What do you get when you mix a remote Tuareg village deep inside Malian Sahel region with no electricity or running water for that matter with a seriously curious mind with a strong preference for following world news? And if you spice it up with a pinch of an arid environment, proximity to nowhere except deserted border with Burkina Faso and rainy season approaching fast? Well yeah, you’ve guessed it! Nothing else but a brand new shiny satellite dish from CanalSat.
Now, this would be nothing special even in Mali, but remember this is village of Teberemt in one of Mali’s more remote areas. No electricity, no running water. And nearest settlement resembling at least from afar an urban area a mere 2 hours drive away. Well what’s this all got to do with a satellite dish you say. Bypassing the obvious need for a constant source of electricity to power the receiver and a TV set, the next stumbling block might be positioning the dish itself. Which includes fixing the dish on the pole firmly into the ground and rotating it towards the exact position of desired satellite somewhere on the sky above. And, ahem, all this is usually done by a trained technician for the obvious reasons.
But hey! Remember where we are? In the middle of very nowhere and of course there were no trained technicians on hand to bail us out of this mischief of ours… It was a nice regular hot as hell overcast day, air filled with sand and dust. And the guys decided tackling the satellite dish was the next best thing right after inventing a wheel. But hey, what’s gotta be done, gotta be done right? And so it was that the elders left the young guns go about their business. Almou was leading the charge along with Muftah – the chief of the village and Almou’s elder brother, Abdou, Ali, and a few other guys including two drivers and the resident herdsman.
The first part of setting up a satellite dish is not that hard. You find a stick, call it a pole and fix the dish on it followed by ramming the pole into the hard ground so it does not turn over. Oddly enough they’ve decided the best place is right in the middle of a goat paddock, but hey who am I to judge?! 😉 Next they’ve connected the dish to the set top box and this is where things went down its own unforeseen path. As they were getting no signal on the TV set they’ve decided to draft the most experienced person in village on board. Make him join their team. So they drafted me from my afternoon nap. Reasoning behind the drafting being that being a toubab surely I must know everything there is to know about the minor science of satellites and television combined. And guess what?! With nothing better to do anyway I gladly accepted the invitation and hopped on board.
My first move turns to be a success as I’ve managed to tune into the proper channel on the set top box. But that was as far as my knowledge was to go. Just when my fame was starting to sore to unknown heights turning me into nothing less than the saviour of the news we’ve hit a serious stumbling block. Which summed up in one tiny sentence in the guide book accompanying the set top box. A wee instruction. A line mentioning the positioning of the little receiver in the middle of the dish. See, you have to position that bloody little tube into the exact predefined spot on the sky if you are to catch at least a glimpse of a satellite signal. And, of course, nobody really had a clue where 19,2° could be on that vast sky. And, of course, our first approach was to simply try turning the dish and the receiver. So we’ve turned it a bit. And a bit more. And some more. And more. And even some more. Till we almost went crazy with searching. And just when we thought this try is gotta be the one the screen went black. No more signal. No more TV. Yap, you’ve guessed it right. We ran out of electricity.
If, by any chance you’re asking yourself where we’ve got the electricity in the first place, being in a place without one, well, as usual, simple solutions exist for most sophisticated problems. Muftah has a big car battery that serves as a generator. For emergencies. Like urgent refill of Thuraya – a satellite phone – and such. And this was the exact source of juice we dried up trying to fire up the satellite TV. But hey! If anything our team was ingenious. No battery, no problem. Where there are cars there are car batteries. And so it was they’ve parked one of the big Toyota’s right in front of the entrance and plugged the whole TV + set top box installation straight onto the car’s battery. And by act of prudence they’ve left the car running so the battery would not run out.
Happy to have solved what was thrown at us we went back to where we’ve got stuck. Which was finding that bloody elusive satellite up in the sky. The only important person at the time was the operator of the pole. The guy that was turning the dish in vanishing hope of finding that lone bird. Needless to say everybody wanted to have a go at it, and everybody did. Even me I gave it a go turning and turning that bloody dish and screaming towards the guys sitting in the shade inside in front of the TV “Can you seeee it yeeet?”. And of course they did not. We gave it another proper go but then had to admit defeat. A lone bird up on the sky beat us up. And late at night, lying on our mats under that wast and beautiful African sky Muftah was confined to the short wave news on his portable radio.