Agence Future Travel log 3.7: Africa - Segou, Djenne and Mopti
On the way from Bamako to Segou we left too late and suffered badly from the daytime heat. We stayed with the family of a friend from Brussels in the bare tin roof room of one of their permanent guests. Bram found Segou the most well-organised Malinese town he had encountered. I interviewed two students who told me about the absurdity of NGO's for IT-development "when half of the villages in my country do not even have electricity".
Djenne, some long, hot but relatively fast kilometres along the road, has the largest mudbrick construction of the world, a mosque. We visited the sights but did not conduct interviews.
We got to Mopti in a day. En route we interviewed a young man attending to the shop of his boss and his unemployed friend. They talked about NGO efforts to plant orchards in their region and about the need for education if the future was to be any different from the past.
In Mopti, we stayed at a drop-in centre for street children. We interviewed the director, one of the monitors and two of the boys (there were no girls there, apparently they are too useful to families to end up on the street). The director and the monitor talked about their efforts to give the streetboys a better perspective on the future. The kids themselves had gotten the point and all wanted to become tradesmen.
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