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.

In the morning the handful of us non-fasters collect at the side of the pool for our breakfast.  At least that is what we did the first day but the next morning there was no action by the pool – breakfast was served someplace else. One more surprise. This trip is just too full of surprises.

I noticed that the wading pool was blue again thanks to a bucket full of chemicals that changed the color. I have decided I will forego swimming here. I simply don’t trust the chemicals or the filtering system. I also suspect a return of the ducks.

Breakfast on day one consisted of a piece of bread with (well) fried eggs and Lipton or Nescafe. On day two it was a piece of bread with a slice of fried spam. I asked whether there was an alternative, like jam, but no. And so I had my spam and ate it too.

The dinner arrangement last night was also a surprise. Participants had asked to be given their money to make up for the meals they are not taking or would not take at the conference center. I asked my two non-fasting colleagues about their dinner plans but they were a bit vague. Maybe they assume that the place they get their food from (outside the confines of the conference center) is not fit for a foreigner.  Or maybe their dinner consisted of the snacks provided in the afternoon. Later I discovered that they sent a driver to fetch a meal someplace.  I saw no restaurants on our way out here.

It was clear that I was on my own for dinner unless I wanted to join the fast breaking crowd but I was too hungry for that. I discovered there were leftovers from lunch (a vague resemblance to the famous Senegalese dish ‘Cieboudiene’) and when asked I about dinner I was instantly served a plate full in the refectory. The small room hadn’t been cleaned from our lunch, and was thus full of flies. I retired early to my fly-free hut and tinkered a bit with our plans for tomorrow while watching Grey’s Anatomy in French.

I am now installed in a ‘case’ a traditional round hut. In Southern Africa they call these ‘rondavels.’ It is a luxurious hut in that it has a shower and a bath (and hot water). It has an air conditioner that works quite well and is very welcome in this heat. There is a refrigerator with a bottle of red wine in it. It is not clear whether this is a welcoming gift or left behind by the previous occupant. The refrigerator door doesn’t close and soon there is water all over the floor. I also have a flat screen TV with a cable connection (Canal+), requiring two remotes. Some huts got a router to serve surrounding huts but the passwords don’t match the router name and even where it does, the internet doesn’t work. I have surrendered to not being connected.

The huts, as well as some two-story buildings are built close together in clusters on the grounds along winding paths. The style is ‘faux rustic,’ with cement logs along the paths and as hand railings that are made to look like fallen trees, tree branches or trunks. The paths are zigzagging around a beautiful and very large swimming pool that seems to be mostly used by the wild life – two Peking ducks were happily swimming in the cloudy green water of the children’s wading pool – making it even cloudier. I was discouraged from using the pool (which looked like it was swimmable) as the maintenance and filtering systems were not to be trusted. Too bad.

There are many animals here – it’s like a small private zoo. Some animals are in pens: five ostriches in a small enclosure seem to be, if not happy then at least curious about us, the new arrivals.  The porcupines stay mostly inside their faux grotto, understandable given how many of their quills are missing or broken, and raise their quills when they think there is a reason to go outside (food).  At least 20 snow white geese are clustered together in another enclosed area, making a mess and much noise. They have a blue bottomed pool that is rather dirty. There are a few animals roaming around loose: golden cranes, some peacocks and a very large turtle.  A teak-planked bridge, flanked by banana trees goes over another blue bottomed pull that may or may not have animals in it – I can’t see as the water is filled with algae.

As with so many other things during this trip, I was wrong about where we would be staying. The pattern seems to be that I get wrong or incomplete information followed by a surprise.

The workshop started on Sunday night with the arrival of everyone at the conference center. It was as if we also surprised the conference staff. There was much coming and going and missing and then getting towels and soap and toilet paper and finding matches to rooms and packs of remotes (airco, TV, cable), tied together with the masking tape, probably left over from a previous workshop.

The arrangement for food was not clear – at least three quarters of the participants were fasting and their meal times do not coincide with ours, the non-fasting minority. They eat after it is dark and before daybreak, while we do the opposite. It’s all very complicated to organize – there are the per diem arrangements that require much negotiation and calculation. It is falling on the shoulders of the brand new office assistant who came in from a neighboring country – and she is doing admirably well it seems.

It took a while to get everyone settled and by then it was time for ‘la rupture,’ the breaking of the fast. First there was the coffee, tea or Citronelle, next to the large swimming pool, then the first prayer and then, by now in the dark, a meal that was only recognizable by the flashlights of our smart phones (a piece of beef and an onion sauce with limp and lukewarm fries – not bad, just limp).