Three Canadians in Djenné: The Tale of an Epic Guidebook Fail

So this all went down about a month ago, but I've been dealing with an impossibly slow internet connection, reeling from a series of ill-fated weekend road trips, healing from a bevy of minor but nonetheless unfortunate ailments and a indulging a raucous desire to squeeze as much fun in as possible during my last month and half in Mali.

Two other Canadians who work in a little village south of Bamako and I headed to one of West Africa's oldest towns, Djenné, for the first part of my much-needed-mid-mandate break. After barely making our 6am bus, we spent 10 hours sweating all the way to Djenné where we walked into an AMBUSH. 

For the three of us, this outing was one of the first "touristy" things we did in Mali, since for the most part, our work and living in families/NGO bases/paltry salaries keep us separate from the tourists who show up in sparkling clean outdoor performance gear and air conditioned 4X4's (this is my jealousy font). To prepare for our journey, we talked to other PSIJ's who had been already, quizzed local colleagues and of course, depended greatly on what is usually the holy bible to travellers, The Lonely Planet travel guide. 

LP warned us that touts/street vendors/would-be guides would be an exhausting annoyance in Mopti, but had nothing to say about Djenné on the subject. As far as we could tell, Djenné was a sleepy, mud-built town where you can view the world's biggest mud structure, eat delicious “widjila” and shop in the Monday market. We figured that we would just lounge there for two days before heading further north to Mopti to quickly pick up a guide for Dogon Country. 

Djenné ended up being anything but sleepy. To our dismay, the harassment began the second we stepped off the bus and on to the ferry that takes you across the Bani, since Djenné is a kind of island. A man came up to us offering his "guide" services. We said we weren't interested, but he followed us to our hostel and hung around for 2 hours while we got settled. We opted to hear him out since we really had nothing planned for the next 2 days other than look at the mud mosque and wait for the Monday market, and Djenné's so small that within the first 2 minutes, we'd kind of already seen the mosque. He told us that he'd, take us to a Peul village by horse-cart and a Bozo village by boat, and then give us historical tour of Djenné. We "discuted" the price down to something we thought was reasonable and agreed to use his "services" and he finally left us alone. For me, he had me at the boat ride, but I'm a sucker for anything that involves being on water.

We then headed to a slightly cheaper restaurant than the one at our hotel, which took under a minute, but in that time a mob of children had begun following us asking for our water bottles, presents, balls, pens, money and the street vendors camped in front of the mosque caught sight of us and started making their way over to hawk their wares. We couldn't even eat a meal without vendors coming and sitting down at our table and shoving necklaces in our faces or offering to be our Dogon guides. It made Bamako seem like a walk in the park. I couldn't help but feel like my trusted LP had let me down, and I couldn't help but wonder, if Djenné was this bad and LP didn't say anything about it, how bad could Mopti be?

Some guys were taking their tea at the hotel and invited us to join. We got to talking and expressed that we wanted to go somewhere quiet to have a drink, which LP accurately warned us would be hard to come by in Djenné, but we'd been in Mali long enough to know that where there's a will, there's a way to drink.

They led us through the narrow, winding labyrinth of mud-lined streets to the other end of town while we were accosted the entire way and I was even straight-up slapped by two kids. Along the way, it was impossible to overlook the poverty that surrounded us, and I was amazed that in some ways the living conditions there seemed worse than in Bamako, which is counted as one of the least livable cities in the world, and this ranking I believe is a function of its poverty.

All unfortunate observations aside, our booze-filled oasis was someone's back yard, complete with a donkey, a sheep pen that housed the biggest sheep I've ever seen and approximately 20 chickens that we saw climb into a tree at one point, our barmaid was a 12 year old girl, and our host rejected the Don Draper ways of his countrymen in a continuous-broken-English-loop that lasted for over 20 minutes. Still, we liked their company, and as always enjoyed sipping beer under the stars in January.

As we walked home quite peacefully, since we'd outlasted the beggars, we chuckled at how surreal our first hours in Djenné were, and how that if you'd talked to us even 6 months earlier, we would have never guessed that we would be drinking Castel beside a donkey and watching chickens climb trees in a mud town.

After capping off our first and negative impressions of Djenné with some positive ones, our "guided" excursion the next day was a miserable disappointment. As we rode across the dried up river basin, I asked him to tell us a little about the area, and he told us were in the Sahara. Um, no. In the villages, it was to be expected that the kids would mob us, but once their initial attempts to get handouts from us failed, they just wanted the usual: to play a few games, have their pictures taken, and stare at these strange people visiting their home  and I enjoyed the exchanges. Nevertheless, I haven't developed the thick skin that seasoned development and aid workers seem to have, and the obvious signs of disease, malnutrition and plum, desperate poverty that these children carried broke my heart a little.

The Sahel, rather.

Once back in Djenné, our historical tour devolved into a "shopping trip" where I'm sure he gets commission if the tourists he brings by  shops "historically significant" workshops (riiiiiight) buy something. We got annoyed and asked to go to the terrace that he'd set up for us to view the mosque from and watch the sunset.  The views of the mosque and the sun setting over the town were exhilarating, but short-lived, since some merchants had followed us up there with their trays of necklaces on their heads.

