The village

Question: can a young woman born and raised in the US survive for 10 days in the bush in Africa without electricity or running water during the hot dry season? Answer: yes. I return victorious.
So much has happened in the last couple of weeks, it’s hard to even know what to say. So I will try to keep this to the most interesting or noteworthy events that have transpired. Two weeks ago on Friday, Jeff, Ramata, Seydou and I set out for Tedie, the village I will work in. We hired an SUV to drive us out there. Let me tell you, if you like off-roading or extreme sports like that, then Mali is for you. On-roading in Mali is like off-roading. The highway, "goudron", is okay (though full of potholes), but once you turn off and head into the bush, the only way to tell the difference between what’s road and what’s not road is where there are already other tracks from motorcycles or donkey carts. It’s a miracle anyone knows where they’re going. We only broke down once on the way over, and it happened to be in this little paradise known as Borko. There were streams flowing, fields of corn, mango trees, brilliant blue birds. We were there for about an hour as Seydou hitched a motorcycle to the nearest town for some roap, after which he and driver rigged something up and we were on our way again.

After that, the road started to climb, and soon we were up on the plateau with the flat plains of Mali stretching out through the dust below us. The rocks up there are amazing. Big shelves of rock, huge flat boulders that conceivably tumbled from somewhere, though it’s not clear where. Little villages along the road where kids spot you and yell out "Ca va?" Finally, we arrived at my village. It turns out, Tedie is kind of like the collection of villages up there, but each individual neighborhood of houses has a different name. I live in Tongo-Tongo. It’s just a smattering of stone and mud houses perched up on the rock shelf. But more about that later.

When we got there, we were given seats in the "hanger", kind of like a shed or covered outdoor area, and the important men of the village (the chief, the former mayor, the school director) gathered to discuss my future. Jeff showed them his research authorization and they welcomed me warmly. They said the hanger was mine to use and give me a couple rooms in what later seemed to be the building where teachers are lodged at times. My house there is made of stone covered in "banko", a mixture of mud, sand, and manure, with a dirt floor. It’s hot as hell inside most of the time, but it does the trick for housing my stuff. Most of the day you spend outside.
Anyhow, life there is slow and quiet. There’s no electricity, so there’s no lights at night, no television, no fans. You just have what nature gives you—if a wind kicks up (which it often does, being at such a high elevation), it cools down, the full moon lights up at night. People have flashlights and stuff, and little radios, but it’s really like stepping back in time. Most of the day, though, I didn’t even notice the lack of electricity. Honestly, a lot of the time, there’s just no need. But when the afternoon became sweltering and I wanted to take a nap inside, I would have killed for a fan or some air conditioning.

Sleeping there was also not the most comfortable. It’s too hot to sleep inside, but if you sleep outside, chances are a huge wind will sweep through at some point during the night and pelt you with sand and dust, at which point you move inside and swelter. So every night it’s a question of: do I take my chances with the wind and enjoy at least a little bit of cool sleep, even if I have to move at some point? Or do I stay in one place but sweat like a dog? I vacillated between the two.
The one good thing about the hot, dry season is that there are nearly no insects. Just flies. But with the advent of the rains, we will start getting mosquitoes and I will enter my long period of hypochondria. Here in Douentza, it still hasn’t rained, but the first rain of the rainy season came last night in Tongo-Tongo. More about that later. Anyhow, in the morning, you wake up with the sunrise because that's when the hundreds of animals that live all around you start crying. There's this stupid goat that's tied up in the courtyard over who has a kid whose not tied up, so in the morning, the damn thing starts shrieking until the baby returns, then they converse. And then there are the roosters who insist on crowing two feet from your head as you try to sleep. Not to mention the people who start coming through with the greetings the minute it's light out. No, no, sleeping in is not an option. On the other end, I'm completely wiped out by 9 or 10 at night. Very strange for me.

Anyhow, the people of Tongo-Tongo are great. At least the men. The women in the bush work like dogs. It makes me angry to see their life—one of two wives, seven or eight kids, working all day while the men sit in the hanger and drink tea. But what can I do? I discuss with people—that’s what you do in the evening, you sit around and chat, the "causerie". I’ve gotten up on my soapbox about women’s rights, and that’s about all I can do. I’m treated as kind of a separate caste there. They don’t know what to make of me. First of all, white skin. The kids are scared of me and also laugh when they see me. The women also laugh at me. Why don’t I have any children? Why do I sit with the men all day and drink tea? For the moment, I just have to do what keeps me sane, and that’s to talk with the people who are talking, namely the men.

