To Korhoga
We spent the last two days on pavement getting north quickly to Korhoga. One in every ten trucks we see is broken down on the side of the road often with two or three men sleeping under or in front of it, I guess waiting for parts, sometimes with a cooking fire going. These are big three axle trucks loaded to the gills, often running with one or two ruined tires flapping. The potholes cause them to swerve all over the road to miss the often 3 foot or more deep potholes. We did not get a flat in our first month on the road but we have had three in two days, all steel belt wires.
Looking forward to more dirt roads from her as we start to head south to Man. Little has changed in Cote D’Ivoire from Ghana except the language. We continue to be a spectacle drawing lots of attention, all of it friendly. The drivers are very respectful, today we had a cop on his way to work in civilian clothes on a motorcycle turn around after passing us in the other direction to come and chat. He was gracious of our time and just wanted to hear our story. We get friendly honks and waves constantly. The kids are hilarious, happy and thrilled if we give them a balloon or a pencil. We get cheered from school yards as kids run out to the road to greet us. In Ghana it was “hi bronie” (white man). Here it sometimes “monsenior blanc”. Always respectful and playful.
There are some tough images of poverty and poor living conditions, but much more often we see happy, healthy, proud families, even in those conditions. The adolescent girls are working the store, doing laundry, watching smaller siblings. The boys have the teenage coolness that teenage boys everywhere have, but are never rude or troublesome. It is so cool to watch them all laughing and having fun walking to school in their uniforms.
One of the hardest things for me to see is all of the plastic trash strewn about everywhere. There are some efforts to clean things up but for the most part as we enter a village you can tell how big it is by the size of the trash heaps on either end of town. The streets in the village are not much better. Educated Africans complain about this and explain that it comes from centuries of everything being wrapped in leaves or corn husks, not plastic. I realize it is my western sense of values that I am reacting to. These people make far less trash per capita than we do, we are just better at keeping it out of sight.
The people are the reward here. Almost all express a love of the US and a desire to be like us. I always say that there are many things we could learn from them, when I do I can see the pride in them of their country even though they long for change.
We spent tonight fixing tubes from our flats, doing laundry and getting restaurant food, although we have gotten good at street food and it is amazing to see how it changes as we move around. You get what is grown locally, or you pay US prices at infrequent high end grocery stores. Up here in the north there are coffe stands everywhere, which I love. An expresso is about 30 cents, but a bottle of coke or sprite is a dollar. The street food vendors are a constant source of fun for us and Sherry has found them very accommodating of her vegetarian diet.
Tomorrow we take a day off exploring the bigger city of Korhogo then onto some more back roads to start heading south and west to Man.
