The River Where We Live

While we were in Toronto, we caught a couple of the films at HotDocs, Canada's international documentary film festival.

We were fortunate to see The River Where We Live, by Sylvain d'Esperance. This meditative view of the river, the land, and the people living along the Niger Inland Delta (in the region of Mopti in Mali) paints a remarkable story of a people struggling to continue their traditional lives in the face of increasing desertification that is steadily eroding that possibility.

For me the most poignant interview was with a Bozo fisherman who said he was agonized that he could not arrange to get an education for his children, and had tried hard to find a family who would keep them in Mopti so they could go to school. He knew there was no future for them as fishermen as the catch steadily declined. And he had seen how his lack of education had made it impossible for him to get a job in the city. But on the other hand, the family always felt terrible when they stayed in town, and were so happy and healthy when they returned to their encampment on the river.

We had a nice chat with the filmmaker afterwards. One thing he told us that really struck me was that he really understood only very little of the interviews when he was in Mali shooting -- he let his interpreter conduct them in Bambara and Peul. Only when he was back in Montreal having his African friends there translate them did he begin to see the whole picture that he had captured.

Weekend in Toronto

We spent last weekend in Toronto, where we went to visit our old friends Jamie Radner and Polly Wells, and their great kids George and Claire.

Mostly a yack-yack sort of catching-up visit, there wasn't a lot of time to see the city and snap photos. But I was charmed by all the beautiful architecture from the Victorian and first half on the 20th century. I'm not sure what this grand house is being used for these days.

Les Moutons

Doria loves this picture she took just before the Eid in Bamako... everyone who had sheep to sell was trying to unload them for the holiday...


In other sheep news, this was our cousins' ram - I'm pretty sure he made it through the holidays as they've been breeding him for several years. Perhaps he's no intellectual, but he was quite interested in my camera.

These guys are not cheap. In the market at Mopti, I watched a woman bargaining for meat - she bought at around 12 thousand CFA per kilo - about 12 dollars a pound. Here in DC I just picked up some New Zealand lamb chops for half of that.

Don't need to go to exotic places...

to see truly remarkable sights. Here's a triple rainbow (hard to see the third arc in this photo - but it was there) over the Esopus Creek at the Ashokan Field Campus of the State University of New York. Took this a couple summers ago at Fiddle and Dance... that's George Touchstone in front of me snapping away.

Stu and me in the Jardin

Here's a moment from our trip that never ocurred until Rebecca got back home and fired up photoshop. Wonder what else we're missing?

This is where I came to be!

Every now and then when travelling you have a moment that reminds you of the images you had of the place before you'd seen it. I coined a saying that Doria agreed really captured this: "There is where I came to be". Here are three of those moments.

First, a glimpse out the window of our riad in Marakesh.

A stroll through the high Atlas. This is just an hour's drive from the intensity of Marakesh.

Well, maybe Marakesh can seem crazy and crowded, but the garden of the 12-century Katubiya mosque always filled me with a sense of peace. This is where I came to be!

Djenne and Djenne jenno

The city of Djenne is known first and foremost for its magnificent mud mosque, built in 1906 on the site of several more ancient mosques dating back to the thirteen century. It's hard to communicate the experience of standing in front of this building - its sheer size coupled with the otherworldliness of its aesthetics...

Only a few kilometers away is the Djenne Jenno - Old Djenne. It's the original site of the city, abandoned when the town moved to its current site in the early thirteenth century. In the 1990's there was an active dig here, but work stopped in 1999. The site is remarkable - it is absolutely covered in potshards.

Here's a photo of Sarah taking a photo of one ...

We spent a couple hours wandering around, and could have stayed longer. But we were accompanied by the director of the little archeology museum on the site, who wanted to get back. I have a hunch he was along primarily to make sure we did not remove any artifacts.

Here is a fragment of a black pot with elaborate desgins etched into the surface...

Further along we came upon the ruins of the cemetery. Burial was in large urns, in foetal position. I was startled to see the occupant of this one so plainly visible. At first I thought it rude to photograph him-or-her, but then seeing how he was tucked in so cosy and sleeping comfortably all these hundreds of years, I took a photo anyhow.


But let's not leave Djenne on a note of death. It's a very lively town. We spent new years eve there - Doria and I downed quite a few Grand Castels, the Malian beer in the the big, big bottle. On New Year's day Sarah took this shot, which shows how the life of the town goes on not indoors, but on its rooftops and in its courtyards.

