Another album of pictures

Click here to find pictures of the Bean and of Timbuktu!

Timbuktu and some sheep? Yes please.

A wacky trip to Bamako

I am happy to report that I continue to feel fine and that I am now in Bamako with Kevin. Let me retrace our steps for you.

Things are getting wackier and wackier in Mali to give Kevin a last huzzah, it seems. First, there had been a mouse in the clutter of our room in Douentza for a few days, and in the process of packing, we discovered it had made a little home in Kevin’s suitcase, where it enjoyed regular peanut feasts. Then, I dumped a few bags of random garbage in the courtyard, a lot of which was Christmas wrapping paper, and sure enough, maybe an hour later, there are four or five kids rummaging through, playing with their new-found toys. And then as if the bathroom in Douentza couldn’t get any worse, there was a pile of poop on the floor in front of the door. Great.

On a happier note, I finally got my Nova Cuttlefish special I had ordered from Amazon about a month ago, which we enjoyed. If you don’t know cuttlefish, read up on Wikipedia, or just hang on until Kevin and I co-author an informative and entertaining book about the world’s coolest creature (move over, pangolin).

Before we left Douentza, I went back over to our Bella neighbors’ house to get Kevin a new ring made, since the Atlantic Ocean of Ghana ate his last one. The woman there is friendly. When she saw me, she jumped up and gave me a hug as if we were long lost friends. The Bella were traditionally the slave cast (more like indentured servants) of the Touaregs, so they speak Tamashek and share a lot of the same culture, but they are black Africans as opposed to Berber people. This is the family that Jeff always goes to when he needs any sort of leatherwork goods, such as the camel saddle I gifted to my brother and sister-in-law for their wedding.

Anyhow, while we were sitting there talking about it (rather Hamidou acted as translator and I just sat there), I could watch the men working the silver. Their techniques probably haven’t changed much in the last few hundred years. They start with a chunk of raw metal, which they nestle into some hot coals in the ground, and someone heats it with a simple bellows. Then they remove it with tongs and pounds it with a hammer on what looks like a railroad spike stuck in the ground. This process continues of heat and pound, heat and pound, presumably until (in the case of a ring) it becomes the ideal length and width. At this point, they take a chisel and pound a groove along the entire length, into which they will insert a strip of copper for ornamentation. I didn’t see how they join they ends of the ring or file it down smooth, but it was interesting to watch some as seemingly solid as metal bend to the desire of the smith. After the first ring they made was much too thin, they came around with a second one later that night which will serve as a better memento for Kevin when he leaves here all too soon.

On Sunday, the fabled Amelia and Abdoul Salaam came through Douentza. Abdoul Salaam had worked with Jeff for many years, for his language, Hombori Songhay, and more generally on the project. Then he met Amelia, who was in the Peace Corps in Petaga. They fell in love, got married, and are now in North Carolina. I’ve heard stories about them from Jeff and all of his assistants here, so it was nice to actually meet them. They were both charming people. We chatted for much of the afternoon before they headed out to Hombori in the evening.

They had recommended Sonef buses to us for our trip to Bamako, so on Monday afternoon, we went to the freeway to wait for the bus. We got there a little after 3, and of course the bus didn’t show up until 5. Amelia had said that Sonef runs a tight ship: insists on timeliness, doesn’t let people sit in the aisles, decent buses… Well, this is Mali, they got there late, the aisle was full of people without seats going to Sevare (then again between San and Bamako).

The bus was a death trap. It started with a burning smell before we got to Sevare. It was evening by this point, so when I looked out the back door when we stopped, I saw the light of the blinker on the trees and thought it was a fire. Adrenaline coursed through my body and I was about ready to vault the back of my chair and sprint off into the night when I realized that there was no fire. That would’ve been embarrassing. Later, it became clear that the burning rubber smell came from braking. Next, the driver drove way too fast. He would take the turns without slowing down, leaving Kevin and I clutching white-knuckled the backs of the seats in front of us. Not to mention that there was some army guy on the bus in full fatigues carrying a machine gun that would be pointed directly at my head whenever he got on and off the bus.

It was a long, bumpy, sleepless ride, but we finally got to Bamako a little after 6AM and made it back to Hotel Djenne, where Kevin’s adventure began. The only room they had ready was a small suite for $10 more a night, so now we’ve got two rooms and a couch, and of course, fast wireless internet again.

We took a nap in the morning then went out to L’Express for lunch, where we both got incredibly rich pizzas—him a 4 cheese pizza with Roquefort, and me a calzone with egg, ham, pepperoni and cheese stuffed in it. Mmmm.

I’m not sure what our New Year’s plans are yet. Jeremy should be in town, and he seems better at snooping out parties than we are, so I’ll just kick back and wait for that information to come to me. In the meantime, we’ll just be enjoying the Bamakois highlife.

Merry Christmas -- You got malaria!

This post is bound to be long, so for those of you who want the three word summary: sheep, Timbuktu, malaria.

Last Sunday, we sent Oumar on a sheep mission in the market. Our only criteria: small and cute. That morning, the landlord and his family had shown up and taken over much of the courtyard. Remembering how bossy his wife and daughter had been when they had come at the end of the summer, I was not too pleased to see him there, but it turns out that he is really nice. He gave Oumar some more work to do on the house like painting the bathroom and trimming the trees. More on that later.

Just before lunch, I heard baaing in the courtyard. I peaked my head out the door, and there was Oumar leading a mama sheep with a tiny lamb in Hamidou’s arms. Apparently after scouring the whole market, this was the only ewe and lamb combination they could find. In fact, even these two had already been sold to someone planning to take them to Bamako, but we bought them out.

Kevin and I have had fun giving them many names, but the ones that have stuck are Boubou for the mother and either Petite or Professor Bean Pumpkinweather for the little guy. Boubou is quite robust with a dark brown front half (save for her little white shoes) and white on the back. Bean is mostly white, but with some of his mother’s dark brown splotches around his face. He’s probably about three weeks old now, and growing fast. Boubou is tied up by the garden, but Bean can prance around as he likes, much to the chagrin of his mother who grumbles whenever he gets out of reach.

While I thought the landlord or the neighbors would kind of begrudge us putting sheep in the courtyard, everybody would tell us how fine looking our sheep were and congratulate us on them. I guess now we’re truly Malian.

With sheep purchased, we were free to go to Timbuktu. Oumar and I went down to the freeway to get transport information. We found a 4x4 going up the next morning whenever it filled up—could be 4AM, could be 9AM. The guy took Oumar’s phone number and said he would call when the car was going to leave.

Sure enough, at around 6 the next morning, I awoke to Oumar knocking on our door, saying he had gotten the call. We threw on some clothes and trudged like zombies to the roadside. Of course I should have known there was no rush. Why would anything leave on time in Mali? We sat there waiting for the car to leave until probably 8 or 9. I’d reserved the two seats up front next to the driver, figuring it would be slightly more comfortable than the middle seat with four people or the trunk with six.

The road to Timbuktu is awful. It’s a sandy dirt track engraved with mysterious ridges that bother the driver so much that he chooses to drive off-road in sandy ruts that make the vehicle fishtail. Not to mention that our driver looked to be about 16. Every now and again, we would stop and pick up some hitchhikers who rode on the roof on top of the baggage.

As you get further north out of Douentza, the landscape gets sparser and sparser. More sand, less trees, no cliffs. There were also an inexplicably large amount of donkeys in places with no villages in sight. After a grueling five or six hours, we drove into water world, where the Niger river sprawls over the dusty earth. We drove out onto this little dirt causeway and parked to wait for the barge to carry us across.

It took at least three hours for the boat to come. I was not feeling great at this point, sitting on a wooden bench, exhausted and slightly nauseous. Even when the barge got there, at the cusp of evening, I wasn’t sure we would get our vehicle on, such was the queue of cars and trucks waiting. They crammed an incredible number of vehicles on, though. Four SUVs like ours and two trucks, plus a small herd of cattle who would occasionally slip and fall in their own shit. Nevertheless, it was certainly pretty watching the sun go down over this wide expanse of water, with villages on little islands, their mud houses built right up to the edge of the water.

It was nearly dark when we drove off on the other side at the port city of Koroume. The drive from there to Timbuktu proper probably took no more than twenty minutes, since the road was actually paved. Driving in, we could already sense that we had crossed some cultural divide: the cobbled streets with adjoined buildings felt like some medieval European town and almost everyone was wearing turbans.

We were dropped off in the center of town, where we picked up our guide, since we had read you would be hounded constantly if you didn’t. His name was Ali and he showed us to our hotel, the Hotel Bouctou, and gave us a rendezvous for the next day at the hotel.

The hotel was simple, but it did the trick. There was a strange assortment of furniture in the room, as if someone knew that putting furniture in was a good idea but didn’t know how to properly carry it out. For instance, there was an armoire, but it had a chair right in front of it, rendering it totally useless.

We ordered some food at the hotel’s restaurant, the first thing we ate basically all day. I got through a bowl of vegetable soup when I started to feel cold and unwell. When my couscous came out, I had absolutely no appetite and only ate a couple of bites. After dinner, we retreated to the room, where I lay shivering uncontrollably fully clothed under a heavy blanket. I fell asleep that way, but the sleep was choppy and troubled.

The next morning, I was feeling okay enough to go out on our tour of the town. We started out looking at a couple of the old mosques, built in the 15th and 16th centuries, but redone every year, since they’re made of mud brick. Timbuktu is also full of beautiful carved wooden doors and windows, which our guide pointed out to us. Apparently they are all made by one family, and have been for centuries. We went into a little Podunk museum that showed a traditional Timbuktu house with artifacts and all. It was sort of interesting, but basically just overpriced. From there, we saw some of the old European explorers’ houses, Barth, Caille, etc., who braved desert raids and malaria to reach the fabled city. Those were only the ones who made it. The guide also showed us the Flamme de la Paix peace monument that was built after the large Touareg rebellion of 1996. They melted down some three thousands weapons after the cease fire, which gives you some idea of the scale of the conflict.

