The excellent Alice

Absolutely everything to do with this new project in Timbuktu has been exceedingly hard to get to work: first of all the sponsorship of the EAP: The Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library. (They are, in turn, sponsored by one of my country women: Lisbeth Rausing and her ARCADIA). I have been lucky four times running with the Djenné manuscript projects, and the staff at the British Library have always been very amenable and supportive, but this time they seemed to turn against me. They put up all sorts of obstacles which to me seemed quite non-sensical.  There had to be numerous rewrites of the project. In the final negotiations they did come forward with a conditional offer, but they insisted on INSTITUTIONAL STAMPS on the documents from the Timbuktu Libraries before they were willing to give their go ahead. I lost my temper and told them: “ Look, this is a war zone! Noone has had asked anyone for institutional stamps for years!” In the end they relented and that hurdle was crossed too.
Then the there is the question of transport to Timbuktu on the UN planes which has been rumbling on for months. The authorities are unhappy about toubabs spending any time in Timbuktu at all at the moment: the security situation is not improving, on the contrary. UNESCO had offered their support to start with, but in the last few weeks they looked increasingly as if they were withdrawing their support- and without them the project would wither and die. But alhamdilullah! there is the excellent Alice.
H. E. The Hon Alice Walpole, Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Mali, (seen left above with myself in Djenné a few months ago), energetic, enthusiastic and practical,  can  always be relied upon to step in with her pink high heeled shoes, ready to kick-start things which are running awry: She secured the tax free delivery of the project’s digitization material, when she allowed it to be addressed to the British Embassy; even more usefully, she just managed to sweet talk the powers that be at UNESCO so the project was put back on track: they WILL give their support so that we can board that Timbuktu bound UN plane in August: Father Columba, our Benedictine friar  from Minnesota with Walid, the Lebanese teacher who will give the digitization training to the new staff and myself.
And meanwhile I am in London...staying with my lovely friends David and Jeremiah, enjoying a sultry July. This is European high summer, a pleasure I had forgotten about. It is of course very different from the great heat of the Malian April and May when everyone tries to escape the blistering sun. Here the sun is sought not avoided and I soon revert to my roots and my European behaviour once more, finding myself exposing much more flesh then I would find comfortable in Mali...