Or read about his conclusion below: " Concluded would be too strong a word. What I feel is that there would definitely be room for hope. There's a lot of work to be done. For every area that one hears about or sees where there are efforts being made to stop desertification, there are lots of other areas where these efforts are not being made or there are things that are actually destructive still going on. You know it's hard to say. But certainly there is a lot of hope among the people that we were working with and good reason for it because we saw living examples of situations where people had turned it back. Whether you can do it on a national scale fast enough is another question altogether. Certainly locally, among the people that are actively working on the problem, it is being dealt with."

For this one... you'll have to get RealAudio. We're not providing a transcript because it's not the words that are interesting... it's the delivery!

Or read his description below: " Well the big event yesterday was filming a local Malian musician singing a song she wrote for us about us being here. Actually it's two songs and we'll pick one, on that subject and slight variations on that theme. It worked very well. We were out on the edge of town and it looked quite nice. And she sang very well. And then today we started off by going over to meet Mobe Traore, who's a another guitar player from here who I'd heard at the Calgary folk festival back in the summer. We didn't expect him to be in town and he turned out to be in town, so we went and had a brief visit with him. He was about to go and play at a friend's wedding, so he invited us to come along to the wedding. We didn't stay for very much of it in the end. In the afternoon we ran around doing more shots....shots in the market. People in Bamako, especially the market, are much less excited about being filmed than the people in the country were, or much less pleased about the concept. There are some angry fists being shaken at the lense which I'm sure we have on tape. Basically, that was it...just basically picking up stuff that we hadn't gotten yet. As of about 6:30 tonight it was a wrap."

Or read his answer below: " There's a tendency for the music of the area to break out in styles that are not exactly national or particular to one nation. The griot tradition is not just a Malian tradition...it's also Senegalese and Ghanaian and represented in other countries in the area. Any of the cultures that are artificially divided by the national boundaries that were left by Colonialism have similar expressions. When stuff comes on the radio, the Malian drivers are always immediately able to identify where it's coming from. So, they hear distinctions for sure."

Or read his answer below: " There was definitely an interest there. You have to understand that most of these people had never seen a guitar like what I play. They have their traditional guitar, the ngoni, which when they are trying to describe it to us, they will call it a traditional Malian guitar, which bears very little resemblance to the instrument that I play, especially the Dobro which is shiny chrome. It was pretty interesting for them just to see and hear it. Of course they didn't understand anything I was singing because nobody speaks English around here, so there was no communication of the specific kind that came through the lyrics, but there was definite sense of a shared experience anytime you play with or for people. They're there...they're into it...there's music as a bridge. In this case a different kind of bridge perhaps than what I would normally be dealing with, with an audience at home, but definitely things were exchanged through these performances. So yes I think there was communication there for sure."

Or read her answer below: " In the villages, basically if people get through the elementary school they are very lucky.....if they can afford it. What I know is that once they've done five classes of elementary, they go to sort of a middle school for another four years and if they're really good, in this case they would have to go to Douentza itself, or even to Mopti to get to a high school. So, that means you actually have to go to a boarding school to get to high school if you live in the rural areas because there are not many high schools around. At that point if you are in a boarding school, probably the rythmn would by very similar to our system. The kids who are younger, who go to middle school would have to work at home and help. So you would go to school in the evening and in the early morning and you would have to do your chores and help your family. But with high school, I think you would probably study pretty similar to what we do."

Or read her answer below: " The tradition is oral. You meet a lot of people who have never been able to read or write, but the history is very much alive though oral..passing on from one generation to another. Certain things, like it was mentioned that we were talking to the chief, certain things only the old people would be allowed to talk about with the chief, but then he would pass it on, so there's a lot of tradition. What the program has done, particularly with USC, is to try and write some of these things down. Not all of it. Some of the things you shouldn't write down, but other things would be very helpful to have in writing so, there is a little bit of a switch developing that the younger generation appreciates to have things in writing. But, I think the oral traditional will continue."