GeekCorps Mali

It was my last afternoon in Mali, as I started psychic re-entry process into my normal existence, that I remembered that in real life, hey, I'm a geek. So I dropped by the offices of GeekCorps Mali, which as it turned out was just around the corner from where I was staying at Rebecca and Fode's house in the Quartier Hippodrome. And project director Matt Berg took time to show me around their labs and talk to me about their work.

GeekCorps Mali (GCM) is a USAID-funded project whose mission is to provide appropriate technology, technology transfer, and technical assistance in Mali. Matt showed me some of their innovations in the "appropriate technology" arena and they knocked my socks off. Like Bottlenet - a Wifi antenna built out of low-cost, locally available components and assembled in one of Mali's ubiquitous 1.5 liter mineral water bottles.

When we visited some villages in the Malian countryside I was surprised that children always asked us for our empy water bottles, till I saw them in use at local wells, where girls were refilling them from the pump. In the village of Amani in Dogon Country some Fulani women sold us a few liters of fresh cow's milk in a couple of these water bottles. (wow - was that good - and really helped to settle my stomache, which was somewhat agitated after days of pouring hot Malian pepper sauce on everything I ate.) Then I saw them being used with their bottoms cut off as funnels and as spigots on wells. But using them as a wave guide takes it to an entirely new level.

Another problem we witnessed first hand in Timbuktu is the near impossibility of keeping the Sahelian dust and sand out of computers. Geekcorps has addressed this by designing the Desert PC, a completely sealed system unit employing a low-power CPU and a heat-sink system that in effect uses a built in "radiator" rather than a fan to cool the device. Largely based on Geekcorps award-winning desgin, Via Technologies, whose components Geekcorps used in their prototype, is now selling the PC1 for use in desert conditions.

Matt also stressed that on all their projects GCM uses Malian volunteers - so that the tech skills employed will be transfered to folks living in the country. The big success story in this area is a young man named Moussa Keita, who has gone on from his volunteer work with GCM to found his own web development company, Zirasun.

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retro-actively cross-posted from my Non-Profit Technology Blog.

By the lake of the sacred crocodiles...

In the village of Amani in the heart of Dogon Country we had one of the most wonderful interludes of our up-country trip. It started out as one of what Doria termed the "Mr Roger's moments" -- events set up by the tour company to appear we were just taking part in local village life, but were in fact entirely pre-planned for our benefit... as in" oh look, here comes the cheif's Griot to pay him a visit". In this case a group of Fulani women came by selling milk as we sat in a local guest-house waiting for our lunch. But despite the fact that we found no language in common, it turned into a real moment of contact, and we all had a lot of fun.


This beautiful young woman arrived at the gig late, and was just a little shy about joining in.


After lunch we took a lot of pictures - the party kept getting bigger. Kneeling in the center with the donkey-headed walking stick is Ousman, our local guide while we were in Dogon Country. He was a really great guy -- and very funny. Really liked the dramatic pose. After lunch, we walked over to the pond to see the crocodiles..


I know the late Steve Irwin would have been walzting with this guy - but I kept a little distance. None of the locals seemed to worry about them at all as they lumbered in and out of the water and basked in the sun. My friend Gilles had warned me to watch out for the crocs in Mali - so I bought him a little bronze croc-art pipe from a vendor set up by the pond.

Jammin' in Bamako

On our last evening in Bamako, Fode surprised us by engaging this duo, on Kora and drum, to come play and sing for us at the house. What a great surprise. They were totally laid back, and not the least bit put out when Doria began to play along with them on this tiny one-string banjo uke-sort of thing whose name we've forgotten. Easier to just pick up than the 21-string kora! (notice Doria's henna'd hands!)

Djenne rooftops

I love this picture... it captures what I learned to love about West African architecture... click to see the full-size image. I snapped it from the rooftop of the Djenne Campment.

Old Segou

Segou is a bustling city on the banks of the Niger River. Old Segou, a few kilometers away, is a struggling village on the site occupied by the city when it was the capital of the Bambara kingdom founded by Biton Mamary Coulibaly in the mid 18th century.



The current chief of the village of Old Segou is a direct descendant of this illustrious line. We had a chance to met Chief Coulibaly when we visited the village, and hear about the efforts at economic development the village council is undertaking.
You can't guess from this very kingly photo, but during the entire meeting, the chief's two year old daughter traipsed back and forth among us in sneakers that lit up and squeaked with every step.

