Diabaly 1 - April 4

The project I’m working on is the short-term design and feasibility phase for what will eventually be an enormously complicated 5-year irrigation project. The project site begins about 6 hours north of Bamako. We have an irrigation team (designing canals, etc.), a roads team (improving an existing road in the project area), a land-use planning team (deciding where villages, pasturage, farmland, etc. are going to be), and an environmental and social assessment team, whose principal job is writing an environmental impact assessment and mitigation plan. A part of this is doing baseline health and socioeconomic surveys so that when the bigger project gets going, it has something to measure its progress against.

This week I have been with the public health expert up in the project site as the survey team practices performing the health survey. It has been very cool. We have spent the past 2 days going over the questionnaire – first reading it in French and translating it into Bambara, so that all the survey team members feel like they know what they’re asking; then working with the Peulh translators to make sure that they can effectively communicate the questions and answers. Lots of interesting cultural stuff has come up. The 3rd question in the survey asks people to identify their relationship to the head of household – i.e. self, spouse, child, whatever. One of the surveyors couldn’t wrap his head around the possibility of a man being the spouse of the head of household – i.e. of the head of household being a woman. Other people pointed out that when they did their original survey – in which the heads of household were identified – there were widows in charge of families who may have since remarried; for the sake of consistency in their data, then, a man might technically be the husband of the head of household. Everyone took as given his overall point – that it would be impossible for a man to really just be the consort of the head of household.

Driving up here was fascinating. The road ran parallel to the Niger until a town/dam called Markala, when we started to follow assorted canals in the Office du Niger irrigation scheme. Lots of the land was dry, dusty, and scrubby, pocked with thorny obstinate vegetation. Then suddenly we hit a pocket of dry-season rice and market-garden cultivation – all these clearly demarcated fields with little feeder canals forming ridges between them – and the contrast between a desiccated empty field, and its neighbour glowing green, is one of the loveliest things I have ever seen. I took photos, since I then left the camera sitting in the car in 110 degree heat I am not sanguine they will turn out. At one point when I got out to take a photo, a dude on a donkey cart was passing by, and he immediately hopped off and demanded I take a photo of him – he even decided that it should be as he drank water out of the ditch. Normally I have strong feelings against taking photos of people as though they were scenery (Look at the exotic African! No, I have no idea what his name is! Next I’ll show you my photos of wild game!) but the agency in this case was all coming from him.

Some of the people in the project area are Peulh (Fulani nomadic or semi-nomadic herder-type people) and there are lots of ruminants wandering around. The cattle are lovely – elegant, soft-eyed, dewlapped. I am also fond of the donkeys, whose withers aren’t even as high as my waist but who maintain an air of gentle resignation while hauling enormous loads of people, rice, fodder, firewood, mud bricks, etc. The sheep are just gawky and stupid. There are also goats and in the settled villages on the canals, assorted birds – guinea fowls, chickens, even some geese that looked, as my grandmother would say, like nasty pieces of work. Like Boss Tweed, waddling around Tammany. Lots of the mammals had young (the baby donkeys, with their little fuzzy coats, are so cute) with them – is the middle of the dry season really the best time, evolutionarily speaking, to have vulnerable infants? I guess it must be, or they wouldn’t.

Tomorrow we go out to the test village to put the questionnaires into action!