Tourists

I was walking from the bus station back to the Peace Corps transit house in the regional capital and noticed that something was different. Where normally I passed unoticed, now people on both sides of the street were yelling at me, trying to get my attention. The typically lazy street was coursing with a hyperkinetic energy, as if everyone had had ten cups of coffee that morning. I walked quickly trying to make it through the gauntlet of street vendors and keep ahead of whoever was trying to get my attention and whatever it was they wanted. One young guy caught up to me and started speaking quickly in a language I couldn’t understand, as if we were sharing a secret. He desperately tried different languages until he hit on one that registered: “My friend, you want the Ganja?” I said no thanks and hurried on. What in the world had happened to my laid-back, friendly, no hassle Mali?

            That was my first introduction to tourist season, the frantic four months of “cold season” between November and March when the Western world descends on this sleepy desert backwater in a cloud of foreign accents, outsized expectations, impossible demands, oversized cameras, fleets of Landcruisers, sex, and money money money. In that feeding frenzy, suddenly every man on the street has some “ancient/traditional/magical/authentic artifact” to sell you, offers you a taxi (though he has no car), and to be your guide to Timbuktu (though he’s never been there himself and still has no car). It is the one time of the year when the hotels are full, prices double, and the average Malian has the chance to score big—to receive a handout from a passing tourist who doesn’t realize the value of their gift in the fourth poorest country in the world (a used pocket knife, water bottle, pocket change), or to rip one off, which really isn’t underhanded in a country where every price is negotiable and based on whatever a particular person is willing to pay. There are all kinds of tourists: ruin-seekers, poverty tourists, cultural tourists, Third World development tourists. Thrill seekers come to climb the “Hand of Fatoma,” a spire of rock that rises out of the desert and is the highest point in West Africa and highest sheer vertical rock face in the world, site of a recent North Face climbing expedition documentary. Another kind of thrill seeker, usually a middle-aged European women, comes to find or maintain an African boyfriend. There are those that come to experience Mali's’vibrant music scene, birthplace of the Blues and the banjo, site of the annual “Festival in the Desert,” when musicians from around the world commune together. Then there are the those who just come for the desert itself, to ride camels and “find themselves” in the mighty Sahara (they usually get lost), and to get their passports stamped in the real-life Timbuktu (there’s not much else to do there).

Most famous of all is “Dogon Country,” a long line of cliffs jutting out of the desert where the traditionally animist Dogon people have made their homes in caves for several hundred years after fleeing slave-raiders and Islamic invaders. Possessing their own unique cosmology and home to 80 dialects—many mutually unintelligible—scattered throughout hard-to-reach and often hidden villages, the Dogon are a fascination to Westerners: imagine trekking through a landscape of Mesa Verde’s, but where the people still live there more or less the way they always have. You can learn a lot about a person by how they react to this strange world. A group of tourists will come back from the same trip together, but one will speak only of the shocking poverty, another will be amazed by the preserved culture, while still another will barely see the living people, so entranced with the ruins and sheer beauty of the landscape. People see what they want to see. To some the Dogon stand as a symbol of an older, more vital and primal way of living left behind by modern living. Others see an example of the failure of modern economics and systems of government to take care of the least fortunate. To some, the Dogon are hopelessly backwards, to others they possess ancient wisdom and magic. Unfathomly culturally rich, unimaginably dirt poor, heathens, holy men, incredibly wise, utterly illiterate, tourists come seeking something specific in the Dogon--and inevitably find exactly what they were looking for. Meanwhile the amused Dogon don’t see what all the big fuss is about.

Tourists have an impulse to possess pieces of this unique culture (myself included, after all I am just a slightly longer-term tourist here)—not the made-for-tourists versions, new and overly decorative, but the “real” ones. Everything must be “real,” that is, as visitors define it. They want the Dogon as they imagine them, not sporting a Nike ballcap, not educated and speaking French, and they’d better not see that empty Coke bottle in the corner. One American complained to me after visiting a village: “They just didn’t act authentic.” In search of “authentic,” tourists buy the cracked clay pots out of the working kitchen, the the broken  carved door locks right off the gates. (They’ve bought all the old doors off all the houses of Timbuktu). I once saw tourists stop by the side of the highway and buy the wooden axe and pounding mortar and pestle out of Malians hands, which they were more than happy to sell them. Then they bought the stool out from under an old woman before they left, the amused locals pocketing the money and laughing as they watched the strange creatures speed away in their Jeep packed with dirty old broken things they had no use for. It would be like unimaginably rich and powerful aliens showing up at your house and wanting to inspect and collet the things in your kitchen: a spatula, the toaster, a fork, and insisting on not the good new ones but the egg-covered spatula with the broken handle, the outmoded toaster, the fork with the twisted prong. As one local guide incredulously asked a Peace Corps volunteer friend of his: “Why in the world do you guys want all this crap?” It was a good question.

