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Welcome to My Peace Corps

So let me tell you about Koury – I promised you’d get a good one, so I hope this is it. Koury is a town of 10,000(? I don’t believe that). It’s a highway town, like Colorado Springs. We get a lot of big busses (and big trucks, and little trucks, and private vehicles) going from Bamako to Burkina Faso and back again. The main drag has electricity – sometimes. The official line is six hours of electricity starting at six o’clock, but sometimes six o’clock is more like seven (but it is critically important that the electricity is on by seven, because sometime after seven is when Marina, our French-dubbed Brazilian soap opera comes on) and I get up forty or so times in the night and I’ve seen the electricity still on at four in the morning. So I don’t know if the guy who is supposed to turn it off just sometimes doesn’t, or if maybe it lasts longer if lots of people aren’t using it. So, electricity, and also our main drag is paved. Like, real paved! With real asphalt! And (perhaps no winter helps) it is in better condition that a lot of streets in COS. On market day, Monday, its pretty scary on the main drag, because even though there are two market places, one of which is (looks) brand new and beautiful, the market takes place right on the street. I don’t think we’ve had any mortal market day accidents since I’ve been in town, but the trucks (especially the gas trucks) don’t always bother slowing down, even if there are five bazillion people including little children in the street. In our market you can find almost anything you would want. You cannot, however, find popcorn. Boo. They tell me you can find that in Koutiala, but I have not found it there, either. I will keep looking. Sam taught me how to make it without a popper. She’s so handy!

The town is chest-deep in schools. It could just be that I live in the district where all the schools are and so it seems like there are more than there really are, but there are at least four. Just right in my area! Its actually a little frightening and disconcerting to be there at the beginning of the school day. The children all line up in line and march around with their tiny little bare feet saluting things and singing (patriotic?) songs. Then they all shout slogans. Its a lot like videos I’ve seen of communist Chinese schoolchildren. But I don’t know what they are really saying or singing about or anything like that. Then they all go play soccer, and only afterwards do they go to the classrooms. I don’t know if American school children get as much vacation as these guys do, but if they do, then I think I’d like to be a teacher! We also have school in Koury from Tuesday to Saturday, because Monday is market day. There are two theories on this. One is that the children have to work at the market. The other is that the surrounding villages all send their children to Koury to go to school, and that Monday is the only opportunity that families have to see each other. I think it is a combination of the two.

But the schools seem to be good – the town is very highly educated. Almost everybody speaks French (at least a little), a lot of people read, a lot of people can do math, and there is an understanding and a sense of importance of extra-Koury affairs. Let me qualify this. This is my little community within Koury that I see this in. Obviously, though I doubt there are 10,000 people, most of the town I do not know and do not associate with and there may be a different Koury that I don’t even know about.

My host family is really a mother, her son, and another boy about his age who is from the country but living at our place to go to school. There is another guy who lives with us, I guess just a lodger. There is something not quite altogether normal about that guy. He has these fits. Sullen fits. The other day he was mad at me because I wouldn’t give him my coffee and go buy him bread, so he started a fight between my chicken and the alpha rooster. My chicken, of course, being weak and pathetic, lost the fight and proceeded to die. And my family was in Bamako at a wedding at the time and I had a dead chicken. Now, I’m your regular ordinary, run-of-the-mill suburban Coloradan, and I have to admit I had no idea what to do with a dead chicken. I really didn’t want to gut it myself, and don’t think I would have done a good job. I was also a little worried because I think that you should not eat things that died of natural causes, except losing a chicken fight isn’t really a natural cause, so I got over that worry and decided it was probably safe to eat and gave it to the neighbors who were upset about it because it was dead but not bled and they didn’t understand why I was giving them a dead chicken and I’m not sure really all that went down, but it was a rather unpleasant experience. And the poor chicken was so scrawny he probably didn’t feed very many people.

My host brother is named Ismael, but he’s called Sumaila. He’s an eighth grader and he intends to go to medical school. He has an older brother who is currently in medical school in Abijan. Right now (watch out, Carl) he plans to graduate from high school and go to America for medical school where he will live with Mary and marry Marie. I told him that he is going to have to study English very, very hard if he wants to go to medical school in America, so we speak English together. In Mali they learn by rote. So if you say some key words they all repeat back the same dialogue to you. Kind of like if you get an American of a certain age who went to Catholic school you can say “Gallia est divisa...” and they will rattle off some Caesar without necessarily knowing what it means. My favorite is if you say “bus” or “autobus” Sumaila does this dialogue about being on the wrong bus and trying to decide if he should get off or go to the main bus station downtown. I think maybe medical school in America is not in the cards for the boy, but his French is good, and he will do well. The eighth grade science program is pretty good, and he likes it.

