l'Amitié

This short article on Cote d'Ivoire's declining tourism industry mentions a beach village named Assouindé. As a volunteer in Cote d'Ivoire, I spent about a week there between finishing pre-service training and installing myself in my village. This post-training Assouindé trip was something of a tradition among PCVs, and volunteers found reasons to spend time at Assouindé on countless other occasions as well.

The default hotel for PCVs in Assouindé was called Hotel l'Amitié (Friendship Hotel). They had little bungalows right on the beach that were pretty bare-bones but dirt cheap. They also had a big wooden deck, where if you could tolerate waiting several hours for your food, they served their specialty of pasta with a red, creamy, seafood sauce that I still think about six years later. Mosts nights there were bonfires and drumming on the beach. There was an older woman in the village who sold freshly made fruit juices. Next door to the hotel there was an Italian man with a pet chimpanzee who ran a little cafe where you could get good coffee or limoncello. If you wanted anything else, say, some bangui (palm wine) or coutoucou (local hard liquor), the guy who ran l'Amitié would get it for you.

I heard through the Peace Corps rumor mill that l'Amitié was burned down by locals not long after the war broke out. Its owners, like the men interviewed in the tourism story, were Burkinabé and would have made natural targets in the ethnic violence that was widespread in the early phase of the war.

Cote d'Ivoire is supposed to have presidential and legislative elections in November as part of the national reconciliation. The peace process has been characterized by a number of apparent breakthroughs that have ultimately failed to hold up, and it would be foolish for an outside observer to predict whether this time things will be any different. Nevertheless, I'm hopeful and optimistic that the US isn't the only country that will be changing direction in November.