When I left Johannesburg, South Africa for Bamako, Mali I oddly found myself on a plane bound for New York City. Unbeknownst to me until check-in, flights from Tambo International Airport to JFK stop in Senegal to refuel. Darker is the final destination for only a handful of passengers, and a layover for apparently just me. Flying up the continent I contemplated how possible it would be to not disembark in Dakar, to call my parents from JKF, and wait for them to pick me up while eating an everything bagel. It was impossible for me not to think this while sitting between passengers bound for the city that makes me drool over soy buttermilk biscuits from Sacred Chow and the public library system in equal measure. But really, I was thrilled to be heading to Mali. Once I took a job that pays in maloti, I assumed air travel would be out of the question until I’m shipped back to America at the end of my contract. I got ridiculously lucky. For once, my work, my traveling whims, and the opportunity to see a far-flung friend were not at odds. Although I got kicked out of the NYC bound plane in Dakar, I was sent hurtling toward Dogon country, Timbuktu and my favorite peace corps volunteer on the planet, a fabulous slice of Jersey right here in Africa.
I’d love to skip straight to the part where Kate and I gallop off into the sunset on twin camels in a kola nut induced euphoria, and I will skip most of the unpleasant and boring details between unplugging my refrigerator in Lesotho and reuniting on a staircase in Bamako. But I just want to say that if the airport in Dakar were a Jelly Belly it would be licorice, namely a waste and a disappointment of a transit hub. Once they let you check in, it’s bearable; there are a few souvenir shops and duty free stores where one can purchase m&ms in varying quantities, and a couple of bar/cafes. However, I was held captive in the transit area for 12 hours. The room was freezing and the chairs seemed purposely slippery so that if you tried to lean back and relax the slightest bit you would slide to the floor. Toilet paper, toilet seats, and soap were not considered necessary bathroom features, and the water worked only intermittently. But the worst part for me was that there was no place to buy food until they let you check in. I had to break into the bag of marshmallows I was bringing to toast with Kate on a propane stove so I could take my malaria prophylaxis. After about six hours of transit room, a vendor rolled in selling $8 pink-meated sandwiches. My hunger equaled my disgust at whatever lay between the bread, so what would have been a really expensive baloney sandwich became a ridiculously expensive soggy roll once I flicked off the spongy animal matter.
Fast forward, and food seems a good place to start. Many people have an image of Africans eating a diet solely of airlifted USAID food and grubs. Despite what I’ve seen and moreover, consumed, to the contrary, I had not imagined Malian food could be so pleasing. I mean, it’s one of the poorest countries in the world and largely desert for goodness sake. Of course, the diet I could afford has considerably more variety and nutrition than the average Malian’s, but I was still surprised, usually in a good way. Street food was it’s own wonderful microcosm, my favorites being spicy, fried sweet potatoes and bissap, a frozen hibiscus juice. My first foray into street food was for scrambled eggs on baguette. It seemed simple enough, although the cook asked if I wanted my scrambled eggs topped with hardboiled eggs. Um. . .? Luckily Kate was there to translate, as I tend to nod when I have no idea what someone is saying. This is how three weeks later, when I was on my own, I ended up with a hard boiled egg, plantain, onion, tomato, cucumber and fish juice sandwich. It was a delicious accident, let me tell you. I was treated to a different kind of food entirely in the village where Kate does her work. A neighborhood family has adopted Kate and feeds her and by extension, me, twice a day. The women and children share one bowl, eating with their hands, and on the other side of the yard, the men do the same. When I asked Kate about Malian table (mat on the dirt) etiquette, she said, “Just eat a lot.” No matter how much I ate of the always fresh, and usually delicious meals, it was never enough for the food pushing mamas. This was especially true the day we had tô with okra sauce, an incarnation of a food I was served in Ghana and hoped to never come across again. Tô, a mashed ball of millet is quite pleasant, especially once I confirmed it was not "toe," and the taste of okra is also good, but when okra is cooked in a stew it becomes a gelatinous mound of slime, and appears, not unlike an upper respiratory infection symptom. It quivers as you swallow it and strings from your fingers and lips no matter how carefully you try to eat. I thought I beat the tô and okra sauce system by scooping an untouched chunk of millet from the middle of the ball. But it slid from my slimy fingers and bounced on a pool of okra sauce before sinking to the bottom of the bowl. As if as punishment, the cow, slurping from her own bowl of okra sauce spit some up in my flip flop before closing her green lips around my ponytail.
