Missed some photos?

I've made all my photo albums public so you can check out some photos you may have missed. Just click on the link to the left "My photo albums" and select the album of your choice!

Diafarabe Cattle Crossing

Finally! I'm posting an entry!

Sorry for being MIA for the last while - not too much been going on here/I just haven't gotten around to writing anything. Regardless, I recently went up to Diafarabe (about a 4 hour drive north of Segou on some back roads) where there is a huge cattle crossing every year. Essentially the rainy season is long over and the herders (mostly from the ethnic group 'Phuls') cross the Niger River from North to South searching for pasture. I missed this last year and couldn't pass the last minute opportunity to go this time! The problem is they never set the exact date until the day or two before the crossing and given you need a private 4x4 to get there I'd pretty much written off my chances of getting there. Lucky for me, the day before a group of Americans from the US Embassy came up to Segou to spend the night before heading out to Diafarabe early the next morning. Two other volunteers hitched rides up from Bamako and hooked me up with the last spot in one of the cars. Mind you, they found out about the extra seat around 10pm Friday and the cars were planning to set off at 6am the next morning! So, after a short night sleep and some quick preparations I was off...

The photos pretty much tell the story but one of the great things for me was just being around all the Puhls. In Segou pretty much everyone is Bambara but few Puhls. Puhls have a very distinct look so that I can usually pick them out of a crowd. Plus they were all completely decked out in their nicest outfits as the photos can attest. Luckily Ariel, one of the PCVs that came along, used to live in a Puhl speaking village and got us along just fine. And without further ado... the photos. I finally got around to adding captions to my photos and will hopefully do so from now on. Enjoy!



If the slideshow doesn't work or to view full screen, click here:

Diafarabe Cattle Crossing

Official Launch of Segou's Tourism Website!!

After many months of hard work, I am proud to announce that the website I've been working on has officially been launched! For those that don’t know, I have been working with Mali 's Ministry of Tourism in cooperation with CPEL, a local NGO, to develop an informational website for tourists. If you were ever curious to see a little more about where I live in Mali , now’s your chance! Go to http://www.tourisme-segou.com and take a look!

Currently the website is only available in French. However, I tested Google Translate and it gives you a general idea though not perfect. Just enter the site address in the box at the bottom, choose the language you want and voila! (Please note that for some reason Google doesn't translate the welcome page so click on one of the links to start looking around). I am currently working on translating the entire site into English - so for now, Google Translate will have to do.

We will be working to improve the site over the coming months but for the time being we wanted to get what was finished thus far online. I have already identified a couple bugs but am hoping to get those fixed by next week. Any comments or feedback you have is most welcome!

Please feel free to pass the website address along to any friends or family that may be interested.

Bogolan bags from Mali at Hallmark stores...

I just wanted to pass along a quick note about a really exciting project Peace Corps has being working on here in Mali. I imagine you have heard of the (Product) Red Campaign - Hallmark just launched a product made not far from me and in a traditional style famous to Segou where I live. Go to Hallmark's website and check them out!

Initially, they are only distributing 20,000 to their 3,500 "Golden Crown" stores coming down to barely 10 bags per store but come January another 100,000 will come out... if you don't see them now, try back then.

This has been a big secret until now because these bags are a part of the (Product) Red project (the project that Bono - from U2- helped start which encourages companies to sell products where part of the profits return to Africa to buy Anti-retroviral drugs for people with AIDS). Every bag has a Red label on it representing this. Hallmark was a new company chosen to produce under the Red label.

The most amazing thing is just for Mali Chic alone (one of the artisan groups working on the projcect), they have employed 315 artisans to work on this project making 65,000 of the 120,000 bags. This entire project has brought in over $507,000 into Mali which is over 228,000,000 Francs CFA, all which has gone to artisans who have created these bags - plus all the money that will be donated through (Product) Red!

I just wanted to inform you about all the excitement that is going on here and wish I would be there in the states to be able to see the first set of bags come out in stores! Pass this message on to anyone else that you think will be interested in or has any connection to Mali because the success of these bags will hopefully mean that Hallmark or other companies could become interested in what Mali has to offer!

If you're in the states, watch Rachel Ray on Friday October 12th. Hallmark should be presenting this project on that show.

Dogon Country!!

I didn't want to overload you all with a bunch of long posts all at once so have held off on putting this one up...

Here is the post about my - somewhat - recent trip trekking around Dogon Country in the Mopti Region, courtesy of Dom Cronshaw.

I have some really exciting news to put up later this week and am just waiting for it to be finalized - so stay tuned!

And without further ado...

The Adventures of [Djiné Moussa Doumbia, Djenaba Samaké and] Amadou Ba

Summary: Yuri, Kathy and Dom head off for a three-day, 39km hike up, around, over and through Dogon Country in southern Mali. Dom drinks over 8L of water in one day and pees just once and Kathy gets a well-deserved exploration of perhaps the most amazing part of Mali.

After 7 or so hours on a bus where Yuri carefully selected our seats to offer the best chance for air circulation, we arrived back in Sevaré at dusk. Our once again gratuitous host, Sara, was still 20 minutes from her house, so we scaled the wall and headed up to the roof to watch the sunset. As we chowed down on the “street food” which consisted of a type of fried dough ball and some fried yam chips with some spicy sprinkling, the moon quickly took over from the sun as the main source of illumination over Mali. When Sara arrived, we joined her inside and began to plan the trip to Dogon. Yuri was excited about the trip and it’s only now that I understand how my non-committal attitude early on could have left him a tad perturbed. My “go with the flow” had clashed a bit with his wanting to get stuff penciled in and I’d like to apologize to him for that one. Nevertheless, after some helpful advice from Sara who’d already visited the area, we made a decision about a timeline, a guide and set up our departure for early the next morning. We’d elected to take the more expensive guide of the two on offer as he was supposedly the go-to guy for all the PCVs and came highly recommended by Sara. We all had a good repack of our rucksacks along with some of the vanilla biscuits I’d purchased from some kid while hanging out the back of that pickup truck outside of Gao before showering and getting ready for a night on the roof and under the stars – there was no way I was going to endure a replay of Sevaré heat in a sheltered balcony with no airflow.

I awoke before Yuri and Kathy and pondered cracking open the copy of The Kite Runner that I’d been neglecting. I had good intentions when I picked the book up more than a week ago, but had given it little time opting rather to try to spank the other PCV teams in the spades tourney or watch Mali go by. This morning would be no different as the couple beside me soon slumbered no more and we were up and at ‘em by close to 6am. With Sara in tow, we met our guide at the main road – I was not at all ready. A hefty chap of around 6’2” and a good 230 lbs, I at first had no idea what language Hassimi was speaking in. Figuring a smile was the best option, I threw out a big one which was immediately reciprocated. After a quick road-side breakfast of an egg sandwich and a Malian coffee, we hopped into our ride. For being the “more expensive” guide, I expected some sort of 4WD vehicle and was surprised by the sight of “Grandma”. A once blue 1968 Peugeot 300, “Grandma” was Hassimi’s true love and he beamed with pride as he showed her off. Her doors would open only for him; the door lock knobs were long and there was a definite trick to getting the latch mechanism to release. Her floor boards felt thin beneath the red African dust and the upholstery was certainly from another age. Sitting shotgun, I found a bottle of water at my feet that I imagined was for drinking but, as I would later learn, was for “Grandma” and her tendency to get a little hot under the hood. The main road to Bandiagara, the major town (less than 7,000 people) near the start of our Dogon trek had been washed out and so we would be taking the more difficult and longer “back road”. We’d paid more for this unfortunate circumstance and now all our hopes and prayers were riding on Hassimi and “Grandma”.

As we bumped and crashed along some decently rough roads, I had no idea of the wonders that awaited us; Dogon had been just another few days on my itinerary and wholly Yuri’s responsibility. We stopped in Bandiagara for lunch and chatted with Hassimi about potential promotions for his business and how he could capitalize further on his popularity. Yuri and I were really into it, though I felt Kathy was growing bored of the marketing/promotion lecture. During lunch it also came out that I had yet to receive a Malian name. All the PCVs had them and they were a way of connecting with other Malians. Your Malian surname was shared by many others and there is a defined system of “joking cousins” that can essentially call each other names and laugh it off. The way the PCVs explained it, the system functions as a pressure release and allows for a fair amount of face-saving and playful rib poking. The honor had been given to Yuri, but having little inspiration, Hassimi undertook the task and bestowed upon me the name of Amadou Ba. The surname “Ba” can mean “mother” or “large”, and at 6’2” and 95kgs, I think I fit the bill.

