If you like the blog, read the book: Wild Wild East

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Recently I've recieved a number of nice notes from people who've read my book, Wild Wild East over the summer. This note from Yves Capelle made me smile: " This is definitely good stuff - and should be published. I'll send the link to a few friends if you don't mind. If there's a hard cover to be published, let me know and I'll make an order."

As I'm now based in Germany, I realize that I've now come full circle to the land of the man who sent me to Asia and opens the first chapter in the book, Michael Conrad.

Chicago, April 1995: I'm sitting in my office on the 26th floor of the Leo Burnett building, watching the sailboats go by, when the telephone rings; it's Michael Conrad, our Worldwide Creative Director, and he has a question: "What do you know about Korea", he asks. "Nothing", I said - and that's how I got the job.

The book doesn't have an ending yet, but I may be living it now...

The first 70 pages is now available for download - or you can read it from the comfort of your own screen right here:


Wild Wild East - An American memoir of uncommon circumstance

For those who are not fans of the book-reading format, or it's just to damn small to read, download the standard view here:

Get me the big copy!

BLURB: (The publisher's sales pitch) Part memoir, part travelogue, part historical guide and part American business review, Wild Wild East follows the adventures of one businessman in his quest to have his creative life make sense. From an adoption agency in Manhattan to the board rooms of corporate America and then on to the far east, WWE weaves a story from 1995 through 2005 and beyond with flashbacks from the author's life that grow chronologically until they catch up with him in real time. Throughout the telling the author travels the globe through over 30 countries and the flashbacks occur every time he takes a trip, both before and after, usually when he is on a plane when there is plenty of time for reflection. In this way the story builds upon itself in both complexity and understanding from the reader as to why the central character makes the decisions he does and travels the roads of fortune or less fortune as the case unfolds.

Do give it a read and let me know how it works for you. And reTweet to pass it around.

Todd Rundgren's AWATS: While I was travelling

As I have been away on extended holiday, tons of things have been going on and I have been remiss in attending to them from a reporting perspective. My bad. So to make up for past sins, here's a musical update:

One of those things has been Todd Rundgren's restaging of his classic album from 1973, A Wizard A True Star, AWATS, which premiered in Akron, Ohio on 6, September this year. Make sure to click on the previous link and see a selection of highlights from the show. The following clip is just one example of how a "concept album" translates to the live stage:



In March, 2003, Barney Hoskyns wrote the following in Mojo Magazine (UK) regarding the album AWATS:

"Sometimes," Todd Rundgren sang, "I don't know what to feel." But sometimes you do know what to feel. And right now I feel like saying what I've contended for many years, which is that Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star is simply The Greatest Album Ever Made.

You heard me right, pardner. Better than Pet Sounds. Better than OK Computer. Certainly better than Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Farts Dub Band. An album of vaulting ambition - of wizardry and true stardom - released into an unsuspecting world by a contrary, super-precocious wonderboy who should have been the biggest thing to happen in the '70s but who was just too complex and polymorphous for lasting pop success.

A Wizard, A True Star came out 35 years ago but still sounds more bravely futuristic than any ostensibly cutting-edge electro-pop being made in the 21st Century. A dizzying, intoxicating rollercoaster ride of emotions and genre mutations, the album was substantially the work of Rundgren himself, pieced together in late 1972 at his own Secret Sound studio on NYC's West 24th Street."

Coming in February of 2010, this show will visit the UK & The Netherlands. I hope to catch it there with my partner and will make sure to post a full review. Thanks to Doug at RundgrenRadio.com for the Barney Hoskyns snippet and a big hey to all those stateside who have been lucky enough to have seen the show. I hope to join you in 2010!

Leaving Mali: Out of Africa - My next Evil Plan begins in Munich: The Wild Wild East In WWWest Germany I

[The photos here are arranged in comparitive fashion - first with Mali on the right and Paris on the left, and then, with Paris and French things on the left and comparitives George Jetson and Munich, Germany on the right. I hope it gives a reasonable facsimile idea of the diverse worlds we were traversing at the time.]