Fortunately Mali is the African country where I for once don’t feel completely guilty about leaving food on my plate. In Mali it is a common practice for families to give up one boy to Koranic school where he will stay, usually far from home, for about seven years. The mother gets a free ticket to heaven, and the child gets an education and his basic needs met. The system’s idea of providing the boys, known as garibouts (gairiboos), with food consists of the teachers sending their students to beg for food and change on the street, and restaurants and families often leave leftover food to them. They walk around with plastic buckets and are a quiet, constant presence. Before I understood who they were, I found their presence very hard to swallow. After an explanation of how the schools work, I came to view them as legitimate beggars- whatever that means- and eventually I stopped noticing them. When I was a camp counselor, I had an Animal Planet loving camper with Aspergers. He would frequently head butt me in the spine and when I tried to encourage him to keep his head to himself, he would shrug and say, “I’m just bein’ a caribou.” When the children thrust their buckets at me and mumbled in French or a local language I imagined they were saying, “I’m just bein’ a garibout.”
I found myself guessing what people were saying often, as my French is terrible, my understanding of African accents speaking French even worse, and my knowledge of local Malian languages nonexistent. Because Kate can carry a conversation in French and Koro Boro, I frequently found myself in the presence of conversations I could not understand a word of. When I worried Kate was getting irritated by the incessant translating, I annoyed her even more by “translating” the conversations myself:
Is your friend mute or just unfriendly?
No she is just American.
Ah, yes, I can tell by the girth. Is she married?
No she is highly available and yours for six goats, six sheep and a camel.
Deal.
The only words of Koro Boro that I learned were “thank you” and “peace only,” which I used regardless of situation.
Your feet are very dirty.
Thank you.
What is your name?
Peace only.
I also learned, but had less occasion to use the Koro Boro phrase “anasar kang buu,” which means “dead white people’s clothes.” When Americans and Europeans donate clothes to charity, they often end up being sold for pennies in markets in the developing world. Malians are quite aware of where these clothes come from, but they conclude that the owners of the clothing must be dead if they are being given away.
While in Mali, I celebrated several holidays having little or nothing to do with this predominantly Muslim country. A Christmas Eve party was held in the regional capital and Gao and the peace corps volunteers of that area and their visitors trudged in for the festivities. One magical volunteer is like the Martha Stewart of the desert. She typed up caroling songbooks, sewed African-print stockings (filled with jewelry she crafted herself), and a built a gingerbread house with sculpted sugar snowmen that no one was allowed to touch, not even the slab of cookie implausibly placed over the top of the chimney (how was smoke supposed to get out and Santa in?) At dusk she slipped into a one-shoulder dress she rigged up herself by strategically wrapping and tying a pearly green turban around herself, and reigned serenely over the merriment. Noelle quickly evolved into a bachelorette party for a volunteer bride-to-be who was dressed in Christmas decorations. We hit the town for a scavenger hunt, and whenever anyone inquired as to what all the Toubabs (white people), especially the glittery one, were up to, Kate told them that on American Christmas, the newest bride is dressed like a fool and paraded around town. One man, upon hearing this said, “May you have twenty children. Then you send me five boys form America to sell turbans in my shop.” Shortly thereafter, Kate and I threw a Chanukah celebration. I made latkes (potato pancakes) and Kate fashioned a dreidel. I tried explaining the rules to the goyim (“this means you take half” “this means you get nothing”) but there was an oversight in terms of gelt, the chocolate coins you play for. Strip dreidel was the inevitable conclusion. Spin a shin, put an item of clothing into the pot, spin a gimmel, and you may end up with your friend’s sweaty bandana. Before nudity could enter the scene, the tournament relocated to the local bar where gelt was replaced with beer. And finally, there was New Year’s to celebrate, which Kate and I did by crashing a high school dance party. I didn’t know then, nor do I know now what possessed us. It was literally inside a high school, desks pushed to the edges of linoleum, glaring florescent lights, and chalked equations unerased on the blackboard. The high schoolers didn’t take any particular notice of the overage Toubabs crashing their party, and I believe I was more surprised than they were to find myself there.
I also had the opportunity to experience some more traditional Malian events, namely the Dogon Dancing Mask Festival, a celebration of various arts forms in and around Dogon Country. We paid our 4,000 CFA ($8) entrance fee and found ourselves, unsurprisingly with an entrance fee like that, surrounded by other foreigners. We listened to music led by a Willie Nelson-esque Malian and watched a dozen women dressed in indigo cloth kick up clouds of dust in their exquisite out of sync dancing. Then the gates opened up and hundreds of Malians flooded the audience. The children especially went wild over the traditional warfare segment. Adolescent boys donned three pairs of shorts each and locked in a sort of head to shoulder embrace. Between Kate’s translations of the commentary and my own observations, the object seemed to be to wedge your thumbs into the waistbands of your opponent’s shorts, lift him up in this manner and drop him to the ground. Finally, we were treated the mask dancing in which men swing their heads around topped with masks several meters tall that they held in their teeth.
