Only an hour out of Djenné, we floated into a vast green rice plain encircling the tiny village of Syn. Like Djenné, Syn is a jumble of sand-colored buildings cut by twisting narrow passageways that all lead eventually to the turreted mosque on the hill's highest point. Due to yearly flooding that makes such villages virtual islands, a pinasse is the only way in and out.

We were able to speak with village elders about an ambitious new plan to regulate the flooding that cuts villages like Syn off from the outside world. Working with CARE, dozens of villages -- more than 10,000 families in all -- are engaged in a vast effort to build dikes, sluice gates and irrigation ditches across a stretch of more than 30,000 acres. Once completed, these structures will enable them to control the amount of water they can channel to the tender rice stalks that surround their villages in a waving sea of green.

To expend such effort on a single crop seems at first glance like putting all your eggs in one basket. But the dry, chalky soil along the banks of the river is ideal for rice and the river amply supplies the enormous amount of water needed for its cultivation. Too much water, however, drowns rice plants before they can bear fruit, while too little starves them into shriveled brown stalks. If the river can be controlled, Mali has the potential to become a rice powerhouse, along the lines of a Thailand or Vietnam. Indeed, the Malian government is engaged in huge irrigation schemes with large commercial and state-owned farming enterprises. But the key to Mali's future may lie also with small-scale farmers like Boukadari Diakité, a member of Syn's farmers' association.

"It is our land and we know what needs to be done," he says. "And from the beginning we wanted to do something like this. We just didn't have the means to do so until CARE came."

Diakité and his neighbors had made small attempts to control the water on the Bonne Entente, or "Good Understanding" -- the name of the flood plain that surrounds Syn. But small attempts to solve a large problem didn't work. It was only with the organizational known-how and long reach of CARE that neighboring villages started to work together on a full-scale effort to control the river.

"This is the biggest agricultural project in the Djenné area," says CARE Mali's Country Director Steve Wallace. "And yet there has been little conflict between the farmers. It's an indicator of the degree of unity that exists around the concept and a sign that they will work to preserve their accomplishment."

The size of the CARE program has vast implications. This is not a small development project, designed to lift a few hundred farmers out of poverty. The resident's of Syn and dozens of other villages -- more than 50,000 people in all -- have the potential to double their incomes and in doing so, impact the fortunes of Djenné itself.

Click here to view a video of some of the irrigation work being done in Mali.

Continue to Day 3