Spent the morning collecting the last of the supplies. Left Faranah late morning headed for the remote village, Somoria, where our project camp is located. Within five minutes, we burst a tire. Limped back into town and sought out the tire guy. We found him and I could not have been more impressed with the skill and craft of an individual, after seeing him labor over our tire. What he was able to do, in quick work, with homemade tools, was astonishing. I watched him in absolute awe. He had it patched and ready to roll much faster than any Michelin shop or Midas Man could ever hope to, and with no modern machinery or tools. Africans are often some of the most inventive resourceful people, able to do so much with so little. The price for his labor and materials: 10,000 Guinea Francs ($2).
We hit the dirt again and began the 4 hour journey to Somoria on an unpaved dual track through the bush. Stopped several times along the way at isolated villages, tribal clans living traditionally off the land. Growing cassava, gathering fruit, hunting wild game, pounding millet, collecting honey, fetching water from the river, raising goats and tending cattle. At each village, we would buy large burlap sacks full of fruit, mostly mangos and bananas, for our chimps. Our arrival was always met with sincere enthusiasm and joy. Of course, my digital camera was an endless source of discussion and fascination for them, once they saw their image in replay. Children ran around with drippy noses, barefoot, and mostly naked but with pure glee at seeing white people. We frightened some of them and they ran away crying, convinced they had just seen aliens. As we drove off, with the entire village waving goodbye, it seemed to me that I had just passed through a diorama of traditional African village life in the year 1309, 1709, or 2009. Large swaths of the continent will forever be rooted in the Pleistocene epoch.
We stopped at 4 more villages along the way and by the last one, our truck was pathetically buckling under the weight of our colossal mountain of supplies stacked like those pickup trucks in America that roam the night piling up flattened cardboard boxes for recycling. We rolled into camp just as night was falling. My introduction to the staff was a bit awkward, considering it was pitch black and we were all wearing headlamps. We unloaded the gear and then Matthieu led me to my new home for next 6 months. A little round mud hut, about 15' in diameter, with a bed in advanced state of decay and unseen creatures lurking in the thatched roof. I don't have the courage to shine my flashlight on it. Whatever is festering up there, there's nothing I can do about it. I'd rather not know. The identity of one resident has already been established, though. There is bat shit on the floor.
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