After lunch in Bandiagara, we continued on and reached Sanga, our launch point, in the early afternoon. After Hassimi chatted with some of the locals, we threw on our packs and began walking without any mention of where we were going. As we were parked in close proximity to a number of sleeping establishments, I thought perhaps we’d stay there. Instead, we walked up the rocks that formed Sanga’s base and over to the cliffs that overlooked a magnificent valley. Walking with a number of villagers who had made a trek to Sanga, we began our descent down a decently established path before the path narrowed into a small canyon. At the far end, the canyon opened to a cliffside escarpment of thatched roofs and stone walls. Ahead, the end of the canyon framed a picturesque waterfall and I hoped we’d get a chance to cool off with a power shower. Unfortunately, our path wrapped around through the village and away from the waterfall. We’d been hiking perhaps an hour before I finished my first 1.5L bottle of water. While the locals were happy to drink well water, as was our guide Hassimi, he advised us against it and instead to treat or buy our water. Though I had water purification tabs with me, I figured I’d save them for when it wasn’t possible to purchase water and instead paid the exorbitant sum of CFA1300 (Nearly $3) for a bottle at the first “hotel” we stopped at. It’s very much worth noting that everything in Dogon country is pretty basic - there’s no TV, no internet, no real distractions. For those seeking some time to reconnect with nature, it’s perfect, but it also means that in order to enjoy creature comforts like bottled water, you have to pay for them. While expensive, I thought about the woman who would have had to bring the case of water down the steep cliffs that we’d just descended and I felt a lot better about her making some money for her sizeable effort. After another two hours, we arrived at the village of Koundou – our first stop on this journey.

Right in the valley on the sides of these massive rock walls that very much reminded me of Southwestern Colorado, we stayed on the roof of the largest hotel in town. I was quick to order another bottle of water and polished a good bit of it before heading for a shower and some clean clothes. This would be another 12 hour+ day in the Malian books. I’d been in West Africa for two weeks and had yet had to purchase soap, but as none was provided at our place, I wandered across the road to a little window where despite having maybe 20 items in all, they had 3 different types of soap. Happy with the cheapest at CFA300, I walked back and hoped into the shower, though while cold, was absolutely fine. It was third room I’d tried as of the four communal bathrooms, only two had showers and only one of those was even piped with water. Of course, there was no indication of any of this – I can only presume Malians have plenty of time and just like to leave little challenges everywhere. My throat still very sore, dinner went down with considerable effort and the beer Yuri and I shared offered no relief. Tired, I taught Hassimi a phrase to which he took an enthusiastic liking when I told him that that night I’d sleep very well; “like a ton of bricks”. Hearing a Malian repeat that phrase and putting the wrong emphasis on the wrong syllables and giving it his own timing still makes me smile. As night fell and with no motivation to engage my one distraction in “The Kite Runner”, I crawled into my tent, onto my sleeping sack and fell asleep.

From the valley floor, the cliffs of Dogon Country are certainly impressive, but more so are the mid-cliff dwellings that are spotted along a number of the faces. The rich history of the region includes a people known as the Tellem who existed before the current inhabitants, the Dogon. Lonely Planet tells it like this: “The origins of the Tellem are unclear – Dogon tradition describes them as small and red skinned – and non are believed to remain today, although some Dogon say that the Tellem now live on the plains to the east. The vertical cliff is several hundred meters high, yet the Tellem managed to build dwellings and stores in the most inaccessible places. Most cannot be reached today, and the Dogon believe the Tellem could fly, or used magic powers to reach them. Another theory suggests that the wetter climate of the previous millennium allowed vines and creepers to cover the cliff, providing natural ladders for the early inhabitants.” I heard this story repeated by Hassimi who claims that he was also told that the Tellem were pygmies would had “black magic” powers including the gift of flight. Hassimi later scooted quickly around a frog, no doubt afraid of it.

Day two would see two ascents and one descent. While it's difficult to estimate, we likely covered somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-18km over a variety of landscapes from the flat valley to the rocky cliffs all the way to the top of one of the escarpments from where we got some fantastic views (this is where I took the shot with the CU sticker). In continuation from the previous night and somewhat his trademark, Hassimi laid out a number of riddles throughout the day. Kathy had laid out some good ones herself including something about a bell, a cliff and a guy dying. My best offering was the 4 liters from a 5 liter and 3 liter jugs that I learned from Die Hard with a Vengeance. Hassimi’s cracker was the following: A cowboy walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender points a gun at him and the cowboy says “thank you”. What happened? I’ll let that one stew with you a bit. If you believe Hassimi, it’s really obvious and easy.

Through another village, we saw how local people lived in Dogon and while much of it was hidden from us, it struck me how crucially important water is for these people and how much work they must exert in order to get it. The well for the villages half-way up the cliff is down in the valley a good 3km away. Women walk this multiple times a day in bare feet and carry back the liquid valuable on their heads. Granted, it’s easier than carrying it in your arms, but it’s a serious undertaking any way you slice it and absolutely nothing like turning on a tap. Also noteworthy (and shown in the galleries) is the meeting place for the village men. A 3m structure with a thick roof and very low ceiling, the design is intentional in that one with heated emotions must remain seated and therefore his physical ability to over-react is limited. Essentially, he must sit and try to talk things out rather than get up to rant, rave and perhaps attack he with whom he is having a disagreement. While basic, I liked the idea and wondered what it would be like in Western courtrooms – high paid attorneys in $3,000 suits sitting on the floor, unable to prance around and espouse concocted tales.

We took lunch near the top of the cliffs and by this point I had already polished off 2 bottles of water an ordered 2 more. I removed my pack and then my shirt and was able to wring out a fair amount of liquid from it. I wondered how much was actual sweat and how much water my body had taken from my what I was putting in my mouth and immediately pushing out onto my skin. I mentioned to Yuri that while I was no stranger to sweating, this topped every experience I’d ever had including Japan, Cambodia, and even India. After a plate of spaghetti and a short ziz on a plastic straw mat while covered with my turban, we were right back at it climbing the final 50m to the top of the cliffs. In one proof of worth, we had to scale an 8ft, single pole ladder. The potential fall was a frightening 30m though this was mitigated by a series of logs that had been propped over the gap. I gave the strength of the logs little thought and shot up the ladder with haste. As we left the darkness of the crevasse, the world opened to us. In all directions, Dogon Country laid before us – from the valleys to the cliffs, from this viewpoint we stood in amazement of this truly breathtaking place that seemed to have no business being in a place like Mali. After a number of photos, Hassimi rushed us off, over the solid rock top to the descent of the day. Through another village, we clambered down both rocks as well as decently-worn paths before finally making it to another flat area. Covered with plots of cultivation, it became very apparent that the people of Dogon are subsistence farmers and live a simple life built around community and family. For a moment, I wondered what it would be like to live such a life. As a PCV, some had – for 2 years. I tried to imagine no email, no MLS games, no scotch, no electricity and I gave up. Such a life, for such a period of time, was outside of my mental grasp. I wonder how I would endure the simplicity of such a life and how I would control my longing for things that to the people of Dogon hold no significance whatsoever. For much of the one hour walk through the flats, none of us spoke instead opting to absorb.

