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Dear everyone,
Get ready. I’m gonna tell you the whole goddamn story.
First though, the scene is this: I’m back in Ndende, my house is intact, my dog is huge and barely remembers me, and I’m coming down with some sore-throat flu thing. It rains all evening starting at 5:15, and I’m reading New Yorkers, dad’s letter from South Africa, and avoiding preparing for class tomorrow. I wouldn’t say I’m in the best mood right now - I’m full of post-vacation self-assessment, and everyone I met today said "Hey! Happy New Year! You got fatter!" Thanks. ‘Preciate it, really. Very kind of you to point that out.
I’m glad to be at home but not teach; I suppose I’ll get used to it again, but there’s all this other stuff I want to do, like go to villages and get commercants to buy condoms and slap PNLS (the AIDS branch of the Ministry of Health) around so that my province can actually get supplied with the cheap condoms. I’m doing a survey on attitudes on sex and condom usage and maybe it’s fruitless, maybe we’ll get good data and maybe not, and most likely we will still have all the same problems, only we’ll have ‘numbers’ to point to. We’ll see. So yeah - don’t let anybody tell you Peace Corps is all wonderful and happy and exciting and enriching. You try going on a vacation like mine and coming back to BAD roads, "you gained weight!", and mud, and see how you feel.
So. I went to Mali, Burkina Faso and Togo. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? On December 7 I was all set to go to Gamba for Christmas. Stanley, a big African-American EE volunteer with cool-nerd glasses, dreads, and a reputation for being a super-host (he had promised mango-honey chicken and elephants, sea turtles, and hippos - and he delivered) had invited tout le monde chez lui. And tout le monde was going. Except Jenny, who was trying to go to Togo and Benin with Mohommed, her Gabonese-Muslim small businessman boyfriend. His passport didn’t go through because of red tape in Ndende, as she told me sitting in her hammock, recovering from a nasty bout of food poisoning. "So, you wanna go to West Africa?" she said. "I’m gonna go, regardless. I need a vacation, it’s been a year. We could even go to Mali." My mouth gets a little dry and my heart speeds up. I say I’ll think about it, then catch a cab, buy a big mortar and pestle from a Malian lady, and get the bush taxi back to Ndende.
The next few days I spend calculating finances and talking to Malians and Senegalese and Togolese about plane fares and buses, and I decide I can’t go. It’s not really worth it just to see Togo and Benin, and Jenny probably won’t go to Mali since it wasn’t part of the original plan. I send a little note saying sorry, I can’t go, but here are my contacts in Bamako in case you make it up there. The next day I get a letter by bush taxi - ‘If you’re not coming with me, can you send me contacts in Mali?’ Fuck, I say. She’s going to Mali. I re-agonize all over again, grade my students’ tests, turn in final grades, arrange for the dog and the house, and take off for Mouila telling everyone I’ll be back the next day. I tell Mike, my family, and Seydou the tailor that I might not be coming back for a while. After all - I can’t just let Jenny go to Mali by herself.
I wait for hours at the intersection for a truck or bus, getting periodic updates on the army/student volleyball game. The army’s in town to keep the peace because our legislative elections have been a little chaud-chaud (hot). Ndende’s deputé (senator) is Pierre Mamboundou, leader of the opposition party UPG. He never comes to Ndende and lives mostly in France, but he talks a lot of smack about Bongo and is the reason our post office will never open. He has a pretty large following down south, and people who don’t ilke Bongo support him, but the people who are tired of the stalemate over things like the post office and the roads and cellphone service are supporting Bongo again. Mamboundou sent out an appeal to all Gabonese to boycott the elections, because they’re rigged, unfair, etc. The voting lists kept changing numbers; right before voting day 25,000 disappeared. People were given train, plane, and bus tickets back to their villages to go vote for PDG, Bongo’s party. Our local opposition rabble-rouser, La Democrate, went above and beyond the call of duty and burned the ballot boxes in Ndende election morning. An hour later the army arrived to prevent such things from happening. Nobody voted, but everyone is now calm and the military are bored and chasing lycee girls, and losing to the students in the volleyball and soccer games.
A big cattle/banana/manioc truck pulls up and the folks headed to Libreville climb in. I get in, get knocked around, and listen to Punu songs. When I ask the girl next to me what they’re singing about she says shoot, I don’t know, I’m Fang, I don’t understand a thing. "Me neither," I say, and we have a little moment.
