“We’re all millionaires, but we’re completely poor.” It was this comment by a taxi driver during my trip to Zimbabwe last week that exemplified the troubled state of his nation, which the US has dubbed an “outpost of tyranny.”

A few figures from the trip:

• One US cent: What a Zimbabwean $100 bill is worth after years of hyperinflation.
• $3.9 million: My rental-car bill in Zimbabwe dollars (about US$400)
• 10 minutes: How long it took me to count a four-inch stack of Zimbabwe $20,000 bills to pay the rental-car agency and have the clerk check my counting.
• 1.5 million: The number of Zimbabweans – out of 12 million total – who the government admits are seriously short of food.
• 4.8 million: An independent estimate of the actual number of Zimbabweans short of food.
• 25 years: How long President Robert Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe.
• 36.61 years: The average life expectancy at birth of a Zimbabwean – the fourth-lowest in the world, according to the CIA World Factbook.
• 2: The number of people during my four-day trip who asked me to help them get out of the country.

One of the challenges of covering the recent Pan-African Film and Television Festival (FESPACO) in Burkina Faso has been getting there (and back). There are currently no direct flights between Accra, Ghana, where I live, and Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. Buses ply the 600-mile journey every day but I'm frightened by the speed and recklessness of their drivers, so I chose to drive my own car.

Taking a vehicle across borders in Africa involves a certain amount of paperwork. I had to obtain a "green card," which is an international registration certificate that looks just like a passport, a "brown card," insurance cover valid for West Africa, both of which I had before leaving Accra.

At the Burkina Faso border, I had to get a "laissez-passer," a temporary registration card for that country. Yet obtaining these documents and crossing the border took nowhere near the time that I spent on the side of the road dealing with car trouble.

Thank goodness for Africa's roadside mechanics. In every small town along every main road I've traveled in East and West Africa, I've seen veritable strip malls offering tires, welders, body shops, and mechanics of varying skill levels. While a breakdown on the road is never fun, one is rarely far from help. And the help that is almost always both inexpensive and honest.

Before leaving Accra for Ouagadougou, my 1994 Nissan sedan has had its share of problems, but I did all the pre-departure checks I could think of and the car seemed to be running smoothly. I loaded up the car with a journalist friend from Nairobi at 6 a.m. on departure day, turned the key, and nothing happened.

My battery had mysteriously died overnight. I called my mechanic, who left behind his breakfast, dashed to my house within a few minutes, diagnosed the problem and gave me the battery from his truck. He didn't charge me anything.

We travelled about 400 miles that day, arriving at dusk in Tamale, a small city in the semi-arid north of Ghana. The next morning, the car started fine, but made an awful muscle-car rumbling noise. I took a look underneath and could see the exhaust pipe had come away from the manifold. A guy named Ahmed who was sitting beside the road helped me find a welder who fixed the problem within an hour and billed me $2. I gave him $3 for not trying to take advantage of a foreigner in a bind.

About 40 miles down the road, the rumbling began anew. The exhaust pipe was again dangling, the $2 weld hadn't held. The next settlement of any size was called Walewale, where I learned I needed an electric welder instead of a gas welder. At the Hope Hands Fitting and Welding Shop, the electric welder did the job for $4. It has held since.

In the photo above, mechanics at the Hope Hands Fitting and Welding Shop work on my car.

On Sunday, the morning after the film festival's award ceremony (in which the South African film Drum took top honors) I left Ouagadougou carrying a different passenger, a radio reporter from Berlin.

About 80 miles south of the city, as I touched the brakes to avoid a flock of guinea fowl crossing the road, my front right tire blew. And I mean blew. It was ripped to shreds, the steel belts sticking out from the rubber like a mad scientist's hair.

A bunch of children and young men from the nearby collection of huts - a village called Pihgyiri - came to help. I jacked up the car and got the tire off, but when I tried putting on the spare, I discovered that it didn't fit. The used-car salesman in Accra had obviously just given me whatever tire he had lying around, and I'd never checked.

So I flagged down a "bush taxi," in this case a putt-putting Peugeot station wagon with a ripped-out interior, cracked windshield and lack of functioning door handles. It cost $1 to get me and my tire to the next town, Po, six miles further along the highway. There I bought a used tire for $15. The seller took me to a different guy, Sulieman, to fit the tire on the wheel (charge: $1). To do so, he started slapping some substance that resembled a kind of porridge eaten in West Africa. I asked, and he told me that it was precisely that porridge, "gari," made from the pounded flour of the cassava plant mixed with water.

