Napoleon, a Ham Sandwich, and 40 Tons of Cement

More than 2 years of hard work have finally begun to pay off. This week we have begun the first phase of our school construction project. We began the week like most others, in the backseat of an old Peugeot station wagon with a plastic bag full of cash. Finally after several hours waiting at the bank, we stood at a bank tellers window for 20 minutes as he counted out 14,000,000 CFA in front of us and deposited it into the construction account. We walked outside and hopped on the first bus that pulled up. We lucked out and got a Somatra bus which are pretty dependable. The only thing is Somatra uses old French Renault buses which must have been designed by Napoleon himself, because I can not fit in the seats. I have to turn sideways with my legs in the aisle and the armrest digs into my hip. Good news was there were no crying babies or dying sheep on board, just Malians. After three and a half hours in a bus with no windows in Mali I was not in the best of moods when I got a very interesting phone call. It was BuildOn ,the NGO we're working with, saying that they've decided to buy the cement in Segou, the city we just left 250 kilometers ago. We sighed deeply and shrugged as we bargained with a taxi driver in the Malian sun.

(I would have put a picture here but somebody else used it already. Just imagine a big stack of Malian Money.)

After showering and sitting in the A/C for a while we decided to do something wild, so we hopped in a Taxi and headed for the grocery store. This might not sound like a big deal to you, but in Mali grocery stores are rare and expensive, designed for foreign embassy workers and wealthy Malians. I usually go to the grocery store and stand in the frozen food section trying to figure out how I could get Ice Cream home before melting, then I realize it costs more than I make in a week here so I weep a little and head for the more reasonably priced canned corn. But on this occassion I was feeling a little saucy and stopped at the meat counter. There it was pink and smoked...HAM! I tried to decipher the metric system doing math in my head. The tag read 1325 CFA/100 grams, how many grams of ham or on an average American sandwich? How many grams are in a pound? Will Mary let me spend this much money on ham?
I got 400 grams of ham and headed for the cheeses. I chose the cheapest one they had and found a couple sandwich rolls to complete this behemoth. Mary bought hair dye.

(Imagine a photo of a ham sandwich being held by a blond woman who now has black hair.)

We spent the night in Bamako and then caught a bus back to Segoou, so we could meet up with our construction supervisor and purchase cement. We arrived early at the cement vendors warehouse to begin negotiating the price of cement and transportation. We had already met twice and each time the price had changed, so today we would try to get cement for the lowest price possible. We agreed on 130,000 CFA (290 USD) per ton including transportation. We shook hands at 10:30 and he said a truck was on its way to begin loading the cement. Right on schedule the truck arrived at 1:30, and they began loading 800 bags of cement one at a time, no forklifts or palette jacks for these young men. It took three hours of grueling work in the sun but finally they finished and we were ready to head to Tongo. It is 40 Kilmoeters to Cinzana and then another 20 kilometers of bad road to Tongo. We arrived as the sun was setting and the entire village greeted us as the truck pulled into the village center. They made quick work of the cement and had it unloaded in two hours. Though we were eager to get back to Segou we ate dinner in Tongo and waited as they made a fresh pot of tea for us. We finally returned to Segou after midnight and exhausted passed out in our office. The next day we shipped another 300 bags of cement to Tongo and returned to Segou for a meeting with BuildOn's directors. It was a long week but it felt good to have work to do, and it also felt good to know that all those months of beggin for money, and the hours spent in meetings with the people of Tongo and Cinzana, as well as the many budgets we submitted and resubmitted finally brought us to the cabin of a truck with three strange men pulling 40 tons of cement down a dirt road.

(Imagine a montage of photos, Malians carrying cement, a big truck in a village, a truck cabin, people smiling, etc.)