Da 12 Days of Christmas!

Sending our best wishes for a beautiful holiday season to all our friends and family at home!! 

(p.s. "they" do know it's Christmas time in Africa)

In Everlasting Memory

"The African continent was bled of its human resources [sic] via all possible routes: across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of Muslim countries…Four million enslaved people exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million across the Atlantic Ocean."

In a 500 km stretch of coastline in Ghana, 37 slave castles stand as monument to the atrocities of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Americas. 

Over 350 years, millions of African men, women and children were separated from their families, shackled, detained, beaten and sold into slavery at these forts.  African slaves were branded with a hot iron of their new owner’s insignia and pushed through the Door of No Return onto waiting boats for the New World.

The slave history and slave castles are an eerie backdrop to everyday life in coastal Ghana. These whitewashed forts sit on the edge of a beautiful coast, with rocky shoreline below, and the town’s center of commerce just behind them.  We visited the Cape Coast and Elmina castles on a hot, sunny day when the winter haramattan wind had clouded the humid air with dust.  Most folks went along their normal business of fishing and trading in the literal shadow of the castle. Inside the castle, however, there is a quiet reverence to the horrific experience that transpired there. 

The Portuguese arrived in Ghana in the late 15th century, initially for gold and ivory.  With the establishment of plantations in the Americas during the 16th century, slaves rapidly replaced gold as the prize export. Believed to be physically strong and well suited for work in the heat of colonies in the US south, Brazil and the Indies, West Africans were stolen from their homes and forced to walk hundreds of miles to forts along the southern coast.  Because many of these slave castles along the Gold Coast were originally built to store the first exports of gold ore, cocoa, timber and cotton, the castle cells are incredibly small, with little ventilation or light.  When the exhausted and starving captured Africans arrived at the coast, French, Spanish, Swedish, British and Portuguese colonizers packed 100 to 200 of them into these small cells. 

With five or so cells in each castle, up to 1000 people were held at one time, with enough food and water to stay alive, but not enough to retain their strength of body or spirit.  People slept and ate in their own waste in these rooms.  Disease spread through the weakened men. The Governor of the castle only called for women to be cleaned before he raped them.  The deceased were tossed to the ocean.  On-site chapels at each castle sanctioned it all.

The visit to the slave castles of Ghana was one of our last stops in West Africa.  It’s taken us almost three weeks to sit down to write this blog as we’ve processed the experience, at times bristling with disgust, at other times protectively detached.  After Ghana, we visited the pyramids in Cairo and ruins in ancient Greece – notably also built through slave labor. In the comparing slavery in each of these locations, what is so different about the trans-Atlantic slave trade is how massive the scale, how inhuman the brutality and how global the participation were in the exploitation of West and Central Africans. 

This systemic, economic and physical domination irrevocably changed the trajectory of peoples and nations for generations to come, both in Africa and in the New World.  In an economic analysis, the modern-day wealth of the West, the poverty and lack of infrastructure of Africa offer clear evidence that the impact of the slave trade is still felt around the world today.  And that says nothing of the toll that slavery has taken on the emotional, psychological and human aspect of all those who participated – either by choice or by force.

Today, at the door of each of the 37 slave castles, is a plaque that reads:

Tone, Base, Slap

We’ve been trying to avoid some of the cheesiest tourist traps in West Africa – we’ve scoffed at backpackers with braids, we have not purchased African pajamas, and when rasta dudes approach us for drumming lessons, we’ve demurred.  This last one was the hardest, as Sara has been trying her hand at djembe for the past year, and when we made our African Bucket List, “take drumming lessons in Africa” was at the top.   Julienne, on the other hand, begged complete exemption from this item.  

While drumming seemed to be everywhere in West Africa, we couldn’t find a master drummer anywhere to show us the ropes. As we neared our last few weeks, we started to think that a drumming lesson just wasn’t going to happen.  So when a week before leaving, we had the chance to spend an hour with Antoinette Kudoto, Ghana’s first and only female master drummer in her small shop in Cape Coast, we said boom boom pow.

