This past week three new EWB volunteers have arrived in Mali and they all came to visit me in Sevare. I guess more accurately I took them to visit me. I wanted everyone to get to see rural Mali right away, since they will be mostly working to benefit rural areas. I decided to go to an irrigated rice field of a friend with two of the volunteers for the weekend. It is a colleague of mine, Madou Kone, is part of an agricultural cooperative. They are starting a new rice field and hope to expand to grow bananas, eggplants, gombo and have livestock. I’ve helped him create some of the plan for their work and we’ve written proposals together to solicit support and funding. I am very excited about the concept being the type of guy who likes cooperatives.
Saturday morning we set off. Our voyage began with a little trip to the market to stock up on food since we would be alone with the labourers beside the rice field. While I was buying some dates a fight broke out right beside us between a grown man and a boy. This was definitely not fair so I decided to jump in and try to break things up. While I’m trying to break up the fight Jean-Luc and Veronique are starting to feel a little ill at ease in the market. Unfortunately a mentally disturbed man grabbed Jean-Luc by the neck while I was in the middle of the melee. This led made them both a little uncomfortable for the next while. Apparently the fight was over some problem of 25 CFA or about 5 cents. After things had settled down we got the rest of our supplies and left the market, which was the best part for my new colleagues.
We arrived at the field which is on the banks of the Niger river at about 11 am. Of course the work was to start during the hottest time of day. After a tour of all the canals that were hand dug to irrigate the rice in the dry season we went to start watering with the motor pump. The motor was not very happy. It is an old German diesel motor that you need to crank really hard before it’ll start. About four of us just kept taking turns cranking the motor in the hot sun for about 20 minutes before we decided it was time to start taking things apart and seeing what was wrong. At this point I usually let the Malians make their miracles happens since I’m not that great at taking apart motors, figuring out what is wrong and putting them together again in working order. The next four hours were a series of adjustments to the injector and failed attempts to crank the motor into gear. I got it going a couple times and we slowly watched the water get pumped up the hose towards the rice field only to have the water stop just before it made it. I don’t think the motor was saying “I think I can, I think I can” and for all our sweat and tears we didn’t get anything done the whole day. Really this was par for the course and in the late afternoon we hung around and drank tea as a chameleon hung out in our shade tree.
After the tea it was time for my friend Youssouf to set out some traps for the “little carnivors” that run around. Youssouf is maybe 20 years old and is a real man of the wild. He can cultivate 4 hectares of rice alone by hand. When he was living in the city he used to run 30 km a day. I’ve always wondered how a football or wrestling team of Malians would fare if they showed up at the Saskatchewan championships. I think they would demolish everyone. Youssouf was full of good information. He is especially interested in magic and told me how to a great number of things. He and I set out to lay some traps in the bush. I was feeling like an expert from my one afternoon of beaver trapping in Canada. After some thorough searching we found two different hole to set up our traps beside. We put down a little dried fish and some papaya and hoped for the best. Youssouf was hoping he’d get some meat to eat. People in Mali used to hunt and trap a lot but now the wild animals are disappearing. This is making life difficult for many whose livelihood partly depending on hunting. At night we all slept in a nice little hut beside the water after eating a giant portion of rice.
In the morning I slept in a little hoping my sunburn from the day before would go away. When I woke up I saw Youssouf walking towards the hut from the direction of our traps. I soon saw that we had caught something but I noticed it was really long. He put down the trap in front of me and there in it’s clutches was a 2 meter black cobra. When Youssouf found the trap in the morning the cobra wasn’t dead so he had to go find a long stick and kill it. He can definitely take care of himself. Everyone was very excited about the snake. They are sacred to many ethnicities in Mali. I was told how if you cut off the head of a cobra and plant it in the ground the body of the snake will grow back. At the right time you can pull the whole snake out of the ground and as soon as you throw it into the air it will come alive.
We also caught two mice in traps beside the hut so it was a good haul but nothing that Youssouf was going to eat. He cooked us all some rice porridge. We walked for a couple hours to visit a nearby village, Trimou, that has come together to make an 11 hectare irrigated rice field. It took 100 men three months to do all the preparation. All the canals and tilling are done by hand out in the dry merciless sun. The men of Trimou were very happy with their new fields. Each person was given an eighth of a hectare which could provide over a tonne of rice. At one pm we realized we were again not being very smart in that we had spent the hottest part of the day out in the sun.
When the other workers got back we were told that they were going to buy a new motor. This left us with another afternoon to sit back and drink tea with the chameleon.
I think Jean-Luc and Veronique were on overload but I think everything went well and I’m glad to have met the seemingly all powerful Youssouf. I am now even more optimistic about the success of the cooperative and the good things it can bring for rural Mali. I see the potential for participation and solidarity as a means to putting food in people’s stomachs and money in their pockets.