and made a machine gun gesture. Then he saw it. OBAMA.
"O-BAH-MAH," he said with a massive grin. I offered him the postcard which he excitedly placed in the back of his car window (next to the kitten sun shades!?)
And just like that the tension was cut. And that goodwill continued as we travelled further south into Africa. It seemed the darker the population was, the bigger and more joyous the reaction would be. I passed out 25 Obama postcards alone at the Gambian border checkpoint. Grown men, many with guns, reduced to children over the sight of Obama.
Once we arrived at our hotel in Banjul after finally driven the 4200+ miles, Melissa, my girlfriend, took me aside and said she was wrong about Obama and his power to transform. HOPE.
My realization came several days earlier on our last night in Dakhla as we shared three cups of tea with a local family who'd invited teams to dinner as they completed car repairs at a nearby garage (can you imagine that at your local Jiffy Lube?) Talk of course turned to Obama and the excitement in the room was electric. These are people living in harsh conditions, more than a world away, and they believe with all their heart that Obama will change the world. And so do I.
