Djenne. January 17-19, 2011.

After a night in Mopti, we are back in the jeeps with fresh spare tires for a three-hour drive through the Sahel until we reach Djenne. Thhis is a town in which Tuareg nomads, Felani and Banbara tribes people live in villages around this dusty town. Djenne too has a mud mosque. It is the largest mud mosque in Mali and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Felani are animists. The Banbara are a mix of animists, christians and muslims. Djenne is a bustling and crowded marketplace. The women sit, breastfeeding their babies as they sell their wares: grain, cereals, vegetables, fish and all other variety of necessities for the local people.

There are few tourists in this country. The U.S. State Department as well as other foreign ministries around the world have identified Mali as too dangerous for travel due to Al Qaeda and drug traffickers. Our "campement" is stark. We do have toilets in the rooms, but no toilet seats. They must be operated manually by filling the bowl with water until gravity takes over. The bed is rock hard as is the pillow. At least we have mosquito nets. No hot water, of course.

The food is just plain awful. The local people eat rice or couscous with sauce for virtually every meal. Sometimes they have some chicken in the sauce. Fish is generally too expensive. We will have chicken with our rice, and sometimes capitaine, a river fish, as a meal that will be repeated every day and night while we are in country. The chicken is scrawny. There is virtually no meat.

During the days we venture out of Djenne into a Banbara and a Felani village. The villages are always similar. Small mud hovels with mud brick walls surrounding a small square of dirt to separate one abode from another. The villagers are all essentially related to one another. There are approximately 150 people in each of these villages.

Each village we see is dominated by a mud mosque. The mud mosques are dark and dreary inside. Numerous columns keep the structure in place making it impossible to see much of anything beyond any vantage point. Bats fly from perch to perch, a perfect dark living place for these fearsome creatures that are simply ignored by the locals.

The most immediate impression in these villages is the overwhelming number of small children relative to adults.

All of Mali is full of dust. It is desert. The dust has a strange way of softening the light and color, but not the harsh life these people live.