From there, we got sucked into a Touareg tent “for tea”, which was really an excuse for the Touaregs to sell us their goods. It was interesting being in the tent, a low building made of wooden poles covered in woven mats, but man, those guys were ruthless hawkers. And all of them will tell you the same thing: “You won’t find one like this anywhere else. Each piece has a story. For you I’ll give you a good price.” We basically got pressured into buying more stuff than we needed or wanted, but that’s okay.

After finally escaping from their clutches, we took a quick swing through Timbuktu’s market, which is basically like Douentza’s, then went back to the hotel. I rested up for a few minutes, then Kevin and I went out to find lunch. We ate at this little restaurant called the Poulet d’Or (golden chicken), even though when we ordered their chicken, it turned out they didn’t have any.

We were supposed to go camel riding at 4 o’ clock. However, after lunch, I started to not feel real great again. I felt sort of feverish and chilled. Kevin convinced me that it would be a good idea to go to the doctor just to make sure I was okay, since I hadn’t brought my thermometer or anything with me. Around 3:30, we asked the man at the reception about clinics, and he sent us on motorcycles with our guide and another guide to go see a good doctor, Dr. Toure.

He saw me right away. It turned out I had a pretty high temperature, at least 100 degrees, though I’m not entirely certain on my Celsius conversion. He sent me to the lab, where the technician took a quick blood test and confirmed that I had early stages of malaria. The doctor prescribed some malaria medication and aspirin to me, then told us to wait while he removed some cyst or something. We had to wait nearly an hour for him to finish doing that, just so he could write us a receipt. I guess I shouldn’t have expected a Malian clinic to actually go fast, even when it had started out that way.

The problem with the medication was that it needed to be taken with food, but I had no appetite. I picked up some bananas and oranges and bread at the market before going to the hotel. After taking the medication, I slept fairly well and woke up feeling okay. We spent the morning resting up, then headed out for lunch. We ate at this strangely American-themed restaurant and bar, which offered basically no American food, but it had a cow skull and some American license plates. Unlike the Poulet d’Or, they had chicken, and it was great.

Before our rescheduled camel riding, we thought we might go see some other sites our guidebook had talked about. We wanted to see the institute that archives all of the manuscripts, I think that must be where Jeremy works, but it was closed because they built a new building that wasn’t open yet. The guidebook also mentioned a water tower you could climb and get a good view of the city, but the guide seemed to think that you couldn’t go up that. We asked if we could go in the mosque, but it was closed for renovations. Finally, we settled on a library that archived some of the manuscripts, but it was also closed for the time being. The guide told us to just go have a drink at the hotel and we could stop back at the library before the camels.

In the end, the library didn’t open early, so we decided to ride camels and then hit up the manuscripts in the evening. We tromped over some sand dunes out the back of our hotel to where some Touaregs were waiting with camels. The style of riding is completely different than it was in India. Whereas there, you road the camel basically like a horse, with stirrups and all, here you sat in this big wooden chair-like saddle with a plank both at your back and up between your legs, and you crossed your feet on the camel’s neck. It was actually a much easier way of riding. But I suppose these guys are desert nomads, it goes without saying that they would have figured out the easiest way of riding.

We were led out into the desert by the group of Touaregs. Two men to lead the camels, one man to act as the main guide, another guy to speak to Kevin in English a bit, and the last one whose only purpose seemed to be to ask us “Ca va?” every three minutes. We reached the “door of the desert”, the place where the real dunes of the Sahara began. There, we got off the camels and scrambled up a dune to sit and observe the desert in all of its splendor. Here, the sand was still dotted with scrubby bushes, but apparently three days out, it becomes only sand as far as the eye can see. These guys do salt caravans: fifteen days out by camel to pick up the salt and fifteen days back. They taught us a couple words of Touareg, which I have completely forgotten, but it was interesting at the time. And of course, obligatorily, they hawked some goods with all of the same catch phrases.

After a while of resting on the dunes, watching little scarabs leave bird-like tracks in the sand, we got back on our camels and headed for home. At this point, I began to feel sort of nauseous. Maybe it was the rocking of my desert ship that was doing it, I don’t know. When we got off where we started, I just wanted to power back to the hotel. We rested a few minutes, then I pulled together some energy to go see the manuscripts, all the while feeling rather queasy.

The library was a beautiful building, if nothing else, with lovely doors and windows and a nice stone courtyard. They had a small room devoted to manuscripts, with some of the more interesting pieces displayed in glass cases. They had what seems to be the Gutenberg Bible of Korans, illuminated with real gold, as well as texts on Islamic law and grammar and science. It was a quick tour, but interesting.

It was dinner time, but I certainly didn’t feel like eating. I choked down a banana and a couple of oranges to take my medicine, but that was all I could handle. Kevin ventured out on his own for dinner, thankfully unhassled in the dark. He went back to the same American restaurant, where apparently the power went out for about twenty minutes, leaving him to drink beer and ponder in the pitch blackness of Timbuktu. Meanwhile, I just lay uncomfortably in bed, wanting to throw up but not being able to.

That all changed in the middle of the night, when my stomach decided it had had enough with the banana and oranges. Unfortunately, it didn’t make me feel completely better. When we got up at 4:30 the next morning to wait for the 4x4 to take us back, I was still feeling exhausted and nauseous. Luckily, the trip back went much more quickly than the trip there. We got all the way from Timbuktu to Douentza in about 6 hours, as opposed to the 10 for going there, but it was still a painful trip, bumpy and stifling since the driver had the windows up and no fan on.

Christmas day, and we were back in Douentza. We trudged back home, only to find with horror that Oumar had hacked all of the branches off of our two trees. Just splintered trunks standing like corpses beside our garden. No more shade. No more little chirping red birds. I was so depressed I could cry just looking at that. To escape it, I collapsed in bed. In the afternoon, we walked up to the post office to see if any of the mail I was waiting for had arrived. It hadn’t, but on the way back, as usual, a herd up sheep ran by us, and Kevin says, “Isn’t that Bean?” Sure enough, the little brat had gotten caught up in the herd and was crying incessantly, examining each ewe to see if it was his mother. Kevin ran to check if Bean was indeed gone, while I chased the little lamb back towards the house. Eventually, he ran into somebody’s courtyard, where I followed him and scooped him up in my arms. Kevin found me en route as I carried him back, confirming that indeed this was the Professor. The reunion of mother and child was ever so cute. When we got in the door, both Boubou and Bean starting crying and running towards each other. Bean proceeded to suckle, his little tail wagging. He is quite a naughty boy.

For Christmas festivities, we opened some presents my parents had sent to us, which made it feel like we weren’t quite so far away. I just wish I had been in better health. The whole time, my head was still throbbing and I had no energy.

Yesterday was no better. I spent the whole day lying around like a lump. In fact, I probably gave myself a headache just because I was sleeping so much. We tried to watch Wall-E last night, which my parents gave me for Christmas, but I just feel asleep. At 2 in the morning, I woke up, unable to sleep anymore, so I paced around the courtyard for a while in the cold night air until I went back to bed and drowsed until 6:30, when I needed to put my foot down and stop sleeping. Today, I’m finally feeling better. I thought it would never happen, but I have an appetite and my headache is gone.

All in all, not the most pleasant last few days, but still exciting and novel. I mean, where else can I get malaria in Timbuktu on Christmas?

Reflections on marriages and money

Today, we got sucked into a marriage party. We were heading out the door to go buy water at the market when Hamidou came and told us to come over to his house. We were ushered into a dim room with various weavings hung on the walls, where he offered us soft drinks and bags of frozen native ginger ale (very spicy). We were not entirely sure what was going on, but it gave us a chance to admire a couple of Hamidou’s aunts in their finery: fancy boubous, gold rings in the braids framing their faces, eye make-up. Hamidou showed us his wife-to-be, a baby girl about 10 months old.

They had a nice TV set with cable in there, surprisingly enough, which we watched a bit while waiting for the newlyweds to arrive. Eventually we went back across the street to our house to eat lunch, but then the procession came down the street, with cheering and shouting. Oumar rushed us out and we saw the couple, the groom in a suit and the bride in a white wedding dress, flanked by family and friends.

We still had little to no idea of what was happening, but just allowed ourselves to be led around, back into the room, now packed with well-wishers, where Oumar took a bunch of photos and some griots asked us for money. Traditionally, a caste of people known as griots show up at weddings and other celebrations and start singing the history of you and your family and you have to give them money to go away. Even the people here complain about it being rather annoying.

Finally, the party moved on and we were free to return home and finish our rice.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my financial image here lately. I never quite know how to act, when to give, how much to give, etc. It is clear that I (and basically anyone else coming from the US) have more financial means than most people here. At the same time, those means are not as great as the people here think, seeing my white skin. They seem to think that white people have an endless stream of wealth, an idea which I suppose colonialism and recent tourism would support. However, I am here on research money, and what I don’t spend on expenses I try to save for expenses when I get home, where sandwiches cost $5.

When strangers ask me for money, I have a pretty much no-go policy. I figure that I have enough friends here who are in need of things that they should be where I concentrate my efforts. Even with my friends, I can’t get them everything there heart desires, a) because I don’t have that kind of money and b) because it sets up a weird power relationship that I don’t like. I’m not here to be a sugar mama. And even the kids in the street who scream, “Toobob, give me a present!”, it makes me feel uncomfortable how they just assume that racially they are poorer and I must be Santa Claus because of the color of my skin.

The past few days, though, people have asked me for things that I have granted. Maybe it’s the holiday spirit. Hamidou and Ramata I consider to be my children, and I take care of them however I can. Hamidou’s shoes are falling apart—I told him I’d buy him new ones. I let Oumar use the motorcycle a lot (I would like to cut back on that with the new one) and buy the gas for it. The neighbor boys asked me for money to buy a soccer ball last night, and even though I don’t usually interact with them, I gave it to them, and they’ve been playing with it ever since. But it’s not an uneven exchange. People around here do so much for me, from looking over the house while I’m gone, to taking care of our garden, to running errands. It’s just so hard to know when you’re giving too much or when you’re not giving enough.

