Mali via Philadelphia!

Hello out there in blog land! It's time for another posting, because exciting things are happening. The biggest of them (or at least the one most at hand) is the fact that I got my "staging kit" in the mail today from the Peace Corps. Staging is the period of time right before we leave for Mali- a 2-3 day orientation thing where all of us (those of us going to Mali in July) will meet and be oriented. The big mystery (for me anyway) as far as staging was where it was going to be, since they don't tell you that till a month or so ahead of time. The answer: Philadelphia! I'm kind of excited about that since Bryn Mawr was right outside the city - hopefully I'll be able to set up a visit with my friend Molly, who lives in the area, before staging.

Lots of other stuff going on lately as well. I returned home to Milwaukee from DC last Friday evening (after a two-day drive which included being stuck in Chicago rush hour traffic for a few hours). Didn't stick around here for long, however. I had a bike-trip planned with my friend Carrie. The idea was to bike out of Milwaukee on Friday and spend two nights camping out. That plan kind of fell apart, however, because we neglected to plan anything and I ended up getting in to Milwaukee a bit later on Friday than planned.

So we decided to camp out of the car and bring the bikes along and go on a shorter trip on Saturday and a longer trip on Sunday. We decided to go to Point Beach State Park, right on Lake Michigan, where there was a trail that went through the forest and then along the lake. Unfortunately, almost all of the campsites had been reserved, but we took a chance and managed to snag the last tent site when we got there (after geting a warning for speeding 8 miles over the limit by an overly zealous park ranger).

The bike ride was really through some beautiful scenery; ended up going about 15 miles round trip, making it through the forest and part of the trail on the water before it was getting dark. After we returned to the campsite, we ditched the food we had brought for dinner and went to the "best sub place" in Two Rivers, WI, where we had some really good pizza and garlic bread (opted out on the subs). It rained during the night, but we still managed to make a campfire. In the morning, we had breakfast on the beach, then headed home because Carrie's foot was cut up from stepping on some glass the day before and she thought more riding would hurt. On the way home, we made a random detour to a strawberry farm and picked some strawberries to bring home.

Other than that, I've been getting pretty excited for all of the trips I have planned coming up and for Mali. I just bought a backpack to use on my trip with my friend Shannon; I'm leaving tomorrow for Tennessee, and we're going to spend three days hiking through the Smokey Mountains. Yay!

I've been feeling more and more excited for Mali lately, and happier with my decision. It's been nice to be home and have some downtime. My father bought me a book, Dancing Skeletons, by a woman named Katherine Dettwyler, who is a nutritional anthropologist at Texas A&M University. It was a study on Malian culture, with a special emphasis on hunger and malnutrition in the country. Oddly enough, reading it made me think that I might possibly go back to school for anthropology. I really love reading ethnography, and this was a particularly fast read, in the narrative style.

One thing that struck me about the book was how hunger and childhood mortality are just a fact of life for Malians. In one of the last chapters, the author contrasted her experience of having her daughter (who she had with her in country) come down with a serious bout of malaria and surviving with all the interviews she had with Malian mothers where she had them detail the children they had had and who had died and who had lived. Of course, many of the women had had more than ten children in their lives, losing more than half before they grew to become adults. How can a person deal with that kind of loss on such a regular basis? The author's research assistant explains to her that if you grow up losing siblings, experiencing death on a regular basis, you don't necessarily become numb to it but you learn to accept it as a fact of life. In some places, it's not considered appropriate to express too much grief over the death of a child, because it happens so often and because the belief is that Allah has chosen to take the child.

I'm not sure how to process this information quite yet. I spent all of last year working at an anti-hunger organization. I entered in hundreds of numbers detailing child mortality rates and hunger/malnutrition rates in developing countries, and it's not that I didn't know what they mean and it's not even that reading this book has shed some new light on the subject. Hunger and poverty just seem like such vast problems, and while I've been learning a lot more about these issues in the past few years and doing some work that has hopefully helped make people more aware of them, sometimes they just seem to big to even tackle. Is "development" the answer to the problems of people in developing countries? I've been saying to myself for the past year or so that I don't want to get involved in development as a career path, because it seems like uncertain moral territory. The concept of going into someone else's country and solving their problems for them with our Yankee know-how seems to me like another excuse to foster the idea of Western supremecy. And a good way for the US to continue our dismal track record of interfering in other countries' affairs and fucking things up. But on the other hand, we do have money over here, we do have technology. We have the means to change all of these sad statistics, so in a way we're morally obligated to do something about poverty abroad. It would just be nice if we knew what the solution was.