Category: On the road

Balance

Apart from some money this last trip to Ivory Coast didn’t bring me anything worth of.
I did not meet many new people, the job was almost inexistent and no news on the MMM’AL side.
I practiced a bit of tennis (just a bit, and not exactly good tennis), and I got malaria. Totting up: balance is in red.
Lesson learned: consider more carefully the place and the job; not a simple exercise.
Possibly out of Africa: Asia, South America or Northern Europe, why not.

Becoming waterproof

There are several signs. Denying few coins to all sort of mendicants for an assorted range of good reasons. Treating harshly the street kids ‘because otherwise they will not respect you’. Pulling the leg of a handicapped man (and this phrase is a bad example too).

I am definitely becoming stranger to the local environment. I am affected by the merciless virus contaminating most of international bureaucrats who recreate all over an impermeable globe avoiding to being affected by the circumstances.

Even the guilt feeling, faithful escort within those exotic missions is quieter, almost silent.

Time for a change?

End of May

This is an endofmay blog, I’m writing to avoid a gap, to fill a possibly empty space, to leave a memory of this month.

I came back from Congo.

Not precisely back, as I went to Roma and not Barcelona (from where I left almost two years before).

Now going to Ivory Coast (again, this time really again).

Today on ‘Repubblica’ an article on Ivory Coast on the first page. Just because of the world championship.

I’m probably going back to Abidjan for the wrong reasons, but, at the end, it’s the job.

Kin-Brazza-Kin

We went to the other side.
We did the same we could have done here; some shopping, lunch in a café, breakfast in an international hotel, newspapers.
Not much for the discovering of a country.
But without telephone, far away from the office and by way of a trip on the river as adventure topping.
Old Brazza would be revolving in his grave.