Expat Election Party!

It is almost 7AM and I'm writing from a small internet cafe in Bamako, which we rented out for the night to watch the Canadian federal election live on the internet. Unfortunately the star-studded CBC coverage was down, so we settled for CTV while checking individual ridings on canada.com.

Being sick all day, I spent the evening trying to get better enough to see the results come in. After all, missing this election would be like missing Christmas, although in this case, we knew that the crazy old uncle would come in to spoil things in the end.

Watching the results come in starting at 3AM was exciting. Considering that Joe had been working on a few NDP campaigns before he left for Ghana, he was quite happy to see Jack Layton, Olivia Chow and Paul Dewar (Ottawa Centre) win. Nobody is happy about the Tories in power, although at least it is only a minority, meaning that Harper is going to have to reach out if he wants to last longer than Joe Clark. We were qlso quite happy to see almost 30 seats for the NDP. Poor Paul Martin is toast.

Anyways, at 10AM, Joe, Matt and our new Korean friend Janir will be on a bus to Mopti while I will knock myself out with Nyquil. After that, it will be off to Timbuktu, hiking in Dogon country and then back to Accra for classes. (ho-hum)

I'll see you around the bend...