I'm writing this in a cyber cafe opposite the 'grand mosque' in downtown Timbuctou, which frankly, constitutes something of a miracle. Firstly that such things exist in this somewhat out of the way neck of the woods, and secondly, that I have been able to cope with the technology required, and worst of all, trying to type on a French keyboard, and one that is so old, all the letters on the plastic keys have been worn away.
Still, at least we've got here, not the easiest place to get to as there is no proper road, no bridge over the river, and 'planes don't really like to land here as they can't refuel - fuel tankers can't get here.
And not the easiest of starts either - reveille at 4 o'clock, no breakfast, arriving at the airport about five-thirty - too early for the police, immigration people, security etc, so we just went ahead and took off without them. Not quite Heathrow, but then not British Airways either.The airhostess helped us on with the three cameras, then put them in the cockpit with the pilot, so they wouldn't be any inconvenience to us!
Mark you, none of that 'Business Class' stuff.
When we finally arrive, we are met by Uloulu - Tuareg chief for the region, and prime 'fixer'. But sadly he hasn't yet been able to fix the sandstorm we've come all this way to find. Still there's plenty of time yet. And frankly they all think we're completely bonkers anyway - they spend their lives trying to avoid storms - they kill people! Still, we've arranged to hire six camels, and travel with a Tuareg family as they search for water and food for their livestock.
This is the very worst time of the year - the end of the dry season - everything, animals and humans are practically at the end of their tether. Apart from the drought in Northern Kenya two years ago, I've never seen animals look so thin, and starting to see dead livestock everywhere. We drove down to the river to look at someone's cattle - like walking skeletons and even the camels have used up all their fat.
And when you see camels with no humps, you know things are tough.
One small compensation - a hippo had calved in a shallow of the river yesterday, making her doubly dangerous (everybody is terrified of 'les bangas' and the crazy Jeremy who keeps wanting to take the canoe really close to film them). Sweet, watching her immense head loom out of the water warning us off, and then suddenly, little junior popping up to watch at her side.
Also, a bit worrying to hear Amadou and Uloulo muttering together. Turns out they think I'm too old and knackered to spend days on end in the bush on a camel. Bloody cheek!
Jeremy Hulme
Wednesday, 23 July 2008
Not Too Old For A Camel Ride
Tuesday, 22 July 2008
Arriving in Style
As predicted, the baggage area at the airport was extremely ‘colourful’. And ‘dead ethnic' – as another English traveller once said.
About 35 degrees, a hundred percent humidity, it’s the height of the rainy season, hordes of people, all shouting at each other, battling to get huge trunks and cases onto the three available trolleys.
Not surprisingly, one of our nine boxes was missing – finally after a despairing hour, I saw the towering figure of Dr. Amadou, our director here, fighting his way through the throng. Then, after just the merest bit of shouting at obviously just the right people, the lost box appeared.
Then comes the battle with the customs. Again Amadou saves the day – with just the right mix of yelling, contrition and back-slapping, and the head honcho gets his magic stamp out of the drawer, applies it to our many papers, and Bingo ! (or Voila !, whichever you prefer).
Then all that has to happen is for all the boxes to pass through the x-ray machine.
This used to be the most dangerous job in Mali, as some poor bloke had to actually push it all through by hand. They only used to last about six weeks, but now they’ve installed a motor-driven conveyor belt, and life is easy. So then all that’s needed is a half-hour shouting match with the ‘helpers’, who loaded the boxes onto the belt, over their due payment, and then we’re off. A mere two hours after landing.
This morning, after a few hours much needed sleep, it was off to the police station for the confirmation of our visas (there is unsurprisingly no Malian Embassy in London).
Amazingly easy this time – once they told us it would take a week – then off to meet up with the SPANA team treating animals in one of the city’s poorer districts.
As usual, they are hard at it, with about sixty donks and half a dozen horses. On the whole the donkeys are in pretty good nick – Amadou says it’s not surprising after more than ten years of bullying their owners into looking after them a bit better.
One woman proudly shows me her donkey mare – apparently she’d lost four foals in successive years – salmonella in her milk – then after SPANA’s treatment she at last reared a colt-foal successfully.
She announced loudly she’d therefore called it Amadou. Much falling about with laughter.
Then the heavens opened, the rain came down like stair-rods and a vicious wind tore the leaves from the trees and sent the plastic bags swirling up into the leaden skies.
