Happy Birthday!
A nice Dutch family stayed with us yesterday. The daughter and her boyfriend were both celebrating their birthdays, by co-incidence on the same day.
I was also celebrating an anniversary on the 1st April.
A year ago the day before yesterday I arrived in Djenné, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, all alone, ready for adventure. (see the first and second blog entries, July).
I took a flat in town, something I had always dreamt of: to arrive in an unknown place, and to start a new life. In my fantasies I always invented a new persona too. Normally I was an emigré Russian Countess, who had suffered a broken heart , lost all her family and friends as well as most of her money on roulette, and who was now in search of a new beginning. But the Countess was cheerful, mind you, a bit like Die Lustige Witwe.
In reality I followed the plan but wimped out when it came to the new identity. Like the good catholic that I ought to be, I told the truth when asked and remained Swedish and boringly true to the details of my life.
Now I sit here, tired, tired, tired.
The f.....g Chinese generator is yet again playing up. And it is getting hot hot hot in Djenne. And in two hours the tourists are coming: three air conditioned rooms tonight and tomorrow the American Embassy is arriving to try us out. All I want to do is be somewhere where noone wants to talk to me, where noone wants to tell me that the shower has broken down in the Tamachek, that we have run out of ice, that there are no lemons in the market and that another ceiling fan has given up the ghost, yet another victim of the fluctuating power supply from the Chinese tyrant out the back.
And yet, we haven't done too badly and really, I am proud... But glad too to be going 'home' to Europe in a few days...