The motorcycle is a trusty stead.

Al-hamdu lillah, I am home safe from the village. Once again, it’s hard to squeeze a week’s worth of especially exciting village time into a single blog entry, but I will try.

We decided that the time had come to attempt the trip to Tongo-Tongo on motorcycle, since in the end, having a motorcycle out there would give me more freedom and be more convenient. Our departure we scheduled for Saturday morning, 8 AM. However, Friday night, a huge rain storm came through, knocking out our electricity even.

In the morning, Minkailou and Seydou went off to check out the road and came back, saying it was too wet. Since they said it was just around the corner, I went with to look. I was expecting some big puddles, but to my surprise, there was a full-fledged river crossing the road. I told them that where I’m from, rivers stay put—they’re either there or they’re not.

Needless to say, our route was hindered. I was a bit discouraged, but luckily we got out the next day. We loaded up the motorcycles with all of our gear, and Seydou and I helmeted up (like the well-raised children we are), and we got underway. At the beginning, I was in high spirits. It was precisely that feeling that I came to Africa to find: cruising through the brush on motorcycle, detached insect wings fluttering up like flower petals around our tires.

However, if there’s anything this trip has taught me, it’s that there are always ups and downs, even in the span of a few hours. Pretty soon, we’d lost the road, fallen over in the mud, and had to physically get off and push the motorcycles up steep, rocky “roads”. To make matters worse, we only brought one jug of water with us for four people, a terrible lack of foresight in the African bush.

Maybe five or six hours after we set off, we finally arrived in Tongo-Tongo. It was great to be back, to be honest. It was a happy reunion with the people I had met a few weeks before (who perhaps thought I had fled forever). My Tommo-So was a bit better this time, too, so I could even converse a little bit. I got a nasty sunburn on my shoulders on the way over, even though I double applied sunscreen, and now it’s peeling, leaving a juxtaposition of two different races on the same set of shoulders.

Minkailou spent the night then left the next morning. Since I only had five work days in the village, I had to make the most of the time I had in a Tommo speaking area. Therefore, as opposed to eliciting grammatical paradigms with Ramata, something I can easily do in Douentza, I put on my Real Fieldworker Hat and set off to get cultural stuff.

What do I mean by cultural stuff, you ask? Well, each day was a bit different. On Monday, Ramata, Seydou and I took off to the fields to get pictures and videos of the actions of planting. Now that the rains of have come, grass has grown in areas I thought plants could never grow, and all able-bodied persons are working the fields. That’s the people’s job in Tongo-Tongo—subsistence farming. The whole community is largely self-sufficient. Anyhow, I tried my hand at hoeing (plus got pictures of a dozen different kinds of hoes), and also managed to bloody two of my toes on rocks in the span of about ten minutes. Good times.

The next day was dedicated to plant specimens. Seydou and I took to the fields with Bureima, Ramata’s older brother, to collect leaf specimens and get the names in Tommo-So. I filled my memory card with pictures of branches and leaf arrangements and pressed a bunch of specimens as well for Jeff to identify.

Wednesday, I elicited the words for different kinds of livestock: the difference between a bull, a castrated bull, and a bull that’s emasculated by crushing the testicles with a rock (this is the process used if the bull wasn’t castrated at a young enough age). I also got a whole lot of words for donkey tack and the word for the act of smearing feces on a cow’s udder to discourage the calf from suckling. I was definitely getting into the heart of the Tommo language there.

Thursday, we elicited agriculture words, as well as many words for pour, splash, drip, etc. Friday, I filmed the different pouring actions, possibly to present at the conference in Leiden. We also got words for religion and millet beer. Also accomplished this week: insect specimens.

Being in the village is always a trip. It’s very tranquil and interesting, but you get bored really quickly. Afternoon was always nap time, not because I was tired, but because I needed a break from sitting under the hanger listening to conversations in a language I only sort of understand. Luckily, the weather was much more pleasant than the first time around, so I could even sleep inside at night.

We ate much better this time than last. This time, as opposed to Ramata cooking, we commissioned the director’s wife to cook for us, and she did a pretty good job. We brought in some cans of peas and mixed vegetables to be cooked with chicken (which we had almost every night). On the subject of chicken, Tongo-Tongo was much quieter this time around, because apparently some disease came through and killed their chickens. Here are my fingers crossed to it not being Avian Flu. To keep spirits up, I bought a couple of cans of fruit salad at the Mory market. Never have syrup-soaked pears and cherries tasted so good. Here I’m always eating strange fruits I don’t know the names of in English. Were it not for Wikipedia, I would be forever in the dark. But here we go, names in Tommo: we have the kambe (best made into a juice), the bie, the mingyu (tastes like pumpkin and is apparently a laxative), the saa (wild grape), julO (some strange seed pod with a powdery yellow flesh), ElE (wild pea).

Last night, it looked like we were going to have rain, a sure curse for the road back. There was lightning in the distance on both sides of us and clouds approaching, but in the end, it went right around the village. Seydou and I took off on motorcycle around 7:30 this morning, this time taking the same road we took by car before. It’s longer in terms of kilometers, but the road is much better, and it ends up joining the highway (meaning the road is paved, otherwise the traffic level is more or less the same, i.e. nil).

When we first set out, we got completely lost in the bush. This is not hard to do, because as I said before, the road is just a well-worn path—if you take one well-worn by, say, cows, you will soon find yourself surrounded by thorny trees with no road in sight. The plus side to this bush sidetrack is that I saw a lot of bird species—ibis things, big eagles, egrets, brilliant blue kingfishers. It was very serene indeed.

Around 11:30, Seydou and I rolled into Douentza with no other injury than very sore butts (it turns out that four hours on a motorcycle is not the most comfortable experience). As always, it’s good to be back to refrigerated beverages and water I can drink without boiling. It was a good stay in the village, albeit short (perhaps this is why it was so good?). Now it’s on to sorting out all of the pictures and videos I took and getting ready for my imminent trip to the opposite extreme of Mali civilization: Bamako.