Sylvia's Journal

Last night I went out with the two Dutch guys who are lodged at the hotel and my Quebec friend joined us at the last minute – a good thing. It reminded me why, all these years ago, I traded in my Dutch husband for an American one. There is something about the Dutch I meet abroad that irritates me. They know everything, they have an opinion about everything (with particularly strong opinions about the US) and they are always right. This I have come to associate especially with Dutch men (former husband included) – although of course I know others, not Dutch, who exhibit some of these traits.

My new Dutch acquaintances are here to work on security issues with the Dutch embassy. They are military men, seconded by the ministry of defense. They are sent all over the world to deal with threats. They just came from Kabul, so we had something to talk about. When I mentioned I had lived in two powder keg places (Lebanon and Afghanistan) I was told that there is a more serious one I had not mentioned: the Sahara/southern Libya/northern Mali and Niger powder keg. That’s why they were here – but they couldn’t say much other that they dealt with ‘special’ stuff. One has been an air marshal in the past. I have never met an air marshal as they fly incognito, but I know they are always on my plane. And so I got to ask the question I always wanted to ask an air marshal: don’t they want something to happen, on these long boring rides, see some action? He laughed but I didn’t get my answer. I think such information is not be made public on a blogsite no doubt.

I had negotiated a price for taking us to a lovely restaurant, just a tad too far to walk. My compatriots, upon hearing what I had negotiated laughed and said I had been suckered into much too a high a price. And then they started to talk about a bad experience they had had with the same driver earlier in the week and how they told him, basically, to go screw himself, implying basically that I was naive. I told him that I had no problem overpaying a bit (it still is small change for me, and surely for them) because the end of Ramadan feast is approaching and everyone needs money and that I didn’t feel I had been taken for a ride. They had some faint excuse that they were here on the Dutch taxpayers account and that therefore they should pay as little as possible (this did not apply to meals and drinks of course). I told them they should take another taxi if they didn’t want to contribute to his overpriced fare. In the end we all piled into the taxi but I noticed an icy silence from the otherwise talkative driver.

When we returned from a fabulous dinner they hesitated about contributing to the fare. I waved them off, no need to waste Dutch taxpayer money on a poorly negotiated deal (a waft of Trump?). But they did contributed something in the end.  The taxi man was very agitated and waited until they had disappeared through the hotel security gates, and then, with only my Quebecois friend and me in attendance started to rant about how they had treated him. He was visibly shaken but I told him I didn’t want to hear anything about his experiences with them and that we were negotiating with him on our terms, a bit more favorable to him. We hired him to take us to the national park, the zoo and museum for a Sunday outing. He agreed as long as it was not with them. I am sure the price we negotiated was ridiculous in the eye of our Dutch military men – but it what fine with us, from the North American continent, proving their general disdain for anything (north)american.

Roadside advertisements here are of a kind that I don’t think you’d see in the US anymore. I think they may have been common in the 60s and 70s, but advertisers probably wouldn’t get away with them nowadays, at least not in the US or Europe. But here all is up for grabs. Advertising that alcohol consumption makes you smart and successful (la bière de la réussite), or that sugar is good for you. One billboard for a line of sugary sodas shows a young boy kid picking up the front end of a small truck with one hand while holding the sugary drink in his other; or there is the one billboard that encourages people to ‘find the lion inside you’ advertising a line of candy. Of course now, because of Ramadan, many billboards wish people a blessed Ramadan showing happy beautiful people drinking or eating specific products, including one of a family eating in front of a Shell station (Shell wishes you…). And women empowerment is not forgotten either: Maggi reminding people that every woman who uses Maggi in her cooking is a Star.

This morning during my morning jog on the treadmill I listened to an NPRs Hidden Brain podcast (This Is Your Brain On Ads) about how ads to which one was exposed at an early age hold sway over anything that the intelligent grown up now knows is nonsense or plain wrong, like nutritious breakfast that consist for 80% of sugar. But those were advertised to the innocent and credulous young mind, with the help of cartoon characters. The message got engraved somewhere deep in our brain and trumps everything we know to be true.

Large electronic billboards are also starting to emerge. They are quite common in the big cities in Asia and I had seen them in Kenya (not always working properly), but last night I saw the best one ever. It is permanently displayed on the main drag near my hotel. It says (most visible at night) in English, in large white on black letters:

• Mouse not found
• Keyboard not found
• Fatal error
• System suspended

It is a frightening message if you don’t know what these words mean.

But the best thing I saw today was the man with a plastic bag that has the picture and name of our previous president on it. He is still on people’s screen. The plastic bag is also, unfortunately, made with chemicals that don’t dissolve in a hundred years, so his picture will be around a bit until the bag starts to fray as it flaps in the wind from trees or fences, along with the millions of black plastic bags that dot the landscape. This way even our honorable last president will eventually contribute to clogged drains. The Rwandan president did well to ban plastic bags (you are told upon landing in Kigali to leave all plastic bags on the plane). But here it looks like such political will is not on the horizon yet, especially if the current president gets his way and stays on beyond his mandate. Malians are protesting many other things the current administration is not doing, and maybe plastic bags are not quite up there with things like the economy, security and transparency.

It was another one of those ‘retrouvailles’ like I had in Niger some months ago. Here in Bamako I met up with a woman who played big in the family planning league in Mali, all those years back. She is also retired, in the way I plan to ‘retire.’ We hadn’t seen each other in 24 years and when we looked at each other we both decided we have aged well and actually hadn’t changed all that much. My white hairs are visible but hers were under a scarf so there is no telling. We sat in the shade by the pool and talked and talked until we had exhausted all topics which ranged far and wide.

She had lost her husband about 8 years ago – he had two warnings that he needed to change his life style – she had given up long before (“he never listened to me”) but then he also didn’t listen to the doctors; and so when the third heart attack came on there was no one to save him. I couldn’t quite gauge whether his departure was upsetting and traumatic or not and I decided not to ask. How would one ask anyways? (Did you mind?)

The rest of the day I prepared for the workshop on governance that starts on Monday. I am working a bit in a vacuum because my colleagues are on a long holiday weekend, something I only found out on Thursday – we did agree on the design for the four days but a lot of the detail work, such as preparing the facilitation notes, slides, handouts and whatnot fell to me.

I had to educate myself on the language of governance in French, like finding out what the difference is between ‘statut’ and ‘reglement interieur,’ sometimes squished together as ‘SRI.’ Google and a reliable internet connection turned out to be invaluable. Thanks to the good internet Axel and I chatted for a bit – I won’t be there to put in the geraniums at the ancestral graves and drop some thanksgiving vodka on the graves of my in-laws – they were quite fond of the liquid – as well as the grave of my grand in-laws who were not, as they were teetotalers.

For exercise I did my 30 minutes on the treadmill and 20 minutes in the pool, offset by eating a few ‘palets Bretons (“pur beurre”),’ those very buttery cookies that Air France hands out in its salon, and that are quite addictive.

I tried watching the news for a while and was heartened by the Irish popular vote to start disassembling Ireland’s long male hegemony regarding the role and place of women. While some people may believe that we are in a downturn when it comes to liberal values and civility, this showed to me (as well as Weinstein in shackles) that we are in an upward move and that the antics of some of our world leaders are just blips on the screen, temporary disturbances – the line that connects the dots is going up and up.

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.