Gossi

Gossi

Gossi is a city of little cement but plenty of stick, mud and sun. There is no electricity or running water in Gossi, but radios are frequently herd admits the wail of a random donkey. Some of the wells have been replaced by water pumps but are used only after a small fee has been paid. Gossi is located right off the road between Mopti and Gao just inside the Timbuktu region of Mali.

Gossi is an anomaly… it is a city of nomadic people…

To understand Gossi one must grasp it as an ultimate Oasis in which the Toureg people sustain a large population of human life in what might otherwise be an uninhabitable place for a multitude of people. In other words… Gossi has water… a lake… that doesn’t disappear… even in the hottest part of the dry season. As a result, many of the nomadic Toureg migrate to Gossi during the hottest part of the dry season, and since so many nomads make this journey, many have established a more permanent residence which in the rainy season becomes abandoned, or left virtually unattended, because when the rains come the family and herds go back out to “Bruce” (meaning desert). When Natalie, Bess and I stayed at Natalie’s family’s concession, the only inhabitant living there was a 19 year old boy named Elhmedi, everyone else was out to Bruce.

After meditating for three days in the cool shade of the large hanger in Natalie’s concession, I reached the conclusion that “this concession is not always this empty, quite, and uneventful… it must be different to live walled in with the entire family and herd… God Help Natalie!!!”

In reality, Gossi is not really a city but an ongoing bustling of nomadic living - condensed. The Touregs have somehow and mysteriously constructed large mud walled concessions that separate and help them watch over their herds, and since they built these walls why not add a little mud house with a door and some windows in the far corner – but they don’t make much use of these “indoor” mud homes because the sun turns them into human ovens. Solution, store various things in the home (mud oven), maybe sleep there on a cool night, and continue the leisurely nomadic lifestyle spending most of day outside in the cool shade of a stick hanger or stick-domed-thing (no word for it in English, only an analogy: stick/animal-hide igloo-thing). Anyway, Gossi will be better described by the pictures below…

Gossi is a peninsula that projects north away from the road with the lake wrapping itself around all three sides. The tip of the peninsula has less water around it, the water is narrower, and seems more river-like because the far bank is a short paddle. The water (part of the lake) to the left of the peninsula (when standing on the road looking north) is the bulk of the water at Gossi, the water on the left is the most open and exposed of the Gossi lake, and a human eye can barely distinguish an individual tree on the far reaches of the lake. This is a good example of how things are measured in Tamashek, an eyes distance, the length a camel sprints before it tires, a man’s forearm… The water to the right of the peninsula (when standing on the road looking north) is also very vast, but marshy and has many trees making it more grove-like – a very different appearance entirely. At first we didn’t think the water on the right and on left of the peninsula actually connected, but it does. Maybe there is more water on the right side than left, but if so, I can’t tell you that yet because I can’t see across it like on the left side. And anyway, how could I measure it with Tamashek units – “Of course Watson, the lake is a biggiollion large cow bladder fulls”.

So the entire peninsula of Gossi is not all human inhabitants, the left and central portion of the peninsula is human dwelling (houses and streets), but the right side of the peninsula consists of gardens. Every permanent resident in Gossi is entitled to have at least a small plot in the large community garden, even if they just let it grow over, which seems the case for many people in Gossi and thus one of my projects will be to promote gardening. Gossi is by no means limited to the space on the peninsula, once crossing over the water at the tip, there is yet another large area of mud-city-Toureg-dwelling-place that then disperses into the desert… on this side of the lake there is a hospital run by a French Nun, a Sister, an M.D, she has lived there for 20 years bringing some level of conventional medicine to the nomads, she is currently teaching three of them, apprentices, who will then take the knowledge into the “Bruce” (meaning desert). I don’t know if she speaks Tamashek, a person can survive in Gossi if they know French, I would imagine she speaks some Tamashek after 20 years but she only spoke French when we met briefly. This French woman is the only white person to ever live in Gossi, the Toureg have named the Hospital and half the city on the northern side of the lake surrounding the Hospital after her – and after 20 years of service who can say otherwise.

O.K. I have not said much about the house Bess and I will live in. This is because the house we were going to live in had part of its roof collapse under the pressure of the monsoon rains. The remaining wooden beams were infested with termites, the bathroom walls were no higher than my nipples, and some of the windows had insufficient locks. One of the Chief men here in Gossi (Not the Chief) took us around the city looking for a new home, it came down to living with the Mayor or the Mason. There are still some repairs to made to our new home, so I will wait until we’re all settled in before I describe and show off our home for the next two years…

Population Gossi, some 20,000 people (mostly Toureg but many Songri), but nothing is two stories high there, and the city is very very spread out so there are always tress and green things – at least now during the rainy season.