January | 2019 | A Lion in the Path

Surveying is the process of finding order in chaos. I am currently in Western Mali, doing a pilot run of a survey designed to give us a holistic understanding of how ordinary Malians perceive child marriage and malnutrition. I helped create a painstaking research methodology to target 6000 individual respondents living in 2000 households in 80 different communities in two vast regions of the country. The survey tool is over 500 lines of Excel code, with embedded timers, GPS captures, skip logic, and picklists of anticipated responses. It has been bench-tested to ensure its infallibility and perfect standardization. It exists on a computer server today as a rigorous and empirical measurement tool. It will soon be deployed by surveyors with tablets to some of the poorest and least developed regions of the world, and used to measure the breathtaking complexity of human preferences, expectations and core beliefs.

The questions on the survey tool have been reviewed by psychologists, nutritionists, child protection experts and professional surveyors. The sample selection parameters and research methodology have been designed in consultation with demographers, and exhaustively examined by ethical review boards on two continents. The tool received hundreds of hours of collective attention before any one of our target respondents was asked a single question.

My complete understanding of the survey tool began to fade during the translation process. The tool was originally drafted in English and then translated into French, which I could understand perfectly but without the same level of nuance as the first version. Our data collection partner translated it from French to Bambara, the national language of Mali, and suddenly the tool which I had spent hours tweaking and refining was unintelligible to me. From Bambara it was translated into the regional languages Kassonké, Soninké, Sénoufou and Mianka. The process was like a game of telephone, where the signal became increasingly clear for respondents in the rural communities, but increasingly crackly and distant for me.

The complexity of the task of categorizing and quantifying participant responses was evident on the first day of the pilot. The demographic questions alone are a huge challenge. Families in rural Mali live collectively in compounds overseen by patriarchs, and within each compound there can be up to ten individual households. Defining households by asking if people are related, or sleep under the same roof, or prepare meals together is not easy: the answer is always that it’s complicated. A household contains brothers and sisters and cousins and uncles and people who are called cousins but aren’t even related by blood. The wives cook shared meals in colossal cauldrons outdoors, and anybody within arm’s reach of the serving dish partakes in the meal. A man with multiple wives can be identified as the head of household for houses in two different villages. One constant is that each compound looks like a daycare center on a field trip: there are babies EVERYWHERE. They snooze in the shade, braid each other’s hair, weep, recover, and observe the adult conversations in wide-eyed silence.

So demographic questions are challenging. If a man says that most months he earns 40,000 francs but he earns 1,000,000 francs during the month that he sells his cotton crop, and he shares this money between two wives with their own small streams of income as well as giving his uncle 10,000 francs every two months or so, what is his household’s monthly income? I was present to hear a surveyor ask one head of household how many children he had, and after a minute of consideration he said he had seven. “You forgot the one studying in Bamako!” an onlooker (there are always onlookers) pointed out. The man was momentarily chastened, but then said “well one of the ones I just counted is actually my nephew, so it’s still only seven.”

After we’ve gotten through the demographic questions, we get to the questions related to personal beliefs and social expectations. Many surveys ask clear and unambiguous questions. Are your children vaccinated? How much did you spend on rice in the last month? Do you own a bicycle? How many hectares do you farm? Our survey asks people what they feel and what they prefer; we ask them to speculate what their neighbor might prefer. In roundabout ways we ask them what they would prefer if their neighbor preferred something different. The translation phase of the survey was exhausting: we have stretched the conditional and interrogative tenses of the local language to their fullest. Out of ten people in your community, how many do you believe believe that you should arrange the marriage of your daughter within the year of her first period? To what extent do you believe that the mother of a sick infant should exclusively follow the recommendations of a traditional healer?

The respondents are patient in the face of these endless questions. We tell them that they will not be compensated for their time, but their responses can help create a brighter future for the children of Mali. It is a testament to their generosity, goodwill and optimism that for the most part they accept this explanation without complaint. I see respondents puzzle over this deeply personal interrogation, and it’s clear that they are considering many of these questions for the first time. There are dozens of sequential questions, but the two overarching ones are these: what do you do, and why? I hope no one ever asks me these questions. As I watch people wrestle with the confusion and ambiguity of the survey, guided by our ever-patient enumerators, I realize how much I myself struggle to articulate the rationale for my personal beliefs.