Kate and I followed this with a visit to a Dogon village. My favorite part was seeing a local courthouse. The ceilings are purposely low (maybe four feet high) to keep people’s anger in check; the threat of concussion makes someone think twice before jumping up and shouting. The US ambassador to Mali was touring the village at the same time. Kate requested an introduction by our guide and he returned to us with someone who was clearly not the ambassador but perhaps her child or intern. Following this disappointment, we climbed some rocks for an aerial view of the mosques, complaining of the inappropriate attire (pants, tank tops) of our fellow countrywomen. We gazed at the village spread out below us while a gust of wind blew our skirts to our faces.
We were spending the 15 kilometres away, and inquired to our guide about the likelihood of hitching a ride at least part way. We assume he meant to be reassuring when he said, “a car will see you walking small small and will take you by force.” This turned out to be true, but not before we crossed paths with a very long and very dead (but freshly killed) black mamba.
Things were more deserty (lanky blond camels grazing on the side of the road) and less snakey in Kate’s neck of the country. I found myself continually amazed at Gao (regional capital) traffic. It was dizzying trying to keep track of the 4x4s, donkey carts, pedestrians, livestock and motorbikes which often contained entire families, kids straddled between their parents and babies tied to their mother’s backs, all sharing the road and kicking up the sand. I didn’t even notice when in Southern Africa, I became adjusted to keeping on the left side of the road, but back in Mali, where traffic sticks to the right, I almost gotten taken out a couple of times by a motorbike. Kate and I biked all of our errands, which I found particularly challenging on the sand. It was even more challenging when I rode for several minutes with the front wheel turned backwards without noticing, keeping half of my concentration on clamping my skirt over my knees and the other half wondering why I couldn’t get my fingers around the brakes.
Gao is also located on the Niger River so I also got to experience water transportation, namely, being canoed through the rice fields with a bamboo pole. I was headed toward the Rose Dune, a big ole hump of sand where all the sorcerers meet in the night. Fact: If you meet someone who claims to be a sorcerer and he has never heard of the Rose Dune, he is not a real sorcerer. I don’t think Mali is cool with sorceresses, so I didn’t get to hang around after dusk. However, I did see a bunch of scarab beetles. When I first saw their footprints in the sand, I thought they were bicycle tracks. They are pretty incredible creatures.
Although Kate’s village is located on a major road, things were considerably calmer than in then center Gao. We did laundry in buckets that turned the water black, read and giggled. If people couldn’t remember or didn’t know my Malian name, they referred to me as Kate’s “hangasine.” I don’t know of an English word that means the equivalent but Kate explained that it refers to someone in your age group who you are with all the time. Kate was also like a village cruise hostess. She cooked me porridge and bean powder, read David Sedaris to me when she decided I wasn’t laughing aloud enough while reading it to myself, and kept the house stocked with water, which watching Kate carry on her head is just the prettiest sight. We made s’mores over Kate’s stove and ate them with the South African wine I brought. Alcohol is a major taboo in much of the country, so Kate did not want to be left with the wine, nor did I want to take it with me. She suggested I give it to the cow that routinely disturbs the peace with its incessant groaning to shut it up, but I can’t imagine a drunk bovine is any quieter than a sober one. Nor is wine an acceptable contribution to a garibout’s bucket, so we splashed the leftover in the dirt and I carted the bottle back to the city to leave no trace in Kate’s village.
One of Kate’s colleagues commented that I look like I sleep easy in the village. She meant that I looked at ease, but it was also literally true. I slept like a champ in all of Mali. If there was a mat on somebody’s floor, I was dreaming by the time my head hit the ground. After New Year’s Eve dinner, I dragged myself to a bar with Kate, and slept in a chair until I was roused at midnight. I even slept through the early morning calls to prayer and the swarms of mosquitoes sucking on my face and ankles on a roof in Timbuktu.
I didn’t sleep quite as well on the bus, and the bus was where I spent a good chunk of my time, familiarizing myself with such cultural institutions as local toilets (in lieu of toilet paper, stripy plastic teapots filled with water), getting my passport checked- and even stamped- crossing from one region to the next, and bus station food (one day Kate and I managed to cover a single food group- fried). Then there was the practice of rushing the door to the bus to get the best seats despite the fact that the drivers admit one passenger at a time, and call the names from a list in the order the tickets were purchased. Baffling. When I first met up with Kate she said, “Hi, good to see you, we’re getting on a bus in 8 hours for 24 hours and you’re to go by the name of ‘Zeinaba Maiga.’” I spent many hours on the bus staring out the window, my eyes shocked by how flat the landscape is. I’ve gotten so used to being in the mountains that the flatness made the land appear somehow damaged to me. When we traveled in areas with more varied terrain, that seemed even weirder somehow; in Dogon country there are peaks and cliffs that seem sort of stuck in the sand every so often like the whole region is a massive, spread-out sculpture garden. Of course, this was not the first all day bus ride. In fact, we started 2009 by rolling along, sucking on a ring pop and singing a “full day bus ride” to the tune of “Good Day Sunshine,” which eventually and senselessly devolved into replacing the chorus of Labamba with “black, black mamba, barack obamba.”
