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Published: February 20th 2009
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I settled down to write a long entry chronicling the myriad things that have happened since my last post, but now that I’m at the keyboard, I feel like that task is too daunting—a lot has happened! Instead, I feel more inclined to give just a brief look back at the past three weeks. In that time Nora and I went to the Festival on the Niger, had Nora’s parents and brother visit us, traveled to Dogon country, and returned to Bamako with the first wave of hot season sweeping over us. Now, those three weeks of activity and heat seem quite distant. Nora has since departed for North Carolina along with her family to attend the funeral of her grandfather, leaving me in quiet solidarity. Moreover, the weather has changed yet again. The days have turned cloudy and milder (no longer in the 100’s), and yesterday I felt the first drops of blessed rain in four months.
I have never really felt an extreme dislike for winter that other people (notably Nora) have, but until yesterday I have never felt so completely different from the day before on account of the weather. Though I felt perhaps a total of
10 drops of rain yesterday, Bamako seemed like an entirely different city to me. Back in the US, each time of year renders a constellation of memories, sensations, and perceptions which only come alive for me when the weather and the calendar hearken the onset of a new season. I can only guess that this was what I felt yesterday after months of relatively monotonous weather. The smell of damp air, the tiny white flowers on the lime tree, the darkened tint to the trees, houses, and passing people by the cloud-obscured sky, these gave me a familiar and welcome sensation of spring, which I had no idea that I was missing. That said, my mood and therefore my week have been quite good.
For a brief catch-up, the Festival on the Niger was… well, it was interesting. There were thousands of people, the vast majority of them Malians. The main concert venue, which was the stone-paved bank of the Niger River, was over-crowded and always on the brink of chaos. We witnessed several shoving matching, including a minor physical altercation between two older European adults, and a bizarre series of shifting alliances on account of the organizers ridiculous
and intermittent insistences that everyone remain seated. Because of that, people alternated between yelling at the people in front of them to sit down and after giving in to standing up, yelling at the people behind them to quit badgering them about blocking their view. We saw quite a few good shows, including Vieux Farka Touré, Ali Farka Touré’s son; our Durham acquaintance, Mamadou Diabaté; and several other groups whose names I forget. We also saw more griot singers than we would prefer. Imagine straining to make the loudest noise possible with your voice, bending it to follow a semblance of a melody, and adding tremulous flourishes—that’s what griot singing often sounds like. Overall it was a fun three days but probably not worth the $130 tickets.
When Nora’s parents came a couple days after the Festival, we spent the first couple of days in Bamako in little activity. The heat and the bustle of the city were understandably overwhelming, and getting around can be exhausting. After two days in Bamako, we returned to Segou (site of the Festival), which is a much smaller and tourist-friendly town. We spent another couple of low-key days there and then went to
Djenné, the mosque of which is the largest mud structure in the world. We only spent one night there, but we got an excellent tour of the town and the outside of the mosque.
The next day we headed to Sevaré, which along with Mopti forms the gateway to Dogon country. Unfortunately, Nora’s mom got pretty sick that night, so she and her father stayed in Sevaré while Nora, her brother Court, and I headed off to visit a couple of villages outside of Bandiagara with the guide. The first village that we reached was supposedly the first Dogon village, founded when a group of Bambara people fled the Fulani, who were spreading Islam by force. The children really latched on to us, and at all times we had an escort of at least a dozen of them. After that village, we went to Ende, a beautiful site of cliff-dwellings that were inhabited all the way up until the 1960’s. The dwellings were perched about 100 feet below the overhang of the lip of the cliff and consequently were in excellent shape. Despite the hazy air, the scene was incredibly majestic.
The following two days, we all returned to
Ende and several other sites, spending a hot and near sleepless night at a campement near Ende. On our last morning in Sevaré, as we were preparing to make our way back to Bamako, we got the sad news that Nora’s grandfather had died. We stayed the night in Segou, where Nora’s family made arrangements to leave early and Nora purchased tickets to return to the US for a week. Back in Bamako, we spent another lazy day of doing not much before Nora and her family flew out on Sunday.
Since then, I’ve gotten my final set of completed surveys back just as I was finishing up the data entry for another big survey study, so I have plenty of work in front of me. Aside from that, though, I’ve just been relishing the signs of rain and getting work done at a reasonable pace. I think that I’m finally getting to a point where I’m not thinking about work at every free moment. Even though I’m doing about as much work as I was before, it’s really nice to be able to let my mind relax!
Anyway, I tried to post the choicest photos—there were so
many of them! Enjoy
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