Today I was driving in a Land Rover today over packed red
roads through a rural area of Mali, West Africa. The sun streaming through the
plumes of red dust being tossed up by the Helix truck in front of us gave the
flat, dry landscape an almost dreamy quality as if I was looking at a sepia
coloured photograph. The countryside is dotted by huge baobab trees, freshly
plowed fields and scrawny bushes and donkeys, cows, horses, pigs, goats and
sheep that give the impression that someone has randomly strewn about pieces
from a child’s farm playset. The rainy season only has just started but there
are already a few places where we had to drive through water and in a few weeks
these places will be largely inaccessible.
Now I am sitting outside under a porch listening as the wind
picks up and brushes through the leaves of the mango and moringa trees in the
courtyard. You can tell the rain is coming because the wind picks up suddenly
and there is a lot of dust in the air and the birds start to get very noisy
right before the rain starts to fall. For now it is not raining very hard; for
all the thunder and wind only a very few drops actually fall to the ground. It
may be raining harder somewhere else, but for this area, so desperate for rain,
the ground will have wait for a good drink for another few days. I have been
told the rains are a bit late this year, and while no one expects another food
crisis and most indications are that this year should be a good harvest, there
is a still some anxiety in the voices of the people as they look at the mostly
cloudless skies and then back at their still bare fields.
I wanted to have a few pictures to add to this post but the
connection is not fast enough today. Hopefully sometime soon.
A la prochaine!
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