Enough of that. Oumar and the boys planted some lettuce in our garden yesterday. We’ll see if it grows. The only thing flourishing is a papaya tree that still isn’t giving any fruit (so much for flourishing). Tomorrow, Kevin and I are going to buy a sheep with a newborn lamb. When else will I get the opportunity to raise sheep? And here I can do it in the comfort of my own courtyard. If it doesn’t go well, I’ll just resell it. But the lambs are just so cute. We stopped by M. Guindo’s house a couple of days ago. He raises a lot of animals, and now one of his ewes gave birth to three lambs that were only a couple of weeks old. Their ears are so soft. Seeing them really sealed the deal.

Then it’s off to Timbuktu for a couple of nights, and we’ll be back here on Christmas Eve to celebrate at home base. Unfortunately, Oumar, my only somewhat Christian friend, is going to his family’s village near Sevare to celebrate, but I’m sure Ramata (who is only questionably Muslim anyway) and the others will take any excuse for a small feast.

Back from our many travels

We are back in Douentza! Bright and early Monday morning, our taxi came and picked us up at our hotel and we hit the road. This time, the taxi was luxury—it had AC, so then we didn’t have to have the windows down and get coated in dust the entire trip. We got through the border without any problems and were to Bandiagara by a bit after noon.

Since we had rented the car for the day, I decided to make the most of it and get some errands done on our way back to Douentza. Kirill’s village, Songho, is just beyond Bandiagara, so we dropped by to say hello. As we were on our way down the dirt road leading to the village, Kirill comes up on his motorcycle, apparently on his way to Bandiagara to get to the bank before it closed. So we got to say a brief hello, but continued on to the village ourselves to have a soda and a look around.

After that, we stopped in Sevare to go to the bank and post office and have lunch. We were back on the road by 4 o’ clock and made it into Douentza just after sundown.

We put up the taxi driver that night so he could leave early the next morning and get back to Ouagadougou. Here, when you rent a taxi like that, you have to pay for both the trip over and for the driver to get back. I guess it makes sense, you can’t strand them in a foreign country, but it’s too bad you have to pay for time you don’t use.

It was very nice to be home and see my friends again. I gave people the little souvenirs I brought from Ghana. It’s really hard to judge how people will respond to gifts. For example, I got Hamidou, Mr. 13 going on 30, a little black and silver necklace with Ghana’s (and also incidentally Mali’s) colors in it, and I was afraid that maybe it wasn’t appropriate or he wouldn’t like it, but he was thrilled, telling me, “I’m going to keep this until the day I die.” Figures. Then the next day, Oumar came up and me and said, “I saw that great necklace you got for Hamidou, do you have any more like that?” I’d gotten him a bottle opener carved like a crocodile, which he liked, but I guess the necklace was really the hit.

On Tuesday, I bought a new motorcycle. The old Star was just costing more money to repair it every three days than it was worth, and it practically wouldn’t start anymore, so it was time. Hamidou’s uncle works at a mechanic shop associated with a guy who sells motorcycles, and they’d gotten some new Stars in, so Oumar and I went and bought one. It’s more or less the same as my old motorcycle, just a little smaller and it actually works. I’m in that overprotective-of-new-expensive-thing mode, but I’m sure I will be able to drive it without worrying about dust eventually.

Yesterday, however, was a bad day. Kevin and I tried to come to the internet on the new motorcycle, but it just turned into a disaster. I took it out in the street to start it, but it wasn’t starting up very easily. Whenever this happens, a huge crowd of mostly boys and young men forms, staring at you, saying variably “Why don’t you give it to Monsieur [Kevin]?” or “Laura, it’s hard.” Yeah, shut up. Me being a woman has nothing to do with me not being able to start the motorcycle. Oumar eventually came up and got it started, but I was already feeling humiliated by that time.

Now on a roll, we wound our way through Douentza until we got in a deadlock with another motorcycle and had to stop. This in turn made the engine stop. I was already angry that my new motorcycle was stalling and then even more angry with all of the young men being like, “Laura, it’s hard, huh?”, so fuming, I let a man take my motorcycle to his shop to look at it. Oumar eventually rolled up, having heard that I’d had a problem, and asked me why I hadn’t called him, or what I was doing taking it the shop. I was too mad and upset to even speak. After replacing some part on the engine, I drove the old Star home and Oumar took Kevin back on the new one.

Oumar proceeded to tell me how it just needed to be broken in or something like that, so I let him take it out and I went in my room to cry out my frustration. I just get so sick of men’s vanity here, either patronizing me about the motorcycle or trying to marry me off as if I’m just some cow or object to be tossed around. Certainly, it’s much easier on a day-to-day basis to be a woman here than it was in India, but it’s still an incredibly sexist culture, undertones of which pervade everything.

No matter, yesterday afternoon, we went over to Dave’s place and played some “ladder ball” and tossed around a Frisbee. Then before bed, Kevin read through some of the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit with me and we watched a David Attenborough documentary on Easter Island. Today, the motorcycle took us here no problem. Perhaps Oumar was right. Perhaps it did need to be broken in.

Imagine the least efficient system ever--then make it two degrees worse.

Today, I passed my threshold of tolerance for transportation inefficiency. Kevin can attest to my rage. All that about Ghana’s bus system being so much better than Mali’s? Forget it.

So we went to the STC station in Kumasi at 3, when we were told to report for our 4 o’ clock bus to Ouagadougou. The bus didn’t even show up until 4, much less actually depart. The luggage holds were full to the brim, and I was afraid we wouldn’t get our suitcases on, but they found a way. And that way was filling every extra nook and cranny inside the bus with luggage. Goodbye safety codes. The stairwell to the back door of the bus was entirely blocked by a luggage heap that spilled down the whole aisle as well.

We had seats 46 and 47, the very last row of the bus, where we had a fun fivesome of people crushed in with us in the back corner. The AC was on, but you could only feel it if you put your palm right up against the vent.

The bus finally left closer to 5. As usual, we got our born-again Christian movies, these being particularly blatant with a real-life devil being defeated by a Bible-wielding, Jesus-praying wholesome priest. No subtlety, but kind of comical.

A couple of hours into the journey, we came to a halt next to a cyanide truck (it warned of cyanide, I don’t really know what it contained) and stayed there for at least an hour. Usually if the bus stops, it’s at a station, and you can get off and pee, but no one was moving. I think what happened was that it had rained and some vehicle ahead of us (truck, perhaps?) had gotten stuck in a mud trap and couldn’t move. In any case, we got moving again eventually.

Now, there are a lot of things about the bus process that just make no sense, as if someone in charge were trying to be the most inefficient as humanly possible. In this case, the bus left Kumasi at 4PM, which meant that we arrived at the border with Burkina after the border crossing closed. First of all, why would you close a border? It’s the border. People move across it. Do people just pack up and go home at night? That would seem to invite illegal crossing. If they’re there, though, why not just let people through? Second, why not have the bus either leave earlier so that we get to the border crossing before it closes or later so that we arrive in the morning when it opens? No, we have to leave at 4, which should have gotten us there maybe around 10PM, but it was actually closer to 3AM or 4AM after all of the delay.

So we pull into the STC station at Bolgatanga (I believe) and they turn the bus off so people could sleep. Except you can’t sleep because it’s a stuffy, overflowing bus where you have no room to sit. Kevin and I just got out and sat around until the sun came up, and I used the rest of my Ghanaian phone credit to call my parents. At least it was a morning menagerie at the bus station: pigs snuffling around in piles of trash, a serious pigeon party complete with throat-feather puffing above us, and a small flock of guinea fowl whose disproportionately small heads would poke up over the tin roof of the bus station every now and again accompanied by a chorus of clucking and the scrambling of avian feet on metal. We pulled out of the station again at around 7 or 8, probably at least an hour after the border re-opened.

You have already read about the inexplicably inefficient border crossings. This experience took the cake, though. We get out at the border leaving Ghana (which you would think would be the same as the one entering Burkina Faso, but of course not), where we have to fill out the same forms we filled in entering just to leave. Then a couple of guys in front of us (American and Canadian, I think) got sucked into a Ghanaian visa trap, whereby it seems that you purchase a one-year visa, but when you enter the country you’re only granted 60 days, after which you have to either leave and come back for another 60 days or apply for an extension. Both of their 60 days had expired (I think they had been studying at a university), so they presumably had to pay to get their visas extended.

After that, we piled back onto the bus, though those two got left behind and had to walk to the next checkpoint, just a kilometer up the road, probably. There we again got out and gave our passports to the Burkinabe authorities. There were several foreigners on the bus who hadn’t bothered to get their visas until they got to the border, and for future reference for those considering doing that, just don’t. Just go to the embassy before you leave, otherwise you hold everybody up and fill people like me with rage. So those people get their visas and head back to the bus, but then the rest of us have to wait even more for the border agents to actually get around to looking at our passports. When we finally got them, we found that the bus had pulled rather far away and out of sight into a sea of semi-trucks.

Upon actually locating the bus, we noticed that they were taking all of the carefully Tetris-ed luggage out of the luggage holds. I guess the border patrol needed to check luggage now. So here’s the whole bus population standing around with their suitcases while the border patrol agents presumably do nothing, wander around the bus, people get on and off, no one is looking at anything. Maybe a half an hour later, they look at some boxes in the luggage hold, waste time for another 15 minutes, then come and “look at” our luggage, which consisted of us unzipping it and showing them the top layer. So secure. After all of this, the luggage had to be forced back into the bus, which again took an infuriatingly long time. By the time we got through the myriad borders, it was past 11 o’ clock.

My blood pressure was steadily mounting the whole time, since I was hoping to get into Ouaga in the morning and get a taxi back to Mali on the same day, but these dreams were being ripped to pieces. And it was hot. And it was crowded. And none of it made any sense.

There really should be an easier way of traveling. I could think of at least a dozen no-brainers to make the whole experience that much less unpleasant. In the end, it took over 20 hours to go the distance from LA to San Francisco. Given, there was a border crossing involved, but as Kevin put it, "That shouldn't add 16 hours."

Anyway, we’re here in Ouagadougou now, back at the Hotel Yibi, and we have a taxi out to Douentza tomorrow morning. I’m looking forward to getting home, as much as Douentza is home. Home for the holidays, right? I wish.