Leaving Mali was not tough. It was excrutiating. The rain and the cramped, four people in a Mercedes plus luggage, only added to the anxiety of the speed of the trip. In just two days the decision to leave country had been made and we were off - but not before paying the airport tariff that apparently everyone needs to pay before getting out of country - the tariff of having your life flash before your eyes and realizing that if you didn't jump through the right hoops at customs, including a few well pressed Francs into the right hands, you might actually have to stay. The situation at departures at Bamako airport was sheer pandemonium, like the rush to exit country during a military coup. But no coup had been had. This was just another ordinary day in Mali with the only thing for sure - that more people wanted to leave Mali than wanted to come in. Hundreds rushed the ticket counters at check-in and at no fewer than three times were we told that the line we had been standing in was the wrong one and we needed to move to the end of a new line. This took hours.

Once inside the terminal and waiting for our flight (photo above) we were immediately confronted by sellers of all things Malian in an effort to relieve us of whatever remaining CFA Francs (Communaute Financiere Africaine) we might be in possession of as well as the hundreds who would board the plane with us. On the food chain of well connected Malians vs. poor backpacker-looking foreigners, we were on the bottom. An obviously well to do Malian family, dressed like ancient African royalty waited to board, with their twin sons in tow, outfitted with perfectly tailored African suits and matching custom made packpacks & Nikes - I lost my few remaining Francs to the purchase of a CD, a packet of chocolate and a Time magazine in English, with a cover blaring yet another flattering photo of Barack Obama, Africa's new national hero. Nevermind that Obama is not really from Africa. That's wasn't the point. The point was that a black man was now the President of the most powerful country on earth and this fact would not be lost on the still millions of Africans hungering for a better life. From dusty streetside stalls selling plastic chairs and kiddie toilets, to men brandishing cowboy style beltbuckles with photo insets, the image of Barack Obama was everywhere in Mali. When I tried to take a picture of a picture of Obama, propped up beside a streetside stand, the owner stopped me and asked for three Francs (about six dollars). I declined his price and moved along. Obama had become too expensive for me to photograph his photograph.

The flight back to Paris was the polar opposite of the flight in. Packed with flyers and not an empty seat to be had, we had paid an exorbitant fee to have changed tickets to be on this flying sardine can back into the civilized world - and the this time surly Aigle Azur staff made no attemp at concealing their contempt with us, the customers that had them on what was possibly the most unglamorous international flight on the planet. Tray tables did not stow properly, forget about video screens or a movie and whether you wanted the chicken or beef was not to have been a question. You were lucky to have gotten anything at all. It could have been Aeroflot. At one point I remarked to our dominatrix flight attendant that, "She could work a whole lot harder at being nice to people" and she glared back at me in a flood of disbelief that any passenger would even choose to question her crappy attitude. Probably she wasn't getting laid by this pilot on landing in Paris. Not my fault.

Landing at Charles Degaulle from Mali is like being deposited on the moon from earth - only in reverse. The sheer idea that you can take the metro from there to Gare De L'Est train station for a mere 10€ each and not have to pay an insane cabfare is a convenience many travellers might have chosen to have overlooked, but not us. We were now on as tight a budget as we had ever been and were willing to go through the extra bit of luggage handling to save 50€. But what we didn't account for were the turnstyles. While airports are designed to handle travelers with luggage and subways were not, we immediately understood the loss of a conveniently rolled luggage cart and began hauling our gear up and down stairs in a metro system that was designed during the time of Tolouse Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha and not much in the time of George Jetson - going through turnstyles and people passage devices a number of times - until I left a bag behind trying to get through one of them. How does one retrieve a bag after the full body-length two metal door device has closed? Well, waiting for another person to come through and then jumping in, the wrong way mind you, could do it. If you don't get your foot caught in the device mind you. Which I did. And the injury will plague me for the next number of weeks and months. Caught right above the heal and just to the right of my achilles tendon, the metal doors closed on an area that caused me to wince and pull away leaving a quarter-sized piece of skin flapping about and gushing enough blood to be used on the set of any self respecting slasher film. The blood was intense. I grabbed my partner's fine silk scarf and began wrapping the ankle, almost tournequet style so as to stop the bleeding, but to no avail. This sucker was going to bleed like a stuck pig and there was nothing I could do about it. We stood in the hallway just below street level of Gare De L'Est and tried to resolve our situation - all the while attracting the attention of all passing by. A limping bloody American and a fright-ridden Vietnamese trying desperately to do something, but what, nobody could tell.

