Since my Emberá day trip I have been pretty busy, with work assignments in Nicaragua and Mali, and I'm writing this in my hotel room in Bolivia, ready to start the next assignment here tomorrow. Three continents in six weeks (I also attended a big meeting in the UK) - they are still working me hard!
Mali was an interesting trip, coming just a couple of days after I had been offered, and accepted, another contract back in West Africa. I'll be starting back there in early April, and this quick trip to Mali was a great reminder of what I will be going back to.
Firstly there is the rather less comfortable travel than I've become used to over here. The airport in Bamako, for example, has just four international departure gates, no restaurant or cafe inside the terminal (in fact not even a place to buy a simple coffee), a departures board that was showing only flights that had already departed earlier in the day (so I wandered between gates, trying to guess which one my flight would leave from), and I didn't even bother to check whether there was wifi. Once on the plane there was the confusion about who sits where - I had forgotten this aspect of West Africa - as people either willfully sit wherever they want (until challenged) or, perhaps, can't read what is on their boarding pass. It was sufficient to delay take-off for nearly an hour.
Then there's the security aspect, which is now a lot worse than it was when I left back in 2013. Trying to board our flight in Bamako, every passenger had to present laptops and mobile phones to a row of security staff who carefully swiped certain parts to check for explosives. In our office the security briefing warned me against visiting any restaurants or bars that are popular with expats as they are a potential terrorist target. I was safe to eat in the hotel, but the hotel was like Fort Knox and consequently rather lacking in character. In the countries where I will be working, we have Al Qaida and related offshoots in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, Boko Haram in Nigeria and the north of Cameroon, and various rebel groups in the Central African Republic. It will not be safe for me to wander around on buses before and after assignments in the way I used to.
But on the good side, on the plane I watched a film called Clouds over Conakry which captured so well the different (competing) aspects of the culture - the modern young women wanting to enjoy nights on the town, the Muslim preachers warning about the young misbehaving, the still strong power of the ancestral fetish and spirits - and corruption at high levels. Really an excellent film. & of course there is the music!! The first African music I listened to on my short trip was on the Air France playlist - a band called Fofoulah, who I had never heard of before. There was no information on them, and I was puzzling over the Senegal-style drums and some of the lyrics seeming to be in Wolof, yet with a dubby feel that I guessed might be more Nigerian. Ha! It turns out they are a London band, but with Senegalese members on drums and vocals. Then in the car, travelling out to visit a field office, I heard Rokia Kone (new to me), a superb Burkinabe singer whose name the driver didn't know, and then some classic Salif Keita from the past. It whetted my appetite for the cultural side!
I realise as I write this that I will have been in my three favourite countries (Mali, Nicaragua and Bolivia) all within the space of one month. Wow! OK so I feel as though I've spent much of that month in aeroplanes and airports, and I did miss the entire carnival weekend on the Mali trip, but still, how lucky am I?
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