Day 5, Mali

by Jane Chesnutt | Comments


I'm writing this at 31,000 feet over the Congo, en route to Bamako. There's too much haze to see anything, though every once in a while I catch the gleam of water, usually a thin, snaking river.

I know it's a clich©, but this trip has been a blur, literally and figuratively. I wrote in my pre-post of how, while on safari in Tanzania last year, I tried to imprint the landscape on my mind.

Forget that this time. We've done a city a day, so you barely get the sense of a place when you go wheels-up again.

The motorcades don’t tear around at 70 mph, but they also don't stop for red lights. Almost all of us have little digital point-and-shoot cameras and we aim them out the windows, but by the time the shutter clicks, the image you wanted is two vehicles behind you.

Here are snapshot views of the three cities seen, all quite different:

Dakar, Senegal: A dusty, bustling city with sand and half-finished construction everywhere. Not a blade of grass to be seen and only a few palm trees.

Wherever you go, you see work horses pulling what is clearly a traditional cart, and I very much got the sense that the old and the new coexist here.

Dakar is an overwhelmingly Muslim city, and it certainly feels that way, though I can't quite tell you why. Yes, you see mosques and some Arabic lettering (French is the official language), but I also saw not one burka. Of course, we were only there for a morning, and a short one at that.

Maputo, Mozambique: As different as night and day from Dakar, aside from being on the water (the Indian Ocean in this case, as opposed to the Atlantic). Think of a lush, flowering resort city, with villas cascading down the hills to the water, and you're in the vicinity of what Maputo is like.

However, as I said in an earlier post, just beyond this small, circumscribed area, is appalling destitution—vast areas where people live in windowless houses made of bamboo sticks.

There's vast potential for tourism to pull some of these people out of poverty—Mozambique has miles and miles of pristine beaches (it's twice the length of California). But the country lacks the roads and other infrastructure: You can't get to much of that coastline.

But if they do get it together…well! On our day there, we in the press pool had the "luxury," for this trip, of a couple hours to ourselves before our flight (the First Lady had an official dinner). I spent part of that time on the terrace of our grand old hotel, nursing a glass of wine and looking out at the Indian Ocean. I thought, would I come back and spend my own money, rather than the company's? Absolutely.

Lusaka, Zambia: Dare I say, the most American of the cities we've seen? And not because U.S. brands are plastered everywhere—though they are.

But there's almost what I'd call a suburban feel to some of what we saw, for example, a couple of new strip malls that would not be out of place in most American communities. The houses we passed on our route sometimes had a middle-class character. Even the houses of the poor—at least the ones we saw—were more substantial (cinderblock) and larger than in Mozambique.

We liked the people, too. It probably helps that English is the official language there. (It's Portuguese in Mozambique.) We could communicate. But I think there was more to it.

Let me give you an example. Since we've been landing late at night, all of the welcomes have been as basic as protocol allows, I suspect. But as we taxied to our spot in Lusaka, people on the left of the plane starting calling out that there was a band…and dancers…and singers—a big boisterous greeting.

The staff was clearly thrown—this was not in the plan—and the Secret Service went into overdrive. Mrs. Bush must have been exhausted, but she gamely made her way over. I was at a distance and couldn't see much more than a crush of people, but I could hear. And it was joyous.

That good feeling carried over to the next day. We're spending such a short time in each of these places that any kind of sweeping judgment is especially suspect, but it seemed to me that we were treated with special warmth in Zambia.

That's true, too, for Bamako, Mali, where we landed a couple of hours ago—in daylight, of all things. (I'm being ironic.)

Once again, we're in a city that feels worlds different from the one we left. This is a French-speaking, largely Muslim city, and the signs of both are everywhere.

The place is teeming: with people, motorbikes, markets, flies, life. It's very hot (though not 100°+, and we'd been warned it might be). You see signs of lovely Moorish architecture, and also very poor motels that appear to be a major form of shelter here.

I'm writing now from the Nelson Mandela School, where we've just been in a classroom with Mrs. Bush and 54 children. It was, for me, the best event of the trip.

Mali is now educating more children, we were told. As a result there also are more teachers, and not all of them are well-trained. So, as in Zambia and other nations, there is a radio program that transmits lessons to classrooms. We sat in on part of one of those lessons. I know I said that the children yesterday were picture-perfect adorable—well, these were even more picture-perfect adorable. There were dressed in uniforms of terrific African cloth in either green, blue, red or yellow.

Mrs. Bush clearly enjoyed herself, sitting in the middle of the children. She always introduces "my little girl, Jenna," to the students.

After class, she lingered, watching as her gifts to the children—a cute bag with a coloring book and a hand puppet inside—were distributed. The children kept saying, in unison, "Merci Madame," and still she lingered.

She went up to one table and helped a child with the puppet, a kitty-cat. "Meow," she said, as she smiled at the child.

We're joined by local press at every stop. Today, they've been well-behaved. Starting at the airport, it's been wild here, with our handlers barely able to contain the crush.

One of the surprises of the trip for me was that the press has a Secret Service agent assigned to it, starting from when you get to Andrews. (Whether he's guarding us from others, or others from us is a question I haven't asked.) The agents rotate this duty, which is considered onerous, and our agent, Kerry, has referred to this trip with us as "herding cats." We saw him get fierce for the first time at the airport and later at the Presidential Palace. It was an experience.

We're now at the airport going back to the plane, so I will sign off. It's been an amazing trip and I will do a follow-up on Monday.