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.