Or read his (final interactive) answer below: " I think it will have a lasting effect on the people we met. I think, for one thing, we were very exotic compared to most of the people who were there. They won't forget us in a hurry. We were in their face for two weeks practically, in the case of the people of Ibisa. They were glad to see us. They received us very well partly because of the association with USC and partly because they were just hospitable people anyway. I think in some ways, doors were opened for us that were a little surprising. I think the interview that we did with the old chief of the village led to him revealing things about the culture that are not usually revelaed. The people who know anything about the Dogon culture will probably find the interview with him most ineteresting when they get to see it. But I think in the case of those people at least there'll definitely be a lasting impact. They will be telling stories about us and probably telling jokes about us for a long time to come. In the case of the other people around, I wouldn't think we'd be particularly memorable to the people of Timbuktou for instance, to whom we were just more tourists basically. But I think with Tumani Djoubati, for instance, I intend to keep contact with im. I think we got along really well and there was a sort of warmth that I think we both felt there that we both would like to keep going if possible, so, who knows where that will go."

Daily Journal: FEBRUARY 27, 1998

Today the team travelled from Mopti to Bamako (the capital of Mali) where they will spend the next few days. They didn't have much to say about their journey but they did answer some questions.

Or read his answer below: " Everywhere we've gone, until today, we've had great encounters with a wonderful assortment of donkeys...they're everywhere, they're the beast of burdens around these parts. They're stubborn and just great looking creatures and they're everywhere. For the first time since we left Timbuktou we saw some horses, they're a small breed of horse, a little bit in the vein of a Morgan horse but they're smaller, they're around 15 heads I guess, somewhere between a pony and a horse. We've seen lots of dogs. In some areas they seem to like their dogs and look after their dogs...other times you seem almost roaming packs of dogs. They just wander around in packs. We see lots of goats and sheep....sheep that aside from their heads that give it away as sheep, look like goats because they're very short-haired. Lots of cows. The Peul people have a particular breed that they favour and they're spotted brown, white, black and white cows. They're quite different from the cows back home....long horns and a kind of a lumpy matter between their shoulders. They look a bit like bramen cattle. We've seen huge cockroaches in shower and in the latrine that we used to frequent back in Doentza, especially at night they would come out and hang around on the walls. We've seen lots of birds, wonderfully coloured birds that I haven't seen anywhere else and lots of chickens and today for the first time I saw a little group of pigs burrowing around in a mound of dirt and stuff. Of course throughout the trip we've seen lots of camels, until the last leg of the journey. Hippos, that was one of the few wild animals we saw in the Niger River when we were crossing on the ferry. Just near Douentza there's an elephant reserve which has all kinds of monkeys and elephants and apparently other wild animals. It wasn't the nature of our film nor did we have enough time to go up and take a look."

Or read his answer below: " You see things, you experience things and it takes time to sort of put it all into perspective with all the other things you've seen and experienced, so it's a little bit hard for me to just pull out of a hat what impact this experience will have had on my view of things. I mean it's a reinforcement of stuff I've already seen. I've been in other third world countries with a similar degrees of difficulty of poverty, let's say. This is the first time in a desert situation and the first time in different kinds of cultures that we've moved through. What impact those cultures will have is hard to say. Spiritually speaking , I don't know that I am going to be swayed of my general world view one way or the other by this. Every experience that I have, that most of us have, if we go into it with out eyes open, it enriches us. It leads to interesting questions if nothing else, and I expect that this will do that as well."

Or read his answer below: " When we were here in October it looked dry enough to us, although that was supposed to be the end of the rainy season, but there had been very little rain and it looked dry enough to us, but now it looks even worse, there's been absolutely no rain since then. The Niger River is at a much lower level. We drove bridges across Rivers that were completely dried up. It's quite a desperate situation. Our focus this time was on the market gardens. That is something that USC has helped the local people to get into in the last few years to make up for the lack of food during the so called rainy season or winter season, the rain that hasn't been coming for the last couple of years. So, they've got them into market gardening and that harvest is around this time of year. So we focussed on that principally this time. The market gardening is mainly in the hands of the women here, so we see how the women now are playing a central role in helping the communities to survive."

