Segou

I went to Mali last weekend to meet with a friend/colleague from Vancouver who is working on a nutrition project in rural Mali. I was thrilled when she suggested we meet in Segou – I was ready to see a familiar, friendly, and female face!

Segou was lovely. It’s a small, sleepy town along the Niger River, with a few good restaurants and some beautiful crafts for sale. Nicole and I took advantage of all the shops in close proximity and bought pottery, baskets, and textiles. My bag was quite heavy on the return to Burkina! We visited a workshop where the artists make cotton cloth and paint it with a mixture of clay, mud, soap, or medicinal plants. The traditional designs are absolutely breathtaking. We watched the artists working and I bought one Bogolon cloth, and one Gala (made from the leaves of the indigo tree).

Nicole and I traded stories from the field and life in Mali/Burkina, enjoyed pizza and cold beer at a restaurant overlooking the river, and relished the hot shower, air conditioning, and comfortable bed in the hotel room. We also watched parts of the World Cup in real time. Nicole was in East Africa recently to teach a short course in nutrition and flew through Nairobi on the return. She beamed as she opened her bag and said that she had brought me a gift: Kenyan coffee! When I thanked her she laughed and said that she knew Pacific Northwesterner appreciation of good coffee.

The bus to and from Segou was a trip in and of itself: 12 hours on Friday, and 9 hours on the return. It was a classic African travel adventure: the bus broke down not 15 minutes outside of Bobo and we sat by the road for 1.5 hours and on the return, I bought a ticket only to discover the bus was full. I had to hurry via taxi to another bus company, which was also overbooked (with people sitting in the aisles) so I stood for the first few minutes until a man offered me his seat. I had to laugh; it was all too comical. Then, that bus hit another vehicle in Segou and, in the process, dislodged the front door, so we rode for 8 hours with the front door open. Fortunately, no one was injured in the incident and we returned to Bobo, if not quickly, safely. I had the company of Nelson Mandela’s 600-page autobiography and a nice French woman sitting next to me. I liked my seatmate immediately when she got our tickets reimbursed by the first bus company and then offered to watch my bag on pit stops along the road; she really won me over when, about 6 hours into the trip, she told me that I spoke French well.

On Monday I took the early (6:15 am) bus back to Orodara and had a very long day at the office upon my return. The field entire team refused to work that day (for the third time), so we suspended the field activities while we “reorganize” the survey. We started contacting people on our wait list and have begun training a new team already. It’s not easy, and it’s discouraging, but it’s an opportunity to learn from the previous experience and try to make the second attempt run more efficiently (easier said than done).

On a brighter note, while morale among the last survey team was low, the coordinating team’s sense of humor has anything but decreased. Apparently I have developed the habit of saying that I have a few questions by saying, “J’ai quelque des questions,” which is not pretty French. During a three hour-long meeting shortly after the survey team threatened to strike (for the second time), in an effort to lighten the mood, my senior collaborator wrapped up the meeting by saying that if we have questions to ask; only he phrased it, “As Shelby would say, ‘quelque des questions’,” and grinned at me while the other eight people burst out laughing. I asked, “What?!” and the doctor sitting next to me suppressed his laugh long enough to explain that it’s ‘quelque questions, not quelque des questions’.

I laughed with them and, feigning anger, demanded, “In the 9 months that I have been here, why has no one corrected me?” – which only made all of us laugh more. Since then, it’s become a source of many jokes among the staff, to the point where practically none of us can say a phrase starting with “quelque” without suppressing a laugh or, for the sake of a good laugh, inserting the “des” and letting everyone giggle. I find it highly amusing and have to wonder if the French woman on the Segou bus was just being charitable.