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Farewell

I have been home for five days now. It is alarming how quickly a year's worth of Mali can recede in such a short time; it already feels like a dream. I'm fighting to hold onto the experience through looking at pictures and putting up videos, but it still fades.

And so this shall be my last post to Pangolin Watch, over a year from the first. Thank you to all of you who avidly followed my adventures and to those of you who even checked in from time to time. It gave me a lot of courage in Mali knowing that there were people back home behind me. I hope this blog was as enjoyable to read as it was for me to write, seeing as it constitutes my journals for the year. So thanks for coming along on the voyage with me.

We had no pangolin sightings, unfortunately, but perhaps on the next adventure? Malaysia? We shall see.

Home at last

Well, that's it. I'm back in the US. It still is kind of hard to believe, since it just feels so normal, as if I hit the pause button on my life, went to Africa for a year, then came back and just resumed. Mali already feels like a world away, and yet I was there no more than 48 hours ago. It will take a little while to reconcile these two lives, I feel.

The trip went smoothly. Before going to the airport, I met Spencer and Jaimie at a wonderful restaurant right in the neighborhood of SIL called African Foods. Pretty generic name. But it was the best service I've gotten anywhere in Mali, and possibly some of the best, well, African food. I got a Cameroonian sauce of spinach and peanuts with plantains, along with my final Castel beer, which the waiter had to get next door since theirs wasn't cold. Just as I was done eating, I got a call on my cell phone from the embassy expeditor, who evidently had come to SIL to pick me up. Luckily, I had all my baggage with me, so the waiter just gave him directions and he picked me up directly from the restaurant.

Embassy expeditor is really an apt name. They do indeed expedite you through the airport process like some VIP, whisking you past authorities before depositing you in front of bag screening, the final step before the waiting room. I got a little teary sitting waiting for the plane. I mean, that was really it, it was over. But I felt giddy walking up the steps to the airplane. This was the longest time I'd gone without flying in years.

I watched the lights of Bamako shrink away as we took off. On the little flight locator map on the TV screen, I located my mountain by Douentza and watched as our digital plane glided past. Then I slept.

When I woke up, we were high above a glowing metropolis, somewhere in Spain, as my TV informed me. It was huge. We landed in Paris at dawn. Somehow in five hours' time, the Niger River had become the Seine.

I spent a relatively uneventful layover in Paris. I had my first little taste of culture shock, as I greeted the guy checking passports and asked how he was doing, in good Malian fashion, and he kind of laughed at me. I forgot that we don't really do greetings here. I did end up going through security and to the wrong set of gates, at one point. When we got in, the flight information for the Atlanta flight said terminal E only, no gate, so I randomly picked one of the two options and of course picked the wrong one, as I saw as soon as I got through security. No matter, I had time. The other unfortunate thing about Paris (and the US, I presume) is that you cannot exchange CFA at their currency exchange. Ridiculous! Now I have $60 worth of CFA just sitting around, being a souvenir. But my credit card hadn't been cancelled, so I got a pain au chocolat and some Orangina and celebrated the First World (even though you can find both of those things in Bamako).

They did security checks on our passports. The guy checking mine tried to swipe it, but lo and behold, it wouldn't swipe. He asked me if I'd put it through the washing machine. "No, just a bad bus ride in Mali."

The Atlanta flight was long, some 9 hours, and we didn't have individual TV screens. The main cabin screen played three movies, all of which I watched without sound (as I am wont to do), as well as several TV shows. I napped on my tray table some and continued to plow through Bill Bryson (which I finished on the Minneapolis flight). I was surrounded by my kinsmen at last. Americans are so boisterous. We're self-assured, we talk to strangers, and we just have a vibe about us that screams AMERICA. It's not a bad thing. It's just our culture, and it was funny to be confronted with it again.

It was a quick layover in Atlanta, just enough time to get through customs, recheck my bag, and get on the next flight. I was feeling a bit like a zombie at that point, but at least I was a homeward-bound zombie. At least it was a quick flight--only two hours; after the preceding 14-15 hours of flight, I was ready to be done.

Flying into Minnesota was a strange experience, not the least of which because it was unusually hazy. Hell, I could've been in Douentza for how much dust was in the air! It was due to unusual winds, winds that made landing a hair-raising experience. Once safely on the ground, I felt my excitement rise. I was really home. My parents were waiting at the bottom of the escalator to baggage claim, and oh, was it good to see them. I instantly felt more awake as we talked face to face for the first time in nearly 8 months.

We got some Mexican food for dinner (carnitas... pork... yes) and I unpacked some. Some things were broken in my luggage, but nothing irreparably. I skyped with Kevin on a real internet connection for a little bit then went to bed around 8:30 or 9. Jet lag so far hasn't been too bad. Yes, I got up at 6:45, which is unusual for me, but not totally unusual. I have a haircut today (much needed) and a dentist appointment tomorrow (not much wanted, but much needed). Time to start looking and feeling American again.

I will update once or twice more as I report on the adjustment process, but my friends, we are in the final stages of Pangolin Watch.

Saying my goodbyes to Mali

I’m sitting here watching the last bit of Malian light that I will see fade away. It’s incredibly surreal. It doesn’t feel real at all. Various strands of my life are coming together and blending as I prepare to close this chapter. Here I am, listening to classical Indian music, thinking about taking tabla lessons in Los Angeles while sitting in an apartment in the middle of Africa waiting for a flight through France to Minnesota. It’s just too much change to internalize right now.

