Mali - Day two

Day 2

A flurry of phone calls produces new opportunities for flight. From Germany, a travel agent has found seats for four on a flight through Togo to Frankfurt. Suddenly no one cares what airline or whether they get air miles or travel points. As quickly as the offer arrives it is withdrawn.

The airport is closed. This is now certain. From the womb of our little plaza, we hear more shots in the streets, look around the circles and sigh.

I am with eleven others who attended the same conference – an NGO-sponsored meeting to discuss the effects of mining on the health and environment of Africans. (Our Western and Eastern – the Chinese are here too – based mining companies behave badly when away from the environmental and social constraints of the more sophisticated nations; in fact a quote from an Australian executive, John Borshaff, in 2007 said exactly that: “The Canadians and Australians have become over-sophisticated in their environmental and social concerns over uranium mining. The future of uranium is in Africa.”) Some of my colleagues took an arduous overland trip to a village in the West of Mali, Falea, where prospecting for uranium is occurring so today there is time to share their photos and debrief the trip.

The hotel manager recommends that everyone order a decent meal for lunch because the food is available and he doesn't know if the cooks will be able to get to the market for the evening meal. But other than this small concern, the day is passing quietly with telephone calls to loved ones, travel agents and embassies. Those pesky requests, “register with your embassy”, rarely heeded, becomes important.

As the heat of the day reaches its peak, a sort of communal bathing occurs in the small but refreshing pool. There seem to be sufficient staff arriving and leaving – and, since the tourist season is ending and the hotel during a military coup would ordinarily be fairly empty, the manager is smiling broadly.

The news of the day is that the airport will be closed until Monday or Tuesday. And the female cooks were exchanged for some men who did a very good job although we can see that the menu will not be changing. Ah, we are fortunate to have food.

Activists being activists, the day closes with a group meeting. Someone amongst us has decided that we may as well be planning how to best use the time together. A movie of mining in India is shown – hardly the stuff of a bedtime story.