Antoinette started with the basics:

Begin with a SLAP

“You make the slap sound just like when you slap someone. Haven’t you ever slapped someone?  I’ve slapped plenty.”  Antoinette started drumming at age 13 when she was selected to play the djembe at St. Monica’s Girls’ School.  Traditionally played by men, it was the experience of attending a single-gender school that allowed Antoinette access to the drum, when otherwise she would have been selected to dance.  For the next twenty five years Antoinette cultivated her talent – at times at odds with her family and traditional community over it.  Only when we asked did Antoinette talk about how hard she fought to be the drummer she is today.  Today she performs extensively as a drummer and instructor across Africa, Europe and the US, including teaching at universities in California and Michigan.  We think that’s called the smack down.

Add the music of the TONE

The tone of the drum has certainly been the steady background rhythm to our time in Africa, and as Antoinette said “it’s the talking drum that commands people to move.”  One evening in our backyard in Dakar we heard drums playing nearby and we walked in our neighborhood until we found the three teenage drummers offering a laid-back street performance.  In Northern Ghana we saw large drums being made by hand, and there were plenty of thin goat-skin drums available for purchase in Mali and Burkina.  Youssour N’Dor had no fewer than six drummers on stage with him getting the whole crowd dancing. It’s the sound of these talking drums that communicates feeling and energy and pretty important cultural stories. Just as we’ve experienced with the multitude of local dialects in each country, the drum also has its own language in each town.  Antoinette taught us a three-part rhythm from Gambia.

 

Stay centered with the BASE

The big base beat of the drum comes right from the center -- one open hand thudding and bouncing up from the very middle.  As easily recognizable as the loud sound emanating from the center of the drum, every single person that we met in Cape Coast knew Antoinette and her shop.  They knew the group of young people that she is teaching traditional drumming and dance in the shadow of the slave castle.  Women knew to come by the shop to listen in to our lessons (and cluck their tongues when we missed the beat). Even the Chief knows that Antoinette’s shop is the place for him to stock up on hand-carved lutes.  Like the easy base beat, far away from the fight of the slap, Antoinette is now at the heart of the community.

The kicker of our time with Antoinette is that every time we played part of the rhythm, whether we got it wrong or we landed right on beat, she ended each segment by saying “I thank you for that!”  Antoinette was the teacher, but she was thanking us as students for wanting to learn and supporting her in teaching.   

And that is called the Grace note.

Don't Think of an Elephant

Watering hole at Mole National Park

We arrived in English-speaking Ghana last week, and we have promptly forgotten any French that we may have learned in the past two months.  Ghana is significantly different than any of the other West African nations that we have visited – notable for a change in language (from French to English), a change in religion (from Muslim to born-again Christian), a change in currency (from the West African Franc to the Ghanaian cedi) and a change in climate (from desert to jungle).  Our time in Ghana started in the north of the country at Mole National Park – home to 700 elephants, gangs of cheeky baboons, plenty of self-satisfied warthogs, water bucks and kob antelope.  We stayed inside the park at a small hotel that overlooks the main watering hole, and there squinted in sun to search for bus-sized elephants.

In the 1920’s the Ghanaian government noticed that a number of people in the Northern region of the country were developing sleeping sickness.  The culprit was the tse-tse fly, a gnarly biting fly that annoys both humans and elephants.  It was the fly that tipped people off to the elephant population in this region, and thus began the systemic effort to end sleeping sickness by killing off the tse-tse’s elephant host.  By the 1970’s the movement to protect the dwindling elephant population had begun, and the national park was established with 4600 sq km dedicated to the big fellas. 

When our sweaty (did we mention it’s humid in the jungle?) morning safari walk yielded only a few antelope, we pooled our cedis with the few other folks we had arrived with and mounted the top of a jeep to get us further into elephant terrain. After an hour of slow driving, the sun was going down and it wasn’t looking promising.  And then, a few velvet monkeys, kob and cross-bill birds later, we found exactly one big BIG elephant.   

Our guide Yeboah (named for Thursday, the day of his birth), like any good guide upon seeing an elephant in the distance, urged us to get off the jeep and walk towards it for a closer look.  This was exactly the opposite of any safari wisdom we’ve heard.  When we asked him what the elephant would do once he smelled us, Yeboah said very calmly “Well, he’ll either run at us or away from us.”  Exactly, that’s what we thought.
 

Aw, mom, stop holding me back.

When the walking safari didn't yield results...

Raise a Calabas to Pinot Noir

Burkina Faso is a small landlocked country between Mali and Ghana that most people we know have never heard of.  When we told a friend that we were going to Burkina Faso, she said, what's the name of that country again, Pinot Noir? Burkina also has one of the best names of a capital city, and we've had fun saying that we're going to Ouagadougou (wah-ga-doo-goo). Notably, Ouaga is the first place in West Africa where Julienne has found chips and salsa, making it a very good place indeed. 

