I have now been in Sevare long enough to get settled and adapt to some of the local conditions. I try to live a life like all my neighbors. I have a mud walled room in a compound with a little over 20 other people. A few bachelors in the army and the family of the landlord share the space. We have a big open area in the middle with a couple trees and some sheep which is a good spot to sit down in a lawn chair. I read and chat with the men, while the women are busy cooking and doing other domestic activities. I’ve had real trouble getting into conversations with them, but this is out of the regular cultural context. Hopefully with time I can earn their trust. When the men aren’t around they help me with my bambara.

I eat rice, beans and local couscous on the street for about 50 cents a meal. I’ve got my bike that I cruise around town and to work in. Slowly I’m learning bambara, the main local language. I’m trying my best to integrate and understand the culture. For a while I thought I was doing a good job.

I have realized that the poverty in Mali is so severe that I am not doing what the locals do. I spend fifty cents on a meal while others spend hours pounding millet and cooking over a charcoal stove to make a meal for under 50 cents. My $2.00 daily food budget already makes my life much easier than the majority of Malians. I don’t ever walk away from a meal wondering when my next one will come. We are getting into what people call the hunger gap. It has been many months since the harvest and farmers are preparing the fields for the upcoming rainy season. People are nearing or have already surpassed the end of their food stock. Last year was bad for millet which means that right now many people don’t have enough to eat. Even the Peul (Fulani) herders have been selling more cattle than usual to pay for food. Others are selling whatever they have because short term hunger is more important than long term possessions.

I live in a house like almost everyone else accept I have two small rooms for one person. Some of my friends have four people in the same type of accommodation. I have two light bulbs which gives me more electricity than about 80% of the people in town. A street nearby has hundreds of people reading the Koran and studying every night because it is the only place the public has access to light. I love seeing groups of students with a chalkboard sitting on the small boulevard under the orange street light.

A lot of the things in my town are very romantic. The mud houses, donkey carts, women doing laundry at a public tap and calls from the mosque at times of prayer are things I see and can easily romanticize. The Peul women carrying fresh milk on their heads, with gorgeous colourful clothing makes me thing of “the good old days” when you bought your milk from the person who milked the cow. The wonderful simple life without worries of cell phone calls, declining stocks or getting the kids from the suburbs to soccer on time. But life isn’t that simple. If that woman doesn’t sell her milk today she’ll have no money. She’ll walk kilometers in the sun to find buyers for her milk. When the rains come poorly constructed mud buildings start to fall apart. No lights let you see the stars but make it really tough to study for school.

I am a part of all this just like everyone else but all of my actions are by choice. I choose to eat meals of rice and onions, ride a bike and live with enough electricity to be comfortable. My neighbors didn’t choose. It may look pretty to see 10 women washing laundry by hand in public but don’t think they had a choice in the matter. I can sit down beside them and do the same thing but I am free not to. I do the same things but don’t have the same experience. My citizenship and one week of income at home gives me more freedom than most people here.

I try to live in solidarity with my neighbors and want to understand the struggles they face. I am learning what they define as poverty. I may think the herders are poor because they are nomadic and have no settled home. They may think they are rich because they have many cattle and that I am poor because I am 24 and do not yet have a wife. I can try to go local but will never really do it. I can live in material poverty but I will never experience poverty in terms of opportunities or worry. I have security and peace of mind, many of my friends do not. I will not fully experience the lives of people here because I will only stay for about two years. My situation is temporary and by choice my neighbors is not.

The Malians living in poverty have a strength that I do not possess. I will continue to live, learn, love and share with my friends here, doing my best to live the same way they do. Hopefully we can create connections and have exchanges that are truly meaningful and move our global community in a positive direction. Solidarity is important but it will take more allow people to chose a live they value.

So I got a bike. Apparently I paid too much but such is the norm in these countries even after visiting four bike vendors and discussing the prices. I get the mechanic to add a rear brake, which is almost useless. My bike has 26 less gears and one less brake that can bring me from twenty kilometers and hour to zero in about 40 meters. I really wanted an old 10 speed road bike to fly around town at top speed. Those are hard to find while my blue steel one speed leisure handle bar bike is everywhere. After realizing the dream of the road bike is just that, a dream, I get the one speed. You could say I have simplified. As an advocate of appropriate technology it only makes sense that I have the most common, cheap and simple bike. Every mechanic can repair it, as can I, and spare parts are easy to find and after a couple weeks on the bike I’m realizing why the town has so many mechanics that are in business. This wouldn’t be so if I brought my rocking touring bike here from Canada. Although I could bring enough spare parts over and fix it all myself. I’m sure ebay and MEC could provide any addition stuff I needed on an internet order.

I take off from Mopti to do the 12 km trip to Sevare and am ready to feel that freedom a bike brings. About half a kilometer out of town I hear something and pedaling instantly gets a whole lot easier. Easy like there is no resistance, easy like my chain is off, easy like my chain is broken and lying like a snake on the road behind me. After 30 meters of braking at full intensity I come to a stop. There lies the remnants of my chain. I pick it up and stand for a while examining it. It’s not that bad just one broken link. This is one reason why things in Africa aren’t as reliable and efficient. Inefficiency breeds inefficiency.