Our second ascent of the day began at just after 4:30pm and Hassimi’s angst had calmed a bit. Apparently, we’d made decent time through the flats and we would likely make it to our camp before nightfall. While not tired, I’d nearly killed the 2 bottles of water I’d purchased at lunch and was rationing the last ¾ L, not knowing where our camp would be. Much like the morning’s climb, but seemingly easier, we chugged on up the side of the hill from which grew the mighty cliffs of Dogon. Through villages with curious children we passed offering smiles and greetings in the very limited Dogon that Hassimi had taught us. Yuri was the most keen to engage the locals and practiced his Dogon every chance he got with children, old women and even a local dog. About half way up the cliff, we took a break and watched as a massive and gray cloud loomed in the distance over the valley. I quickly pointed out to Hassimi that we’d been done in by not one, but two big storms on the Niger. As the storm approached, I threw out a guess of it hitting us in about 15 minutes. No more than 3 minutes later, the rain started. At first, small, infrequent drops simply caused us to up our pace, but as the rain got a bit harder, we sought shelter under a large boulder that simply wasn’t large enough for the five of us (we’d picked up another guide along the way, apparently Hassimi’s doing). Hassimi encouraged us to push on saying that there was a larger shelter ahead. Walking on steep cliffs is a tricky endeavor, but when you add water to the mix, it can get quite serious and we were all very aware of the implications of a fall in a part of the country where there are no real roads and a rescue is hours away. And so, as the rain soaked our bodies and our bags, we took our time and topped the cliff. I wondered where this shelter was that Hassimi had said was close. We had been walking for 10 minutes and I’d seen nothing resembling appropriate shelter. After another five minutes, I smelled what he was up to as I could see a village in the distance. Through a field of millet and just before dusk, we arrived at our stopping point for the night. A very simple lodge with just covered areas, a pit toilet and bucket showers, we would make it home for the night. After we laid out a few things to attempt to dry, I ordered another bottle of water and quickly made short work of it. Kathy was first to shower with the hot water that the owner of the place had kindly prepared for her. Yuri and I followed, getting a similar courtesy. Bucket showers are an experience that everyone should have at least once in their life. Granted, they don’t compare to meeting Desmond Tutu or rafting the Nile, but to use a bucket, a cup and a bar of soap to clean yourself is an eye-opening experience. You have to get the wetting-yourself quantity correct and quickly lather up before getting too cold. Appropriately soapy, you have to ration the remaining water in the bucket to ensure you get all the suds off. If there’s anything you don’t want to do with a shower it’s to leave still covered in Irish Spring. Furthermore, a bucket of water is no more than 4 gallons - that’s the average per minute flow of a shower in the U.S. – and many people take daily 20 minute showers. Such realizations make to sit back and question the experience and knowledge of politicians who claim that Africans use resources irresponsibly. I had consciously drunk five and a half 1.5L bottles of water that day – and had peed one time; and it was a half-pee at that. Conclusion: Dogon makes ya sweat.

Our final morning began like the previous with toast, margarine, Nescafé and packing. A short day of hiking with much less vertical involvement than the previous days, we were able to take our time and enjoy the scenery. Over hiking paths, car tracks and even an actual road, we made our way back to Sanga enjoying each others company as well as a few of the local fruits called Zabans along the way. As proof that he’s spent too much time away from Western candy, Yuri tried to convince me they taste somewhat like Sweet-Tarts. In actual fact, the ascorbic acid content in them made the ulcers in the back of my throat hugely unhappy and I limited my intake. As a funny aside, they are somewhat hard to open and Malians have both a song and dance that surrounds the event. Maybe someone’s captured it and put it on YouTube.

After a day that was longer than I expected, we arrived sweaty and dirty back to “Grandma” who graciously took us as far as Bandiagara before she had a problem with her left front brake line that forced us to take a timeout. Luckily, Kathy and Yuri had wanted to buy some of the tasty jam that Hassimi had provided for us on the trip and Bandiagara was the spot. One of the two had also thankfully brought some cards and we sat playing hearts wondering when we might get out of there. In an odd twist of fate, a few minutes before entering the restaurant to play cards, a Toyota Land Cruiser rolled right in front of us carrying the three Spanish girls I’d met and spent the day with in Senegal. They were quick to stop and we quickly exchanged niceties before they mentioned that they were on their way back to Senegal for the wedding they’d mentioned nearly 2 weeks prior. The world can seem like a big place, but when such events occur it’s impossible not to be surprised at the chances.

With “Grandma” feeling better, she took us, once again, over the bumpy roads and through the mud puddles back to Sevaré where Sara was kind enough to put us up for a third night. The next morning it was back on the bus – this time to Segou, Yuri and Kathy’s site, for a few days of doing very little. After the Niger trip and now Dogon Country, I was more than ready.

Oh, and Hassimi's riddle: did you figure it out? Yeah, we didn't either. The oh-so-obvious answer (according to him) is that the cowboy had hiccups and that it's commonly known that you cure those by being frightened. Gotta love Hassimi.

Timbuktu Hopes Ancient Texts Spark a Revival

This article is a little old but interesting none the less...

Candace Feit for The New York Times

Ismaël Diadié Haïdara with collected family manuscripts. He says Timbuktu has a "second chance" to become a great city again.

By LYDIA POLGREEN

Published: August 7, 2007

TIMBUKTU, Mali — Ismaël Diadié Haïdara held a treasure in his slender fingers that has somehow endured through 11 generations — a square of battered leather enclosing a history of the two branches of his family, one side reaching back to the Visigoths in Spain and the other to the ancient origins of the Songhai emperors who ruled this city at its zenith.

“This is our family’s story,” he said, carefully leafing through the unbound pages. “It was written in 1519.”

The musty collection of fragile, crumbling pages, written in the florid Arabic script of the sixteenth century, is also this once forgotten outpost’s future.

A surge of interest in ancient books, hidden for centuries in houses along Timbuktu’s dusty streets and in leather trunks in nomad camps, is raising hopes that Timbuktu — a city whose name has become a staccato synonym for nowhere — may once again claim a place at the intellectual heart of Africa.

“I am a historian,” Mr. Haïdara said. “I know from my research that great cities seldom get a second chance. Yet here we have a second chance because we held on to our past.”

This ancient city, a prisoner of the relentless sands of the Sahara and a changing world that prized access to the sea over the grooves worn by camel hooves across the dunes, is on the verge of a renaissance.

“We want to build an Alexandria for black Africa,” said Mohamed Dicko, director of the Ahmed Baba Institute, a government-run library in Timbuktu. “This is our chance to regain our place in history.”

Candace Feit for The New York Times

A copy of the Koran from the 12th century. According to notes in the text, it was bought for a Moroccan king for a sum of gold.

The South African government is building a new library for the institute, a state-of-the-art facility that will house, catalog and digitize tens of thousands of books and make their contents

available, many for the first time, to researchers. Charities and governments from Europe, the United States and the Middle East have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the city’s musty family libraries, which are being expanded and transformed into research institutions, drawing scholars from around the world eager to translate and interpret the long forgotten manuscripts.

The Libyan government is planning to transform a dingy 40-room hotel into a luxurious 100-room resort, complete with Timbuktu’s only swimming pool and space to hold academic and religious conferences. Libya is also digging a new canal that will bring the Niger River to the edge of Timbuktu.

Timbuktu’s new seekers have a variety of motives. South Africa and Libya are vying for influence on the African stage, each promoting its vision of a resurgent Africa. Spain has direct

links to some of the history stored here, while American charities began giving money after Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor of African studies, featured the manuscripts in a television documentary series in the late 1990s.

This new chapter in the story of Timbuktu, whose fortunes fell in the twilight of the Middle Ages, is almost as extraordinary as those that preceded it.

The geography that has doomed Timbuktu to obscurity in the popular imagination for half a millennium was once the reason for its greatness. It was founded as a trading post by nomads in the 11th century and later became part of the vast Mali Empire, then ultimately came under the control of the Songhai Empire.

For centuries it flourished because it sat between the great superhighways of the era — the

Sahara, with its caravan routes carrying salt, cloth, spices and other riches from the north, and the Niger River, which carried gold and slaves from the rest of West Africa.

Traders brought books and manuscripts from across the Mediterranean and Middle East, and books were bought and sold in Timbuktu — in Arabic and local languages like Songhai and Tamashek, the language of the Tuareg people.

Timbuktu was home to the University of Sankore, which at its height had 25,000 scholars. An army of scribes, gifted in calligraphy, earned their living copying the manuscripts brought by travelers. Prominent families added those copies to their own libraries. As a result, Timbuktu became a repository of an extensive and eclectic collection of manuscripts.

“Astronomy, botany, pharmacology, geometry, geography, chemistry, biology,” said Ali Imam

Ben Essayouti, the descendant of a family of imams that keeps a vast library in one of the city’s mosques. “There is Islamic law, family law, women’s rights, human rights, laws regarding livestock, children’s rights. All subjects under the sun, they are represented here.”

One 19th-century book on Islamic practices gives advice on menstruation. A medical text suggests using toad meat to treat snake bites, and droppings from panthers mixed with butter to soothe boils. There are thousands of Korans and books on Islamic law, as well as decorated biographies of the Prophet Muhammad, some dating back a millennium, complete with diagrams of his shoes.

