Dieu Avant Tout

19 April 2007



A bush taxi is to depart from Mopti to Djenne at some point on Thursday, so we get to the station early in the morning and buy tickets. They tell us it will not leave until at least 20 people are signed up. There are currently only 9. I look at the taxi, a large van baking in the 100 degree heat. There is a full day of waiting ahead of us, resting on a log in the shade with the Malians and another young French couple.

In this setting you do nothing but watch for hours and be happy you have shade. It's can be hard to be with children here, some of which are rolling around half-naked in the dirt or sitting in greasy tires talking to themselves. Some of them sing songs when they ask for money. Every once in awhile, an old man will catch them begging and chase them out into the sun with his sandal. In time, of course, they will be driven back into the dusty shelter by the unforgiving Malian heat.

We wait like this for hours, in hopes that we will be Djenne-bound, an ancient island city on the salt trade route to Timbuktu and home to the world's largest mud-built building, the towering mosque. To see this remote of a place, you must stuff yourself into this kind of situatin, or drop 200 bucks on a private car and sneaky guide.

Around 3pm or so, by far the hottest time of the day, a man yells out "Djenne!" and we head to the van. Before we get on, they try to charge us an obscene amount for our bags. It is moments like these that you want to disappear from the world in frustration. It is just an arbitrary foreigner tax. I began to contest in broken French before the Frenchman from the couple jumped in and nearly came to blows with the huckster, screaming at him that it was unjust. Turns out they had been in Mali for longer than us and his madness in this moment personified the sort of breaking point Dave and I found ourselves in. These little fees add up and you have to put your foot down or you will get stepped on. The Frenchman got the "tubab tax" down to a reasonable level and everyone crammed into the oven, along with literally 20 Malians.

Driving across the Pyrenees in Putamama has got nothing on this. Forget privacy. A young kid's knee is firmly in your crotch. A little girl with goat meat grease on her lips has fallen asleep against your leg. Next to you, a teenager blows on your neck and innocently looks the other way when you turn your head, then slaps a high five with his friend. Your legs are completely dead and asleep within 30 minutes and, over the next few houres, you feel the sensation rising up to your navel and fear it might hit your chest. At every stop, the backdoors swing open and children beg and beg, looking at you like it is your ordained duty to save them, as if 50 cents will make a spot of difference in the course of their lives.

You ride steady and strong like this, following your breath, and it seems clear to you that the optimism one feels toward the state of the world is largely tied to the state of one's own personal life. If one feels a sense of hope or sees an outlet to their own existence, suddenly the world feels possible, as if butting heads with it is not so hard. This is of course misleading. Suffering like this will always exist in the background, in the bottom of our minds. While I speak of Mali's lively people and colorful culture, I don't mean to say that all its people dance around in the streets, laughing and loving, even though there is a stagnant stream of shit flowing next to their shacks. The situation here is grinding and I do not know how the African people find a balance. As I have said before, we do not need to be morose and swim around in the pain and anguish of ourselves and others. But it is our duty, if we want to be whole, to try to understand what it means in our own lives, so we can confront situations like this head-on.

The ignition of the van growls and the people squashed around you settle in and you observe how everything they feel is on the table and in public. The luxury of holding back emotions is non-existant. The passengers leap from yelling at each other, lecturing, scolding, to laughing and sharing food and holding each other closely. This is how the bulk of population in Mali travels, clustered togeter, as one unit, with loud voices and song. Plastered on the front of every one of these vans are the words "Dieu Avant Tout", "God Above All".