Malimalimalimali

Okay, so I had to start this post with this picture. I think it's my favorite out of the batch I took with Shannon and our dear man-friend here. Yes, I am picking his nose; we have a very special bond. We met in Knoxville after the Squirrel Nut Zippers concert that I went to with Shan on Sunday evening, and from there it was all history. I think he's planning to come visit me in Mali.

Speaking of Mali; I'm so excited/impatient for it now. I'm glad this feeling came two and a half weeks ahead of time and not two months ago. I think I would have gone insane. The good news is I'll be super busy for the next two weeks. Going up to FGC on Saturday for a week to chill with the Quakers for a week and then it's off to Washington State with the family to visit my brother and go backpacking again. Went backpacking with Shannon last week (before the momentus meeting with Mr. Right). It was a good trip. We had three days on the trail, the second being the most challenging as it involved four miles or so of straight up the mountain (plus three miles of easier terrain). Another highlight: squirrels (or some small rodent) ate through Shannon's small backpack that we had suspended high up away from the bears (including its zipper) then through a plastic container with to get to the trail mix within the first night; the second night they vandalized my sleeping back stuff sack and ate an entire payday candy bar and a half, half a granola bar, and nibbled on some bread. But in general a good trip.

Anyhoo, so preparations for Mali: mostly been buying a bunch of stuff, putting all the music I can on my ipod, trying to work a bit on language. To tell the truth, I haven't really done much with the language stuff. I have a whole textbook on Bambara that has recordings along with it and a set of lessons the PC gave us; I've gotten through the intro and the first chapter or so of the text and the first 4 PC lessons. I think I officially know how to say, morning, noon and night now (sogoma, wula, su) and I have some basic ideas of how greetings go and I've listened to the alphabet numerous times. Most of this I learned on the plane to and from TN and back when I first got the resources a month or two ago. This reminds me a bit of how we used to give drafts of the Hunger Report to Jim (vp of policy at Bread) to read on planes because any other time he wasn't likely to be able to sit down and give it the attention it needed. Maybe if I was trapped on a plane for the next two weeks. Hmm, well enough of that; I'll take a closer look in my free time next week.

Not much else to report. I'm listening to a CD I bought yesterday of two Malian musicians, Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate. This is my first listen, but I recognize some of the music from one of the African compilation CDs I have. It's good. Okeedokee, I'm running out of stuff to say. Good night!

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.

Just got back from the Young Adult Friends retreat in West Virginia this afternoon. I was feeling kind of unenthusiastic before I left, because helping to get things ready for it was sort of a pain. I didn't actually end up doing that much aside from helping Rosie go shopping and going to a committee meeting, but whenever I'm involved in planning anything, I tend to overthink it and spend a lot of time worrying about it.

But in any case, the retreat turned out to be a ton of fun. We went to this Quaker retreat house in West Virginia on Friday evening and got back this morning. The drive up was a bit stressful because Rosie was worried about the directions and the last bit involved driving through some dark, narrow, rocky roads. When we got there, things began to perk up. There were a couple of people waiting and a "tree-house" structure for us to sleep in. It wasn't actually in a tree, but it was this large wooden structure that was stood on stilts on the side of a hill- no walls, but an obliging roof above. We laid out our sleeping bags on the floor and cooked up some mac and cheese as others arrived. Two of the new arrivals, Basil and Conamore, brought their dog Camilla, who was a great addition to the party.

Unfortunately, I didn't really get any sleep on Friday evening (and had gotten about four hours the night before) due to a bout of insomnia and the nighttime soundtrack featuring a couple of birds, a little snoring, and Camilla's occasional barking. So I was pretty tired when I woke up, but everyone was in a good mood in the morning. We had breakfast then a bit of worship-sharing for about an hour or so on the subject of simplicity. In the late afternoon/morning, we set off on a hike through the woods. It was mostly uphill for a while, which was definitely a work out for me, but it felt good, and hiking is really a good way to get to know people. The vibe reminded me a bit of the APA group when I was in Paris and we'd take side trips together- everyone's very genial and it's a great opportunity to have little chats with people. Plus some of the scenery was great. We had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch on a cliff face overlooking a bunch of rolling hills.

After we got back to the treehouse, everyone collapsed for about an hour and slept, then began to revive. I made chili for dinner with the help of Andrew, Barrie, and Calley. It turned out pretty well, and despite my worries that there would be too much, it was all gone just like that. After dinner, we all hung around in the tree house and then went down to the fire and made s'mores and sat around talking for a while. Some people stayed by the fire for a while longer singning, but I was tired and collapsed into slumber in the treehouse.

This morning, I woke up (yay, I woke up, which means I was asleep!) with everyone else. Basil patched together some of the food we had left (way more than we could actually eat) and we had bagel-poached egg-spinach-onion-cheese and tomato sandwiches for breakfast, follwed by the most restful Meeting I've had in quite a while. It made me remember some of the reasons that I kept going to Meeting this year. I'm never quite sure of my beliefs, but this morning I had moments where it seemed impossible to doubt that the Light was there with us.

I've basically spent the afternoon putting music into the iPod that Uncle Larry bought me. I was going to go contra dancing with Robin, but I decided I was too tired and wanted some alone time at the last moment. So now I'm sitting here listening to music and reflecting on the weekend. Nice.

Hm, I suppose this blog is supposed to be about Mali, isn't it? Well, I have been thinking about Mali a bit, but to be honest, the prospect of leaving DC is more on the forefront of my mind. I'll only be here another week and a half or so, and then it's home to Wisconsin and off traveling for a month or so before I leave for Mali. I've been feeling kind of mixed about this on and off, and I'm sure I still when I leave, but now that the end of my time here is staring me in the face, I'm feeling a bit better. Like now I can finally take some concrete steps in getting ready to leave. I'm no longer stuck in that "between-time" before I leave, and I think that's kind of a relief.

This morning when I was sitting in Meeting, I was trying to meditate a bit on the idea of home. The past few years, feeling at home anywhere and settling in has kind of been the last thing on my mind. I've been more interested in exploring. But as I was thinking about my time in DC, it seemed to me that I could really make this place a home and be very happy here. That made me feel kind of satisfied, as if even if I'm leaving, I can always come back. Not that I didn't know that before, but it just felt like more of a comforting idea this morning than it has.

Well, I think that's it for now. I promise to write more about my thoughts on the Mali trip and what I'm learning about Mali in future posts.