Mr. Haïdara is a descendant of the Kati family, a prominent Muslim family in Toledo, Spain. One of his ancestors fled religious persecution in the 15th century and settled in what is now Mali, bringing his formidable library with him. The Kati family intermarried into the Songhai imperial

family, and the habit Mr. Haïdara’s ancestors had of doodling notes in the margins of their manuscripts has left an abundance of historical information: births and deaths in the imperial family, the weather, drafts of imperial letters, herbal cures, records of slaves, and salt and gold traded.

Moroccan invaders deposed the Songhai empire in 1591, and the new rulers were hostile to the community of scholars, who were seen as malcontents. Facing persecution, many fled, taking many books with them.

West African sea routes overtook the importance of the old inland desert and river trade, and the city began its long decline. When the first European explorers stumbled across the once fabled city, they were stunned at its decrepitude. René Caillié, a French explorer who arrived

here in 1828, said it was “a mass of ill-looking houses built of earth.”

Mr. Caillié’s description remains accurate today. For all its vaunted legend, Timbuktu remains a collection of low mud houses along narrow, trash-choked streets backed by sand dunes, difficult to reach and unimpressive on first sight. In 1990, Unesco designated it an endangered site because sand dunes threatened to swallow it.

Many tourists who come here stay for just a day, long enough to buy a T-shirt and get their passports stamped at the local tourism office as proof they have been to the end of the earth. In a recent Internet campaign to choose the new seven wonders of the world, Timbuktu failed to make the cut, much to the chagrin of the city’s tour guides and boosters.

Yet the city has been making a slow comeback for years. Its manuscripts, long hidden, began to emerge in the mid-20th century, as Mali won its independence from France and the city was declared a Unesco world heritage site.

The government created an institute named after Ahmed Baba, Timbuktu’s greatest scholar, to collect, preserve and interpret the manuscripts. Abdel Kader Haïdara, no relation of Ismaël Diadié Haïdara, an Islamic scholar whose family owned an extensive collection of manuscripts, started an organization called Savama-DCI dedicated to preserving the manuscripts. After a visit from Mr. Gates in 1997, he was able to get help from American charities to support private family libraries. With the support of the Ford and Mellon foundations, families began to catalog and preserve their collections.

But time, scorching desert heat, termites and sandstorms have taken a toll on the manuscripts. Most were locked in trunks or kept on dusty shelves for centuries, and their pages are brittle and crumbling, waterlogged and termite-eaten. In the village of Ber, two hours of dusty track east of Timbuktu, Fida Ag Mohammed tends to several trunks of manuscripts that have been in his family, a line of Tuareg imams, for centuries.

“This is a biography of the Prophet Muhammad,” he said, gingerly lifting one manuscript bound in crumbling leather. “It is from the 13th century.”

The neat lines of Arabic script were clearly legible, but the edges of many pages had crumbled away, the words trailing off into nothingness.

Savama is in the process of building a new mud-brick library for Mr. Mohammed’s books, but until it is ready he has no means to preserve his manuscripts. To rescue their contents, if not their physical substance, he was copying the most fragile texts by hand, using an ink he makes himself out of gum.

Now, when the scorching heat of the day eases, a favored sunset activity in Timbuktu is watching the Libyan earthmovers dig the new canal. Like tiny toy trucks in a giant sandbox, they push mountains of sand to coax the Niger to flow here, bringing more water and new life to the dune-surrounded city.

“To see this machine makes me more happy because it means things are changing in Timbuktu,” said Sidi Muhammad, a 40-year-old Koranic scholar, splayed on a dune with a group of friends, gossiping and fingering their prayer beads.

The Malian government has encouraged Islamic learning to flourish here once again, and there are dozens of Koranic schools where children and adults learn to read and recite the Koran. Training programs are teaching men and women how to classify, interpret and translate the documents, as well as preserve them for future study.

Abdel Kader Haïdara, who in many ways started the renaissance by wandering the desert in search of manuscripts, persuading families to allow their treasures to see the light of day, said Timbuktu’s best days lie ahead of it.

“Timbuktu is coming back,” he said. “It will rise again.”

Final Boat Trip Post

Go to Dom's Blog and read up on his final post about the trip. As always, great prose... enjoy!!!

Summary: We arrive in Gao, not 10km from our final campsite and experience PCV life in Eastern Mali.

Continuation of our gallivanting around Mali...

Here is the link to Dom's 3rd (out of 4 - one still to be written) post about his trip here: http://dominiccronshaw.blogspot.com/2007/09/gao-ho.html.

Summary: 7 days, 6 nights on the Niger River from Mopti to Gao proved to be an experience that me and 13 PCVs earned. From swimming in one of Mali’s largest public toilets to surviving two sizable storms, our excursion to Timbuktu and beyond was paid for in full – in more ways than one.

As I won't get a chance to write something about this (and I think he did a mighty fine job that would be hard to challenge), I am not planning on writing something about this. So - please follow the link to hear about more of our adventures.

Some people couldn't find the link to his photos - click here for his picasa albums.

If you have any questions or what greater detail, shoot me an email or leave a comment and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

Enjoy!

Mali's dismal health care system

I'm much better after my bout with food poisoning (most likely salmonella) which brought me here to Bamako where I'm recovering. My confidence has been reassured as to the Peace Corps' ability to deal with health and security emergencies and horribly unnerved at the Malian systems ability to do the same.

I'll provide two examples: The first occurred a few months ago at my regional office of the Ministry of Tourism where I work. One of my fellow co-workers, Justin Dabou, (of which there are only five) fell ill and was taken to the hospital Friday morning. He has a history of high blood pressure and is frequently absent from work for being sick. His condition progressively worsened throughout the day. By the evening, the hospital in Segou was trying to transfer him to Bamako where he could obtain better suited care. This became a huge problem since in Mali you need to pay before you receive treatment (or at least need to demonstrate sufficiently that you'll be able to honor all debts). Being transported to Bamako (a three and a half hour drive west) by what I presume would have been an ambulance costs over 150,000 franc CFA which equates to over $300. $300 is an enormous sum of money for a wealthy Malian let alone an at best middle-class Malian - which is where Justin would fall. To complicate matters further his first wife and only wife (I clarify this as it is possible for him to have up to 4 being in a Muslim country) was in Bamako and unable to handle this matter personally.

Madani Niang, my homologue [counterpart], being the great guy that he is, was at the hospital all night trying to secure Justin's release and transportation to Bamako to receive the increasingly urgent care that he so desperately needed. Around 4am Saturday morning Madani had finally gathered together enough money and was filling out the final pages of forms to get Justin to Bamako when he was approached by the doctor with information that he so often conveys. Justin had passed away. He was minutes from getting in an ambulance to be rushed to Bamako where he could be treated but he didn't make it. He was 45 years old. 45 is just three years shy of 48 - the average life expectancy at birth in Mali.

Justin had gone to collage and even spoke a little English. He had just moved to a new house the week before and his life was looking up... he had so much potential. When I look at him and what he could have done in his life - I see so much that will never be, so much that could have been - should have been. Justin Dabou, may you rest in peace.

The second example happened just last week on Monday the 27th of August. As you may have noticed, I have now been here in Mali for over a year (in fact it was a year and one month on that day). Thus, the new crop of volunteers has arrived and are going through all the trials and tribulations of training - or as we call it: stage (pronounced with a soft g). During part of their two month stage, they visit their future sites for a week to see where they are going to spend the next two years of their life. That week had just come to an end and the stagaires were set to return to Bamako Monday morning. The trouble started when one of them was leaving his hotel to grab an egg sandwich from across the street.

Kyle slipped on some sand on the tile floor and broke his left ankle - a freak accident. He broke a chip off of the fibula (the one at the back near the Achilles not the tibia which is the big one in front). The fracture wasn't even the most shocking part of the problem... he had somehow also managed to completely dislocate his entire foot from the bottom of his leg, twist it about 65 degrees to the left and move it inside to the right about 2 inches. Picture that for a moment. Pretty fucking gruesome and not something you want to have happen to you even in America let alone Mali, West Africa.

