Meg in Mali

Journal: August 27, 2009

2009-09-01T09:26:00.000-07:00

This morning I ate some breakfast at 5:00 am (easy to do since it's the month of Ramadan and my host family is waking up around that time to eat and drink water to prepare them for fasting the rest of the day), went back to sleep for a while and then woke up again at six to get dressed and out the door. Today was the day of my "half marathon" that I've been planning to do since I started running nine months or so ago. On my regular runs, I usually make it to Station N'Tarla, the village where I did the garden project, about 5 km down the road. Today I passed Station, stopping to drink water at the house of the president of the women's organization there, and continued another 4 km down the road to N'Tarla, a larger village in the "brousse." All in all, the run was probably about 15-16 km, not quite a half marathon, but close enough as far as I'm concerned. It feels good to have made my goal, after working on running for close to a year. I can't say I'm very fast (clocked it at a bit over 2 1/2 hours this morning) but it is definitely satisfying to have made my goal.

I feel as if I've been making a lot of goals lately, in preparation for leaving Mali. Yesterday, for example, I cooked zamen, or riz au gras, successfully for the first time in Mali, all by myself, without burning or undercooking the rice, which has been my problem in the past (rice here seems to cook faster for some reason).

I've also been busy the past few months seeing some parts of Mali that I hadn't seen much of, and making some other athletic goals. In June/July, I took off for Manatali in the western region of Kayes, along with my bike. I rode first up the paved road from my site to Segou, about 110 km (60 miles), the first 75 of which I did the first day, spending the night at another volunteer's site, and then finishing up the next morning.

I then bused to Bamako and then Kita with my bike, where I met up with Calita, another volunteer, and we spent another day and a half biking to Manatali, about 150 km (90 miles). That trip was particularly beautiful, as it is rainy season and everything was lush and green. That part of the country is also pretty hilly, with some red cliffs sticking up along the side of the road as we went alont. About a quarter of the way was on a paved road, the rest on a red dirt road. We biked from the afternoon until dusk the first day, stopping to pitch our tents on the side of the road for the night and leaving early again the next day. Manantali itself was beautiful, the site of a hydro-electric dam that provides electricity for a huge chunk of West Africa. About 20-30 other volunteers showed up that weekend to celebrate the fourth of July, and I felt almost like I was on Cape Cod, relaxing in the river and playing cards for a day or two. There were a couple of hippos bathing in the river the first day, not quite Cape Cod, I suppose.

After getting back from Manatali I spent another month or so in the Koutiala region and at site, mostly just hanging out. I did manage to start a mural of a world map on the wall of the primary school in Ferme, which I just finished this week.

At the beginning of August, I left site again, this time for the Dogon region in the north, where some fellow volunteers had planned a 2 1/2 day hike. About eleven of us set out with a Dogon guide named Amadou, making a circle from Sangha, a village at the top of the cliffs in Dogon, to the bottom of the cliffs, then up onto another cliff, where we viewed the palace of the Tellum people, a group of pygmees that used to live on the cliffs about a thousand years ago. The last day of the hike, we walked along the cliffs for a few hours and then climbed a steep staircase leading back to Sangha.

Since getting back from Dogon, I've mostly been preparing to leave Mali, packing up my things, spending time in my village. We've had two parties since I got back (we did them both a bit early to avoid falling in the fasting month), the first at Station N'Tarla, the second in Ferme. At Station, the women hired local drummers, balaphone players (a xylophone-like instrument), and a singer to see me off to Ameriki. Everyone danced and rejoiced and so on. I also got my fifteen minutes of fame, because someone had called the radio from Koutiala, and they sent a guy to do a piece on the toubabu woman leaving Mali after two years. Though I never managed to actually hear it over the radio, I've been getting a lot of "I thought you had already left"-s from pelople around here since then.

We had a similar party in Ferme on Wednesday last week, pretty much the same minus the radio man and plus an hour or two of technical difficulties with the sound system. It turned out okay, though. Three other local volunteers, Hannah, Jenn, and Maridee came as well and hung out for the night.

Now I only have a day or two left at site before heading to Bamako to do paperwork until my flight out on Wednesday night. After that, it's three weeks on an organic farm in the south of France, and back home in October. Looking forward to that job market . . .

Hanging out by the water in Manantali.

The Tellum palace.

Drummers drying out the drums by the fire at the party in Station N'Tarla.

Dancing in N'Tarla.

Dancing in Feremuna- see Maridee . . .

The World Map. Finished.

2009-06-09T04:01:00.000-07:00

So, it’s been a while (again) since I wrote in here. Sorry, can’t think of any other way to begin this entry. My instincts tell me I should think of some catchy phrase to get your interest, but my brain is not cooperating.

The last three months or so have been pretty busy work-wise, but also pretty low-key in general. I spent most of March getting prepared for the work at the maternity that we were organizing with the women’s group and the local clinic and also writing up a proposal to do a cloth-dying training with the women’s organization in Ferme. For the most part, that went pretty smoothly. At the maternity, Adiaratou (the midwife) and Hamadoune (the medical technical/director of the CSCOM) and I met with the women’s cooperative from Ferme to organize everyone into four groups, one group for each week of the month. Adiaratou and I also told the women coming into the maternity on Wednesdays for baby weighing days throughout March to bring the ingredients for making improved porridge (those ingredients being corn, millet, sorghum, peanut and bean powder).

When April arrived, each week the group of women from the cooperative that was going to come give a presentation would go to Adiaratou to go over the information they had to communicate and then head to the maternity on Wednesdays and Fridays to convey that information to the women coming in and to give porridge demonstrations. It all went over pretty smoothly, and I think it’s the project that I’m the most proud of since I’ve been here- it’s sustainable, didn’t involve giving people money, and involves teaching people new things. The women have been pretty good about coming in as well without me bugging them about it, and most days that there have been presentations at the maternity, the whole women’s cooperative shows up to listen to what the day’s presentation is.

The past few weeks, we’ve put the maternity project on hold, however, to have our cloth dying formation. I had written up the proposal in March after a few months of searching for a trainer and discussing with the ladies what they wanted to study. The idea for the formation began in November when I had a meeting with the women’s cooperative in Ferme to ask them what they wanted to do with me as far as work was concerned for the rest of my time here. They said they wanted to do a more advanced cloth dying training to learn more about mixing colors and tie dying. We decided on Awa Keita, who had been working in the garden with the women as an agricultural extension agent and who also had knowledge about cloth dying, as the trainer. A few weeks after I submitted my proposal, we got the funding, and we spent a week or two making purchases and meeting with Awa to discuss the training. When I got back from close of service conference in late May (more on that soon), we made some final arrangements and began the training. In general, it went pretty well. Awa taught the ladies a whole bunch of new color combinations (they had said they weren’t very strong on mixing colors and to tell the truth a lot of the time I felt like the colors they produced were too bright or just off in some way) and helped them prepare swatches of cloth to use as samples to show to potential buyers. They also practiced some more complicated tie dying patters. See pictures of the training (and also the maternity work) at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2031291&id=10301328&l=63ed1be532

Aside from work, things have been pretty low key and probably will be for the next three months. In mid May, I went to Bamako for COS conference and got a date for when I will be leaving Mali, September 2. I think I am going to go to Europe for a few weeks before coming home- my plan is to go WWOOF-ing- find an organic farm or two to work on, either in France or England or both. Or maybe Italy. Who knows. After I get back, who knows what I’ll be up to . . . I’m feeling pretty much at loose ends right now. Part of me wants to go to graduate school and start a career and settle down, but part of me still wants to travel more or feels like there is other stuff for me to be doing. I’m not exactly sure how to reconcile the two, but I guess we’ll see. Life goes on, right?

2009-03-10T11:13:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

I’m back in Koutiala after two weeks at site (first full two weeks I’ve spent there since Septemberish! I’m so proud of myself). Things are going well. I was on vacation for most of February with my parents, who came right at the end of January and then toured Mali and sat on the beach in Senegal for a few days with me. We had a good visit, spending four nights at my site the first week and then heading up north to Dogon country to tour the cliffs up there (sort of an American southwest-ish scenery) with our guide Hassimi. In Senegal, we headed straight to the beach and spent three nights in Toubab Diallo, a beach community not too far from Dakar, where we ate some good fresh fish and sat on the beach. Back in Dakar, we took a day trip to Goree Island, a small island right off the coast where there had been a colonial settlement.

After my parents had gone home, I spent another week or so in Senegal to play softball in the annual softball tournament put on by Peace Corps Senegal. We had about 27 volunteers from Mali- we didn’t win any games (and I struck out while batting . . .) but we had fun, and it was great to meet with other volunteers from West African countries. People came from most of the countries surrounding Senegal- Mauritania, Guinea, the Gambia, etc. After the weekend of playing softball, I headed to the beach again with about 20 other volunteers, where we rented a house on the beach for two nights and played a lot of Spades and once more ate a lot of fish and drank a bit of beer.

Back at site, things have been going well. I’ve been trying to finish up my project with Badenya Ton at Station N’Tarla. We put up the fencing in February and are currently working on resolving the water situation in the garden- the women have hired someone to dig the wells which had gone dry a bit deeper and are planning to dig two more; I’m just hoping the new wells will have enough water in them. At Ferme, I’m still working on organizing the nutrition education project at the maternity, getting the women’s organization together to learn how to do porridge demonstrations that we’re scheduling to take place in April. We’ve also been talking more about doing some further training on cloth dying techniques, hopefully including some business training along with the cloth dying.

I’ve been keeping myself busy working out (been jogging pretty consistently since I got back in December, though I had a lapse during February while traveling) and cooking for myself since I finally (I know, 20 months into service) got a stove. In Koutiala the past few days, I’ve been enjoying the privilege of having an internet connection and a stove/oven at our stage house- both of which we had been waiting for for months.

Hope everyone is doing well, I’ll write again when I get a chance.

Journal: Wednesday, January 14, 2009

2009-01-17T04:22:00.000-08:00

The past week or so has felt like what I always thought Peace Corps should be. It's weird it's taken 18 months, but here I am at a place where I'm actually more or less happy with the way things are here, and it's kind of almost over (if 8 months left is almost over). I don't know whether to take this positive feeling and go back to Ameriki with it or to take it and extend for a third year . . . a debate for another time, though.

I've been very busy since I got back from all my vacationing for Christmas, New Years, Thanksgiving, etc. Last week I made a trip to Koutiala, partly to hang out with local volunteers, but largely to meet with someone about the possibility of doing more training on cloth-dying with the ladies in Ferme. I got in contact with a woman who dyes cloth and does training through the local artisan organization that Koutiala volunteer Maridee works with, and she showed me photos of some of her work and around her work station at her house. She seemed like she'd be great for them, except for her price tag, which was 45,000 CFA a day (about $90), an astronomical sum, considering a full time teacher in a Malian primary school might get paid only about twice that in a month. So I don't know if that will go anywhere, but we'll see if we can either get that price down some or find someone else.

When I got back to Ferme, I started the week with some work at the maternity. I've been talking with the doctor at the clinic in town lately about doing some work on malnutrition at the maternity for the remainder of my service. I helped him put together some statistics on malnourished children coming into the maternity in the past year for a report he's doing. Looked over the registers and found the number of children at 70% of the ideal weight and under (about 9 over the year, out of about 170 childre aged 0-10 months or so coming into the maternity), and a few other numbers. I worked on that in addition to the ususal work on the baby-weighing and pregnancy consultation days. Today we talked about the prospect of possibly training some women in village to go do education at the maternity on a regular basis. I'm supposed to ask some of the ladies from my women's organization if they'll be up to it. I hope they will be.

