michelle in mali: Dogon Country

One of the guys that works here with another people group had 5 more guys join him as volunteers for the semester. They call themselves Cinco de Mali...so the original guy started calling himself The Big Tamale...and we three girls are now known as The Chimichangas. It's ridiculous, I know.

So after the guys had a week of training, Nafi took us all up to Dogon Country to do things like climb mountains, scale cliffs, and look at 1000's of years old human bones in caves. It looks a lot like the Grand Canyon, but the Dogon people build their houses into the side of these cliffs. So you'd be standing down in the canyon looking up, and at first you didn't really notice it, but when you looked closely, you'd see an entire village carved into the side of a cliff. I don't care who you are, that's pretty cool. You should really Google some images. So we climbed up and down those cliffs, visiting the people and taking lots of pictures.

One of the places we stayed had a pond next to it with dozens of crocodiles. We were pretty fascinated by them. Everybody was just standing there watching them when on the other side of the pond, Sarah and some of the boys started freaking out. Apparently this baby crocodile was just floating there, minding its own business, when one of the giant ones came up behind it and chomped down. I'm not gonna lie, at first I just figured that it was the mama trying to get its baby away from all the human folk. But sure enough, about 10 minutes later, the giant crocodile emerged from the water with the baby in its mouth and just started chowing down. The translator said that it is bad news for the goats and sheep when the crocodiles resort to eating their own young.

We also hiked up a cliff to these "Telem graves." Again, you should Google it. It was one of the more tricky hiking maneuvers we had to do, but once we got up there it was worth it. There were all of these carved out areas in the cliff and then the people had built little rooms. Dead bodies would be lifted up on a pulley and left in these graves. There were human bones all over the place and our guide said they were thousands of years old. It was pretty crazy. And kind of crunchy.

Here are some pictures:

Kind of blurry, but here's a room of bones.