Dust makes our teeth look white.

We started our Burkina sojourn with a few days collecting ourselves in Bobo-Dialassou, home of the Bobos, and home of Sara's first travel sickness.  After some good meals (now that we're in a country that's only 50% Muslim, we're starting to see exotic menu items that had previously been verboten -- like pork and booze), we made our way east to the tiny town of Banfora.  Small but mighty, Banfora is richly appointed with some pretty awesome natural sites.  So we did what any good tourists would do: we rented mopeds and scooted around for a day on some dusty pock-marked roads in search of a good photo.  Julienne only fell off the bike once.  At 7 am, we were speeding through rice fields with donkeys and bicycles to the Sindou Peaks and Domes of Fabedougou, wild and pointed rock formations cut into the limestone as the ocean receded millions of years ago. We crawled over the black rocks and orange shards of pottery that remained after the village had been abandoned for a larger locale as the village grew.

After Sindou, our rasta guides -- not ones to miss a drink -- brought us by their fave family-run pub for a bowl of palm wine before making our way to the next hike. Palm wine is produced like fermented maple syrup, and a "tapper" shimmies up a palm tree to insert a drain into the tree to extract the sap.  A white sweet liquid is collected from the trunk, and then after being fermented in the sun, you have a wonderful milky white alcoholic brew that is consumed by the bowlful. Sara's only wanted to try palm wine since reading Things Fall Apart her freshman year of college. Bucket list, check.    

We then hiked along a dry plateau to a natural pool made from a waterfall.  After a quick scan for crocs, in we went. IT WAS AWESOME. Further to the Kerfiguela Falls we passed just a slightly scary wildfire, coursing through the dry grain.  Full of cotton, red onions, sugar cane, rice and millet, Burkina seems to be both incredibly lush and incredibly dry all at once.  And that sugar cane also comes in handy for another libation created here -- African rum, which almost blinded us at first swig.

The final stop of the day was Lake Tengrela, a 100-hectacre pond, home to 60 hippopotami. We rubbed the dust out of our eyes, plopped ourselves into a wood canoe, and watched the sunset on the lake with exactly one ginormous, submerged, chomping and very close hippo in the lily pads.

And now, waiting to say this for three months... we're here today and Ghana tomorrow!

The Global 99%

We’ve spent the overwhelming majority of the last two months trying to make sense of things. We started with a French immersion program so we could understand a language common throughout the region. We traveled to different parts of different countries to see how people live: their homes, their livelihoods, their food, their transport and their values. We tried to build a holistic itinerary to get the best primer possible on the opportunities and challenges facing West Africa.

Open bathroom trenches into the street sidewalk.

After touching the various parts of the elephant, our observations and experiences have left us exhausted and conflicted. Our questions span the gamut from the philosophical (how do people who habitually have nothing have so much generosity?); to the economic (how are the people of Mali going to survive this year when they experienced lower than average rainfall for their crops and the international community has imposed travel warnings against tourism?); to the political (how can the world continue to turn its back on this region?)

This trip is important for us to gain a better knowledge of West Africa, but it’s impossible to understand this region without also seeing the broader global context.

The United Nations Development Programme recently published its annual Human Development Report. This internationally regarded document tries to explain at a global level the definitions of, trends of, and challenges facing human development. The Human Development Index (HDI) measures three basic dimensions—life expectancy, educational attainment and income—across all nations in the world. The results, virtually the same from last year, are what one would expect: Europe and the Middle East lead the regions, towering over Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. 

Below is a reproduction of some countries of note:

What stood out for us in this report is the statistical and academic description of what we’ve experienced through our travels, but until now, have had a hard time articulating: poor people in the world disproportionately get the shaft; poor people in the world disproportionately carry a double (if not triple) burden of deprivation.

Washing at the river before the cows cross

The 2011 Human Development Report focuses this year on the link between human development and environmental sustainability. Specifically, it details how populations in lesser developed countries are more vulnerable to environmental changes. Overall, the poorest regions seem to have gotten hotter (but not much wetter) in the past several years. As a result, people in these regions suffer more severe stresses, such as increased natural disasters, increased spread of disease like malaria and dengue fever, and increased malnutrition due to decreased crop yields.  Additionally, they tend to have fewer means or technologies to adapt to these stresses (lower river levels means they spend more time each day fetching water, keeping families working harder to grow fewer crops for subsistence or having less to sell at the market).
 