Outside of the maternity, I've been working in the garden with the ladies when I can and getting a fair amount of exercise, two activities that have left me physically exhuasted much of the time. I've been keeping to my regime of jogging and bike riding, working towards that marathon . . . All last week, my back was aching unpleasantly, I think from the bike rides to and from Koutiala, but from weeding and watering things in the garden as well. Watering the garden now takes the women about two hours each day, pulling water from the well and watering 40 beds (1 by 5 meters each). The potatoes have really sprouted up and the cabbage and tomatoes are also growing, though the cabbage isalso being attacked by some small pests. I've been trying to get things together to try the urine fertilizer on some tomatoes as well, but it's slow going, as I haven't had a lot of time to go work in the garden myself, and these things don't magically happen by themselves, though the ladies have been helping me.

To add to the physical exhaustion, I've started hanging out with some of the female students from the Centre d'Apprentissage Agricole, working out together in the evenings. It's not much of a workout, to tell the truth, just two laps around the soccer field and a few jumping jacks. But I'm really excited to hang out with a group of women more or less my age who are educated. And to hang out with some more students from CAA- so far most of my contact has been pesky male students coming to my door to woo me or ask for money (a sneaking suspicion that they are one and the same . . .). So yay, female friends! Unfortunately school is over mid February and they're all going home then, but I'll take what I can get.

Journal: Thursday, December 11, 2008

2008-12-15T01:28:00.000-08:00

I've been back just about a week now, and things are going well. The trip from the US was a bit exhausting. I left on the first and spent two days hanging out in Paris. I can't say that I actually did much, which I blame on jet-lag. I got there on Tuesday morning and spent most of the morning and early afternoon finding a hostel and some food . . . I had been hoping to walk around and do some more site-seeing, but instead I decided I was exhausted and was back at the hostel in bed by 4 pm. The next day wasn't any better. I couldn't sleep Tuesday til four in the morning or so and then managed to sleep until 3 in the afternoon . . . so much for wandering the city of lights. Still, I had a good afternoon that day- I found a cozy tea shop with a fireplace and sat down to read for a while before heading back. I stopped in Notre Dame on the way, where they were having an evening service, very beautiful singing. Back at the hostel, I couldn't sleep most of the night again.

Since I got back to Mali, I've felt oddly relaxed and clear-headed. I got in early Friday morning around 4 am and hung out at the Peace Corps Bureau until the car that was supposed to make the circle from Bamako to Sikasso to Koutiala and back to Bamako left. We traveled all day, spending the night in Sikasso, and I was back "home" by Saturday morning. Monday was Tabaski, so things have been pretty relaxed all week. Monday was spent hangning out with my host family and visiting friends, Tuesday more of the same, and Wednesday working at the maternity and then attending a tea party at Koko, one of the family compounds out in the country.

Today was a particularly nice day. I woke up early (my internal clock seems to have re-adjusted to Mali) to go for a jog (definitely needing some exercise after all the wonderful Ameriki food) and then off to the garden to work with the women from Ferme. Since I left, they've been working with a local woman trained by the FAO in gardening techniques to grow potatoes in the garden. Right before I left they cleared a space for the communal garden they would be working on, and since then they've been working together each Thursday to prepare beds and seed potatoes. There are probably forty beds, one meter by four, in preparation, fifteen or so of which already have potatoes growing. The women have more seed potatoes in preparation in a potato nursery as well as a nursery full of tomato and cabbage plants, protected by a mosquito net held up by a few arched branches.

We spent all morning watering things and digging beds, then ate lunch and drank tea for a hour or two under the big mango tree. The woman who's been studying with the women never actually showed up today, but we still got a fair amount of work done, and it was nice to spend the day with the women. We also talked about possible projects for the time before I leave to go home, and decided to try setting up some training sessions to help the women improve their cloth-dying techniques. We'll also spend a few days in January working on the bilan for 2008, hopefully getting our paperwork in order again.

That's about it for now. If I don't write again before Christmas, Happy Holidays and all that. It was great to see everyone for Thanksgiving.

I'm in Morocco!

2008-11-15T00:43:00.000-08:00

I'm in Morocco and it's amazing, just like being back home except not. When we got off the plane, it was cold enough out that I could see my breath and I was really glad that I had bought a winter jacket in Koutiala before leaving Mali. I'm a dork and I took a picture of the airport. Paris in T-4 hours!

Oh Yeah . . . .

2008-10-05T02:11:00.000-07:00

News I forgot yesterday - my dog Tozo gave birth to seven healthy puppies last Tuesday. They all look mostly like sausages at this point, but I think they are destined for immense cuteness in the coming weeks. See a picture of them with their proud mama.

Also equally cute, see a picture of my little host sister Asha and my host father Drissa. Asha and her mom Ami are relatives from my host family's village, and have been visiting for a few months. Asha's almost one year old and is good fun to play with (she can clap her hands!).

Update!

2008-10-04T05:22:00.000-07:00

So it's been quite a while since I wrote in here (again). I'm in Koutiala right now, taking advantage of all day internet access, using one of the computers of the new volunteers, Maridee. So lately, things have been-- busy??? Yes, busy, and I think they will be at least through December. It's a nice feeling after spending much of the first year here "getting adjusted."

What has been making me busy, you ask? Well, first of all, I want to thank everyone who gave money or helped pass on information for the Badenya project. As of about three weeks ago, all the money was in (it only took a month!) and just last week I got a call from Peace Corps to tell me that the money was available to me here in Mali. So in the next few weeks, I anticipate putting up the new fencing for the garden. We'll also be digging two more wells in addition to the two that the women had dug in the garden space already, though that will have to wait at least another month or two until the rainy season here is completely over.

The women are being as industrious as usual. I visited the garden a week ago, and many had harvested or were in the process of harvesting their rainy season crops- peanuts, corn, millet, sorghum, beans, even some cucumbers and onions, which are more cold season than rainy season crops. Even better, last week they all participated in a week of training on gardening techniques that I organized as a part of the project. The training was one week for five mornings, three hours each morning, and covered topics ranging from how to prepare garden beds to how to make a compost pit to how to farm a variety of different kinds of vegetables. I had the help of Abdulye Kebe, one of the teachers from the school in my own village, the Centre d'Apprentissage Agricole. The training was held in one of the classrooms in the elementary school at Station N'Tarla (the village where the project is taking place). For four mornings we met and conveyed information to the women, who spent much time copying it down into their notebooks (a challenge for many of them, who have only begun working on literacy skills in the past year). On the fourth day, I gave a presentation on how to make natural pesticides with a method I had been trained on by the Peace Corps, and my homologue Souleymane Dao came to help out with another presentation on using urine as fertilizer, something we both learned about at April In Service Training in Bamako. The fifth day, we all met at one of the women's houses and Kebe gave a demonstration on how to fill in a compost pit using the method he had described in class, then went to the garden to prepare a few sample beds.

The week was a very rewarding experience, especially because of the enthusiasm of the women. Over the course of the week, over forty women showed up, with an average of thirty women present each day. So again, thank you to everyone who contributed. You contribution is really making a difference for the women at Station N'Tarla.

In other happenings, we have had the pleasure of welcoming four new volunteers to the Koutiala area in the past two or three weeks: Maridee in Koutiala itself, Audra in a village about forty km outside of Koutiala in the direction of Sikasso, and Jenn and Hannah out in the M'Pessoba area with me and Amanda, replacing Greg and Murv. So far things are going well and it looks to be a good group. We've also recenty obtained a house of our own in Koutiala, a small apartment in the same concession with Maridee's house. It has a beautiful concession with the shade of a few mango trees cooling things off, as well as our own outdoor nyegan (toilet) with a flushing toilet and a shower head (definite luxuries in Mali). We'll be working on furnishing it over the next few weeks, and hopefully be all settled in by November.

Well, I think that's it for now. I have some pictures from the training that I'll try to get up online in the next week or two- unfotunately I couldn't take a lot because my camera batteries died just before the trainings were to take place. In any case, hope all is well in Ameriki to anyone reading this there. Best!

Badenya Project

2008-07-29T07:22:00.000-07:00

Hi All,

So it's been a while now since I updated my blog. Things are going pretty well at site. Since the rainy season began a month or two ago, everyone in village has been busy working in the fields. I've been going out with them to help myself, spending a morning here and there weeding corn or millet fields with my host family. It's hard work, and my host father is out in the fields every day for five or six hours. Needless to say he spends most of the evening sleeping in his hammock.

In Feremuna, the women's organization has been busy. Every rainy season, they plant a field crop in the garden. This year we discussed a number of possible crops, including rice and millet, but settled on planting beans. We also took a day to go work on enforcing the fence that surrounds the garden, since the cows have been getting in and munching on the women's vegetables. We put up a few wooden posts to replace iron ones that had been stolen by roaming children and also planted some new gytropha bushes along the perimeter. The previous volunteer had started working on this 'live fence,' and hopefully in the next year or two the women will have planted enough to surround the entire garden, providing a more permanent fence.

In addition to working in the fields and in the garden at Feremuna, for the past few months I have been working with another women’s organization in Station N’Tarla, a small settlement down the road from Feremuna. It is with this organization that I plan to base the remainder of my 2008 work, a garden project that will increase the yearly income of the women’s cooperative.

The women’s cooperative of Station N’Tarla, Badenya Ton, has been in existence for over ten years. Since becoming a state-sanctioned cooperative in 2005, their activities have included farming two hectares of corn, millet and beans during the rainy season, the profits from which are used to support each individual woman’s small commerce activities during the rest of the year. Every three months following the growing season, women are able to take small loans of 2500 to 7500 CFA (about 6-18 USD) to buy materials for their small businesses, which range from buying and reselling rice to preparing refrigerated drinks to sell in market. In addition to these activities, the women have recently begun literacy training, which took place during the hot season from March to May of 2008.

For the past year and a half, the women have also been planning a community garden project in hopes of increasing the financial power of the cooperative. At the time that I first met with the cooperative, in December of 2007, they had already begun preparing the garden for work in 2008, obtaining permission for the use of a 1 hectare parcel of land from the village and a donation of wire fencing from the French NGO Fondation Pour L’Enfance. From March to May of 2008, they commissioned the digging of two wells in the garden space and are currently growing rainy season crops of corn, beans, rice, and peanuts.

My work with Badenya Ton will focus on preparing the garden for vegetable gardening during the 2008 cold season, including the installation of the wire fencing to protect the area from roaming animals and the digging of two more wells to ensure adequate water for the area. I also plan to conduct a series of trainings on gardening techniques I have studied during training with Peace Corps. The project will be executed through the Peace Corps Partnership Program, which allows me to raise funds directly through family, friends, and interested parties in the US. Our goal is to raise $1958.75 out of a total project cost of $2621.25. Badenya Ton will contribute the equivalent of $662.50 (about 25 percent of the total project cost) to cover the cost of labour for digging the wells and installing the fencing. We hope to raise the funds before the beginning of the cold season in October so the area will be ready for a full season of vegetable gardening.

I believe this is a worthy endeavour and I hope that you are interested in helping the women’s cooperative of Station N’Tarla to expand their activities and grow as an organization.

To make a donation, go to https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=688-270 , enter the amount you would like to give (any amount is greatly appreciated!) and click Donate. Your contribution is completely tax deductible, and Peace Corps will send you a receipt. If you cannot make a donation yourself, please forward a copy of this letter to anyone you think would be interested. If you have any questions please email me and I’ll get back with you as soon as possible.

If you would like to see some pictures of the Badenya Ton at work, I have posted some at
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2023802&l=7e693&id=10301328

Thank you, merci, i ni che from myself and the women of Station N’Tarla.

Shall write a new more 'blog-like' entry soon.

Meg

Journal, June 7, 2008

2008-06-12T06:15:00.000-07:00

I did work today! It felt like work, anyway, which was lovely since I hardly feel like I've done anything since I got here . . . I guess that's not true. I've spent a lot of time talking with people about things I could do as projectsm etc., but I just feel like all I've done is talk so far- ideas come and go, rejected because people don't seem interested or motivated or I don't feel interested or motivated or qualified . . .

