14 December 2005 - 09:46
We’re waiting by the river for the boat that’s going to take us upriver to Medine, where we’ll hike to an old French fort and a waterfall. It doesn’t leave for two more hours, so Andrew and Rachel went to get more food. We’re going to camp out for a night there.
We’re sitting a dozen meters from the bank, close enough to the big bridge crossing the river to hit it with a rock. There are probably a hundred people on the banks with us, on both sides of the river, both sides of the bridge. A crowd of men directly in front of me are loading an orange dump truck with sand to make concrete for construction. The sand is coming in a steady stream from somewhere up the river, where men dive to the bottom with buckets, fill them with sand, dump the buckets into the long, canoe-like boats called pirogues, then bring the boats as far down the river as they can, to the concrete spillway just before the bridge in front of me. Then the sand continues along its course, from the boats onto flat boards held by two men each, dumped onto the bank, shoveled from the bank into the truck, driven to the construction site in town, from one man to the next.
I think I just learned the word for watermelon in Bambara, the most common language in Mali. At least, I’m assuming “zanabe” means watermelon, since that’s what the woman in the Jurassic Park t-shirt just said to me with a “you’re going to buy some, right?” look as she walked by with a plate of watermelon slices on her head.
The sheep here look fatter than the ones in Mauritania. A small herd just went by, being taken to get water from the river.
A dozen topless women stand on the concrete spillway, washing clothes, the sun shining brightly off their moist backs. Theirs sons, playing on the opposite side of the spillway, take turns watching the babies while their mothers work, diving in the water and splashing around in between their stints as babysitters. As each mother finishes her work, she says her goodbyes, pulls a shirt on, ties her baby to her back, and loads her laundry into a large plastic basin that she balances on her head for the walk home with her other children following behind.
Two little boys are standing in front of me, eating watermelon. The smaller one is naked. Watermelon juice runs down his chin, drips onto his chest, runs over his chubby belly and drips to the ground from his uncircumcised penis. In my head, he is a sweet, sticky, African cherub fountain, and I laugh.
The road in front of me is pretty rough, rutted out by water flowing down it towards the river. A teenager on a motorcycle almost wiped out right here a minute ago. Now he’s out in the middle of the river on the spillway, with the exhaust of his motorcycle spraying a plume of water into the air like a jetski.
The tanker truck is back. I didn’t know what it was doing before because it left right after we got here, but now it’s back at the bank, filling up with water, probably to deliver it to a part of town nearby that still doesn’t have a water system in place.
The men with the boats use long bamboo poles to propel them along. I wonder if asked, if they would sing like the gondoliers in Venice. I wonder if they’ve ever heard of Venice.
More women are constantly arriving to wash clothes, walking by us with their enormous bundles of brightly-colored clothes in plastic basins, balanced on their heads like they’re not even there. One of them winks at me.
The sheep are done drinking, and now they’re getting bathed…in the same water in which other people are bathing, washing clothes and filling up tanker trucks with drinking water.
A man driving a car has joined the teenager with the motorcycle out on the spillway now. They are both washing their vehicles in the middle of the river.
Somewhere, a radio is blaring African music with a quick beat.
Will, sitting beside me, has made a new friend – a pregnant mutt has come over to say hello. He wants me to pet her too, but I’m not really excited about the prospect of having random dog grime on my hands for the rest of the afternoon, especially since most of our meals lately have been food we purchase from street vendors and eat with our hands.
I can smell the wood shavings from the boats being built nearby, but I can’t quite place the smell – it’s not wood that I’m familiar with, but it smells faintly like cedar. The men work carefully with hand tools, carving and shaping their boats by hand.
Andrew and Rachel came back with ballbastiks – small plastic bags of frozen juice in various colors and flavors, all very sugary. They’re delicious. Finished with them, we toss the plastic bags on the ground, aware that we’re just contributing to the trash-in-streets problem, but we don’t really have any other choice.
All around us, women sit by coolers, selling bags of water, more ballbastiks, fried bread balls, and vegetables. Colorfully clad men circulate amongst the crowd of people waiting for the boat, selling bread, padlocks, toys, shirts, shoes, watches, medicine (no prescription needed), cigarettes, belts, sunglasses, cell phone covers. One of them is wearing a 50-Cent shirt and a hat that says “I love Jesus, Prince of Peace.” I’m not sure why they all think that I, waiting for the boat, would feel inclined at this very moment to buy padlocks or sunglasses, but every one that passes by looks at me like he thinks he really has a chance to sell me something.
People mill about, waiting for the boat. Soon we’ll all rush down to the water’s edge, scrambling for equally uncomfortable seats for the ride to Medine, cramped together in a leaky boat with chickens, bunches of bananas, and an assortment of baggage heading back to small villages along the river route.
Three boys stop in front of me. Two of them are carrying buckets on their heads. We exchange greetings, and I ask if the two with buckets are the wives of the empty-handed boy. We all laugh at my joke, making light of African gender roles, wherein women do most of the work – carrying babies on their backs and buckets of water, food, clothes, or market goods on their heads just about everywhere they go. As they walk away, I notice that one of the buckets says, “I Love Africa.”
Me too.