The other boy is a seventh grader named Zumana. We call him Zu. He may in fact be the best thing that Mali has produced in several generations. He is so cheerful and a good worker, and enthusiastic about everything. He is much smaller than Ismael but makes up for it in a radiant personality. He is going to be a teacher. The seventh grade science book is a little more chaotic than the eighth grade one, and he doesn’t like science right now, and I don’t blame him. My favorite thing about Zu is this: he plays pick up soccer every afternoon, so about four o’clock he goes into his room and puts on his soccer outfit, which is a pair of shorts and a pair of fishnet stockings. I can’t get over the stockings. And I try not to laugh, because soccer is a very serious undertaking, and these are very special soccer socks, but I can’t really help myself. It’s just too much. Zumana and Ismael make me want to be a PCV in Koury.

My host mother is Haoua. Ben, the other Koury PCV said of her, “she’s not really very jolly.” Sometimes I am afraid of her, and sometimes I think she hates me, but what can you do? I do my best. She is involved with a national association of women’s associations making shea butter. She also seems to be involved in several other women’s associations. But I am confused. And every time I try to become less confused I become more confused. We have one association that meets every Tuesday – and I hate it because there is always lots of angry shouting – and I thought at first that was the shea association, then I thought it was an association that had something to do with a mill that some women’s association owns, but now I think they are a community literacy group. The mill, though, is a point of contention between me and the women of Koury that I sincerely hope is going to be cleared up when my boss comes next week. I think that they want me to work at it. And I am not going to work at the mill, because that would serve no one. They do that just fine on their own. But I don’t want to put a bad light on my host mother, she is a little intimidating, and I certainly wouldn’t want to meet her alone in a dark alley, but for all her brusqueness she has been invaluable to me in Koury and I am so grateful to have her and wouldn’t trade her for another host mother.

Adama is my host father, but he is a government official in Bamako so we don’t see him very often. When he is in town its a little weird. It’s like he holds court. People come to him with petitions, he sits there and they give him bags of rice or beans and grovel around at his feet. And then we have to spend hours picking bugs and rocks out of the beans. But I think its a pretty good use of five hours if you are going to be eating those beans for dinner tomorrow. I think that Adama is the marriage of the old and the new Mali – he is participating in modern democratic governance (?) but there is some kind of older, deeper, tribal fealty going on there, too.

We used to have Adis in our household. She was our maid. And she was my best Malian friend. She might have been my only Malian friend. But she got fired over Seliba. Being fired over Seliba is like being fired on Christmas Eve. There was a big hooha, and I’m really not sure what happened, but there was something about her stealing the salt money to get her hair done. But now the story is that her dad threatened to cut her throat if she didn’t come to Burkina Faso immediately. And then they lean down and say, “He drinks alcohol.” And everybody nods with serious faces. But whatever happened, Addis is no longer with us. And I had just said goodbye to one PC friend and was saying goodbye to another, and had had a very frustrating day not communicating with anybody at all, and I had thought I had seen a two-headed donkey but it turned out to just be two one-headed donkeys, and I was coming down with a cold when this all happened, and it was very tragic for me. It was a lot more tragic for her, I bet. So we’ve been without household help for a while, and let me tell you, things have kind of gone to hell a little bit! (I mean, its just a little dirty and the family only eats porridge for dinner every night – I actually make my own dinner, anyway.)

I have two homologues (counterparts). Neither of them understands why I am there or what I am going to be doing or their roles in helping to facilitate that. And I have neither the language nor any answers for them. One is another frightening lady – who I’m trying to crack with lots of short visits – who I think is the leader of the campaign to get me to take over operation of the mill. Yesterday we had lunch together and she said, well, I’ll see you this afternoon at the mill, and I said that I would not be going to the mill, and she was flabbergasted. The other is the BLM officer of the area. It’s not really called BLM, but that would be the equivalent bureau in the States. As far as I can tell, if you are a Malian BLM officer, you are responsible for working an average of four hours per month. So we sit in the shade and drink tea. This one is double trouble because not only does he not know how I fit into the picture, I can’t figure out how his bureau fits into the picture. And he’s in Bamako for the month, so he won’t even be there for my site visit for us to figure it all out.