Or read his description below: " We had a travel day...moving away from Douentza to the west...to Mopti. We went through a place called Sanga and Bandiagara which are on the Bandiagara escarpment ....the Dogon area. Today we went through there and spent a good part of the day wandering around in the cliffs of Sanga, which I'm sure Bruce will tell you more about. Very, very beautiful part of the country. And tomorrow we are heading towards Bamako. We should be there by the end of the day tomorrow. The following couple of days we're going to be filming with a Malian musician on Saturday."

Or read his description below: " As you arrrive in it you are kind of going what's all the fuss about...this is a world heritage site. It's steeped in history and remarkable for these cliff-side villages. When you drive into town from the direction we came from, you drive across a sort of broad rolling plateau. You know it's nice country, but you don't see anything that suggests it should be a world heritage site. The town itself is undergoing construction and reconstruction and the buildings look more substanital, are better built using concrete instead of the banko-clay stuff you see elsewhere. It all looks pretty dressy! When you get past the town and the road winds down this incredible escarpment face and you find yourself confronted with basically a broad desert plain that goes for 200 kilometres, all the way down to Burkino Faso. The cliff-face itself is dotted with Dogon villages that are built very much in the traditional style, moreso than the ones we saw around Douentza, the ones that I saw at least anyways. Right in the cliff-face above these villages are the reamins of houses that were inhabited by people called the Tellem, who are pre-historic people who were there when the Dogons got there. There is evidence that they lived in these cliff-face dwellings for thousands of years. Their mysterious in the way that nobdody knows much about them. They were either exterminated or driven away in confrontations with the Dogon, who were forced into this area with their confrontations with the more agressive Islamic peoples, as they moved into the area. So, that's the basic history. The Dogon villages are set up below the cliff dwellings. The cliff dwellings are little kind of turret-like structures that are built right into the cliff-face and they presumably are built over the entrances of caves so instead of living as cave dwellers, the way we think of neanderthals living, they were living in the caves but they built on to the front of the caves quite sophisticted structures of interesting architectural design. It's really incredible to look up at. Some of these things, you can't fathom how they ever came and went from them because they were 400 feet up a cliff, that's just basically a sheer drop and there's somebody's house there. And then there's another 200 feet to the top of th cliff. These are broad estimates in terms of figures, but that's the kind of impression it gives. One theory is they had rope structures that connected these buildings and the ground but, our Dogon guide said he didn't think that was the case, that they just climbed up, but that's a bit of a stretch so, who knows. But a really incredible depth of history in these structures and an incredible landscape. You can see for miles and if the sand hadn't been blowing in the distance you could have seen probably all the way to Burkina Faso from the top of this thing.... it's just amazing!"

Or read his answer below: " They use their hands a lot when they're talking. They speak (the Dogon people) in short phrases. For instance when we're greeting the chief of a village, there'll be a bunch of the elders of the village sitting around..the chief will speak and he'll come out with a short phrase and everybody will go uh-huh and then he'll come out with another one and everyone will go uh-huh. Their speach is accompanied by, it depends on the person how much body language they use, but there's a lot of hand gesturing and it's distinctly local ..different than anything you would run into in Italy, for example, where people are famous for waving their hands around when they talk. It's a different kind of hand language. Body language...people stand very close to you. Then sense of personal space is very different here from what it is at home. In a crowd, people crowd right up against you and nobody minds."

Or read his answer below: " People are friendly...open and welcoming. You know, you'll meet somebody on a path and they'll be looking pretty surly...they'll have their regular "getting through the day" face on just like people at home do. But as soon as you say hello there's this beam of a smile that comes out and they're engaged with you immmediately. You exchange greetings and you shake hands. There's an openess to communication that you don't see much at home these days. One thing that struck me as we were driving along today, everywhere you drive people, particlarly the kids, but adults as well, will wave at you. You're just a car passing full of strangers, they have no idea who's in the car, but there's this desire to exchange greetings, to communicate in some way. I remember when I was a kid in around 1949 and 1950, I would be pretty little, but I can remember being driven around and farmers driving by on their tractors would wave at you as you drove by if you were in the country. You don't see much of that anymore either, but there was a sense that...I was struck by the fact that we once had that same sense of the appropriateness of communicating with each other even though it was only instantaneous or momentary, that these people have. And it seems to me that the loss of that indicates maybe a deeper loss."