"Get to the train dammit, get to the train", was all I could think. With my partner crying that we should go to the hostpital immediately (Vietnamese and Koreans have a habit of going to hospitals for things like splinters and the common cold), I played the brave American and vowed to soldier on - a decision I would live (thankfully) to regret later. Our window of opportunity to get the next train to Munich was narrowing and we needed to get a move on - no matter if the team leader looked to be in danger of loosing a limb. Nobody was about to care for an injured American in Paris anymore. WWII is over and now it's just the WWE all on his own.

Closing in on the ticket counter at Gare De L'Est it became immediately apparent that we weren't getting on the next train for sure - throngs of not very happy Parisians would see to that and they were already having their way with the attendants over their troubles. Little would be accomplished by an injured American trying to bully the French to get to Germany. "Sure, we let you yanks do that the last time you were here, because it was in our best interest. But now you have to wait - behind all the EU members, like all the other tourists", they seemed to say. "And nice to see you've finally made peace with the Vietnamese", I imagined them adding. Once at the counter I was informed that the next train to Munich would be a night train - and after a red-eye flight from Mali, that was just what we didn't need. But choices seemed non- existent and after a consultation with my partner it was agreed that that's exactly what we would do, provided we could get a sleeping car, which sounded perversely romantic in a European sort of way - if one had forgotten that I was sporting a legwound the size of Prussia which was becoming more and more in need of attention. So a sleeping car it was, at a small price premium, but well worth avoiding the wrath of an unhappy travel companion who had last voiced her unhappiness by leaving an entire country. Deal done. Except neither of us had ever travelled in a sleeping car and so surprises lay in store. Welcome the six berth couchette. A comfortable little rolling casket equipped with six bunks and plenty of non privacy. I, the luckiest man in car 54, would be sharing this compartment with not one, but five other attractive ladies on our way to Munich. "Orgy girls?", I imagined imagining like Tony Curtis in the film, Some Like It Hot. "Fat chance, schlub. Just pack it in and snooze, bozo - or all five of us will come clock your ass for even thinking about sex in a compartment full of five women", I imagined them not imagining but actually saying in unison. I slept like a baby. A baby in a women's prison.

Good morning, Munich. Munich's main station holds nothing over a French train station in terms of style or romance, save for a fabulous selection of food kiosks, and it was now our duty to get out of there and to the apartment we had reserved - somewhere on the outskirts of the city. But how to do that - a selection of subways, S-Bahn, U-Bahn (pronounced ooo-bahn) and trams awaited. Luckily, my partner speaks German, having been raised and educated here, so she used her impeccable language skills to get us to our intended destination. "Taxi", she bellowed- And off we went, into what, in the movie In Bruge, Colin Farrell would have described as, a fairytale town. Munich. Home of Augustiner, Hacker-Pschorr, Löwen-Bräu and more famous beers than you can shake a stick at. Our first evening in town finds us at the Augustiner beer house enjoying what cannot be enjoyed outside the city because they simply won't export the stuff. "Why export the good stuff when you can't import better?", my Vietnamese partner explains to me. "Right", I imagined responding. I needed a Vietnamese to explain German beer to me? Well, apparently I did. So many things are left out of an American education. I need to make a note to let Obama's people know about this.

The next few days would be left trying to figure out how we had ended up in German suburbia, far away from the fairytale nature of most of the citycenter, and what exactly we would be doing for the next few months. Munich, is now our new home. And although we had originally planned to travel here first, and end up in Mali later, the exact opposite has happened. But at least we're not in Vietnam. "Life is what happens to you, when you're busy making other plans", John Lennon said. I guess we all could be learning something from that. - My friend, Hugh MacLeod, has had quite a success with his book Ignore Everybody and has just announced the publication of his second book, Evil Plans. This whole trip, I've been working on an Evil Plan of my own - but if I tell you what it is, then it wouldn't be an evil plan, would it? You'll just have to stay tuned and read the installments as the Wild Wild East embarks on his continuing adventures in WWWest Germany. Infinite Wisdom comes at a price. A price I'm willing to pay. Now it's time to get on with the plan. Hugh's chapter 11 in Evil Plans reads like this, "Treat it like an adventure, an adventure worth sharing". So that's what I'm going to keep on doing...

