SAND WOMEN Gretchen Fletcher The sand women of Mali practice their trade in Araouane. Six days by camel north of Timbuktu, they bear bowl after bowl of encroaching sand away from doorsteps, lest homes and mosques be buried under a constantly shifting Sahara. But as swiftly as they clear away the portals, the wind brings back the contents of their bowls. The women grit their teeth and pit themselves against the desert relentlessly battling it with wooden bowls whose surfaces are sanded as smooth as the women's skin, constantly abraded by the same grains that sift into their nostrils and lips and form rows of ridges on the desert floor down which continually trickle small pieces of the desert in their inexorable trek toward the doors of the sand women, one hundred sixty miles north of Timbuktu. "Poor primitive women," say their sisters in their cities, "doomed forever to perform tasks that will only need repeating. Why don't they just give up?"

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