I show up at Jenny’s at 8pm on the 14th of December, and she is psyched. "I had to come and see if it was feasible, I couldn’t let you go to Mali and find out later I could’ve gone too - but I’m not sure I’m going," I blurt out. She contains her excitement and feeds me fried chicken.
The water has been cut off the whole day. The elections in Mouila were a mess, with the loser (Mahanga Moussavou) declaring une ‘ville morte’ and threatening shopkeepers. I saw trucks speeding down the street, carrying guys with megaphones and guns. "Ville morte tomorrow, no shops shall be open, if you open your shop you will invite destruction. No school tomorrow. No one goes to work. Everyone, stay at home." I ask Mohommed why this guy is such a sore loser he would stop the city and cut water and power for his constituents. "If he causes enough trouble and makes enough noise, Bongo will give him a suitcase of cash to shut him up. He’s been doing this for ten years and he loses every time, so he’s got to recoup his losses somehow."
All this was Thursday. Friday we call Jan, the country director, who clears our vacation. Sophie makes plane reservations for us to Lome, Togo. We’re going. I notice some wierd red spots on my back, like zits but with a dark spot in the middle. Saturday we hang out, Sunday is the end of Ramadan and we go to the morning prayer with Mohommed, take pictures, and eat freshly slaughtered sheep at M. Seck’s, a Senegalese hardware guy. Jenny and I eat with the mamas, who give us Sprite and then yogurt with millet, so when we finally leave we are overfull.
We do a little visiting, because that’s what you do at the end of Ramadan, and hear the life story of Traore, the husband of a friend of Jenny’s. Seven brothers, one sister, a small village. Never went to school. Made his way to Gabon and got a job driving a guy’s kids to school. The guy let him fill in on the route, when one of the regular truckers got sick, and voila, eventually he gets a real permit and a real route. One day he has 1.5 million CFA - enough to buy a Korean car, the Pony. At the dealership he sees a mangled one and takes it for 700,000. The dealer, impressed with his do-it-yourself attitude, fixes it up for him for another 100,000. He starts doing taxi routes and soon has enough money to buy a mini bus and do the Lebamba-Mouila route. When he started fifteen years ago, he was the only guy doing this route. Now he has two wives, some kids, a new concrete house, and he was practically crying thinking about all the Allah had given him - him, a poor villageois who never went to school. You see? Deferred gratification. Sacrifice. Patience. Malians come and they start small and they work up. Mohommed started with a machete, cutting lawns, then a weed whacker, then a weed whacking business, and now a computer school and a taxi. He’s Gabonese (but Muslim. He’s not your average Gabonese). Gabonese have lots of ideas - find 300,000 CFA and pay guys to plant corn or bananas, plant 1000 banana trees and you get 5 million CFA. But never "I’ll plant some bananas this year and then next year plant more and grow and grow until I am the banana supplier for the grand marche in Libreville. No. They want to supply the grand marché straight off. Still, they have lots of good ideas. I don’t want to bash them too hard.
We went to Libreville on Monday with Ben, an American working for an environmental consulting company Shell had hired to do reforestation. He lived in Mali from age 7-17, in a Fulani village (missionary parents who work on literacy). Stanley in Gamba is buddies with this guy, who was going back to see his folks for Christmas and taking the route up to Libreville to see a little of Gabon before his contract ended. Our bus looked all right, and we got in the back row of seats. The boy-chauffeur tied the luggage on top of the bus with caoutchou (rubber straps), passing them through my window.
Of course, this being the RAINY season, it rained. Unable to close my window because of the caoutchou, I got soaked. When I told the driver I would have been drier had he attached me up with the luggage, under the tarp, I got 5000 off the 13,000 ticket. Throughout the day I could also feel the wierd zits in my back stinging from time to time. Jenny said they were getting bigger. Great. Zits with black spots that sting and get bigger? I had 7 botfly larvae camping out in my back.
It was kinda cool, actually. I made jokes about botfly elevage, like I was raising rabbits or something. People were grossed out and fascinated when I showed them. So I was excited when I went to see Jean-Luc, our doctor. I figured we’d laugh about it and he’d take them out and put them in a vial to scare trainees with.
