Mali and Paris - February 2008

Somebody once said ‘It’s a wonderful thing travel, it confirms all your prejudices'. Certainly, at five o’clock in the morning, on a freezing Sunday pre-dawn, I know exactly what they mean. Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris is far and away the worst airport in the world – and that’s up against some pretty stiff opposition – including gems like Heathrow, Algiers and not to mention Nouakchott, Mauritania.

I’m sitting writing this in Terminal ‘E’, after arriving over an hour and a half ago – there was only one bus to unload the whole plane, so we waited twenty minutes to get off, then were bussed for another twenty minutes around the airfield, waving at terminal ‘E’ as we whizzed past the first time, before being dropped at terminal ‘F’.

There a couple of nice secret policemen checked all our passports in case we were trying to invade France illegally. Then we tried to make our way back to ‘E’, being told (gleefully), that the navettes (connecting buses) were probably on strike this morning – having a little go at Sarko and his new bride. Eventually we were dumped at the end of a cold, damp, grey concrete tunnel, to fight our way up and through the next security screen into the mythical Terminal ‘E’.

It all seemed a long way away from north Mali, forty-eight hours earlier. We were doing a check (following a formal evaluation) of the Para-Vet project around Tombuctou and Gao that we started about ten years ago.

There had been a long and bloody civil war between the Tuareg, ‘Arab’ nomads in the north – and the black, West African Malian government based in Bamako.
The UN persuaded the Tuareg to accept a peace deal, and in return they were to get some health-care, a few schools and some veterinary input. SPANA was already established in Mali, so we were asked if we could help.

Over the years since then we’ve trained over fifty of the local tribesmen – they all had to be registered ex-terrorists - provided them with an initial ‘bank’ of basic veterinary

Medicines, established a price scale with the people, and set them going. We still do free prophylactic treatment for the donkeys and camels and follow-up training courses, but apart from that the whole thing is self-sustainable. Of course there have been a few disasters, and unsurprisingly some of the men are better and more dynamic than others, but in general it’s made a big difference to the people of the desert, and along the river, who are totally dependent on their livestock.

This time, we first went to see a Tuareg camp, away up in the sand dunes north of Tomuctou. We had a film producer with us wanting to make a series about Working Animals. After worming some of the camels (they suffer quite badly from mange), we were eating the obligatory goat together, when Mr. BBC asked the Tuareg headman, if the camels were important to him.

He looked at me in amazement. Was this stupid foreigner completely mad?
‘Of course we can’t live without them. Most days we just have camel milk and yoghurt to eat. Any grain has to be transported back on them from town. We ride them up deep into the Sahara to bring back salt. They are our transport when we move camp, carry water, gather firewood, or if one of the women is sick. Then when they are too old we eat them. Without them there can be no Tuareg’.
I wish I could say the same about Air France.

Jeremy Hulme