The Road

We leave the city at dawn. The streets are not deserted.

Over the course of my trip I become obsessed with thinking about roads, because we spend so much time on them. The contrast between good roads and bad roads, and the implications of the qualities of a road for people, is extreme.

The two-lane tarmac road up to Fandriana, where the SMART project is based, is mostly good, and we are able to travel quite fast. Because it’s there, people use it a lot. So we’re sharing the road with ox-drawn carts, cyclists, minibuses, other 4-wheel drives, and lots and lots of pedestrians. The different speeds of these travellers, and the winding nature of the road to Fandriana, means lots of changes in gear. Lots of horn work, too, as we overtake, especially on bends in the road.

Sometimes I look at the pedestrians, particularly the children in school uniforms, walking towards us as we speed by. I think,
“Where are you going, mate?”
I’ve just come at least 6 km since the last major buildings. That is so, so far to walk every day, before 7am.

It’s particularly gutting to be speeding along a deserted stretch, and passing a woman sitting on her own. At the sound of the approaching car she holds up a scrawny chicken, or a makeshift cage containing two brightly coloured birds. She’s just sitting waiting for the sound of a car, hoping we will screech to a stop and leap out to give her money for this relatively useless pet.

My dad phones me, from a continent away in Europe, before he gets on a plane to go to another continent, Aisa. How incredible mobile phones are.

Mind you, I’m amazed by any technology. Dad phoned after I had just been to the toilet in a hole in the ground, so I’d just been musing on how wonderful simple flushing toilets are. 7 million people living in London, not counting tourists: God bless sewerage.

It strikes me that the scenes I’m seeing, more or less, are the same scenes my dad saw on his first trip to Africa, before I was born. People walking along long roads, skinny men walking beside skinny oxen and carts, women carrying large bundles of clothes, baskets, or hay on their heads. Shrivelled chickens pecking hopefully at bits of detritus on the path.

What’s different to what my father saw, 38 years ago? More mobile phones, more sports shirts. Probably a greater contrast between the trappings of the poor, which must have stayed constant at subsistence level, and the trappings of the rich, who embrace the bling.