No. "So where did you get them?" My laundry, I think (duh - that’s what he told us!). "You do not iron your clothes?!" The girl who does my laundry doesn’t always iron - she said they’ve never had them - "You think Jean-Luc is a liar? I tell you in the session they are everywhere! You think this girl knows more than me, Jean Luc? Why do you not listen to me - were you sleeping?" No no no, I was there, I heard, I just....my lip starts trembling and I can’t talk, he is angry, exasperated, these stupid volunteers, I tell them everything and they still come to me with botflies and worms and giardia.
We go into the exam room and he weighs me. "You are gaining. 10 pounds." (‘That’s all?’ I think). "How do you feel about that?" I shrug. Tears are spilling down my face. I am a bad volunteer. I think I am one cool cat - hey, everybody, I have botflies! - and really I am just a fat slob who can’t take care of her own health. He really took the wind out of my sails, boy. He was nice the whole time, but he was pissed and disappointed in me and that hurt.worse than when he popped the little bastards out of my back. Seven. Seven little larvae, short and fat and pointed at one end. He gave me antibiotics and gauze and patched me up. "You iron your clothes now?" Of course, Jean Luc, anything you say, I am gonna be the healthiest PCV in Africa from now on. The next day I tried to get Immodium from him, for our trip - "What do you need that for? You boil your water. You buy bottled water. No problem! You cook your food well. No problem! What you need Immodium for?" Clearly, I do not know how to deal with this man. He wanted something besides "But, if have to get in a bush taxi in Mali (‘What is so great about this Mali that everyone is going there?’) - just in case, see." He gave it to us, finally. And we didn’t need it. But no way am I gonna tell him I am deworming myself. He’d flip his lid.
In Libreville Jenny took me to Mbolo and I nearly had a heart attack. This is Gabon’s Super Kmart and let me tell you, looking at all those washers dryers stereos blenders game boys fridges cheese cereal jam clothes soaps perfume cookies fruit basil for crying out loud frozen dinners pizzas - I started panicking. You can pay with VISA. It was awful.
The Malian embassy was way more fun. The visa woman is good friends with my Malian neighbor in Ndende. Togo tried to overcharge us, thinking we were from Brazil, and then wouldn’t accept one of my 10,000 cfa notes (it might be counterfeit. Whatever). Done and done. At the airport, paying for our ticket, we dealt with the sister of the Gabonese mother of a PCV in Togo. Her dad was a PCV in Gabon, back in the day. The woman passed us two pieces of a Christmas cake through the slot in the window you put your money through. This is the same airport where the gendarmes try to charge you ‘exit taxes’ and threaten to detain you and make you sleep on the floor if you take pictures. Technically, it’s a military establishment. So they get riled up. The thing to do in this situation, as Ben from Makokou found out, is to say ok, fine, I’ll sleep here. Because they just want money, not your company for the evening.
December 22: We LEAVE. At 4am. Thinking that my central african cfa were no good in West Africa (this is true) I had left them in the safe in Libreville and took only my credit card. The PCVs in Lome say credit cards didn’t work in Lome. Fortunately, Jenny had CFA and we change them on the black market with some Malian papas (Bambara saves the day, once again). We chill with Benin volunteers who are looking for dance clubs, and Togo volunteers who are headed to Ghana for christmas. No one understands why we want to travel 2500 km in 18 days. We go to an Ethiopian restaurant which turns out to be a Spanish grill place. Still, we are in West Africa and it is all very exciting.
The next morning we’re slow in leaving because there’s bread and butter and jam for breakfast at the volunteer hotel. Arriving at the bus station at 8:30 we discover our car up north to the border left at 8:00. We discover this after buying a ticket. Naively, we think it should be easy to get a refund and buy tickets for another bus going 3/4 of the way to the border. It is not. They want us to wait four hours then spend at least twelve en route to arrive around midnight some place we don’t know. We get tough with the guys and have our way but end up waiting four hours and spending 8 cramped on a bus, arriving at night in a place we don’t know.
While at the bus station, though, we find a cute little mosque to take pictures of and a funny looking fruit tree. We ask a toothless papa what it is and he just grins and knocks a lime, or something, off with his cane. He nibbles the skin off and offers us one and it is bitter as hell. I think now it might have been a tree full of unripe guavas. We make sour faces and he cackles at us and we all laugh.
