Good News!

No time to write anything of note (we are snowed under by Malimali work) but I feel compelled to  say at least something about  the two major bits of good news that  today has brought:

This morning Alpha (right) my saintly but ham-fisted tailor brought his brother (left) along to see me.  Now, this was something of an apparition since  the last thing I had  heard of him was on the day we bundled him  into a  bush taxi  to the hospital in Mopti  on what I presumed was to be his final journey– he was on the verge of death from a badly infected tooth and noone expected him to even make it to the Mopti hospital. But here he was! Safe and sound but with a great scar across his neck.

Alpha, by the way, would be mortally embarrassed if he understood what his T-shirt said. He, like everyone else here buy our cast- off  second hand clothes in the market for a small fee. It is much cheaper to  dress in second hand Western clothes than to have something traditional made. This has of course  all but ruined the indigenous clothing manufacture. But that is another story… Here in Djenné though  many people still dress in their traditional beautiful Grand Boubous, and Alpha only wears T-shirts for work.

And the other Good News today  is that the northern armed rebels which include the MNLA have finally decided to sign the Peace Treaty which has been negotiated in Algiers over the last few months . The signing will go ahead on the 15^th of April and Inshallah, it  will mark the end of these three years of profound Malian crisis and usher in the beginning of peace and prosperity once more for this bruised nation.