An elaborate greeting in rural Mali

By Jonathan Izard
BBC News

The landlocked West African country of Mali is one of the world's poorest nations, but despite years of political unrest the country remains relatively peaceful and the villages, enchanting.

It is the faces that stay with me now: bright, eager, keen to engage in conversation, to make contact of any kind.

Car parts and oil drums are hammered into everyday utensils

But before I caught the plane to Mali, I had not really known what to expect.

On my first morning in the capital, Bamako, I visit a recycling market.

In an area the size of a football pitch, hundreds of men are squatting on the earth in the furious heat of the sun.

They hammer away at bits of metal that were once parts of cars, roofs and oil drums, cutting and bashing them, bending and shaping them into a different object with another use - a stove, a spoon or a cooking pot.

The noise of this furious industry - a driving percussive cacophony - almost prevents conversation but I ask one young man how many hours a day he works here?

He smiles. "As many as I can," he says.

And how many days?

He laughs. "How many days are there in the week?"

Then he shakes his head at my naivety and returns to his task, holding a strip of metal in his bare toes and hammering it into shape before reaching for the next.

All around the activity continues. Nobody has time to tend the donkey that is quietly dying in the street.

Village calm

Two days' drive east of the bustling capital is the contrasting calm of the massive Bandiagara escarpment and the Dogon villages that cling dramatically to the face of it.

The village meeting house is built with a very low ceiling, the theory being that if the men cannot stand up, they cannot get angry

The Dogon people have been here for centuries and their way of life has barely changed.

Their houses are made from mud, thatched with dried grass.

A goat provides milk. A few scrawny chickens peck in the earth.

Water must be collected daily from the nearest well - an hour's walk away down on the flat plain - by women carrying huge pots on their heads.

And it is the women who do most of the work: baking bread, pounding the millet to make beer - for the men, of course - sweeping away the endless dust, and all with a small baby at their waist, wrapped into their brightly coloured robes.

The men, in contrast, spend a lot of time sitting and talking - vital work, of course - and gathering at the meeting house, which is built with a very low ceiling, the theory being that if the men cannot even stand up, they cannot get angry.

It is an idea that parliament buildings around the world could usefully adopt.

The long hello

The Dogon greeting is an elaborate affair.

The women do most of the labour-intensive tasks in the village

It begins when two people are still far apart. It needs to.

First one inquires about the other's health and the other replies that he is well.

Then about his wife. She is fine, likewise his parents, his children, his animals.

Each inquiry receives the same response.

Then the second person repeats the list of questions to the first, getting his replies in turn.

Only after this protracted preamble and the mutually swapped phrase 'yappo-yappo' can they move on to the rest of their conversation.

But the chances are that by now they have passed each other by and are calling back over their shoulders.

Dealing with beggars

Please, we were told by the company who had helped to organise our trip, do not give anything to anyone.

The children will ask for presents, for pens or other gifts.

But giving will endorse the belief that begging can be a way of life.

Better for them to go to school and get an education.

So, at each village we come to, when the little palms stretch out and the faces turn up to us in expectation, I turn my pockets inside out to show I have nothing and then try to engage in conversation, in games and songs.

Children clutch at my fingers, laughing and chattering. Gifts of pens and books and games are taken to a village elder to be distributed later.

After several days trekking through these Dogon villages - Amani, Tirelli, Banani, Dougarou - we decide to buy a gift for the porters who have been carrying our tents, food and other provisions.

Our guide, Dow, explains that the most appreciated gift would be a sheep. We agree, so he arranges to buy one from a village we pass through and it walks with us up the rocky cliff path.

Nothing is wasted

That evening, as we pitch our tents under a rising moon and the people of Youga Piri invite us to join their dance of welcome, the beast is slowly roasting on a spit over a wood fire.

Again, nothing will be wasted.

The skin is pegged out to dry. The heart and liver are drying on a blood-stained rock.

Four feet are laid neatly on the ground, to be whittled into jewellery later.

And, hanging in a large baobab tree, is the sheep's head.

Its eyes are open, its expression calm, as if accepting its fate.

What is not eaten will still be used, even down to the jawbones hung to ward off evil spirits.

I stare at the sheep. It stares at me.

Now back in London, shaking the red Saharan dust from my clothes, it is the faces that stay with me.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 11 March, 2006 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.