In addition to the "guided" tour being a disappointment, the market was like any market in any old town, and doesn't hold a candle to Bamako's "Grand Marché". Also something I feel like LP should have mentioned.

Nevertheless, it's never all bad in Mali, so when our search for Tuareg scarves in the market proved fruitless, the man who had been asking us to join him for tea the entire time we'd been there, but we kept refusing, led us through the winding streets to a rooftop where he told us to wait in peace while he searched for a scarf vendor. As the sun set behind the Bani, a vendor carried his scarves of many colours up the stairs, and my friend and I took our time trying on the different colours, learning how to tie them properly and "discuted" in an unrivalled tranquility.

After going to all those troubles to find us the scarves, we figured we owed our new friend Barack his 3 cups of tea. After supper, we joined him and some friends on the rooftop once again where we listened to Celine Dion on cassette tape (LP is right about some things), stargazed and chatted with our hosts while enjoying the ritual that is drinking tea in this country. In the end, all he wanted was to give us his address so that we could be pen pals.

So Djenné is not a place to visit for the faint of heart, but worth it for its understated beauty and drinking tea with Barack if you have the good sense to accept his offer.

Now pics, next post Pays Dogon.

Non-Rooftop Fun:

Bus crossing on the Bani

Pirogue-watching from the port.

Moroccan style mud building.

The underwhelming Monday Market

Ducking out of the market to drink beside a donkey

The donkey we drank beside

Rooftop Fun

Rooftop tea

Shopping with over-persistent-necklace-selling-ladies.

This colour brings out the two colours of my eyes.

Tuareg scarf shopping with a view.

T Gets Technical Part 1: The Evolution of my Mandate

I have recently, and somewhat regretfully, returned from my mid-mandate break. I'm waiting to pilfer my travel buddies' pictures since my ancient Nikon didn't fully capture the beauty of the mud city (Djenné) and cliff (Pays Dogon).

Seeing that my internship is now halfway over, I've been reflecting on its somewhat haphazard evolution. As some of my readers have expressed interest in learning more about what I'm doing in Mali, I figured I should oblige with the following warning:

This blog post risks being excessively boring since 99% of aid and/or development work is "unsexy".

Anyway, my mandate evolved as follows: 

• Applied to be a "microcredit officer" for the shea butter cooperative in a tiny village called Zantiébougou that doesn't have electricity.

• Got interviewed as such by a Québécois NGO, but with a caveat that I would need to accept that my mandate may change and evolve over time.

• Got hired as such, once again advised that things may very well change before I take off. (This part was kind of annoying, because preparing for Bamako is a lot different than preparing for a tiny, isolated village with no electricity).

• Advised during my pre-departure training that I would be doing something funding and communications related in Bamako.

• Spent my first 2 weeks in Bamako without knowing my mandate or job title. My work then was to get used to the heat, the smells, the food, the bugs, the pollution, and find a non-jerk family.  

Eventually, I was advised that I would be a "Project Advisor", charged with supporting the communications team by transforming their initial "cooperation" with potential donors to "consolidation" on specific projects . In addition, I have to revamp the website, and hopefully launch 2-3 new projects, or at the very least secure stable funding for them (huge, intimidating amounts of funding sometimes).

In terms of translating into the daily grind, so far I've been reviewing funding proposals, providing feedback, then waiting for my local colleague to rewrite them and get back to me. I also do some leg work for the communication team.  AMPJ, being in a Francophone country, mostly deals with Francophone donors. However, there's nothing stopping us from asking for funds from Anglophone donors, so I started translating some of the communication team's documents and sending them off too. In addition, I decided that if I was going to be on Facebook multiple times a day while waiting for edits, I might as well make it work related somehow. So I'm working on an AMPJ page, because one of my "objectives" is to help raise the profile of the NGO. I'm guessing my director meant within the local community, but I'm sure using the intarwebs counts for something.

Eventually, I got bored of reading the same 3 projects over and over again, so I asked for more work. This translated into making "logic frameworks" for projects. Definitely a brain teaser, but again, I'm still just a worker in an unsexy office (if I wrote "unsexy office worker" that would be a misnomer, right?). I also managed to convince my boss to let me draft a proposal myself instead of just reviewing them, so now I'm *patiently* awaiting his comments on it.

In the spirit of what I'm translating as "International Cooperation", I am supposed to follow the local partners' lead on everything. This has meant a lot of sitting around, but now I'll make up some things to work on (eg: database of potential donors) to make the time more easy passing and let my local colleagues decide if it's useful or not. That's local ownership right? And if I teach the communications staffer how to use the Facebook page's discussion threads to get incoming Canadian volunteers to bring them office supplies, that's capacity-building right?

I did however, refuse  to entirely cede the micro-credit  aspect of my mandate. As such, I have been very, very lucky enough to go on a few ill-fated project-related excursions, and I'll discuss those and post corresponding pictures in Part 2.

