Friday, February 20, 2009

pays dogon

i never know how to come home.  sometimes slipping back into the groove is seamless.  surrounded by great friends and montana skies, home is where i digest visions of other places and new connections.  other times, coming to montana confuses my senses.  i have figured out that the best prescription for settling back to life when i feel challenged is to just slow down, be quiet for a bit, and let my world be small till i am ready to dive back in to my community.  

one week after this homecoming, i took a fall skiing and blew my ACL, PCL, and meniscus.  huh.  slow down, be quiet, and heal.  i will have surgery on march 2, and till then will have much time to contemplate.  i am immobilized in a town where people sit still only when they have to.  so many of us have been hurt doing the sports we love.  i figure it is just my time.  not pleased about it, but able to see the bigger picture.

my bigger picture has the most lovely details.  graceful old women carefully maneuvering the trail down the cliffs, teems of children playing in the stream, reminders of ancient settlements high in the cliffs and stories of its people who many believe had the power of flight.  there is a  rich source of imagery bubbling from mind and little of it is self-created.  my mental files overflow with information about the world.  i may not be able to walk very well right now, no matter.  there are many places i can go.

our friends at Dje Yamen had planned an excursion to take us for a day trip to visit Tireli, home to one of Tandana's school garden projects.  we traveled by car that morning to the edge of the escarpment and got our first breathtaking views of the cliffs and the plain below.  we followed an old trail down the cliff.  to be out moving around in this beautiful place was just what i needed.  we seemed to move slowly through the cliffs, limited only by the desire to savor every angle, every perspective of the view before us.  cameras were clicking away with each turn in the trail, knowing all the time that these photographs would be unable to capture the sense of expansiveness of the sub-saharan landscape.

we entered Tireli from the cliffs and made our way down the meandering paths of the village itself until we arrived at the campement where Isaac had arranged for us to lunch.  after lunch, we had the unexpected opportunity to engage the village chief and several other elders in conversation that ranged from regional politics and education to organized religion and traditional animist practices.  i appreciate those moments when beliefs i hold onto get turned upside down.  

afterward, we strolled over to the school garden where Isaac explained the project's goals and what they are doing to achieve them.  with each discussion of local problems and their potential solutions, i have a growing awareness of the centrality of local insights to create enduring, positive change.  Isaac and his cohorts are intimately connected with their environments and have well-informed, progressive ways of understanding the challenges before them.

we spent the rest of the afternoon visiting with the children.  surely they must have been wondering what the heck we were doing there.  still, they were polite, gracious hosts.   

later that evening, as we toured through the countryside on our ride back to Bandiagara, the cliff settlements of the ancient Tellem people loomed overhead.  i considered Isaac's comments from earlier in the day, that the Tellem had recently returned to their villages in the cover of night and flown up to their former dwellings to perform their ancestral ceremonies.  when asked how he knew they had come even though no one had seen them, Isaac considered the question as though it was nonsense.  he said, "well, we just know that we know."  that made perfect sense to me.

this intellectual dilemma asks us to believe in multiple, contradictory things at the same time.  i have no doubt that these ancient ones can fly and i know that the human capacity for flight is dependent on certain technologies.  it is perfectly acceptable to take both of these notions into my belief system.  the power of contradictory, opposing forces dissipates.  instead of hanging my hat on this notion or that, i simply get to acquire more hats.

how divine.

Monday, February 9, 2009

Djenne to Bandiagara

we left Djenne in the early afternoon, headed for Bandiagara.  a dry, hazy afternoon lay still upon the horizon.  we all seemed to grow quiet that afternoon.  whether it was the distilling of new ideas of this African experience or preparing oneself for the upcoming unknown ahead of us, i do not know.  the ride was uneventful, but still i felt in my heart a stirring of anticipation.  

we had spent the morning working with a family of bogolan mud-cloth artists.  Bogolan is a local textile technique that uses mixtures of clay and other natural ingredients to dye cloth.  the traditional cloths tend toward complicated geometric patterns while the newer cloths are more representational.  after a quick demonstration, they set us to work on our own cloths.  i often refer to  myself as someone who is artistically challenged.  i even get jittery in the face of crafty or otherwise art-y projects.  that morning however, as we set up our cloths on the roof of the house overlooking all of Djenne with the Grand Mosque in the background, i realized that it would be foolish to do anything but find peace in the process.  the night before, i had had a dream about a mint green cruiser bicycle, so i decided to attempt to give my bicycle life on cloth.  after the mud had dried, we carried our cloths to the river where our new friends carefully washed the mud away to reveal the designs we each had created.  Aubrey's swirls and shapes, Anna's motorcycle, Ursula's geometrics, all of them were wonderful.  little bits of ourselves right there on the cloth.  surprise, i even liked mine a little bit.  