Or read his descriptiont below: " First thing we went to a village called Beni which is the site of a dam that's being built across a narrow valley, the intention of which is to catch the run-off during the rainy season and hold it. It's going to be about two metres high which will produce a lake of that depth approximately....that will cover quite a large area and hopefully I guess, in their view, will last through most of the dry season. From that dam they will have a system of irrigation channels that will allow them to improve the soil and develop farming in the area below the dam. So, it's a pretty important project. It's the biggest undertaking of that sort. It's a micro-dam, it's not a mega project of any sort, but it's an ambitious undertaking under these conditions. USC is providing the materials and the villagers are providing the work. Basically they've committed themselves to getting it done before the rainy season starts. It's well underway. The wall we saw is about a metre high and it runs the whole width of this valley. It was kind of an impressive thing to see. The village itself is perched on a ledge on a plateau high above the dam in a very interesting locations as well. I guess it's worth adding that one of the reasons that the dam is important from an irrigation point of view is that on the other side of where the dam is, is the village's only water supply, which is a well that requires the women to walk about a kilometre straight uphill carrying water on their heads....every day to supply their household needs. Obviously under those conditions there's nothing that they can do in the way of agriculture. So this will provide hopefully, a way for them to expand their economic base and their nutritional base as well. We spent the afternoon in Ibisa catching up on whatever we thought we'd missed and saying our goodbyes to people. That pretty much summs it up. It was nice to get a last little vivid glimpse of Ibisa, which is such a beautiful location. When you get above the village into where the springs are, it's all lush and green and beautiful and it's about the only spot like that anywhere near here, so it's kind of a magic little place."

Or read his answer below:" It was a mistake!! It came out of, I think, a conversation I had with Bruce. He was trying to remember the name of an article that he thought he had read and he said something and as I remembers it ...it was River of Sand. What a great title!! It turns out that it wasn't the name of the article. So it still fits. We've been up here for a few weeks, so that's a good sign."

Or read their description below: " (Bob Lang) This morning we filmed a tree nursery and a seed bank that have been established in this area. It was quite impressive. A small beginning but a very important one for the people in this area. This afternoon we were up with Bruce filming a musical performance in a village called Wollo, which is just on a plateau north of here...north of Douentza. It was quite a site....Bruce on the edge of a cliff and a hundred kids watching him with his steel Dobro. (Bruce) As Bob said it was a kind of a plateau part-way up the side of the foothill slope of these incredible cliffs. It was a really amazing landscape...there's an amazing view from there. It's a bit of a funky place...it's partly abandoned. A lot of people have left for the exode. Those who've stayed, there's apparently a political division among them. A couple of people want to be Chief and not much is getting done around the village. You can kind of tell that by the state of things. There's a noticeable funk about the place both literally and figuratively, but the people were really welcoming and definitely interested in what we were up to. And it looked incredibly beautiful from up there."

Or read their description below: " (Bob) We had a little mishap with the camera. Fortunately the Betacam is a workhorse and even though it's damaged a bit, it's still usable and we got through that.
(Bruce) The Betacam actually separated into two distinct pieces which are now held together with gaffer tape, but it worked all the same. So, that's some kind of testimony to the Betacam, I suppose."

Or read her answer below: " Certainly, to try to raise awareness in Canada about the complexity of the lives people have here in Mali by living in desert and pre-desert areas and fighting very hard to keep their livelihood and keep their environment going. For that you need solidarity. That's very clear. Raising awareness in Canada is very important. USC Canada has been here for 10 years so we're very keen to have a broader base of support in Canada and use our various means to do so. The video would be one means to raise the awareness and help people appreciate the situation. At the same time, we've added in a completely new component in the sense that we also believe that Mali has a lot to offer in terms of music, in terms of culture and tradition, which we would all be very intrested in. There's also that element of outreach. Certainly it has nothing to do with evangelism."