The Trouble With Mali: Into Afrika With The Wild Wild East V

The trouble with Mali is that there is no trouble. Not at least the sort of contemporary corruption and civil unrest associated with Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d'Ivoire. Rather, Mali is a democracy, formed in 1960 after the French abandondoned their colonial rule. According to Wikipedia, today, Mali is one of the most politically and socially stable countries in Africa. And all the better to do business in, one would think. But Mali is also one of the poorest countries on the planet, ranked by the CIA World Factbook as one of the 25 poorest countries on earth sporting a per capita GDP that ranks the country 207 out of arguably 195 countries in the world - Now you go ask the CIA how they came up with that number when WorldAtlas.com has a pretty good explanation of why there are considered to be a maximum of 195 countries currently on the planet. But by any calculation, #207 is dirt-poor and if you don't like the dirt, just go during the rainy season (August) and it will be mud. Mud-poor.

In any case, the only trouble with Mali at the current time seemed to be us. Under the auspices of helping a family business, my partner and I were brought into Mali with the idea that we could help the business at hand through a combination of management consulting and marketing disciplines but after a four day review of the situation, when asked the question by my partner, "What do you think we could do to help the operation here?", my answer was, "Nothing".

And I arrived at that answer, not by using a complex matrix of management consulting evaluations and test scenarios but by a much more simple and human metric. Figuring out the problems and tracing them to their source - and in this case, the source was right at the top. The business owner. To an outside observer, the business had plenty of room for improvement, but to the owner, things were running just as they wanted them to run. And micromanaged to perfection. To make any suggestion, any suggestion at all, would have been to question the owner's logic and authority, and if one thing had become clear, amidst the dust and heat of this subtropical climate, that was not to be done.

So we were left to our own devices as to how to earn a living, and in a country supported primarily by international aid organizations that became the problem at hand. Yes, our food and lodging would still have been paid by our initial client but our impact and value would have been of little importance and our own personal job satisfaction seemed at risk, even before we had gotten to the point of getting any job done at all. So it was off to plan "B"- The only problem there, is that we really had no plan "B". Plan "A", which was arranged for us way back in Vietnam, allowed for us to be supported by a single client, whilst pursuing other avenues on our own, but at this point that single client had been reduced to a near non-profit one and other avenues just didn't exist yet in a country that we had only been in for 4 days. Plan "A" had now become plan "B" with no money and no time. However in my short four days, aside from the wonderful day I spent with David and the children of Bamako I had managed to get by the US Embassy to register and to have met the director of marketing at the country's largest TV channel, ORTM, the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision du Mali - (go ahead, say that as fast as you can at the end of every field report you aspiring foreign correspondents).

The embassy was predictably American with absolutely no one knowing where any of the other departments were in the complex (Google the US Army acronym OPSEC), like the Commercial section or another section called Pol/Econ (Political/Economic), but the man at Mali ORTM TV was generally interested in meeting me and seemed eager to work together in the future. But at this point, that's all I had and my partner had been so busy with client #1 that she had not yet even ventured into the Malian sea of non-business - and I say non-business, not as a slight to anyone in Mali but as a nod to the idea that the country is still so underdeveloped, aside from the businesses of mining and farming, that little actual consumer work is actually done. The biggest advertiser I could see was O2, the mobile phone operator and after that, a pretty big drop to some food products and motorbike promotions. See the photo that proclaims "rotisserie moderne" and you decide just how "moderne" that rotisserie might be (the second photo of the fire and cook should give you a clue).

The purpose of our trip had always been a combination of business and pleasure mixed with adventure, but now the pleasure had subsided with Paris and we were confronted by the distinct lack of business and an adventure that would only seem adventurous to a fairly green Peace Corps volunteer. Enter the decision.

