21. 12. On the road to Mopti

9:00 a.m. getting a taxi to lead us to Modibo Keita, a local social scientist, who had studied in Germany. In the 1990s he started to work on the topic of waste in Bamako, and now he is director of a waste consulting company. They mostly work for international NGOs, now they hope to get a commission from an American company, who wants to burn waste to get electricity. They work out the best way to do it, how to organize the collecting and separating of waste etc. At the moment they work on a concept how to deal with electronic waste, how to repair or dispose old computers etc. “The government does nothing, and there is no support at all”.

At noon we were back on the road for Mopti. Driving in boiling heat, Stefan felt sick. Manuel stopped for a group of people who wanted to go to Djeme, which was about 20 km apart. Arriving there, it was 5 p.m. already, and we decided to stay there.

The man in the group turned out to be a healer, he told Manuel a lot about local healing plants, and he gave us a cola nut. We were invited to dinner and spend the night safely on the street in front of their house. But first we all went to the internet café, were we spent about 3 hours. Stefan did not manage to upload the video to the blog, and while trying, we all could not get workable connection. I started to prepare pix on photoshop while uploading, which took around 15 minutes for a small file.

After the session, we had spent as much money as we would have paid for a dinner for 4 (around eur 9,-), but all my batteries were charged again. Since Bamako, we can not use the electricity from the truck battery any more, our Steyr refused to start. So we depend on external charging possibilities, which is quite problematic with three laptops charging for 4 hours each.

It is getting more and more difficult to get pix on the blog: boiling heat (around 37-40 degrees), no electricity, not internet. We will keep feeding the blog, but we are not always 100% precise and do the research and compare data after returning back home. We also will work on the selection of pictures later on – for the moment we are glad to be able to make it at all.