Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Bamako-Douentza, Part II

Sunday, June 8th

We all piled out of the bus and someone laid a mat out on the ground on the side of the road, so we lay down. Under the stars I tried to get some sleep. I felt very peaceful for a while. When the call to prayer began at 4 AM and I realized I had hardly slept, I got in a much worse mood. When we were still there when it was light with no signs of leaving, I was quite grouchy indeed. It was hot, I was dirty, and I was tired as hell from no good night’s sleep since I left home.

We ended up there until 2 in the afternoon. The bus had an oil leak and they spent hours trying to fix it. We thought a relief bus would come for a while, but it didn’t. Later in the morning, I was feeling much more relaxed, maybe because I had resigned myself to my fate of never reaching Douentza. We bought a mango and sliced it up, sat in the shade of a shack while Abbie carried on in Fulfulde with all of the people from the bus. I learned a word or two, including one with an implosive ‘d’ (Doiru, cough), and just relaxed.

The bus ride from then on out was hell. It was daytime now, and whatever breeze that was marginally cool at night was hot. That’s when there was a breeze. By this time, we were all so dirty and sweaty, but it didn’t even matter; since everyone was, you couldn’t even smell it. The bus was so slow, too, and continued with the frequent stops.

We shouldn’t made it to Sevare by 7, but we didn’t get there until around midnight, I suppose. Right before we got in, there was a police checkpoint, and this asshole policeman decided to check people’s papers, so we had to pull out our passports. This is when I realized that my passport, which had been in a moneybelt around my waste, had gotten soaked through with sweat, warped, and little blue dots had appeared all over the main page of it from bleeding through the cover. Great work, US government, way to make a durable important document. At that point, I was starving, tired, thirsty, hot, and frustrated, and I just cried. I couldn’t help it. Abbie comforted me, and I eventually stopped, and we got off the bus in Sevare.

We went over and got some food at this little stand, and I was convinced I would get food poisoning. I bet the food had been sitting for some time, so I didn’t get the meat, just the potatoes, but the woman still spooned unknown meat sauce all over it. I still had tears in my eyes as I worked at the potatoes, but I was so hungry I couldn’t even eat, if that makes sense.

When we got back on the bus to go to Douentza, I didn’t feel very good. I started to feel nauseous. I just sat with my head on a pillow between my legs and dozed as the roads got worse and worse. It was the bumpiest, most pothole filled road I’ve ever been on. And one of my laptops was in my suitcase on top of the bus, which had been sitting in the heat for two days.

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