In many cases the most disadvantaged people bear and will continue to bear the repercussions of environmental deterioration, even if they contribute little to the problem themselves. In cruel irony, low HDI countries contribute the least to global climate change, but they have experienced the greatest loss in rainfall and the greatest increase in temperature, with implications for agricultural production and livelihoods. While we are choked by the output of poor-performing diesel vehicles and we see a yellow haze congeal around the city at each sunset, it’s important to remember that the average UK citizen accounts for as much greenhouse gas emissions in two months as a person in a low HDI country generates in a year.

Seats from computer monitor e-waste  (Bamako photo exhibit)

In addition to big picture environmental factors, people in low HDI countries also must deal with environmental threats to their immediate surroundings: indoor air pollution, dirty water and poor sanitation.  More than 6 people in 10 lack ready access to clean water, contributing to both disease and malnutrition.  Nearly 4 in 10 people lack sanitary toilets. And indoor air pollution kills 11 times more people living in low HDI countries than people elsewhere.  In every village we’ve seen, most cooking is done with small charcoal stoves, heating well or river water where people also bathe, and waste (both human and household) is left in the yard for roving animals or siphoned back to the river through open sewer trenches. 

As the report outlines, global and immediate environmental factors have direct, undeniable outcomes in each of the three issue areas:

Health and Life Expectancy

Each year environment-related diseases, including acute respiratory infections and diarrhea, kill at least 3 million children under age 5—more than the entire under-five populations of Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland combined.  In Mali, one in five children dies before the age of five. This shocking statistic was reinforced when we learned that days before we arrived in Djenne, our guide lost his five year old son for, as he explained, “no apparent reason.” Being here has put a human face on these statistics.

  

Charcoal cook stove

Educational Attainment

Forecasts suggest that continuing failure to reduce grave environmental risks will also significantly exacerbate social inequalities in education.  When food and water are the primary objectives of the day, education becomes a luxury.  Last week, we met a man who explained that his one bag of rice this year yielded less than what it had in previous years because of low rains, thus causing hunger for his family and limiting income that would have been used for schooling. In fact, nearly 3 in 10 children of school age children in low HDI countries are not enrolled in school.  Without electricity, study time is limited to day hours, and time is often diverted to collecting cooking fuel and water, activities shown to slow education progress and lower school enrollment.

Economic Opportunity and Poverty

And finally, projections suggest that environmental factors threaten to slow (or even reverse) decades of sustained economic progress by the world’s poor majority. Beginning in 2010, the Human Development Report introduced a “multidimensional poverty index” to explain the phenomenon that people in poor countries experience compounding negative factors.  In a chicken-and-egg scenario, those countries with the greatest intensity of environmental deprivations also had populations living in the most severe poverty.  What’s interesting is that the standards of poverty were not only low when set against the global poverty index (earning less than $1.25 per day), but that the low HDI countries had a greater percentage of their population that fell below each nation’s self-determined poverty line. The gap between classes in the developing world is widening even here.  And, as we meet with people who are facing the loss of crop or tourism income, they are palpably feeling their economic power decrease further.   

At this writing, we are four countries in to our eight-nation trip.  None of the countries we will visit will rank higher than 135 out of the 187 nations listed in the Human Development Index.  Nonetheless, the people that we have met are undoubtedly wealthy with assets that aren’t measured by these charts:  generosity, perseverance, resilience, commitment to family, and commitment to culture.  With that backdrop, the disparity of what is happening with these nations feels even more unjust.  And how can we as people now invested in the future of this region contribute to human development?

Timbuktu’s Three Cups of Tea

Almost immediately upon arrival in Timbuktu, we were invited to join a small group of Toureg men for their morning tea.  Sitting down in the sand, as the charcoal was lit for the kettle, the men explained that "Toureg tea" consists of three cups, brewed one at a time and drank roughly 20 minutes apart. The tea leaves are added to the kettle only once, and then in successive rounds of brewing with additional water and sugar, three cups are produced.

The first cup, "strong like death", is the most potent and tastes like chewed tea leaves. The second cup, "sweet like life", is an even blend of tea and sugar. And the third cup, "sugar like love", is like the sticky last swig of the kool aid pitcher.