The vestibule in our accomodation, between the sleeping rooms of the home was the place where the computer was placed and my sole refuge during my stay in Mali. There, the connection (quite good actually) to the Internet provided my contact to the outside world and the world of employment, if any, in Mali or any of the surrounding countries. I do have a friend in Ghana, working with Group M on Diageo spirits and even John Taylor, my old client from BAT had told me that he was responsible for the marketing of their cigarrettes in 12 African countries - so I was up in the wee hours, tryingt to dig us out of our African hole when my partner came out of her room, a mix of pain and joy on her face when she proposed that we leave and return to Germany to rethink the whole plan. Munich to be exact. Let's see - German order, logic, cleanliness, Ocktoberfest and one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe, or Mali? No decision metrics were involved. (see photo) I immediately agreed on Germany. We had three months worth of cash and lodging left on us. The only choice was from where to spend them.

But leaving Mali would not be so easy as it would have seemed. What seemed to be return Aigle Azur airline tickets to Paris that were supposedly guaranteed to be cost effectively changeable tuned out to cost a bundle to alter the return, and even a few nights in a Malian 3-star hotel came at a price of $70 bucks a night. The only cheap thing we encountered on our way out was a couple of rotisseries offering smoked lamb and I tell you, that was positively delicious, and around three dollars bought you enough for three people. The photos above show the venue and smoker. I was also able to meet Nancy, an American nutritionalist for the Helen Keller Foundation (Did you know that a great number of blindness cases were due to malnutrition? I didn't) and she was a joy.

The other joy I'll take from Mali was the people. They were warm & honest, the women absolutely stunning, and positively joyful the whole time we were there. They remind us pain-in-the-ass westerners that there's a whole lot more to life than money and that maybe we should spend more time looking into the eyes of our children and working and planning for them instead of doing midless yuppie things for ourselves. The Wild Wild East thanks the people of Mali, and certainly in no second place, my partner for giving us a glimpse into this beautiful country. We will be back. But next time we'll understand the nature of business much more and be prepared, both mentally and financially to understand the difference between the developed world and the world that more of the inhabitants of this planet live in.

For more in the "Into Afrika with the Wild Wild East" series, check here:

I) The Antipodes of Mali & Paree
II) Good Morning Mali and the Red Toilet Paper
III) Family Feuds, Singing Children & The Sounds of Silence
IV) How to Get From Mali to Munich
V) The Trouble With Mali

What's Dem Damn New Widgets?

Here at the Wild Wild East Dailies (WWED for short) we're extremely concerned with reader input, reader satisfaction, reader interaction and feedback of all varieties, good and not so good - so we've recently instituted a few new widgets for you to get your clickers around.

The first is a "ReTweet" button for Twitter users. This button, as seen below, allows you to send a WWED post to Twitter, along with your personal 140 characters or so to let others know things like "Dave's totally off his meds now!" or "How the hell does this dude get from Vietnam to Paris, to Mali, to Munich on his piss-ant budget?" or "I believe David is actually a modern-day Jesus. Please read his post and see the gospel of our times". Please ReTweet at will. It will work automatically, so long as you are signed in to your Twitter account at the time of ReTweeting.



The second one you'll see is a nifty little 5-star rating system from OutBrain.com. This clever device allows you to love me or trash me, all with a click of the index finger, and I will never know who you are, friend or foe. This button works for all and there is no sign-up, no needing to join another worthless service and no spam in return. Just simply click on the star of your choice and be done with it. I hope you will all take the opportunity of using both of these interactions at your own convenience. They're both fun, quick and painless and help me add yet a few more interactions to the blog.

And as always, please leave your comments on the individual posts themselves. My love in writing starts first with your love in reading and the comments I get are essentially my pay for a job well done, or sloppily done, as I might on odd days. I thank you all for your time, devotion, attention and virtual love. It ain't easy traversing the globe and dragging a whole blog around with me. Without your support, I would have been just stuck on the tarmac in Hanoi. Cheers! Now click away...

How to get from Mali to Munich: Into Afrika with the Wild Wild East IV

09.02.09 The day began with apartment searches in Bamako and let me tell you, a trip to the grocery store, a car buying soree or an apartment search for foreigners will turn up higher prices in Mali than you're able to find in nearly every other country on earth. When they see a foreigner, they see cash, tons of it and there are just no two ways about it. An Apartment in Mali costs more than a house in Vietnam or a flat in Paris. Witness the photo of a beautiful girl trudging through the mud-strewn streets of Bamako and tell me how much the apartment will cost. Right. Now, go figure.