The trip north is paved and dry and hot and unpleasant but we get to Kara and ask for the Peace Corps house ("there where the Americans live"). We’re dropped off in front of a large scruffy house, and sure enough, are greeted by Cooter, a small tan dog, and several volunteers. They took us out to dinner at a restaurant of German extraction - the Germans colonised Togo first, leaving beautiful city planning and a few good beers. Jenny and I had hamburgers and onion soup and were very happy. The volunteers talked about living au village and fishing with their papas and eating millet porridge and homemade cow cheese, and how the Togolese think they are crazy for drinking the light beer, Eku, with the dark beer, Awooyo, in the same evening. Not to mention making black and tans.
Togo has a health program, an agriculture program, an environment program, and a girl’s education program - 90 pcvs total. Most are au village and many come in every couple weeks to the regional houses to shop and relax a little.
Togo’s president is the longest serving leader in Africa. Bongo is #2. We talked politics: the north of Togo, Kara region, is like the Southeast of Gabon, in that the president is from there and so it gets a disproportionate amount of money, etc. A few years back Eyadema’s plane crashed near Kara and he walked away, unscathed, thanks to (people say) his powerful feticheurs. Now that day is a national holiday. The crash site has a big monument and it’s all very spooky. His power is dwindling and the opposition is picking up speed, even in the north, but Eyadema is trying to finagle another term to take advantage of possible offshore oil deposits.
So dinner was fun and the pCVs were super, and the next morning we had omelettes at the bus station and set out for Burkina. Dapaong wasn’t that far and on our way we saw women carrying firewood on their heads, filing along from en brousse like ants. From Dapaong we got a taxi to Cinkasse, the border town, where we bought watermelon and peanuts and waiting for our bus to Ouagadougou to leave. They piled on the baggage; our bus and others were teetering along with bags of clothes and piles of calebashes and tables and chairs and sacks of rice and hardware, the baggage almost as much volume as the bus itself. Sitting around till 6pm we saw women on motos and bikes and a guy on a tractor and blind old papa carrying a crippled girl on his shoulders - his eyes. The border was fine, we paid our 7 day transit visa and were told to get an extension in Ouaga, since we’d be coming back through after it expired. There were four or five places where they checked our papers but everything was pretty easy. We got across in two hours (3 miles, two hours!) and got to Ouaga at 2am after a miserable journey full of stops and starts. Too late to get to Peace Corps (they don’t accept foreign volunteers anyway, it turns out), we found a cheap hotel in Lonely Planet and crashed.
At the bank the next morning people were everywhere, trying to get money out before it closed for Christmas. My VISA worked at the ATM, and we had pintade (guinea fowl) for lunch before setting off for Bobo Dioulasso. Lome was sandy and not very paved, but Ouaga was a fully functioning African city with small parks and big buildings and NGO offices everywhere. In West Africa, you can’t throw a rock without hitting an NGO - a big change from Gabon, where life is too expensive to send aid workers and besides Gabon has this huge percapita income, so what the hell do they need aid for anyway? (I could mention the 18% vaccination rate and the 70% malnutrition rate, but you don’t see that when you drive through Libreville - you just see big buildings and freeways and Super Kmart and cellphones).
Jenny and I were very impressed with the transportation in West Africa. In Mouila you go to the right intersection and hop on a car which leaves when it is full and not before. In Lome and Kara it was slightly more advanced; the station had marked areas for different destinations, and a ticket guy at a little table. Cars left when they were full but had more or less set hours. In Ouaga they have actual bus companies and you can buy a ticket in advance and show up and even get air conditioning on your greyhound-type bus. Not always. Still, the ride to Bobo was comfy and we got in in the early evening.
Again, we asked for the place where the americans live, and were taken out into the suburbs, which have wide sandy streets and walled compounds. Christmas Eve, we thought - we’re gonna be crashing a party. But the volunteers were nice and said come on in, we had our party a couple days ago, so there are beds available and would you like a shower? There’s some leftover spaghetti and rice and sauce. In the morning they made biscuits and bacon and eggs and there was real coffee and boy, let me tell you, this was some Christmas. We got on bikes and went into town to do email and have ice cream and shop at the marché, and I got to start using Bambara again. Volunteers there are way out in the boonies, where they have to bike 40km to get to a bus stop, and they told us stories about being sick with dysentery and having to get in for treatment.
Jenny and I explored a bit on the bikes - Bobo is laid out really nice, though its crowded, it’s a nice small city. The marché is super and easy to get around in. It’s in a big covered area and has sections for food, fabric, tailors, tourist stuff, and everything else (pots, pans, etc). People are really nice. We bought our tickets to Bamako in advance and made dinner, and left the next morning at 11 on a smallish ‘big’ bus.
