Last week we headed south and east, into the interior of West Africa.
Ate breakfast at this “Fast-Foods” place — eggs and onions on French bread.
It’s there near the bottom of the menu — “omelette.” Wish I hadn’t cut off the next item on the menu — “shandwish.”Then this happened. A flat tire. Something you don’t want to see anywhere.And certainly not here.At least, if we had to, we could have asked this guy if we could borrow his cell phone. Instead, we put on the spare and hit the road for the next town, where we pulled in to get the tire patched.We had plenty of company as we waited — for two hours — for the spare to be patched. It had one pretty good sized hole, as well as a nail and some other bit of metal that had gone through.I was drawn to the contrasts — the guy on the horse cart with a cell phone, a mule hitched to a cart by the roadside as a tractor-trailer truck whizzed past, and this, a solar-powered cell-phone tower, with a mule and a goat grazing in the foreground. This photo was taken on our way back, after we crossed the border from one country to another. The border controls on this back route? A policeman came and lackadaisically asked if we were the same people on the manifest for the car, then retreated back into the shade. I can’t blame him; it was well over 100 degrees F.And finally, after we bought eggs for the next morning, I found a great illustration for how I often feel in West Africa.
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