Hello from smelly French
Ivory Coast.
None of the five days I spent in this dirty, smelly city in French Cote d'Ivoire
could be
described as vaguely enjoyable. Everything seemed to require a struggle,
mostly because no one wanted or could communicate with me in English and
ridiculed my feeble attempts to use the little French I could remember
from high school. Even the television offered French channels exclusively, not
even ubiquitous CNN! None of the English language newspapers found in
other foreign capitals were anywhere available in this forgotten French
outpost.
While there were plenty of cafes, few looked up to my now somewhat more
accommodating standards of hygiene. Of course there were no American fast
food places like Mac Donald's or Burger King in this Anglo-phobic part of
the world either. People on the street, while not always hostile,
certainly were not outgoing and friendly to my eye. One exception occurred
in the elevator at my hotel. One evening a well dressed man
riding up with me turned and solemnly asked: "American?" When I
indicated agreement his sad expression followed by softly spoken French words I
could not understand made it perfectly clear the depth of his sympathy for
the suffering Americans. As he spoke his eyes glistened with emotion and
his right hand touched his heart; gesture which needed no interpretation.
I am sure he must have been looking for some American with whom to share
his compassion for all these days since the 9/11 disaster. I am grateful he chose me to
be that person.
The infrastructure in the center of the city is more or less First
World, but once you get ten blocks or so from the center the quality of
sanitation deteriorates noticeably. The stench of rotting fruits and
vegetables piled in every other alley from the day's street markets,
occasionally whiffs of human urine from the very common public peeing
by males (I can now easily differentiate between the human and animal
varieties!), frequent waves of raw sewage odors from open drainage
channels overwhelm your senses unexpectedly.
Smokers in public places are arrogant, smoking with impunity in front
of ¨No Fumar¨ signs. My requests for compliance were twice rebuked with
one guy giving me a good tongue lashing in French. I still see quite a bit
of unselfconscious male crotch grabbing on public streets, sometimes
escalating into an orgy of vigorous fondling! No one pays any attention to
such antics at all.
Want a pedicure? Sit right down here on the curb for
the works. No waiting. Coconut sellers prepare their product by deftly
removing the hard shell from half the nut leaving the white meat exposed
and looking like a snow cone. Oranges offered for immediate consumption
have had the outer bitter portion of the rind carefully shaved off leaving
the fruit now enclosed in the light yellow pulpy inner portion of the
rind.
I spent five nights in Abidjan getting visas for Mali, Berkina Faso,
Senegal and Ghana. The Hotel Ibis is far from elegant, but at $48 per
night it is among the cheapest in the capital city. Internet access runs
$4 to $6 per hour and is troublesome. Again a little kid of about three
yelled ¨Hello Daddy. ¨ You've got to wonder who taught him to do such a
thing upon seeing a white male.
The bus station is like most I've had to use throughout Africa; dirty,
hectic, crowded with touts wanting to ¨help,¨ waiting passengers with
their piles of personal belongings and cargo enclosed in huge cloth bundles, surly
bus company employees who cannot speak even a few words of English and
refuse to take the time to decode my encrypted French... you get the idea.
The 11:00 bus to Accura Ghana didn't leave until 13:00 meaning we would
not arrive in Accura until after dark. As the reality became clear I made
plans to abandon the bus as soon as possible once inside Ghana. That
turned out to be in Takoradi our first stop after crossing the border.
Peace,
Fred Bellomy 16 September 2001
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