It is through this lens, Timbuktu's version of three cups of tea, that we reflect back on our experience in the city at the edge of the world.

Cup 1: Strong Like Death

Timbuktu's inaccessibility is as much its allure as its thorn. One needs either 5 hours by car, 2 days by boat, or 3 days by camel to reach Timbuktu from any of the nearby villages, and to live in a place so remote, you have to be strong. And to continually fight a climate inhospitable to crops, with bleaching sun and blustering sand storms, you live on the edge. You protect yourself from the elements by wearing long boubous and covering your head and face with a lengthy turban.

There are two industries in Timbuktu, each with brutal conditions of scarcity and competition: tourism and salt mining. One report that we read notes that Timbuktu’s tourism industry has been in a devastating free fall during the past two years. In 2009, 49,000 western tourists visited the city. In 2010, 6,000. And, by the end of June 2011, less than 1,000.  For a town where 70% of its 33,000 inhabitants rely on tourism for their livelihoods, this decline has been catastrophic and is attributed to western governments imposing warnings advising people against travel to Timbuktu because of a heightened threat of kidnapping.

While we can only assume the validity of the numbers, the lack of tourists became eerily apparent the moment we got off the boat. Within 30 minutes of arriving at our hotel (between our first and second cups of tea), a guide came by to look for us, claiming that he had been sent by “our French friend, Mike” who had told us about him 4 days earlier in a town 400km away. A heated argument ensued between the guide and the hotel owner’s brother, ending in the guide being escorted out of the gated courtyard yelling “I just want a chance to do my job.”

This wasn’t the first time we experienced two men fighting over the scarce tourist attention. It wasn’t the first time we felt in the middle of a situation that was hard for everyone: we deserved the right to feel protected within the walls of our hotel, the proprietor had the right to determine who could be on his property, and the entrepreneur had the right to ask if we wanted his services. In an environment where the supply of guides far exceeds the demand of tourists, and there are few other options, no one wins. Combine this dynamic with endemic poverty and a history of ethnic and religious conflict, and it’s no surprise that Timbuktu is shroud in a callousness necessary to survive.

Two days after the exchange between the guide and the hotel owner’s brother, a group of armed men barged into a hotel restaurant directly across the sand road from Timbuktu’s “Flame of Peace” monument and abducted three men and killed one western tourist. While no one has claimed responsibility for this attack, it is widely assumed that it was carried out by an extremist group of outsiders from Niger, Mauritania or Algeria.  Compounding AQIM, Mali and its Sahel region neighbors face a spate of men returning after fighting in Libya, now armed and without a benefactor.

Timbuktu was a hard place for us. We had a constant feeling of being watched, and whether it was by honest people trying to make an honest living or by others wanting to do harm, we will never know. Fortunately, we left Timbuktu hours before the kidnapping occurred and we were safely hundreds of miles away before we heard the news.

We were frightened: the restaurant was the same one we tried to eat lunch at the day before and it was just blocks from our hotel; was the Dutch abductee one of the women we went on a sunset camel ride with the night before? were the kidnappers heading south and targeting hotels in other tourist towns? We were confused: how was it possible that in such a tightly knit community, this was really an outside job? was the guide involved? was it politically motivated because the Malian president was scheduled to visit the Netherlands a week later? And, we were certain: this incident destroyed the future tourism industry for the majority of hardworking men and women who live in Timbuktu.

 

Cup 2: Sweet Like Life

After the second cup of tea was poured, the Toureg men asked to show us the treasures of the desert, each with a story, each at a good price.

The men had arrived the day before with a salt caravan, a brutal 800 km trek through the desert with anywhere from 30-200 camels carrying 60 kilo salt slabs from the faraway mines. These trips take 40 days, with the camels and men traveling at night by way of the stars to avoid the heat of the day. Occurring only in the cool months (October-March), these salt caravans have, for centuries, linked Timbuktu with the Mediterranean. With its strategic positioning at the edge of the Sahara Desert and at the top of the bend of the Niger River, Timbuktu is a perfectly situated terminus of the salt caravans to access markets throughout Mali and West Africa.

Virtually unchanged for centuries, these caravans still continue to produce generations of Toureg men on the move for months at a time and well-versed in many languages. Each camel hauls four slabs of salt, cut from a dried lake, and is carried across the desert to sale.  We rode camels to have dinner with this young guide in his semi-Nomadic village on Thanksgiving night.  There, he explained the languages he needs for his trade: "I speak Toureg, French, Arabic, English, Berber, Bambara, and Camel." "I'm sorry; did you say 'camel'?" "Yes, it is very important for the Toureg people to speak camel, because when we are out in the desert, far away from water, the camels know how to find it. But only when we ask for help." [Then we told him about the wonders of Google translate.]