The other stagaires called me and I biked over arriving about 10 minutes later. We immediately got on the phone to our Peace Corps medical staff in Bamako (as we are so well educated to do) to asses the situation and get him help. A little while later an ambulance from the fire brigade showed up ready to take him to the Segou hospital. They came rushing in with a stretcher straight out some bad 70's TV show and a walking boot for Kyle's foot. The stretcher wasn't a problem; it was the hard walking boot that concerned everyone. Kyle's eyes lit up and pleaded for us not to let them touch him! You see, his foot was very twisted and there was no way in hell of fitting in that boot – it just wasn't going to and should not happen.

We argued for a good while before they huffed off being thoroughly insulted that we didn't think they knew how to do their job. Um... I don't proclaim to be an EMT or anything close to what would resemble a medical professional but what they wanted to do was not normal. Eventually, another ambulance came to take him to the hospital. This time we had a Peace Corps trusted doctor with us overseeing everything and tensions were calmed. Kyle had taken 800mg of ibuprophen and a hydrocodone for his pain and a car had been dispatched from Bamako with a Peace Corps doctor to bring him back. Things seemed to be improving or at least stable.

I rode with him to the hospital and we went directly into take x-rays. We had been in the room for no more than a minute and the radiologist approached me saying they needed to lift Kyle's leg so they could slide the x-ray film underneath. Sure - sounds reasonable right? Simple, standard sounding procedure... and remember the radiologist had seen the patient for no more than a minute and had but a fraction of the information he need about the situation and Kyle's condition. (Remember at this point all we had were the visual analysis of what it looked like - the fractured fibula and dislocation was what we found out later).

With me standing next to him, the radiologist began to lift Kyle's leg so that he could slide under the x-ray film. He grabbed the upper calf and, to my complete astonishment, Kyle's toes. He was partially lifting this poor man's foot by his toes!!! I didn't have to wait for Kyle's screams of pain to know that wasn't right and attempted to pull the doctors hand away. I couldn't pull too hard as he had a firm grab on the foot and I didn't want to jerk and cause any more pain than Kyle was already enduring. Then to even further incomprehension and with complete disregard for the extreme amount of pain Kyle was already going through - while still lifting his foot by the toes, he proceeded to firmly grab the bottom of his foot by the heel and twist it back into place!! It was so quick there was nothing I could do… but oh my god did it look and sound painful! A few of our friends who had accompanied us to the hospital and had been waiting outside came rushing in when they heard Kyle screaming bloody murder from the pain. Again, I am not a medical professional but that was just not normal - I don't care what you say, there is no way that falls within some standard operating procedure.

That is the main point I wanted to convey - after that everything was pretty calm and just a lot of waiting around for another two hours while we waited for the car (a typical NGO white Land Cruiser) to arrive and transport Kyle to Bamako. Holy crap though - can you believe what that "doctor" did??! Man. Wow. Intense.

There you have it - a few examples of the Malian health care system. As you might gather, when I fell ill just two days later with food poisoning - I had no intention of entering it. I'm not sure what I ate. It may have been a small pastry the previous morning or some salami I'd been sent in a care package but either way the result was far from pleasant. I woke up around 4am running to the bathroom to vomit and did so at least every 15 minutes for the next 6 hours.

By 7 am I gave in and called our PC doctors who called Kathy (the other volunteer in Segou) to send her over and take care of me. She was wonderful and made at least five or six trips to the pharmacy for the necessary medications. These included first some oral Vagolene to stop the nausea and later some in a syringe since I couldn't keep it down and needed to stop throwing up. 4 hours after the vomiting began, my bowels started acting up. Let’s just say I started running to the bathroom to intestinally evacuate with high frequency. Unsurprisingly, I was losing my fluids at an alarming rate and was in need of medical attention. At the last moment the injection kicked-in and I started to shut off one of the valves so I could retain a little liquid.

Again, the PC doctors sent a car from Bamako to pick me up when the severity of my situation was realized. I was promptly picked up and taken in a daze on the 3 hour journey back to Bamako. I've been recovering in Bamako now for an entire week and can just about say today - one week later - that I am 100% back to normal. Peace Corps has its own 'med office' in Bamako where sick volunteers can stay as long as they need when ill. I have done just that and will be leaving tomorrow to return to my life as usual in Mali.

Cool photo of Mali

Click on it to see the full image...

Stories!!!

Ok - so I have been sick for the last week and on top of that am a bit lazy to write up a story about my recent adventures... specifically the ones with my friend Dom Cronshaw who just came to visit. So...

Check out his website for even more photos (in addition to the ones I posted below) and some great prose about our voyage. Click here and go to read the first addition.

His summary is this: Dom flys to Bamako, Mali and meets up with the Peace Corps gang who will be his companions for his time there. Booze did flow, dance moves were thrown and a hangover was earned.

If you're ambitious, you can keep going and read his second entry here.

This post's summary is: The boat trip begins. This post covers what life was like on the boat as well as what the much more unique nights yielded. Dom performs the first of a few surgeries on the trip and manages to nearly fumigate Yuri – serves him right for not making sure we had enough water for the trip.

He is a bit long winded but his posts are well written and I highly recommend the read. As we travelled together and I'm not doing too well and staying current - I suggest you read his posts since it might be a while if I get something up. Plus - how I don't know if I could communicate the situations as eloquently as he has. Although I implore you to read my comments in response to a few jabs at my honor.

If you want to read more about his trip, he has links to his archive (just like I do) except his or on the right. Stay tuned as there are still at least two more posts to finish up our gallivanting around Mali.

Some photos

Here are some photos of some excursions I've taken around Mali. For now, I've uploaded them to my Picasa webalbum. I'll get a story to go along with them hopefully tomorrow. In the meantime, check out Kathy's blog and Dom's blog for their versions least I take too long...

Niger Boat Trip

Dogon

Tuareg rebels attack Malian military in Kidal Region

Here is a story I just got emailed to me. This area is pretty far off but thought I'd pass it along just to keep you all informed. No immediate threat is posed to the limited region of Kidal in the North East.

Tuareg conflict spreads to Mali

There's been a second attack within two days in northern Mali on a military convoy by Tuareg rebels.

Reports from the Kidal region say insurgents attacked three army vehicles close to the border with Algeria, abducting all of their occupants.

The number of missing soldiers is unclear.

On Monday, the authorities in Mali confirmed reports that 15 soldiers had been seized close to the border with Niger; their whereabouts are unknown.

The main Tuareg movement in Mali say it is abiding by last year's political agreement with the government that ended its insurgency conflict.

But last week, a Tuareg splinter group in Mali announced it had formed an alliance with Tuareg rebels in neighbouring Niger, who have begun a new military offensive this year against the Niger government.

The governments of Mali and Niger have said they will work together against the rebels who have demanded better development and a share of Niger's mineral wealth.

The soldiers snatched in Tedjerete in Mali were protecting agricultural technicians working to halt a locust infestation.

Since February the Tuareg rebels, known as the Niger Movement For Justice, have killed over 40 soldiers.

The attacks have been in the remote north of Niger which is rich in uranium.

In addition to demands for more development the rebels have also called for a fairer share of the mining revenue.

Niger's President Mamadou Tandja has vowed to fight rather than negotiate and declared a state of alert in the region giving extra powers to the military.

Over the weekend, a delegation headed by Niger's prime minister travelled to Sudan and Libya to seek help in ending the insurgency.



Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/africa/6966754.stm

Published: 2007/08/28 11:43:12 GMT

© BBC MMVII

Political Transparency

Just a short comment on some of the sentiments referred to in the previous post:

Mali is praised for being politically stable and trustworthy - generally there isn't too much graft and corruption.

I said generally. Recently, I had a blatant reminder of just how fragile that line is - my counterpart, the director of the regional tourism office - a pretty coveted and respectable position - was removed from his position this week.

Why? He supported the opposition during the recent presidential elections. Sure, they could probably explain and give another reason but it was clearly politically motivated - because he supported the other candidate, he is thus not loyal and needs to be fired. This implies that one must support the winner for if they don't, they risk being disposed of if the other party/candidate wins. If this is how politics are run - it is inherently less free and democratic because voters might not vote how they truly feel because they don't want to lose their job/contract/etc.

My counterpart grew up in Segou - taught French at a local high school and is the "Chief de Quartier" of probably the most populous neighborhood of Segou. His heart is truly invested in the development of Segou to improve the lives of all those living there. He is intelligent, organized, motivated, honest, and just has a great understanding of how all the pieces come together. While he may not have been an expert on tourism when he got the job a few years ago, he certainly knows what is going on now... except for now he doesn't have a job anymore.

