The Road To Mali

Greetings one and all from Bamako, Mali.


Agrandir le plan

This is it, this is as far from home as i'm gonna go on this trip. 8000 km of peddling. Its my birthday today and i have made it to Bamako, thecapital city of Mali. Today is sunday and, as Amadou and Mariam, the now world famous blind Malian musicians sang in Dimanche a Bamako,  today is the day of marrages and I have seen plenty around town. There's one just around the corner with a band playing that classic relentless Mali sound as the griots sing the praises of all present and bless the famillies whilst they in turn are blessed with cash from the beautifully attired ladies dancing in the circle. The event is taking place in a marque on the busy, dirty street and for me appitimizes the contrasts of this place.
 I am very happy to be here and the first couple of days in this city has already been filled with playing music and meeting good folk. Having said that this is the dirtiest, poorest, most polluted hectic place i've been on this journey and life here is a hard struggle for many. Open sewers and streets litterred with rubbish and overwhelming amounts of crazy traffic, crumbling ghettoes, dust and fumes and the awesome hustle and bustle of city life. This is all a bit of a shock after 10 days of cycling through forests and staying in villages and, to be honest, i don't know if i can handle the stink and hecticness much longer. My birthday present to my self was a face mask that all the scooter riders ware (and there's thousands of them) and it somehow makes it bearable to be on the street.
What an adventure it has been to get here. Thats not to say it's all over in any way as i still have to make my way back to The Gambia and i'm planning to travel through Guinea Connakry, Guinea Bissau and the Cassamance to get there so planty more of the road to come but for the meantime i'm going to spend a week or so learning Mali style guitar and jamming with musicians. At least thats the idea but I'll have see if i can stand the stink first.

 I delayed my departure east to Mali for a week as there were so many worrying news stories of fighting in the north of the country as Toureg rebels who had been teamed up with Gadaffi's militias returned across the desert armed to the teeth with serious weaponry. The Malian army simply couldn't cope and the rebels have taken control of a number of nothern towns. Some 60000 refugees fled in all directions to neighbouring countries and retaliation demonstrations kicked off in Bamako causing the Tuareg resident in the city themselves to flee for their own safety. Some still believe that this could become a serious civil war and as a result of such stories on the BBC world service and the worry of my gambian friends i decided to go to a festival In Kartong on the the Gambian coast for a week and await further news. It was a little holiday away from the open road and great to dance into the night to the varoius Mandinka, Wolof  and Jula bands and just take it easy doing very little. I didn,t even take any photos so you'll have to imagine all the fun that i had. Go on let your imagination run wild!
Well even after all that the calling of the open road bekoned me on as ever so i loaded up the bike again and left the village of Kwinella heading up river into the uknown once again. The first night was spent in the compound of the regional director of Action aid, the next with a Fulani Imam, then a French hunting lodge, another Fula family, a community of migrant gold diggers and more villages of mud huts and grass roofs. Here's a few of my wonderful hosts.....

The experience of heading off each morning and not knowing where you will spend that night, or if there will be a village with food or water continues to be extremely rich and empowering. Somehow each day something or someone appears that just touches my heart and blows me away. The journey inland from Gambia takes you into dryer and poorer lands. Firstly there are far more Fula people and fewer Mandinkas. At least the Mandinkas become the Malinkis and then the Bambara of Mali. These peoples are all related as the Mandinka travelled from the great Empire of Mali many centuries ago. The Fula are a wonderful people and from my experience all ways very welcoming and accomodating when a rondom Engliush cyclists turns up looking for a bed for the night. They were traditionaly semi nomadic cow herders and continue this tradition of looking after the cattle all across west Africa.

 I have had so many great encounters with people and this internet is again painfully slow at uploading photographs that i'm afraid i don't have the time to tell all. Each lunch time has been an interesting routine of finding some place to feast on rice and then relax during the heat of the afternoon. So often people won't even let me pay for food which says something about their hospitality when they really have so little them semlves. We've had the guitar out on several of these occasions and one night the entire village was gathered in the compound to witness this crazy cycling toubab playing the guitar. We sang and danced into the night and the magic of music transformed our hearts and brought us together.
On the road to Mali i met a guy on  a bike heading home after spending several weeks unsuccessfully digging for gold. Then that night i stayed in little encampment of folk who also turned out to be gold diggers. We were at a noisy dusty junction as trucks passed by 24 hours a day from the gold mine to the processing plant. These men worked for an absolute pitence whilst the french owned company trucked riches out of the African soil. It seems sometimes that little has changed here and so often the experience of poverty becomes heartbreaking when the injustice is so blatant.
The landscape changed little for several days heading into Mali with hundreds of miles of sun baked forest with just a scattering of small traditional villages of mud huts and grass roofs. Strangely the road was one of the best I have cycled here and stretched all the way from Kedougou in Senegal untill Bamako. It turns out to have been built by the Chinese and travels straight through the heart of gold country....

