From the UNHAS flight to Bamako

UNHAS- United Nations Humanitarian Aid Service- supplies little propeller planes that flit  between the Malian outposts of Mopti, Timbuktu, Gao, Menaka and Bourem. Although difficult and fairly expensive to arrange, a ticket with one of these planes does at least more or less guarantee that one will get to one’s destination, which is an improvement on the normal MINUSMA planes which are free but nerve-rackingly uncertain unless one has a ticket stamped ‘MUST-FLY’ which hardly ever happens for people engaged in anything labelled ‘culture’. I am flying back to London tonight and am grateful to be sitting in this little plane winging its way to Bamako from Timbuktu, where I have spent two days in the UN ‘Supercamp’ this time, in the company of Father Columba from Minnesota our partner in this Timbuktu project and Dmitry Bondarev, my old friend and collaborator on the manuscript projects since the very beginning of the work on the Djenne manuscripts in 2008. 

                                                                         

We are following the course of the river Niger upstream- the water is still standing very high and some of the villages look precariously close to submersion even now, two months after the end of the rainy season and my river journey which followed this same course from the Timbuktu port of Kabara to Mopti.

It has been good to have my two companions with me this time- the three Timbuktu libraries  with their digitization staff are a militant and sometimes mutinous lot and it is always a challenge to face them on my own. Now I was blissfully able to hide behind Fr. Columba and refer their requests for health visits;  salary increases; the perennial milk demands etc. etc. to him for a change. 

                                                                           

                                                                               
The visits to Timbuktu are becoming increasingly   regulated by the UN because of the deteriorating security situation. This time we not only slept in the ‘Supercamp’ in little prefab rooms with our own bathrooms (more comfortable than the more utilitarian Swedish tented camp)  but we were also escorted into town by a team of our own blue helmeted soldiers from Burkina Faso and Senegal and we even had our own very cute little private tank that followed us around all morning as we went between the three libraries and finally made our courtesy visits to the two great Imams of Timbuktu: first to the Sankore Mosque below to visit Imam Al Aqib,

                                                                            
then Imam Essayouti of the Djingareyber, below:

                                                                                  

The British Library part of the project in Timbuktu will end in July, but the Minnesota Benedictines will probably still continue-  whether I will or not is still not clear.