A bipolar day

What a difference a few hours, hundreds of miles, and another country make. We awoke this morning for an early-morning flight to Bamako, the capital of Mali. If it wasn’t bad enough that we were up and dressed by 5am, the taxi driver waiting for us outside the hotel in the darkness appeared to be drunk.

When I first came out on the street, I saw a man with dirty and torn clothes
stumble up the street and urinate. Then when he came to the car and got in the driver seat, I was mortified. The hotel had called the driver for us and negotiated the price, so we got in. We luckily remembered to confirm the cost of the ride in front of the hotel’s security guard because the guy said it was going to cost us more than the agreed upon price.

The security guy helped us and we were set to go. A block or two later, though, the driver pulled into a darkened gas station and demanded some money for gas. Um. It’s closed, we point out to him. So, we didn’t give him anything.

The tank was clearly on empty, but nothing was open, so we headed out toward the airport again and twice the car started to sputter to a stop. Both times he grumbled something that we couldn’t understand. It almost sounded like he wanted twice the amount of money because he was being put out or something.

I wanted to tell him that he was putting us out by him not having any gas, KNOWING that he was driving us to the airport.

Long story short, we actually made it to our flight, but not before he threw our bags on the ground in anger before sputtering away.

I was just relieved we survived long enought to see Mali, which has been
incredible so far, mostly because of the wonderful hospitality we’ve received from most everyone from the moment we landed.

A South African contractor working on a long-term project in Mali offered to
have his driver drop us at our hotel, but we would just have to wait a few
minutes with him at the airport. While we waited, we tried negotiating for a SIM card for our phones. The vendor wanted 2,000cfa, which we all thought was too high. Loot, the South African fellow, called his local friend, Aguibou, who told him what we should pay. When the vendor didn’t come down, we didn’t buy it.

Another long story short, Loot’s driver dropped him off at Aguibou’s house and Aguibou hopped in the car and gave the driver instructions to go to the local telecom office, then went in and bought the cards for us (with our money).

We were so humbly grateful for all of their help, we were shocked when neither Aguibou nor his driver would accept any money for having driven us all over the place before taking us to the hotel. “We all need to help each other,” he told us. “We need to do good, so that good comes back to us.”

This statement, almost word for word, was uttered to us later the same day by Bathily Kamssourou, pictured above, the woman who works at the Air Mali office in downtown Bamako.

After we scrounged up barely enough cash to make a booking, she called a money changer she knows to convert our dollars into CFAs and then helped negotiate a better rate. The guy tried to tell us the rate was worse because we only had twenty dollar bills. We would get a better rate for 50s and 100s. Hmm. It seems to spend the same no matter what the denomination. After a little negotiation, the rate was more inline with the going rate with a commission tacked on.

We finished all our errands except for securing a bus ticket for tomorrow and Bathily justed happened to live near the station, so she grabbed us a cab, then went with us to the station where she helped us through the chaos to find the right bus company. Then she had the driver drop her at her house and then take us back to our hotel.

After the day we’ve had, we have a lot of “paying it forward” to do.

Tomorrow, we are off to Mopti, then Dogon and Timbuktu later in the week.