there was a stillness that settled in me while we were working on our cloths.  since arriving in Africa, it had been all go, go, go.  last minute running around, logistical details, trying to find the time to get to know everyone in the group, all these things seemed to wring the hours out of the day.  so to have a few moments on a crisp, sunny morning to be quiet, yet together held a sweet richness for me.

perhaps this opportunity for introspection lingered as we loaded up the trucks that afternoon and followed us down the road to Bandiagara.  one member of our group was not feeling well and i was worried, but optimistic.  i grappled with other uncertainties as well.  nothing special, just the regular program-running sort of stuff.  but more that anything else, the refrain that settled in my internal dialogue went something like this, "i am here.  here i am.  Africa Africa Africa."

several hours later, Timothee, Moussa, Daniel, Isaac, and Noum hosted us to a lovely welcome dinner.  the stage was set.  the momentum had been created.  it was as though everything up till then had been a slow walk up a long mountain and we were just about to crest the hill to get our first view of the landscape.  but not yet.  there were still a few more things to do.

Monday, February 2, 2009

yalema-palooza 2009

the world has changed since i last wrote.  i confess that i too have changed.   i'd like to think that each one of us is in a constant flux, a state where we are open to experiences and are thereby changed and improved because of them.  i suppose it is my way of understanding the old Japanese proverb that you cannot step in the same river twice.  

speaking of rivers.

last week i floated on the Niger River in central Mali with my nine new friends.  the Niger is a big, lumbering desert river that seems to cut the Sahara desert in half.  glassy, flatwater bordered on both sides by desert and desert, there are small fishing villages dotted along the waterway.  the Bozo people (no jokes, please, that is really the name of their ethnic group) are notorious for their enduring river/fishing culture.  they fish from small wooden boats called pirogues, the helmsman working from the rear while another person balances precariously from the narrow bow, working the fishing nets.  other larger boats, the pinasses, offer transport for villagers up and down the river.  the Niger is a busy place, yet remarkably peaceful.  there is something about the light on the water and the welcoming waves of local villagers.  something special.  something that helped me to digest our experiences in the village and all that led up to it.  on another day, the hum of the boat's motor and the quiet lapping of water might have sent me to a sweet doze, but on this trip, the Niger called me to internal attention and i took that time to consider a few big questions.


we had just come from spending a week in Kansongho, a small Dogon village up on the plateau.  i had visited this community in July as a representative of the Tandana Foundation.  upon returning home from that trip, Anna and i decided to propose a volunteer vacation to the region, hoping that other folks might agree with us that it is a special place.  a few short months later, after sending out e-mails, making phone calls, and sending out invitations on facebook (crazy facebook), our group met in downtown Bamako, Mali for the first time.  there was no way to know in those first moments how beautifully our group would come together in the coming weeks.  but come together, we did.  and we were not alone.  the people of Kansongho and the very place itself stood not as symbols, but as lively, important parts of our whole.  the Tandana volunteers had come to help.  how could we know in advance how much we would receive?

done in a direct shot, the journey overland from Bamako to Kansongho is long and grueling, so we decided to break it into a few days, giving everyone a chance to find their feet on African soil and prepare for our time in the village.  on the way, we visited the ancient port city of Segou where we stumbled upon an impromptu evening of live music that still has me tapping my toes.  one of my favorite evenings of the trip, our night in Segou seemed to be an omen of the wonderful things to come.  one by one the musicians and dancers pulled us off our chairs and we danced in the warm African evening.  later we traveled to Djenne, home of the world's largest mud brick mosque.  we showed up just in time for market day, a swirling madness of vegetable vendors, fishmongers, hardware booths, goats, chickens, calls to prayer.  we stayed the night in Djenne to work with a mud cloth artist the following morning, so we had a chance to also see Djenne without the market craziness.  it turns out that what had been a mob the day before, became a sleepy little place where we could stroll side streets and make new friends along the way.  Thanks to Christopher Lindstrom, we made a great contact in Djenne, a local man named Hamadoun who hosted us with great friendship and graciousness.

our next stop was Bandiagara, our jumping off place before heading into Dogon country.  jumping off.  jumping in.