At the Mailan border the guards worked out of a mud-daub house in a teeny village. They looked at our passports upside down, asked us to show them where our visa was, and grunted their approval. For 40 km the road was unpaved, so we jolted along through an NGO forest research station. In Sikasso we changed buses and got dinner, and got into Bamako at 2am.
I had to bang on the gate at the Dante’s for a long time - the guardian wasn’t there, so I had to wake up the family. Dante came out grinning and laughing and gave me a big hug, and Rokia got up and greeted us too. It was unbelievable that we had finally made it. I think Jenny was a little overwhelmed at the poshness of the house but I was just so glad to be home.
We spent three whirlwind days in Bamako, and I saw just about everyone there was to see: Cherif, the Carleton kids, my family, Brandon, the family of my tailor in Ndende, the guys at the marché, and concerts by Toumani Diabate and Habib Koite. I found out from Toumani that he hadn’t been able to go to Ryan’s wedding (visa problems - I think he got busted for sending people over as ‘musicians’ finally), but that the kids book is coming along. During the opening act at Habib’s concert, I went in to the bar and he looked up and said "Anna! Ca va!" He’s doing well, the big rock star, but still down to earth and super nice. I mentioned that since the mail wasn’t working in Gabon I hadn’t gotten a tape of his new album yet, and he promptly went out to give me a copy of the cd. I tell ya, I love this guy.
Thursday night we had dinner at Rangoli, an Indian restaurant up on the roof of a three floor building, with Brandon and his Fullbright friends. Matt, who was researching immigration and its effects on both the workers and their families, was leaving the next day to go back to the States. I had met him back in April ‘01 when he had only been in Mali for a month and was a little overwhelmed with the realities of his project. That night Ryan, who’d been living with Toumani for 7 months, had given him advice and encouragement. Tonight, Matt was the old hand and dispensing words of wisdom to the new kids, Brandon and Jeremy. They’re all modern history guys: Brandon is doing memory and the 1991 revolution, and Jeremy is doing history of Islam in the Fulani population in a northern region. Matt and I talked about immigrants, since Gabon has a lot, and he said in Cote D’Ivoire people resent the Dioula (Bambara speaking group) because they own everything. Gabonese have a similar resentment of ‘Malians’, which includes Senegalese and Mauritanians. The problem for the Malians is that they leave home to make their fortunes, and when they don’t succeed enough they are ashamed to come home and be seen as failures.
We bought a bunch of stuff to take home - batik scenes of women pounding millet and tuareg boxes and bottle openers, and stickers. We packed more into those 3 days than I would have thought possible, and even were able to make pizza for my family, which they really enjoyed. We investigated changing our return ticket to Libreville so we could stay longer but were told it wasn’t possible. Dante drove us to the bus station to get our car for Mopti, and I cried. I know I can’t explain to you how important these people are to me - Dante and Rokia and Aicha and Moustaf and now little baby Makan - I just feel so lucky to be a part of their lives and to have their love and support. I miss them.
On the road up north we bought these little peanut butter paste balls, some had piment and some didn’t, they were pretty good. We got into Sevare in the evening and were led to the Peace Corps house by a Dogon kid. After signing in and figuring out sheets and towels, we met the volunteers, who were withdrawn and not really happy to see us. "There’s like 35 people here, there aren’t any more beds, even on the roof. But you guys can take a shower." Ok. So we did. They didn’t much feel like chatting either and the vibe was very unwelcoming, so we took Ben from Gamba’s advice and stayed at Mac’s Refuge.
This was one of the highlights of the trip. Mac was born in Mopti to American missionaries back in the 40’s, and grew up speaking Dogon and Bambara and French. He did high school and college in the US, then got married and moved back to Dogon country to do missionary work himself. Eventually the family moved back to the states, where his wife ‘had a nervous breakdown and decided she didn’t want to be married to me anymore,’ as he put it. He worked for a while as a massage therapist, then came back to Mali, did some contracting with the US Special Forces. They were training Malian troops for UN Peacekeeping in Sierra Leone. He arranged cooking, translating, washing. In 1997 he decided to open up a little bed and breakfast for weary tourists hiking around Dogon country. Now he’s got 8 rooms, each decorated for a different ethnicity - we had the Tuareg room, with wool blankets and swords and leatherwork everywhere. He put in a pool, which we swam in that night (brr!), and people can camp on the roof. He doesn’t have a phone, so people make reservations through Peace Corps Baba, a souvenir seller with a phone. Most people hear about him through word of mouth or the internet - his daughter, who went to boarding school in Cote D’Ivoire with Ben from Gamba, set up a website for him. He is one of the nicest guys, and makes a killer breakfast. We had pancakes, yogurt, fruit salad, homemade guava jam, homemade peanut butter, coffee, cocoa, honey, all at this big family table with the other folks staying there. There were some COSing volunteers from Senegal, a few tourists, and parents of Mali PCVs visiting their kids.