So, while Mali is generally blessed with good governance - it still has a long way to go.

Millennium Development Goals

Here is article recently published in the economist... I live just a few kilometers from one of the MDC villages and Segou has recently been choosen as an MDC city (not sure exactly what that means and what it will entail yet).

Enjoy and let me know what you think!

The eight commandments
Jul 5th 2007 | DHAKA, KOLKATA AND TIMBUKTU
From The Economist print edition


Panos












In 2000 the world set itself goals to cut poverty, disease and illiteracy. It will take more than aid to meet them

RICK JOHNSTON carries his “Arsenator” with him whenever he leaves his office at the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Dhaka to check on the handpumps, standpipes and ringwells of rural Bangladesh. This device, a sort of portable chemistry set, can detect whether village groundwater is laced with dangerous concentrations of arsenic. If it finds its way into a person's organs the poison can accumulate, causing black lesions and terminal cancers.

Arsenic has contaminated over 90% of the shallow tubewells in Muradnagar, a subdistrict three hours from Dhaka. Drilling deeper is not an option: the low-lying aquifer is too salty. The households in this corner of the subdistrict rely instead on a gift from the United Nations Foundation: a $4,000-filtration plant, which can strip arsenic and iron from up to 2,000 litres of water a day. A small crowd gathers to watch Mr Johnston mix water from the plant with the chemical reagent in his kit. The Arsenator will take 20 minutes to deliver its verdict.

In 1990 more than one person in four lacked access to safe water, according to the United Nations. By 2015 that scandal will be only half as large—if the world's leaders keep the grand promises they made at the UN's New York headquarters in September 2000. The pledges, which also include halving poverty and hunger, schooling the world's children, arresting disease and rescuing mothers and their infants from untimely deaths, have been translated into eight “Millennium Development Goals” (MDGs). July 7th is officially the halfway point between setting the goals and reaching the 2015 deadline.

Sadly, the UN family is better at making goals than meeting them. In 1977 in Mar del Plata, Argentina, the world urged itself to provide safe water and sanitation for all by the end of the 1980s. In 1990 the UN renewed the call, extending the deadline to the end of the century. In 1978 in what is now Almaty, Kazakhstan, governments promised “health for all” by 2000. In 1990 in Jomtien, Thailand, they called for universal primary schooling by 2000, a goal pushed back to 2015 ten years later. Kevin Watkins, the lead author of the UN's yearly Human Development Report, worries that the pledges the UN mints so readily may become a “debased currency”. In the summer of 2005, at the height of a campaign to “make poverty history”, only 3% of Britons thought the world would meet the 2015 goal of halving poverty, defined as the proportion of people who live on less than the equivalent of a dollar a day.

Such fatalism is as unwarranted as complacency. The world is making unprecedented progress against poverty. Thanks to miraculous growth in China and India, the first MDG target should be met. Almost 32% of people in the developing world lived on less than a dollar a day in 1990. In 2004 that figure was 19.2%. It should fall below 16% by 2015 (see chart 2).

But if such progress inspires optimism, the goals themselves provoke scepticism. They are meant to convert worthy aspirations into quantifiable commitments, against which governments can be judged. But only 57 out of 163 developing countries have counted the poor more than once since 1990. Ninety-two have not counted them at all.

The world has promised to halt the spread of malaria by 2015. But the disease's death toll is unknown. To monitor its fourth and fifth goals, cutting infant and maternal mortality, the UN would like to cull data from death certificates. But many places lack hospitals, let alone hospital records. The UN relies instead on surveys, which net 5,000-30,000 people in a country once every five years or so. These ask siblings whether they have lost any sisters to childbirth. But these estimates are too vague to track trends over time or to make meaningful comparisons between countries, the UN laments.

The numerical targets are also arbitrary. They are not a global totting up of what might be doable country by country. Far from it. China, for example, had more or less halved poverty from its 1990 level by the time that goal was set in 2000. Sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, will not meet any of the goals. They remain too distant even to serve as beacons to steer by.

Although the extreme-poverty rate in Africa has fallen from an estimated 46% in 1999 to 41% in 2004, that is still way off the 2015 target of 22%. Hunger and malnutrition still gnaw at the region: the proportion of under-fives who are underweight has declined only marginally, from 33% in 1990 to 29% in 2005. Despite dramatic gains, Africa will not meet the goal of universal primary enrolment either; the rate is up from 57% in 1999 to 70% in 2005.

Africa lags behind partly because its population is growing so rapidly. In rural areas, mothers are giving birth to at least six children on average, doubling the population every generation. As a result, Africa's top-line numbers are improving more than its ratios. Millions more African children are going to school, but the denominator is also increasing. According to the UN, in 1990 there were 237m Africans under 14; today, that figure is 348m, and by 2015 it is expected to top 400m. What price the goal of universal schooling at that pace of population growth?

Start where you're ATT

Yet it is still possible to get things done, even if not at the pace that the MDGs demand. Take Mali, for instance. This landlocked country, straddling the Sahel region and the Sahara desert, should be one of the least promising countries for development on earth. It is ranked third from bottom (in 175th place) in the UN's human-development index, just shutting out its neighbour Niger and poor Sierra Leone. Yet Western governments and aid agencies, to say nothing of Libya, the Islamic Development Bank and the Chinese, are all flocking to Mali with both great expectations and lots of money.

Why has Mali generated so much hope, whereas nearby Nigeria and Guinea, for example, provoke merely exasperation? Mali has a government, led by Amadou Toumani Touré (“ATT” to Malians) that devotes most of its limited resources to what it calls the “Struggle against Poverty” rather then squandering them on the baubles of office. Mr Touré's commitment is acknowledged by Malians, who have just re-elected him for a second term. It has also been rewarded by donors. Mali is one of only five African countries to have fully qualified for America's Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), with its stringent criteria for good governance; that alone will bring in $460m over the next five years, a huge amount in a country with a government budget of only about $1.5 billion.

How will Mr Touré spend this money? Mali's government has made agriculture and infrastructure a priority. The head of its poverty-reduction programme, Sékouba Diarra, argues that rather than depending on aid, his government wants to raise growth to lift people out of poverty. With greater mechanisation and irrigation, the country's 3.5m farmers will, he hopes, become self-supporting, growing much more than the traditional crop of cotton. Donors have been persuaded to give large sums to support this; the MCA, for example, is funding a 16,000-hectare (40,000-acre) irrigation project at Alatona, which represents almost a 20% increase in the country's drought-proof cropland.

In a desert country, irrigation is probably the most important anti-poverty tool of all, and the results can be seen in the remote villages around the desert town of Timbuktu. In recent years villagers have been shown how to build irrigation canals to capture the flood-waters of the huge Niger river, which winds its way through most of the country. This week, with the rains just about to arrive, the people of one of the villages, Adina Koira, are coming to the end of a three-month communal slog to build up their 5km of irrigation canals. On the irrigated lands they have been able to grow traditional crops such as cotton and rice, as well as new ones such as tomatoes and onions. At the moment they can buy aid-subsidised fertiliser and seeds to do this.

So successful has some of this irrigation work been that the villagers have even reversed the usual patterns of immigration. People are coming back to the villages, from the capital Bamako, or from other nearby countries such as Côte d'Ivoire and Niger, to share in the new sense of endeavour, if not actual prosperity. One man, reflecting the experience of many villagers of the Sahel, says that without the irrigation schemes “none of us would be here today.”

The hope eventually is that Mali, using the waters of the Niger, will become the bread-basket of west Africa. It would also be nice to have better access to European and American markets. But for any of that to happen, Mali needs roads and transport. The country has excellent beef, for instance. But as one UN official says, “You can't have the cattle walk 2,000km to market—they become skeletons.” During the four-month rainy season, villages just 20km or 30km apart can become cut off from trading with each other. Thus donors such as the European Union and China are building roads and the Americans are re-developing the international airport.

Donors now contribute about a fifth of the government's budget. Foreigners are happy to help out because they are confident that the funds they provide will not be misused. The institutional framework for reducing poverty seems entrenched and irreversible, whatever happens to ATT. Mr Diarra is confident that even Mali will reach the goal of halving poverty in the end. Not by 2015, but perhaps by 2025.

