the owner of the house im living in came home last friday and we all went out to meet him. his name is abdoul doumbia and hes a malian musician who lives in the US, but comes home for a couple of months every year. just so happens that on the same flight was a group of americans who came to Mali to do a two week long projet, their group is called engineers without borders, like doctors without borders i think they are affiliated or something.
anyways so one of my friends here is an english professor here named sékou camara and they had contacted him a couple of months ago to help translate for this project that they are doing. their plan is to install a couple of large cisterns (cisterns are like big gigantic plastic holding containers for water) in this guy abdouls village called Zambougou which is to the north of a town called Ségou. the point of this is to give the village water for irrigation during the dry season. So he agreed, it just so happened that they were on the exact same flight as abdoul, so when we get back to the house they start telling sékou about their plans. its kind of complicated but since they only have about two weeks they need to buy everything for their trip really fast in Bamako then head up to the village. because its so rushed and stuff they dont really have time to ask the village people first if they actually want them ( even though the cisterns are free for the village they entail alot of extra work too ) . so, they just basically end up asking sékou if he thinks the village would want them, completely ignoring the fact that he has to say yes because he needs the money they are paying him to work as a translator. so that was kind of funny, seeing them just through these big expensive things at the village people, obligating them to all this extra work.
so they have all these errands they have to do, shit to buy and stuff in Bamako before heading up to the village. i decide to tag along for the ride. Both of the guys are extremely nice, well educated, etc. one teaches biochem or something to med school students and one is an engineer. so we finally end up at this huge industrial warehouse in bamako where they need to buy the cisterns, they agree on a price and its done.
transporting them to the village is more complicated because they are so big. my other friend sidibe gets chosen to go with the truck and he asks me if i want to go. i said yes, sensing an adventure. so a couple of hours later he comes and picks me up. theres a problem at first though because the guy who originally said he would drive them up decided to disappear and no one could find him. so sidibe and me had to find someone else, but when we did the new guy said he would only go to Ségou, not all the way to Zambougou because the road is all dirt there. so after an interesting little semi truck ride through the brush of mali, which included us seeing an evil witch standing by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, an interesting discussion about AIDS in Africa, and a couple of encounters with greedy malian border guards, we arrive at Sékou at around four in the morning. i was lucky and got to sleep a couple of hours but sidibe didnt get any at all.
so now we have to find someone to take these huge ass cisterns to this tiny village out in the middle of nowhere. No one wants to do it and those who will are asking for way to much mooney. After about five hours of wandering aimlessly through ségou asking everyone if they know anyone who can do it, we find someone. We joyously load up the stuff into this huge gigantic dumpster truck looking thing that is open on the top and has about 20 people in it, we get lifted up and we take off to zambougou.
the ride over there was cool, i almost fell off the truck a couple of times because we were sitting on the cisterns; but we eventually made it. these guys in the truck help us load stuff down, and we go talk to the village chief. sidibe starts telling him about the engineers without borders and the project, a couple of people pretend like they know what hes talking about
after talking with the chief for awhile it becomes clear that its not the rightr Zambougou, they have never heard of Abdoul Doumbia and dont know what Engineers Without Borders are. So we dropped off the cisterns in the wrong village.
were kind of stuck because we dont have any more money. the money that was supposed to be for transporting the stuff is all gone and we dont really know what to do. We finally are able to talk one of the villagers to give us a ride to the highqway on his piece of shit moto, which we gladly uncomfortably pile onto.
a longride on the moto through some crazy looking african countryside with all these huge ass trees poking out everywhere and looking like some national geographic documentary and then the guy demands thatwe give him the equivalent of twenty us dollars for the gas he has used. we adamantly rfuse since hes not even taking us into the city, hes just dropping us off at the highway, but hes insistent, he needs to buy cigarettes and his teeth are pretty gnarly, so finally after a heated argument he stops the moto and tells us that he wont take us any farther unless we give him the money so we get off and start walking ourselves.
we are out in the middle of nowhere, its hot as hell even in winter because its midday and we are kilometres from the highway, the water is almost gone too. but we start walking anyway because we have no other choice.
We make it to the highway and try to flag down cars as they pass by. We see at least 4 or 5 of the huge expensive ugly land cruisers that development project people buy then the entire staff uses as a company car whiz by us filled with stuffy looking white people who dont even look at us as we are excitedly waving at them to stop . i know they saw us because we were standing in the middle of the road.
one of those soutrama things finally comes by and stops. he doesnt want to takeus because we dont have money but eventually he takes pity on us because of our darkly amusing story. we finally get to sékou and head to my friends house to try to relax and sleep because its been like two days since we slept.
sidibe explains the story to her, i try to take a nap. theres really nothing we can do except wait until the engineers without borders group gets there, they dont have a phone with them. finallythey get there and we go out to tell them what happened, the EWB guys are upset obviously but understand that things like that happen when youre in africa .
but we still dont get to go home. since sidibe was the one who talked to the village guy, hes the only one who can get them back. so we have to go back to the wrong Zambougou. Its too late in the day for us to do that right now and nobody knows how to find a truck on such short notice so we head back to the right zambougou to finally rest and sleep.
its a pretty interesting place, theres a peace corps volunteer who has been living there for about two years and is fluent in bambara and im just in awe of her linguistic ability, she knows like five languages or something. i spend the trip there talking with her. shes a little disillusioned with the whole peace corps thing which is just basically a way for someone to learn an exotic language really well, according to her. i think it would be cool to live in the village for awhile but id be screwed if there just happened to be no one in the village who played music......
we rest and eat. Malian food is good but in the village its mostly just tho, this starchy tastless gruel that im not too into. i sleep good though, its quite in the village and you can see the stars; bamako is way too noisy at all times. we wake up and i realize the other reason i couldnt live in a village is that there is no coffee.
the EWB guys ingeniously decide that we can attach the cisterns to the top of the van they have already rented. With two trips its enough. so we go through a two long safari back to the wrong zambougou.
its tiring but uneventful, we take another soutrama back into sékou. i get a really bad headache on the minibus ride into bamako and feel like the world is going to end. but i make it.
i realized two things during the trip :
1. i need to learn bambara.
2. dont expect white people in land cruisers to care about the little people.