The buses are pretty organized, but the bachet system seemed much more haphazard. Bachets are more for local transport and look sort of like a cross between a pick up truck, covered wagon and hayride. Everywhere I’ve been in Africa has some version of the bachet, the vehicle filled to bursting, that never arrives or leaves when you wish it would, and is falling apart. There are benches rather than seats, and bless whoever gets in last, and has to sort of sit on two people until gravity pushes the person down to the bench. Once the conductor said to a rather robust Malian who fruitlessly tried to walk to the back, “Excuse my language, but you must enter with the ass first.” It would be a joke to ask when a bachet is going to leave, but the unspoken rule is that you leave in T minus sheep in a bag. Yeah, they bag the livestock, and I do mean live, but at least they try to be humane about it and don’t bag them until the last possible moment. Once Kate and I were confused when our animal passenger was nowhere to be seen, yet we were pulling out of the station. Then the stream of pee coming from the ceiling told us that the sheep was very much with us, and not only inside a bag, but inside a bag strapped to the roof.
Kate is banned from going there by Peace Corps, but she threatened to put me on a bus to Timbuktu if I irritate her. Well, I decided to go there anyway, so I was on my own for my last week in Mali. I met a Scottish guy who was going the same direction as I was and thank goodness I only had to spend about eight hours with him. If Kate had met him, she would have sent him to Timbuktu. He was the sort of person who names all of the countries he’s been to without being asked, and who “doesn’t believe in tour guides.” He was appalled that I hadn’t been to the famous mosque next door to where we were staying. “But it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site!” I mean, I biked past it a dozen times with Kate on the way to a restaurant for steamed dough in date and moss sauce, or on the way back from ordering a dress from the tailor. Kate pointed it out once, and said something like, “That mosque is old and famous . . . Hey! Do you want to see this other mosque that looks like a penis?” So I missed out on a couple UNESCO sites, Timbuktu has plenty of those guys.
The ride from the major transportation crossroads to Timbuktu is pretty painful. The dust is so thick that I longed for a turban to cover my face like everyone else. I tried to use my scarf, but it didn’t keep the dust out and only made my face sweat. I coughed nonstop for the four hours we were on unpaved roads, and blew mud out of my nose for hours after. The road ended and we had to take a ferry across the river with about a hundred cows. No, make that bulls. With really long horns. They got pretty rowdy and annoyed when the herders tried to get them on the boat. They were bucking and running with their heads down low, and the herders would grab them by the tails and yank them back in line. When they were all on board, they started sliding and falling down with their knees buckled all over the wet floor which was made worse by their nervous urination. I was pretty sure I would end up gutted.
Timbuktu itself is sort of a strange place. Its history is massive and long, but you would really never know that just by looking. It just looks like a beige city, roads, sky, houses, mosques and all. I think to really enjoy Timbuktu, you have to remain in the frame of mind of, “woah, I’m in Timbuktu.” I had a local guide take me around the city and explain to me what beige things I was looking at. There are a bunch of old buildings named after European explorers, and I could never figure out why. The guide would say things like, “And this guy tricked us into thinking he was an Arab by learning the local languages, but then we figured out he was lying because he couldn’t eat couscous with his hands . . . and this guy tricked us into thinking he was a Muslim by reading from the Koran, but then we figured out he was lying when we saw the bible hidden underneath.” I just didn’t get it. I slept on the roof of a hotel wrapped in Kate’s UN refugee blanket. Either from the dust, or the clouds, I could barely see the stars, but Timbuktu is situated against sand dunes and that is quite beautiful. I didn’t stay in Timbuktu long because most of the sites you can see in a day. Plus the city was overrun with over-tie dyed, over-excitable Europeans on their way to the Festival in the Desert (I met one couple who drove from Switzerland to Timbuktu in two weeks just to make it to the festival) and they were just a little hard to take.