In any case, today I felt like we did some important work. The ladies' organization here in Ferme seems like it's been floundering for various reasons since the last volunteer left- they were supposed to get a grant from the World Bank to do chicken-raising and expand on their gardening and that didn't go through, they're missing money that the members were supposed to pay as dues but are late with or haven't paid for whatever reason, the wells in the garden are of course still apt to go dry in the hot season (though they didn't this year) so the women can't count on doing gardening during the entire year. Etc., etc. In addition to all of this, I feel sometimes as if they lack initiative, or maybe just are't used to doing certain things themselves. I feel sometimes like we don't have meetings unless I call them, and I know that Dao has expressed exasperation before that the ladies are slow to organiwe if he doesn't do it for them.

Example: the bilan. The ladies were supposed to meet in early January to renew the board of people who handle various organizational tasks - president, secretary, etc. in addition to this meeting, they were supposed to write their bilan, a document summarizing how much money they made the previous year and what activities they carried out. For months now, Dao has been complaining about how they haven't done this, they haven't done that, and to top it off, they still haven't written that bilan. Instead, Abu was working on it. Very slowly, I might add.

There are some perfectly logical reasons why things are in this state - Abu has always done this job for them, so they're not used to doing it, and until a few years ago, they probably couldn't have done it, because they don't have the literacy skills.

So at our last peeting a month or two ago, before I went to Ghana, I suggested that we get together and take a look at what Abu had put together and have him explain the process so next year they can do it themselves. We finally had that meeting today - me, Safiyatou (my Bambara teacher and the ladies' literacy coach), Asha (the president of the ladies organization), and Abu sat down and went over numbers and papers for three hours. We started off looking at the group's financial records, and it became obvious that we were going to need the ladies to start writing those themselves, in Bambara. Abu has always written everything himself, in French because that's what he's used to, so at the moment if the ladies wanted to write the bilan themselves with no help it actually wouldn't be possible, since they don't understand French.

After discussing this, we started to look over the part of the bilan that was the summary of what activities the ladies had done in 2007. I suggested that we translate some of it into Bambara so the ladies could look at it later when they were writing the bilan for 2008. Somehow this turned into 1-2 hours of translating the entire document (which is actually not finished in the first place). It was kind of a tedious process, but it was really great to see the ladies sit and listen to Abu and then put their writing skills to a practical use. And to feel like I had spurred this. It would make me really happy if they could do this kind of thing by themselves after I left.

I'm still not quite sure what my contribution to Ferme will have been by the time I leave. I have some ideas for smaller things we could do the next few months - organize composting in the garden, work on the live fence that the previous volunteer started, maybe try out some new kinds of natural pesticide, try out this innovation that a fellow PCV is promoting of using urine as fertilizer. Finish dying the cloth that we started a month ago and work on selling it.

In addition to this, i think I'm going to do a funded project down the road with another women's organization that is working on their own garden project but are missing funding for fencing. They're pretty active and already used to running things themselves, so I feel good about trying to get funding for them. They also do literacy classes, and I've been attending those on and off for the past three months or so.

So I am actually feeling pretty positive lately. There's still the day to day boredom of beoing in village, but I've been working on 1) Accepting that as the way things are in the middle of nowhere in Africa and 2) Keeping myself busy with a lot of crocheting. I've also been going for short jogs in the morning with my very energetic dog Towo. Trying to keep the endorphins up.

Quick Update

2008-06-06T04:14:00.000-07:00

So here's a super-quick update.

Am in Koutiala right now for a quick overnight before going back to site. I've been away from site a fair amount lately. After April In Service Training, I spent two weeks at site and then went to Ghana for two weeks with fellow PCVs Beth, Phil, Rachel, Nicole, and Ben. I've uploaded some of those pictures onto facebook at:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2022132&l=64f5b&id=10301328

Also, see some extra pictures from Mali at:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2021762&l=fd393&id=10301328

Things are going well at site, though I'm still getting settled in after being away for so long. Hopefully will be getting some projects in order soon. Update on that later . . .

Journal: Monday, April 21 2008

2008-05-06T04:42:00.000-07:00

It rained all last night. It was the amazing: the first real rain in many months. It rained once in March, the first time since October, but that was really just a small rain.

Yesterday's rain began on my way back from M'Pessoba market. As usual, I had spent the whole day chatting with Murv and Greg - Sunday's our day to meet up. We usually get into M'Pesso around 10 am or so, go make a trip into the market (I buy food for my host family), then go hang out at Boua's boutigi. Actually, two boutigis (general store type places), both run by men named Boua. We leave our bikes with Boua Diakité, a twenty year old kid who runs a store for his father selling shoes and clothing, and then usually spend most of the day with Boua Coulibaly, another young man with an adorable stutter and a jovial temprement. Yesterday, we spent all day sweating at Coulibaly's boutigi. The heat has been worse lately, and I've finally felt like it's the hot season. It has gotten to the point where even if you don't move, you just sit there sweating. It's really not possible (or at least recommended) to leave M'Pessoba and bike home until the heat breaks, around four or five in the afternoon. Yesterday we traded gossip and joked around until 4:30 or so and then set off back home.

I had just gotten out of M'Pessoba on the paved road when I saw it - a great mass of red dust straight ahead of me. It was cloudy when I left M'Pessoba, but I hadn't imagined that it actually meant there was a storm coming. As I biked, the wind grew stronger and stronger and sand began blowing in my face. I tried to continue on, but had to stop and face away from the wind. For ten minutes or so, wind and sand beat at my back and then - rain! Rain came, just a little, but it was definitely there. A few minutes later, the storm eased and I was able to bike home. There were puddles on the paved road, and I as I rode through them I watched drops of water leap to the side as my wheels cut trhough them with an acute satisfaction. I hadn't seen thes phenomenon in a good seven months.

When I returned to Ferme, I was presented with the aftermath of the storm: magoes. Everywhere. Unrip ones, knocked down by the wind, dotted the main road through Ferme. I had to get off my bike and walk it the rest of the way home to avoid running over mangoes.

When I got home, I took my camera and went for a walk. I met my friend Mama Wedragu at her house. She lamented the fact that so many mangoes had fallen unripe. Usually, they fall to the ground when they're ripened, May or June, and the villagers go out with baskets iand collect them to eat or sell. Even the animals roam the village, looking for mangoes.

In the aftermath of the storm, the villagers had run to pick up the few ripe mangoes, so by the time I set out on my walk, most of them had been collected. I found one small mangoe, the size of a plum, and took it with me to the other end of the village, where a mangoe tree had been torn in half by the wind. A few village men were busy chopping the rest of it down, a group of children gawking at the spectacle.

Eventually, I made my way back to my house and took my evening bucket bath before heading over to Drissa and Jelika's for dinner and conversation. The village cheif's daughter came over and chatted with Jeilka while I worked on studying for the GRE. As it got late and was time to leave, it began to rain again, a little at first and then pouring so I had to run home.

The rest of the night it rained and rained. It was raining when I woke up and now it's really cloudy and cool. My yard is a mess, full of broken branches and unripe magoes and puddles. Some really big puddles

Journal Monday, March 3, 2008

2008-03-09T08:58:00.000-07:00

It feels like a long time since I've written in here. Here I am sitting on my porch, admiring the view. The sun is setting in a pinkish fashion this evening, and I'm not sure how long I'll be able to write, but I feel as if I had an interesting day, perhaps one that is worth writing down.

It's had some ups and downs. I got up this morning around 7:30, to the sound of Na at my door with breakfast in hand. Breakfast was beans leftover from last night, a treat for me. Jelika had saved them from the night before because I didn't get to eat any (and I had bought them in the market that morning) because I went over to Dao's house to eat last night. Two of the CAA professors were going to leave and zork in a different place and all the other teachers had a party for them. It was a very male-oriented affair - all the teachers from the school were there, plus Hamadoune and Baliandou from IRCT. They sat around playing cards, listening to loud booming music and drinking tea (for what else to men do in Mali?) and I sat around feeling fairly awkward as usual. I got some of them to teach me the game they were playing, which was a bit more complicated than the usual Mali UNO game. I kind of got it, played a few hands.

Then Dao stood up and gave a speech about all the good work that they had done the past year, and awarded them each a new mosquito net. Actually, I was selected to give them the mosquito net, I think because I was the only woman there or because I was the toubab. After this little ceremony, I sat around for a while feeling restless and then finally begged off to go sleep.

In any case, none of this has that much to do with today, except that when Dao came over to tell me about the meeting of the men, he also said that he had arranged a meeting for me with the ladies at IRCT. We had talked about going back to IRCT and N'Tarla to have another meeting with the people there about work, after I complained a few weeks back about having nothing to do. So he said the plan was for me and Abou Diabate to go up to IRCT in the morning to talk with the ladies and then up to N'Tarla to greet the dugutigi and set up a meeting there. Dao would go himself but had some business to take care of for the school.

So this morning, after having eaten my beans and spent a half hour or so working on digging a pit I'm going to put compost in, Abou came by and we went up to IIRCT together.

IRCT is the research institute up the road 4 km from Ferme, and it's fairly well off - Id say even more well off than Ferme - they have electricity and a tap water system. Whenever we do baby weighings at the maternity on Wednesdays and a giant baby shows up with a well clad mama, you know that they came from IRCT or from Ferme. I guess this is part of what made me uneasy about going up there - I wasn't sure if I really wanted to concentrate my efforts on helping a group of people who are already fairly well situated.

When we got there, we greeted some of the workers and then went to the "center," where the women study Bambara sometimes. The meeting was to be held there. It took about 45 minutes, but eventually the place filled up and we began the meeting. It mostly consisted of greetings, then some explanation on the part of the women as to what their current activities are. During the rainy season for a number of years now, the women have gone out to work their field together, harvesting peanuts and two types of millet. During the cold and dry seasons, the ladies take the money they've made from the farming and individually partake in small commerce activities, returning money to the caisse with some interest later on. They've made a fair amount of money this way, and for the past few years have been trying to get things together to have a garden as well. Things have started to fall into place as far as that is concerned in the past few months. They got permission to use some land near IRCT as the garden, dug one well, got the president's (of Mali) wife to donate garden tools somehow, and are using all of their money to take a loan out of the bank to dig another well and clear some of the land. They need some money, however, for a fence which they said would cost between 500 and 1000 USD. They also said they were looking for some money to help with books to study for their literacy classes and buy a blackboard.

After this explanation, I was asked to speak and explain where I stood on things. I said I couldn't say what I could do as far as the money was concerned at the moment, but maybe once they got the garden going we could bring some people in to do formations on gardening. Abou pointed out that they needed money to get things in order before they could do any formations. Which makes sense, and thinking it over now, I think that might have been an insufficient answer to give them. But I wasn't really prepared to be asked to give money right on the spot and give a definative answer. And I told them this, that I wanted to go look at the garden and talk to PC a bit and know them a bit better and then maybe start a project. But Abou kept bugging me to clarify my answer and objecting that maybe I hadn't understood when I felt like I had said what I was going to for the moment. And then I felt annoyed and uneasy and kind of guilty that I couldn't answer right away. Then Rosaline, the president of the women and a tall and sort of impressive woman, asked what I could say to the women so they would keep up their spirits. That annoyed me even more, but I said they had done good work and God willing, they would be able to do more good work. Which felt kind of insufficient again, because the way they had presented it, it wasn't just God who had the power to decide if they would do more good work, but me.

So basically, I felt kind of bullied and uncomfortable. But then we took a turn around the area where the garden would be and I began to perk up a little more; it felt good to be out of that particular situation. The garden area was very large, and I'm not sure exactly how they're planning to water everything with the two wells they have planned, assuming they use the majority of the land. There's a large stretch of land covered in underbrush that they said they're going to try to clar, and one well that is already dug. All in all, things seemed remarkably in order, especially for Mali, and I began to think it might not be a bad thing to try and help them with some money. They certainly give the impression of being well-organized and motivated.