The day ended at 4am the following morning with my partner, coming into the common vestibule between our rooms in the family home and announcing that we were going to Munich. "David, we're leaving here". she said. She had seen enough of the country and was ready to go. And so we are now in Munich.

I will follow up on our exit from Mali later, (it was not all about the country) but for now, dear readers, the location is Munich. We have been here for a week and a half now.

For more in the "Into Afrika" series, check here:

I) The Antipodes of Mali & Paree
II) Good Morning Mali and the Red Toilet Paper
III) Family Feuds, Singing Children & The Sounds of Silence
IV) How to Get From Mali to Munich
V) The Trouble With Mali

Family Feuds, Singing Children and Sounds of Silence: Into Afrika With The Wild Wild East III

08.31.09 - If you could hear the children sing, you would love Mali like no other country on Earth. And it was for just 20 minutes on a Monday evening that had begun with a morning straight out of "The War of the Roses" minus the attractive stars, that I ventured out into Mali itself, all alone, on a two lane road into Bamako central with nothing but a few Euro and great desire to not be involved in the family feud that was brewing up back at the old Castro casa.

A Nescafe on the street teaches you that the mixing of beverages, tea also, is done by pouring the liquid and mix from one Solo cup into another at a distance that stretches both arms to their widest span and not a drop is missed. Ever. High extended righthand cup pours into lower extended lefthand cup and then a quick reverse to lift the lefthand cup to the high position and pour into the lower righthand cup - a process, that if you can imaging the arms of a very tall man behaving like the action of a taffy pulling machine at Coney Island, is as acrobatic and efficient as you ever have seen. A Malian coffee, served with style.

Whatever was going on back at the house had all the markings of a family squabble that would drag my partner into it in a way that I could not stop - and certainly had nothing to do with me, so rather than being an unwitting spectator for the mental maternal mudwrestling that seemed about to ensue, I just escaped out the front door for a brief morning's walk - that well, turned out to be not so brief at all. And just as I wanted it.

After a long day of walking, a trip to the American Embassy, a lunch and the meeting of David, the ebony to my ivory, the sound of the children's voices could all but make me forget what a godforsaken shithole we were in, because on the ground, the only people who think this place is a godforsaken shithole are the foreigners who didn't do ther homework upfront. But I had done mine. I knew that any charm the country might have would come at tourist rates so I had decided to stear clear of anything remotely begging for tourist's eyes and see what bit of Mali I could see for myself - sans map or guide with my past experience in Mongolia firmly embeded in my conciousness as a reality check. Jet black Hummers with jet black windows whiz by the constant stream of used whatevers on their way to the offices of the mining companies the driver's work for - mining being one of the few profitable enterprises in the country - rich enough to attract foreign investment yet poor enough to not even coming close to relieving the country of its dependence on foreign aid. This is a world where nothing is fair and the average citizen will get little more than screwed for the greater part of his/her life. It's just built that way, the world is - and we can all hold up places like Mali as examples of the idea that when push comes to shove, that most of us just don't give a shit. Except when the children sing.

David had helped me to find the embassy in the afternoon. I bought him two cokes and lunch. I was invited to go to a small village with him and hear him play his viola. We drank a sort of homemade wine that reminded me most of the ricewine that farmers make in Korea. I paid for the wine as well. It was good.

And then he started to sing. First a Malian song that the children immediately recognized and then adding English rap verses that I could echo - and then echo the Malain syllables as best I could. And it made the kids laugh - this funny foreigner trying to get all the hymaballayas and jumbawallas right and the verse from David, "and all the while the children smile - at two Davids, black and white in style"... Heeeeeeeeeyaaaaaaaaaaay oh! Heeeeeeeeeeeeyaaaaaaaay oh!

Later it was described to me that people like David were bums, just preying on the white tourists to get a guide job or some free food and wine. I told the person who told me this to look around. The place was full of bums. It was just a matter of what kind of bum you wanted to be. He showed me a day of friendship and joy, asked for nothing, and all I did was buy him some Coke, some lunch and some wine. Did I spend 15€? Barely. Nothing's cheap in Mali.

