Niger Currents
Exploring life and technology along the Niger river

Bintu walks silently over to the bench where Eli and I are sitting. As I look up, she motions with her head for us to get up. Break time is over. We walk across the compound, and a smirk cracks her stern complexion as she points at the pile of dishes from the night before. Bintu is playing the role of a stern supervisor, but she is having too much fun for the facade to hold.

Eli and I smile too, then Bintu sits back and watches patiently as Eli and I get to work. She taught us how to wash dishes the day before, so like a confident teacher she lets her students do their thing until they need help.

Everything was going well until we got to the cooking pots. Eli seemed to have the technique down, but it just wasn't happening for me. I motioned to Bintu to ask her to lead me through one more time. The pots take a beating, and get blackened every day sitting over a wood fire. People here remove the burn marks by scrubbing them off using a small amount of clean sand.

Seeing is believing and I know it works well, but it's still odd for me to start cleaning something by picking up some sand off the ground with the cleaning cloth. In any case, women here have developed a technique that works effectively with what they have available locally - seems like a perfect example of appropriate technology in action to me... If only I could get the technique down!

My idea of what technology is has definitely changed over the past few years. To me, technology used to mean a new machine or product - a new computer, a race car or a cell phone. But life in Ghana with Engineers Without Borders Canada has shown me hundreds of examples of people solving daily problems with what was available right in front of them - this could mean anything from local building techniques to the guy who built a machine to dehull groundnuts from car and motorcycle parts. Technology is no longer just gadgets; it is all about people using ingenious thinking to solve everyday problems.

We came to Samalenfora with the idea of spending a couple of days learning about the life of a rural woman. In many places there can be a stigma about crossing the clearly-defined boundary between what is men's and women's work. The chief, who is also Bintu's father-in-law, seemed happy to let us spend a couple of days learning what women do. But I think our explanation passed on an understanding that our real goal was to learn how to be a rural woman, rather than learning what it's like to be a rural woman from a woman's point of view and through some of her daily experiences.

It felt like boot camp while we were accompanying Bintu on some of her daily tasks. We washed dishes, pounded grain, prepared food, collected water and fetched wood in the morning. It was enough to tire us out, but only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the regular tasks a rural woman undertakes.

For me the most difficult task was making peanut butter for the soup. Bintu was patient with us, smiling compassionately and only laughing occasionally. The process begins with a fist-sized ball of partially crushed peanuts with the consistency of play dough. The ball is placed near the top of a flat stone and a bar-like piece of stone is used to smear small bits of the ball downwards, smoothing out the chunks. It looked easy enough and Eli seemed to get it, but I just couldn't get the rhythm.

Quite understandably, I felt like Bintu was getting impatient - my inefficient grinding was holding up the show. When we were pounding grain earlier that day, at least there was nothing urgent we needed to hurry for - but this time I was delaying the soup! Bintu quickly reground all my peanut butter in a couple of minutes. I was trying to understand her secret, but I just couldn't figure it out.

The following morning Bintu woke us up at 5 AM. She had already been up for a while to light a fire for heating water; I didn't mind the opportunity to sleep in.

It was quite the scene as Bintu showed up at the well with two white guys in tow. Her friends couldn't stop laughing as we tried to load the water on our heads. Our buckets were filled right to the top and, before we knew it, water sloshing out of the buckets had soaked both Eli and me. We were all fortunate this day; we only had to make three trips to the well as there were three of us carrying water. When Bintu is on her own she has to make the five-minute trip many more times.

I was eager to get to know Bintu and to find out about more than just what she does - I wanted to know what she thinks about life in Samalenfora and what she thought of the two foreigners who were trying to follow in her footsteps for a couple of days. I knew she had a good sense of humour and an irrepressible energy, but I really didn't have a feel for who she was. The work we were helping with is considered women's work and we were being included when there were tasks to be completed, but we were still being treated like men most of the time. So we didn't really get to know Bintu; we only got to see just some of the tasks she does in a day. I hoped a long walk to collect wood would give us some time to talk.

As we wander out past the edge of her village I try to break the ice, asking her what her friends think of us, and if we did a good job collecting water - but before we really get started we arrive at the wood-collecting spot. I hope to continue our conversation, but by the time I snap a couple of photos Ishmael, who is acting as our interpreter, is already off collecting wood.

Bintu prunes the dead pieces of wood we are collecting. She will keep nothing too big or small - only the pieces of a convenient size to carry back. She laughs as I haul a trunk out of the nearby woods, and looking at her pile I realise I am being optimistic - we have to carry all of this back to the village on our heads! I watch and admire the ease and grace with which she goes about her work. This work isn't easy - and neither is pounding grain, nor any of the other work she does each day. But Bintu just goes about her business without complaint. Even when I ask her about the daily workload she speaks about her work in such a matter-of-fact way that if I hadn't actually been there it would have sounded easy. I don't know what her secret is, but this woman makes the difficult look easy and talks about it as if it is nothing.

As we arrange the four bundles of wood and prepare to load them on our heads, I can't find a spot even remotely comfortable to carry the load, even with a cloth pad to spread the load. The bundle of wood isn't so much heavy as it is awkward. It hurts my skull and I have to strain just to keep it from falling forward and back as I walk. Halfway down the trail, a farmer notices my struggle. He stops me, helps me lift the load, and adds a handful of leaves as padding. As we finally reach the edge of the village I start to count the steps back to the compound. When we reach the compound I drop the wood, happy to be finished and glad to have avoided the embarrassment of dropping it along the way. Eli and I sit and have a short rest. It is nine in the morning. Bintu's day has just started and we are already tired.

I ask if we are going to the farm with Bintu, hoping we will finally have a chance to talk with her at length. But she isn't going today; it is the transition time between the dry and rainy seasons and there isn't a lot of work on the farm. Ishmael tells us Bintu is done with us; our boot camp is over.

Later in the morning, I press Ishmael - "Do you think we can speak with her some more before we go?" After some discussion, we agree that it might be awkward for her to answer questions about the life of a woman with her husband and father in-law present in the compound.

We leave later that afternoon after the midday sun has cooled. Bintu's grace and strength amaze me but they certainly don't surprise me. They are traits she shares with many of the rural women I worked with in Ghana. I don't know how they do it, but I'm thankful that they do. In Mali, and in the other places I have visited in West Africa, women are often the glue that holds their families together.

Samalenfora was our first stop after crossing into Mali from Guinea. The transition between the two countries was quite astonishing. It may have had a lot to do with the fact that the border was only 130 km from Bamako, the capital of Mali, while Conakry, the capital of Guinea, is well over 600 km away. In any case, it was strange to go from electricity in only rare cases to seeing electric lines running right to the border on the Malian side.

From Samalenfora we rode another 30 km to a small village just outside of the bustling town of Sibi. We had expected an easy ride into Bamako the following morning but were surprised with a very rough 35 km. The new highway has yet to make it all the way to Bamako. The rare treat of chocolate croissants in Bamako made up for the six hours spent riding on the bumpy, dusty roads.