Timbuktu was once a bastion of Islamic scholarship. In the 16th century, it was home to one of the largest universities (25,000+ students) of Arabic learning in the Muslim world. Now, several public and private libraries preserve the rich history of scholarship in the region. We visited one library, funded partially by the Ford and Carnegie foundations, that housed, translated, and catalogued over 23,000 Islamic religious, historical, and scientific texts. The oldest manuscripts date from the 12th century and others include some of the few written histories of Africa's great empires and texts carried from Spain when Muslims were expelled in 1492. Some experts believe that there are over 5 million manuscripts in the Timbuktu region, preserved by the dry desert air and stored away in family homes.

Tangentially related to both the salt caravans (he uses camel hide) and the tourism industry (we bought 2 boxes), and the manuscripts (his boxes are used to preserve the ancient papers), Mohammed is a skilled leather artist. Born and raised in a small village 80km outside of Timbuktu, Mohammed learned his craft from him father beginning at age 5 or 6. Today, he has a small workshop (mats on a cement floor) and four apprentices, and he sells his works to tourists and in exhibitions throughout Europe. Part zoot-suit wearing OG from West Oakland, part sophisticated artist from the galleries of Paris, Mohammed was a fascinating contradiction. Mohammed was the first Malian we met who showed us equal parts global mobility and a commitment to his home. He yearned for a show in New York or San Francisco, and lamented the lack of foreigners visiting Timbuktu. He used century old tools and drove a Japanese car made for French roads. He found us by showing up at our hotel in the dark wearing a near face-covering turban and introduced himself as "Peace Corps Mohammed." He seemed to delicately straddle the ever advancing European world, while keeping a foot firmly in the pre-historic ways in Timbuktu.

Cup 3: Sugar Like Love

We booked our stay at Sahara Passions, a hotel on the northern outskirts of Timbuktu, a few days in advance, but when we arrived we found neither co-owner Toureg Shinhouk or Canadian Miranda.  Instead, at this remote desert hotel, inn-keeper assistants Aziz and Ibrahim showed us to the rooftop accommodation, and they set about to making tea.  After tea, they walked us to the passport office for that ever-important stamp, and then the guys wrapped us up like Tuareg women with a new blue scarf from the grand market.  Hungry and hot from the noon sun, we returned to the hotel to share fistfuls of rice, butter and meat from a communal bowl. Not quite the Thanksgiving turkey and stuffing we were thinking of, but the generosity of the portions and of the hosts would rival any table set that day.  We then began our next round of tea.

That night, as the sun set, we packed up the tea leaves, bottled water, plastic bag of raw sugar, a kettle and three small glasses.   Aziz and Ibrahim walked us into the Sahara dunes, in hopes of seeing the evening salt caravan.  The men said their fifth prayers of the day and then lit the charcoal right on the sand.  Ibrahim, who is responsible for making tea on the salt caravan, tried to teach Sara how to pour the kettle – from a distance so far from the cups that the sugar mixes into the brew, and then is poured back into the kettle for another tall mixing pour.  On brewing the second cup, Ibrahim wrapped his head in a scarf as he had at each other time we had seen him brew the second cup, out of respect for “the sweetness of life.”

Before the final cup, a car rolled over a dune in the near distance, and Ibrahim packed us up immediately to head back to the hotel -- perhaps a forewarning of the violence to come later that night and next day.  The final cup of tea we took back at the hotel on the roof, under the brightest star Sirius, used to guide the salt caravans.  We pulled out the iPad, and Aziz and Ibrahim were convinced it was magic to see the image on the screen flip around when the device moved.  We don’t think they were wrong.  We showed them photos of our trip and played the few African songs we had on the iPad.  They told us a story from last year's Festival au Desert when they shook the hand of their famous Malian heroine, Oumou Sangare. From the roof, Aziz belted out “Aicha” from the top of his lungs. 

The next day, when we were ready to part, the guys were saddened to see us go.  Was it their hospitality? they asked. We took a crooked photo with the camera balanced on the hood of a car and all kissed goodbye.  We told them we would be back.  “Like family” they kept saying.