A sickly day of hassle

Yesterday was a day of exhaustion. I still had two important forms that needed to get to Fulbright, and fast, so Jeff said I should probably go down to Sevare to send them. Not wanting to go there alone, I got Ramata to agree to go with me. At 5:45 when I woke up, though, I felt quite nauseous. I was afraid I would be sick and not be able to go, but it passed enough to make it to the freeway to meet Ramata and catch a bus.

We pulled into Sevare around 10 AM, at which point we headed to SoTelMa, the big internet place there, only to find out that they didn’t have a printer. The lady working there told us to find Modele, another place, but in the end we ended up going to the high school and printing my forms there.

Sevare is centered around the Carrefour (the intersection), where North-South you have the roads to Gao-Bamako (respectively) and East-West you have the roads to Mopti-Bandiagara (not sure of their direction). The high school was just on the other side of the Carrefour on the way to Bamako. The post office, our next stop, is on the road to Mopti, but somehow I got all turned around and we ended up walking quite a ways down the road to Bamako. At this point, allow me to mention that it was really hot and humid. Rather than immediately walk all the way back and correct our mistake, I decided it would be better to stop at the Motel restaurant and have lunch. The Motel has a very pleasant courtyard which we ate in. A raw vegetable salad, chicken with green beans, and nice cold papaya for dessert. All around very pleasant.

After that, it was back to the errands. We walked back to the Carrefour, then headed down the road to Mopti. I knew that my bank, the BNDA, was on that road and the post office was somewhere before it. However, we came upon my bank without any sign of the post office. When we asked, it turns out we had missed it and had to walk back to find it. There, we were turned away to go buy an envelope, since the post office obviously has no reason to sell them, and then it was their lunch time, so we had to wait an hour. I needed to call New York to discuss some Fulbright business, so we went back down the Bamako road to find another quite restaurant (the market on Mopti road is really loud and hectic).

My luck, however, seems to be non-existent with these things, and the man I needed to talk to wasn’t in his office that day. I got pretty discouraged at this point, since the whole point of going to Mopti was to talk to him, figure stuff out, and send the papers. Not knowing what else to do, we walked back to the post office and sent the papers express mail (a week), which wasn’t cheap. While getting all of that worked out, I started feeling sick again—nausea, a headache with a little dizziness. It passed enough for Ramata and I to take a taxi to the road to Gao (I was so done with walking at that point) and catch a mini bus to Douentza.

The mini bus was not as hellish as it easily could have been. We weren’t crammed in 5 across, which was a luxury. However, unlike the big buses, minibuses will basically stop anywhere a passenger wants them to, so a lot more dropping people off at Podunk villages by the highway than if it had been a big bus. It took about 4 hours to get back to Douentza, at which point I had a splitting headache.

I went to bed right after choking down some dinner, but woke up in the middle of the night feeling sick again. I kept my dinner down and went back to bed, but I still felt pretty crappy in the morning. I’m hoping it’s not giardia or something. I feel better now than I did this morning, but who knows, I could feel crappy again tonight. I’d had a really good track record for Mali, so I guess my turn came to feel a little sick. It could definitely be worse (knock on wood).