My new bogolan studio is finally nearing completion, and soon the great loom I have ordered from Segou will be arriving, with a weaver who will stay for a month with us to instruct three locals how to use it.
The builders will move on within a week to constructing a new house where the guides and drivers will sleep because their old house within the hotel compound will become the new shop housing the merchandise we will produce in the MaliMali studio. (See www.malimali.org)
And then we will start on the new hangar, or the roof structure for the bar and restaurant, as soon as the tourist season is over, around the middle of March.
And then....and then...and then...
I lay awake sometimes in the early hours unable to sleep. But I never stray from the confines of Djenné Djenno, over which I hover busily in my mind, building and cultivating, tearing down and constructing elsewhere, until I finally fall asleep exhausted but happy. Life beyond the borders of my little kindom has become irrelevant somehow, apart from a few rare outposts where my few loved ones reside.