Blog
Baby Beast's second life
Just received pictures of Baby Beast from Diema. Converted to a 9+ seat minivan it serves Village Ventures to transport people to/from the center, but in addition it is also operated as a taxi, helping a local family to earn some money.    |
Donations finally arrived in Mali!
After almost 4 months of fighting, waiting, (and bribing) our donations have finally arrived in Mali yesterday. It has been a tremendous effort to get the stuff across the border, laws, rules and responsibilities are unfortunately very unstable in Mali these days. Salihou and Pam from Village Ventures, thank you very much for your help to get the donations into Mali.  June 5, 2013: Medicines arrive in the clinic of Mali Health Organizing Project in Bamako |
Our donations are still stuck at the Malian border :-(
| Baby Beast and the medicines have arrived at the Malian border a few days ago, but Malian customs don't let the car into the country and again and again ask for new certificates, exoneration letters, tax exemption letters, etc. I hope the problems can be sorted out soon, our driver has been on the road now for almost a week. |
Perfect culmination of this trip to Bissau: I almost got arrested
The offense was trying to take photos of the carnival without being an official photographer.  Nevertheless it is a sad story. To even the smallest delict the police replies with pure violence. They were beating children and women with their batons and old car v-belts for standing too close to the street and similarly serious offenses.  The carnival was closed today by a beautiful costume parade. Here some impressions:     |
Ready to go
We have checked out from our rooms and are waiting for the last carnival day to start. Around noon it is too hot to do anything outside. The last two weeks were an unforgettable experience (I fell in love with the people of sub-saharan Africa again), a tough challenge (I can't remember to ever have slept that little, except perhaps during some crazy training sessions in Belgium in 2007), and I found one of the still existing real banana republics in the world: Guinea-Bissau. It is all about corruption here, everybody is trying to rip you off, you are constantly at the mercy of the many shady officials (or would-be officials, everybody is a minister or a former minister or a relative of a minister or at least a friend of a minister here and they all derive special privileges and rights from their "status"). |
Beach party cancelled :-(
We wanted to hire a boat and go to one of the islands of Guinea Bissau today but prices were too high. Our best offer for a one day trip was 450.000 CFA, around 700 EUR, far beyond our budget. The islands are around 100km away, but still 700EUR is heavily overpriced. Or our bargaining skills are too limited. Or both.  Searching for a boat in the harbor of Bissau   We are hanging out at the hotel pool instead, drinking beer, and waiting for the temperature to fall before we go to the city again.  There are still a lot of teams trying to sell their car, or even worse, waiting for the money for an already sold one. The whole country seems to have run out of money.  Car "market" in front of a hangar with old Russian aircraft wrecks. Police and army are expelling all potential buyers in order to make good bargains themselves. |
Pajero sold...
... donations found and loaded into Baby Beast, Baby Beast handed over to Village Ventures, enjoyed Bissau carnival in the evening. It was a successful day.  Unloading our boxes from the donation truck. Of course they have been at the very end of the truck, so we had to dig through 30 tons of boxes to reach them.  Lots of helping hands. Special thanks to József Kádár (always wearing a tie) and his wife (on his right) for transporting the donations of the Budapest Bamako to Africa every year. Free of charge of course, that is his contribution to the charity projects.   |
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