How can it be this hard?

We are still in Kumasi, Ghana. We explored every conceivable option on how to get back to Mali in the cheapest and most efficient way, and after weighing our options, it still made sense to wait for the STC bus that leaves tomorrow to get to Ouagadougou and maybe rent a taxi to take us straight back to Douentza from there. It is just mind-bogglingly difficult to get distances that are not that far by American standards. For instance, it costs 400 dollars to fly one way from Accra to Ouagadougou, a distance equivalent to flying from Los Angeles to San Francisco. We also looked at another bus company that leaves for Ouaga every evening, but the buses in their lot looked as though someone had taken a crowbar to them, so we shied away from that option. It would cost 500 dollars plus the price of gas to get someone to drive us from Kumasi to Mali, an option we seriously considered, but didn’t go with in the end because we couldn’t locate any drivers by just asking around.

Even more unbelievable, when we went to a travel agency in Kumasi to ask for advice on getting to Mali, the woman replies, “Mali… where is that? North Africa?” Um, no. It’s practically next door to your country. And you’re a travel agent. Get with it.

In the meantime, we’ve pretty much been lounging around the hotel enjoying somewhat spotty wireless internet. Today, we went to the Moti Mahal and got delicious Indian food for lunch. All of this eating of various foods has reignited my passion for cooking, and I’m going to try to find ways of doing more of that when I get back to Mali, perhaps starting with stocking up on exotic spices in Bamako.

Yesterday, we had a burger fiasco. We ate a couple of meals at a shiny new restaurant called It’s My Kitchen, just down the street from our hotel. This place has the most attentive service of any restaurant I’ve been in here. The waiters would constantly reassure you that your food was coming, collect your empty bottle the minute the last drop of soda hit the glass, and bring you a plate of nicely folded napkins when they saw your hands were getting messy. Anyhow, for lunch, both Kevin and I ordered the cheeseburger. In the usual attentive manner, the waiter came over and a big communication failure ensued. He was asking us if we wanted chicken with our cheeseburgers, and we’re like, “No, just the burger” (except that it took a lot more confused conversation to get there). So a few minutes later, our burgers come out, and big delicious buns with what looks like a big delicious chicken patty (unexpected, but not totally incredible given our earlier conversation) in the middle. Upon sinking in our teeth, however, we realized that no, it was not a chicken patty, but a third bun, and there was no meat in the thing at all. We called the waiter over and asked about the meat, and confused, he tells us, “But you ordered the cheeseburger…” This is explains why so many places say “beef burger with cheese” on their menu. In the end, we got a couple of chicken patties each on the burgers, and they were delicious, but it was quite the fiasco.

One thing that makes moving around in Ghanaian cities so entertaining are the various store signs, some with English names that don’t quite hit the mark. Some favorites:

-Elite University: Remedial!!! Remedial!!! Remedial!!!
-The Lord’s Casket Furniture Shop
-Afrigirl Unisex Salon
-Ham Florals and Internal Decoration

I’m sure there have been more, but I just can’t think of them now.

On a work note, I finally was able to parse the name of this plant, Abrus precatorius, with pretty red and black (poisonous seeds). It’s called [ɛ̀nɛ̀gìrìndùgǎy], which, I realize, breaks up into /ɛ̀nɛ̀ gìrì-m dùgɔ̌-y/ ‘the jewelry of sheep herders.’ Plus ten.

More photos!

Here are two new photo albums to illustrate the recent posts. Enjoy!

Pre-travel Mali

Burkina Faso and Ghana

Beach paradise and the jungle

I apologize that it has taken this long to update. As I suspected, we had no internet on the beach, and the keyboard of the computer where we were in Cape Coast was so jammed that writing a blog post would not have been good for my blood pressure. But here we are in the Ashanti city of Kumasi in Ghana. Let me recap our past week for you. But before I do that, let me say that Kevin and I are both in good health—thanks for all of your concern.

The last installment indicated we were going to a beach town called Busua, and go we did. After trying to reach a couple of resorts on Dixcove to no avail (either the number doesn’t work, is constantly busy, isn’t right… a common occurrence), we settled on a place called the African Rainbow Resort in Busua. We nearly got left behind by the bus in Cape Coast at one of its rest stops, but we ran and jumped on in the nick of time.

It was mid-afternoon when we arrived at our resort. It was lovely. The room was open and airy, no AC, but naturally ventilated and cooled by the ocean breeze from the balcony. We went down to the beach after settling in and waded in the water. It would be hard to find a more ideal beach. There was no steep drop-off into the water, but rather the warm waves rolled up high onto the flat beach, resulting in a wide wade-able stretch. That day, we had our first run-in with Frank, the juice man, aggressively peddling his juice. More about him later.

The next day, we hit the beach in the late morning and rented body boards from the Black Star Surf Shop. Neither Kevin nor I had ever been body boarding, but it was delightful. The water was warm and the waves weren’t too big, but they were still powerful enough to give you quite a ride. After an hour of that, we were again approached by Frank the Juice Guy, brother of Dan the Pancake Man, and we agreed to go give it a try, since the guidebook had mentioned good things about the pancakes.

He led us back away from the beach to a run-down little house with a couple plastic tables. The steps to getting our pancakes were baffling. We told him what we wanted (“American pancakes with banana and chocolate”), then he told someone else, who came later and asked us too, then some people got in a car, and some guy came back with a plastic bag of bananas… it was as though they had to scour the town for ingredients. But in the end, we each had in front of us a fresh pancake with sliced banana and a bar of melted chocolate (to be spread ourselves), as well as a liter and a half of fresh chunky mango-orange juice. Our walk back to the resort was accompanied by an afternoon rain shower, which turned into a hefty thunderstorm overnight. We spent the rest of the day playing Scrabble and pool and getting eaten by mosquitoes.

Saturday, we got more adventurous with our water sports, and went sea kayaking. The scariest part was getting out of the surf. A young man who worked for the hotel waded out as deep as he could go once I was seated on the kayak to hold me steady and help push me out, but the rather large waves crashing onto me head on capsized me once and pushed me back to shore. The second try, though, after a little bit of screaming and a lot of paddling, I burst through the last wave and found myself on the calm sea behind the surf. Kevin joined me and we paddled serenely out towards the little coastal island.

It was about twenty minutes of paddling when we arrived at the island, steering our red plastic kayaks around a small isthmus of rocks marking out a protected cove to land in. The island was basically a big pile of rocks with a couple of coconut palms and a lot of tide pools. Dozens of crabs would scuttle out of our way as we explored, checking out the black spiny sea urchins in the pools and the cowry shells peppering the sand. After a little while, we took to the sea again, bobbing along the undulating water until the waves pushed us back to land.

We went to the neighboring resort for dinner that night, where they were having a barbecue night, complete with a traditional drum and dance group. I wanted to try their ostrich sausage, but they were out of it, so I had a big plate of corned beef and egg stew with yams, a Ghanaian dish, which was delicious. I even tried Kevin’s grilled lobster and enjoyed it.

Our last full day in Busua, we walked down a muddy jungle bush path to get to the neighboring fishing town of Dixcove. It was much more bustling than Busua, with dozens of wooden fishing boats moored on the rocky shore and a heavy smell of fish and sewage in the air. Sunday was Ghana’s presidential election, and there were a couple of polling stations set up, including one on Fort Metal Cross, Dixcove’s old British slave fort. We took a quick tour of the fort and got the sobering account of how the slaves were kept in a room for three months before being shipped out; if the toilet filled up, they would have to sit with the sewage, if someone died, they would stay in there until the three months were up, and the food was thrown down through a hole in the ceiling. It was chilling.

Kevin and I both had huge burritos and beer at the surf shop for lunch, then went body boarding again. This time, the waves were bigger and our technique was better, and all in all, we were probably in the water for two hours or more.

I was depressed to be leaving the beach the next day. The whole experience was wonderful. I already described the beach, but the hotel itself had a nice atmosphere, with tons of yellow birds weaving grass nests in its gardens. The one thing detracting from the stay was the baffling lack of pina coladas. No where made them, despite the fact that the area is bursting with coconut trees and fresh pineapples, and the hotel bar had rum and a blender. Who knows, but there’s one for the suggestion box.

Monday, we took the advice of the Canadian co-owner of our resort and checked into the Hotel Hacienda outside of Cape Coast. The room was arguably pretty nice, but the feeling of the hotel was dreary and it was far from everything. We went into town for a late lunch then toured their slave fort, Cape Coast Castle, a much bigger one than at Dixcove, with a nicely laid out museum in it. The fort had changed hands many times, originally set up by the Portuguese, then taken over by a progression of the Dutch, Danish, Swedish (who knew?), and finally ending up in the hands of the British. At night, we walked to the local minimart and got snacks which we ate while catching up on our Top 40 hits on a British music channel coming through on their satellite TV.

We decided to change hotels and try out the Hans Cottage Botel, on the road to Kakum National Park. What exactly made it a botel rather than a hotel is unclear. Maybe it was the thatched restaurant on stilts over the crocodile pond, but I don’t know. In any case, it was quite a unique place to stay, with delicious fresh passion fruit juice. In the late afternoon, we took a taxi up to the national park, where we took the walk across the “canopy walkway”, a series of seven rope bridges 40 meters above the forest floor. The bridges swing disturbingly when stepped on, and I had some horror visions of the bridges snapping off their anchor trees, but it was a great way to see the forest. Unfortunately, we didn’t see much in the way of wildlife, though I think I saw an elephant on the way from the taxi.

And to stay true to my roots, I must say that I was in pangolin country, but unfortunately, the critters are nocturnal and I saw none.

We are now in Kumasi, as I said, trying to get back to Mali, but it’s harder than it should be. We asked at the Cape Coast STC bus station when there were buses going from Kumasi to Ouagadougou, but the woman told us we would have to ask in Kumasi. So today we pulled in around 5:30 PM and found out that a bus left at 4:00 and the next won’t be until Saturday. Unless we find another transport company that isn’t suicide to take, we’ll have to hole up here for three nights and hope we get pretty quick transport out of Ouagadougou to Mali.