But I heard the children sing. Maybe 20 at one time. And it was music. The music of a world that will not do much to take care of these kids. And I wondered about every Armani suit I had ever purchased and a couple of houses and another wonder about the sole amount I might have spent on taxis in one year and I wondered, with all the resources at my disposal, if I could ever make enough of my life to take care of just one of these little kids - would it make a difference? Would I change the world? Or even a little bit of it? All I knew that whatever was being argued about at the house that morning was centered on money, or culture, or pride in something that was inherently worthless in the eyes of the children of this country - and it made me wonder again if the supposedly smart societies on this planet would ever get their heads screwed on straight. And then I walked home - to wash my feet - something not a one of those kids would have a need or desire to do that night. And I heard the silence of the rest of the world as the songs of the children of Mali rang in my ears...

For more in the "Into Afrika" series, check here:

I) The Antipodes of Mali & Paree
II) Good Morning Mali and the Red Toilet Paper
III) Family Feuds, Singing Children & The Sounds of Silence
IV) How to Get From Mali to Munich
V) The Trouble With Mali

Good Morning Mali & The Red Toilet Paper: Into Afrika with the Wild Wild East II

08.29.09 - RCNevada opens his post, Onward To Mali, with the following, " I’ve never been to Mali, but I’ve spoken to people who have. And after hearing their stories and seeing their pictures I can’t for the life of me think of a single reason I would want to go there." And I can tell you he's dead right, at least for our first day. The previous evening found us traveling from Bamako airport to the city proper and trying to figure out where the city proper was. All along the road into town my eyelids kept flashing like the shutter on a camera taking rapid-fire snapshots of a country in more disrepair than Mongolia, the 183rd poorest country on the planet. Mali is the 187th, depending on which chart you look at.

I had spent a few months in Mongolia five years ago at the invitation of Ulaanbaatar's TV5 to write and produce a television program on the Olympics and if one needed a lesson in what happens to a country when the prevailing colonial power or political friend cuts and runs when things get tough - Mongolia was a case study. RCNevada continues on Mali, "According to one man who lived in Bamako for a year trying to set up a business, the country of Mali serves but one purpose: That is to serve as a shining example of what happens when the profit dries up and the colonial government packs it in and goes home, leaving the country in the hands of people who have no concept of how to run a business, much less a country."

This echoed a hollow "ditto" as I watched unfinished building after unfinished building fly by on the road into town, inviting unfavourable comparisons to the same scenario in Mongolia. Mali spoke to me in the same language that Mongolia had, the latter being left in the lurch after the fall of the Soviet Union with no understanding of a market economy and no motivation to go beyond NGOs for aid. Although I believed it immediately, it would take me days to know for sure that Mali had the same disease - insufficient sociological antibodies to fight off the shit situation they had been left in by the French.

But our invitation had come at the request of my partner's mother and the situation we were presented was that of an open opportunity to develop business and even learn from the more than plentiful NGOs how to pitch marketing projects to aid organizations and how to acquire funds from those organizations to implement projects of our own - all in an untouched land of organic produce and absolutely beautiful music we were told. Rubbish, we found - except for the music.

The look on my partner's face as we turned off the main blacktop onto a sand, rock and mud side road was that of horror as she eyed the fully one metre deep mud trenches that our old Mercedes would have to traverse - and this was not the sleek Mercedes of our early trip Frankfurt fame. This was a banged up more than ten year old model that had had it's make & model markings replaced by Daewoo and Toyota logos to make up for the three stolen hubcaps and the missing peace symbol from the hood. A Mercedes without the markings might as well be a Chevy and in this case, it was a Chevy that kept it's parking lights on while the engine was turned off - so long as the power cables were still connected to the battery. Worried about the battery going dead on a following day, I wondered why the driver didn't just disconnect the cables at every parking stop but realized that he knew just how long the car could sit with it's running lights on and still be restarted, saving him from the tedious job of screwing the cables on and off every time mother Miss Daisy wanted to stop and buy something.

"Where's the road?!", my partner exclaimed as we plunged deep into a muddy rut and the driver gunned the engine to slop us through, the trunk and gas tank slamming against the muddy rocks and refuse that littered what they called a street - her eyes all bugged out trying to see something/anything on the poorly lit pass. "Welcome to the third world, I chimed", knowing full well that this was but the first of many cultural shocks that she would encounter on this slow slide from a world that delights in the exploits of Paris Hilton's new BFF.

