This man looks happy enough but I can't imagine why. Perhaps he is winning at the game he and 9 other men were playing. He lives in a hardcore slum of Mopti. The occupants are the Bella people. His ancestors had been held as slaves by the Tuaregs up until 1848. Liberation had not supplied bootstraps to pull themselves up by. Not being anybody's property, there was no longer anyone in whose interest it was to keep their culture alive, and now they live in a collection of huts atop the city dump, which periodically floods just to make sure the repulsive pathos is top-flight. Kone, our guide, was barely tolerant of gamblers and idlers. The idiom of looking down your nose at someone — he can actually do that. He lifts his head back. I don't think I have a photo of it though. Kone said of a beggar he pronounced drug-addicted in Ouagadougou, "I would sooner throw my money down a well!" But he was quick to distribute charity to young children and old women. I tried to learn from him, having been so unsuccessful at giving alms in my own life. It is something we will need to know more and more as the government of the US retreats from governing.