Presidential Lair and Office Space, Bamako Style

This week we had a meeting with Dr. Ina Togo at the Ministry of Health. She was the first woman in Mali to get a medical degree (from a French school). She grew up in a remote village in the Dogon country and somehow financed her education by selling shoes on the street. Caitlin is good friends with her son, so she agreed to get us a list of the equipment needed for the new clinic. The ministry’s offices were up on the hill next to the presidential compound. The president seems to have designed his compound after watching several James Bond movies- its set up exactly like the Goldfinger lair. You can approach the hill in a taxi, but after a certain checkpoint, taxis are no longer allowed. After charging us exorbitantly (tubabo tax) the taxi driver refused to go further, so we had to call Togo. She sent down her chauffeur to pick us up and he arrived a few minutes later, listening to Akon, in a tie-dye boubou in the nicest car I’ve seen yet in Mali.
The streets on the way up the hill were like the wide boulevards of Florida and lined with palms. There were no motos and just a five minute drive from the polluted Marché de Medine, the air seemed much cleaner. When we finally got to the top of the hill, the ministry buildings all looked like brand new versions of seventies style Floridian mansions. The parking lots were filled with sparkling SUVs and the ministry itself was almost chilly from the excessive air conditioning. It was surreal and even more suprising when Togo had the document we were looking for in hand when we arrived.
Unfortunately, Togo doesn’t exemplify typical Malian bureaucracy. After the visit on the hill, Togo sent us with her chaffeur to a regional health office to make sure the dossier registering the new clinic was on file (to ensure that the government will pay fifty percent of the cost of the new clinic and include it in the 2008 budget). Caitlin had the dossier number because apparently files in Mali aren’t organized by name or subject, but just by long 12 digit numbers. It took us three hours and the chauffeur’s amazing patience driving back and forth between two different regional health centers to finally find out that the woman with the correct file had just returned from an extended vacation and needed until at least Monday to put her hands on the file. At one point, Ben and I were sitting in the lobby of the center waiting for Caitlin to find the file. We saw her following a succession of three different secretaries up and down the stairs, and along the corridors, stopping in a series of offices to track down the file number. No one really seemed fazed by the search for the missing dossier. It was just another quest for another nameless file…