Or read his answer below: " Is it necessary to look at what corporations do and to make choices about your own stance on things based on what you find when you look like that? I would say of course it's important. It's important for everybody...Christians and otherwise. To me the world is sliding faster and faster into a kind of almost corporate-based fuedalism that certainly serves the interests of those on the boards of major corporations and it doesn't really serve the interests of anyone else. It's a very grave threat to the kind of democratic ideals that we all grew up with. So, I think that needs to be paid very close attention to. The more people that are concerned about that kind of thing, the greater the likelihood that we will get around it somehow...around this threat. But in spiritual terms for me, it comes down to a matter of conscience. If you are talking about whether you want to invest in a certain corporation then you have to look at what that corporation does and you have to look at whether by doing these things, you're supporting something that you don't want to be supporting. And that's what it comes down to."

Or read his answer below: " It's officially a Muslim country, but there are vestiges at least, of other faiths. The Dogon people with whom we've been spending all this time...the only public statement or overt statement we've had on that issue you've already heard. The indication was 'OK we used to be superstitous, now we're not because we have the faith'. But in fact I think those old traditions linger in people's minds and hearts and I think it's clear that there's a connection with the earth among the people that is not, as part of my limited knowledge at least, the Islam faith. It is something that goes back further in history than the arrival of Islam. Just as you find the same thing among people in the Christian world that have preserved elements of earlier views....that have a general world view that is broader and more earth-based than what the very formal faiths that we've inherited have tended to be. So, the people in Ibisa still do make sacrifices to keep the spring flowing. They just make smaller ones than they used to make. That suggests to me that there is a lot of other stuff going on that we would have to be here a lot longer to get the dope on."

Or read her answer below: " I haven't seen any wind up radios around here. I've heard of them, but I haven't seen any and I don't think.... where we are right now...they don't exist yet. People use a lot of transistor radios. You normally find two or three people around who have them and they share the news or the music with everybody around them. I'm sure they're spending a lot of money on batteries but they have no choice. I mean, it's also that you find that the simpler and cheaper solutions are not available to people who are poor, so they spend a lot more money on basic things or things that they see as a luxury like a transistor, because that's the only way they can get it."

Or read his description below: " This thing that we did yesterday was actually a really nice way to spend part of a Sunday afternoon... jamming with this guy, who actually looks like a cross between an African version of Hugh Marsh mixed with Ray Charles. He was really cool and he played great. He had a four string version of the Ngoni that he played pretty much in a rythmic style but he had finger picks made up of balls with little leather straps that went around the fingers. He drummed on the surface of the instrument as well as playing the instrument. It was really interesting to watch and fun to play with. We did a jam together based on a thing that he started playing and we did a song of mine called Kit Carson in which he played kind of a rythmn stuff along with me. It was fun!"

Or read his description below: " Today the musical content called for a recreation of this casual drum lesson that I had the other day when the folks at Ibissa pulled out the drums for us. So I had a whole personal kind of involved lesson for the camera today which was also a very interesting and fun. Otherwise we were just kind of poking around the town shooting things which will turn up in the film. People doing their thing and various farming techniques and that sort of stuff."

Or read his description below: " We haven't eaten in a local persons house exactly. So I shouldn't try to answer what local people eat. But what we've been eating, it has generally consisted of rice or some other form of starchy matter, millet, couscous like stuff or pasta, spaghetti cut up in little pieces occasionally. It is a pretty meat intense diet traditionally, the meat being chicken, lamb, sometimes beef, sometimes a little bit of fish. It is usually presented, in our experience at least, most of the time we've had a stew made of this plus various vegetables which are put with whatever the starchy substance was. The vegetables include a kind of bitter gourd thing that grows on a vine in the sand. It don't know what it's called. When it's cooked it's kind of bright green and it is bitter tasting but it mixes really well with the sauce and other ingredients. I'm told it's bitter melon, but it doesn't really resemble a melon very much. It's small, about the size of a hard ball and it's very firm as well. That, yams, casaba root, onions, various things like that...hot peppers, savage little red peppers, that come in these casseroles which we eat with great caution."

