The antimalarial, mefloquine, has some side effects. Dave lost a bit of sleep and I’ve had dreams about being some large table being XORed with some other large table. Certainly not as bad as have been reported by others.

Assou, whose company will take us on a tour of Mali, met us as we got off the plane, before we had even been through passport control. The security at the Sénou Airport is casual that way. He took our passports and landing cards and gave them to a tall woman who ran into an office and back out, then cut through the line to give the now-stamped landing cards to the uniformed immigration officer crouched behind the thronged glass cubicle. He led us through the usual gauntlet of taxi touts, who could read that our MAPK had been phosphorylated and therefore relatively few of them asked us if we wanted taxis but the thing to sell now at Airports is SIM cards which we also already had. Total elapsed time from touchdown to the hotel: 59 minutes. Any of you will know this is amazing, who have landed at night from a foreign country into the airport of a pathetic third world paranoid bureaucratic corrupt satrapy, such as SFO.

“How do you do that?” I asked Assou. “You must know all those guys.”

“Cousins, friends, friends of friends…” said Assou. MySpace is about three centuries behind the social networking capacity of any African businessman.

I saw lots of people flashing SIM cards on the road into town, too. Bamako at night gives the impression of Tijuana at night, except the people in Bamako are poor. In Mali they know all about the service economy.

You can tell when things are the hardest of the hard cause you don’t see kids selling things, even trash. Adults are selling. When adults have the crappiest jobs, it’s like eating your seed corn. God knows what the kids are doing. I hope they’re all right.

Posted by ray on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 at 2:16 am