I headed back to Bamako to get a good look at the capital and to get on the plane. I came across several Peace Corps volunteers in the city for training, and there were rumors that Gao, Kate’s region had been evacuated just after I left. Kate had suspected that might happen, since the homes of political leaders were attacked as we were riding there on a bus New Year’s day. Excuse me, there was no attack, just a “hand grenade incident” according to Kate’s supervisor. When I heard there may have been an evacuation, I was not worried about Kate’s safety, but at how annoyed she would be to have to stop working on her various health and sanitation projects. I found out later that I need not have worried. Apparently, Kate’s village is too far to evacuate her, and they would have had to bring her through the area experiencing unrest to get her out of the region.
I got back to Lesotho early Monday morning, and spent the first hour of my 24th birthday waiting on line at the border to get my passport stamped. Home sweet inefficient home.
I’d love to skip straight to the part where Kate and I gallop off into the sunset on twin camels in a kola nut induced euphoria, and I will skip most of the unpleasant and boring details between unplugging my refrigerator in Lesotho and reuniting on a staircase in Bamako. But I just want to say that if the airport in Dakar were a Jelly Belly it would be licorice, namely a waste and a disappointment of a transit hub. Once they let you check in, it’s bearable; there are a few souvenir shops and duty free stores where one can purchase m&ms in varying quantities, and a couple of bar/cafes. However, I was held captive in the transit area for 12 hours. The room was freezing and the chairs seemed purposely slippery so that if you tried to lean back and relax the slightest bit you would slide to the floor. Toilet paper, toilet seats, and soap were not considered necessary bathroom features, and the water worked only intermittently. But the worst part for me was that there was no place to buy food until they let you check in. I had to break into the bag of marshmallows I was bringing to toast with Kate on a propane stove so I could take my malaria prophylaxis. After about six hours of transit room, a vendor rolled in selling $8 pink-meated sandwiches. My hunger equaled my disgust at whatever lay between the bread, so what would have been a really expensive baloney sandwich became a ridiculously expensive soggy roll once I flicked off the spongy animal matter.
Fast forward, and food seems a good place to start. Many people have an image of Africans eating a diet solely of airlifted USAID food and grubs. Despite what I’ve seen and moreover, consumed, to the contrary, I had not imagined Malian food could be so pleasing. I mean, it’s one of the poorest countries in the world and largely desert for goodness sake. Of course, the diet I could afford has considerably more variety and nutrition than the average Malian’s, but I was still surprised, usually in a good way. Street food was it’s own wonderful microcosm, my favorites being spicy, fried sweet potatoes and bissap, a frozen hibiscus juice. My first foray into street food was for scrambled eggs on baguette. It seemed simple enough, although the cook asked if I wanted my scrambled eggs topped with hardboiled eggs. Um. . .? Luckily Kate was there to translate, as I tend to nod when I have no idea what someone is saying. This is how three weeks later, when I was on my own, I ended up with a hard boiled egg, plantain, onion, tomato, cucumber and fish juice sandwich. It was a delicious accident, let me tell you. I was treated to a different kind of food entirely in the village where Kate does her work. A neighborhood family has adopted Kate and feeds her and by extension, me, twice a day. The women and children share one bowl, eating with their hands, and on the other side of the yard, the men do the same. When I asked Kate about Malian table (mat on the dirt) etiquette, she said, “Just eat a lot.” No matter how much I ate of the always fresh, and usually delicious meals, it was never enough for the food pushing mamas. This was especially true the day we had tô with okra sauce, an incarnation of a food I was served in Ghana and hoped to never come across again. Tô, a mashed ball of millet is quite pleasant, especially once I confirmed it was not "toe," and the taste of okra is also good, but when okra is cooked in a stew it becomes a gelatinous mound of slime, and appears, not unlike an upper respiratory infection symptom. It quivers as you swallow it and strings from your fingers and lips no matter how carefully you try to eat. I thought I beat the tô and okra sauce system by scooping an untouched chunk of millet from the middle of the ball. But it slid from my slimy fingers and bounced on a pool of okra sauce before sinking to the bottom of the bowl. As if as punishment, the cow, slurping from her own bowl of okra sauce spit some up in my flip flop before closing her green lips around my ponytail.
Fortunately Mali is the African country where I for once don’t feel completely guilty about leaving food on my plate. In Mali it is a common practice for families to give up one boy to Koranic school where he will stay, usually far from home, for about seven years. The mother gets a free ticket to heaven, and the child gets an education and his basic needs met. The system’s idea of providing the boys, known as garibouts (gairiboos), with food consists of the teachers sending their students to beg for food and change on the street, and restaurants and families often leave leftover food to them. They walk around with plastic buckets and are a quiet, constant presence. Before I understood who they were, I found their presence very hard to swallow. After an explanation of how the schools work, I came to view them as legitimate beggars- whatever that means- and eventually I stopped noticing them. When I was a camp counselor, I had an Animal Planet loving camper with Aspergers. He would frequently head butt me in the spine and when I tried to encourage him to keep his head to himself, he would shrug and say, “I’m just bein’ a caribou.” When the children thrust their buckets at me and mumbled in French or a local language I imagined they were saying, “I’m just bein’ a garibout.”
