The Journey South.

 

It started this morning in Bollnas, an ordinary little town in the ‘mid-North’ of Sweden where I go to see my mother and step father whenever I am in Europe. They are old now, and every parting is a little more melancholy than the one before. This time I felt that my mother thought we might never see each other again.

The great, never ending coniferous forests of the North sped past rain-ladened and the rain continued in Stockholm. But as the South approached the sun began to make an appearance and soon the landscape rolling by  my train window became dotted by little lakes that glittered in the afternoon sun with holiday makers rowing by their red painted summer houses.

 And the cows changed colour of course. When, as a little girl, I travelled on this southbound train I became beside myself with joy at this sure sign of arriving in southern climes: when the cows changed colour from brown and white to black and white I knew it was not so far left to go. I used to have a diary on my wall where I crossed off the days before I was leaving for the South for my summer holidays. And the South was of course Torekov my childhood paradise, the little fishing village on the south west coast where I learned to swim and to sail with all my cousins on those long summers when the sun always shone.

And this is where I am heading now, to Torekov, for a few days with my cousins before I continue even further South, and board my Bamako bound plane once more, via Istanboul this time. Soon I will be back in Mali again, meeting up with Father Columba who has travelled out from Minnesota, and Walid who has come from Lebanon. Together we will travel to Timbuktu again this time to start, finally, the digitization project inshallah...but the road forward is not so easy. Will we even get on the plane? UNESCO are uneasy about our presence in Timbuktu and have mumbled about maybe doing the training in Bamako instead of travelling to Timbuktu- but the whole point of this is of course that the remaining Timbuktu libraries do NOT want to take their manuscripts to Bamako!   Again I reflect that this project is certainly not straight forward...