Homesickness

They continued across the desert. With every day that passed, the boy's heart became more and more silent. It no longer wanted to know about things of the past or future; it was content simply to contemplate the desert, to drink with the boy from the soul of the world. The boy and his heart had become friends, and neither was capable of betraying the other.

When his heart spoke to him, it was to provide a stimulus to the boy, and to give him strength, because the days of silence there in the desert were wearisome. His heart told the boy what his strongest qualities were: his courage in having given up his sheep and trying to live out his Personal Legend, and his enthusiasm during the time he had worked in the crystal shop.

I wrote this quotation from The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho in my journal a couple of weeks ago. My fellow PCT, Rachel, had lent it to me, and it seemed very topical for what I was experiencing. Ever since I got here, my emotional state has been majorly fluctuating. There's been so much stuff to take in- new language, new food, endless training sessions, all new people, etc. A lot of this stuff has been good, but it has also been quite a shock- l'expérience m'a boulversée. The first week or so in Sinsina was really hard because this shock sort of took over, and all I could think about most of the time was how cool the weather was at home or some such thing. Since then, things have been up or down- one moment I'll be giddy and excited, the next moment planning my escape.

This past week in Sinsina, I was feeling pretty negative most of the time. There was a lot of good stuff about the week- I hung out with my host family a fair amount, reread a good book, worked (kind of) on my Bambara. But at the same time, I couldn't help myself from conjuring up images of my life as it might be right now if I were at home.

Hm, I'm not sure exactly how to articulate this, but whenever I read that quote from the Alchemist in my journal, I feel like someone out there must understand how I'm feeling about being in Mali- it's like this basic conflict between knowing what I want for myself in my life right now and what will make me happier and more self-actualized in the long run and wanting at the same time the safety, security, and familiarity of home.

On the one hand, I've basically gotten everything I wanted in being here. Already, this experience has been unlike any other experience I've ever had and I can only think that completing two years of service will continue to expand my understanding of some issues I feel are really important to me (understanding and respecting other cultures, learning about poverty, working with nutrition issues).

This morning the agricultural volunteers took a trip to the International Crop Research Insitute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), which conveniently has a center right next door to Tubaniso. We got a tour and some explanation of what the center works on as well as a similar presentation of two other organizations, ICRAFT and the Asian Vegetable and Somethingoranother Research Center, that are situated on the grounds. Er, sorry I can't remember the names of the last two there, but at any rate . . . The first part of the tour was with the people from ICRAFT, which is a research institute that does stuff with agroforestry. We learned about tree grafting, which is really cool and seems like a great way of getting fruitful trees to communities faster. By grafting the branch of a tree that's already making fruit onto a younger tree, you can greatly decrease the amount of time before that tree begins flowering- for example, they showed us a baobab tree (sira in Bambara)- which normally takes 18 years of growing before it begins to produce fruit- if grafted, it only takes 5-10 years (may have these figures mixed up a bit, but you get the basic idea). In the case of the baobab, what's also cool is that a grafted tree is much shorter than a regularly-grown tree, which is good because it means villagers can more easily reach the fruit and there's less chance of accidents.

We also got a chance to talk to the people at ICRISAT. They told us a bit about some of the varieties of crops they are experimenting with- a variety of peanut that is resistent to two particular illnesses, a couple of varieties of sorghum, etc. There was also a woman who works on nutritional issues who was telling us about how she was working on developing new ways of food processing that would help fight anemia and other nutritional deficiencies in children. The Asiain Vegetable people showed us around their garden, pointing out some varieties of leafy vegetable that they were trying to encourage comsumption of for nutritional reasons, and over to their tomato crops- apparently there's a particular virus that attacks tomato plants in Mali- they were experimenting with different varieties of tomatos to see if any of them would be resistant to the virus (none of them seemed to be as far as I could tell).

Anyway, it was a really interesting morning, and I found myself feeling more enthusiasm for this undertaking than I've felt for a week anyway. There's so much to learn here, so much I could do, but it all seems so daunting, and being away from everything familiar makes it seemt that much more difficult. It's easy to be positive right now, somehow, at Tubaniso, but, well, I don't know. I hope it gets better.

Send me letters, anyway, and M&Ms.