Sani, a traditional healer, is giving a young boy a haircut with a straight razor, one of the many services he offers.

The river from Mopti to Diré is a long stretch of rice fields and white earth, and Diré itself is looked upon by travel books as little more than a launching point for boat trips to Tombouctou. But Diré's weekly market is a spectacle worth dallying for. Besides the colorful assortment of food, clothing and livestock, you may have a chance to meet someone like Youssouf Mahomane Sani , a traditional healer from neighboring Niger. Niger is famous throughout West Africa for its healers, and on the day we wandered through the market, Sani demonstrated why. Using a small scalpel, a glass funnel and a plastic cup, he was draining "bad blood" from a client's swollen leg. It is one of the many "cures" he offers to the dozens of customers who line up eagerly for his services.

Further up the river, we stopped to talk with women planting new rice stalks in neatly carved fields. Even hard at work, Malian women are gorgeous in their grands bou-bous, the colorful robes that cover the body to the ankles but leave a shoulder bare. Some wear twisted, gold-plate earrings the size of dinner plates, while their children run naked with only a gris-gris, a beaded belt, to protect them from evil spirits. Mali is one of the world's poorest countries and yet its people project a proud self-possession. Some say it is the collective memory of the nation's ancient, imperial history, cherished and guarded through a strong oral tradition, that is behind the unflappable reserve and unique unity of Mali's more than two-dozen ethnic groups. But looking around at the dusty fields and the swollen bellies of the children, the self-sufficiency of these people is easily explainable. For centuries, they have had no one to rely upon but themselves.

Now there is some relief. As it is doing all along the river, CARE is working to improve the lot of rice farmers on this dry stretch from Diré to Tombouctou. Dozens of communities have been organized to rehabilitate the dikes and canals that irrigate their rice fields. CARE is experimenting with motorized pumps which shoot water through fire-engine-size hoses up the steep banks of the river and into irrigation canals.

Control of the water has allowed farmers to move their plots away from the riverbanks and the yearly flooding that often washed away their crops.

"Before, you could not count on anything," says Mohamoudou Alhousseini, a rice farmer from the small village of Chirfiga. "If the rain and the tide was good, the farm was good. If it was bad, you suffered."

Fellow farmer Abdourahamane Maiga likes the pump because it brings water all the way to his village, via a system of interlocking irrigation canals. "I'm happy because now we can farm close to the village. Before I had to walk 15 kilometers just to reach a good place along the river to farm. I had to leave very early in the morning and sometimes sleep there."

His brother Mohamaoudou Maiga likes the fact that he can now control the amount of water that washes his rice plants. "Before, I could never guarantee I would succeed. Now I have confidence."

Members of the Kirchamba Women's Association watch as rice is husked.

Still further up the river in the tiny village of Kirchamba, members of the local women's association discuss a loan they received from CARE, part of a credit program CARE offers to Malian entrepreneurs throughout the country. With the money, the group purchased a rise-husking machine, and the two to three hours they used to spend husking a basket of rice melted into a five-minute operation.

"Before, my hand was blistered and cracked from husking rice," says Kontourou Homma, president of this group of women. "You used to have to get up at dawn, and you were lucky to finish the job by the end of the day."

Homma estimates that her group will be able to repay the CARE loan in a year, and they already have an ambitious plan to purchase another machine that can process the husked rice into saleable powder. This would spare the women the arduous task of pounding rice with stone tablets and free up even more of their time for other tasks.

"We can already see results," says Homma, and she praises CARE's help. "At our level here, we have never seen an organization like this. They are helping us for our well-being only. So that we can be independent."

Independence is key, agrees her colleague, Kanto Badou, the group's treasurer. "If you're given food for free, it's only good one time. But when we are given the notion that it's for our own good to take care of ourselves, it will continue."

"I want to thank everyone at CARE who has helped us," says Badou. "Even those people in the United States - tell them also."

Around a twisting corner in Kirchamba's mud and brick sprawl, young women are hoisting water from a sturdily-constructed village well, using an animal skin sack for a bucket. All along this stretch of river leading up to Tombouctou, CARE is working with villages to build such wells and to offer hygiene education that is essential to preventing disease. It is estimated that more than 50 percent of Malians do not have access to clean water; many wash their clothes, dishes and bodies in the same river from which they drink.

Click here to view a video of women at the well.

Continue to Day 5