Tea Time

Back in village, I’ve been indulging in one of my favorite Malian pastimes. Tea hopping. Malians drink tea constantly. But it’s not any tea, and it’s certainly not a cup of tea that you grab on your way to work. This is Chinese green tea, served in shot glasses, in three rounds, with massive amounts of sugar, and sometimes boiled with a hint of mint. The first round of tea is quite strong, and throughout the three rounds, which could take as little as 30 minutes or last as long as 3 hours, the tea gets progressively sweeter, becoming more and more like sugar water. Tea is an art form here, and everyone wants the honor of making and serving the tea. Except me. Because pouring the tea is a complicated process of getting just the right amount of foam in each shot glass, lifting the teapot ever higher while never spilling a drop. It’s an integral part of Malian life, and while many families may not have enough money to purchase medicine or provide their children with nutritious diets, everyone has enough money to buy tea and sugar every single day.

So if I have a particularly slow day and am wondering what to do with myself, the solution is simple: tea hopping. I start out at my counterpart’s house, since she often starts drinking tea early in the afternoon, and boils it quite quickly since her father in law is most certainly addicted and is quite grumpy until he’s had his three shots. From there, I can wonder through the village, chatting and drinking tea with friends and neighbors. If I’m lucky, I might find someone who’s drinking dableni, or hibiscus tea, instead, a delicious variation. Others serve the tea with peanuts. It’s how we pass cool mornings, hot afternoons, starlit nights. When I’m talking on the radio, I know that my friends and neighbors are fanning the charcoal and setting a teapot on the fire. When I finish my shout outs and leave the radio station, I can be certain that there will be a cup waiting for me when I get home.


Confident that I wouldn’t find much of a Christmas celebration in my own village, I headed up to Mali’s Dogon country for the holiday, where I met up with over thirty other Peace Corps volunteers. Since cold season started around mid-November, I’ve watched as countless four-wheelers and buses carrying white tourists passed through my village, making their way up to visit the cliffs of Dogon. Most people in my village are confused about why white tourists are interested in visiting Mali, much less why they would want to walk up and down cliffs for several days. Nonetheless, I was sent off from my village with snacks for the journey and many benedictions for a happy holiday and safe return.

I traveled up to Dogon with another Peace Corps volunteer, Joelle, and we were able to quickly hop onto a bus heading in that direction, making friends with two wealthy Malian girls listening to music on their fancy Razor phones. In addition to the driver, Malian buses normally carry 3-4 additional operators, whose main purpose is to lean out of the door and call out the destination of the bus and the price, in our case “Sevare! Keme naani! Sevare!” If someone actually responds to their cries and wants to get on the bus, one of the men (and they’re always men) jumps out of the bus and practically pushes you back inside. Meanwhile, the driver, desperate not to lose a second, has already started the bus again, and the busmen must run to jump onto the bus before it moves on again, searching for new passengers. In addition, these men also are responsible for controlling the countless vendors who swarm the bus at every stop. But perhaps their most important duty is keeping the driver supplied with tea. After all, one shouldn’t be deprived of tea only because one is on the road! Luckily, while picking up Joelle and I, the busmen were also able to pick up charcoal, tea, and sugar. As our bus made its progress across the Sahel, the busmen fanned the charcoal and carefully poured out sweet cups of tea, washing the cups out of the window.

Once there, it was easy to see why so many tourists make the long trip out. We spent three days hiking through the cliffs, each night in a different village in our mosquito net tents under the stars, and my god, those cliffs were gorgeous. The cliffs themselves are reminiscent of what I imagine Utah might look like. But what makes the Dogon cliffs so spectacular is that there are whole villages carved into them. The villages are ruins from long ago, but of course no one really knows when. They are high up in the cliffs, and the Dogon people now believe that these ancient peoples were able to climb up to their houses because they spoke a sacred language that allowed them to scale the cliffs like lizards.

Today, the Dogon people live in villages nestled into the cliffs, or at the base of the cliffs. In general, the Dogon, because of their isolation, have largely maintained their animist beliefs. This means that you can’t exactly meander all over Dogon villages by yourself. Instead, unless you know the village well, you better be with a guide, or else risk walking into sacred areas, or areas that are forbidden to women. They still perform masked dances, and unlike in my village, the sounds of drumming are frequent. But the villages are often so isolated that their water source might be as much as a mile away; village children might have to scramble down an entire mountain to get to school; and each Dogon village speaks a different dialect, meaning that at market or when they get together, Dogon from different villages actually speak Peulh together!



Returning to my village after the holiday, I found myself in a situation I had not expected to encounter. I expected that I might be more knowledgeable about America, about the West, about the world than many Malians; that I even might be more knowledgeable about West Africa. But I never expected to know more about Mali than other Malians. It feels very strange to be teaching Malians about their own country, but I found myself riddled with all sorts of questions about Dogon country upon my return. I guess it should be no surprise when most villagers have never left our region, know nothing of Bamako. But how could I not look at my host’s wife – a woman of more than thirty years, a member of the chief of the village’s family–in wonder when told me that she had never, ever left our village of 3,000 people?