The pool

Home comes with an abrupt stop and we are facing the courtyard of what was once, the Cuban ambassador's residence in Mali - arguably a reasonably wealthy abode by local standards. It boasts a garden, two storeys, a maze of rooms and a swimming pool. We had been forewarned that the pool needed cleaning, and even tacitly agreed to do so enroute to Mali, in thanks to our gracious host, but the whole idea that my partner had packed a cute bikini in which to do the cleaning was now becoming just screamingly hilarious once we saw the pool. What sort of cruel joke could this have been that our combined airfares from Vietnam to Germany, on to France and forward to Mali would be seemingly worth more than the whole of this residence and its accompanying pool? "Oh dear David. Shut the F up and sit the F down", my future self says to my present self. "You have no idea how whacky the finances are going to get around here" he continues. And no, at that point I didn't - but I suppose that's the beauty of being a barnacle on a ship that somebody else built and sailed. At virtually no point during the proposal, or planning of this endeavor had I been requested for more than yes or no answers to questions like, "Would you like to spend three weeks in Munich, Paris or Frankfurt before going to Mali?" It would soon become apparent that the trip was executed perfectly bass-ackwards leaving nothing but poverty and chaos as the icing on a three week Parisian holiday instead of the other way around

Time to meet the mosquitos. One of the things we had been prepared to deal with was the idea that part of the house had been reapportioned to serve as kitchen for the owner's restaurant chain - so we fully expected to see things a bit of a mess downstairs. But what had failed to have been mentioned was that there would be over 20 staff living in the house and its supporting out-structures along with ourselves and our hosts. They also forgot to mention the mosquitos. Welcome to the third world. The one in which my partner and her mom would sleep in an air conditioned and hermetically sealed portion of the house and I would sleep, "soldier style", as it had been described to me, in a simple clean room just down the hall but without aircon. And that would have been fine, had they not overlooked the need for mosquito netting, which all the other residents had. But I was the new guy, and I should have expected some oversights in this area - the same as the owner should have expected me to have been banging on their bedroom door at four o'clock in the morning after suffering through 3 hours of mosquito coordinated dive bombing attacks. 

An unhappy owner and a can of bug killer was produced and I then did my best to sleep with well near 100 bites in just the space of a few hours. Rainy season. And nobody seemed to have thought that the metres worth of stale and rancid water still left in the pool would have been any cause for mosquito breeding.

Morning comes in Mali with the priests at a nearby mosque chanting through loudspeakers around 5am during what we didn't know was going to be Ramadan and though initially jarring would turn out to be sort of an early morning lullaby in my first week of this new and undiscovered land.

Popping up around six, I can't get dressed fast enough to hit the streets and see what had been shrouded in mosquito laden darkness just hours before - the street life of Mali and all it's glory. Drugstores are carried on heads in baskets and you just need to poke around the basket a bit to find the cure for whatever ill might be ailing you. These are black market drugs by the way, but finding and Excedrin or a Motrin here can be akin to finding the toy in a box of Cracker Jacks. Notice the photo of the green peppers with the Malian coin at the lower right of the photo. That coin is about the size of a quarter so you can see that a standard green pepper here is about 1/3rd the size of what you might be used to in the west, or even in Vietnam. All the people are tall and if you had missed that virtually all of the woman are gorgeous, you'll most certainly be impressed by the manner in which they carry most anything ranging from food to auto parts atop their heads with perfect balance. Mali was adequately described to me by my partner as remedial, and whilst I had already experienced this sort of an economy and culture in Mongolia, my partner could not have been more over whelmed. Here, her mother had assembled not just a business but a life in this tropical moonscape of a country and she was still trying to come to grips with that. For all of our missteps along the way, the one thing I have always assured her was that I would absolutely go to Mali just because it was there, and secretly, because I thought she needed me there as a vote of confidence. This place will turn out to bring more that either of us ever could have dreamed it would. Now we just need to give the country time to let it's mysteries unfold. Bring on the epiphany, Bamako. And explain to us why all the toilet paper in the country is red.

For more in the "Into Afrika" series, check here:

I) The Antipodes of Mali & Paree
II) Good Morning Mali and the Red Toilet Paper
III) Family Feuds, Singing Children & The Sounds of Silence
IV) How to Get From Mali to Munich