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

The Antipodes of Mali & Paree: Into Afrika With the Wild Wild East I

08.28.09 - "Goddammit honey, I left that owner's manual to life around here somewhere! Have you seen it?" I'm looking exactly for the page that tells me what to do when I go from Paris, France to Bamako, Mali. I'm sure that's in the index somewhere. Isn't it? Awe, fuck it. We'll just have make it up as we go along. Pay special attention to the contrasting photos on the left and the right-hand sides of the page, and see if you can guess where they are from.

Booking your trip to Afrika through a Vietnamese travel agent in Paris, France is not a move recommended in the Lonely Planet Guide or any Fromers book I've seen and should I ever write a travel guide I'll be sure not to include it as well. Our day started off with a jostling of the sleeping feet in bed as my partner, fully clothed, ready for travel battle and standing at the foot of my sheep counting platform, announces that I need to get my ass out of the sack and off to the Internet cafe to print out our visas for Mali - a move that had been curiously overlooked by our head travel planner earlier in the week. Hmm, that's an interesting one. On a team of two and I'm not the head travel planner, who the hell's responsibility might that be? Awe, fuck it again - I am reminded by a post earlier in the week from RCNevada that the rule in these situations regarding women and arguments is to "Always apologize, especially if you're right", so I forgo the almost ritual-like pissing match we usually have over these things and get on the job. The last thing I want to do on the precipace of entering the dark continent is to apologize for something I didn't fuck up - there will be plenty of other things I didn't fuck up to apologize for later in the trip I'm sure.

Returning from that job well done, I am accosted by a man speaking German to my partner in the apartment we are vacating. He has been sent by the leaseholder to make sure we haven't broken anything or stolen any trivets and we, of course, would like to see our full six hundred Euro deposit returned. Our job is to be incredibly nice to him and he is a complete asshole. "I've been vaiting heah foh fohty minootes", he announces to me as I start to wonder who the fuck is paying the bill and realize it is we, just right before I tell him to go fuck himself - and then I stop. All my bags gave been packed in a way that one might stuff a sausage and I quickly understand that he has had quite the intimidating effect on my diminutive partner, forcing her to rush the packing of all my gear. "Do you think a man would like to have a shower before he gets on a plane to Afrika", I ask him? "Yes", he answers in a way that can only be described as man #1 understanding man #2's line in the sand just before man #2 hauls off and pops the bitch. Crisis averted. I shower and then repack my bags just to make sure he knows who's the boss.

We bid farewell to the folks at Kiwi Corner, the charming little bistro just downstairs from our Parisian home office for the month, and we're off for Orly. Fleeting scenes of all the architecture I've come to regard as common whiz by as I travel fully well knowing that the next urban assault on my eyeballs will be one of the capital city of the 187th poorest country in the world, Banako, Mali. It's a little like watching yourself going to your death in a movie. You know you're not really going to die, because it's a movie, but it still scares the piss out of you. Orly arrives and the taxi driver asks of course which airline we are flying and to where. He is told Air France by the head travel planner and given a terminal location but that doesn't seem to add up for him. He asks to see our reservation form which doubles as our e-ticket and takes a look. "Oui, oui", he says, "Dise es pour Mali en Aigle Azur, Mademoiselle!" Translation please? "You International numbskulls! You're flying to Mali on Aigle Azur Airways, not Air France." The look between the travel partners in the back seat was absolutely priceless. Weren't we supposed to be ready for the bush pilots once we got to Afrika, not flying in with them? Visions of us wearing goggles with our scarves flapping in the wind rush through my mind as we unload the luggage to the curb. "Pay the man honey, and let's see just exactly what we've gotten ourselves into. And make sure to slap whomever didn't know we were not flying Air France. Oh, that would be you...", me mutters.

For our comfort and safety, the Aigle Azur staff at the airport in France was crack professional, helpful and went out of their way to smooth over some travel hurdles like the fact that my Mali visa had been issued in the name of "Eduardo Carlos" Instead of David Edward Carlson (Everitt, being my birthname and Edward being my given middle name) an oversight sure to have raised terrorist threats in the US but not so much as a raised eyebrow in France as the list of Swedish surnamed terrorists is pretty short and the passport numbers matched perfectly. A shout-out to John from Aigle Azur who was just very helpful and friendly to us both and helped me steal a cigarette on our way back from the security office to the check-in desk in my second week of my no-smoking drive (a whole other story about that later).

