Bobo Dilassou

10/11 February

Very poor children live here

Feel sorry for this captured owl

DInky baskets for your bill

Thursday is a day of leisure to rest my hand that was cramping after hanging on tight to the throttle and brake all day yesterday (only occasionally in panic)! Wander about town, lunch @ a local restaurant w/wifi, check out their very good mud Mosque and wander the Grand Marche. Not forgetting the obligatory nightclub for live music with cold beer. There are a few ‘famous’ nightclubs here in town – Les Bambous, Le Bois d’Ebone, Le Moonlight etc and as a dutiful tourist I feel I should at least have a look see (and a beer) to check out the great music on offer at each one during my time here. Just for comparison, of course. AS well there is a naming ceremony for a new baby happening across the road from the where I’m staying, and that goes all day & ALL night!! Much music dj’ing and continual dancing from the women, and of course they’re pretty stoked if a babou joins in, which of course I do, as I walk past during the day. I buy some fruit for the very poor kids next door – I reckon the youngest will be dead within the year – very listless, malnourished etc etc. But mum will go on bearing babies cause that’s just what you do here if you’re poor, hmm

Friday I try another venture on the roads touring the countryside via the now more reliable mobylette - I have lost count of the all the helpful blokes who have at one time or another tinkered with said conveyance! I ride out the 20km to visit Foret de Kou, a designated ‘forest’ that is a delight to wander its many kms of paths. Nearby is the Kou river, although they want 500cfa to swim in VERY shallow water, where locals are doing their washing – I give it a miss and head safely back to Bobo. Tonight there is good music at a local bar – if you buy a beer, you get a ‘ringside’ table. After a couple of hours of energetic drumming, dancing and general merriment another day passes easily here.

FACT: The death toll for kids under 5 in West Africa is estimated to be in the millions, and usually from preventable & curable causes, well drownings are notorious along with malnutrition. One in every six children in sub-Saharan Africa will die before his or her fifth birthday. This region is described by UNICEF as the most difficult place in the world for a child to survive