The survey is too long, some questions are confusing, and there are surprising outliers that oblige us to reconsider our field research protocol. As I construct detailed mental lists of all of the questions and parameters to revise, I also note the questions that are clear and useful. There’s a lot of work ahead of us, but so far, it could be worse.

The Hôtel Kamadjan in Siby, Mali is very reasonably priced. The hotel is actually just a high wall enclosing two dozen masonry huts, all perfectly round and topped with a straw roof. My hut contained a toilet with no seat, a shower that only spat cold water, a mattress of the approximate thickness of yoga mat, and two pillows that, when unsheathed from their cases, turned out to be made out of Styrofoam. The Kamadjan offers a welcome respite for travelers who feel overwhelmed by too many choices. In the straw-roofed restaurant I wasn’t asked what I wanted for dinner, but instead was informed what meal I would receive, and when I asked for a beer the truculent barman handed me a chilly bottle without getting lost in the details of what brand or size I might prefer. When I told the manager that my room had no toilet paper he grimaced and said, “surely you would prefer a packet of tissues instead?” I realized that this was another decision that wouldn’t require much input from me.

The thing is, I was delighted with the hotel. The water in my room worked pretty reliably, and I like the smell of thatched roofs. Besides, I didn’t come to Siby for the room service. I came here to go on adventures.

Siby is the basecamp of An Ka Yelen, a cooperative of rock climbers and mountain bike guides who fund their own adventures by guiding visitors on expeditions in the sandstone cliffs around the town. All of their ropes, carabiners, harnesses, helmets and bikes fit inside a tightly-packed hut in the Kamadjan courtyard. Despite their small clubhouse they have big ambitions. In 2013 their guides received funding from the climbing gear manufacturer Petzl to do intensive training in Chamonix, and the subsequent year their team summitted Kilimanjaro in 5 days. They’ve done mountain bike training courses in the Moroccan highlands, and they run climbing and rappelling training for the commando branches of the Malian army. They were like all the other climbers I’ve ever met: remarkably strong handshakes, an obsession with gear, and a desire to earn money only to the extent necessary to allow them to do more climbing.

I told them that I also liked to climb rocks and ride bikes, and since we had the only things that matter in common, we bonded quickly. On Saturday morning I woke up early and rode to the Arche de Kamadjan with Moussa and Timbaleck. The cliffs were only a 20 minute walk above the village, and I noticed that Timbaleck wore loafers as he hopped up the hill from rock to rock. At the face of the first pitch we changed into harnesses and climbing shoes, and Timbaleck lead climbed along the hydraulically-drilled anchor points to fix a top rope. We began to ascend. I would climb the top rope pitches that Moussa and Timbaleck fixed, and after a few runs we would move to a new face where they would secure new ropes.

The last time I went up an outdoor face I was ice climbing in Maine, and it took me a while to get back in the rhythm of rubber meeting rock. I struggled initially, feeling Earth’s relentless pull against every ounce of my body weight. My technique was worse than I remembered, and I often defaulted to following M&Ts shouted French instructions about where to look for elusive handholds and ledges. As the morning went on, my muscles and the rocks warmed up. I used less chalk and more instinct, and found moments of celebration in each additional vertical meter. After touching the top anchor after one tough ascent I turned to scan the landscape before descending, and realized that I could see the sun shining perfectly centered through the Arch. We climbed for three hours before returning to the hotel to be informed what we would eat for lunch.

I ate a lot of rice and tomato sauce to replenish my energy for the next adventure. In the afternoon, as the temperature flirted with 100 degrees, I went out to bounce off some rocks on a mountain bike. To get to the plateau you ride two kilometers through the village and then up a comically steep road that would make Sisyphus feel right at home. If you sit back on the bike seat your front wheel floats off the ground with each strong push of the pedals, but if you stand and lean forward your rear wheel loses traction and spins rooster tails of sand and pebbles. I thrashed up to the top in low gear, and then followed the dirt track through the villages. The path wasn’t technical, but it was nice to cruise along an open trail. I could see the smoke from brush fires smudging the horizon, and the sandstone cliffs hemmed me in in every direction. At times I encountered other cyclists: women carrying firewood or Dozo hunters with muzzle loaders riding iron-framed bicycles that could have dated from Mali’s colonial era. It felt like an odd meeting of worlds: I was riding a fat-tired bike with ludicrous shock absorbers whose cables and inner tubes were imported from France, and as I hopped along I met bikers churning slowly and steadily on indestructible village bikes. I greeted them, and they all seemed happy, if not surprised, to see me out there.

