The Staring Problem

I spent a week hiking in Dogon Country with Sandra and Guillaume (their website's in French, but you'll be able to look at photos, I think) who are starting a trip around the world that will last a year and a half, and who were kind enough to save me from freezing to death at night. It gets cold at night on the edge of the desert; cold and windy. We slept outside; I was rolled up in a sheet, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, folding and refolding my body trying to hide my legs from that dusty wind. Dogon Country, for those of you consulting maps, is east of Mopti before the Burkina Faso border. Dogon Country, now inhabited by the Dogon tribe, obviously, used to be peopled by the Tellem tribe who carved houses high up in the divets of the cliff face. So high that it remains a mystery how the Tellem managed to scramble up to their doors. "They were magicians," our guide said, staring up at the cliffs. The place is a geological wonderland: a flat red plain with a ridge of cliffs bulging out like a spine.
I left Sandra and Guillaume and our guide, Ibrahim (who had lived for several years in Douala, so he and I spent many, many hours making fun of how Cameroonians talk) yesterday because my money was getting low - there are no ATMs in Mali- and I needed to get to Bamako. I caught a van in Bamba, a village in Dogon Country, to a neighboring village where we stopped to load and unload 50lb. sacks of millet and take on more passengers. I got out and wandered around the very small market -a few stalls selling the ususal: instant coffee, cookies, sugar, tea, dates and women selling tubers- and drew a crowd of 25 children who gathered in a semi-circle and stared at me solomly while I sat on a log eating peanuts and waited to get back on the van and continue to Douentza. Apparently, I was riveting; I ate peanuts and stared back at the kids, and wondered how long I would have to be boring before they lost interest and drifted away. What is the half life of my novelty? It's always odd, and basically incomprehensible to me, to be the object of such curiousity. Imagine, me exotic! Me! When there are men clad in turbans riding camels, and people with their teeth filed into points. Me! in a baseball cap and T-shirt, with dirty feet, picking my nose on a log.