The village chief is this old man with kind eyes and grey hair. He doesn’t speak any French, but as I progress with my Tommo-So, I can talk to him a bit. I can at least get through the greetings. Dogon greetings are an elaborate ritual that depends on the time of day and that happens whether you haven’t seen someone for three hours or for three days. Sometimes I mess up and use the wrong time of day "how are you" equivalent, but for the most part, I’m good now. Otherwise in Tommo-So, I can say simple things like "I’m not going to the market today", "Aren’t you going to bathe?", "No thank you". I’m getting used to the rhythm of the language too, so now when I listen to people talking, I have the impression that I understand, even when I don’t. People are patient with me, though, and try to help. There are other people who speak French, too, at varying degrees. Everywhere from people who speak no French, to Solomon who can say some things and calls me Yora, to Monsieur Mousa, the little teacher who never tires of talking. People say he’s a "fou gueri", a cured crazy. Not sure entirely how crazy he was, but he certainly can keep on talking for hours about the situation of the teachers in Mali, the state of affairs in the world, his prayers, everything. It’s quite a cast of characters there. Then there are the old toothless women who come by with their eyes askew, who greet me then say things to me that I don’t understand and laugh at my blank stare. There’s an adorable two-year-old boy named Samba who tromps through and treats me with caution. All little kids here are naked from the waste down, basically. So many naked kids. Then there’s the other two-year-old boy, Noun, who always has snot under his nose and who is much more of a terrible two than Samba.
Sometimes we go out walking to the neighboring villages—Anju, Entaga, Gene—to greet the elders and show me off. People get such a kick out of the fact that I can greet and say my name in Tommo-So. When I’m actually able to communicate, it’ll be great.

Seydou and I took off to the market at Mory one day, which was my first time on a motorcycle. I was half terrified, half having a great time. Again, these are the non-roads we’re talking about, with rocks and sand and pebbles, but Seydou is a good driver and I felt safe enough.

Communication, however, is a problem. There is nearly no cell phone network, and the service I have, Orange, doesn’t work at all. Malitel works if you climb up this big hill and go over to the rock with the forked stick stuck in it that you hang the cell phone on (as if that makes it work). Even then, service is spotty. That I don’t like. I don’t like being in the middle of nowhere, unable to communicate. My grandfather passed away the Saturday after I arrived, and I couldn’t get ahold of my family more than to hear them say that. When I heard that, I wanted to come back quickly, so Seydou decided he would stay longer and we would go back together that Friday on motorcyle and foot down the hill. However, come Thursday, when we called Jeff to make sure things were in order, he told us he decided motorcyles were too dangerous and that we would have to wait until Monday when he would send the SUV. That was a discouraging moment, to be sure.

There were other discouraging moments too. For example, that Friday, there was the inauguration of the new school and there was a big dance being held. Seydou and I went over to see, but the people who were effectively the bouncers yelled at Seydou to put away the camera and then demanded money. And there were about 200 children surrounding me, touching my skin. It’s at moments like that you wish you weren’t white. Why couldn’t I stand there and watch the dance like everyone else? But I guess these are the monsters created by tourism. For the most part, I haven’t had problems like that, though. My white skin is a novelty, but not really a curse.

Food in the village gets monotonous. We bring in rice and pasta so I can avoid millet paste (which is not good, it turns out), but rice, macaroni, rice, macaroni gets old really quickly and leaves you with no desire to eat. Twice we bought chicken to get a bit of protein, but I still have been losing weight. Seydou tries to force feed me, but I have no desire to eat my body weight in rice. On the subject of chicken, meat is very fresh here. As in, an hour before, the rooster is alive, being held by its feet, then its throat is cut and it’s plucked in front of you. It doesn’t get much more fresh than that.

But about the rain. Seydou and I had gone inside to split my headphones and listen to my discman last night because a wind had come up, and about fifteen minutes later, the rain came outside, then it started raining inside. The water came right through the roof, taking the mud with it. We scrambled to get the mattresses into the dry part of the house as the rest of it became a muddy mess. I had mud water in my hair and my clothes and we just stood there, watching it rain. Surprisingly, I wasn’t too discouraged. I think by that point, my skin had thickened to circumstances a bit. Anyhow, we got someone to open the room next door, which was dry, and we managed to sleep in there.

But in general, at night before the moon comes up, there are more stars than I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s absolutely beautiful. And you’re out there, surrounded by trees and dirt and rocks, and it’s an exhilerating feeling. Work is coming along. I’m in good spirits. But it’s good to be out of the village and back in Douentza. I’ll be here until after the 4th of July, so more constant updates in the meantime.

RE: the discussion of pangolins in the comments. Mark my words, I shall seek them out, even if I have to go to Ghana to do it, and I will avenge the name. In the village, I saw what initially I thought was the French word for pangolin, "kipique", which turned out to be hedgehogs. Two little spiky balls the kids had caught. Dang, they were cute, but I had to run before they killed them and ate them because I couldn't bear to watch it.

I'm going to try to get some pictures up on facebook or here, but the internet is extremely slow. I'll keep you posted on that front.