Hm. Work.
Around the time of Thanksgiving, I remembered belatedly about that "work" thing. We were supposed to have followed the "NATCAT" process (don't ask me what that stands for- during one of our training sessions someone asked the agriculture official what it stood for and he didn't know- neither was it written on the packet- it was left to further investigation, results to be reported later) the first three months at site, which we found described in a packet hurredly dispensed to us one of the last days at Tubaniso before installation at site. I had glanced at it during my first weeks at site and kind of dismissed it because the process it described seemed kind of unrealistic to me and not entirely applicable to my situation. The first month at site we were supposed to conduct interviews with key members of the community. Then the second month at site we were supposed to work with small groups of community members to try to assess their needs. The third month we were supposed to bring these groups together and emerge with a rounded understanding of what our community's needs were.
Which all sounds very nice. Except. I'm at a site where there have already been two volunteers, so a large part of what I will be doing will be to continue their work. There's basically one community group with which I'm supposed to work, the women's group, and they already have clearly expressed what they want to be doing (chicken raising, gardening, soap making and cloth dying). Plus to be quite frank, the first few months at site I spent a lot of time thinking about going home and how unhappy and lonely I felt, and since this the way things seem to work with me, I really needed to feel settled in before I wanted to think about calling meetings (scary!). Nevermind about language issues as well.
So, in the last month or so at site, I decided I would focus on what seemed to me reasonable actions to take to understand my community's needs. I made up an interview to do with each of the woman, and made a list of "key community members" that I was going to go interview (my homologue Dao, the doctor at the CESCOM, the mayor of M'Pessoba, Ferme's dugutigi, the matrone at Kolomuso etc). I also arranged with Dao to go to the surrounding villages and meet with their dugutigis just to know who they were and understand a bit about what organizations they had had contact with and whether or not the villagers themselves had organized cooperatives and other village organizations to carry out small income activities like my ladies. Dr. Traore had suggested this a few months ago but Dao didn't have time to go with me til after Seliba.
Things went more or less according to plan. I didn't talk to nearly as many of the women as I had wanted (ended up having done three interviews in all) but I did feel like I got a feel for how things work and got to talk to one or two of the women who I hadn't had a chance to talk with a lot. I got to see the mayor in M'Pessoba and asked some questions about the local government and which NGOs were in the area. Talked to Ferme's dugutigi, which I had been putting off for many a month, and I made it up to Kolomuso to find out more about the situation there. The trips to the area dugutigis were six in number. Most of them went pretty well, especially since Dao was there to translate everything into French for me and to say everything I had said in Bambara over again to them. He also came up with what I thought was a pretty moving speech about how if there was no water for gardening and times were tough in the villages we visited, so they were in Ferme as well and we were all in this together, etc. Made me happy that he is my homologue. He's busy a lot of the time, but he's pretty well put together and very smart.
The results were many and left me feeling a bit overwhelmed and a bit unsure of what I see myself accomplishing in the long run. The women seem to have things together in the garden (at least to my inexperienced and honestly fairly ignorant eye). They've done formations with the previous volunteers on subjects ranging from composting to natural pesticides. They haven't done soap making or cloth dying since I got there, but I don't think we'll have a problem getting it together when I get back.
The interviews with the dugutigis and the mayor left me a bit more informed on who's been in the area development-wise. There are a couple of health and education organizations in town, working in the surrounding villages doing formations, though according to the mayor, this kind of presence is relatively new, within the past 3 or 4 years. Before that, it looks like organizations would come up every once in a while from Koutiala. Three of the villages I visited- Berebougou, Sobala, and Kemessoroula- had had World Vision come about 15 years ago to work with women's cooperatives on soap making and sheep raising as small income endeavors, and two others had had other organizations come to install pumps and tap water systems.
In addition to gathering this info, a couple of the meetings left me with unfinished business. The main problem facing my ladies in Ferme right now is that they were supposed to get some money from a local organization called PACR for to fund chicken raising activities and building better wells in the garden (since currently they go dry in March or so) and the money never came. The explanation for this is a bit up in the air and I don't really feel like recording the technicalities here, but basically I need to go talk to the local representative of PACR. Which I tried to do before I left for Bamako, three times, but had no success because she was out for the holidays.
In Kolomuso: Previous volunteer constructed a maternity. Things were going well when she left but since then they encountered some sort of difficulties in getting the vaccination materials there for the baby weighing/vaccination days (they have to come to Ferme's CESCOM to get them) and the vaccination days stopped hapening. When the incentive of free vaccinations was lost, so was the attendance of the women and so no one comes for baby weighing days anymore either. Problem I can solve? Maybe.
In any case, collecting all this information was a lot of stuff to do, and I ended up feeling pretty stressed the last few weeks I was at site because of it (and of course there was also garden work and general socializing to do . . .). Did a fair amount of traveling in the midst of it all. I went to another volunteer's village about 40 k away for Christmas, to Segou for New Years, and to Koutiala once or twice for brief visits. By the time the day arrived to leave site, I was pretty overjoyed, because it meant a few weeks of not feeling like I needed to be doing this or that or talking to this person or that person in Bambara in village. Went to Koutiala to write my NATCAT results, then hightailed it here to Bamako.
Training so far has been somewhat intense but also kind of discouraging in some ways. We have sessions scheduled every day from 8:30 to 5ish, with optional language training squeezed in if we so choose. Subjects of training have ranged from composting to cooking with solar cooking pots (see pictures below) to organizations in Mali. A lot of the time I emerge from these sessions exhausted from trying to absorb a lot of information. A lot of the time, I also feel as if the information I have absorbed isn't that useful. For example, I went to a session on nutrition one day, but ended up listening to a two hour lecture on the programs of Helen Keller International, some which had to do with nutrition, but others which didn't and none of which told me some of the basic information I wanted to know.
Probably the most useful sessions have been a couple of ag sessions that have demonstrated gardening techniques on a practical level and had us try them out. The garden here at Tubaniso is pretty impressive. Large, with beautiful soil (which I notice now after working pale clay-ey soil for the past three months).
Overall, training has left me feeling kind of drained and ready to go back to village and see what I can do. I still don't feel as if I have any ideas for big, long-term projects, but I'm slowly collecting ideas for some smaller ones, and a number that I can get started on when I get back to village. More on that later. Have some ranting and raving to do, but it'll have to wait a while because I just wrote a looot.
Nighty night.