Rain stopped play.
Jeremy Hulme
Monday, 21 July 2008
Storm Warnings in Mali
Well, here I am, at about 35,000 feet, just finishing my meal in, wait for it, Air France Club Class. Now, before you get all upset and hair-shirtish, and rush off to complain to the Charity Commission, I must insist, that SPANA has not paid a penny for all this. So, I have just finished my ‘garantit ce repas sans viande de porc’ and endured the cultural and culinary disaster of having the cheese BEFORE the dessert (no wonder the French colonies rebelled so violently) – let me explain.
ITV (or award-winning film-maker Chris Terrill to be precise) are making a series of films on ‘storms’.
They’ve already done tornados in Kansas, white-outs in Norway, gales in the southern oceans, now they want to do sand-storms in the Sahara.
So who better to contact than SPANA? And as they will also show us working with the Tuareg, training para-vets and looking after their herds of camels, sheep and goats (pretty impressive free publicity) – and as I said earlier – paying for it all, how could I say ‘no’ ?
But it’s no holiday. Five O’clock start this morning, dragging seventy kilos of baggage (yes, how could we not take advantage of the opportunity of taking stacks of medicines and goodies out with us ?), across London to Heathrow. Then, when film-maker Chris Terrill finally arrived, he had seven boxes of filming equipment!
Air France, having weighed and labelled all the stuff, suddenly decided that they had a rule that only three pieces of baggage were allowed per person.
So off it all came again.
Then after frantic phone calls, and offers of bucket loads of money, they decided it ‘might be possible’ after all. So, all the boxes got weighed and labelled a second time.
Then they all had to be taken off again. Wrong shapes and sizes.
Finally we waved goodbye to them, at ‘special bagage’. By this time we only had about ten minutes to get through the traumas of ‘security’, and run to the boarding gate and get on the plane – just to find someone already in my seat.
But did I complain? Very much aware of the ‘Entente Cordiale’, I just said ‘n’importe quoi’ to the very large Malian lady, and found somewhere else.
Now the trick in Charles de Gaulle Airport, is not minding very much if your luggage doesn’t make it ‘en correspondance’ to the onwards flight. Or maybe it’s just with the flights from England, a sort of revenge for Agincourt or Waterloo or whatever.
But when I asked at the Bamako check-in desk, if our luggage had made it across, she replied ‘Biensur, monsieur, - and by the way, you ‘ave been up-graded’.
Zut alors!
But not my chum from ITV. So after some pretty feeble protestations, that, er, by right he should have the exalted position, here I am. Can’t think why,
Maybe they think I’m some sort of trouble-maker.!
What fun it’s going to be getting all those boxes through the customs in Bamako.
Jeremy Hulme
Friday, 11 July 2008
The (Long) Road to Marrakech
Life has been a mite hectic of late – hence no blogs for a week or two. The biggest problem was the frantic rush to get everything shipped to Morocco for the wretched Eco-Museum in Toubkal National Park. All in all it’s been a nightmare – working with the local authorities over there (half of whom have been hoping the whole project would be a disaster), funding courtesy of World Bank, Diana working here on the text and displays, SPANA Morocco doing the translations. That should give you a bit of a clue as to the squabbling, fights and major opportunities for gold-plated, 24 carat cock-ups.
I mean, not only are we doing each bit of text in three languages – English, French
(taking 30% more space to say the same thing), and Arabic – where of course the printers over here don’t even know whether it’s upside down or not! And if that’s not enough, some bright spark decided to add Berber as well. And all the locals argue about its alphabet, or even whether it really exists. What a nightmare.
Then the World Bank got difficult and said all the invoices had to be received for payment by 1st July – so a mad rush to get all the displays finished and packed off in the little SPANA truck (remember, it brought all the stuff over from Marrakech for Chelsea).
The truck had spent the previous month parked outside our house in Essex, gradually being packed with stuff –including a full size replica Friesian cow.
Just before the deadline – and don’t tell me, I know that this is a guaranteed recipe for disaster – on the day before we’d booked the ferry we were due to receive the panels for the food-web display. Very sexy – back lit Perspex, with integrated art-work, flashing lights etc – only they were 2 metres 90 long, and the truck was only 2 metres 70. Disaster. And the designers couldn’t give a toss and just walked off and left us. Simon (the lucky driver), Diana and I, sunk to the floor in desperation and gloom in the loading bay. We were already two hours late.