So birthday greetings from me in Bamako.
The dude here has run out of internet tokens so times up.
Much love to one and all
Ed

A month in The Gambia

A month in The Gambia….

Time passes and gradually I have really started to feel at home here. I have noticed on this journey that once I have stopped somewhere it doesn’t take long for the inertia to kick in and make it harder to leave to hit the road again even after a short rest, but this time it feels particularly difficult. Arriving in The Gambia well over a month ago did somehow feel like reaching my destination as it is here that I feel most connected to the place and people having spent more time over the years. However I did always have it in mind to continue my journey to Bambako in Mali. I was there once before but it was long ago. I have always loved the music, both traditional and more modern that one hears out of that place and it feels like a logical destination for this ride. The Mandinka people of The Gambia originally came from Mali and when I tell people that I’m heading that way, once they have got over the initial shock of the idea of me traveling there alone by bicycle, they often tell me how they have relations there. Tata Dinding told me how his family of musicians or ‘griots’ traveled from Mali and how he would love to visit there one day but sadly was not up for joining me on a bike. Now that the time has come to part with my friends and family here it’s so hard to leave. But Once again the open road calls and soon I’ll be back in the red dust of that highway heading east this time and following my dreams.

                                          looks like some one's hitched a ride.

But what of my time here? Well as I mentioned in the last post about the Fresh Start Foundation I have had a chance to connect with their projects here and help out in a few ways as well as get up to all sorts of other adventures including hosting Ramsey and Tom from the Visions Series filming for the big movie. They stayed for 10 days and we had a great time interviewing all sorts of characters talking about my cycle ride, the power of music in community, education, climate change, and how we can bridge cultures creatively. We interviewed Lamin about the work of Fresh Start and the inspiration to bring about truly positive change and even went out into the bush and took a boat on the magnificent River Gambia with my old friend Wandi to see some of the stunning wildlife of the region.

                                          

I took them to meet Tata Dindng in Brikama and we were blessed to be able to film a fantastic jam in their compound that will provide some great music for the film. The following day we traveled with the band along sandy bush tracks across the border with Senegal to a village in the Cassamance region. This area has been troubled by rebels fighting for independence for years and just this week more fighting broke out not far away and I have recently heard that Kwinella village is preparing to receive over a thousand refugees. Presidential elections are due this month and reports of trouble across Senegal has been coming through the crackly air waves of the little transistor radios that play in the shade of mango trees as the heat of the afternoon passes. We were in the village for a music festival and thankfully all was peaceful whilst we were there. The people of Dombondir village are largely from the Jola tribe and the music and performances was very typical of their culture. The drumming and dance was stunning and some great bands played over the weekend but the highlights were the kumpo dance and the traditional wrestling on Sunday afternoon.

The Kumpo involved all the women on one side singing and playing hypnotic percussion rhythms on bits of metal and all the men gathered in a line opposite them. Into the space in between leaped the crazy Kumpo dancer completely covered with long grass like a huge whirling hay stack sending ripples of excitement through the crowd. Every one sang beautiful call-and-response songs whilst the men or women would break away from the lines running towards each other, or the spinning hay stack, to bust some crazy cheeky dance moves and then escape back to the safety of their lines. Other costumed characters appeared including a scary black baboon and a one armed figure dressed in sacking who danced beating the earth with a stick. The whole event was accompanied by full power drum rhythms specific to each of the costumed dancers and involved everybody who was up for it. It was dark and I was too enthralled to take any photos any way but I did get a few snaps of the wrestling the next day.

These guys know how to work a crowd and must have spent a good couple of hours strutting about and dancing before any wrestling actually took place. Wrestling is a big deal in Senegal and top wrestlers are famous stars in the country so it was all taken very seriously and in the end one team won…. And the other lost.

Tom and Ramsey had left the festival early to go and do some more filming with Tata’s band and so when it came to trying to get home on Monday morning I was reminded of one of the reasons why I had chosen to travel by bike in the first place. I hate waiting for lifts in Africa! I was ready by 9 in the morning for a car that by 4 in the afternoon looked like it wasn’t going anywhere after all. Instead I walked with a friend through the bush, passed beautiful rice fields and crossed the river that is the border between the two countries. We never did see any immigration officials or actual border controls and it all felt wonderfully clandestine out in the wilds of Africa.