I still felt a bit annoyed, though, as abou kept saying how I could just help them with this and explaining the situation over again, just in case I hadn't understood the first three times.

After our turn around the garden, we went to Rosaline's house, a large house typical of the area, and sat down and talked for a while, a bit about PC and a bit about Ferme and a bit about the ladies at IRCT. Well, actually for the most part they talked and I picked up what I could of what they were saying and once in a while someone bothered to direct a question my way.

Then the remaining ladies left, leaving me with Abou, Rosaline, and Rosaline's husband. Rosaline's husband and Abou talked for what seemed like forever before Rosaline invited us inside to eat. They actually had a dining table inside with bowls and spoons for rice (the first I've seen of this in Mali) and I ate with the men while Rosaline ate outside.

After lunch we sat around for a while, then Abou and Rosaline wandered off to have a "meeting." They were in their meeting for a very long timem but eventually they came back, and when they returned I asked them what they had been talking about and abou said they were talking about marriage. How two people can respect one another in that situation. Since for various reasons I've been feeling lately like I understand the relationship between men and women in Mali less and less, and I was a little annoyed about the way they made me feel about everything in the morning, I decided to spark some conversation and told Abou outright that I don't understand how men and women here relate to each othere.

He said, okay, what don't you understand? I started off with why do women do all the cooking here. Malians always get a kick out of my insistence that men should cook, and it's my standard response to would-be suitors I meet on the streets to explain to them how my husband is back in Amerikim and by the way he does all the cooking for me, just to get a laugh out of them (or a look of incredulity) and distract them from their attempts to get my number and address. Abou explained how men do cook if there are no women around, but if there is a woman around, she cooks, and that's just how it is.

I then commented on how women do a lot of work here- cooking, cleaning, raising the children, and why don't men do the work, too. Abou said men do help with the children-take them to the doctor if they're sick, for example. And how men work and women work, they just don't do the same work.

So I asked then, what about education? Why are so many women here less educated than men? This was where we started to get a bit more confused. Abou said something about women reaching the age of puberty and then running off and thinking they could act like men and go "tulonke" (play) and get pregnant. And how it was their fault if this should pass and they will have shamed their parents. How in Mali, it's very important for people to keep their dignity and having a daughter get pregnant robs them of their dignity. I made some further inquisitions and learned that in Mali, it's always the woman's fault if she gets pregnant. According to Abou, it's always the woman who goes to the man to get pregnant, never the man who initiates the sexual relationship.

That made me so mad. I guess I was asking for it, and in a way it's good to have had the conversation, but it left me feeling kind of sad and disillusioned that my friend thought these things. And Abou seems to me a very honorable and good person for the most part.

So I said to him, okay, you're not going to convince me of your viewpoint and I'm not going to convince you of mine, but I guess we can try to explain things. And he said, that's true because we come from different cultures with different ways, and that's why we see things differently.

So I tried to explain to him what I thought, which is maybe just as much my personal version of things as much as a representation of American culture. I said that in my view, being pregnant outside of marriage is not a shameful thing in and of itself. It is something that has downsides and upsides, good and bad in it, but in and of itself it is not shameful, to the woman or her parents. And furthermore, that sex is a thing that involves two people, a man and a woman. And if the woman becomes pregnang, she can't point her finger and say it's the man's fault, at the same time as he can't to the same thing to her because they both decided to have sex.

Which seems to me perfect reasoning, but of course Abou just reiterated what he said, and to top it off said that a man can't force a woman to have sex. And I said he can't? And Abou said, can't she scream if she doesn't want it? Thankfully that was just a side conversation that I didn't ask him to explain anymore, because I don't want to think of what he would have said.

In the end, we didn't reach any big conclusions. Throughout most of it, Rosaline kept quietm though she made it clear at various junctures that she more or less agreed with what Abou had said. We agreed to reconvene on Saturday, because Rosaline said she would teach me some Malian cooking. The tentative agreement was for Abou to come along too and Rosaline made some crack about getting him a skirt for the occasion. Ironically, perhaps, I realized this evening that Saturday is March 8, Women's Day in Mali.

The whole conversation left me feeling ready to write a really long journal entry and get it all sorted out and compartmentalized, but I'm not sure if I can. I've always prided myself on being able to see both sides of an argument and to respect other people, but I realized there are some things I can't respect, even if I don't think I can really change them. I generally find Abou to be a very good person, and I know he cares for his wife and is very involved in helping out the women, but I just can't agree with him on this point. I suppose as far as pregnancy goes, it's not even the rule in American society that pregnancy out of wedlock wouldn't make someone feel shameful, or that some wouldn't point the finger at the woman. I don't agree with Abou that this is just a matter of our cultures being different. Yes, Malian and American cultures are different and therefore the roles of women and men are not going to be the same. But women are not naturally subordinate to men, and to chalk the kind of inequality that exists in this society up to culture is erroneous. Gender inequality exists in the US as well, but we identify it as a problem instead of just saying that it is they way God willed it.

Following this conversation, later this evening I happened by Mama Wedragu's house on the way home from watering the garden and stopped to chat as I do fairly oftern. We were sitting there talking when Adiaratou happened by and told us that Odile, one of the ladies who's been working at the maternity lately, had just had a baby girl. Which surprised me because I hadn't known that she was pregnant. Which then made me feel sheepish because she's the third one of my coworkers at the maternity in the past two months or so who has had a baby and who I didn't know was pregnant. And also, none of them had husbands. Add to this Bintou, also working at the maternity and also an unwed mother.

So despite having my head kind of tired from my talk with Abou, I had the same talk with Mama. Mama was in agreement that having a child out of wedlock was a shameful thing in Mali and said that if a woman had a baby out of wedlock people wouldn't come to the baby's baptism because the baby had no father. I explained to her what I thought and she tooke it in stride. Mama is completely aware of the injustice of the way women are treated here. She's constantly being held back by her husband from going to one social event or another and complains to me about it, even as she follows his orders. And she has told me numerous times the story of how her mother forced her to marry her husband when she was fifteen, even though she refused and wouldn't even go to her own wedding. And yet here she is, 25 years and seven or eight children later, living with him and doing as she's told.

I don't have any good way to respond to this. I don't know whether to ask her why she doesn't leave him (two of his other wives did, after all), just like I don't know how to feel towards Abou, knowing what he thinks about all of this. The bottom line, I guess, is that all of this is probably what most people in this country feel. They have this set of cultural beliefs to live up to and live up to them to one degree or another.

Somehow that feels insufficient. That doesn't feel like a conclusion but rather just another "mogo te kelen ye" (people aren't the same) cop-out. There must be some values that are constant, something that is right and something that is wrong, and something in between. I just feel at a loss to try and identify which is which.

Oh dear, my brain is tired now. I suppose I'll just have to keep some of these questions safe for another day.

"Ne te decourage pas"

2008-02-19T10:26:00.000-08:00

"Don't be discouraged."

This is what my homologue, Souleymane Dao, told me two Thursdays ago back at site after I talked to him about my work, or rather the lack of it. The past few weeks have been discouraging, to say the least, partly because the work I had been hoping to do at site has been stalled, partly because of difficulties adjusting back to being at site after three weeks away.

I got back to site a bit over three weeks ago, tired of traveling and ready to settle in for a while. I had decided that I wanted to try and break out of my habit of spending a week and a half or two weeks at site followed by a few days away in Koutiala or another city, all the better for my integration, I thought. I was going to spend all of February at site and become super-integrated. So for the first week or two, I worked dilligently on my Bambara, tried my best to spend free time with people instead of holed up in my house reading, and got Jelika and Adiaratou to give me some Malian cooking lessons. I painted the furniture in my house and posted some pictures on the wall in an effort to make it feel like home. Made French toast with the kids during one of our nightly tutoring sessions. Went to the baptism of one of Drissa's cousins and even managed to get myself to go for a run one morning! Okay, so going for a run doesn't have anything to do with integration, but it was a positive thing to do . . .

All of this was very well and good, but unfortunately being "integrated" also means that you have to deal with the annoyances of living in a culture much different from your own. In Mali, this means children yelling "toubab" at you as you walk down the street, having your progress on the language narrated by everyone you meet, having to greet EVERYONE ALL THE TIME, everyone asking you for money or gifts all the time, having people constantly asking you why you're not married, and being bored and lonely because there's no one who understands your own culture. This is not to say that there aren't plenty of things that I like about Malian culture/Mali in general (for example, people here are open to social interaction in a way that most Western cultures aren't, which makes it easier to feel welcomed into the community) just that after an extended period spent at site, the negative can begin to overshadow the positive.

In addition to these frustrations, as I've learned a bit more about the situation in my village in the past few weeks, I've become more and more uncertain of what kind of work I can do for the next 20 months (it's been 7 months here today!). The women's organization had a meeting the week that I got back to summarize the work they did last year and plan work for this year. Apparently, 2007 wasn't a year where a lot of work got done- they made soap three or four times and dyed cloth once. They hadn't done either of these activities since I got here. The soap making has become difficult because the oil prices went up so it's no longer a very profitable activity, and the cloth dying costs a large amount of money to get going. At this meeting, the ladies asked me if I could donate money to buy cloth to let them dye cloth, which took me aback a bit. I asked them how much, and they said 70,000 CFA, which is about $140. A lot of money, in other words, and not something I'm willing to donate, since I don't really see it as my job to give them my own money.

After this meeting, I had a look at their financial records, which was pretty eye-opening. Apparently the previous volunteer did donate a large amount of money to get them going on the cloth dying, and then made regular trips to Bamako to sell the cloth for the ladies. They made a large amount of money this way, about $400. However, looking at the records, there was a moment where a large portion of this money suddenly disappeared from the caisse. Talking with some of the women later, I found out that the women all decided to buy a large amount of cloth to dye the same color and make into clothes to wear togheter. Each woman would pay for a few meters of cloth. Unfortunately, not everyone had the money to pay for the cloth, and so even now, over a year later, there is a large amount of money owed.

In addition to this, the grant money from PACR looks like it's not going to come. I talked to their representative in M'Pessoba, Pascaline, who told me that someone higher up in the organization in Sikasso had decided that because some of the women are the wives of men who work as professors at the school or at IRCT (the research institute down the road), they had less need for the money. Additionally, she also said that the people of Feremuna live in the area because of the school (CAA), and if the state should one day decide to close the school (no sign of that as far as I know) and leave the land, the people would leave too, and PACR's investment in the land will have been for naught. Everyone in Ferme is pretty pissed, and understandably so. No one from PACR has come to the village to explicitly explain this decision. I had to go to the mayor's office four times before I finally managed to talk to Pascaline.

And Kolomuso . . . apparently the matrone has just begun doing baby weighing days and vaccinations again. However, talking to Adiaratou about the situation, I learned that women are not going to the maternity to have their children. For example, Hamadoune (the doctor at Ferme) just got a report from the matrone that last month, six women had their children at home and only two had them at the maternity. He says when we went up to Kolomuso for the vaccination campaign in December, he went and talked with some of the ladies, who said that they don't go to the maternity because they don't like the matrone and think she is incompetent. The matrone, Fanta, is completely aware of this, I learned when I went up last week to talk with them again. She gave me the impression that she would like to go somewhere else herself to find work, but she's married to someone in the village and so is tied down to the area. I have no idea at this point whether she really is incompetent, and each time I go up there I leave feeling frustrated because each time I go up we have trouble communicating and she complains that I don't speak Bambara as well as the previous volunteer.

So all of this leads me back to that discussion with my homologue. Don't be discouraged, he said, and I'm trying not to be, but sometimes I just feel like my head is going to explode. Which is why I'm in Bamako right now, taking a little mini vacation. Had my first hot shower in seven months Monday evening (felt so wonderfully clean . . .) and putzed around town yesterday, buying toubab food (read: ice cream, cheeseburgers and M&Ms). Made a visit or two with people at the Peace Corps bureau to discuss the way things were going. Might go see the museum in Bamako today.