But maybe it’s okay because my pet project isn’t really going to deal directly with either of these two counterparts. We have a great porch and a TV that works pretty well some of the time, so we are the place that my little community within the community watches Marina and soccer. I hang out with a lot of young people every evening. And they and I are excited about the prospect of building a children’s garden. There is a community garden in Koury, but its a highly sought-after commodity. Koury is very urban and commercial for a Malian town, and there is not much space in town where people can grow their own vegetables. So all the community garden spaces are taken, and the only way to get one is to buy one off of someone who no longer wants it, and it is expensive. So the children have no opportunity to garden on their own. So they want to be able to grow things (for some reason, they really want to grow onions) and I want them to build something tangible themselves. We haven’t started on this project yet because it is vacation from school and a lot of the kids have gone back to their own villages, but I am hoping to learn about starting community gardens at our training in January and then we’ll see what we can do.

The other two lights of my life these days are my kittens. They came with the house. I would not say that I am a cat person, I am just a my cats person. They are a boy and a girl, and their names are Whiskers and Tiger (which I think Sam hates and wants me to change to Mickey and Minnie), but they are called Fat Frances and Elegant Emeline. They are also called Handsome Hal and Sissy Sally. They are so funny I almost can’t even handle it. They spend a good deal of their energy hunting each other. That is why Tiger is named as he is, because he has stripes and when they were really little he was the only hunter, and Whiskers just got hunted. And Whiskers is so named because she stuck her head in the fire and burned off half her whiskers. They are starting to grow back, but she is still a little lopsided. Tiger actually had his first kill the other day. He got a frog that jumped into our house. It was good of him to do – keep the vermin from taking over – but it was a little revolting to listen to him chewing up the little frog skull. And apparently it was a little revolting to him, too, because he spent the rest of the night sick and barfing. I felt so bad for the little guy – he was in such distress. He just sat in his bed looking miserably at me saying, why did you do this to me? And Emeline, since she became a player, is not really so nice and kept jumping on him, and he would just look at her with big, sad eyes. She also is really demanding when they sleep, and its a good thing that Tiger is so easy going, because she just arranges him however she wants him to be and then drapes herself on him. And then also, going back to the frog, I was nervous because I thought that if it was making him puke like that then maybe it was a poison frog, but he didn’t die. So now I have kittens, and they really are so nice to have around, because it is a chore just to be awake in Mali, and at least with them they are never judging me or laughing at me when I am trying my hardest or frustrated with me because I don’t understand or expecting anything from me that I cannot or will not give them. And they love me and cuddle with me and make me laugh. Uh, oh, I’ve fallen in love.

The other day we went to visit an Ajja who had just gotten back from Mecca. I got really worked up about appropriate clothing for the occasion, because it seemed a pretty big deal to me. So worked up, in fact, that I momentarily forgot that I was in Mali and in Mali ankles show all the time. I’m not sure all that we talked about, but I know we discussed that she wasn’t allowed to sleep, the fact that there weren’t really that many black people there, that Japanese people are very short, and then the cost of staples in Mecca. Which makes sense, those are important things – we must sleep and we must feed our families. And we saw tourist photos of her in front of Mecca backdrops. Which were funny, but amazing. I know I’m not eligible to go there and see it for myself, but it looks incredible. The volume of people is just astounding. I learned some special blessings on the way over, and they were very well received, and I did a good job of keeping my hair covered, but I could never be a well-covered Muslim woman because my ears need their freedom. But she looked very happy and content.

So every day I have some new question about Mali. Today the question of the day is why Malians think it is a good strategy to ride their bikes with their knees akimbo. Now, I hear you saying, Kelly, you clearly don’t know what akimbo means if you think you can put your knees that way, but I do, and they do. I don’t know how they do it, but I see it, and it seems horribly inefficient and uncomfortable to me, but that is how they ride their bikes. Very strange.

Also, I’d like to go ahead and maybe not reverse my position, but temper it a little, on Malian food. My host mom (even though they only get porridge for dinner) makes a wicked good tigedigena for lunch, which is Bambara for peanut butter sauce. And – brace yourself – cabato is really good. Its to, but it isn’t made with millet, which I have decided is the problem. I even eat slimy green to sauce with reckless abandon these days. And I eat papaya like as if they didn’t taste like baby vomit. I really am becoming a malimuso, which is my host mother’s favorite joke to make.