We had an interesting conversation with the volunteers from Senegal. There are tons of Senegalese and Malian immigrants in Gabon, and they’re the ones that own all the little boutiques and stores. People ask us about Gabon and we’d say well, it’s nice, but the Gabonese are kind of lazy. They’re hard to get to know and most volunteers would say their good friends are West Africans. They have a work ethic and patience, while the Gabonese just sit there waiting for money to fall out of the sky. They go to school to get a degree so they can get a government job which will provide them with a salary and an office in which they do next to nothing. No Gabonese own small businesses. "Well, do they farm?" asked the PCVs. "Yeah, they have their plantation, but the women just go and plant and weed a little and then harvest. You stick a piece of wood in the ground and it grows into food in 4 months. It’s not hard to eat like in Senegal where you really have to work the soil, and there is harvesttime, which may or may not provide you with enough food for the rest of the year when you can’t grow anything. "
"Really?" said the volunteers. "Because in Senegal people are that lazy too. I mean, the guys just sit around, like you’re talking about, and the women are off in the fields. And all the ones with a work ethic leave Senegal to make money somewhere."
Huh. This sort of shattered my image of Senegalese and Malians. I realized that in Mali I lived in the capital with a wealthy family, and in Gabon I live in a small town working with average people, and I can’t really compare these two things without taking that into account. I realized that everything I know about Africa is secondhand, everything I’m telling these volunteers about my country is things I’ve heard other volunteers say or other Gabonese or Malians say, and they each have their own filter. None of it is fact, really, just opinion, hearsay. It reminded me of the time we visited the American embassy in Bamako and heard the political officer and the public affairs counselor talk about their jobs. The P.O. said he was back in Washington and someone said "Oh, you’ve been in Somalia? Did you know that xyz has been greatly affected by the qpr? And that this impacts the blahblah sector as well?" And the P.O. thought to himself, shoot, he got that from the cable I wrote. So now it’s fact because I wrote it. The P.O. thought this was pretty neat and so did I, but talking with the Senegalese volunteers showed me I need to get my facts straight before I go around spouting off.
We left Mac’s the next morning and got in a pick up headed to Bandiagara. In the car was a know-it-all Swiss woman from Cote D’Ivoire, and we ended up hooking up with her and her dumbshit guide, who wasn’t even Dogon. Arriving in Bandiagara, which is the setting off point for the southern Dogon trips, we were accosted by other guides trying to win our custom, but we stuck with what we knew, even if we’d only known them for forty five minutes. After a long histoire about which car we were taking to Djigibombo, we left, drove on stone roads through dry stony terrain, and got to the little town, which we toured. During the tour I figured out I knew more about Dogon country than our guide, but it was too late, and he at least was getting us food and a place to sleep every night. That afternoon we hiked down the cliff and stayed New Year’s Eve in Kani Kombele, a small village with a mud mosque and a mud pit where they dig bricks. Your average dogon town. The night was cold and I moved down from the roof because it was too windy. Before leaving for Tele and San I got an indigo blanket.
We hiked along in the shadow of the cliff, passed Tele, and went on to San, which is super touristy in that there is a lot of stuff to buy and a lot of people wanting to sell you things. Indigo (which is Dogon) and mudcloth (which isn’t) abounded. We waited a long time for lunch, then went up the cliff to see the hogon’s house, where people do sacrifices and ask for advice. The cliff dwellings were teeny, and we were told the people moved down after the threat of invasion had passed, because it was a big pain to haul water up and down the cliff all the time. I don’t blame them. I get more scared of heights as I get older, and more than a few times I felt vertigo taking hold. We hiked back to Tele, scrounged up some food, and went to talk to some Burkina volunteers we had met earlier about how to get to Ouaga the next day.