Maybe when I get back to site things will start going better. The women did finally make soap on Monday before I left, so that's a good sign, right? Wish me luck.

The ladies make soap!

Relaxing in Bamako at Relax.

Another Journal Entry

2008-01-26T02:18:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

I cqn't believe it's already 2008. I suppose that's a bit of a belated reaction to the New Year. But you know it's a new year when you go to write the date and have to correct the last digit of the year because you wrote the wrong one. This seems to happen for a while each year. I wonder if I tracked it if I could tell how long it takes to make the transition to writing the correct year all the time. Is it January, February, March, or even later, and what does the answer to that question mean on a psychological level? Maybe it does change from year to year, and if I'm still writing "2007" at the top of the page come April, that will mean that 2007 was a really great year. Don't want to think about what that would mean for 2008.

I'm writing from the night time in Koutiala. Another bout of insomnia seems to be on the horizon at the moment. It's only 11:30, but I don't feel like sleeping (even though the normal bed time is 9:30-10), and my sore throat and stuffy nose don't help on the sleeping end either. Maybe a journal entry will help with this. It did two nights ago at my last bout of insomnia. That was actually a relatively painless one. I was in Bamako, in this penthous suite that I somehow ended up staying in with only one other volunteer (go figure). The PC gives us vouchers to hotes in Bamako and a lot of people were staying over for a night or two after IST. There were two rooms in the suite, separated by a curtain, one with a huge bed, the other room lined with cushioned benches with a satiny-red-gold-oriental print thing going on. I was in this room, sleeping on a twin bed positioned along one side of the wall. Well, not sleeping, I suppose. There was no mosquito net and therefore there were mosquitos buzzing in my ear.

So I left the room to go wander the hotel, eventually going up two windey flights of stairs to reach the roof. The roof was amazing. It wasn't finished-looking- had a gravely ground with a few random tufts of grass sticking out of it, and to coplete the picture, a few empty beer bottles (apparently others had enjoyed the roof in the recent past). It was such a wonderful sight from the roof. Breathtaking to me at the time, because I was suffering the tail end of a bout of homesickness (what else is new?). In front of me, there was a large cliff in the distance. Behind, a few random tall buildings sticking up from the city landscape. To one side, the sound of cars rushing down the highway.

The most amazing part of it, though, was the lights. Lights dotted the land all around me as far as the eye could see. All of these aspects of my surroundings suddenly made me feel at ease. I had a feeling of familiarity. Pehaps it is strange, but when I thought about it, I realized that I hadn't seen a sight like that for the past six months. City lights. I could have been in DC or Milwaukee or Philly, and that made me feel light and free. To have that feeling in Mali is a rare thing.

Though maybe I shouldn't put it down to being in Mali. It seems to me as if ever since I arrived in this country, I've been critical and unhappy, generally on edge. Somehow, I haven't been able to eradicate the idea that floats in and out of my head once in a while that Africa is what you get stuck with if you're not smart or lucky enough to go to Europe. Africa is the "cultural experience," where you go if you can weather something really out of the ordinary.

Yesterday I was at the mission here in Koutiala having a conversation with on one of the women who lives/works there. We were talking about how I'd been to Segou for New Years and about how there were nice restaurants and a lot of crafts being sold down by the river. Then we both got on talking about how there was not much of anything special about Koutiala- she was adamant about how there's "not even one restaurant, at least not a real one, anywaym" referring to the few Malian reataurants that are in town- and admittedly many of them do fite the Bambara term "dumunifeereyoro"("food selling place") a little more closely than our spolied American ideas of a good restaurant.

When she said that, I feel as if I immdediately judged her. Good thing she wasn't living en brousse, I thought, she'd never make it there. But then, thinking it over, I'm not sure that I'm that much different on some level. I feel as if I'm able to live here, in Mali, because I am the variety of person that doesn't "need" all the comforts in life, the kind that can make that sacrifice.

Most of the time, the Malians here acknowledge that it is a sacrifice. Sometimes in village, or wherever I'm roaming, I have met Malians who ask me, "Ameriki ka di?" ("Is America good?"), followed very shortly by "Mali ka di?" ("Is Mali good?"), and of course I answer, why yes, both Ameriki and Mali are good. "Ameriki ka di ni Mali ye?" ("Is America better than Mali?"). Of course not! Some then voice the opinion that Mali isn't that good in their opinion. Here, it's hard to feed your children. Here, baara ka ca de! (there's a lot of work!). Ameriki must be better . . . who am I trying to kid?

One of the things that attracted me about the Peace Corps was the idea that we were meant to come here and to live like the locals. Unlike the vast majority of Westerners in Mali, I was going to come live in village, have local friends, know how to cook local meals, etc. I was really looking for a challenge, I said to myself.

At the same time, though, I don't think I appreciated what a challenge it would be and how engrained in me is the need both for a sense of familiarity/my culture and the physical comforts of home. I constantly find myself missing things from home and being frustrated when I can't seem to understand why people here act a certain way, at the same time as I judge myself for this. There is a part of me that is very politically correct and that wants to be very "macho" and say that physical comforts are for the vast majority of weak, materialstic Americans. I don't know, maybe these tendancies come from having studied anthropology for four years in college, or from being a "sort of Quaker" (that's my term). The ideas of cross-cultural understanding and valuing friends/family/education, etc over big SUVs and TVs have been beaten into me.

To my surprise, a part of the challenge of giving up the comforts of home has been realizing and adapting to the fact that it is in fact a challenge to be here, and that I shouldn't feel critical of myself for feeling this challenge and sometimes needing relief from it (in the form of MandMs, trips to Koutiala, time spent reading or talking in English with other volunteers). At the same time, I do feel as if I am still reaching for a higher level of integration in my village that still has not been attained and that might be very good and necessary for the implementation of projects, and maybe my general sanity. I'm still reaching for a better balance.

Hm, okay, time to wrap this up. Tis late now and I do feel the sleep coming on. Til next time.

IST

2008-01-16T11:39:00.000-08:00

So I've been at Tubaniso now for about a week and a half, unbeknownst to me blog readers (whoever you are). I came last Sunday for In Service Training (IST), the tail end of my 12 weeks of training in Mali. Now that the first three months are up and I can speak some Bambara (kind of), it's time to get some work done.

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.

Amadou et Miriam

2008-01-10T16:12:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to listen to Malian music a bit lately. The kids (Sinali, Amadou and Na) really like it when I play music when we hang out at night- they love dancing, so when I finally got a tape-player (most music here is available in casette-form), I went out and bought some tapes. So far my Malian music collection includes Ali Farka Toure, Rokia Traore, Djeneba Sec, Oumou Sangare, and Amadou and Miraim. Amadou et Mariam are my current favorites. Check out a video of their song "Senegal Fast Food" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShzhsPD3K0E&feature=related. French lyrics can be found at http://www.lyricstime.com/amadou-et-mariam-s-n-gal-fast-food-lyrics.html. I think most of the images in the video are actually from Senegal, but it looks pretty similar to Mali, with the exception of the numerous shots of the ocean, and generally looking less poor and run down.

Just for fun, here's my translation of the lyrics:

It is now five o'clock on the dot

It's for Manhattan Fast Food, Dakar, Senegal, the Paris theater
That I leave tomorrow
The stations in Dakar, Bamako, Mopti
Any problems there? All is well
Today I'm getting married, I have faith
Amoul solo, Gao, l'Algérie, Tunisie, Italie
No problems, I'm in love!
At Manhattan Fast Food, Dakar, Senegal, the Paris theater
I've got an elevator to the ghetto

Chorus:

It's midnight in Tokyo,
Five o'clock in Mali
What time is it in heaven?
It's midnight in Tokyo,
Five o'clock in Mali
What time is it in heaven?

For those of us who leave our country
We ask that those we leave behind don't forget us
Those of us who are a part of this, this
which none of us know how to name
We who are in far away countries
We ask that those we leave behind don't forget us

It's at Manhattan Fast Food, Dakar, Senegal
Grandmother's at the Dantec hospital doing fine
I'm here, you're there, the visa's at the consulate
Number 39, I'm waiting
For the civil state (of marriage) in the year 2000, already 2000 years at Manhattan Fast Food, Dakar, Senegal, the Paris theater

Chorus

Dakar, Bamako, Rio de Janeiro
Where is the problem? Where is the fronteer? Weaving between the walls in the elevator to the ghetto
At Mahattan Fast Food, Dakar, Senegal, the Paris theater.

Chorus

Hmm, well, it could be better, hope it's comprehensible!

M

Merry Christmas

2007-12-23T04:05:00.000-08:00

This morning as I was biking to Koutiala with Merv, I had what Merv said she thought was a thought specific to Mali and a limited range of other places: "I wish I hadn't eaten that sheep brain for breakfast." I didn't know that's what it was when I ate it, and I suppose in the grand scheme of things eating sheep brain is no big deal, but still. Sometimes here in Mali I can't help myself from taking a step back and scratching my head over the general state of my life.

So. Sheep brains. This singular event followed three days of feating and general festivity for Tabaski, the Islamic holiday that comes two months after Ramadan. On the day of Tabaski (or Seliba, in Bambara), each family is supposed to slaughter a sheep, I gather in tribute to the Biblical story of Abraham, who was asked to slaughter his child but God intervened at the last moment and had him slaughter a sheep instead. Slaughter a sheep we did (see pictures below). My host father, Drissa, cut its throat, and my host brother Moussa along with Sinali, Massa, and Amadou, skinned it. We then spent most of the morning eating large amounts of meat and playing with some of the gifts I had given the children (thanks to my mother, who sent them from Ameriki).

The day of Seliba itself and the two days after, I went around and visited some of the neighborhood people- Seliba afternoon at my Bambara tutor Safiyatou's compound, and then over to my homologue Dao's place, and the day after I made it to the house of Jean Bosco Berthe, a retired technician from the agricultural research center down the road who I hadn't talked to much yet (he gave me a chicken), and also to the house of Korotimi, the wife of the director of IRCT, who is friends with my host family. That one was interesting, since I went with Jelika by donkey cart, which I had never done before. Friday I also made a trip to N'Tarla, a village about 7 km away from Ferme, to meet with the dugitigi (chief) there and discuss the possibility of working with their community. In the next few weeks I'll be going around with Dao to five other village to meet with other dugutigis. This one, with Souleymane Malle, went pretty well (and I scored a hunk of sheep meat off that meeting!).

Yesterday I went to M'Pessoba and hung out with the other volunteers for a while then went back home to hang out with Adiaratou for a while. Which brings me to now. Just got into Koutiala. It was a hard bike ride because my stomach wasn't liking the sheep's brain too much and in general I think feasting for the past few weeks hasn't put me in the best shape for a 25 mile bike ride. But I survived, and I think my digestive system has as well.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Some Pages From My Journal

2007-12-09T02:56:00.000-08:00

Monday, December 3, 2007

I think today was a pretty good day, as was yesterday, now that I think of it. Yesterday in particular- all the sweeter because it started out kind of so-so. Yesterday being Sunday, I rode my bike to market to get there around 10, as usual. I knew Amanda and Merv had gone to Sikasso, so I wasn't expecting them to be there, but I thought Greg would be, and I was looking forward a bit to speaking some English. However, when I arrived at Boua's boutigi, he informed me that Greg had left to go to Sikasso on Saturday evening. I was a bit disappointed, because it meant I wasn't going to have my usual English-speaking day, but I went into the market and bought food to give to Jelika. I was supposed to meet Adiartou, the matrone of the maternity, at the boutigi at 11 anyways, because we were going to buy materials to do embroidery. I was at her house on Monday or Tuesday of last week and she had showed me some of the stuff she had done and told me she could teach me.