We suggested cutting a bit off one end. ‘Can’t possibly be done’, the designers chirruped with that melancholy glee unique to the British.
Finally, following a blinding flash of inspiration, we discovered that if we unloaded everything, put the panels in diagonally, then re-loaded everything around them, they might just fit.
I swear the designers were disappointed.
So we waved finally a cheery farewell to Simon, setting off for Lille and a rendez-vous with our Moroccan counterpart.(Of course the truck broke down en route, and then despite having all the correct papers the Moroccan Customs impounded the vehicle – but it’s just too painful to go into here.
Then all we had to do was organise the wedding in the garden for our daughter. Horrific weather, but the tents went up, along with the running battle to stop the blooming rabbits eating the bedding plants as fast as we could stick them in.
But we got lucky, last Saturday afternoon the sun appeared, the little village church looked lovely - half of SPANA’s staff turned up, including the overseas directors, and we had a great party in the garden – with much singing and dancing.
At least it scared the blinking rabbits away for an hour or two.
Now all we’ve got to do is write the next SPANA News – by Monday!
Jeremy Hulme
Tuesday, 24 June 2008
Writing this in the glorious luxury of the economy-class cabin of Royal Air Maroc, having just finished the delicious in-flight meal. All around me the happy passengers are dozing quietly, snoring gently, or hawking and spitting into the airsick bags.
I am feeling somewhat jaded after eight days on the move, without spending two nights in the same hotel – irritatingly leaving a rather fine pair of trousers that I’ve become rather fond of somewhere along the way.
It all started last Monday in Geneva where we had been invited to make a presentation to the UNHCR. That is a big deal. The livestock strategy paper we’d been asked to produce for Chad has been somewhat stalled (could it be the three million pounds we reckoned it might cost?), so it was really exciting to get a chance to shake them all up a bit. Simon (our communications guy) and I had done a bit of work on a bi-lingual presentation and a bit of film (culled from our appearance on Channel 4 News and the BBC – but don’t tell them), and it looked pretty good. We got a pretty good reception too. We've always tended to find in our dealings with the powers that be that amazingly, (and from with people who’ve got more doctorates and degrees between them than Tony Blair’s had free holidays), they rarely twig that nomads and poor farmers in Africa depend on animals. Perhaps we’ve begun to lift the veil from their eyes.
Then I went on to Marrakech that night by Air France via Paris. Big Mistake.
France was on strike. And not helped by them being whupped by Italy in the football while I was trying to get from Charles de Gaulle airport across Paris to Orly.
Royal Air Maroc cancelled a couple of flights, and I finally crawled into bed in Marrakech at two-thirty the following morning.
Then we had an inspection tour of our various clinics and projects with a couple of trustees, before winding up in Tangiers, the other end of the country, on Saturday.
I must have driven at least a thousand miles in the three days, dodging the police speed traps wherever possible, or trying to schmooze out of trouble when caught.
It normally works – ‘Oh officer, was I really doing a hundred and fifty in an eighty zone ? Surely not ? And your country is so lovely – what a silly stupid little visitor to your lovely country I’ve been’.
‘Well, yes you were. But don’t you ever be so naughty again –now off you go’
Though I did come unstuck once.
Several years ago I was stopped coming out of Ben Guerir on the way down to Marrakech, doing some amazing amount above the speed limit.
One of Morocco’s finest invited me to step out of the car and requested my driving licence.
‘Your middle name is Ferguson I see’
‘Yes’ I replied.
‘That’s interesting’ he went on,’ I once had a Ferguson television’.
‘Yesss !’ I thought to myself, ‘That should do it’.
‘That was my uncle,’ I replied, ’he made televisions’.
‘Great!’ he grinned at me. ‘Revenge at last. You’re fined five hundred dirhams – the bloody thing never did work properly’.
So in Tangier yesterday we had our annual ‘out-of-this-world-experience’, when the original It-Girl, Annie Lambton, organises a cocktail party cum fundraiser on the roof of her house in the middle of a sumptuous garden. Tangier is famous of course for its, er, ’colourful’ people, and they come along in force for drinkies, and don’t seem to mind too much having their cash forcibly extracted from them.
Jeremy Hulme