In the morning we took a bull cart to Bankass, where we waited for a car to Koro. Three cars came, all full. Finally we realized we’d have to pay extra to convince a guy to go, and after we did he went and got a bunch of people to come with us. I think with our extra dough the guys all bought tô for lunch, and we hunkered down with them and dipped our burning hot pieces of millet glop into the slimy okra sauce. I hated tô in Mali but in Bankass, crouching eating with the guys around a communal bowl, it was delicious.
Our truck kept breaking down and we only just arrived in time to catch the bus to Ouahigouya - we literally had to run to get on and got the last places. Already on the bus were the Burkina volunteers and a Canadian couple from Accra, Ghana. We all went through the border crossing together and left the PCvs in Ouahigouya, continuing on to Ouagadougou. Negotiating a cheap hotel room was a little difficult, but after Bronwyn said she would just set up her tent in the courtyard the hotel guy gave us a deal. "You cannot sleep outside! It is dangerous! Inside, locked up, that is good. Outside in the courtyard it is not safe. You sleep inside tonight."
Once again we only spent 12 hours in Ouaga, and left for Togo at 8am on a bus that was blasting VOA top 40 hits and was mostly empty. That put us in a great mood. At the border we had to hire boys on bikes to ferry us through the 3 miles of checkpoints: they had cardboard strapped to their baggage-carrier racks to sit on, and so we did. The Togolese gendarme was gonna make us pay another visa because we were coming back through after our transit visa expired. We played dumb and cute - "so if I go through Burkina to spend six months in Niger, I need a six month visa for Burkina too?" Something worked, because he let us go. Hooray for feminine wiles.
We got to Kara that night and some of the same volunteers were still there. "Hey, nice to see ya! How was Burkina? Want some fruit bat?" The boys had killed a small bat with a slingshot and had grilled it up. Not much meat, but it was pretty good. We contributed a grilled pintade to the dinner plans, which included potatoes and steak and salad. The next day we did email and tried to do souvenir shopping, but nothing really worked out and the artisans market was empty. We did notice that recycling is big in Togo, and that the oil lamps the mamas use to sell food by at night are made from old cans of dried milk. We also passed a big pile of dead flip flops.
We got back to Lome after a long day on the road, and had Chinese food, scoring free beer from the owner. Jenny wanted to get a bouboub for Mohommed so we went to the marche, which was closed, mostly. We found some Malians and succeeded in getting a decent boubou for a decent price, then wandered aimlessly looking for stickers and kente bookmarks, failing miserably and getting rained on in the process. After a nap and saying hi to Erin Brown, my Carleton classmate, we set out again to look for gifts. Near our hotel as we looked for a taxi three boys on horses came galloping up the street from the beach. "Taxi?" I said. They looked puzzled. "Where are you going?" they said. "Hotel Palm Beach, 500," I said. The boys looked at eachother, then at us. "1000," they said. We whooped and got on with the boys in back, and set off for the other side of town. We galloped down rainy boulevards and got strange looks. I was grinning my head off. Hotel Palm Beach is of course, on the beach, so I asked if we could ride a bit near the water. There we were, cantering along the ocean, like starring in my very own Black Stallion movie. It was wonderful.
We didn’t end up finding the things we wanted, and just went to the airport the next morning. Our flight stopped in Abidjan and Cotonou, and wasn’t full, so we had plenty of time and opportunity to chat with the male flight attendents. When the drinks came we got Cokes, and then they came back and handed us two beers. Ten minutes later, two sprites. Then some tonic water, more beers, more cokes. We got two lunches each, and extra cheeses. By the end we had a bag full of cans and half a case of Coke they wanted us to take occupying the seat next to us. I spied a unique opportunity and asked if we could see the cockpit - they came and got us at the end, so we were there while they landed the plane. We flew in over Cap Esterias and man, it was pretty neat. The pilot and copilot were nice and spoke English - they have to do all the checks in English, even between the two of them. "It is good to be a pilot, but not when Bongo is flying," they said. "When he flies you are waiting on the ground for hours and hours. You do not fly. But if you are Bongo’s pilot, you get much money. Then it is good." It was a nice way to end the trip, chatting with the pilots and being treated like special people.
Libreville was hectic, what with Ebola evacuees and reposting Amanda and waiting for Pauline to get back from vacation. But now I’m home.
Good old Ndende.
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