After taking my usual turn around the market, I headed back to the boutigi and found Adiaratou there almost right away. We walked through the market to a store at the back that I'd never seen before and bought the goods. Then Adiaratou asked what I was doing next and I said I wasn't sure, so she asked in a sort of offhand way if I wanted to go to her house. I said yes, so we treked over there, stopping along the way to meet her husband Ousmane, a big, friendly teddy-bear type guy who informed me that he speaks English "small small." At her house, I met Ousmane's first wife, Barakissa. We all sat around talking for just a little while, and then Adiaratou and I went over to visit a friend of hers who had just had a child on Thursday, then back to her house to meet her other friend, Batama, who had also recently had a child,and to eat lunch. After lunch, she taught me some embroidery and we sat around a bit before heading over to a woman who braids hair. She did Adiaratou's hair then took on mine. So I've been kuntigi-ed (braided) once more. Got a range of reactions from people- usually some mixture of laughter and "Anyana!" ("Good!"). Drissa said my mother wouldn't recognize me if she saw me now.

After the braiding, Adiaratou and I parted ways. On my way back to take a turn around the market, I went past Bintou's mother's restaurant and predictably ran into Bintou (one of my co-workers at the maternity). Since I was alone and it had been a while since I saw Bintou, I stopped and chatted with her for a while. I found out that she's married and has a four year old daughter. Maybe it's silly, but when she introduced her daughter (Ami) as her daughter, I thought she was joking- because she had just told me that she herself was only twenty years old. And because she's always struck me as a less conventional/more liberal Malian, one who didn't prescribe to the usual get married and have ten children thing that seems to be the norm here. And because Bintou jokes around a lot. But no, apparently she had a child when she was 16.

When I got back to Ferme, I went to the garden and planted some onions that Jelika had procured at the market. I'm really beginning to enjoy working in the garden, because people are helping me out more recently, and the garden is expanding, and most importantly, things aren't dying. I was kind of unsure about the tomatoes there for a while, but they seem to have pulled through after their transplanting from the nursery.

Today was also pretty good- went to the garden in the morning to prepare a bed, then stopped by the infirmery to say hi to Bintou. We chatted a little, then I headed home to eat lunch before going over to Safiyatou's to meet her before going to the muso baro (a little women's tea party). The muso baro was okay- there was tea and peanuts as usual. However, I didn't talk much, and I ended up making a faux pas by asking one of the women her name when we had been introduced multiple (many) times before. Oops. And then the women spent a lot of time arguing over money issues, which seems to be a common occurrence.

Because they spent so much time arguing, it was almost 6 by the time I made it to the garden. I had told Ba Kante and Mama that I was going to give them some tomato plants from my nursery. When I got there, Ba Kante had gone home and then had pulled up the remaining plants from my nursery, which I was a bit put-out by, since Jelika had wanted to take some more to put in her garden, and in general that was a lot of tomato plants. But I decided to not make a big fuss over it since I have some new plants that have sprouted, and now they won't bug me for more plants.

This evening the kids came over and we were going to study, but ended up having a little mathematics contest instead. Amadou won, I'm not sure if because of how easy I made his test compared to the others or because he actually knows his stuff best. Anways, I'm thinking about what I can to to study with them.

So a busy couple of days, and I'm anticipating a few more busy days as well. I am feeling like I'm beginning to make some real friends here, which is nice. Still plotting my next escape to Koutiala, but oh well . . .

She writes from Koutiala.. .

Thanksgiving

2007-11-24T04:18:00.000-08:00

This is going to be a quick update, because I have limited time here at the internet cafe, and, well, I'm lazy.

I'm currently sitting in Koutiala, having returned from three days and three nights spent hanging out with other volunteers in Sikasso ville for Thanksgiving. I've been traveling all week. On Tuesday all of the Koutiala area volunteers met in Koutiala to spend the night making hamburgers and hanging around with Sadio, our local Bambara tutor/Malian buddy, and his roommate Dolo. The next day, we headed to Sikasso, where we spent Wednesday making more than ten apple and pumpkin pies for the sixty or so people who came into the city from around the country. Thanksgiving day itself I spent hanging out with people and eating copious amounts of food. Sounds a lot like an American Thanksgiving, huh? Yesterday was Mexican night. All the volunteers went over to Katie's house and ate a meal of tacos on the roof of her apartment building. Nice.

Hm, sorry for the somewhat mechanical sounding update. Things are generally going pretty well at site, though I've been gone a fair amount in the past week or so. Came up here last week for Bambara tutoring, and now have been gone since Tuesday for Thanksgiving festivities. However, I feel like I'm settling in a bit more, getting to know more people and so on. I had all the ladies from the women's organization over to my house for tea two Mondays ago- was pretty successful. Have some photos of it that I'm working on getting up online. They will be available here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2018089&l=aedc2&id=10301328

soon.

In other news, the new Hunger Report, which I was working on last year at Bread for the World, is up online. Check it out here:

http://www.bread.org/learn/hunger-reports/hunger-report-2008-download.html

I wrote the initial draft for Chapter 3, and there's an artical I wrote on a Milwaukee-area NGO in there as well.

That's it for now! Will write again later.

It's been a while

2007-10-24T09:03:00.000-07:00

Since I wrote in this blog. I've now been at site almost four weeks, which seems like a long time and not much time at all all at once.

Hm, not sure how to begin this. The first few weeks at site were pretty tough, mostly because they felt kind of lonely. Not that I hadn't anticipated those feelings, but the anticipation of them is a bit different than the experience. Actually, now that I think about it, the anticipation of everything to do with the Peace Corps has been different than how it has actually felt to be here doing this. I suppose it's the same with everything a person does, but I think that feeling is especially acute with this experience, since I really had no idea what Mali was going to be like. Six months ago I don't think I could have even found the country on a map (though I might have gotten close) and now I'm living here.

In any case, the fist couple of weeks at site were tough because I was feeling kind of alone. There are people all around, and most of them are friendly people, but with language and cultural barriers as there are, it is possible to feel completely alone in the midst of a crowd of people. My days so far are pretty varied as to how much I get done (if anything) and what I'm doing. Wednesday and Friday mornings, I go to work at the local maternity, which is three buildings down from my house. Wednesdays are baby-weighings/vaccinations, Fridays we weigh pregnant women and vaccinate them against tetnus. Mostly what I do so far is help record these figures- I'm not allowed to stick anyone with a needle according to Peace Corps, so there will be no playing doctor for me.

There is a small host of people who work at the maternity with me, some of whom seem to come and go on there own schedules. But in general, the group includes Awa, Mariam, Abdu, Bintou, and another woman who has started coming since this last friday with her young daughter in tow (who, incidentally, has developed some irrational fear of toubabs and wouldn't stop crying this morning every time she saw me). If I could use one word to describe this group of people it would be . . . smart-allecky. Okay, maybe that's two words, but in any case it works. Everyone is very jovial and likes to make fun of one another. I expecially like Bintou, I think because she is my age or a couple of years younger and seems to have quite a strong character. I feel like she would be a good person to have back you up in a fight. It makes me happy, too, to find a woman my age-ish who hasn't gotten married yet and seems to maybe have some ambitions. The downside to everyone's joking nature at the maternity, though, is that often I don't get the jokes (limited language . . .) and have to smile and nod a lot.

When I'm not working at the maternity (most of the time), I can be found sitting at my house reading a book, working in the garden, or over at my Bambara tutor's house attempting to understand what she is saying to me. The Bambara is progressing comparatively slowly since I moved to Ferme. Without the structured 7-8 hours of class time each day, my motivation to learn things kind of wanes. Not to say that I haven't been giving it some work- I've been drafting a translation of Cinderella in Bambara for the past few weeks and reading each new section to my Bambara tutor. Have also been working on learning vocabulary from our Agricultural Bambara handbook, which comes in useful in terms of talking about activities in the garden.

Evenings, I spend with my host family, sometimes talking, sometimes studying, sometimes watching TV. Lately the three younger kids, Sinali, Amadou and Na, have been coming over to my house to work on their lessons from school. I'm pretty sure they come over mostly because there is a lightbulb and a blackboard in one of the rooms of my house, but since there there I feel obliged to try to help them out. These efforts range from somewhat fruitful to laughable, depending on how suitable my language skills are to whatever they're studying and how much I can read out of their notes (not always a lot, especially with Na). I usually have the most luck studying with Sinali, since he's a bit older, knows a bit more French, and takes better notes. Lately Moussa has been coming over to help his younger siblings, but I'm not a fan of his methods, which involve hitting them upside the head when they don't know an answer after having left them to stare at a math problem that they don't understand while he hangs out with his friends outside for fifteen minutes. Hm, does that sound bitter? Anyway, we had a bit of a discussion on the topic of corporal punishment in the school setting yesterday, but I'm not sure what will come of that.

In the garden, I've been doing what I can do, which is not very much. I always thought it was a bit of a crazy idea to come to Africa and work as an "Agricultural Extension Agent" when I've barely farmed a day in my life, and now I'm encountering some of the challenges of this proposition. My first attempt was to grow some seeds in my backyard that I had brought from the US- Mesculan seeds. I made myself a nice little bed, mixed in some fertilizer, planted the seeds and watched as they sprouted and were promptly eaten by the frogs and chickens that apparently find my backyard a pretty happening place. 'Twas fairly depressing, but I guess you figure out ways to deal with these things as time goes on. Right now I'm trying again in the women's garden. Just spent a few days getting a rather large bed prepared, in which I want to plant a couple of different kinds of seeds (tomatoes, lettuce, onion, broccoli) and see what pests that like to eat the fruits of my labor inhabit this new territory.

So anyway, that's pretty much how things have been going so far. Right now I'm in Koutiala again at the mission, using their internet. Shall try to update again in a few weeks.

So I know I said I wouldn't have internet anymore . . .

2007-09-26T16:09:00.000-07:00

But apparently access is available here at the missionary in Koutiala, at least if you have a computer, which I do via fellow PCV Amanda. Thought I'd take advantage to post some pictures.

Bess on the rope at Tubaniso.

On the way to swear-in.

Roomies Lindsey and Stephanie at the embassy.

Jared gives his Tamasheq speech.

Sinsina kow.

"Swearing in."

Sikasso kow.

Dinner in Sikasso.

Blurry volunteers in the kitchen: Michele and Trinh.

Sikasso

2007-09-24T09:07:00.000-07:00

Right now, I'm hanging out at an internet café in Sikasso ville. I arrived here yesterday in the company of eight other volunteers. Tomorrow I'll be going to Koutiala with fellow volunteers Ben and Amanda, where we'll hang out for a day or to to buy stuff for our houses before being installed on Thursday. I'm looking forward to installation, since it means the beginning of my actual service and the end of being shepherded around by the PC. On the other hand, it might end up being a bit anti climatic, after the past week or so.

I've pretty much been hanging out with other PCVs since swear-in on Friday. Friday evening, we had a party at the Pirates club, which went on until the wee hours of the morning. It was really a lot of fun; I haven't really had a chance to let loose since I got to Mali, and spending the night dancing was just what I needed. The day after, we entertained ourselves by swimming in the hotel pool (we spent the night in Bamako in a hotel) and eating as much 'toubab' food as possible (lots of ice cream, chocolate, and burgers- my vegetarianism seems to have gone down the tube for now).

Yesterday morning we left for Sikasso around 6 am, arriving just around 2 in the afternoon. We met up with some of the resident volunteers, Trinh, Michelle, and Jack, and spent the evening walking around, eating, and watching a few movies. Sikasso is the second largest city in Mali, followed by Segou, and then Koutiala. Although I'm not sure how often I'll be coming here, since Segou and Koutiala are both significantly closer, it is nice to have gotten the lay of the land and to have met some more Sikasso volunteers.

Anyway, think that's all I'll write for now. Wish me luck with installation. I'll hopefully be able to update again in a few weeks.