I found myself guessing what people were saying often, as my French is terrible, my understanding of African accents speaking French even worse, and my knowledge of local Malian languages nonexistent. Because Kate can carry a conversation in French and Koro Boro, I frequently found myself in the presence of conversations I could not understand a word of. When I worried Kate was getting irritated by the incessant translating, I annoyed her even more by “translating” the conversations myself:
Is your friend mute or just unfriendly?
No she is just American.
Ah, yes, I can tell by the girth. Is she married?
No she is highly available and yours for six goats, six sheep and a camel.
Deal.
The only words of Koro Boro that I learned were “thank you” and “peace only,” which I used regardless of situation.
Your feet are very dirty.
Thank you.
What is your name?
Peace only.
I also learned, but had less occasion to use the Koro Boro phrase “anasar kang buu,” which means “dead white people’s clothes.” When Americans and Europeans donate clothes to charity, they often end up being sold for pennies in markets in the developing world. Malians are quite aware of where these clothes come from, but they conclude that the owners of the clothing must be dead if they are being given away.
While in Mali, I celebrated several holidays having little or nothing to do with this predominantly Muslim country. A Christmas Eve party was held in the regional capital and Gao and the peace corps volunteers of that area and their visitors trudged in for the festivities. One magical volunteer is like the Martha Stewart of the desert. She typed up caroling songbooks, sewed African-print stockings (filled with jewelry she crafted herself), and a built a gingerbread house with sculpted sugar snowmen that no one was allowed to touch, not even the slab of cookie implausibly placed over the top of the chimney (how was smoke supposed to get out and Santa in?) At dusk she slipped into a one-shoulder dress she rigged up herself by strategically wrapping and tying a pearly green turban around herself, and reigned serenely over the merriment. Noelle quickly evolved into a bachelorette party for a volunteer bride-to-be who was dressed in Christmas decorations. We hit the town for a scavenger hunt, and whenever anyone inquired as to what all the Toubabs (white people), especially the glittery one, were up to, Kate told them that on American Christmas, the newest bride is dressed like a fool and paraded around town. One man, upon hearing this said, “May you have twenty children. Then you send me five boys form America to sell turbans in my shop.” Shortly thereafter, Kate and I threw a Chanukah celebration. I made latkes (potato pancakes) and Kate fashioned a dreidel. I tried explaining the rules to the goyim (“this means you take half” “this means you get nothing”) but there was an oversight in terms of gelt, the chocolate coins you play for. Strip dreidel was the inevitable conclusion. Spin a shin, put an item of clothing into the pot, spin a gimmel, and you may end up with your friend’s sweaty bandana. Before nudity could enter the scene, the tournament relocated to the local bar where gelt was replaced with beer. And finally, there was New Year’s to celebrate, which Kate and I did by crashing a high school dance party. I didn’t know then, nor do I know now what possessed us. It was literally inside a high school, desks pushed to the edges of linoleum, glaring florescent lights, and chalked equations unerased on the blackboard. The high schoolers didn’t take any particular notice of the overage Toubabs crashing their party, and I believe I was more surprised than they were to find myself there.
I also had the opportunity to experience some more traditional Malian events, namely the Dogon Dancing Mask Festival, a celebration of various arts forms in and around Dogon Country. We paid our 4,000 CFA ($8) entrance fee and found ourselves, unsurprisingly with an entrance fee like that, surrounded by other foreigners. We listened to music led by a Willie Nelson-esque Malian and watched a dozen women dressed in indigo cloth kick up clouds of dust in their exquisite out of sync dancing. Then the gates opened up and hundreds of Malians flooded the audience. The children especially went wild over the traditional warfare segment. Adolescent boys donned three pairs of shorts each and locked in a sort of head to shoulder embrace. Between Kate’s translations of the commentary and my own observations, the object seemed to be to wedge your thumbs into the waistbands of your opponent’s shorts, lift him up in this manner and drop him to the ground. Finally, we were treated the mask dancing in which men swing their heads around topped with masks several meters tall that they held in their teeth.
Kate and I followed this with a visit to a Dogon village. My favorite part was seeing a local courthouse. The ceilings are purposely low (maybe four feet high) to keep people’s anger in check; the threat of concussion makes someone think twice before jumping up and shouting. The US ambassador to Mali was touring the village at the same time. Kate requested an introduction by our guide and he returned to us with someone who was clearly not the ambassador but perhaps her child or intern. Following this disappointment, we climbed some rocks for an aerial view of the mosques, complaining of the inappropriate attire (pants, tank tops) of our fellow countrywomen. We gazed at the village spread out below us while a gust of wind blew our skirts to our faces.