When a plane bounce lands - that means the wheels hit the ground at least three times - you're either happy that the new pilot didn't crash it or happy that you got yourself thoroughly smashed on the cheap wine for seven and a half hours - In our case, we had to settle for the no-crashing sort of happiness because even the cheapest of wine is not served on flights to predominantly Muslim countries. What we didn't realize was that landing safetly would have found itself to have been the least of our worries. The driving and the drinking, in that order precisely, was going to be another thing entirely. You can thank the Catholics for that. In a country that otherwise would have followed Mohammed's law to the letter, Jesus' boys brought the booze.

Our host makes quick work of the immigration boys who have detained us for not having yellow fever vaccination cards. What the hell - we're not bringing in any H1N1, so let us get the Malian disease du jour! "Just spend all your foreign cash before you croak or end up like the English Patient", they told us in French. Or at least that's what I thought they said.

And so the story ends here for you all today. Feels just like a soap opera doesn't it? Just enough drama to keep you wet for the next episode! Suffer girls, cause it don't get more pretty than Paris around here, that's for sure. If you were looking for the antipode to Paree I'm sure Bamako, Mali will fill the bill.

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

Is Publicis Groupe a dead brand? The Wild Wild East Goes West IX

As my parting note from Paris, please read the following post from Seth Godin here, and then my non-encounter with Publicis Groupe afterward. Seth Godin is a best selling author on marketing and regularly conducts seminars with Fortune 500 marketing staffs.

Brands that matter

In this era, there are two questions every marketer answers:

Do I want people to interact with me and my brand in unexpected ways (as opposed to just quietly consume it)? When they interact, do I overwhelm people with delight worth remarking about?

If you think about dead brands like Tide or United Airlines, the answer to both questions is clearly 'no'. On the other hand, vibrant growing brands manage to answer both questions with a resounding 'yes.' It's not an accident and it's not easy, but if you do it right, it may be worth it.

On our trip through Paris I had it clearly marked on my itinerary that I wanted to stop by Publicis and talk with one of their International directors about the concept of Infinite Wisdom and how we might work together in Asia and other markets. For those who may not be aware, Infinite Wisdom is our combination of a marketing partner with a traditional management consulting firm providing market research, in-depth brand analysis, brand design and marketing solutions to clients and agencies alike. It's a concept that neither traditional agencies nor management consulting firms have been able to bridge and I thought that certainly someone there would be interested in exploring at least the idea. It's a client-centric idea that pairs analysis and marketing execution together in a way that makes executions the direct result of the marketing plan.

In any case, we could be producing rubber stamps that you use to make cost effective Post-It note business cards and if nobody has ever done that before it seems that someone at the world's third largest communications holding company might be interested in that idea - if you could find them.

So off I went, on a personal visit to the groupe to see if I could find an international director, regional director or discipline specific director to speak with.

Cut to the offices of Publicis Groupe on Avenue des Champs Elysées in Paris, just a stone's throw away from the Arc de Triomphe . They're a fairly faded retail glitzy affair complete with a coffee shop and multiplex movie theatre that at street level, if you didn't know it, could pass as a rather non-enticing mall effort, anywhere in middle America. A museum like display of the founder, Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, tones things down a bit once in the lobby and one of the desk attendents finishes a cigarrette outside to come in and care for my request, which in English, befuddles the attractive female receptionist behind the actual counter. A baffling display of company owned logos including Leo Burnett, Saatchi and seemingly all their subsidiaries try's in vain to explain what the company actually does but it's plain to see that the founder's black and white photographic relationships with everyone from Charles De Gaulle, to Harry S. Truman carries the weight around there not to mention the more than toney address that more than undermines the cheesy facade that was certainly not designed by Frank Gehry, let alone the country's design L'enfant Terrible, Philippe Starck.

"Tell me again he says", as I try to explain the nature of my business and that I certainly do not have an appointment but am simply looking for the right person with which to have an appointment with. He then tells me in no uncertain terms that they are not able to give out the names of anyone who might be working in the building and then relays to me a telephone number that I should call on a yellow sticky note. I ask with whom should I speak and he says he doesn't know but just to call it. Later, I learn it is the general number listed in the phone book. Thank you.

