Merigoesaround

A carrousel or merry-go-round is an amusement ride consisting of a rotating circular platform with seats for riders. So your meri was going around another type of carrousels...the baggage ones at the airport of Johannesburg looking for a stranded conference banner suspected to be a weapon. A development aid missile, I thought. Sometimes going around at airports one learns lots. I like to guess nationalities, languages, and destinations. Boyfriend husband and I often compete to know which language the couple sitting in front of us in the plane speaks: Hungarian!?, Finnish!?  Other than languages and nationalities one can learn a lot on how not to behave at airports. A mix of arrogance and bully attitude often makes me feel some people should really stay at home so I can seat and enjoy the ride. The conference banner, a.k.a, development weapon, was in carousel #7 so there I headed determined to take it and go to the hotel, when I found myself surrounded by the pa...

Toc, toc, toc, toc. Again and again. For a month and a half. This is how long my bed spread took to be woven in a village close to Korogho.  Thread after thread, the hands of anonymous women and adolescents crafted what today covers me at night. My bed spread is a rarity, which gives me a bitter sweet comfort/discomfort. It appears that West African cotton (11% of the world's cotton) is the best quality cotton in the world. The fact that it is picked by hand, instead of by ugly machines, apparently makes the difference. However, while some primary processing is done in Cote d'Ivoire (seed cotton is converted to lint in gins located near farms in rural areas) the conversion of cotton lint to thread, textiles and clothing is mostly done elsewhere. And that noise, the toc, toc the beating that feeds the heart of local economies is little by little fading away, just like a distant scary dream under a bed spread.

The end of the mango season approaches in Ivory Coast. Small mountains of that fruit decorate the two sides of the road. Seydou, the driver, stops to buy some kilos for his relatives in the city. The image captivates the foreign eye. Mangoes, women, colorful bubus , dancing children, red sand. The dynamism, vitality, and resilience of Africa all at once, just outside the window of the car. I hide my phone and try to turn the beauty into a picture. Eh tooii !! (Hey you!) somebody screams at me.  You are beautiful . I say in French. Merci . She answers. Smiling, she runs back to the fruit mountain, a new buyer approaches. It is the end of the mango season.

He had divorced a year ago. That arranged marriage should have never happened. The way to forget and to run away from the gossip was to go abroad, he thought...and this is how Colonel Maj Khan found himself heading a mission of Blue Helmets in Korogho, Northern Ivory Coast. He had always had a taste for adventure and that had brought him to join the intelligence unit of the Pakistani army. Then marriage, followed by drama. And then there we were, sitting in what looked to me, and probably was, a private jet from the UN. For a second I thought of my mum, who has no grand children to show to the neighbors, but plenty of pictures of meri going around. Meri was there to interview cotton farmers. The Colonel was there to forget. Coincidentally he was thousands of miles away from the gossip, from the woman that made the last 5 years of his life so miserable, but close to the softness of cotton. That softness he had known so well, growing in a family of cotton farmers in Southern...

After a far too long African winter with loads of wind, warm weather is finally arriving to the Cape Verde Peninsula, the piece of rock that Dakar occupies. And with the raising sea water temperature, groups of adolescents start invading what is theirs: the beaches of the Peninsula. Some are there to learn how to swim, others to practice Senegalese wrestling or play soccer, but most of them want to see and be seen. The mostly male crowd that invades the sand is occassionally spiced up by the overtly sexyness of few girls. Some wear headscarves and clothes while they bath, others tiny bikinis, many a combination of bra-turned-swimming suit and short skirts. And the beach boys look, and the girls smile. The beach radiates adolescence and energy, a captivating hormone circus that beats any good book in this hot afternoon.

Malick's fingers tell stories. Each of his 10 fingers, his 10 disfigured nails and his damaged fingerprints have spent most of Malick's life holding the sowtah, the traditional tool used by Senegalese woodcarvers to cut away parts of wood and shape it into mysterious pieces of art. Malick's eyes tell stories too. Some happy but most sad ones. Like the day he fell in love with that American student who spent few nights of her internship sleeping in his atelier at the Village des Arts. Side by side. He thought she loved him. She only wanted to write about the lawbe , the caste group in Wolof society that includes all crafstmen that work with wood, like Malick.  He does not like white girls that much anymore. They bring all type of temptations and are interested. Sweet-faced manipulators to whom he can succumb. His art is already a difficult fit under Islam, which denounces all type of sculpted forms, d...