The terrain is bouncy and the visibility low as we hiccup and careen through the dust in our UN SUVs, great white boats on a vast sea of sand. At what is effectively the village square, we come to a roaring halt, and proceed into a blank area with a courtyard wall around it. The village is made up of scores of low-slung adobe-style homes almost invisible against the sand and earth from which they were fashioned. Small children who seem simply to materialize out of the dust follow us. The bigger ones are sitting patiently in the school, a one-room building. The project coordinators estimate that more than 70 percent of Toya's children of school age do not attend classes; about 80 percent of the population is illiterate. Sachs takes a cell phone picture of the students in their green-and-yellow-checked uniforms, and they gather around to look at the images, pointing and smiling. Among the 37 schoolchildren, whose ages range from 11 to 17, I count 5 notebooks, one pen, 4 workbooks, and one slate with chalk. The planned school lunch program could increase attendance by 50 percent.

Toya's villagers stand around in groups, watching as Sachs and his entourage inspect the community. A few hundred of the more than 5,000 people who live here have come to welcome us. The wind whips over the sand, luffing the men's robes like sails. A rice farmer tells Sachs that the yield is very low but that if they could just grow a windbreak of some kind, they could have mangoes, bananas, dates, and oranges. The Millennium Villages Project is hoping to double or triple the rice harvest with new rice seeds and fertilizer that are better adapted to the local climate. The windbreak, too, sounds like a good idea to Sachs and his entourage. Under a beating sun, he tells a circle of village elders that he wants them to start nurseries and fisheries. To me, it seems as if he must be hallucinating: fruit trees and fish? All around us is sand and wind. I ask a woman standing outside the circle what she thinks of Sachs.

"I've heard of him," Aïssata Amadou Maïga answers quietly. "He came to help us." A farmer who cultivates rice with her hands, the 45-year-old has five children, ages 30, 25, 14, 8, and 3.

"He came to bring us happiness," another villager adds. In other words, hopes are high—which is always dangerous, because high hopes must be fulfilled or anger and desperation can result.

The Tuareg who live here have seen their fortunes decline over the centuries. These camel-riding, saber-flashing people were the original settlers of Timbuktu in the eleventh century. Back then, the tribesmen managed the trans-Saharan caravans, whose biggest stop was Timbuktu. After the French colonized West Africa in the 1800s, the Tuareg slowly began to give up many of their nomadic, warrior ways. The Tuareg of Toya now remain in place almost the entire year, because rice cultivation requires great attention. I saw no camels, and other than the two lambs we were later offered for lunch, no animals besides a few raggedy, straggling goats and a skinny donkey. And yet the feeling of Saharan tribalism persists amid the blowing sands, the desert dances, the drums, and the hospitality. As the men wrap and rewrap their turbans, you cannot avoid the feeling, still, that you are among an ancient people, on ancient lands.