Sylvia's Journal

There were two animals I had overlooked, a big one and a tiny one. The big one is a turtle even bigger than the one who greeted me upon arrival, about two feet in length and nearly a foot high when standing high on its legs. The tiny one is a fawn, Bambi, who at lunch time comes to the door of the kitchen and awaits his (or her?) surrogate mother – a young man belonging to the kitchen staff who comes out with a baby bottle and fills it with milk. The fawn knows where its food comes from and is patiently waiting before guzzling down the bottle. The kitchen staff doesn’t speak much French but one didn’t need language to figure out that the fawn was an orphan and a few months old.

The animals are having a field day with the mangoes and oranges that plop down from the trees everywhere. There are half eaten mangoes strewn all over. I am not sure who nibbles the mangoes and who picks the mangoes clean down to the stones. I watched the turtle for a while as it was working on a mango. It’s a slow process especially when the mango is a bit slippery. But the turtle seems infinitely patient. Whatever is left behind is eaten by another animal and after that a smaller animal and so forth all the way down to the ants and flies who do the final clean up.

The pool is clean now. A few men spent the day scrubbing the bottom and cleaning the filters. But it’s too late now – I am not convinced it’s swimmable; and besides, the Peking ducks are lurking on the side. They seem to like chlorine or whatever chemical is used to clean the pool. The bottom color, which I thought was blue enough has become bright blue (aqua) – the same color as the geese pool which has also been cleaned. The gate to the geese pool was closed and I could tell the geese wanted to swim – it was very hot. I swear I saw them panting. All the animals are acrually quite sad looking, only the turtles and Bambi look happy. But the peacocks and geese and porcupines and ostriches all look unhealthy and sad – with missing plumes and quills, and panting.

Even though sad looking, the ostriches greet me every morning. They are very curious. They walk over to the fence to say hello, and look me straight in the eye. They have huge bulging eyes and must have quite a field of vision, seeing me coming when I can barely see them.  I talk with, existential talk but they don’t respond. I imagine they must be frustrated that they can’t walk free. Apparently when the guests are gone they are let out and have the run of the place; though it’s not much of a run on the cobbled and twisted paths and the low trees they would get tangled up in.

I had a brief moment of uninterrupted, and fairly fast, internet access yesterday evening when I was given the router to take to my room so I could send the updated facilitator notes to my team. But this morning everyone in the workshop took advantage of the ‘free’ internet and we had soon exhausted the balance on the Orange data sim card inside the router. It was never recharged and I will have to wait till I am back in Bamako. I think the same happened to the Canal+ subscription as I was not able to watch any station of interest, not even Grey’s Anatomy.