We were spending the 15 kilometres away, and inquired to our guide about the likelihood of hitching a ride at least part way. We assume he meant to be reassuring when he said, “a car will see you walking small small and will take you by force.” This turned out to be true, but not before we crossed paths with a very long and very dead (but freshly killed) black mamba.
Things were more deserty (lanky blond camels grazing on the side of the road) and less snakey in Kate’s neck of the country. I found myself continually amazed at Gao (regional capital) traffic. It was dizzying trying to keep track of the 4x4s, donkey carts, pedestrians, livestock and motorbikes which often contained entire families, kids straddled between their parents and babies tied to their mother’s backs, all sharing the road and kicking up the sand. I didn’t even notice when in Southern Africa, I became adjusted to keeping on the left side of the road, but back in Mali, where traffic sticks to the right, I almost gotten taken out a couple of times by a motorbike. Kate and I biked all of our errands, which I found particularly challenging on the sand. It was even more challenging when I rode for several minutes with the front wheel turned backwards without noticing, keeping half of my concentration on clamping my skirt over my knees and the other half wondering why I couldn’t get my fingers around the brakes.
Gao is also located on the Niger River so I also got to experience water transportation, namely, being canoed through the rice fields with a bamboo pole. I was headed toward the Rose Dune, a big ole hump of sand where all the sorcerers meet in the night. Fact: If you meet someone who claims to be a sorcerer and he has never heard of the Rose Dune, he is not a real sorcerer. I don’t think Mali is cool with sorceresses, so I didn’t get to hang around after dusk. However, I did see a bunch of scarab beetles. When I first saw their footprints in the sand, I thought they were bicycle tracks. They are pretty incredible creatures.
Although Kate’s village is located on a major road, things were considerably calmer than in then center Gao. We did laundry in buckets that turned the water black, read and giggled. If people couldn’t remember or didn’t know my Malian name, they referred to me as Kate’s “hangasine.” I don’t know of an English word that means the equivalent but Kate explained that it refers to someone in your age group who you are with all the time. Kate was also like a village cruise hostess. She cooked me porridge and bean powder, read David Sedaris to me when she decided I wasn’t laughing aloud enough while reading it to myself, and kept the house stocked with water, which watching Kate carry on her head is just the prettiest sight. We made s’mores over Kate’s stove and ate them with the South African wine I brought. Alcohol is a major taboo in much of the country, so Kate did not want to be left with the wine, nor did I want to take it with me. She suggested I give it to the cow that routinely disturbs the peace with its incessant groaning to shut it up, but I can’t imagine a drunk bovine is any quieter than a sober one. Nor is wine an acceptable contribution to a garibout’s bucket, so we splashed the leftover in the dirt and I carted the bottle back to the city to leave no trace in Kate’s village.
One of Kate’s colleagues commented that I look like I sleep easy in the village. She meant that I looked at ease, but it was also literally true. I slept like a champ in all of Mali. If there was a mat on somebody’s floor, I was dreaming by the time my head hit the ground. After New Year’s Eve dinner, I dragged myself to a bar with Kate, and slept in a chair until I was roused at midnight. I even slept through the early morning calls to prayer and the swarms of mosquitoes sucking on my face and ankles on a roof in Timbuktu.
I didn’t sleep quite as well on the bus, and the bus was where I spent a good chunk of my time, familiarizing myself with such cultural institutions as local toilets (in lieu of toilet paper, stripy plastic teapots filled with water), getting my passport checked- and even stamped- crossing from one region to the next, and bus station food (one day Kate and I managed to cover a single food group- fried). Then there was the practice of rushing the door to the bus to get the best seats despite the fact that the drivers admit one passenger at a time, and call the names from a list in the order the tickets were purchased. Baffling. When I first met up with Kate she said, “Hi, good to see you, we’re getting on a bus in 8 hours for 24 hours and you’re to go by the name of ‘Zeinaba Maiga.’” I spent many hours on the bus staring out the window, my eyes shocked by how flat the landscape is. I’ve gotten so used to being in the mountains that the flatness made the land appear somehow damaged to me. When we traveled in areas with more varied terrain, that seemed even weirder somehow; in Dogon country there are peaks and cliffs that seem sort of stuck in the sand every so often like the whole region is a massive, spread-out sculpture garden. Of course, this was not the first all day bus ride. In fact, we started 2009 by rolling along, sucking on a ring pop and singing a “full day bus ride” to the tune of “Good Day Sunshine,” which eventually and senselessly devolved into replacing the chorus of Labamba with “black, black mamba, barack obamba.”