As my bike always breaks down I can’t be on time and most people don’t have the financial freedom to buy something that won’t break down. They are stuck buying cheap things that break to buy more cheap things that break. As I ponder all this holding my broken chain in my now greasy hands, sweating in the afternoon soon what do I see coming at me. A kid speeding down the road on an old white Peugeot 10 speed road bike. He flies by me as I look on stunned, nothing moving but my rubber neck as if a supermodel just walked past. I pick my jaw up off the floor, wipe the drool off my chin and start walking back. How’s that for a stomp on the old toes. If I’m able to save money maybe I can move on up to a 10 speed in a few months. A 10 year old boy fixes my chain with spare links, a hammer, a screw and hunk of steel as a pounding plate in about three minutes. I give him enough to buy some rice, which is probably more than I should have given him. No wonder the artisans here are so skilled. At 10 years old they are out of school and working on the street. Most of the flat tire repair stations I’ve seen in Africa are manned by children no older than 12. Fixing flats must be the bottom of the barrel for mechanic jobs, a nice entry point for kids. If we found a way to truly give everyone the right of free primary education Africa would need a new legion of flat tire fixers, or maybe people would do it themselves.

The ride home is fabulous. The head wind makes it cool but tough with my one gear. Those people who decide what gear to make the one speed did a good job. You can go relatively fast or at a calm pace, but it’s no good for starting uphill or breaking speed records.

The next night I make my daily trip into town to eat beans at a nice little street stand run by a family that keeps producing new brothers, sisters and cousins every time I go. I’ve asked how many there are in the family and they say too many to count. I’ve checked out a room that would be perfect there however they want about twice as much as it’s worth. Even at twice as much it’s in my price range but I don’t want to contribute to the dual economy of foreigner and local. As a sort of a tax I don’t mind paying a small amount extra. The problem is that the mango seller with two mangos left could become apt to keeping them aside in waiting for a foreigner to pay an exaggerated price while locals can’t buy what they need. Worse yet too many foreigners over paying could increase the value of items such that the local population could not afford them. Of course a lot of this extra money being paid would go into the pockets of locals making them more able to pay. There would be many whose line of work would not allow them to capitalize on the foreign factor. This may encourage them to quit what they are doing as a livelihood and move into serving foreigners, who in their trendy ways may soon move on and leave the person without clientele.

It gets dark at seven and that is when I leave my house. My flashing rear LED, brought from Saskatoon, in full effect to avoid getting hit from behind as I cruise on the highway. Helmet on my head because I’ve invested too much to have it go to mush. Some people here wear helmets on motor bikes. More than in Benin although almost everyone in Ghana has a helmet. I wonder if they have many brain injuries? With the health care system maybe the helmet won’t really help. As I get into town just 20 meters away from my beans and couscous there are two policemen who stop me. Did you know it is illegal to ride a bike in Mali without a headlight? Of all the rules to have. As they explain the rule a Malian goes by with the same number of headlights as me but is not stopped. The one policeman is buddies with two guys from work, small town. I tell them I just got my bike yesterday. After a few minutes of discussion I am let off the hook. Second time in a week I’ve talked myself out of a ticket. Is that a karma debit?

So work has given me a nice red 100 cc motor bike. Work is little ways out of town so this is a nice luxury. I wish the bike had one less motor and two more pedals though. I think I will buy a crappy pedal bike to get around town and to and from work and only use the motorbike for long work trips.

Today I had to go to the bank in Mopti 12 km away. Mopti is a bustling compact city constrained by the Niger river. People drive like everywhere else in West Africa which means that it is not uncommon to see bikes swerving across lanes or cars parked in the middle of busy streets. Drivers just aren’t as predictable as they are in Canada, which leaves me a little on edge.

I arrive in the morning when traffic is busiest and have never been to Mopti so I don’t know my way around. I’m glad that this is my third day on the bike and I can now up shift and down shift with only a 20% chance of stalling. Going down a dirt road I come to a paved one that seems to lead to bigger buildings, and maybe banks, on the left. I give the old hand signal to let everyone know I’m doing a left hand turn. On the paved road the first car to come my way is giving me the old naughty finger shake. You know the one your mom gave you when you stole all her cookies with the pointer finger wagging back and forth. I decide to err on the side of caution and pull over and stop to see what his problem is. Just then a police officer comes up to me with the same finger wave letting me know I’m in trouble. I look down the street and notice it’s only one way. Then I look at which way everyone is going, not the same way I am. Ouch. The officer informs me that I have violated an official Malian traffic rule that does not allow one to go the wrong way on a one way street. Off to the police station for me.

At the police station I am sternly sat down and my keys are confiscated by an officer with more blank spaces than teeth. They want to know what I’m doing here and how I managed to go the wrong way on a one way street. I assured them Canada also has one way streets and it is not the concept that I had trouble with, it’s just that I missed the sign. They tell me that I must pay a $15 fine, which is kind of big when you are trying to live on a few dollars a day. Wondering if they are trying to take advantage of a newly arrived foreigner I ask if I get a receipt for my fine. They are none too happy to hear my question. I spend the next 10 minutes trying to talk myself out of getting into even more trouble for hinting at the possibility of corruption. We establish that I have caused many problems and that the police are all a bunch of great guys. I crack a few jokes and eventually they decide I’m not a bad apple. Now I know that fines in Mali do in fact come with a receipt. Just as I go to pull out the $15 and go on my way they tell me I can go as long I make sure to solve problems rather than create new ones. I hope I’m up to the task and on Saturday I’m looking for a pedal bike.