2007-09-19T16:49:00.000-07:00

This evening I watched Singing in the Rain in the refectoire with Emily (a current PCV) and some of my fellow trainees. I used to watch Singing in the Rain my freshman year of college whenever I was feeling homesick. Somehow, seeing Gene Kelly do his rain dance inspires a certain kind of joy in me. Seeing him lose himself to childish leaps and twirls and stomps is a little like losing the part of myself that is so grounded in my worries and fears.

Some of my homesickness has faded in the past week or so. The first few days back at Sinsina were hard again, but sometime in the middle of the week, my bad mood broke and somewhere in there I reached a tentative inner peace about being here, resolving to think about what is at hand instead of how long I've committed to being here or what else I could be doing.

There's a lot going on right now. On Sunday morning I said goodbye to my family in Sinsina. It was the end of a series of goodbyes, first on Wednesday when we had a party with the villagers. The party was attended by a lot of children, and some of the adults who were associated with our families. At the party, we presented some gifts to our families and Bocar, the language coordiator at Tubani So, came by to help with this and to give our families certificates of thanks for hosting us. Afterwards, we had a dance party. My "little girls," as I think of them- my host sisters Nayima, Batama, Ajara, Konimba, and our two neighbor Fatimis- were all very excited about dancing, as was Jeneba. They were especially excited to see me dance, and informed me afterward that I knew how to dance kosebe kosebe (very well).

Friday I took my language test, passing with a score of Intermediate Mid. Saturday, I said goodbye to my host father, Sine Doumbia, since he had to go to Bamako to work for a few days. I gave him a few small gifts- a pack of cards and a drawing book for the kids as well as a snow globe I had bought in the Milwaukee airport before leaving. Satuday evening was pretty low-key, but in a really nice way. After dinner I made tea for the family, which was exciting, since I've watched Malians make tea many times now but haven't gotten a chance to do it myself. Making tea in Mali is something of an art, involving pouring tea from the pot to the cup and back to the pot many times, reheating the tea in-between to mix the tea and the sugar in just the right quantities. The result is a very sweet green tea that is served in small glasses.

Sunday morning goodbyes flew by quickly. I woke up in the morning to my usual routine, going to Kajatu's kitchen hut to get hot water for my bath, eating my bread and peanut butter with tea for breakfast, and cleaning up my room a bit before taking a number of pictures and heading to the school to catch the Peace Corps vehicle back to Tubani So.

At the moment, I'm back at Tubani So, eating copious amounts of chocolate, doing some last-minute training on everything from sex education to chicken raising and waiting for our swear-in ceremony on Friday. We've had a bit more time off lately. Monday afternoon, there was nothing to do so I went off with Jared and Bess, two of the other trainees (soon to be volunteers) on a bike ride to some cliffs that aren't too far from Tubani So. We climbed up to the top to take some pictures and enjoy the view. Speaking of pictures, I put some more up online. You can check them out at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2016383&l=be921&id=10301328.

Homesickness

2007-09-07T06:29:00.000-07:00

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.

M'Pessoba Ferme

2007-08-28T13:09:00.000-07:00

I returned to Bamako yesterday from a five-day visit to the site where I will spend the next two years of my service, M'Pessoba Ferme, or Feremuna. It was an interesting five days, full of meetings, exploration, and a bit of welcome relaxation.

My journey began last Wednesday, when I set off from Tubaniso with my homologue (the person in my community who will help me figure out projects to work on and connect to people in the community), Soulemane Dao, at 5:30 in the morning. The day before, Dao had arrived to participate in the "homologue workshop" where everyone's homologues came to learn about the mission of the Peace Corps and what would be expected of them as homologues. This was business as usual for Dao, who has been acting as a homologue for the past five years. There were two volunteers in my village before me, Jenn (Jeneba) and Michelle (Aissita), and he had also had the opportunity to work with volunteers in another village before this. Luckily, he speaks very good French, so when my broken Bambara isn't good enough (frequently), he can clarify in French.

The journey on Wednesday to Feremuna was fairly uneventful. I boarded a bus with Dao and another volunteer, Amanda Jackson, and her homologue, which took us straight to M'Pessoba (where Amanda is stationed) and then to Feremuna, 5-6 km down the road. Feremuna is the home of the Centre d'Apprentissage Agricole, a three-year agricultural school where Dao works as a veteranarain and a professor. The school, and a large part of the village, is located along a wide dirt road lined with mangoe trees that is immediately off the main paved road from M'Pessoba. My house is at the end of this road, a three-room house with a small yard and a private nyegan.

When we arrived, there was a group of women from the women's cooperative waiting to greet me. Unfortunately, I didn't spend as much time talking with them as I would have liked to in retrospect, but we exchanged greetings and names and talked for a few minutes. My host mother, Djelika, and her husband Drissa were also there, and served lunch to Dao and myself. I spent the afternoon hanging around with my host mother for a while asking questions about the women's cooperative, and then Dao arrived to take me around the village and greet many of the profesors and meet the director of the school (who is technically my supervisor, though I'm not sure how much involvement he'll have in my work).

Thursday, I found myself largely without things to do. I spent part of the morning studying Bambara and thinking of some questions to ask the women in the village about the garden (which Dao had showed me the day before). In the afternoon, I decided to go for a walk alone and see what there was to see, maybe check out the garden by myself again. As I walked towards the garden, I met a number of village inhabitants and was invited to chat for a while. Everyone was friendly, and patient with my elementary Bambara skills. When I arrived in the garden, I ran into Kassoum, Dao's oldest son, who went around the garden with me and told me the names of all the crops being grown. The garden looked pretty well established.

I'm still trying to figure out precisely what my role will be in the community. The previous volunteers helped out in the garden, helped the women's cooperative with cloth dying and soap making, and also helped out at the local maternity and a maternity in a neighboring town weighing children and giving vaccinations (though not the actual needle sticking part). There seems to be an endless number of things I could get involved with.

The next couple of days I spent meeting up with local volunteers Merv and Greg and with Amanda as well. On Saturday we took a trip to Koutiala, a city about 45 minutes-1 hour down the road that has about 100,000 inhabitants. I have a feeling I'll be going down there once every two weeks or so; we have a house rented out in a coupound downtown that we can spend the night in and there is a rather large market and a restaurant or two. We hung out Saturday night and returned to the M'Pessoba area around 1 pm the next day.

Now I'm back at Tubaniso, anticipating going back to Sinsina on Thursday. Most recent news: got one of the other volunteers to cut my hair for me and it is now back to the length it was when I was in Paris, a few inches above my shoulders. It feels good- lighter, and I'm sure it will be much easier to take care of. That's it for now, folks.

Home again home again at Tubaniso . . .

2007-08-19T02:49:00.000-07:00

Just got back to Tubaniso yesterday morning after another week and a half in Sinsina. Things are going well; I'm feeling better settled in and am enjoying haning around with my host family a bit more. I think serious thoughts of going home kind of dissipated earlier this week, and it feels better to be committed to being here. There are still so many challenges ahead that make me a bit nervous, though. In particular, the coming week will be another transition period. We are all being sent out to our sites for a couple of days to take a look at things and meet the people we'll be working with there. I've been assigned to a site in the Sikasso region called Feremuna. It's a small village of about 550 located just off the main paved road between Segou ville and Sikasso ville. There have been two volunteers there before me already, so there are a number of specific projects already in the works for me to help out with, including working with the women's organization to get a bigger well dug for their garden and helping the young men's association with a tree nursury. None of which I have any expertise in, of course, so we'll see how that goes.

This week I'm just supposed to set up my bank account, have some time to work with my local language tutor, check out my living conditions, and meet people in the village. I'm pretty nervous about all of this, since my Bambara skills are still pretty low and being alone in my village without PC staff right nearby to help out feels like a lot to handle. Plus, I'm supposed to get myself back to Bamako with public transportation. However, I will have some help with all of this. Our "homologues," the people in our village who we're supposed to work directly with are coming in to Tubaniso tonight and tomorrow night. Mine is coming tomorrow- he's a veterenarian in the village and thankfully he speaks French. He'll travel back to Feremuna with me on Wednesday.

So, a lot to anticipate coming up. The last week was all pretty good. One of the first nights I was back there was a marriage celebration in the village and I went out dancing with Jeneba. The dances during the marriage begin early in the night with the youngest members of the community. People dance in lines facing each other- often the men in one line and the women in the other, and step forward and back for most of the song. It's not until the end of the night that the bride and groom might show up and dance. In general, in Malian weddings the bride and the groom are not present for the actual marriage celebration- marriage is seen as a union of the two families more than the two individuals. I only stayed at the party until 12:30 or so, however, so I didn't get to see if the bride and groom showed up.

Hm, other highlights of the week: biked into Sanagouroba, a bigger town nearby a couple of times for some exercise, which felt good, helped the little girls get water from the pump and learned to carry water (very slowly) on my head, and finally got my host mother to let me help with a little bit of food preparation/cooking.

Anyway, think I'm gonna wind this up right now. I'm in the process of attempting to upload some photos and short videos to facebook. You can check out my progress at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2015655&l=5da43&id=10301328

Sinsina

2007-08-06T13:07:00.000-07:00

So I'm finally back within reach of internet! It feels good to have some time to catch up with things. We just returned from our homestay villages today. I've spent the last few weeks in Sinsina, a village of about 2000 people to the south of Bamako. The past week and a half has been quite an experience.

We got to Sinsina two Wenesdays ago. We were welcomed as we came into town by a line of men who shot off guns (with blanks) in our honor and a crowd of people who led us to the center of town, outside of the mosque. A group of musicians played Malian music on the balophones (a kind of African xylophone) and we were called to dance with the women of the village. Then we met with the dugutiki, the chief of the village, to offer him kola nuts. He and a number of the village elders made small speeches to welcome us and then we went outside for more dancing and to meet our hosts and be taken to our houses.

My host in Sinsina is Sine Doumbia, a technician at a television station in Bamako. My room is part of a compound where Sine lives with his wife, Kajatu, and seven children and one of his cousins and his wife. It took me quite a while to get everyone's names and associations down, as it's hard to remember unfamiliar names and people tend to come and go a lot. So far, I've hung out the most with Madan, my host brother who is a surly 19, and Jeneba, the wife of Sine's cousin, who is a very sweet and caring woman. Jeneba has five children, Cenigba, Ajara, Batama, Konimba, and Awo, ranging from 2 to 16 in age. Madan has six younger siblings, Ousmane, Drisa, Fatima, Bengay, Nanimba, and Seydou (who is a very cute 6 month old). The day that I arrived they gave me the honorary name of Alamako Doumbia, after Sine's mother who also lives in the compoud. I like my name; somehow it feels like it fits me pretty well, and I assume it will follow me throughout Mali for the next two years.

The training so far has been intense, although part of that was adjusting. Each day we have language training from 8 in the morning to 12:30, and then from 2:30 to 6 or so. I feel as if I've learned an enourmous amount of Bambara in that time, although I really have retained only a small amount so far. In the evenings, I go home and collapse. I eat lunch and dinner with Madan in my room, and for entertainment I'll play cards with the kids or go over and hang out with Jeneba. Everyone gets a ball out of hearing me speak Bambara (or try to speak Bambara) and trying to teach me to say things. The kids especially like playing the game of pointing at things and telling me the word (and watching me forget five seconds later). I learned a number of the body parts the first day through this method.

The first few days in town were pretty rough; I had a terrible bout of homesickness and really wanted to go home. It didn't help that I came down with a touch of something two days in and had some nausea and Mr. D for a day or two. I didn't feel like eating anything and they kept giving me meat (which I haven't eaten for the past year and a half). But I felt a bit better little by little and have been feeling pretty positive the past day or two, though I'm still feeling a bit bowled over by the idea of staying in Mali for the next two years.