The buses are pretty organized, but the bachet system seemed much more haphazard. Bachets are more for local transport and look sort of like a cross between a pick up truck, covered wagon and hayride. Everywhere I’ve been in Africa has some version of the bachet, the vehicle filled to bursting, that never arrives or leaves when you wish it would, and is falling apart. There are benches rather than seats, and bless whoever gets in last, and has to sort of sit on two people until gravity pushes the person down to the bench. Once the conductor said to a rather robust Malian who fruitlessly tried to walk to the back, “Excuse my language, but you must enter with the ass first.” It would be a joke to ask when a bachet is going to leave, but the unspoken rule is that you leave in T minus sheep in a bag. Yeah, they bag the livestock, and I do mean live, but at least they try to be humane about it and don’t bag them until the last possible moment. Once Kate and I were confused when our animal passenger was nowhere to be seen, yet we were pulling out of the station. Then the stream of pee coming from the ceiling told us that the sheep was very much with us, and not only inside a bag, but inside a bag strapped to the roof.
Kate is banned from going there by Peace Corps, but she threatened to put me on a bus to Timbuktu if I irritate her. Well, I decided to go there anyway, so I was on my own for my last week in Mali. I met a Scottish guy who was going the same direction as I was and thank goodness I only had to spend about eight hours with him. If Kate had met him, she would have sent him to Timbuktu. He was the sort of person who names all of the countries he’s been to without being asked, and who “doesn’t believe in tour guides.” He was appalled that I hadn’t been to the famous mosque next door to where we were staying. “But it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site!” I mean, I biked past it a dozen times with Kate on the way to a restaurant for steamed dough in date and moss sauce, or on the way back from ordering a dress from the tailor. Kate pointed it out once, and said something like, “That mosque is old and famous . . . Hey! Do you want to see this other mosque that looks like a penis?” So I missed out on a couple UNESCO sites, Timbuktu has plenty of those guys.
The ride from the major transportation crossroads to Timbuktu is pretty painful. The dust is so thick that I longed for a turban to cover my face like everyone else. I tried to use my scarf, but it didn’t keep the dust out and only made my face sweat. I coughed nonstop for the four hours we were on unpaved roads, and blew mud out of my nose for hours after. The road ended and we had to take a ferry across the river with about a hundred cows. No, make that bulls. With really long horns. They got pretty rowdy and annoyed when the herders tried to get them on the boat. They were bucking and running with their heads down low, and the herders would grab them by the tails and yank them back in line. When they were all on board, they started sliding and falling down with their knees buckled all over the wet floor which was made worse by their nervous urination. I was pretty sure I would end up gutted.
Timbuktu itself is sort of a strange place. Its history is massive and long, but you would really never know that just by looking. It just looks like a beige city, roads, sky, houses, mosques and all. I think to really enjoy Timbuktu, you have to remain in the frame of mind of, “woah, I’m in Timbuktu.” I had a local guide take me around the city and explain to me what beige things I was looking at. There are a bunch of old buildings named after European explorers, and I could never figure out why. The guide would say things like, “And this guy tricked us into thinking he was an Arab by learning the local languages, but then we figured out he was lying because he couldn’t eat couscous with his hands . . . and this guy tricked us into thinking he was a Muslim by reading from the Koran, but then we figured out he was lying when we saw the bible hidden underneath.” I just didn’t get it. I slept on the roof of a hotel wrapped in Kate’s UN refugee blanket. Either from the dust, or the clouds, I could barely see the stars, but Timbuktu is situated against sand dunes and that is quite beautiful. I didn’t stay in Timbuktu long because most of the sites you can see in a day. Plus the city was overrun with over-tie dyed, over-excitable Europeans on their way to the Festival in the Desert (I met one couple who drove from Switzerland to Timbuktu in two weeks just to make it to the festival) and they were just a little hard to take.
I headed back to Bamako to get a good look at the capital and to get on the plane. I came across several Peace Corps volunteers in the city for training, and there were rumors that Gao, Kate’s region had been evacuated just after I left. Kate had suspected that might happen, since the homes of political leaders were attacked as we were riding there on a bus New Year’s day. Excuse me, there was no attack, just a “hand grenade incident” according to Kate’s supervisor. When I heard there may have been an evacuation, I was not worried about Kate’s safety, but at how annoyed she would be to have to stop working on her various health and sanitation projects. I found out later that I need not have worried. Apparently, Kate’s village is too far to evacuate her, and they would have had to bring her through the area experiencing unrest to get her out of the region.
I got back to Lesotho early Monday morning, and spent the first hour of my 24th birthday waiting on line at the border to get my passport stamped. Home sweet inefficient home.
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