I recently hosted my own first visitor, an old high school friend of mine from the states who came to see Mali for two weeks. We played tourists together, her presence and fresh eyes reminding me of everything that I’ve stopped seeing—the heat, the beauty, the openess and hospitality of the local cultures, how terrible the local food is, how lucky I am. I gave her some of the best advice I was given when I first arrived: 1) Always chew side-to-side like a cow to avoid biting down on rocks, 2) Laugh, joke, never take anyone or anything too seriously—Malians like to make fun and expect you to give it right back to them, 3) When in doubt don’t drink that water! 4) People, friendship, small talk, community, reputation, history, custom, there are everything—time, material goods, law, work, deadlines are all secondary. She had a great time and everyone loved her, though they were very concerned that at 24 she didn’t have any kids yet (nine years past her child-bearing prime!), and recommended that she improve her diet by eating lots of meat and coffee to get lots of babies. Knowing that my village would assume she was “my woman” as they did every time any female visitor came by, I lied and told them that, yes, this was actually “my woman.” This turned out to be a big mistake as they went nuts overher arrival. The first morning I had a crowd of 30 village women and children at my gate bursting pass me and climbing the walls to get a first peek of “Amadaga’s woman.” People bestowed gifts and blessings on her, assured me she had great child-bearing hips, began suggesting names for our supposed children, and then proposed holding a traditional Dogon wedding with all the village on Saturday—and that’s right when we made the decision to leave on Friday.

Reflections at One Year

A few months ago I travelled to the capital city to participate in the swearing-in of my "sister" training group--meaning the group of volunteers who arrive exactly a year after you to begin work in the same fields, in this case water sanitation, agriculture, and natural resource management. I watched this mirror of the beginning of my own experience unfold--the same boring speeches, the same oath, the same anxiousness to finish training and move in to my real village to begin "work," whatever that was going to be. I did my best to answer their nervous questions about how to stay healthy, about day-to-day life once you were on your own, about whether it would all be worth it, just as elder volunteers had done their best to answer my same questions with encouragement and reassurance a year ago. And I thought about what I would not be telling them: about the inevitable self-doubt, frustration, and lonliness that alternates with the times of elation and complete contentment, oftentimes within the space of one day--things they think they know, but don't really, not yet.

A little over a year ago I arrived in my village, the sun blazing and a sandstorm blowing in off the Sahara. Every volunteer remembers watching the white Peace Corps Landcruiser driving off and waving goodbye that first day, surrounded by village well-wishers you don't know and can't understand, with two words ringing in your head: now what??? In some ways, the past fifteen months seem like the fastest in my life, while in others it sometimes feels like I've never known anything else. One thing's for certain: I've learned more about myself and the world in the last year than in the previous twenty-three. Likewise I've experienced more wild things, been to more interesting places, and had the privilege of meeting more fascinating people than at any time before. I've survived unspeakably bad transportation, sandstorms, waking up next to poisonous snakes and scorpions, Malaria, and three months of 130 degrees without electricity or running water. I've eaten porcupine and rat and feral cat and snake and God knows what else, encountered baboons and alligators, ridden camels. Up here in the desert I've met tourists from all over the world, thrill seekers traversing Africa by motorcycle, aid workers, Christian and Islamic missionaries, linguists, national Geographic writers, Arabic traders, famous musicians, four Ambassadors and two presidents. I've seen the dusty town of Douentza (where I bike each weekend for market) go from one with no paved roads and spotty electricity, to one that tunes in to "The West Wing" every night, has access to satellite internet, and talks of coming cell phones--and yet which is still made of mud, with no household sanitation or piped water. I've lived amongst Moors, Songhrai, Bambara, and Toureg people, and have studied the languages of the Dogon and Fulani. And I've witnessed a region decimated by locusts, watched as half my village packed up and left.

Even the busiest volunteer has lots of time to read and write letters, but most of all you have endless hours to think. There's no hiding--not from yourself or the world--behind the technological distractions of the West, TV, internet, movies, telephones. I've discovered that I am a somewhat better student of languages than I previously thought, though not nearly as patient a teacher as I had assumed. I've discovered weaknesses I didn't know I had, but also a deeper well of strength. I've learned to appreciate the small things here--the very small things--a ripe tomato, a cup of cool water, a crust of bread, a late night conversation with friends, laughter. I've learned the sacredness of a bowl of food, of family, of life for the simple sake of living. I've had to reconsider my former notions of love, community, the individual, obligation, hardship, endurance, faith, family, development, and progress. When I first got here it was like, "Oh look at the cute little lambs!" while now it's more like "Get in my belly you tasty little thing!" At first I saw all the world around me here through a Western lens of poverty and death. Now I barely notice the hardships through the cultural wealth and overall vitality of life that surrounds me here.

Year One is mostly prep work: cultural integration, needs assessment, language learning, collecting funding. Now the real work begins. If my second year (or, if I'm honest with myself, the remaining short nine months) is even half as unpredictable as the first, it should be quite a time...