When I journeyed from my home in Taos to Mali a few months ago, I was little prepared for the degree to which I felt completely at home—I mean deeply, deeply at home. Sure, there were adobe villages that looked just like our pueblos, living monuments to the universal, basic techniques of the earth-building tradition. To top it off, above every village along the Bandiagara escarpment in Dogon country, I saw ancient cliff dwellings dating from the same time as our mysterious Anasazis. I learned that these ancient Tellem people, who were short in stature like the Anasazis, abandoned their dwellings at the same time as the Anasazis and simply vanished. The similarities were downright eerie.

But beyond the obvious architectural similarities, it was the Malians themselves and the way they live that totally captivated me. Mali is a landlocked African country famous for the fabled town of Timbuktu and for the 14th-century Grand Mosque in Djenne, the largest adobe structure in the world. Backed up against the Sahara desert, it’s the proverbial end of the trail. Mali got lucky: whereas the French equipped the coastal countries with industry and infrastructure, they left Mali to serve as the rural breadbasket. As a result, in many places life goes on just as it had for centuries before the Europeans arrived.

 

It’s a land rich in traditional culture, music, and architecture, but in just about every other way Mali is as poor as could be, with an average life expectancy of 46 and a per capita income of $900 a year. But guess what? There, in what is practically the poorest place on earth, the people are perhaps the happiest. In villages where electricity and running water are virtually unknown, everyone knows just how to get everything done with time left over for the really important things like family, ceremony, and community.

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