To Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Senegal, and back

On the trip that we took, there are three categories of experiences that stood out; the places that we saw, the people that we met, and the food that we ate. I had expected the places to dominate the experience of the trip, but because I was already used to being in Africa, much of what would have been new and unusual for a typical Toubab tourist was sort of old hat for me. As such the people that we met and the food that we are were just as interesting as where we were. Therefore, I will break up my description of the trip into these three categories. However, I will give more attention to the places that we went than I did on the trip because I expect that they will be the most interesting to you and also because that is what I am best at writing about. First though, a little background on the trip.

We were four, Ginger, Rocco, Manna, and myself, all PCVs from Mauritania and all working in the environment sectors. It was Rocco who found out about the conference in Accra, Ghana that was the reason for the trip and it was him who planned and orchestrated the whole thing. Each PCV gets 48 days of vacation to use throughout their service and normally we could have not gone an extended trip like this, but because the conference was within our field of work, our bosses gave us free vacation days for the travel down, the conference, and the travel back. Without that the trip could not have happened. The conference, “From Conservation Science to Policy in Africa,” was hosted by the University of Ghana and the Society for Conservation Biology and our plan was to travel overland down to Accra, attend the conference, and then spend a week touring around Ghana before heading back to Rosso, Mauritania where we would meet up with the rest of the Mauritanian volunteers before attending the West African Invitational Softball Tournament (WAIST) in Dakar, Senegal. Given the uncertainty of public transportation here in West Africa we were impressively able to stick to that plan. There were only a few times we ended up in the wrong place, bought the wrong ticket, were lied to, or overpaid. Yet, even throughout all of that we managed to more or less stay on schedule. In order to sum up a month’s worth of traveling through five different countries, I will give a description of the whole trip in three parts; the places, the people, and the food.