It's good to be back in Tubaniso for a couple of days and not feel like everyone is constantly watching me and as if things I'm doing may be culturally incorrect and just to be able to understand everyone. I'm looking forward to collecting myself a bit and thinking about how to be positive and make the most out of my experience when I go back.

Arrived at Last

2007-07-23T13:59:00.000-07:00

So I'm finally in Mali! Been here a few days now. Getting here was a bit of an ordeal. It took over 24 hours of traveling, it's hard to tell exactly how long because of all the time changes and the lack of sleep. We got to the airport in Philly around 2 pm or so on Thursday, and our plane took off around 7- didn't seem like much of a wait, though, because the lines took a while and there were a lot of people around to talk with. The flight was okay, though I didn't sleep at all really. We arrived in Paris around 8 am local time and had about 7-8 hours before our next flight. They had arranged a "day room" for us at a hotel near the airport, a pretty swanky one where they served us a nice breakfast and I watched soap operas in French with my roomie Stephanie. I had really wanted to go into Paris, but PC people strongly discouraged it and even though I almost went with some people, I figured it wouldn't really be worth it since I would just be angsty the whole time about getting back in time and I wouldn't get to see Martine, which was what I really wanted to do in town.

We left Paris around 5 pm local time and arrived in Mali about 5 hours later. The airport was crowded (especially with 81 volunteers) and it took a little while to locate my luggage, but everything was there when I got it. We all drove to Tubaniso, the training facility outside of Bamako in PC vehicles, through the dark. So far I haven't seen much of Mali outside of Tubaniso. There was a whole host of people in the traffic on the way here and by the side of the road hanging out or selling stuff, but we didn't really stop for anything. The sky was so big and full of stars when we got here, it made me feel a bit soothed. I have to say, arriving in the nighttime having not slept for over 24 hours (and having only had about 5 hours the night before due to salsa dancing) didn't really put me in a positive mood when we first arrived. I kind of wanted to get back on the plane . . .

But, here are some positive (and I'm feeling pretty positive right now) highlights of my time here so far: Learning Bambara- we've only had one class, but I'm excited to start a new language. Speaking French- it's amazing how much more confident I feel with my French now than when I was in Paris a few years ago. I was so excited to talk with the stewardesses on the plane, and now with the Malians. I had my language placement test in French today and I've been label "advanced low." The people- they're so friendly and encouraging, and eager to make us feel at home. The mangoes- oh my god you never lived til you tasted a Malian mango.

This afternoon we had a "cultural fair" where we all learned the value of bartering. There were three vendors and a tailor present. One of the vendors was selling ready-made clothes and tried to charge the volunteers about 4 times as much as the clothing was generally worth (according to a current PCV) and succeeded until we were all let in on things. Then he wouldn't take down his price and everyone went to the woman selling cloth instead to buy cloth and then have clothing made- still ended up paying a bit too much, but at least not outrageous (well, compared to the first guy). I had a panya (banya? not sure of the spelling) made- basically a wrap-around skirt- along with a top and a piece of cloth to tie around my head. It's funny, I thought it would seem like a chore to barter, but I think I'm going to enjoy it- if nothing else, it's a fun way of interacting with people. I just need to become better at it and to learn the best price for things (even if it is a toubab, or white person's, price).

I also had my hair braided at the fair- multple braids in rows. It looks really cool, though I'll probably have to take it out after a few days. It's also much cooler temperature-wise. I hadn't realized how much heat my head was retaining.

Hm, other highlights- we had lunch today and ate with our hands, with is the tradition in Mali. You're only allowed to eat with your right hand because people use their left hand when they're in the nyegan (bathroom). I don't think I've quite gotten the hang of the eating with the right hand thing- there was rice all over the place when I'm done. My Malian host family will laugh and laugh at me . . . 'twil be good fun.

We're only spending one more full day here, then it's off to our host villages for training. There are 13 host villages for 81 volunteers, so there will be 5-6 of us or so in each village. They used to send everyone to the same village, but then they figured that this wasn't the best way to help volunteers learn the language and culture and so on. There are villages with people speaking all of the languages we'll be learning (there are 5 local languages and French), and we'll be placed based on what language will be useful in the villages we end up serving in. Most of the training period host villages are around Bamako, I think the farthest is about 2-3 hour drive from Tubaniso.

I'm looking forward to moving to the host village on Wednesday, but I think it will be a whole new thing from what it is here. Here we have electricity, computers, and a staff of Malians who speak English and French and are used to us weird toubabs. I'm still excited, though. Hope things turn out well.

Leaving!

2007-07-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Quick update (very quick). I'm leaving for Philly today (right now!) to begin staging tomorrow. Will be hanging out with my friends Molly from Bryn Mawr and Alissa from FGC in Philly tonight and then staging begins tomorrow. I assume I'll have some sort of access to my email while I'm there and during training, but if anyone wants to reach me via snail mail, my address will be:

Meg Munroe
Corps de la Paix
B.P. 85 Bamako
Mali

Thanks!

FGC Gathering

2007-07-07T19:37:00.000-07:00

This morning, I watched the sun rise over a field in River Falls, WI. It was the end of a week spent at the Gathering put on each year by Friends General Conference, the central governing organization of unprogrammed Quakers. It was the end of a lovely week.
It was also the end of a busy week. I arrived at the campus last Saturday after a seven hour drive with a Friend from Milwaukee Meeting and his daughter. I had connected up with him when I attended Milwaukee Meeting in April. The ride was fairly uneventful, as was my arrival on campus. I registered and moved into the Adult Young Friends dorm, where I discovered that my roommate was a student at Haverford, a happy coincidence. I spent each day this week going to a workshop that I had signed up for on spirituality and activism in the morning and hanging out with Adult Young Friends (Quakers roughly 18-35 in age) in the program in the afternoon and the evening. The theme of this year's Gathering was "And Who is Thy Neighbor?" (or something along those lines), focusing on what we can do to better understand and live in a community with those around us. There were a number of plenaries, presentations by Friends of different backgrounds relating to the theme. The one I found most powerful, I think, was a presentation by two members of the AYF community, one a transgendered young man and the other a woman who lives on a Catholic Workers organic farm. Both of them spoke about their experiences working to reach out to those around them.

I also got the chance to attend a number of other workshops and worship opportunities, including an interest group on chanting on Tuesday and a couple of things focusing on sexuality. Overall, though, I think what made the week great was getting to know those around me. Eveyone was very open and for the most part pretty approachable, and a pleasure to share worship with. I feel like I left the conference with a lot to think about.

Not much time to think about in it, though. I'm leaving for Seattle tomorrow with my parents to go visit my brother and go backpacking with him and my father. We'll also spend a few nights at Quinault Lodge, a lodge on a beautiful lake in the Olympic Penninsula area of Washington that we spent a night at last summer. I really think I'm needing some alone time right now, some time to reflect, but I'm not sure I'll get it. I'm leaving for Philly three days after I get back from Seattle. This is an odd concept to me at the moment, having just come from Gathering. The week seemed to stretch out forever and at times it seemed as if I had never been anywhere else. I think I'm really going to miss having a Meeting in Mali; I'm not sure if any other community of faith could really take its place for me, though I guess it could be good to explore.

Anyway, I'm also friggin tired. I haven't had any sleep since Friday at 9 am. We all stayed up last night to watch that sunrise. I guess I'll write one more update before I go. Crazy, crazy, crazy.

Malimalimalimali

2007-06-28T20:40:00.001-07:00

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!

2007-06-19T15:25:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-06-03T16:02:00.000-07:00

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.

Still in DC, thinking of Mali

2007-05-20T12:15:00.000-07:00

It's Sunday, so I've got some free time on my hands; thought I might start another blog and see how far it goes. I think I've had one or two before that I put a few entries in. I'm sure no one ever read them, though, and I forgot about them rather quickly. However, having a blog could be a good way to keep people updated as to what's going on with me, and to record some of what's going on.

Got my invitation to go serve in Mali with the Peace Corps starting this july (two months from now) about three weeks ago. I've gone through this weird gamut of feelings since then, some related to Mali in particular, but a lot having to do with leaving DC. I came here almost a year ago because, well I'm not sure why- I interned here the summer of 2005 and remember a distinct feeling of being happy to leave for whatever reason. But then sometime senior year at Bryn Mawr, things changed and there seemed to be a lot of good reasons to go to DC. I had been planning to go off to France to teach English, but that plan began to seem less and less practical, money-wise and just for other reasons, such as that I don't really like being the teacher in a classroom setting, something that could definitely get in the way of enjoying that job. And then there was the fact that I wanted a social life after boarding myself up in Canaday Library with a bunch of books for most of senior year. It seemed like DC, where there are a lot of young people interested in social justice issues, a lot of group houses and so on, would be a more likely place to build a healthy social circle than some French country village.

I don't know, it's odd how these choices get made. I think I had some vague idea of what my life would be like here that seemed very idealistic and utopianistic. Now considering Mali, I'm not sure how I feel. I think about it and half the time I think I'm just looking forward to getting back from being abroad and feeling as if I've "seen the world" and I can settle down. Part of me is so tired of leaving places and starting anew; I'm not sure how many more times I can do it.

I had some concept in my mind the summer I was here working at the Smithsonain, I think, that after graduation I would live everywhere for a couple of years- everywhere in the US, maybe go back to France, and then after I had lived everywhere I would decide where the best place was for me. I don't know that I really have the energy for that scenario, however. It occurred to me a few months ago that I should just do whatever feels right. Maybe it's not that important to have lived in California, Washington, Washington DC, Boston, all these places that I had in my mind, if that's not what I want to do. I can always settle somewhere and then move if I feel like I want to move when I want to move.

So I've been feeling a bit conflicted about the Mali invitation because I feel like I could stay in DC and be relatively happy. But I know in the end that I wouldn't be happy if I passed up a chance like this. Is that the right attitude to have, do you think? Is that the kind of feeling that should compell me to go or compell me to stay?

I got a book in the mail yesterday that I ordered a week ago or so, an introduction to the Bambara langugage. Bambara is the most widely-spoken local language in Mali. I don't know if it will be the language that they speak in my village, but I figure it's good to get a head-start on studying it anyway. Things I've learned so far: Bambara is a tonal language, meaning that the meaning of words differs based on how high or low the pitch you articulate them with is. The book said not to focus too much on what word is which pitch, however- rather to just try to imitate the way the instructor speaks on the audio recordings as much as possible.

I hope I have enough discipline to get myself to study this. My French-studying so far has been kind of put on the back burner. I've been listening to news stories on RFI.fr to try to get some listening practice and I bought a book by a Malian author- Le devoir de violence, by Yambo Ouologuem. So far I've made it through the first page (!) with a long list of vocab words that I had to look up multiple times. This relative lack of success at reading it so far has made me think about how I have a hard time getting myself to read French books for pleasure. It occurred to me that one of the reasons I have such a hard time reading in French for pleasure is that I have no deadline to have read the book by and I want to take the time to understand everything. On the other hand, when I read in French for a class, there is generally a deadline and I use this deadline to motivate me not only to get through the book but to tell myself that it's okay to just skip through some parts if I don't understand them, because I get the general sense and it's more important to get the job done.

I was also thinking lately of how my language-learning skill is so centered around the written word. I have a hard time even starting to get a handle on things until I can see things written out. I like everything to have an explanation and to be manifested visually. This could be part of the reason that I have such a hard time with the oral side of language-learning. I think I turn the whole process into a very academic thing; language-learning for me has thus far been largely about understanding a language enough that I can pass this test or that test, or write a paper. I've never really had to use foreign languages as a social tool before, aside from my stint in France. And given my relative shyness, it's not surprising that this part of language has not taken prominence in my mind. Kind of strange, since socializing is what language is all about.

Maybe my time in Mali will help me with this; help me take foreign language-learning out of the textbook context and into the much scarier, fluid, world of the spoken word.