Tom and Ramsey are back in the UK now armed with lots of great footage to make the movie and I’m ready to embark on the next stage of the adventure. The money’s all finished long ago but the road lies ahead calling and the journey continues.

There’s so much more I could say about the joys of village life in rural Africa but I’ll leave that up to your imagination for the moment and for my part step back out into the reality of the unfolding experience as I’m reminded of an old eighties kids TV program that sang out those immortal words;

 “Why don’t you… switch off the TV and do something more interesting instead!”

Time to get off the computer and water the vegetables in the sun baked plots over in the garden..

Much love to one and all

Ed

The Fresh Start Foundation

The Fresh Start Foundation

As many of you know I have been raising money for the Fresh Start Foundation here in the Gambia and I thought it was about time to tell you a little about the fantastic work that they are doing. I have been in the country for just over a month now and soon it will be time to hit the road again, this time east towards Mali but whilst here I have had the chance to check out much of the charities work and even lent a hand as best I could. You can find out more about their work at www.fsfgambia.org.

First of all thank you so much to all those who have donated money through my just giving page for this project. Having witnessed first-hand the importance of this work I can assure you that all the money will be used responsibly and go directly towards the positive change that is the focus of Fresh Start. Your donations will be used specifically to support an ambitious tree planting project in the village which I am really happy about and know will be extremely important for the future.

The charity was set up by my good friend Lamin Daffeh. He is the eldest son of Daffeh family with whom I lived in 1995 and on every visit since so that now I have been adopted as a member of their family and am always so well looked after.  Lamin now lives in the UK and set up the charity a few years ago initially to help with the education of vulnerable children in the village of Kwinella but now their work has expanded in so many ways and I will try to outline some of their different projects here.

Education and Skills Development

• Fresh Start has provided educational materials to 12 different schools in the region of Kwinella and continues to support the village school in various ways.
•  They funded and built a wall around the school grounds, created a library and continue to provide books, computers, resources and pay staff to make it a positive learning environment, they renovated class rooms and other facilities, dug a borehole that provides much needed clean drinking water, they provide funds to supplement the school meals with fish and vegetables, seeds for the school garden, and support a number of orphans throughout their education.
• Fresh Start recently received funding to run a series of workshops on the theme of climate change in a number of local secondary schools and as you may know I have run many similar projects with Movingsouunds in the UK and so offered my services to provide a week of workshops to all the year 7, 8 and 9 students. This was great fun and very different to UK schools in terms of the issues it raised and also the response of the students.

                                          In the school getting down to some climate change education.

• They provide sponsorship to a growing number of students through their secondary school education to help with school fees and this makes a huge difference to the poorer families and enables the young people to continue their education.
• Fresh Start is building 2 very ambitious skill centers, one in the village and one nearer the city to provide education for orphans and further education and vocational training to young people to help them find work.

                                          This is the skills center currently under construction

Health

• Clean drinking water is critical for good health and Fresh Start now provides the village’s main source of clean water through solar powered boreholes. This has made a huge difference to the lives of the local people.
• They have provided equipment to the local regional health centre, renovated the building, wired in the electrics and built accommodation for the health workers.
• They provide regular eye screenings to villages in remote areas and fund much needed cataract operations. With so many incredible life changing success stories this has become an important focus for their work.
• They also provide follow on support, drugs and reading glasses when needed.

Agriculture and the land

• Their ambitious Kunko project in Kwinella aims to provide a community garden for the village with a reliable water source and training in horticulture. I spent many happy mornings helping to create beds for the veggies and water the banana plants. I can’t wait to see the gardens blooming in a few years time.

                                          The first seedlings are transplanted into the new beds.

• They plan to also support animal husbandry projects and initiate a small agricultural revolution by educating about organic farming methods and sustainable land use. As most of the food eaten here is grown locally this will have a huge impact on the lives and diets of the village community.
• Provide seeds and try out all sorts of new varieties to see what grows best.
• They will be planting 1600 trees in the region and educate about the importance of the trees in terms of environmental stability and biodiversity. Gambia is extremely vulnerable to the impending impacts of climate change and deforestation is a huge issue here so this is important work and will be funded by your donations to my cycle ride.

This is just a brief outline of some of the work that the charity is currently undertaking but having met the team I know that so much more is going on than I could mention here and new projects are being developed all the time. Lamin came to visit a few weeks ago and I was amazed to see the response of people to his inspirational work and I hope to be able to continue my support of this project.

Once again many thanks for your support and if you feel so inspired it’s very easy to make a donation, however small at my just giving page. 2p provides a school meal so every little helps.

Much love to you all and more tales of my time in Gambia will follow shortly.

Ed