Goal-hanging

Such incremental progress pleases, but does not satisfy, the custodians of the MDGs, such as Jeffrey Sachs, the UN's special adviser and a tireless advocate for the goals. They are reluctant to lower their sights, arguing that the goals are akin to human rights, solemn obligations that brook no compromise. By this reckoning, the developing world's needs can be counted, the cheapest fixes can be costed, and the resulting bill can be calculated. All that remains is for the rich world to pick up the tab, so that a poor country's health and education ministries can get the job done.

This MDG-think is seductive. It is a potent mix of inspiration (saving lives and educating minds is eminently doable) and accusation (why, then, is the rich world not doing it?). But this thinking is also misleading. However laudable, the goals wrongly invite people to think of development as akin to an “engineering problem”, as Lant Pritchett, now of Harvard University, and Michael Woolcock of the World Bank have argued. The task is to pour money in one end of the MDG pipeline and then count the tubewells and school enrolments emerging from the other.

Some of the duties of government can indeed be left to the technocrats. Repealing tariffs or preserving the value of the currency are tasks best handled by “ten smart people”, the two authors point out. Mr Sachs was one such person, stopping Bolivia's hyperinflation in its tracks in 1985-86, the triumph that first made his name. In Africa, such monetary mayhem is now confined to Zimbabwe. Elsewhere, inflation has fallen from an average of 17% in 2000 to 7% last year.

Other tasks, such as laying a road or delivering a measles jab, rely on the efforts of many more people. But these legionaries need not exercise much judgment or discretion, and their output (a mile of road, a shot in the arm) can be easily counted. Thus immunisation drives and road-building campaigns lend themselves to routinised programmes that can be rolled out and “scaled up”, often with the help of foreign funds. International efforts against measles have helped cut the disease's death toll in Africa from 506,000 in 1999 to 126,000 in 2005.

Most of the MDGs, however, do not play to these strengths. If a country is to educate every child and spare its infants and mothers an early death, it must enlist the efforts of thousands of teachers, nurses and midwives, all of whom must exercise care, diligence and judgment. That conscientiousness is not easy to buy or import, except in showcase communities such as Mr Sachs's Millennium Villages, of which there are several very impressive examples in Mali. For these services, the link between spending and results is notoriously weak.

Ultimate success depends not so much on field-marshals like Mr Sachs, but on footsoldiers like Rita Dana, an auxiliary nurse and midwife in the Bardhaman district of West Bengal, who patiently examines over 60 pregnant mothers in a day. They arrive from up to 3km away, complaining of abdominal pain, vomiting or swollen feet—a possible sign of dangerously high blood pressure. Some of these workers show up even when floodwater is “up to the knee”, says Mohammed Hossain, a consultant to UNICEF. But perhaps a quarter of the centres, he adds, will not be open when they should be.

The more qualified the doctor, the more likely he is to take flight. The district hospital in Matlab, Bangladesh, boasts an operating table, lamp, oxygen cylinder and anaesthetic machine, all carrying the EU's gift tag. They gleam, partly because they are unused. Several surgeons and anaesthetists have been trained, but none so far retained. “Other than holding a gun to their head, doctors do not stay here,” comments Shams Arifeen, a researcher in the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B). Doubling their pay is not the answer, because they can earn five or ten times as much in private practice. Besides, specialists want to educate their children in Dhaka, not in Bangladesh's backwaters.

One response is to turn the doctor's arts into a routine programme. Outside a hut not far from the hospital, a young woman examines a child suffering from pneumonia and diarrhoea, with blood in his stool. Her diagnosis is guided by a flow-chart that leaves little room for discretion. She is one of about 4,500 villagers who have been given 11 days' training under a scheme called Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI). The IMCI protocols are a great leveller: Bangladeshi social workers can adhere to them as faithfully as qualified Brazilian physicians, and reach similar medical conclusions.

Doctors and paramedics pose one set of problems, patients and clients another. The IMCI workers cannot count on everybody taking the advice they offer, for example. Farida Yesmin advises a young mother, expecting her fourth child, of the need to rest and avoid lifting heavy pots of water. The mother's neighbour, sticking her nose in through the window, offers a second opinion: work never did me any harm, she insists.

The customer is not always right

Villagers think a labour of three or even four days is normal for a first-born, Ms Yesmin says; a few will also blame headaches and convulsions on evil spirits. A study published by the ICDDR,B provides an alarming catalogue of such misconceptions. Pregnant women are sometimes told to eat less than normal because an empty stomach supposedly leaves room for the baby to grow. By tradition, midwives might kick the mother's waist or break snails over her head to speed up the delivery.

Superstition is not the only source of competition. Well-stocked quacks in the private sector are adept at giving people what they want—drugs, principally—if not always what they need. One government paramedic, his desk standing in the rainwater that leaks through the roof, confesses that he sometimes prescribes vitamin pills for the sake of it, because his patients do not expect to leave his clinic empty-handed.

Efforts to tackle the plight of the poor do not always win their favour. The needy make their own judgments about outside schemes to improve their lot. In 1980, for example, the UN proclaimed that the next ten years would be the “sanitation decade”. In India the government set about improving sanitation in villages where people still defecated by rivers and under trees. The need was glaring: contaminated water was responsible for countless deaths from diarrhoea. The solution seemed obvious: a toilet with a brick cubicle, squatting slab and two pits. The government set its budget and began building.

Unfortunately, the villagers themselves had not signed up to the UN's proclamations. They preferred to defecate a prudent distance from the place where they ate and slept. Besides, a walk helped to clear the bowels. So the government's construction programme failed abjectly as a sanitation programme. As the only pukka concrete structure in many homes, the toilets were often used for storing grain, keeping hens or even displaying deities, says Chandi Dey of the Ramakrishna Mission, a charity based in Kolkata.

In the late 1980s, his mission and UNICEF realised they could not tackle the sanitation need until they first drummed up demand. Songs, slogans and slideshows spread the message. Public meetings pressed it home. Mr Dey describes how they would put a drop of faecal matter into a glass of water. When people refused to drink from it, the mission would point out that they imbibed such water every day from ponds and rivers where some people defecated, even as others bathed their bodies and rinsed their mouths.

Non-governmental organisations, accustomed to the role of good Samaritans, had to learn the art of marketing. They offered people a commission for persuading their neighbours to buy a toilet. One paid 13 visits to a potential client before closing the deal. Proceeds from the sales helped meet the running costs of “rural sanitary marts”, which employed poor people as toilet-masons making a range of affordable models (mosaic or ceramic bowls; bamboo or brick walls; single pits or twin pits). Now, says one mission-member, “It is not a programme, it is a movement.”

The government soon latched on to this campaign, adding a small subsidy in 1993-94 and a presidential prize in 2003 for villages and districts that can show they are nirmal or unsullied. In West Bengal, where it began, more than two-thirds of rural households now have access to a toilet. But some districts still lag. M.N. Roy, a top civil servant, puts this down to the “low equilibrium” of poor expectations and apathetic politicians.

Parish-pump politics

The trick is to sharpen the elbows and strengthen the hands of poor people so that they demand what they need and get what they demand. For example, a recent report on the MDGs by the World Bank's Bangladesh office lavishes praise on the efforts of Gonoshasthaya Kendra (GK), a health charity, which began life as a battlefield clinic, treating the casualties of Bangladesh's war of independence. Born in battle, the group still sees a place for “creative tension” between the poor and the people who are supposed to serve them. Whenever someone dies in a village, it holds a public post-mortem. The aim is not to blame or indict per se—bare-knuckled confrontation would alienate the government—but to remind public servants that someone is watching them, and that the negligent will be named and shamed.

Promises, promises
EPA
But is this brand of feisty local politics something donors can cultivate? Aid proposals are now replete with mentions of the word “community”. Sceptics argue that donors will conjure up “communities” to fit their projects and their timetables, even if no such organic political unit exists. They also worry that ceding control to the grassroots may simply put aid in the hands of the local mafia.

Perhaps all donors can do is pray for a more productive politics to evolve, then support it when it does. Mali, for example, has gone further than any other African country in decentralising its government. In 1991 it had 18 local communes, now it has 702. In many communes the people now actually pay local taxes and can see the tangible results of the money that they hand over in a school or a health centre. Alexander Newton, the head of USAID in Mali, which helps train the new layer of local administrators in 155 of the communes, argues that “local management of money tends to be much better.”