I will end with a few observations about Ghana in general. First of all, it is incredibly lush. The roads are lined with tons of fruit trees: bananas, oranges, passion fruit vines, papayas, coconuts, plus pineapple groves. Second, Ghana has so many more cars than motorcycles as compared with Mali and Burkina Faso. Finally, just a current events fact, Ghana will be having a run-off election between Nana Akufo-Addo and J. E. Atta-Mills on the 28th of this month, and then we will know who the new president is. Elections for everyone!

On to Ghana

My African countries list now includes three entries, since we arrived in Ghana late Monday night. Monday morning, we got to the bus station around 7, as we were told. I was feeling sort of sick to my stomach, so I was worried about the trip, but luckily I didn’t have any problems. I was amazed by how nice the bus was—actually air conditioned, plush leather seats, nothing in the aisles, and it left on time. Much better than Mali’s bus services. We immediately knew we were entering a Christian nation when all of the music they played and all of the Ghanaian movies they played had a born-again Christian message that was not subtle in the slightest. Rather surreal after coming from Muslim countries. Also strange was that everything started to be in English, albeit English that is very hard to understand.

Par for the African course, however, were the two separate border crossings, one leaving Burkina and one entering Ghana, that were of course about a kilometer apart. When we got off the bus leaving Burkina, I exchanged a big wad of CFA for Ghana Cedi (1 cedi is a little less than a dollar), and in the meantime the bus pulled away without us, but luckily just to the other side of the stop.

The bus ride took 20 hours altogether, the last four of which neither Kevin nor I were feeling well. Finally, at about 4 in the morning, we arrived in Accra and got a taxi to our hotel. It’s not as nice as it must have been five years ago when my guidebook was written (unfortunately the 2008 edition came out in June of this year), but it does the trick. There was a huge spider on the wall, which Kevin killed for me, but otherwise we slept comfortably.

Unfortunately, Kevin was rather sick and bed-ridden yesterday, but he took a dose of antibiotics and today he’s doing better. Yesterday afternoon, a guy who worked at the hotel took me out to help me find a laundry place, which was much harder than it should have been. The first place we went to didn’t have a machine, only dry cleaning, and the other two places would charge about 50 bucks, wouldn’t wash women’s underwear (oh my God, toxic!), and wouldn’t have it ready until after we planned on leaving. Totally discouraged, I finally just paid the guy 30 bucks to wash it all for us by hand. Hopefully it’ll be ready and dry today, though with this humidity, who knows.

Accra has a much different feel than Burkina and Mali. It definitely has a coastal vibe and is very lush and humid. Lots of palm trees and grass, with Ghanaian high life music playing all around. Today when we were waiting an hour for a restaurant to bake us a muffin (ridiculous), a truck drove by blasting party music, the back filled with young people in identical tee-shirts. It was advertising some sort of health insurance. I never knew health insurance was such a party.

Tomorrow, we’re heading over to Busua to lounge on the beach for a few days. I don’t think we’ll have internet, so stay tuned and I’ll write back as soon as possible.

A plethora of elephants

Burkina Faso has many faces, and we have seen a few of them in the last few days.

Our Thanksgiving dinner was at a nice restaurant called Le Verdoyant, which was indeed unbelievably popular (the only place I’ve seen so far where reservations are a good idea). There, we stuffed ourselves with lasagna and pineapple and ham pizza that were delicious, even by American standards. By that, I only mean that sometimes here, things taste so delicious because you haven’t had a pizza in months, but really it’s not that good, but this was legitimately tasty.

After doing some research online, we realized that the bus company we had reserved with to go to Ghana might not be such a good idea, as the buses are old and apparently have the highest incidence of crashes. We decided that we would prefer to get to Ghana alive, if possible, so we pushed back our departure one more day and went to change our bus tickets to the STC bus line, leaving Monday morning. After picking up our visas, we went out for Indian food for lunch.

I would not have expected a fine Indian restaurant in the heart of Ouagadougou, but it was there, and it had delicious cocktails as well. Over lunch, we discussed what to do with our extra time in Burkina. The night before, the taxi driver had talked to us about a safari park called Nazinga and gave us his card, in case we needed anything. After looking it up online, we decided it would be a nice day trip, so we called up Sylvain, the driver, and arranged to go the following day.

After going to India for lunch, we took a trip to the American bar life for dinner. We read about a bar not far from our hotel called the Cactus Bar, reputed to serve burgers and play Western music. It turned out to not actually serve burgers of its own, but you could order from the restaurant downstairs, and it played hip hop. But close enough. We were the only people up there, because apparently we’re square enough to hit the town before ten o’ clock, but we had a couple beers, shot a couple games of pool, and got take-out from downstairs brought up to us wrapped in aluminum foil. To continue the classiness, we went downstairs, where they had a legitimate bowling alley, playing Best of the 90s and everything, except instead of having a big Budweiser sign they had a Castel one. Just in case we forgot we were in Africa. We contemplated going out clubbing, but just went to bed instead.

5:30 the next morning, we awoke to the airy tone of my cell phone alarm, and got dressed and ready for our safari in the dark. We were down in the lobby at 6:00, our scheduled departure time, but I forgot that we were in Africa and nothing is actually on time. The driver showed up around 6:45, and we got underway. On our way out of Ouaga, we stopped at a gas station to fill up, and I went into their minimart to buy water. Again, I was amazed by how modern Ouaga is: prices marked on coolers, clean, stocked, computer and scanner to check out… just like the US.

The drive to Nazinga took about 3 hours. The first half was on the freeway up to a town called Po, and from there it was dirt road. After a little nap, Kevin and I played Scrabble all the way up to the park entrance. The park itself is a very large (about 400 sq. miles) area of protected forest and savannah with man-made watering holes, though they also offer hunting safaris there. Once inside the park’s front gate, there was still about 30 kilometers to go to get to the center camp of the park.

At the gate, we had picked up some local student needing to get to the center. About two or three kilometers in, we spotted a couple of elephants off to our right. The driver stopped, and the rest of us (Kevin, the student, and I) scrambled up on top of the 4x4 to get a better view. Unfortunately, the animals were largely obscured by trees, so we kept going with us still on the roof. Let me tell you, the top of a 4x4 is exceedingly uncomfortable, with the metal bars of the baggage rack digging into your butt as the vehicle bumped along disintegrating dirt road. From up there, however, we spotted a couple of monkeys, some baboons, and a couple of antelope before we even got to the heart of the park and picked up our guide. At one point, the road crossed a watering hole, and there were probably more than ten elephants there cooling off, including one big male making quite a presentation of himself (not for the kids to see).

Finally, we made it to the center, where their little collection of cabins overlooks another watering hole, this one also with seven elephants splashing away in it. Before getting back in the car with our guide, we walked down a little path to an observatory they had built looking out over the watering hole, and we observed the elephants for a while from there.

By this point, it was almost 11:30, not the best time of day to see animals, but we had no choice. We piled back into the 4x4 with our guide and took off on more little paths through the brush. We had terrific luck that day. Not far from camp, we saw a troop of probably thirty elephants, as well as various kinds of antelope (bushbucks, duikers, waterbucks, etc.) and many, many species of bird (eagles, wild guinea fowl, Abyssinian rollers, red-throated bee-eaters, parakeets, to name a few).

We ate lunch with our driver in their screened restaurant overlooking the watering hole. From there, we could see a few warthogs snuffling around in the reeds, as well as a few antelope and deer who had come to drink. Then around 2, we hit the road.

The park was in the process of doing controlled burnings to increase visibility, which I had somewhat mixed feelings about. On the way out, we drove past patch after patch of crackling, burning grass, and the sky was dark with all of the smoke. Around the smoke billows, dozens of birds of prey were circling, waiting for the little animals escaping the fire to run out into the open. The driver told us, though, that the burnings were good for the animals too, because in the open, they were safer from hyenas (which we didn’t see) that would ambush them from the grass. I guess controlled burning prevents raging uncontrolled brush fires, too.

Needless to say, it was an amazing trip. We played some more Scrabble on the way back until we ran out of gas a little ways out of Ouagadougou. It wasn’t a big deal, though, we just paid some guy on a bicycle to go up the road and buy a few liters for us. Around dinner time, we pulled back up to our hotel, completely coated in dirt and dust from the road that may not completely come off for days.

We went back to Le Verdoyant for dinner and got more pizza and lasagna, though this time it was like we were invisible, and the plethora of waiters were nearly impossible to wave down. No matter, the food was still delicious.

So from Italy, to India, to the US, to the savannah, Burkina Faso continues to impress me. It makes me wish I were stationed in Ouagadougou.

Ouagadougou, capital of my heart

Kevin and I are currently on our holiday vacation and have arrived safely in Ouagadougou, the capital of the fine country of Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta). Tuesday morning, we got up and waited at the side of the freeway for a bus going to Sevare. The bus system in Mali is mind-bogglingly inefficient. No one really knows what time the buses will show up or how many seats they will have open, so you just buy tickets and hope for the best. When the bus came, they had oversold the tickets and we ended up having to stand/sit on a water jug in the aisle, but as luck had it, we were stationed right next to these two white girls who ended up being Peace Corps volunteers from up around Gao. We chatted with them the whole way down, which was nice. So much Peace Corps in our life lately!

We got into Sevare around 2:00 and took our baggage to the Mankan Te Bed and Breakfast, a nice little place off the road to Bamako. As much as we craved a nap, I needed to get my bank business done before it closed and we needed to make reservations to get to Burkina, so we headed out for a long hot walk to the BNDA (Banque Nationale du Developpement Agricole). To my relief, my wire transfer got through just fine and I got the money I needed.

Minkailou and Seydou, neither of whom I had seen for over a month, came and met us there and we went to Mopti together to try to nail down our bus departure. Arriving at the bus station, we got another dose of bus efficiency. First, the people selling the tickets had all left to pray or something, then when they came back, it turned out that the bus that was supposed to leave the next day hadn't gotten in yet, even though the man had told Minkailou just three days ago that buses left Mon Wed Fri. They told us we could take a bus from Sevare to Koro, then get on a vehicle to Ouahigouya then change there to go to Ouaga, but after some consideration, we decided to live the high life and rent a car. In the end, despite the cost, I think it was the best option.

