How Do You Say Chiropractor in Dogon?

Where to begin? Several weeks ago while scrambling on the rocks in my village looking for cell phone reception (a very common occurrence), I fell and hit my side on a large rock. I was pretty sure that I had cracked my rib, but it wasn’t overly painful, and I knew that there was not a lot be done, so I left it alone. But three weeks later, it still wasn’t right, so I decided that I needed to take action. I had no desire to sit on a bus for 10 hours to get to Bamako and find out that the doctor couldn’t do anything, so I decided to look locally. My neighbor told me that there was an excellent traditional doctor in a nearby village, and that he would be happy to take me to see him. So it was decided – an hour on a motorcycle beats 10 hours on a bus any day.

We arrived in village to a waiting line of about 7 or 8 people from all over the country looking for treatment. There were people in various states of recuperation wandering around on crutches, wrapped in bandages, nursing swollen appendages. It was fascinating. The patriarch of this medical family was tending to a little girl whose foot had been severed by a van, so his son, a large man with half-dreaded hair wearing a torn smock over his clothes, would see me. Anywhere else he would have looked mentally unstable, but here I respected his effort to look official by wearing a smock.

When my turn arrived, I was led into a house and asked to sit on a mat. I pointed to the affected rib, but he was already probing the area and checking the alignment of my spine. Then before I knew what happened, he stuck his knee in my back, picked me up buy each wrist, and dropped me down, declaring me finished. I felt fantastic. Already I could tell that my rib was back in place, and I felt really rejuvenated. He led me back to the waiting area, and in a few minutes returned with a plastic bag full of a black powder. He instructed me to mix four pinches of the powder in meat broth and drink it twice a day.

So here I am. My rib is in place, my insides are coated in a mysterious black film, and I feel great. The most amazing part is that they do not charge for their services, understanding that most people are not in a position to pay. I said that I wanted to give something for their efforts, so my friend recommended that a 40-cent donation would be in order. I’m thinking of asking if I can make weekly appointments. Maybe they will even throw in a massage.

When Do We Get Direct TV?

Two days ago I was at home thinking about what I could do to distract myself from the fact that I hadn’t eaten or drank since sunup (it is Ramadan and I am fasting), when a truck pulls up in front of my house and some friends of mine from the women’s association in Bandiagara (the ones that helped me with the porridge project) jump out. That in itself was interesting, since we don’t usually get too many people dropping in from out-of-town to say hello. But the next thing I know, they are pulling a television out of the back of the truck and setting it up under our neem tree. Although I can only speculate, I would say that that is the first time anything of that nature has happened in Mandoli. They asked my neighbors to round up as many women as they could for the video, and then asked me to set up all the video equipment, judging that, since I am an American, I know how to do those sorts of things. Or maybe they could read on my face the years of AV experience I gathered from my time working at the Ursinus and Chester County libraries. In either case, I was put to work.

That is when I saw the titles of the videos: La Victime, Excision, and Dogon Dancing. It seemed like an interesting combo, and I was curious to see how the last one would tie in. But it turns out that they were luring the women in with the Dogon dancing video while everyone arrived. We were supposed to watch La Victime (a personal tale of a young girl that was excised) first, before diving into the more clinical excision video, but due to technical difficulties, they had no warmup, and we watched the excision video immediately after the Dogon dancing. For those of you out there that don’t know what female excision is, it is the process of cutting off the clitoris, and oftentimes the labia as well. Some cultures also sew up the vaginal opening. Apparently there was a Law & Order episode about this a while back. I know that Mali has one of the highest excision rates in West Africa, and while I forget the exact percentage of women that are excised, I know it is in the 90s. So my friends from Bandiagara rolled into village to show the women why they should stop excising their little girls by having us watch about 35 minutes of really graphic medical footage of various excisions, medical mishaps and difficult pregnancies. This is pretty remarkable since no one in village really even talks about sex, or their vaginas or women’s issues. So they were pretty shocked. The best part about it was that there was one old man there who was completely engrossed in the video. I don’t think he blinked once. I have to give him credit, because all of the other men went scurrying away within the first minute, but he sat through it all – even the difficult pregnancies. Although it must be said that this is the same old man who loves to update me on my health by the fullness of my breasts, and who strolls past my window after evening prayers to ask if he can come over and “enter my house,” so perhaps it is not all that surprising that he was the one man present for the video.

And just as soon as they came, the women from Bandiagara packed up their tv and hit the road. And there I sat wondering what kind of impact this had on the women of my village. So I took some time to talk with my neighbors about what they thought. They did not see what they watched on the tapes as the same thing as what they practice in village – mostly because the footage from the tapes showed the most extreme cases, and my village does not remove anything other than the clitoris, so they do not have the medical issues common to more extreme surgery. Also they said that men do no want to marry women that are not excised, so it puts a woman at a disadvantage if she does not have the surgery. Since marriages are arranged when the prospective mates are young, and everyone in village knows if a baby girl has been excised, a parent will be jeopardizing their child’s future if they don’t have the procedure done. And of course there is the tradition of it as well, and the thought that if a mother went through it, then her daughter should have to go through it too. So I left the day realizing that the issue is much more complicated than it initially seemed, and change will come very slowly to my neighborhood. But I also realized that their attitude was still very tolerant of other cultural practices, despite the fact that the video was clearly no tolerant of theirs. They asked if Americans practiced excision, or if I was excised, and when I said no, there was no disgust or judgment. Just a shrug and a nod, and that was about it.

So I’m not sure if the video germinated any seeds of thought in their heads, but it certainly did in mine. And if I have a few more unexpected days like this, I’ll have no trouble keeping my mind off my stomach for the rest of Ramadan.