We are village trekkers

Kevin and I got back from the village yesterday afternoon. For being a 48 hour trip, it was quite eventful. Where to begin?

We got up with the sun on Thursday morning to set out. With the rainy season over, the direct route is now navigable by motorcycle. Unlike the route via Borko, however, the direct way doesn’t have a solid road and is full of sand and dry river beds and rocks, thus I cannot drive it. We commissioned Oumar and another motorcycle to take us to the base of the cliff, from where we would carry on by foot. The road getting there was certainly exciting. Instead of taking the freeway, you go out the backside of town and drive along a little dirt track, surrounded by fields and huge boulders as you go deeper into the valley. After about an hour, we arrived where the motorcycle could go no further. It was a little Borko-esque oasis, with a clear stream full of tiny minnows and palms and the echoes of abundant birdsong. There Oumar and company left us, and we started our trek.

The first part of the hike to the village is scaling the mountain. It is like using a Stair Master for an hour straight, but the views are amazing. On the way up, we came across a young man named Hamma carrying a huge basket of millet on his head. He was from Ambile, the village at the top of the cliff, but he took it upon himself to get us all the way to Tongo-Tongo. When we got to his village, he took us into his house and offered us food and water, all of which I perhaps impolitely refused, not wanting to get sick. As is usual in a village I haven’t been to before, all of the children gathered around to stare at us. Finally, we kept going and got to Tongo-Tongo after about another hour’s hike. Overall, from the base of the cliff to my village, it’s about 10 kilometers, so we got our exercise.

Like always, the villagers were very glad to see me and were quite curious to see Kevin. He even picked up a little bit of the elaborate greetings. Ramata’s mother brought us lunch when we got there, millet paste with hibiscus calyx sauce, the first time I’ve actually eaten the staple food in the village itself. Surprisingly, both Kevin and I found it to be quite tasty, though I certainly wouldn’t want to eat it at every meal like the villagers do.

When we arrived, M. le Maire informed me that it was the last day of the millet harvest, so if I wanted to see it at all, we would have to go then. Exhausted as I was from the 10 kilometer hike, I pulled myself together to walk another 4 kilometers round trip to see the field where they were harvesting. In the end, I’m glad I did. There were probably a dozen people in the field, all with little hand knives that they used like garden sheers, only the other blade was the thumb. I tried my hand at harvesting a spike or two, but mainly just succeeded in getting the fiber-glass-like hairs of the millet spike lodged in my thumb. I was told that the field I had farmed a little bit at the beginning of the summer had given a good harvest and I had been deemed good luck. After harvesting a bit, M. le Maire took me to where the heaped all of the harvested millet spikes and sorted them by kind to be tied into bundles and taken back to the village. I saw the little black and white dog sleeping there by the millet, and he actually looked cute. Little did I know…

Anyway, once back in the village, we just hung out and chatted for a little while. We made a can of chili I’d brought for dinner and ate it with some bread and Laughing Cow cheese. I was told that the women were planning on dancing for us that night, something I’d been wanting to see ever since I first got there. Around 8 o’ clock, Ramata’s mother came into my house, as she is wont to do, and brought us a pitcher of millet porridge, which I tried to politely refuse, since I know it has some unboiled water in it, but she insisted on leaving it for us and told us that they were indeed going to dance. In an effort not to be rude, I boiled the porridge to kill off whatever might have been in it, and Kevin and I both ate a bit, though I can’t say as it was exactly good.

At about 9, the dance was preparing in our courtyard. A couple young women had stretched a mat out under the hanger with a big hollow calabash on it to be used as the drum. The celebration started slowly, Ramata’s mother and a dozen girls singing call and response songs in Tommo-So to the pounding beat of the calabash. At intervals, everyone would start clapping a rhythm and someone would go into the middle of the circle to dance, hands extended in front and butt extended in back, stomping a syncopated rhythm with the feet. Eventually the music picked up and they brought out the beautiful calabash covered in cowry shells to use as a percussion instrument. I was pulled into the circle to dance a couple of times, though I was basically just randomly stomping around and probably looked ridiculous. They eventually gave Kevin and I some chairs to sit down and watch the dance unfold under a million stars, punctuated by the occasional meteor. The dance participants slowly changed from mostly girls of 11 or 12 to the older women who would enter the circle and dance with much zeal. Ramata’s grandmother was an interesting spectacle. She would periodically go into the circle and drop on her knees or dance around, her shirt falling off of her shoulders until someone gently removed her to the sidelines. The whole occasion was filled with things I didn’t understand, people throwing down shawls in front of other people, women dropping to their knees and touching someone’s feet, twos and threes of women coming in and dancing determined by some system I didn’t understand. The only thing keeping me from totally enjoying it was the fact that I had gotten up at 6 am and walked 14 kilometers that day, yet the dance went on until past midnight, when Kevin and I excused ourselves for bed.