I've never liked cassava, finding it rather gluey. This practice sealed my opinion. It also sealed the tubeless tire quite well to the rim ... it held for the rest of the trip.

But my visits with the roadside mechanics weren't over. North of the central Ghanaian town of Kintampo, something very strange was happening with my electrical system. Turning on the four-way flashers caused my engine to turn off. When I turned off the ignition, the oil light and battery lights lit up. I explained this to the roadside mechanic who came to my aid, and he promptly started attacking the carburetor.

I kept protesting, but only after he siphoned fuel up to the carburetor with his own lips and the car still wouldn't start did he agree to summon an electrician. The electrician then listened to the bizarre symptoms, poked around the fuse boxes and eventually found a loose connection. He didn't state a price, so I gave him $1 and he smiled.

My Nissan and I are now safely back in Accra. But the 1,200 miles of road had some rather nasty potholes, and I think I need new shocks.

Sitting in the fluorescent-lit waiting room of Soweto’s Jozi FM, doing a story on a popular South African radio show called “Cheaters,” I got to talking to two women who said they were there because they’re both being two-timed by a guy named Thabo. Their names are Florence and Portia. They were there that night to try to lure Thabo into the studio – and expose his cheating ways.

As we got deeper into the conversation, I asked them if they thought all men were cheaters. It’s a common belief in South Africa, where many people think having a mistress boosts a guy’s manliness. This phenomenon of multiple partners – among both men and women – is, sadly, one of the reasons HIV/AIDS has spread so fast in this country, where roughly 1 out of 9 people are thought to have the virus. So their answers are a window into whether the AIDS virus can ever be slowed or halted.

“The only way you can stop any man from cheating is to put the muti on them,” Portia said, referring to spells cast by traditional healers, or witch doctors. She added that she didn’t have much faith even in the healers’ abilities to stop men from cheating.

But Florence, clearly the more optimistic of the two, disagreed. “Not all men are bad. But this one is,” she said. “And that’s why I want to expose him.”

Exposing the rotten ones, she implied, would scare the others away from cheating – and perhaps help stop the spread of AIDS.

Mike Crawley - Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

It must be the only film festival in the world where a pair of hyenas and a pair of crocodiles live at one of the movie theatres.

Cinema Neerwaya is one of the main venues for feature films in competition here at the Pan-African Film Festival (FESPACO) in Ouagadougou. The cinema’s owner, Frank Aleng, loves hunting even more than film and captured these animals in rural Burkina Faso, their caretaker Suleiman explained while tossing a sheep’s head into the cage.

That’s just one of many things that makes FESPACO both weird and wonderful.

I want to emphasize the wonderful. The audiences form probably the best examples of racial mixing I’ve seen on this still somewhat divided continent. I’ve seen Europeans wearing African clothes sharing tables with African directors dressed in suits, talking in a mixture of French and English. I’ve met designers from Slovenia, volunteers from Japan, a Venezuelan researcher living in Paris, and a plethora of talented folks
from places all over this continent.

The films on offer are particularly special because they open windows on a variety of experiences that don’t get shown at your local multiplex. The atmosphere around the cinemas is party-like, with meat roasting on barbecues, popcorn for sale in plastic bags and all sorts of African music styles pumping from huge speakers.

FESPACO transforms Ouagadougou just as cities around the world are transformed when tourists come to town: the streets get cleaned up, taxi drivers boost their fares, and souvenir sellers form a gauntlet outside every venue.

But perhaps more remarkable is how little life changes for most people in Ouagadougou. Sure, the festival organizers put on free nighttime concerts, and one non-profit group is taking a mobile cinema around to outlying villages. But most people are so busy trying to make ends meet in this desperately poor country that they can’t afford to stop working. Men keep repairing shoes and selling spare car parts, women hawk fruit and take care of children.

Speaking of everyday life in the capital, one of the films I’m particularly looking forward to seeing is "Ouaga Saga" – the story of a gang of Ouagadougou street kids who steal a motorbike and argue about what to do with the cash they make from selling it. There are more motorbikes in Ouagadougou than any of the 18 African capitals I’ve seen. Outside every cinema are awning-covered sidewalk parking lots where guards mind the motorbikes; for a fee of course.

And the fee goes up during FESPACO.