Trip to the PoPo

Me and Reaiah and one of the new chicas to Mali were heading to the office to get some business taken care of. We were just pulling down our road when all of the sudden I turned my head in time to see a moto (motorcycle) speeding toward the back of my truck. He jerked sideways to avoid hitting me and almost took out a pedestrian before falling over and almost sliding up under the back of my truck. Of course he got up, quite upset, and a little scratched from the fall, and shaking his finger at me. We just apologized and continued to sit there in the edge of the road because a small crowd of Malians was quickly gathering as the man was hollering at us. Being a few meters from our office, soon all of our Malian workers were out there defending us and trying to calm the mess down, but it didn’t do much good. All of the witnesses defending us, we couldn’t get the man to back down, so finally we agreed to call the police.
Once the police got there they started measuring something (never really figured out what that was about) and loaded his bike into the back of their truck. They almost confiscated another man’s bike who had accidentally almost run through their measuring tape (stretched across the main street) while they were ‘investigating’.
So then it was our first trip to the police station, still unsure if they might lock me up for no good reason (actually just for being the foreigner, and the one with the car=$). We waited, talked to the officer, waited some more. Seems they all knew it wasn’t my fault, but none of them wanted to do anything to the poor man who was actually bleeding a little next to me and who, turns out, is the neighborhood Imam (equivalent to our pastor). Finally he gave up and wanted to go home, so they gave us our papers back and let us go. Completely shot our morning and all the stuff we had meant to get done, but I guess I should be glad I didn’t get locked up. I think that would’ve just been too much for our supervisor to handle that day. Mark off another first for me…