The mighty Niger River. It has many names. "The Hump of the Camel" is one, an appellation that signifies both its vast, curving shape as well as its trajectory, pulsing like an artery through the chest of Saharan Africa. Berber nomads, stopping to water their camels by its banks, called it Gher-N-Igheaen: "The River of Rivers." Europeans, who enforced a chaotic colonial rule here from the 19th century until the 1960s, were said to have named the river for a Latin word for black. And it is indeed black: a jet ribbon that stretches 2,500 miles through four enormous countries: Guinea, Mali, Niger and Nigeria.

From Bamako, the capital of the sweltering West African country of Mali, we followed the river to the crest of its thousand-mile curve. To the place where the water bends and begins its retreat away from the infinite white sands of the Sahara, plunging downward to Niger and then Nigeria. We were going to Tombouctou.

Our first stop was Djenné, the architectural jewel of West Africa and the jumping-off point to much of CARE's work along the river. Then we headed into the Niger's inland delta-- a land-locked sea of more than 30,000 square kilometers formed by a vast web of tributary rivers and streams. There we visited one of the dozens of small villages struggling to harness the too-generous gifts of the Niger River. Then we headed further up the river to Mopti, a swarming port town where the boats that have plied the Niger's waters for centuries meet in one of the world's most colorful, chaotic and odoriferous outdoor spectacles. From Mopti, we headed on to the small city of Diré, the launching-point for river traffic to Tombouctou, where CARE is working with one of the world's last great nomadic tribes: the Tuareg.

Big, Black River
To understand the river you have to appreciate its contrasts. Only about 4 percent of Mali's 1.2 million square kilometers is arable, and most of that land borders the vast, black waters of the Niger. The rest is a baking landscape of flat dusty hinterland, bone-dry desert, or tortured mountains. Two major droughts in the last 30 years, combined with the desertification that plagues Africa generally, have aided the Sahara in its steady creep south. Millions of West Africans who once lived in their country's interior now cling to the banks of the Niger like a life raft. Increasingly, in Mali, life is the river.

It is the Niger's amazing size and scope -- 20,000 square kilometers of water in Mali alone -- that in part gave Mali its reputation as "The Granary of West Africa" during colonial times. But despite the potential for irrigation on a colossal scale, population growth, drought and desertification (much of it caused by goats nibbling away at the nation's groundcover) have made the lives of Mali's farmers ever harder. Organizations like CARE are now taking a new look at how the river can be used. No longer is this rushing water a vast and mysterious force, subject to uncontrollable yearly flooding that washes away farms and villages huddled close to its banks. Now it is a tool, a great life-giving resource that -- if properly harnessed -- may save the farms and futures of thousands.

Continue to Day 1