Call yourself a commuter?
Somewhere in Queens, Sylvester stopped the cab and turned round. “You wearing suspenders?” he asked. When roused at 5am, usually by a tearful child in London, I rub my eyes. But this was midnight on the Van Wyck Expressway, suburban New York. I rubbed my ears. Suspenders? Sylvester, a yellow cab veteran, sighed. “You know, suspenders, to hold up your pants.”
Read MoreAlways Eat on the Street
The best cooking is always streetside Open air cooking Three bowls happy A swank stop Oh am I hungry. Its been hours, seemingly days, since a good meal and I need one now. Not content to wait the usual two hours for ‘fast food’, there is only one option for…
Read MoreDust, Dust, Dust, Dust, Dust
Dust. Rust red dust. From microscopic airborne particles that collect on every flat surface or in your lungs to big sand granules that amass in every un-swept corner of Mali, dust is everywhere here. It’s in my laptop keyboard, on my clothes, and behind my teeth.
Read MoreDrinking Beer by Braille
Its happy hour in Bamako, Mali, and I’m at the Blue Box Bar with the Geekcorps. Now we call it the Blue Box not because there is any official name, no we call it the Blue Box because that is what it is; a big metal box painted blue. And as a metal box in Africa its baking hot on the inside during the day and still warm even at night. So we sit outside, in the soccer field, sipping our beers
Read MoreBusiness Sense in Bamako
Lets say you are a concrete building block maker in Bamako. You have your block form and a shovel. You walk to the construction site and make each block by hand. You mix the cement with the shovel on the ground, scoop it into the form, and then when it starts to fix and harden, you open the form and let it cure in he sun. This whole process doesn’t take more than 10 minutes and you make about 5 cents a block.
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