Hotel L'Auberge Segou

After Djenné I headed to Segou, purely for the purposes of getting a bus to Burkina Faso (the alternative to this backtracking being, again, waiting at a junction. Still not the best plan, I think, so to Segou we go!<br><br>Uneventful journey there - makes a change! - and not much to report from the town itself either... except I checked my e-mail when I was there and had various messages from various people at the chairty I'm ...

Today was the first day that we were able to take it easy. We slept in until 8am! I had one of the coolest church experiences of my life. I could not understand a word but the music was great! It was everything you would imagine you would hear in a church in Africa. The sermon was in French but there was an interpretor that was translating everything into Malians native language, which is Bambara. Ewien was kind enough to translate into English for us as well. It was quite surreal ...

Today we finally got all of the rooms wired with Fiber Optic Cable. I personally spent the whole day installing conduit and boxes for the cable. For the morning I worked side by side with a team of Malians installing electricity in the new Warehouse building that will also hold the offices for administration. Although there was a communication gap, we did a great job sharing work space and tools when necessary. There are two things that are really surreal ...

We were able to finish up running the cable in the pediatric building. We had to use a lot of ladders and no one fell:) Most of our focus was on the warehouse. This building is still under construction. As a mentioned before there is a construction team here from Ohio and they were working in the warehouse as well. We did a good job staying out everyone's way. I didn't know I would have to go all the way to Mali to know what it ...

We have been working very hard the last couple of days. We have connected all three buildings with fiber optic cable. It took quite a bit of work in the Maternity building as we had to keep asking patients to move. Many were friends and family waiting for their daughter's and sister's to have a new baby. When waiting at the hospital everyone brings blankets, water buckets, and cooking pans to take care of everyone while they wait. The ...

... at times! They w**e so welcoming and really kind to us, including getting us buckets of hot wat** for our show**s and feeding us. But the culture h**e is to be with you all the time, I think they probably think its rude if they are not.....wh**e as I would pref** to be able to get dressed in my room in private!! But it was only 3 days, so it was cool and we got stuck into a few be**s for the first time in ages.....we need to dry out again now!

Ségou, ancienne capitale de l'Empire Bambara, a été une importante ville de garnison au temps de la Colonie. On y trouve de très beaux bâtiments de cette époque, bien restaurés et dont les habitants sont fi**s. Grandes avenues bordées de caïlcédrats, fleuve ***** majestueux, de 1 à 2 km de large. Thême du jour :LA CIRCULATION ROUTIERE Sur les routes goudronnées ou sur les pistes en latérite, on rencontre de tout : - des hommes et des femmes à pied et qui marchent ...

... tribesmen. It was my cook group's turn to make dinn**. The Dream This dream or at least my recollection of it was vague enough that I questioned wheth** it was even worth writing down in the morning. In the dream I was out with my broth** Doug and my friend Marc in the evening in New York City. We ate Mexican food and then w**e at a cowboy bar and w**e drinking num**ous pitch**s of be** (as we tend to do when we ...

... of town in a well-populated agricultural area wh**e we w**e visited by Bambara locals in both evening and morning. Ev**y so often a donkey cart hauling wood would pass through our campsite, tents spread near the truck along both sides of a dirt trek through the fields, and I could also see the e**ie sight of convoys of dozens of such carts traveling through the night along the main road a short distance away.

... eat one of the local dishes. Fate would have it that her dog Fifi would enjoy most of the food though. I set the pot on a rickety homemade table and it soon found its way to the ground... slow motion of course, as I helplessly looked on. We saved what we could and Sayward turned it into something respectable again. Either that or we were really hungry. The night was chilly and we slept outside; though sleeping was something we enjoyed very little, as Fifi ferociously fought off her ...