The excessive length of my title -- General Manager of the American Community Services Association of Mali -- is inversely proportional to the number of hours I am obliged to work each week, the number of dollars per hour I can afford to pay myself, and the scope of duties for which I am responsible. I’m just manager of the commissary: a small grocery store and a video club.

My commute takes anywhere from 25-45 minutes, and the heat level is anywhere from tolerable to sweltering, depending on the time of day. I drive past the cattle market and the Abbatoir Frigorifique de Bamako. ("The abbatoir: it's Frigo-riffic!"). I drive by Mali Lait, the Fortune's Club casino, and the newly renovated Sofitel Hotel L'Amitie where all the heads of state will be tomorrow. I try not to get anxious on the old bridge, sandwiched between a SOTRAMA and a tailgating taxi, with exhaust fumes wafting through the windows and a dozen mobilettes zipping by on both sides. I drive by the soccer-playing dinosaur, the Amandine patisserie, and the Bla Bla and Atlantis nightclubs. I park in the shade of mango trees across the street, next to the open sewer. It smells like shit. Children climb the trees looking for ripe fruit.

I greet the guards, who work Monday through Saturday. They wear burgundy uniforms and caps, and when they change into street clothes at the end of the day, I don’t always recognize them. There is the horse-faced one and the baby-faced one, and a new one with yellow pockmarked skin who seems sort of smarmy. In addition to the guards there is a gruff man who wears the same ochre suit every day; he waters the plants and sweeps the sidewalks. In the late afternoon they all eat lunch from a large communal bowl and (“Vient manger!”) invite me to join them. “Merci! Bon appetite!” I decline.

The commissary shares a building with the “infotheque,” a small library open to the public. It is always full of Malians reading English books or taking advantage of the free Internet access. Salman holds my mail at the front desk, since I’m almost never there when the Embassy courier stops by. At times of prayer, he and the other men who work indoors retreat to a private air-conditioned room upstairs. Meanwhile, the guards and caretakers look for a shady spot on the driveway to remove their shoes and kneel.

The commissary store is a small, members-only, duty-free shop. I sell all the junk and brand names we Americans apparently miss: Pop Tarts, Doritos, diet A&W Root Beer; Tidy Cat, Puppy Chow, and Lysol toilet bowl cleaner. Some things, like Pringles, we can get here, but at three times the price. Some things, like rice and flour and vegetable oil and yeast, are available widely and cheaply, and I’m not sure why someone would prefer to buy American brands. It must be the convenience of getting everything in one place.

Almost the first thing I had to do at my new job was handle the arrival of our container. It was ordered in December 2003 by a previous manager and traveled by sea to Dakar, Senegal, where it sat for some time before getting loaded on a train and coming to Bamako, where customs officials processed it. All of a sudden it was ready to be delivered. We hired a dozen Malian day laborers, prayed it wouldn’t rain, and watched the truck back into the driveway.

I didn’t know what a container was before I started working the commissary. It’s the standard unit of shipping, 20 feet long. Packed tightly, it fits into the back of a large truck. When day laborers are hauling boxes off the truck and stacking them on the driveway, it’s a hell of a lot of stuff.

I ran around with a clipboard and a packing list checking things off. An American GSO employee and I directed the laborers, explaining that no, these parmesan-flavored goldfish crackers are not the same as those pizza-flavored goldfish crackers; please keep the kosher dills and baby sweet pickles separate, and same goes for the Hellmann’s Real Mayonnaise, Hellmann’s Light Mayonnaise, and Miracle Whip. It would have been drudgery were it not so fast-paced and new. I was glad to see every box and touch most; in a matter of hours I became intimately acquainted with our inventory.

Then I had to figure out how much to sell things for. Talk about daunting -- I’d never done anything like this job before, and now I was making decisions that could make or break the store’s financial health. Looking at the shipping documents, I figured out the cost of transportation as a percentage of the cost of goods. With the board of directors, we settled on a markup rate that would not discourage sales, but would also allow us to put things on sale later and not lose money. I added those percentages to each item’s wholesale price and voila, we were ready to break out the sticker guns. With the help of my one employee, the teenaged son of American missionaries, and several volunteers, we unpacked and priced as much as we could squeeze on the shelves. Then we opened the store.

In theory, the missionaries’ son rings up sales, bags groceries, and stocks the shelves when things get slow, allowing me to get Important Things done in the back office. But in practice I end up greeting many customers, introducing myself, explaining to them various procedures: You can join if your salary is 51% funded by the U.S. government; teachers can’t buy booze. I enjoy this part -- not having to enforce the rules, but schmoozing. The American community is small and I’ve met almost everyone at the store, from the new Peace Corps country director down to the Ambassador’s bizarrely beautiful Afghan hound.

When we don’t have customers, I put my not-quite-obsessive-compulsive-disorder to work. I arrange boxes and jars. Two weeks ago I cleaned up the video shelves, alphabetizing our hundreds of films. Then I painstakingly recreated the entire movie catalog -- which I could only find on paper -- in Excel.

Yesterday I ventured into the final frontier: my office. I just received a donated printer and fax from USAID’s office. To make room, I moved the dead Dell 486 off the desk and into the closet. To get into the closet, I rearranged the cartons of books blocking the doors. Once I had access, I discovered a veritable Library of Obsolete Technology and Technical Reference*, including another pre-Pentium computer, DOS manuals, and a lot of 5.25” floppy disks.

And sometimes I run errands. My first errand was at the Banque International du Mali, where I needed to get copies of some old statements. The ladies at the information desk were friendly but insisted that I would have to faire une demande. "Well, I'm here," I felt like shouting, "faire-ing une demande!" but I knew that wouldn't get me anywhere. So I went back to the office and typed up a letter in my best French, then had someone else puff it up with "J'ai le honneur de me presenter" and lots of "vueillez-vous" and so forth. I hand-delivered it to the Direction General the next day. I went back a week later to follow up and two bank officials asked me if I had written this letter? Really? All by myself? They asked if I was in the Peace Corps. Everyone always asks if I'm in the Peace Corps. Perhaps I should be flattered by the implication that I bring a certain youthful spirit to all my tasks, but I'm getting increasingly annoyed instead.

*When I worked in Bethesda, Maryland, one of my coworkers had a Museum of Obsolete Technology in his office. He started with an abacus and maybe some punch cards. I donated an IBM hexadecimal counting tool.