I was also fortunate enough to have some very experienced classmates in my M.A. cohort alert me to the potential unsexiness of international work, so my occasional anomie is not surprising to me. Instead, I'm trying to focus on growing personally and professionally from the overall experience of uprooting, leaving everything I know behind and living for a spell in what truly is a different world, as my last post can attest. Clearly, I'm also working on developing a very robust sense of humour. In the end though, my ultimate challenge is to develop an ironclad G.I. tract, so I wouldn't have to have a stomach ache every day while I'm here...inshallah.

Culture Shock Explained: A Photographic Essay

I have just returned to Bamako and work after a blissful mid-mandate break in Djenné and Pays Dogon*, where I ate "cliff bread" and technicolour jam, survived a zombie beggar apocalypse, navigated a city made entirely of mud, trekked along the Falaise de Bandiagara for 4 days and drank tea, shopped and slept on rooftops under the starriest of starry night skies.

*(Pics soon, they take forever to upload to the blog but are pretty much impossible to upload to Facebook unless I do it one and a time, which I won't because I have marriage proposals to collect very important things to do.)

Upon my return which included a 10 hour, sweltering hot, overcrowded and fishy-smelling overnight bus ride, I looked forward to catching up on some zzzz's before starting work again. Truth be told, during my first night back I realised that I slept better outside on a mattress on a roof than I do in my own bed.

The weather is getting hotter and my bed is woefully uncomfortable. So at about 2am after hours of tossing and turning in the creakiest of beds with its wooden slats digging into my shoulder blades, I dismantled my bed in the dark and re-acquainted myself with the floor, cranked the fan and finally knocked out for a few short hours of much, much needed rest.

You see, in Mali a mattress on the floor is more comfortable than a bed, and instead of winter giving way to spring, the "hot season" is now transitioning to the "very hot" season, so I had beads of sweat trickling down my forehead while I sat idly behind a desk when my boss welcomed me back at work and remarked that the heat had returned.

My boss then informed me that I am to head out en brusque brousse again to identify microcredit superstar ladies and put them in charge of the funds in their wee villages. So after being back in Bamako for not even 4 days, and back at work for only 2 days, I've had 2 projects to wrap up before taking off tomorrow on yet another probably ill-fated, backcountry roadtrip where I'm sure to be exposed to all sorts of exhilarating(?!) things.

This got me to thinking about how incredibly different, absolutely everything is here and how I definitely still has the culture shock.

There are supposedly several stages to this affliction, but everyone experiences it differently, so I've dubbed the phases after my own experiences.

The first stage is the "Honeymoon Stage" where ZOMG everything is shiny and new and wonderful!!!

The next is what I like to call the "Mission Creep" (heyo, a little IS humour) where general loneliness, disenchantment and occasional despair creep up on you and make for long days and even longer, sleepless nights. Since I had such a rough introduction to Mali, I think that these two phases occurred concurrently for me rather than consecutively. This meant that my highs were exceptionally high and my lows were devastatingly low...or that I was more manic than Morrissey.

Now I am in the third phase, called "Resignation" where you let go of perpetually longing for things at home, learn to appreciate some of the things here (like beans! I really like it when my mom makes me beans!) and take one of 3 paths with the third being preferable:

1) "Go Native": wear the same brightly coloured, busy patterned outfit head to toe, enjoy the taste of palm oil, think nothing of the trou, find the most convoluted way to do something then do it, etc. This to me is the easier option.

2) Ex-pat Escapism: hang with other toubabs at over-priced toubab joints doing only toubab things.

3) Hybridize and Compartmentalize:  To me, the former is where you learn to love new things in your new home, while not losing yourself in the place. The latter is where you bring what you already know you love (ie: hiking, running, live music) to your new home and learn to appreciate the differences. This option requires constant effort, evaluation and a robust sense of humour, but on my good days, seems to serve me well.

Moreover, having for the most part acquiesced to the wretched taste of palm oil, the trou (although a trou in Djenné broke me, I finally met one I couldn't use) and people's at times perplexing priorities, I can now look back and chuckle at some of the things that I have had to adapt to in a short amount of time. So, over dinner  my Pays Dogon travel buddies and I drafted a list of blog-worthy, dichotomic, photographic comparaisons for your kind perusal:

Culture Shock Explained in Visual Pairings

Column A: Canada               Column B: Mali

Household Items: 

Of the non-glacial variety.                This also can be a dishwasher and a washing machine.

                                                       The 4:00 am call to prayer comes early.  

         

                                                                      Naa douminiké!

Time

 

Pets 

Yes that's a cat on a towel.                      These guys double as dinner          

Trash Disposal

          Where should I toss this?        You know what, here's good.

Multitasking

                                                     Walking down Bamako's main drag carrying twins and balancing a 20 litre bucket on her head.                                                    

Decency

Fidelity

 

High Fidelity: aka loyalty, Cusak style.                            Draper style.

Bathroom

 

                                         I'll leave you to figure the kettle out for yourself.