Just down the road from Timbuktu
One of my nieces (I don’t have very many, in truth) stopped over for supper this evening. Another reason to offer couscous and stirfry beef, in passing. She came to have her laptop overhauled before she sets off on this year’s round of travels. Where to; well, she’ll be “just down the road from Timbuktu”.
Distances are relative, I guess. When you’re halfway around the world, any place that is famous is “just down the road”, although she’ll be relatively far from the mystic city, by my standards. In fact, given the detour needed, she won’t likely get all the way to Timbuktu while staying in Mali. Sounds good, though.
She’s a nurse, and by whatever path “the youth of today” take to get to a career, her path has involved more than one trip to the interior of Africa. Something to do with community based health care systems. What struck me from the stories she told us is that people there are not living in luxury. One of the problems she’ll face is that there is no choice in what you eat. Rice and goat meat. Goat meat and rice. Rice, with a stew of goat. Goat, with a helping of rice. Cooked in water that has been boiled and filtered and treated, until one dares to cook with it. Not luxury.
She’s collected some interesting photos and videos from earlier trips, and part of the laptop tuneup tonight involved some examination of what her current software can do if one “pushes the envelope”. With any luck, she’ll send back some e-pics of her epics (email wise). The only stumbling block is that Mali has a certain lack of high speed connectivity (an aspect it shares with many places in Canada that I’d like to live). When we Googled [Mali Internet] what came back was that there were no available Internet Cafes right now (VC’s take note; a growth potential there).
And here I am afraid to take the bus to Montreal…
