Wind Scattered, Part I: Taxi

Read Part 2

Three months spent training, learning local languages, cultural and security briefings, technical & professional development; a week spent in a tiny village on the road between two major regional cities; a hushed and frantic drive across the top of the country and over the border into Mali, escorted by armed US agents; a month of idle spectating, waiting on new political developments.

That is the sequence of events that brought Andrew, Kevin, Jeneca and me to the front gates of Tubaniso with our bags packed, waiting in the dead of pre-dawn for the arrival of a taxi arranged by phone the previous day.  Our Peace Corps program in Guinea had been evacuated and eventually shut down.  The hundred or so volunteers left without positions were asked to choose  between applying for immediate re-assignment to another country, or to return home to America with the promise of preferential placement if we re-applied to the Peace Corps in the near future.

Filled nearly to the brim with bitter skepticism about our past and future experience as volunteers and tempted by easy opportunity, the four of us decided to make our way home like vagabonds, winding across West Africa and Europe en route back to America.  The taxi would be the first step in the return journey.

We weren't the first to leave, but we were closer to the beginning of the exodus.  The most immediate consequence of that fact was a final night at Tubaniso, the Peace Corps facility where we had spent the past month, filled with bittersweet words of parting.  We debauched together with reckless abandon; hugs and kisses were distributed, chairs were flung across rooms in frustrated rage and sadness as the Peace Corps training group disintegrated, person by person.  Pain was numbed and effusive expressions of love and loyalty buzzed in the air with the music of insects and the tinny melodies from portable speakers.

And now we had arrived at the final moment of departure from our larger Peace Corps experience, and the beginning of something very different.  The car arrived, our bags were loaded, and we pulled away into the darkness, the last goodbyes from the handful of other volunteers who had stayed up with us still weighing heavy in our hearts.

Tubaniso lay on the outskirts of downtown Bamako; the trip to the main bus depot was like a tour and farewell to the desert Metropolis.  Head resting against the glass, I took in the sights out the window - mud-brick houses with corrugated tin roofs, hard dirt roads with scattered with plastic sachets and paper scraps, emaciated strays poking their heads into nooks and crannies,  a mild sewage aroma

wafting from the gutters on the roadside.  The longer we drove, the larger and more modern the appearances of the structures and scenery became; houses and road-side stands replaced by dancing clubs and convenience stores, buildings that might still look ramshackle to the eyes of a Western visitor, but clearly of higher quality compared to the outskirts.  The only thing missing was the people; it was the first time I'd ever seen the streets of Bamako unpopulated by the overflowing life of its residents.  All together, the surroundings suited my mood just fine; grounded in the beautiful West Africa where I'd spent the last six months of my life, but tainted with a hollow emptiness - an experience becoming a memory before my eyes.

For the last stretch of the car ride, the electric lights of the center-city sent orange planes of light sliding across the windows of the car, revealing four young Americans swept forward by global currents into the unknown.