During the chief's tenure the village has installed a solar electrical generating station that is finally bringing some electricity into Old Segou, and with it the chance to use televisions, computers, and other media that can tie the villagers to the rest of the country. Unfortunately I was not able to learn much more about the details of this project.

Uppermost on Chief Coulibaly's mind today is mortality during childbirth - both the mother's and the infant's. The village is only 15 kilometers from a hospital, but for people without access to cars, in an area where roads may wash out during the rainy season, these 15 kilometers can spell the difference between life and death. So the chief is currently seeking funds to enable the village to establish a childbirth center.

Homebrew, Bobo Style

In Segou we visited a Bobo family who run a small brewery in their home, making millet beer in small quantities that they sell from a shed in their compound. While Mali is predominantly Muslim, and thus not alcohol-friendly, there are a number of peoples within the country who have maintained their traditional religions. Our guide Oumar referred to the Bobo people as "hard-core animists". Whatever that means, they certainly were into their beer, and I got quite a few pictures of their backyard brewing venture

Here the millet kernels are soaked in warm water in the sun until they sprout. This, as any self-respecting homebrewer knows, is the first step of the process known as malting. Grains are malted by encouraging them to germinate, or sprout, and then drying them out again before the process goes to far. This increases the sugar known as maltose in the grain.


The millet is then dried out in the sun, to arrest the germination process at the just the right point. I tried hard to get the picture of this grain a moment earlier, when the family pooch was snoozing in the middle of the sprouted millet, but he got up before I could get my camera ready.!

The next step is to pulverize the malted grain, and mix it with water. European brewers call this mixture a "wort". The wort is then cooked to remove bacterial impurities. These guys, operating in completey non-sterile conditions, cook their wort for a full twenty-four hours to kill off any microbes in the mixtures.
This is the stove where the wort is boiled for a full day. When the boiling is over, the wort is cooled, and yeast is added.






The mixture is allowed to ferment uncovered for another twenty-four hours. Since the fermentation is open, no real carbonation develops but a it does get a nice frothy head. I was surprised to taste it and find that in just 24 hours it had lost a good deal of its suger content and tasted like beer. The guys in the hut were drinking it down by the calabash-full.

The Kids of Sikoro

Our nephew Fode is working with a grassroots health organization in Sikoroni, one of the poorest sections of Bamako. He and his colleague Niang took us on a stroll through the neighborhood one afternoon. We were amazed at the high spirits we saw in the community, despite the obstacles these folks struggle to overcome each day.

At one point on the walk I started to snap a photo of Fode and his daughter, Julia Fanta. More and more kids rushed in to join the photo, until finally we had this "class photo" shoot! That's Julia Fanta on Fode's shoulders down near the left, and Doria's sister Julie in the sunhat on the right.

Click an image to enlarge.

Marrakesh Alleyway

Doria took this great shot of the late morning sun slanting through a gateway.

Blue and Green

The blue color of the Majorelle gardens is all the more striking after you've been walking around Marrakesh for a few days, for the city is in general a city of cinnamons, rusts, and ochres.

This is our god-daughter Nila.

She's just joined the Michael Chekov Theater Company in New York City.

Click to enlarge.

Study in Blue

Here's a shot of our good friends Rebecca, Stu, and Nila who shared our Morocco trip with us, against the intensely blue museum in the Majorelle Gardens. We're so glad they came along and helped us say goodbye to Bill. I know there were others who would have liked to be there as well.
Click the pic to enlarge.

Farewell to Bill

Those who know us well remember that we had a sad duty to carry out on this trip. In those morbid talks folks our age find themselves having late at night, our friend Bill had often expressed the wish that when he died his ashes would be scattered in the Majorelle Gardens in Marakesh. Bill loved Morocco, and in fact had been talking about coming along with us on the Moroccan leg of this journey. Then, his sudden and bewildering death in a traffic accident.

We did not have any idea what the garden was like, and were shocked to find it a highly organized botanical garden, with the plants labeled in French, Latin, and Arabic, and guards along every path. So we had to forgo any ceremony, and give the poor guy a toss into the bushes when we discovered we were alone. A visitor sometime before us had carved this graffiti into a cactus when he, too, had found a moment alone. "This is the last time I will see Marakesh".

Been there and back

I had somehow imagined I'd be posting on a close to daily basis on this trip, but that's been entrely impossible. Now that we've been to that prototypically remote place, Timbuctu, and returned to Bamako, I can settle into writing about some of the most interesting moments of our adventure.