Sylvia's Journal

Very few people (and certainly very few tourists, if any) go to Mali these days. The plane from Paris was half full. I had my pick of several empty rows. It was quite a contrast with my trip to Burundi.

It’s hot in Mali in May, very hot; It was 102F when we landed in the middle of the afternoon. A rainstorm cooled things off a bit, down to the lower 90s, but the mercury is going up again and on Sunday it will be 107F according to my weather app.

Tourists might not come because of the heat but they are also staying away because of the periodic news about attacks which are all over the place and unpredictable. Except for the north and northeast where they are happening often enough to trigger travel advisories for those who can postpone their trips or have no real business there, like tourists.

And finally it is the holy month of Ramadan which means that during daylight most eating establishments are closed – tourists might have eaten there but they’re not here. In our hotel the food is kept in the freezer. I eat defrosted chicken and fish with fries, rice or a salad, and tomato sauce for color. The hotel has very few guests, so the food doesn’t get eaten fast enough.

But it’s not all bad. The empty hotel means there are few people who use the fitness equipment or the lovely pool. It is also easy to meet the few hardy folks who are here. There are three Dutch gentlemen who I suprised when I stopped swimming and offered to take a photo (in Dutch) as they were trying to fit themselves into a selfie.

The hotel room I was given is in fact a small apartment with a living room, a big desk, a bedroom, a bathroom and a well equipped kitchenette – plus excellent internet service. Because of the kitchenette I can eat the enormous juicy mangoes to my heart’s content.

A French Canadian gentleman struck up a conversation when I went for my daily swim (the little action at the hotel seems to be at the swimming pool). He invited me to join him and a compatriot to go out of the hotel for dinner and I said yes, happy to escape for a bit after a hard days work at my big desk.

We discovered that we are both two weeks short of a very long period of employment at one organization – he 25 years with a firm in Canada and I 31 years with MSH. We are both ending the same day, June 15, and we are both having a goodbye party. The only difference is that he resigned voluntary, I did not. But our feelings about the new freedom are the same – staying involved with a few gigs here and there and enjoying life the rest of the time.

Total strangers only hours before, we had a wonderful time together. His comrade didn’t show up as, we learned later, he was urgently called to his embassy to fix the entire security installation because the rainstorm and thunder had blown a few fuses and so disarmed the system. Nature can always best us, even the most sophisticated IT systems it seems. Besides, as we learned in Kabul, security is mostly an illusion; there is no protection, just luck, when a bomb gets detonated at an hotel or restaurant creating the panic that activates the neurochemicals. It’s those that determine everyone’ s next act and our fate.