The next day before lunch, Bureima took Kevin and I over to the next village of Entaga, where we had our fortunes read by a man with bushy hair and one skewed eye named Binna Mousa. He reads fortunes in the traditional way of spreading out cowry shells and reading their alignment. We were ushered across his courtyard, carpeted by broken millet stems, into his little mud house, where I sat on a beautifully carved Dogon stool. Our fortunes were entirely positive and largely work related, or so we gleaned from the game of telephone that was the translation of the fortune. Binna Moussa told Bureima in Tommo-So, Bureima told me in broken French, then I translated the broken French into English. Basically, Kevin and I will both be successful in our work, as will Kevin’s sister. There will be no problems and people will travel around in my name. However, in order to make this come true, there are specific offerings we have to make: Kevin must give one white cola nut to an old man or woman, and I have to give seven tamarind fruits to a beggar child. Then we will be “bosses”.

Ramata’s mother made us delicious beans for lunch, then we headed into the village and out into the fields to look around. I showed Kevin the animist fetish, like a giant mud finger pointing to the sky, out behind the village. By the toguna, the round pagoda-like place where the men sit and discuss, they had slaughtered a sheep and the really old guy was hacking at the carcass with an ax. Later we sat down on the rock that was probably covered in sheep’s blood, but so it goes.

We went up the big hill that gives cell phone service and placed Scrabble in the shade of a rocky overhang. In the distance, the towering cliffs around Douentza jutted faintly above the horizon. We made our way back to the village as the sun set. After a dinner of more beans, we sat out under the stars with Ramata’s mother, and for the first time since I got here, my Tommo-So was good enough to actually carry on a decent conversation. She said it was getting cold here, but I told her it was very cold where I am from, and that the water “sleeps” (is frozen) for three months straight. Confused, she asked, “Doesn’t the sun come out?” and I told her it does, so she asked “Doesn’t it have any strength?” and not knowing what to say, I just agreed that it had no strength. Then she asked if all of the water in Bamako (the Niger River) went all the way to the United States. I told her no, we have a lot of water, but it’s not the same water. Then she told me about her children, about Ramata’s older sister who died and how beautiful she was, how Ramata would get married when she was done with school… I look forward to my Tommo-So getting even better and being able to really chat.

Our second night’s sleep was awful. While the first night we were there, the night air was cool and refreshing, the second night was stuffy and awful. On top of that, the once cute little dog chose the spot in front of my door to stand and bark incessantly around 3 in the morning. I wanted to go out and throw a rock at it, or shoot it or something (though I am generally against violence towards animals), but I was afraid of it. We woke up haggard at 6:30 and got ready for the return trip.

The walk to Ambile seemed a lot shorter, since we weren’t already exhausted from the climb. On the way, we passed then fell behind then passed a man from Anji carrying a chicken on his bicycle who was also going to Douentza. On our way down the cliff, we got lost. We were following a little dirt trail, but suddenly it turned into a sheep path and we were on a rocky field with a little stone house and no sign of the right road. After clambering up onto rocks in hopes of looking down onto the path, we finally retraced our steps through what I think was a cemetery, until we found where we had gone wrong. Finding the route down the cliff was all about finding the man-made rock piles, very barely distinguishable from natural piles, that indicated where one should climb down.

With aching knees and sweaty backs, we made it down to the bottom a little after 11, and we waited by the stream and played Scrabble until our rendez-vous with the motorcycles at noon. While waiting, a local farmer picked a couple of guavas and gave them to me, one of which was sour and unripe and the other of which was the most delicious guava I’ve ever tasted.

The roads were rather crowded on the way back with people going to Douentza for the market. Women walk the whole way from the village to Douentza with huge sacks of grain on their heads, and I have no idea how the make it down the cliff like that. It makes you feel like a wuss for being tired from your backpack.