The taxi came and picked us up at our hotel at 9:00 on Wednesday morning. It was a slightly beat up (as most cars are here) Mercedes 190. We took off on the road to Bandiagara, after which we left the paved roads behind and bumped along a dirt road like the one heading to Borko. It was hot and I felt sort of car sick, but all in all, not as bad as a bus would have been.

It turns out that it is not just buses that are inefficient in Mali; the border crossing was equally amazing. We stopped at what I assumed was the border, where we had to show our passports to the police, who in turn wrote down all of our information in their little book. They couldn't even tell which one of us was Kevin and which was Laura (I'm thinking, "Well, the one that's a MAN is Kevin..."). But we got through without being shaken down for any bribes. Then, another fifteen minutes up the road, we stop at yet another border crossing, where again we get out and have to show our passports, and again the guy writes down our information. A little further up, the driver has to get out and show vehicle registration (as he did at the first border crossing) and then a third time he has to stop about another half a kilometer up, not to mention the toll stop. Kevin and I are thinking, "Why don't they just put all of the checks in the same place?" but that would clearly be far too easy.

Driving into Burkina was impressive. The roads are well-paved with electricity lines running for kilometers alongside of them, and even the somewhat small towns we passed through had stoplights. Certainly a change from Mali. After 7 hours in the Boss Mobile, we rolled in to Ouagadougou around 4 and pulled up at our hotel.

I had made reservations, but they got the date wrong, as well as my phone number to call me. For a couple minutes, I thought we were going to have a real problem, but they shifted some stuff around and fit us in. The hotel is pretty nice, with a beautiful pool in a shady courtyard surrounded by African animal carvings. There is even wireless internet, though a lot of pages won't load on it for some reason (which explains why I am currently in a cyber cafe).

This morning we got up and went out to get our Ghanaian visas. Ouagadougou feel much more developed than Bamako. Nice roads, taller buildings, less trash, and things run more efficiently. We got our passport photos done no problem, then headed to the embassy. There, as opposed to filling out three different copies of the same form, they actually had carbon copies, and we got our business done quickly--should be ready for pick up tomorrow.

After getting back to the hotel, we both decided to get our hair cut at their salon. I was the first in the chair. The haircut probably took no more than 10 minutes, which speaks for the quality. Layers? Forget it. I was lucky that it ended up sort of evenly hacked off above the chin. Oh well, at least it's lighter. Kevin wanted his hair buzzed, which should not have been hard, but it ended up taking probably almost an hour. She tried going to town with the rasor first, but his hair just clogged it, so we suggested she cut it short and then buzz it, and even then it took much longer than buzzing should. It worked out in the end and it looks good, but Kevin said she kind of pulled some of his hair out in the process.

While waiting for him to be buzzed, I got a pedicure and watched the Last Legion dubbed in French on the TV. The girl was really overzealous with the pummice stone/nail file/foot buffer; basically anything that sanded off parts of your feet, she was a big fan of. I just had to tell her to stop when she pulled out the fourth sanding device. I prefer to keep some skin on my feet. That being said, my feet are extremely soft now.

After such adventures, we were starving and had some pizza, beer and ice cream at the hotel restaurant, then slept it off. We wanted to go swimming, but the water was too cold without the sun on it. We'll try again tomorrow.

Then this evening, in an effort to find the internet cafe noted in my guide book, we set out walking. We fortuitously ended up at the grocery store across from the big mosque, which puts any grocery store in Bamako to shame. So big. So much stuff. So clean. We could not for the life of us find the internet cafe, though. Where we thought it should be, there was just a surprising stretch of open space in the middle of the city with some weeds growing on it. We asked at the hotel, and I guess they razed that district. Ouaga development in progress, I guess.

After this, we are off to a restaurant which is apparently "unbelievably popular" and serves pizza and pasta. Never too much pizza.

We are village trekkers

Kevin and I got back from the village yesterday afternoon. For being a 48 hour trip, it was quite eventful. Where to begin?

We got up with the sun on Thursday morning to set out. With the rainy season over, the direct route is now navigable by motorcycle. Unlike the route via Borko, however, the direct way doesn’t have a solid road and is full of sand and dry river beds and rocks, thus I cannot drive it. We commissioned Oumar and another motorcycle to take us to the base of the cliff, from where we would carry on by foot. The road getting there was certainly exciting. Instead of taking the freeway, you go out the backside of town and drive along a little dirt track, surrounded by fields and huge boulders as you go deeper into the valley. After about an hour, we arrived where the motorcycle could go no further. It was a little Borko-esque oasis, with a clear stream full of tiny minnows and palms and the echoes of abundant birdsong. There Oumar and company left us, and we started our trek.

The first part of the hike to the village is scaling the mountain. It is like using a Stair Master for an hour straight, but the views are amazing. On the way up, we came across a young man named Hamma carrying a huge basket of millet on his head. He was from Ambile, the village at the top of the cliff, but he took it upon himself to get us all the way to Tongo-Tongo. When we got to his village, he took us into his house and offered us food and water, all of which I perhaps impolitely refused, not wanting to get sick. As is usual in a village I haven’t been to before, all of the children gathered around to stare at us. Finally, we kept going and got to Tongo-Tongo after about another hour’s hike. Overall, from the base of the cliff to my village, it’s about 10 kilometers, so we got our exercise.

Like always, the villagers were very glad to see me and were quite curious to see Kevin. He even picked up a little bit of the elaborate greetings. Ramata’s mother brought us lunch when we got there, millet paste with hibiscus calyx sauce, the first time I’ve actually eaten the staple food in the village itself. Surprisingly, both Kevin and I found it to be quite tasty, though I certainly wouldn’t want to eat it at every meal like the villagers do.

When we arrived, M. le Maire informed me that it was the last day of the millet harvest, so if I wanted to see it at all, we would have to go then. Exhausted as I was from the 10 kilometer hike, I pulled myself together to walk another 4 kilometers round trip to see the field where they were harvesting. In the end, I’m glad I did. There were probably a dozen people in the field, all with little hand knives that they used like garden sheers, only the other blade was the thumb. I tried my hand at harvesting a spike or two, but mainly just succeeded in getting the fiber-glass-like hairs of the millet spike lodged in my thumb. I was told that the field I had farmed a little bit at the beginning of the summer had given a good harvest and I had been deemed good luck. After harvesting a bit, M. le Maire took me to where the heaped all of the harvested millet spikes and sorted them by kind to be tied into bundles and taken back to the village. I saw the little black and white dog sleeping there by the millet, and he actually looked cute. Little did I know…

Anyway, once back in the village, we just hung out and chatted for a little while. We made a can of chili I’d brought for dinner and ate it with some bread and Laughing Cow cheese. I was told that the women were planning on dancing for us that night, something I’d been wanting to see ever since I first got there. Around 8 o’ clock, Ramata’s mother came into my house, as she is wont to do, and brought us a pitcher of millet porridge, which I tried to politely refuse, since I know it has some unboiled water in it, but she insisted on leaving it for us and told us that they were indeed going to dance. In an effort not to be rude, I boiled the porridge to kill off whatever might have been in it, and Kevin and I both ate a bit, though I can’t say as it was exactly good.

At about 9, the dance was preparing in our courtyard. A couple young women had stretched a mat out under the hanger with a big hollow calabash on it to be used as the drum. The celebration started slowly, Ramata’s mother and a dozen girls singing call and response songs in Tommo-So to the pounding beat of the calabash. At intervals, everyone would start clapping a rhythm and someone would go into the middle of the circle to dance, hands extended in front and butt extended in back, stomping a syncopated rhythm with the feet. Eventually the music picked up and they brought out the beautiful calabash covered in cowry shells to use as a percussion instrument. I was pulled into the circle to dance a couple of times, though I was basically just randomly stomping around and probably looked ridiculous. They eventually gave Kevin and I some chairs to sit down and watch the dance unfold under a million stars, punctuated by the occasional meteor. The dance participants slowly changed from mostly girls of 11 or 12 to the older women who would enter the circle and dance with much zeal. Ramata’s grandmother was an interesting spectacle. She would periodically go into the circle and drop on her knees or dance around, her shirt falling off of her shoulders until someone gently removed her to the sidelines. The whole occasion was filled with things I didn’t understand, people throwing down shawls in front of other people, women dropping to their knees and touching someone’s feet, twos and threes of women coming in and dancing determined by some system I didn’t understand. The only thing keeping me from totally enjoying it was the fact that I had gotten up at 6 am and walked 14 kilometers that day, yet the dance went on until past midnight, when Kevin and I excused ourselves for bed.

The next day before lunch, Bureima took Kevin and I over to the next village of Entaga, where we had our fortunes read by a man with bushy hair and one skewed eye named Binna Mousa. He reads fortunes in the traditional way of spreading out cowry shells and reading their alignment. We were ushered across his courtyard, carpeted by broken millet stems, into his little mud house, where I sat on a beautifully carved Dogon stool. Our fortunes were entirely positive and largely work related, or so we gleaned from the game of telephone that was the translation of the fortune. Binna Moussa told Bureima in Tommo-So, Bureima told me in broken French, then I translated the broken French into English. Basically, Kevin and I will both be successful in our work, as will Kevin’s sister. There will be no problems and people will travel around in my name. However, in order to make this come true, there are specific offerings we have to make: Kevin must give one white cola nut to an old man or woman, and I have to give seven tamarind fruits to a beggar child. Then we will be “bosses”.

Ramata’s mother made us delicious beans for lunch, then we headed into the village and out into the fields to look around. I showed Kevin the animist fetish, like a giant mud finger pointing to the sky, out behind the village. By the toguna, the round pagoda-like place where the men sit and discuss, they had slaughtered a sheep and the really old guy was hacking at the carcass with an ax. Later we sat down on the rock that was probably covered in sheep’s blood, but so it goes.