Likewise, in Bangladesh, households are often asked to pay something towards the filters that strip their water of arsenic. These charges are not mean-spirited. They aim instead to turn victims into proprietors. A financial contribution is proof of a household's commitment to a scheme, which helps to ensure a filter's upkeep. Halima paid 300 takas ($4.30) for her filter. Now she wouldn't part with it for 5,000.

Across the border in West Bengal, villages are going a step further. For each well or pump, they are convening a water committee. The committees collect dues to pay for regular water-quality tests by laboratories set up in the sanitary marts. Elsewhere, such committees have not always lasted; everyone would rather someone else paid to maintain their well. But without them, villages will remain forever dependent on outside professionals from the government, UNICEF and the like.

After 20 minutes, Mr Johnston's arsenic reading is ready. The test paper has turned an ominous shade of ochre, suggesting arsenic up to four times the allowable limit. He is phlegmatic. The filter's granules have probably reached the end of their natural life. Once informed, the company can fix it within days, and it takes years of exposure at these concentrations to suffer much harm. But as schoolchildren busily fill their kolshi pitchers with contaminated water, the easy promises of seven years ago feel a long way from fulfilment.

360 view from the top of my house and local rain storm

Here is a view from the roof of my house. I took this video back in November after I first moved in with the hope to put it up here. Only I didn't figure out how to upload videos until just now, so here it is.

Here is another video I recently took from the door of my house of a passing rain storm.

East through Togo and Benin before heading north for home

The Final edition on my trip south - taking me through five countries: Mali, Burkina-Faso, Ghana, Togo, and Benin.

After a leisurely start from Accra, we made our way to a bus station and were on our way east. The plan was to take the few hour trip into Togo and spend a few nights on purportedly not-so-special beaches. By the time we arrived in Lome, the capital of Togo, we decided to continue on the barely two hours across the entire country to Benin. We hadn’t heard many good things about the coast of Togo and much better about that of Benin so off we were to Grand Popo.

Considering the fact that we didn’t leave Accra, Ghana until a little after noon it is quite remarkable and telling of how small these countries are – we were in Grand Popo (just east of Benin’s eastern boarder) by 7pm. We arrived on what would be Memorial Day weekend back in the US and was brotherhood/friendship (approximate translation) weekend in Grand Popo. Perfect, we picked a festival weekend – a mixed blessing – lots of people crowding the place yes also great since there was something interesting going on. Overall a good thing. We dropped off our bags at a posh hotel (by Beninese standards) where all the rooms were full (a situation that applied to virtually all lodgings in town) – we were going to pay $5 a night for the two of us to camp on the beach.

We hitched a ride into town with another guest heading to the festival where we could hopefully satisfy our appetite… we hadn’t eaten since breakfast. We were treated to a Beninese specialty: pot. No not that kind – something that can best be described as a white, gelatinous, mound of mashed up corn grain and a unknown green sauce in which to dip it. We were hungry – it could have been tasteless giggly something or other and we would have eaten it… oh wait, is was.

Peace Corps Benin had just finished a training session in Grand Popo the day before we arrived and a few volunteers had stuck around to enjoy the festival – we had some locals to show us around. It is always interesting meeting volunteers from other countries and talking to them about the differences between where you’re serving and where they are. We were a bit tired from traveling so said farewell to our friends before walking the few kilometers back to our tent on the beach.

The next day we slept late (about 9am) and walked down to hangout on the beach. This was our first glimpse of our surroundings – there was a long gradually rising beach before dropping suddenly to some huge churning waves – not the most swimmer friendly beach. Within an hour a huge rain storm came in. Owing to our relative fascination with rainstorms (remember we don’t get them up in Mali), we decided to stay run to a hut on the beach to watch the storm.

Inside the hut was a group of Beninese taking refuge from the storm (in contrast to our intentionally going out in a ranging thunderstorm). After chatting for a few minutes, they asked if we played volleyball. If you remember (or read) how desperate we were in Ghana to play volleyball that we used a soccer ball, you’d have known our affirmative answer. They were apparently going to play just a 100m down the beach once the storm let up and invited us to play. Only later did we find out they were meeting up with about 20 other players (not including friends coming with them) who were all professional volleyball players.

The man who initially invited us to play turned out to be ranked the No. 1 player in all of Benin. I ended up playing on a team with his sister (she played for the national women’s team), her coach (i.e. the coach of the national women’s team) and the coach of the national men’s team. These people weren’t messing around… well, sort of. It ended up being an informal round robin so to speak with the teams who won most going on to play each other. You might think they would have been pretty harsh on two white Americans that just happened to be on the beach, but they weren’t. The mood was remarkably relaxed and casual – they were just out to have fun. We ended up playing volleyball with them until almost five in the afternoon.

We spent one more day in Grand Popo hanging out with our volunteer friends before heading to the former capital, Cotonou, to extend our 72 hour visas before leaving the north next day. We were a little dismayed to find out it took a full 48 hours to process a visa and, while we were waiting for the office to re-open after lunch, were scheming some way to expedite the process. Things were looking grim until, low and behold one of volleyball friends walked by. It turns out he is in charge of issuing passports (we were at the immigration office) and was going to see what he could do to pull some strings. Five hours later we walked out passports and visas in hand – success! What a small world! In a city with .75 million people, we happen to run into someone we were playing volleyball with in a tiny town two days ago.

We woke up early the next morning to a torrential rain storm – something that doesn’t lend itself to riding a moto. It stopped just in time for us to race off to the bus station and hop a ‘Comfort Line’ bus north. The bus companies are much nicer and more organized in Benin. For one thing – they leave on time!! Knowing this, we were a little concerned cutting it so close, but we made it and before we could find a seat, the bus was moving.

We got off in largish northern town called Natitingou, checked some email for a few painfully slow minutes and jumped in another mini-bus north to Tanguieta our destination for the day. We were accommodated by a hospitable volunteer based in the town who was so kind to let us stay two nights with him. The next day we went out to some waterfalls and a little exploring in the local area. To be honest, I liked northern Benin more than the coast. It probably has something to do with me being from Colorado and being predisposed to liking mountainous regions… it was really pretty and quite refreshing to be surrounded by topography – any topography at all is more than what I have in Mali –so having real-ish mountains (probably more like hills) was quite a treat. We even climbed one of them and got some spectacular views.

After our second night, it was time to get home to Mali. We went out to the main road through Tanguieta hoping to catch a ride north. Only problem was there weren’t any ‘rides’ north. We sat on the side of the road for five hours before finally giving in and catching motos the 80km north to the Benin-Burkina border.

Normally in Mali, we aren’t allowed to ride motos since they are deemed too dangerous. It is really the same situation in Benin only they often don’t have a choice. Thus, they are given helmets and told to ‘be careful’. We picked up some helmets from Cotonou and used them while getting around in the city and to get out to the waterfalls. We never expected to need them for a long distance (80 km on some not-so-fast motos is a long distance as far as I’m concerned) to get out of Benin. We went back to the volunteer’s house to pick them up and were on our way.

As we approached the border, our drivers suddenly veered off to the right onto a dirt track through the border town. As I was trying to figure out what was going on and why we were taking this detour, I realized they were taking us around the border guards on some back road. I immediately told my driver we had to go back – we needed our passports stamped! Two minutes later we popped back onto the main road only to find ourselves surround by gendarme policemen on motos yelling at us to follow them… let me just say they were about the opposite of pleased. We tried to explain we didn’t know what was going on and plead innocence and/or ignorance. Eventually we convinced them we had intended to cross the border normally but our drivers had unexpectedly taken the short-cut.

We were free to go but our drivers were ‘staying here’ – implying a long wait and a bribe to let them go. I still don’t know what ever happened to our drivers, but two hours later when we finally left the border after eating lunch, they were still there with sad expressions on their faces. Knowing they were most likely going to have to bribe their way out of it - we gave them an extra 5,000 (~$10), on top of the 10,000 we were already paying them, to help them out - $10 to us and $10 to them is a big difference. We figured that would at least cover their gas roundtrip.

We caught the last bus to Ouagadougou, spent the night in their beautiful volunteer house and were off the next morning back to Mali. We had a trip similar to our experience back in February to Kayes – i.e. sleeping in the middle of nowhere – and had to sleep at the border until it opened. I just made it to Bamako for my meeting early the next morning and finally, my long trip was over!

I apologize for the length of this post and the tardiness of getting up – hopefully you made it this far.

Till next time!