Today could not have been more diverse, and I think I need to blog just to process some of what has happened. None of it was overly dramatic, but nonetheless...
Earlier today two of us attended a general information meeting for the humanitarian actors in Mali, facilitated by UNOCHA (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs). There was some hard news. Children in the north are being pressed into the armies of the insurgents. Some girls have been trafficked into this country from Burkina Faso as prostitutes, possible for the soldiers in the north. Some soldiers from Chad are reported to have been hurt, possibly killed, in ongoing fighting. Cholera is spreading south from the warzone towards the peaceful south. Menegitis and Measles are also on the rise.
Access to these areas for humanitarian actors continues to be a problem. Services, including simple medical services, are not in good supply. Food security will hit crisis point in the region of Kidal and the northern part of Mali's most famous province, Timbuktu, very soon.
After this we went to market. You've not been to Bamako unless you've been to the smelly, dirty, chaotic, overcrowded, crazy markets. I feel alive in places like this. People's everyday work in the downtown of the city.
We were there to prepare for next week when we are starting vocational training workshops, including soap manufacturing classes. Paying for and taking delivery of warehouse portions of shea butter (1.2 tonnes), perfume (61 Litres) and coconut oil (1260 Litres) make for a lot of work.
That's where things became comical. We arrived at our store room with our goods to await delivery via another truck of some of the other materials we needed (cilicate, caustic soda etc). Around 6pm we found out that the truck had broken down across town and that it had an open back (where people could potentially help themselves). So in our car (a small 4WD), we drove to start a shuttle service to retrieve what we could. As I'm loading caustic soda bags into the car (and managing to burn my arm because we had two sets of gloves between 6 workers) others were trying to make room in the store.
The storeroom is another story again. The local Salvation Army region recently purchased the building for their headquarters and for the ACI Corps. Unfortunately, the building has started to fall down, so they've had to abandon it while they wait for the builder to come back and repair it. One of the officers is praying that it doesn't fall on us while we are working!
It's a strange job I have. Within a day I'm wrestling with the idea of helping children forced into the hardest and most offensive of situations, then rescuing perfume and caustic soda from broken down trucks. Bed time.
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