The next morning I call the number and, unless I made a mistake in thinking they were an "international" firm was reasonably baffled by the succession of non-english speakers I was forwarded to in response to my request. And if you're wondering why I just didn't send an email, so am I. The parent company website succeeds in being a company brochure but seems to let interactivity and any shred of real information fall by the wayside. They even show the most cursory form of professional disrecpect to anyone interested in the firm by listing "webmaster" as the primary email contact for the firm. Embarrasing for a communications company? You tell me.

After the parade of operators who most certainly had decided that the best English speaker could do the best job, they settled on a Mr. Robert Fridovich, Director of Marketing Communication. With all due respect to Mr. Fridovich, because I really did feel he was a nice man, he seemed perplexed with the idea that anyone would call the company looking for anything. I asked for his email and said that I would send a detailed note of my request as well as my full background and contacts - and I did not forget to mention my previous association with Leo Burnett.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a bit of a detail geek and certainly a good salesman so I did feel confident that the note I sent would give him the information he needed to make a recommendation. But it didn't. So I sent yet another detailed note with some possible working scenarios in which his company and mine might benefit. And then, a two day wait.

In the end he came up with nothing.

The reason I was given was that there were no cross agency brand responsibilities assigned to any one person and that I might do better searching the individual agency websites for contacts - so basically, back to square one. In essence, despite a trip to Paris, and indeed a trip to the home office, I had failed in coming up with anyone I didn't already know in the organization.

Thinking of Jana O'Brien's (our Nintendo research head at Burnett in Chicago) encouragement that I, "Just keep on trying", I chided myself with the fact that I had failed to ask for a meeting with Mr. Fridovich himself, knowing that a face to face meeting is always the best way to make an impression and encourage a conversation between both parties - until I realized that that was his responsibility, or at least the brand's and not really mine. In terms of interactivity, the brand itself should have reached out to this consumer and made the experience easier. And both parties could have benefitted - and the brand would have been reading another blog post entirely, instead of this one.

Mr. Fridovich, if you're reading this, thanks for giving it a shot - because it seems that in this case, you didn't fail - but your brand did. Take a good clean, objective look at how your web presense, your front desk demeanor and your telephone response deals with interactivity - and ask yourself, and your superiors, if Publicis Groupe couldn't be doing a better job. Brands die daily in the face of Web 2.0 and beyond, because if interactivity and pleasant brand experiences don't start at the communications company, how are you ever going to instill those disciplines in the consumer brands, your agency brands represent?

Thanks to Seth Godin for the motivation here. I was just going to let this one pass but thought again after reading Seth's post.

For more in the WWE Goes West Series check here:

I) The Wild Wild East Goes West: Onward Ho!
II) Frankfurt
III) C'est Si Bon
IV) Bon Jour Paris!
V) Les Picassos en Paris
VI) Nothing Much Happened en Paree Today
VII) Paris Wallpaper: Sometimes The Best Prayers Have No Words
VIII) Au Revoir Paris
IX) Is Publicis Groupe a Dead Brand?

Au Revoir Paris: The Wild Wild East Goes West VIII

As I make my exit from Paris, I head to my local Internet cafe to clear my mails and make final preparation for today's departure to Mali, Afrika - printing visas, touching base with Twitter Facebook, and the like - having a tiff with a friend over a little "confidential" firestorm - just your normal days workings in land land of international drama and intrigue. As far as drama and intrigue are concerned, savvy readers have detected more than a slight riff between my partner and I in these travels and I assure you, I suspect that riff is far from over. But on we will go. The path to Infinite Wisdom is no easy one, I assure you. Today is launched for me by the man at my Internet cafe, who only speaks French, bellowing "Bowie!, Monsieur David Bowie, bon jour!"- This pretty much cements my happiness for the day in knowing that it's not only in Asia where I seem to favour the great thin white duke, but also here in France. Bon jour Paris, and thank you. Au Revoir, until we meet again!

For more in the WWE Goes West Series check here:

I) The Wild Wild East Goes West: Onward Ho!
II) Frankfurt
III) C'est Si Bon
IV) Bon Jour Paris!
V) Les Picassos en Paris
VI) Nothing Much Happened en Paree Today
VII) Paris Wallpaper: Sometimes The Best Prayers Have No Words
VIII) Au Revoir Paris
IX) Is Publicis Groupe a Dead Brand?