We went up the big hill that gives cell phone service and placed Scrabble in the shade of a rocky overhang. In the distance, the towering cliffs around Douentza jutted faintly above the horizon. We made our way back to the village as the sun set. After a dinner of more beans, we sat out under the stars with Ramata’s mother, and for the first time since I got here, my Tommo-So was good enough to actually carry on a decent conversation. She said it was getting cold here, but I told her it was very cold where I am from, and that the water “sleeps” (is frozen) for three months straight. Confused, she asked, “Doesn’t the sun come out?” and I told her it does, so she asked “Doesn’t it have any strength?” and not knowing what to say, I just agreed that it had no strength. Then she asked if all of the water in Bamako (the Niger River) went all the way to the United States. I told her no, we have a lot of water, but it’s not the same water. Then she told me about her children, about Ramata’s older sister who died and how beautiful she was, how Ramata would get married when she was done with school… I look forward to my Tommo-So getting even better and being able to really chat.

Our second night’s sleep was awful. While the first night we were there, the night air was cool and refreshing, the second night was stuffy and awful. On top of that, the once cute little dog chose the spot in front of my door to stand and bark incessantly around 3 in the morning. I wanted to go out and throw a rock at it, or shoot it or something (though I am generally against violence towards animals), but I was afraid of it. We woke up haggard at 6:30 and got ready for the return trip.

The walk to Ambile seemed a lot shorter, since we weren’t already exhausted from the climb. On the way, we passed then fell behind then passed a man from Anji carrying a chicken on his bicycle who was also going to Douentza. On our way down the cliff, we got lost. We were following a little dirt trail, but suddenly it turned into a sheep path and we were on a rocky field with a little stone house and no sign of the right road. After clambering up onto rocks in hopes of looking down onto the path, we finally retraced our steps through what I think was a cemetery, until we found where we had gone wrong. Finding the route down the cliff was all about finding the man-made rock piles, very barely distinguishable from natural piles, that indicated where one should climb down.

With aching knees and sweaty backs, we made it down to the bottom a little after 11, and we waited by the stream and played Scrabble until our rendez-vous with the motorcycles at noon. While waiting, a local farmer picked a couple of guavas and gave them to me, one of which was sour and unripe and the other of which was the most delicious guava I’ve ever tasted.

The roads were rather crowded on the way back with people going to Douentza for the market. Women walk the whole way from the village to Douentza with huge sacks of grain on their heads, and I have no idea how the make it down the cliff like that. It makes you feel like a wuss for being tired from your backpack.

A village for two and some linguistics

Tomorrow, Kevin and I are off to the village for a couple nights. It’s been a while since I’ve been there, so I need to greet the people. I’ve prepared the dictionary sections I couldn’t really do here to get them done there with photos (guns, jewelry). Time for some millet beer, some Bug Hut 2, and a whole bunch of greetings.

Things are okay in town. I got some more elicitation done with M. Guindo, who was kind enough to send us a gigantic bag full of peanuts. I’ve been thinking a lot about tone lately, and have discovered some things. First, it seems that to explain the tone classes of verbs, there must be a specified low tone that links to the first mora and the high tone to the second (which then spreads). It would otherwise seem odd to have the H link to the first mora in some cases and the second in others. Then you would have to specify some empty slot that just gets filled in as L on the surface. Seems weird. Also, I’ve noticed that in nouns with a LH tone contour, the H links to the last mora, so if you have a heavy (bimoraic) final syllable, you will get a rising tone on it. For instance: /tòndòó/ ‘water jar’. I used to think the whole final syllable was H, but it’s not.

Besides that, I’m finally sorting out all of these infinitives/verbal nouns that have been plaguing me. It seems that /stem + -dim/ is an infinitive, as in:

/núyɔ́-dìm m̀bɛ́-gó wɔ̀-m/ ‘I like to sing’
sing-Inf like-GO be-1sgS (Still don’t know what the GO is)

And then there are two gerundive forms that can be used in the same context as above, but also can be possessed. These change the final vowel of the stem to /i/ and add either /-lé/ or /-yé/. The prior form changes the tone to all H, while the latter has a LH contour. For instance:

/jòbù jɔ́bí-lé wómɔ̀ síɛ́-ǹ/
running run-Ger his good-Copula
‘his running is good’

or

/jòbù jɔ̀bí-yé wómɔ̀ síɛ́-ǹ/
running run-Ger his good-Copula
‘his running is good’

Here we also see the common pattern in Dogon of having a verb with a cognate noun, so you run a run, sing a song, write a writing, etc. Most of the time, the infinitive and the gerunds can be used in the same contexts. As in English, we can say “To run is good” or “Running is good”, but where the two separate is that the gerund can be used as a noun and thus can be possessed (His running is good) but the infinitive cannot (*His to run is good). Perhaps my two gerund forms will end up being different in the end as well, but for now they seem entirely interchangeable.

We finally met Peace Corps Dave, which was great. We went out and got a few beers on Monday night after running into him at the internet, then he came over to our house for lunch the next day. After eating, we went and checked out the Peace Corps house, and I got to borrow some books, including a Fulfulde textbook, which should be very helpful. It was great to make friends with another American in the area.

In other news, Oumar was apparently arrested for a couple hours for hitting a kid and his mom. That’s the story other people have told me. We went to try to visit him in jail, but apparently he’d been released. I saw him later, he said he’d only been held for a couple hours, and that what really happened was that he was at work plastering a wall and some kid was messing it up, so he kind of flung the kid aside, then his mom got angry and was threatening to beat him with her huge wooden pestle, so he pushed her too. The truth is probably somewhere in between. I was pretty worried for a little while there, since Oumar makes everything run so smoothly for me here, I don’t know what I’d do if he got legitimately arrested. Plus, he’s my friend, so that would suck. But it seems that all’s well that ends well, and everything is back to normal now.

Crocodiles

This weekend, Kevin and I went on an adventure. And by that, I mean that the two of us helmeted up and took off on the motorcycle to the village of Borko, tucked into one of the hills on the long way to my village. Borko is a little terrestrial paradise. Unlike the arid land around it, there are several natural springs there, so it stays green all year long. In those streams lies Borko’s biggest claim to fame: crocodiles.

Now, before I went, I wasn’t certain what these reptiles were going to be. They call them “caimans” in the local French, and I thought they might just be Nile monitor lizards, but I assumed that would be interesting anyway.

The whole trip was like an exam of everything I have learned since I got here: driving the motorcycle, finding a village, greeting the chief, navigating in Tommo-So, and I passed on all accounts, I think. The first half of our time there, I didn’t speak any French at all. Borko is actually in the Najamba zone, but the language is closely related and a lot of people speak/understand Tommo-So, since it’s the next zone over.

Anyhow, we pulled up to the village around 11 AM and parked the motorcycle under a tree a little walk from the village itself. Walking up, all of the people saw us and smiled, then I would greet them in Tommo-So and they would give a little “Eh!” of surprise as their faces lit up. Half the time, the greetings were an incomprehensible mixture of Najamba and Tommo and I probably botched a lot of it, but it’s the thought that counts.

We came up to the first village and I asked some kids where the chief was. Tromping through a harvested millet field, we arrived in their streets, and I conversed with this man for a while about where I was from, what we’d come to do, where the chief had went, etc. Turns out, the chief had gone to the fields, but he showed me his three wives (“the red (=light-skinned) one, the dark one, and the other one”) and they gave Kevin and I both big handfuls of peanuts.

Somehow, throughout the course of this, it became clear that we were in the wrong village. Borko is comprised of three little villages, and we needed to walk up to the next one to see the crocs, which we did. There, we gave the chief a bag of kola nuts and 1000 CFA as a gesture of goodwill, then negotiated with the actual village guide (who spoke to me only in French and was much less friendly than everyone else—perhaps a by-product of too much tourism?) to show us the crocodiles for another 5500 CFA ($11).

That covered the cost of the hunks of raw goat meat we picked up with the butcher to feed to the crocodiles. Having done that, the guide ushered us through a little bamboo gate to an open area, where already one large crocodile was sun-bathing, some little water plants stuck to its scaly head. I was startled. Here I was expecting monitor lizards, and three feet in front of me is a legitimate crocodile or alligator or something of the sort.

The guide started clucking and grunting; out of the bushes, one, then two, then three more crocodiles scrambled in for the feast. Two of the them were rather small, probably about 2-3 feet long, but the other two were probably closer to 5 feet. I thought at one point one of them was going to bite my foot off, since it was getting a little close and curious for comfort, but I stepped back and it became more interested in the meat the guide was throwing into their jaws.

These animals are the village’s totem. The guide told me that back in the war with the Mande several hundred years ago, when the Dogon were driven up into the cliffs for safety, the crocodiles helped them cross the river, and ever since then, they’ve been their totem. They don’t hurt the crocodiles—doing so would be hurting the village. In fact, he told me that if anyone killed a crocodile, he would be killed. He also said the crocodiles slept with people at night, but I’m not certain what he meant by that. Finally, if they find a dead one, they bury it as if it were a human.

So because they are so protected and just get fed meat all the time, they are rather tame. We even got to touch one! I wasn’t sure I was going to leave with both my hands, but I did, and the whole experience was rather magical.

Douentza routine and tiny animals

Nothing much new to report here. I continue to do a couple hours of work in the morning, slowly checking those words off of my list. Recent additions have been in the lexical domains of sleeping, pointed objects, hanging, and vehicles. All very exciting.

I saw a tiny baby goat being carried by a tiny child this morning. That was a whole bunch of cute. Part of me wants a baby goat as a pet here, but I know it will just cry all the time and then someone, if not me, will eat it. So it probably isn’t that great of an idea. Best just admire the baby goats of others.

Kevin and I watched Office Space last night, which is quite a different world from Mali. We’ll probably head out on Burkina Faso and Ghana adventuring in a couple of weeks.

Birthdays in Africa

Yesterday was Kevin’s birthday. Certainly the first birthday (of anyone’s) I’ve celebrated in Africa! While there was no birthday cake to be found, we did have a good day, I think. I got him a traditional African board game that is akin to mankala (it’s called Wali here) played by dropping little seeds or beans into various holes around the board, which we have now been playing to determine who will be the ultimate Bean Master. We’re even.

