Chapter 5: Tour of Niena

Now that we're evacuated, we can actually disclose to you where we lived and give you a brief tour of Niena (below), a small rural community in southern Mali. The following is a photo tour of our village that we composed right before we had to evacuate.

There's one paved road that runs through the town where one direction leads to Sikasso, the regional capital, and the other leads to Bamako, the capital of the nation. Otherwise, most roads are simple dirt paths like this one by our host family's house.

We were fortunate to live very close to the gudaron ("paved road"--borrowed from French). This shot is 30 meters from our front door and this direction leads to our regional capital of Sikasso.

Here's a shot of the butiki (small shop, from the French boutique), getting restocked across the street from our house. Our butiki tigi, or butiki owner, Yaya, was a really great guy! We saw him every day and he always helped us stay sane with cold water and sodas.

Here is more of the gudaron, outside of our house. You can see that we had cell towers, power lines, gutters, etc. Not so bad!

Here are the cell towers (Malitel and Orange) right behind our house. You would think that having them so close would allow for better internet at site using the Orange USB stick...but alas, it was a constant struggle.

Here is a picture of the gar, or bus station/stop. Every time a bus stops our friends at the gar are ready to sell mangoes, eggs, cold drinks, and baskets.

A better picture of our gar ladies hustling!

This is our town's library, or CLAC, which stands for something which we've now forgotten! The library was such an awesome place, run by the government but funded by NGOs and managed by locals. They had games like chess, Monopoly, Scrabble, and Risk (in French), as well as a huge assortment of French books including reference books and histories of Mali and stuff. They also had newspapers and a children's section! They also had a meeting room with a huge TV and DVD/video player for educational stuff, as well as a bunch of building-block types of games for the kids. It was so wonderful!

Here is Kafo Jiginew, right by our house and just past the CLAC, which was a major microfinance institution in Mali and in our village. They were much more formal than the groups we were going to and hosting, but offered loans at low interest, especially for farmers.

This is the Centre de Sante Communitaire, or CSCOM, that Carolyn worked at. It was basically the community health center for the catchment area around Niena. We will post a separate blog post with a tour of the CSCOM soon!

Here is the soccer field, full of rocks, as you can probably tell. This is actually on the other side of the main road, facing towards the road (see the cell towers?). We had to cross this--and multiple soccer games going on at once--every day while walking to and from the garden.

Here's a bunch of food trees on the way to the garden. From the left, a papaya tree, a moringa (bashiyirini) tree, and a mango tree. We were trained on pushing moringa in village as a nutritional supplement since it's full of good stuff! People were already growing it, clearly, but not harvesting the leaves for food.

Another young mango tree on the way to the garden. Behind the mango tree is the kongo, or "jungle." As you can see, it's not really a jungle so much as an uninhabited area where animals graze.

Another several houses our way to the garden...we walked this way every day, twice a day!

This is a nice picture of an old mango tree by the pump where we got water for gardening. This was a cool intersection in town because the pump was there, and these community mango trees were there, so there were always a bunch of people to talk to and hang out with while you waited to get water. Kids would climb in the mango tree to pick mangoes, and would also pump water for us. All the adults would sit around and drink tea or gossip or whatever. It was a cool place.

Here is a picture of the way to school for Cass. His homologue (village counterpart), Fatumata, was an awesome lady who taught preschool in the morning and farmed rice in the afternoons. The school is up on the hill, just past the white building in the distance.

That does it for our tour de Niena! We have more pictures of the CSCOM, gardens, etc. that we will be posting soon. We have to catch up before we go to Guyana, so stay tuned!!