Or read his answer below: " I would say the answer to that is a bit speculative, but I think the music here is integrated totally into the rest of these people's lives. Those people who have transistor radios or cassette players have them going all the time. There's music on the radio all the time, that's Malian music primarily although we hear other music from other African countries as well. In the village you don't hear music all the time. but people sing all the time. The kid who's hearding the goats is singing, the kids on the way home from school are singing, people sing while they work. The women are pounding millet and they're singing together while they do it. It's not just a way to escape from your life and feel better its a way to make the actual work you are doing go better and I think at that, it's very comparitive to the roots of blues. Very few people are professional musicians here. There are a few but most are people who are farmers and other occupations and they play music,instruments, at a community function, like celebrations of any kind...the instruments come out and people play. Probably what you'd come across in Cape Bretton."

Or read Bruce's answer below: " You know it's not that distant. It's actually a lot closer to Iraq than Canada is. We don't hear a radio all the time so we're not up to date on exactly what is going on but people do check up on it..sure. The people that we associate with...there's a radio in the truck and the news is on from time to time..people pay attention to that stuff. Also, as we do at home, they pay a lot of attention to the sporting events. There's been a inter-African football championship going on the last couple of weeks and that's been the focus of a great deal of attention in the media. People are aware of what's going on around them, because it's going to effect them and they know that. They live their quiet lives but they're pretty much aware that they can be affected by things taking place somewhere else. The African experience has certainly been, over the last several hundred years, of people being adversely affected by people from somewhere else. So they're pretty tuned in to that kind of stuff. there's also a war going on in Sierra Leone, right next door. So people are paying attention to that to."

Or read her answer below: " At the moment in the program areas here people use wood....that's their only real fuel. If you have money you can of course buy other fuel sources. The program is not designed to provide services for people, but to help them use what they have more efficiently. One fuel source would be solar energy but it's a very difficult one to introduce in areas where the literacy is below 10 per cent. People have to struggle and don't really understand it is a more technical concept. There is an effort being made to introduce a solar dryer for vegetables and fruit in a pilot project, to get them thinking of those types of energies, but it will be a slow process and it will have to be introduced with a lot of education and sensitivity, to their cultural traditons and their land. So, that would be one obvious way of moving forward. What we have done is introduced improved stoves so they don't just cook on an open fire which they've done in the past. So, these are actually portable stoves that use about one third of the fuel or wood than the open fire."

Or read his description below: " We spent the whole day in Ibisa shooting stuff...a range of things...the market. It was market day and it was a very colourful scene with people milling around, buying and selling. People came in from neighbouring villages with their own produce and crafts and so on, including things like bamboo bed frames that a number of men brought in from a nearby village...all kinds of different stuff. We witnessed a cooking workshop wherein new recipes were introduced involving some of the new vegetables that are part of this market gardening program that is the subject of some of our filming. Had a little interview on camera with a guy who gave me a drum lesson the other day. We talked about the exode. We were wondering why there were so few young men in the village, young being mid 20s to mid 30s. You see a lot of older people and a lot of women and children and not so many men of that age. So, we wanted to ask this guy, because he was one who did fit into that age group, why that might be so and he said that in his own family a number of people had left to look for work. In their case it was partly seasonal. This is the off season in terms of the real hard core agriculture that goes on, so some of these people had gone to the city to look for work or other parts of the country. He stayed because he is now the head of the family because his father is dead and this guy is 31 years old. So he stayed to kind of oversee things and some of his relatives are there to help him with the gardening and so on."

Or read about it below: " That's a really interesting question. I don't think a lot of people in Mali think very much about Canada one way or the other. But one thing we found out about immediately on our arrival in Bamako within the first couple of days was that in one of the areas where USC is working near Bamako, this village had heard about the ice storms in eastern Canada and had taken up a collection to send to help people back home....to help the victims of the storm. The collection was a very modest sum by our standards but an enormous sum by theirs and it is something that has to been seen as quite special."

