I walked with Berté, my Bambara translator, through the narrow streets in silence as we headed towards the blacksmiths' workshop. Once you get off the main streets of Djenne the streets change into narrow pathways winding through a maze of houses. It reminds me of the labyrinth of the Minotaur. Small puddles of putrid, stagnant water dot the path. We went at 8:30 in the morning and not many people had started to work yet. The workshop is in a one-story mudbrick building. In the workshop there were quenching pits (pits of water used to cool the metal) littering the floor and piles of discarded metal were everywhere. The workshop was ringing with noise. Several of the blacksmiths were making frying pans and handles.

I spoke with BahAlkoye Sounkono, a blacksmith apprentice who is 12 years old. The master blacksmith was not in the workshop when we arrived. The apprentice was making ember carriers (big spoons with long handles so you could carry embers from one fire to another). They all worked sitting down on the dirt floor. BahAlkoye starts early in the morning and ends the day at 6:00. He does not live close to the workshop. BahAlkoye wants to be a blacksmith because all the males in his family are blacksmiths. Women can not become blacksmiths. The items he makes he sells in the local markets on market day. He gets paid to take the goods and sell them at the market. He can earn about 1,000 CFA a day in the marketplace. This is about two dollars. His master takes care of his expenditures. He does not travel to other small villages to sell tools he makes. He could not remember how long he has been an apprentice, although another apprentice suggested he had been there for five years. He does not know how long he needs to be an apprentice before he becomes a master.

BahAlkoye has never been to school. Schools in Mali are packed and there are not enough of them. One class could have over one hundred students. There are many more boys than girls who go to school because the girls have to help their mothers as soon as they are old enough. I am told that only a quarter of the children of school age in Mali actually go to school, partly because there are not enough places. Now that Mali has a democratic government, the country is building many schools at a rapid rate. Djenne has a new school and I will be sitting in on some classes tomorrow, so I will soon be writing about that.