Bamako

The Parish Hall was full for the film show, hosted jointly by The Screen at Hay and Hay2Timbuktu.

The first half of the evening was a presentation by Mamadou Kone, who runs a Malian NGO called Jeunesse de Developpement (you'll have to imagine accents on some of the 'e's - I haven't worked out how to do that yet).
He did it all in French, with a translator, and I was quite pleased that I understood at least a bit of what he was saying!
A few years ago, Jeunesse de Developpement was set up by young Malian professionals, many of whom worked outside the country, and it has become one of the biggest organisations providing aid in the country. It was good to see what an African organisation could achieve, for a change, instead of seeing one of the big British charities doing work out there.
They do work in education, especially with street children ('jeunes de la rue') and health education, especially re-productive health. Sex is a taboo subject, so there's a lot of mis-information about, but this initiative tells young people clearly how pregnancies happen and how to avoid them, and provides contraceptives, too. They also work with young men in the young offenders' prison, and have a project in the south of the country with two or three hundred women who have started market gardens.
Some of the work they do is funded by Comic Relief, and they feel it is important to have both men and women in positions of authority and doing the decision making - one of their projects is training facilitators and sending them back to their villages to start women's groups, where they can learn to read and write, but also to make decisions that affect their lives.

There was a break for refreshments, provided by Oxfam, and all Fairtrade, followed by a few words from the Fairtrade lady who had, I think, come down from Llandrindod Wells for the evening. In Mali, one of the most important crops from the Fairtrade point of view is cotton, and they are trying to encourage organic growing methods and find markets for them.

And then the film, the main event of the evening.
A court has been set up in a courtyard in Bamako, with the people who live there wandering through to get water from the tap, babies toddling around, and even a goat that takes a dislike to one of the lawyers! The witnesses have gathered there to give evidence of how the policies of the World Bank, the IMF and multi-national companies have changed their lives. Meanwhile there is a sub-plot about a night club singer and her family - and even part of a Western seen on TV one evening.
It was mesmerising - at first confusing as the scenes seemed to have little relation to what had gone before, but gradually drawing you in - and the testimony was powerful. I think my favourite scene was where the old man who was told to sit down because it wasn't his turn to speak yet, at the beginning of the film, got his moment when all the eyes of the court were on him.
The final verdict of the court is never given though - you are left to make up your own mind after the passionate summings up.
It's one of those films I'd like to see again, maybe two or three times, to catch those moments that passed me by the first time.