After lunch, we played some Scrabble, then took a little motorcycle ride up the road. We went up past Petaka and turned off the road where there was a good photo opportunity for Gandamine (spelling?), these big fingers of rock that jut up beside a large cliff. Being late afternoon, the light was really beautiful. It was also his first chance to really get out into the open and see big herds of goats and horned cows and all the other pretty things the Malian countryside has to offer. Then after dinner, we celebrated with the neighbors over a couple beers.

This morning, M. Guindo, Ramata’s old lodger, came over and I got a little bit of work done. I have to keep forging forward, after all.

I did find some guavas in the market on Sunday, though. And I successfully navigated the market with just Kevin and I—only toobobs. I realize now that very seldom if ever did I go to the market by myself without a Malian friend. Now I can use my little bits of Fulfulde or Tommo-So enough to give myself some street cred and avoid excessive toobob prices. Like with the guava lady, she looked like she was Dogon, so I greeted her with a generic Dogon greeting “poh”, which she replied to in Jamsay and I continued in Tommo-So. That’s the thing with Dogon greetings. The words are different, but the general structure is the same, so you can go back and forth in two languages. It would be like:

A: Hello.
B: Bonjour, ca va?
A: I’m fine.
B: La famille va bien?
A : They’re fine. How are you?
B: Ca va bien.

But everyone knows what’s going on. Also I can ask how much something is, but I don’t really know my numbers that well, so I’m at the mercy of whoever’s selling to give me correct change. By asking “how much” in a native language, though, they assume I know what’s up, so they always give me the right change. But that’s my little secret that I wouldn’t know the difference.

Together in Douentza

Kevin and I are successfully to Douentza. The rest of Bamako passed uneventfully, and early Thursday morning, we got up to catch the bus. Unfortunately, Kevin got slightly Africa-ed and didn’t feel well for all of the 14 hour bus ride. Not the best way to move out of the capitol, but in the end, we made it around 11:30 at night.

The weather has cooled off a lot here. Not to say that it’s cool, per se, but it is quite pleasant out generally, and much less humid than Bamako. I think so far Kevin is adjusting nicely—Douentza isn’t luxury, but we get by. It’s rather surreal having him here. Sometimes it feels like Mali must just be some fantasy world I make up in my head, or rather that the US and my life there is when I’m here, so to bring the two together is proof that they both really exist, which is mind-boggling.

We’ve been playing a lot of Scrabble, and he’s started teaching me some Sanskrit, which is full of grammatical paradigms, just how I like it. I suppose one could argue that I shouldn’t be filling my head with other languages when my job is to get Tommo-So down, but I’m a language glutton, what can I say. I sent a message off to Tongo-Tongo today, so we’ll see if M. le Maire comes into town anytime soon. In the meantime, I continue to make progress on my grammar.

After dumping a bunch of money into repairing the motorcycle today, it’s ready for a spin outside of town. We’re going to take off after this and admire the scenery a bit.

That’s all for now. I apologize for the diminished number of posts.

Excitement in Bamako

I'm sorry it's been a while since I've posted. There's a lot to catch you up on, I guess!

Saturday, I moved to the Hotel Djenne, a charming little hotel packed full of Malian art and artifacts in a more happening part of town. I even managed to get wireless internet here (so I have no excuse for not posting). Saturday night, Salif stayed up with me until 2 AM, when I had to go to the airport to get Kevin. Upon arriving there, we learned that the flight wouldn't be in until 20 to 4, so we just settled in and waited it out. Sure enough, we heard the plane land right around then, and a half an hour later, Kevin actually emerged from the Bamako airport. It was amazing and surreal.

Sunday felt like it didn't exist. Kevin and I were both so exhausted from being up until 5 that all we did was sleep and go out to eat.

Monday, we met my friend Rosemary and her husband for lunch and then got passport photos taken to try to start the Burkina visa process. We made our way over the embassy (on the other side of town) just to find out that, in fact, they only process visa requests until noon. At night, we went over to a restaurant called Akwaba at about 9 and were the first ones there. They had a delicious spicy chicken, though.

Yesterday was a big day. We got ourselves out the door to go back to the Burkina embassy and started our visa process. I had intended to go to the American embassy afterwards to cash a check, but didn't have foresight enough to realize that a visa process meant that they were going to hold onto our passports. So the American embassy was out of the question.

We headed back to our side of town and went to a restaurant called the Broadway Cafe, which has all sorts of very good American food. I had a milkshake and a burrito (not Patty's, for those of you who know what that is, but recognizably a burrito nonetheless), and Kevin had the biggest double-cheeseburger the world has ever seen. They even had pancakes and bacon and all sorts of other good stuff on the menu. Will definitely go back.

Election buzz was in the air yesterday. People are so pumped about Obama here, and you instantly make friends if you show your support. In the evening, the embassy hosted an election party at the Radisson (which is very swank, by the way). The party itself wasn't that exciting--it only went to 11 Malian time, 6 EST, so no results. I met another Fulbrighter and we got a drink in the Radisson's posh bar, so all in all enjoyable.

Kevin and I took advantage of the wireless internet to obsessively pour over the election maps until the coast seemed clear and I fell asleep at 4 AM. I haven't been outside yet today, but I'm sure Mali's going to be excited.

Needless to say, it's been very nice having Kevin here, especially to share the elections with. We've just been taking it easy--getting over airport exhaustion, not pushing the culture shock process any faster than it needs to be, and just catching up after a month apart. We're off to the National Museum today and then up to Douentza tomorrow morning. More from there.

Materials posted

Also, a couple manuscripts of mine have been posted on the project website (see link in the side bar). On the front page, there is a little bio about me with a description of my fieldwork, and under the manuscripts link at the top, you can find a preliminary grammar sketch. It is devoid of a lot of data that will come up in later chapters in the grammar, but it gives an overview of what the grammar will cover.

Lazy Bamako

Happy Halloween! I’m certainly not celebrating it here. I already look weird enough, I don’t need to dress up to look like a monster.

Bamako continues to be relaxing. Yesterday, I got my bank errands done all by myself in the morning, kicked around the artisan market for a while, then went to Restaurant Central to meet Salif for lunch. In the early afternoon, I went back to SIL, took a nap, then spent the rest of the day half being productive, half wasting time on the internet. I thought I was supposed to see this other Fulbrighter, but she never called me. That’s okay, though, because just staying in was nice too.

I slept in until almost 8 today (can you believe it?!), ironed some clothes, ate some yogurt, and am now working on my grammar some more. I may see Salif again today, or I may see one of two Fulbrighters, but I’m waiting to be contacted on all accounts. There’s a bakery down the road that I might walk to, because a croissant sounds pretty dang good. We’ll see where my laziness meter points to.

Tomorrow Kevin gets here! Just one more day.

Photos

With the fast internet of Bamako, I have posted my latest photos! You can find them here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2086176&l=2dfc8&id=13302275

Good cop, bad cop

Once more, I find myself in Bamako, with only a slightly arduous tale behind me.

Yesterday afternoon, Oumar and I got on the motorcycle and managed to get all of my baggage and ourselves to the highway. I wanted to go a bit early, after the debacle with the bus arriving way early in late August. While sitting there chatting about needing visas for Ghana and Burkina, it struck me that I had forgotten my passport back at the house. Without my passport, a whole lot of my trip to Bamako (embassy, banks…) would be impossible.

We left my bags under the perhaps not-so-watchful eye of the ticket man and zoomed back towards the house. However, yesterday was police check day in town on motorcycle papers. Oumar had known this since the morning, so I gave him the papers we have and we figured it would be fine. Not. This one particularly mean cop demanded our license (‘vignette’) and actually compared the number to the number on the motorcycle—turns out, they didn’t match up. This meant that he had the right to confiscate our motorcycle. You better believe I got pretty upset. My bus was about to leave, our papers weren’t right, the cop was being mean… another nicer cop came by to try to sort things out, and he took me to the house to get my passport, all the while consoling me as I sniffled with rage.

In the end, we went to the town hall and had to buy a new license. The one we had was for our DT motorcycle that was in Songo with Kirill, not for the Star. 12 dollars later, it got worked out. Perhaps it also helped that I sort of knew the guy working at the town hall. He’d given me a ride back from the internet before, so he knew my name. It was all rather upsetting, but it turned out all right.

I even got my bus on time, which turned out to be a nice, actually air-conditioned Gana bus. In Sevare, Seydou met me at the station and we had dinner together before the bus carried on its way. It was nice to see him, if only for ten minutes. Back on the bus, the man sitting behind me asked if I was American and if I was going to the embassy. When I answered yes to both questions, he told me he had a courier for Gaoussou, whom I’d met before, and asked if I could bring it to him, which I agreed to. We talked about politics for a while (the election is on everyone’s mind). It was nice to not feel so alone on the bus.

We pulled into town when the first tips of dawn were just beginning to show. I found a taxi just fine, who even told me a fairly reasonable price, and the only problem was that my bag got peed on by the sheep who was in the baggage hold. Now I have even more clothes to wash than I had planned.

I got to SIL and took a nap and a shower before heading back out to the embassy. When checking in, I ran into Rosemary, another Fulbrighter, but of the professor variety. Friendly doesn’t even begin to describe her. She’s married to a Liberian (who lived in Guinea after the war?), has spent a lot of time in Africa, and was bursting with excitement to be back.

We went through the security briefing, which was pretty ridiculous. To sum up: don’t make friends with your guards because they will just ask you for money; if you meet any Russians, North Koreans, Iranians, Cubans, etc., report your interaction to the embassy; north of Mopti, there is crime; north of the Niger, don’t go there, except if you want to, in which case, it’s okay.

I had lunch at the cafeteria, where I could get a bacon cheeseburger! That made my day. Then I used their fast internet and headed back to SIL to do some laundry and get some groceries. For the next couple days, I intend to just sit at my computer and use the internet, when I’m not running errands or seeing friends, that is. I may be busier than I thought.

I really like Mali, though. The people are so friendly and it feels so safe. It’s good to stay on your guard, but taxi drivers, store keepers, embassy workers, everyone is full of humor, which makes it a very pleasant place to stay.