But I successfully checked my baggage this morning. I showed up outside of the Air France office about five minutes before they opened at 10AM; mine was the first baggage checked. I am happy to report that I didn’t have any excess luggage fees or anything to pay and that I received my boarding passes without a hitch (except for the final leg to Minneapolis, but I’ll figure that out when the time comes). Afterwards, I went to the embassy one last time to cash a check (it’s always good to have an emergency reserve on you) and to watch Spencer’s presentation. He gave a nice presentation about his music research, including a screening of a video he shot to a Malian rap song about pollution and littering. It was pretty great.

Other than that, I’ve just been hanging out, playing free trials of computer games and reading my book. Unfortunately my internet has gone down at the time of writing this, but hopefully it’ll be back up so I can post it before I leave for the airport around 9PM. If you end up reading this Tuesday evening in America, it worked.

My Mali reading list

I've compiled a list of books that I'm currently reading, read, or started to read. I may have forgotten books somewhere in there, but here's the bulk of it:

Currently reading:
-A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson

Books I’ve read this year:
-To Timbuktu, Mark Jenkins
-The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins
-The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene
-Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris
-The 5 People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom
-The Shack, William Young
-Keeping the Faith, Jodi Picoult
-Memory Keeper’s Daughter, Kim Edwards
-Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
-Demian, Herman Hesse
-The General and His Labyrinth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
-Education of Little Tree, Forrest Carter
-Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
-Making of a Chef, Michael Ruhlman
-Monique and the Mango Rains, Kris Holloway
-Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond
-Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton
-Singing Neanderthals, Steven Mithen

Books I started but didn’t finish, with comments:
-Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter(about halfway through, it got into way too much computer science)
-Stones for Ibarra, Harriet Doerr (good writing, but I didn’t care about the characters)
-People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn (simply got interested in other books)
-Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse (had high hopes, but too dense to penetrate)

It was certainly nice having all of this time to do pleasure reading, something I had been seriously behind on for many years.

Les dimanches à Bamako

Today was a remarkably quiet day in a normally bustling city. I slept in until 11:00AM after an impromptu night of swimming at Matt's place. Immediately, I called Dave to see if we could arrange lunch. He said he and Antony were going out to Adonis, so I got dressed and hailed a cab. The cab driver had no idea where he was going and tried to charge me extra after we drove around for fifteen minutes looking for the restaurant; I staunchly refused. There was hardly anyone in the streets and very few cars on the bridges. I guess Sunday is truly a day of rest. Or rather, as blind musical duo Amadou and Mariam put it, "Les dimanches à Bamako, c'est le jour de mariage" (Sundays in Bamako, it's the day of marriages). I have probably spotted three marriages today.

I had an egg roll and a soda at Adonis before we went to the Campagnard (where I sat for 5 hours using the internet back in February) to drink more soda in their sweet, sweet air-conditioning. Eventually we parted ways, and I got into an even nicer and quieter taxi that took me back towards Badalabougou.

I'm coming to like Bamako. It's a haphazard city, like something thrown together from whatever the Creator had lying around at the time. Rubble heaps? Sure. Fruit stands with grapes? Why not. A big white stallion tied to the side of the road? Naturally. There are so many colors, so many smells (not all of them good), music blaring from taxis passing in a doppler blur, big saucy ladies perched on top of Chinese mopeds, and no shortage of runty goats pillaging trash piles or even a mango seller's table, if they aren't watching.

I came back to SIL and heated up the rest of my cabbage rolls for Lunch Round 2. The rest of the afternoon was spent reading, doing laundry, surfing the internet, and cat-napping in the humidity.

Two days left.

Living the nightlife

Last night, I was literally out until dawn. I wasn't even totally committed to going out at all, but at 10PM when Spencer said he was going to join some friends at a bar across town, I let myself be convinced to come along, so long as he came to pick me up in his taxi. When we got to the bar, called the Flamboyant, we found that there was to be a musical act that night. It started out with a couple of drummers, a terrible synthesizer playing recorded xylophone songs, and a bored-looking guitarist twanging out riffs with too much distortion. Paul and Marie were there, as well as people I didn't know: Jamie, a young woman working on a poli sci dissertation, Hillary, who teaches at a Christian school, Jacob and Owen, a couple pilots for a gold mine, and Matt, a teacher at the American school. Eventually some women started singing and dancing around, which made the music slightly more interesting, but not too much. Here is a sample:



After a while of that, people decided to move to a different bar, so we packed up in Owen's Jeep and went to a place called the Kora, which had pretty delicious wood-fired pizza. Nothing like pizza at 2:30 in the morning. Owen was ready to go home at that point, and I could have myself, but other people were scheming up plans to go to No Stress, the club Kevin and I went to on New Year's Eve. I was on the fence, but allowed myself to be dragged along. After all, it is my last weekend in Mali. The club was pretty fun, when they played music I knew. I did a lot of dancing and others drank from a bottle of whisky, but whisky at 3 in the morning sounded like the grossest thing I could think of. So I just danced. We stayed there almost until it closed; when we went downstairs at 5:30 to go home, the sun was rising. I haven't stayed out that late in a very very long time, but I'm pretty glad I did. I had a good time.

I came back to SIL and crashed until 12:30, at which point I ate the rest of my peanut sauce for lunch, checked my e-mail, then went back to bed. Tonight it was cabbage rolls stuffed with curried ground beef (leftover stuffing from the meat pies), and I also made a big batch of hibiscus juice (which is really more like tea, since you boil the flowers). (Pictures of this latest culinary endeavor have been added to the last photo album.) Some Peace Corps people are going out tonight, but I just want to stay in and read my book. Now that the Satanic Verses is done, it's on to a second reading of A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. I decided tonight that I want to be Bill Bryson when I grow up.

Here is another video of Douentza as well, views down the main road into town: