Bamako and beyond

Our visit to Bamako got off to a bad start when Ezéchiel's suitcase did not show up on the conveyor belt. Unlike the US or France, where the airline company takes responsibility and will deliver an errant suitcase to your door, here it requires trips back and forth to the airport. In Ezéchiel's case, his bag was picked up in error by another individual and only reported the next morning. Ezéchiel  suspected hanky-panky, but everything seemed to be there thank goodness !

The airport is clean and modern

And Air Cote d'Ivoire quite pleasant 

The hiccup in our trip is that Kathryn Seay, who works in the library in Bamako, is in Burkina Faso right now, irony of ironies... The two of us plan to continue on to Ouagadougou in a few days so Ezéchiel can finish his classwork, and I can visit a few people before returning to Abidjan, so I might see her there, but it would have been nice if she had been here while we are at the library in Bamako...  I understand she is attending a workshop there.

Apartments at the SIL Center in Bamako

Rooftop view of the Niger River 

We settled in to our accommodations at the SIL Center in Bamako, which has some housing adjacent to the office building.  The name Bamako comes from a Bambara word that means "tail of the crocodile" and refers to the Niger River that snakes through the city.  Like in Abidjan, there is a nice view from the rooftop of the apartment building, overlooking the river, and at night the bridge across the river it lit with blue lights which is lovely because of the intense color.  In fact, at night Abidjan, Ouagadougou, and Bamako look quite different all lit up--you don't notice the huge drainage ditches at the side or the road, or the (mostly plastic) trash that is a blight on any charm each place may possess.  The highways could be almost anywhere...

Unfortunately the blue lights didn't show up at all in this photo

Meanwhile I have had serious Internet challenges. The Outlook app that I used to receive email from my Hotmail account stopped syncing, so I had no incoming messages. I reinstalled the app and all seems to be fine for the moment.  In addition, likely unrelated, I was unable to access the Outlook site on my laptop all day despite using different networks and different browsers.  I was, however, able to access it on a different computer and was beginning to suspect some malware on the latter...  It seemed that I spent hours with the IT person at the SIL Center and the Outlook people via Messenger trying to diagnose the problem, yet my antivirus seemed completely unaware of any issues... And now, miracle of miracles, it seems to be working...  Go figure...

In Bamako, the library itself was not as dusty as it had been two years ago, but Ezéchiel found it appalling, and took a vacuum cleaner to the shelves, while I worked on changing the wording of the self-service check-out module into French. While we were in there working, there were two university students sitting at the main table in the library speaking in ENGLISH, which was what I found most interesting, They were discussing various internship programs, and both spoke reasonably well, although one clearly had a better command of the language than the other.

Ezéchiel removes the dust

 

Red dust on the wall from the Hamattan blown in through an open window

I know it gets stuffy in the library, and it may be a losing battle, but I am trying to convince them that if they want the flow of air, they need to turn on the overhead fan! Ezéchiel is definitely with me on this one!


The following day we took a field trip into a different part of town, and visited FATMES (Faculté Théoloqique et de Missiologie Evangélique du Sahel) and their theological library. I thought Ezéchiel would appreciate this since he is ordained by the Assemblées de Dieu [Assemblies of God] in Burkina Faso. The library was pathetic, though, and reminded me of the one I had spent a week working in two years ago in Bénin, cataloguing a collection of about the same size. There is a serious need for free/shareware or inexpensive software in French for smaller libraries like these in Africa which don't require a tremendous amount of IT support to set them up and keep them running.

Waiting outside the Center for a taxi--drainage ditch in foreground

Here Ezéchiel poses with the librarian

 After our trip to the theological seminary, I was a bit under the weather, probably due to dehydration, so spent the afternoon in the air-conditioned comfort of the apartment where I was staying, hydrating, and getting some rest. 

The following day our trip by taxi to the airport was during the wee hours of the morning, and we found it beautifully decorated with glowing Christmas lights in red, yellow, green and white. (They're slow at taking the ones down in Ouagadougou as well.)  I thought this was ironic as Mali is basically Muslim country (90%), much more so than Burkina Faso, where Christians make up 30 percent of the population.  Ezéchiel was impressed and wanted to have his picture taken with the terminal as a backdrop but our driver informed him that photographs were not allowed.  It is particularly sensitive as the Mali Air Force has a building adjacent to the facility...

It would be a long wait, however, as we were quite early, and weren't even allowed inside the terminal until an hour or so before the scheduled flight. And then, true to form, Air Burkina was an hour late...