Rharous, Mali
I have just arrived in a small town named Ghourma-Rharous, about 150km east of Timbuktu on the Niger river. My host is a very nice man named Mohammed, whom I met almost accidentally. Turns out he is a writer too, both as a journalist for the local branch of the state radio station and personally, having just completed (but not yet published) his first novel. Fortunately, I also now have enough french to hold an interesting conversation, with the aid of my palm pilot. In short, we get along famously and he is putting me up at his house.
The house is made of mudbrick and the bathroom is just a room with a concrete floor and hole which drains to the sand outside, because there is no running water in this town, nor electricity. Drinking water comes from a well, bathing water comes from the river. The food here is rice with meat or fish sauce, twice a day. Fortunately there are also a few small stores where one can purchase coke, candy, bread, tinned sardines, dates, and various other minor mangeables. On market day and perhaps other days one can also find fresh vegetables, such as tomatoes, cucumbers and onions, and perhaps even mangoes. I am glad for these excesses — all of them luxuries for the local population — because without them I might go mad. You’d be surprised how good a sardine, cucumber and onion sandwich can taste. There are also is supposedly a restaraunt of some sort in this town of 3000 but I haven’t yet investigated thoroughly.
There are no paved roads here; the mud buildings stand directly on the sand. I arrived on the back of a 4×4 Toyota pickup, where I sat on top of a huge pile of baggage with ten other people. Yes, really, eleven people plus baggage plus merchandise (rice sacks, and a pile of I believe goat skins) in the back of a single Toyota. And then three more passengers squished into the front cab. This is normal here.
The mid-afternoon temperature is something over 40 degrees celcius. No electricity means no refrigeration, no air conditioning, no fans. One survives by hiding indoors during the day. Mud walls are very insulating, it turns out.
It turns out that Mohammed is also the communications director of the local branch of Islamic Relief, a UK-funded NGO which does various aid projects in the region. These include building wells, teaching people to wash their hands with soap so as to cut down illness, providing free lunches at schools so as to encourage parents to send their children. They have the only electricity and the only internet for probably fifty miles around — and they’ve let me use both after I miraculously “fixed” their computer by pluggin the keyboard into the correct port and rebooting.
Therefore, I have everything I need here for the moment, including, above all, an intelligent, kind, and curious friend who is my window into a completely foreign way of life. I will probably stay in town for a while to learn what I can learn — and to write. I have a lot to catch up on.