I rode 32 kilometers on rough trails that day, and sank into the warm embrace of my yoga mat mattress that night. The next day I woke up with cramping hands and aching legs. It was time to find an alternative means of transport. I rented two motorcycles, and set off with one of the An Ka Yelen guides to a waterfall outside of town.

Despite the fact that I was now endowed with a throttle, clutch, and engine, the ride wasn’t easy. The paths out there were narrow, and different conditions had different challenges. Parts of the track were sunbaked ridges of soil, and I felt every vibration and could see the flesh of my forearms ripple as my front tire smacked each new crest. Elsewhere we encountered grapefruit-sized red rocks embedded in the trail, and I powered over them while trying to anticipate where the next bounce would throw my front tire. The most difficult sections were smothered in loose sand six inches deep. In those conditions you can’t wrestle the motorcycle into compliance as you would otherwise—the best I could do was to lean forward and whisper sweet words of encouragement into my bike’s ear as it bucked and swayed beneath me.

Along the path I was brought up short by an unexpected obstacle: someone had lit a fire dead in the middle of the trail, which was so hot that I could feel it from ten feet away. I was stymied—I had ridden through rivers and over boulders to get this far, but I was hesitant about actually riding through fire. A group of men came down from up trail, blackened with soot and holding iron hammers on homemade hafts. They were concasseurs, out improving rural routes by breaking apart the most obtrusive rocks. Cracking a granite boulder is a simple but difficult task. First you have to build a smoldering fire, and stoke it for hours to heat the very core of the rock. Once the heat has made the rock brittle, you can clear the logs and begin to chip it apart with hand tools. Each blow of the axe sends red-hot slivers of rock shrapnel in all directions, and this group had been out since morning trying to crack this one boulder. I watched them for 15 minutes, amazed by the patience and persistence it takes to turn chunks of stone into a navigable path. Finally I found an alternative route around the fire, and after giving them 1000 francs for their considerable troubles, rode on. It took us an hour to travel eleven miles.

The ride was well worth it. The waterfall was Edenic. Water tumbled across 40 meters of rock to a 7-foot-deep pool so clear that you could distinguish individual pebbles on the floor below. Fat catfish wriggled lazily in the water, and the site was like a rock amphitheater leading down to the pool. It’s no surprise that the local people have long ascribed supernatural powers and properties to the rocks, groves, and waterfalls of the region. I spent hours there lulled into a sense of calm and relaxation by the inherent beauty of the place. Hunters traditionally camped there for the night and did rituals before setting off to pursue game, and it seemed like an appropriate place to cross the barrier between the human and natural world.

We rode back to town in the afternoon, and I left Siby on Sunday night to return to Bamako. When I arrived at my hotel downtown I was shocked by the chilliness of the air conditioning, and my phone buzzed to life in my pocket after being exposed to WiFi for the first time in two days. I was crusted with sunscreen and dust from the motorcycle ride away from the grove, and the white-shirted hotel staff didn’t protest too hard when I hefted my duffel to carry it up to my room myself. I showered steamily, washing rock dust from my hands, bike chain grease from my legs, and motorcycle dust from my whole surface. I was sunburnt and aching, but profoundly happy.

It does me good to sleep under a straw roof and scrape against some rocks. A unique advantage of my work in Mali is that it affords me the opportunity to visit secluded and fascinating locations that I would never travel to if I wasn’t already here. I am privileged that my spectrum of experiences is so broad; that I can go from a toilet without a seat to a hotel with all the toilet paper I could ever desire. I had a great time in Siby, and I look forward to my next adventure with excitement and an open mind.