Or read his answer below: " Yes....is the short answer to that. I have been inspired by many things. ..the energy of the people, their hospitality and warmth, the culture, the music, the colour...it's a marvellous place from a human perspective. It also has a marvellous landscape that has been inspirational in lots of ways but what that will produce in the long term is impossible to guess at. I've been taking lots of notes, we'll just have to see what develops."

Or read his description below:" We also had a sandstorm today that was actually one of the most interesting features of the day for me, before we even got to Ibisa. We woke up this morning and it was partly clouded over and the mountains were almost obscured from view with blowing dust. It was a great scene at one point, driving down the highway with dust blowing every which way and a guy comes ridimg out of the dust on his white camel with his turban wrapped around his face and a transistor radio hanging around his neck. There's a big soccer series going on right now among various African countries and everyone is tuning into the radio all the time to hear the results of whatever current game is going on so, I assume that was what he was listening to."

Or read his description below: "Film, film, film...mostly around Ibisa. We went to one other village, the village of Beguima this morning, that we had already been to once and we followed on the original plan with those people to film them working their land. They turned out all dressed up in their Sunday best for the film shoot which was kind of pretty looking...not entirely authentic but certainly nice looking...nice colours and so on. They have a lovely garden there. We spent more of the day at Ibisa, the town that we are concentrating on and got shots of people working, doing their thing and covered some of the landscape and that sort of thing. So, we had a celebratory lunch...they've been having meetings to do with USC programs all week,,,,this being USC's local headquarters and they wound up their program today so everyone was saying goodbye and taking off to their own respective districts. One of the villages had donated a lamb which we all ate a piece of in honour of each other and in honour of our continued good luck with the work at hand and so on. And it was all very nice."

Or read his description below: " They come with varying number of strings. The instrument is called an Ngoni. It's got a short little neck. It's about the size of a mandolin or smaller even and the body of it is a gourd or shaped wood with a goat-skin head and it's played with the fingers the way a guitar is but it's got a very high pitched, kind of twangy sound to it that's quite neat. This instrument is thought to be the original form of what's become the banjo and other instruments like that."

Or read his answer below: " The whole place is surprising in lots of different ways. The landscape... there are cultures here that I've never seen before. The depth of history I suppose is certainly different from my experience in Mozambique where you had the sense that people had been cut off from their history. These people, at least the people that we're in contact with, have a very keen sense of the depth of their history and of their roots which is different from elsewhere. And of course in the western hemisphere there isn't that same sense of the depth of history, except among native people."

Or read Bob's description below: "It was a very good day. We had a morning where we filmed a women's group who were doing market gardening which is quite unusual in this town because it is a Muslim town and a traditional dogon town at the same time and the women have traditionally not had their own market gardening. They really weren't responsible for anything that would bring them any income. This is recent activity...actually close to a year and it has been quite a revolution in this village. So they had responsibility for this market garden, they look after it and they get the benefits for their family. It took a lot of convincing of the men in the village to allow them to do this. So we were filming with them and then we went up and spoke with the chief who gave us a very interesting talk about some of the history of the village and the Dogon people who have been around different parts for 1000 years. A lot of their traidtions had to do with traditions that go back many thousands of years. One of them Bruce actually asked about was the fact that there is a spring from which they have quite a few benefits for their agriculture and food growing, so he asked about this spring and what it meant to the community. Very interesting, interesting response that had to do with a combination of Muslim beliefs and the traditional beliefs of the Dogon and how they integrate those two. In the afternoon we did some further filming around the village and ended up, when we were at a bit of a loss as to what to do next, Bruce pulled out his guitar, even though he wasn't feeling very well, and played a little bit from the back of the jeep and then Martin took out his monitor and showed the women, whom we had filmed this morning, some of the footage that we had shot with them and they were tickled and very entertained by it. So we had a little cross cultural communication and a little give and take during the day...it was a really good day."