c. 1998 Religion News Service
(Dale Hanson Bourke is publisher of Religion News Service.)
UNDATED _ I was literally in the middle of nowhere, as nowhere as I had ever been.
As my plane flew over sand dunes and a vast expanse of nothingness I was shocked to hear the pilot alert us that we were in our final descent. I couldn’t imagine what the plane was aiming for. Eventually we touched down on the sand-swept runway in Nouakchott, Mauritania. When we came to a stop, the sand immediately started closing in on our tires.
But that was only the beginning. The dusty West African city was the starting point for my journey into the Sahara. We set out in a Land Rover with water tanks lashed to the roof and a special suspension for driving through the sand.
We started on a two-lane road that had been buckled by the heat and cracked by once-a-year floods. Soon the pavement disappeared under the sand and our driver veered off into the desert, guided only by the relentless sun and a landscape that seemed to shift even as we drove through it.
Nine hours later we arrived in Kiffa. It wasn’t exactly what I had expected. More squatter’s camp than town, it was a settlement of nomads who had stopped roaming the treacherous dunes but still lived in tents. There were few permanent structures here and property lines were marked by low stone walls.
Water came from ancient wells with the buckets made of goat skin. It was as far as I could imagine being from civilization.
And then, while visiting a local women’s cooperative where they dyed fabric and sewed simple designs, I saw what I thought was the proverbial desert mirage. Here, in the middle of nowhere, where clean water was precious and electricity was rare, stood a shiny red Coca-Cola machine, sucking cooling power from a generator and offering the first cold drink I’d had in days.”How did it get here?”I asked stupidly.
No one seemed to know, but the woman who controlled its contents enjoyed great prestige and the rare ability to receive cash payments instead of the endless barter that tied the local economy in knots.
Of all the remarkable sights I saw on my trip to West Africa, the sight of that Coke machine still remains high on my list.
But that’s not the only time I was surprised by the friendly red logo and the familiar bottle. I remember a tiny, poverty stricken village in Guatemala where the children were dying at an alarming rate, mostly from dysentery. The cause of the problem was primarily the lack of clean drinking water. And yet a Coke machine offered its sanitized contents to anyone who could pay the price.
And during the war in Bosnia, when most of the vestiges of civilization had been riddled by bullets or cut up for fire wood, when there was no running water and electricity was turned on only for a few hours each week, even there I remember being surprised by the sight of a shiny Coca-Cola machine in Sarajevo. It hummed away, powered again by a generator, seeming oblivious to the war around it and surprisingly unscathed by enemy fire.
Folks far more adventurous than I have told tales of spotting a red machine in the jungle, on a remote island, in what they thought was an undiscovered village. I heard about some missionaries who were sure they had found a new people group only to have these untouched people offer them a Coke.
My sense that I can never seem to go somewhere that Coke hasn’t already been is both eerie and comforting. I have the feeling that someone took the biblical Great Commission _”Go ye to all the earth and preach the gospel”_ and claimed it for a soft drink.
There seems to be something more than a corporation behind this proliferation. It is almost a mystical permeation of all cultures, a primal attraction transcending borders and identities.
And so, when I learned this week that Coca-Cola is experiencing a downturn, I took the news as more than an economic trend. The third largest corporation in the world is still selling plenty of Cokes in the U.S., but its problems are overseas where it generally earns almost 80 percent of its income.
Some of the problems are caused by currency fluctuations. But most are caused by the fact that individuals all over the world simply can’t spare a coin for a Coke.
This worries me more than any doomsday economist ever will.
It means coins are probably rare at the ladies’ coop in Kiffa and the folks in Bosnia may have survived the war but may not be doing so well with peace. It also means more people are choosing to drink dirty water instead of the bottled soft drink in some villages of Latin America. And that even in the jungles, the economic crunch is being felt.
It’s hard to imagine life being any tougher in most of these places. It’s hard to imagine how poor you must be to not be able to buy a Coke.
DEA END BOURKE
