Merry Christmas everyone. This has been a totally different Christmas day than, I at least have ever experienced. After a very cold night on the roof last night we had a quick breakfast of coffee and bread with jam, we paid our bill, Goldfish showed up and we began our journey into Dogon.

I’m not going to give you a play by play of where we go. I think the pictures will speak better about the countryside than I will. A few things should be mentioned though. We’re travelling for 6 days and 5 nights from Sanga up to Douentza going up and down the escarpment I think probably once or twice a day. Hiking up seems to take around an hour and down about 45 minutes. Today we’ve been seeing a lot of tourists but I hope that by tomorrow we’ll be off the main routes. We’re hoping to pick up some cool stuff by the end of the trek. We all are going to be needing blankets. I’d also like to get some Indigo cloth, and I know Tim wants a mask.

|Goldfish seems like a very wise guide. I’m super glad we got him. I mean we could’ve gotten the kind of guide most Peace Corps people probably go with; someone young, good, hip, but not really as living within the Dogon culture as someone like Goldfish. He’s been living here and guiding for 20 years! And thankfully we’re not dumb enough to get one of the hundreds of schmucks who don’t know anything actually about the region. The tourists here are old euros. And while I know I’ll be old one day too I hope I’ll never be so culturally insensitive or destructive as the generation before me. These kids definitely do not need hand outs of candy.

The Dogon people are animists. They came here originally to avoid persecution for not converting to Islam. The tribe that lived in the area before them, the Tellam, were pigmy cliff dwellers. They hunted in the woods below the escarpment and lived in almost inaccessible caves on the cliff face. The LP speculates that there used to be natural vines climbing the escarpment which provided ladders of a sort but the current lack of any obvious means to accessing these Cliffside structures, caves, and ruins of the Tellam has led the Dogon to think that the pigmies were powerful magicians who had the power to fly. When the Dogon came to the region they cleared the land below the escarpment to make way for farming. With the woodland gone so disappeared the game, and the Tellam hunters were left without any food. So the ones that survived moved on apparently settling near the Guinea border but the remains of the Tellam people have apparently lost almost all of their traditional culture. The Dogons on the other hand have retained much of their culture, and their animistic way of life. Yes the tourists have come, yes the Muslim presence can be felt here, but for the most part things seem to have remained here as I’d imagine them a hundred or a thousand years ago.

Being animists, they commonly practice sacrifice, and defer to the community spiritual leader, the Hogon in any important matters. The role of women in Dogon society seems fairly traditional. Below the escarpment here they grow and harvest rice, but cous cous and onion seem to be their main crops. There’s a lot more to this pretty fascinating culture but for now at least that’s the hi9ghlights of what I know. Perhaps I’ll write more later once I learn some new info. I’m off to eat lunch now; peace out.