TABASKI

My hands smell like mint, garlic, lime, lavender, and organ. I learned that there’s a big difference between eating a chicken you once knew and a goat you’ve been fattening, particularly if you were too dumb to figure out that’s what you were doing until, oh, yesterday. I think that everybody should take part, at least peripherally, in the butchering of their dinner one time, but then I was set to cutting up warm organs with a knife suitable for spreading butter only if it were warmed, which I think a lot of people ought to avoid. I found that lungs are by far my least favorite of said organs and blood removes henna. I learned that guts make up the bulk of an animal and that once his innards have been removed even the biggest strongest meanest goat looks a little pathetic. I make blessings in gibberish, but in Koury there is enough familiarity with learning language that the intention is understood and even the bungled efforts bring smiles. Old ladies see my feet, touch my shirt, grab my hands, saying “I be ke malimuso” – you are becoming a Malian woman. “When you go home you can cook goat meat and peanut powder for your mother and she will be so proud!” And then it really starts: She can cook bashi, too! And tigedigena! Don’t forget sagasaga. Oh, I know, she can cook yassa! Yassa – onion sauce – wouldn’t go over well at my parents’. Yassa – onion sauce – doesn’t actually go over that well with the tender guts of PCVs.

PS and then, several days later, I learned that saga aren’t goats, they are sheep, and that answered some other questions about why we sacrificed goats instead of sheep. The answer being that we didn’t. I just can’t tell the two apart.

12.26.08

SOME LIZARDS IN MALI ARE POISONOUS, BUT I SURE HOPE NOT ALL OF THEM

We’re having a little lizard population boom. At least it sure seems like there are a lot more lizards around now than there were. But maybe its like how in your first season rafting every once in a while you are going along chatting, joking, having a good time, and all of a sudden, “Everybody hold on!” because it all looks the same, but then seven years later they could blindfold you and turn you about and plop you down randomly and you could still tell them exactly how many bends until the next riffle because it no longer all looks the same. Maybe I’m starting to learn how to see Mali.

12.27.08

RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL

So Addissi came back! I don’t really know what happened, but she just climbed off the bus and here she is! Who the heck knows, not me, for sure!

I’ve been having a lot of conversations with my host brothers that I wouldn’t really know how to have in English with another American, much less in Bambara-French with a Malian. We were talking about Nelson Mandela the other day, and about why he was in jail for so long. Ismael looked at me and he said, “So white people used to be bad and now they are good?” I still don’t know a good response to that. I said that there were some bad white people but there also were good white people and that there are good and bad black people and good and bad people of every color. And then, in the transition of the century, he told me that he had heard that Japanese people are very small. I’m not sure why that’s such a hot topic in Koury these days.

1.05.09

KOURY’S MARKET IS DANGEROUS

Our poor maid seems pretty sure that one of these days I’m going to be killed at the market. And I think she may be right. I don’t know where these donkey carts come from, but they all seem to be gunning right for me. There was a kid in my Italian class who thought our textbook should be called Purtroppo, No. I think our market should be called Aminetta! Wotoro!

1.06.09

THIS IS HOW TO RESUSCITATE A CHICKEN

So we have this hen and she started out with seven chicks. Then two died and there were five. Then another died and there were four. Then another died and there were three. Then the fourth one mysteriously came back to life. But then it almost died again. And what I’m trying to get to here is what you do if your chicks almost freeze to death during the night. Chicks apparently need to stay very, very warm at night. But if you wake up in the morning and your chick is on death’s doorstep, the first thing you do is you hold it in your hand for a while and see if it comes back to life like that. If that doesn’t work, you put it on the ground near the fire with an upside down bucket with a hole in it over top with the hole pointed toward the fire. And then you hit the bucket with a stick to try and trick it into thinking its hatching. And then if you have to go to school it stops being hit with a stick because your Peace Corps Volunteer is not totally convinced that an upside down bucket with a hole in it pointed towards the fire has that much of a resemblance to an egg and she’s a little confused why that would bring it back to life anyway, and she thinks that if she were a hypothermic chick she wouldn’t want anybody hitting with a stick the bucket she was trapped under, anyway, but she checks on it every once in a while. And then she goes off to do some work and when she comes back it won’t be quite back to life, but it also won’t be nearly as dead as it used to be. And then a little while later if somebody accidentally kicks over the bucket the chick will miraculously have come back to life! So that’s how you do it!

This morning (while the miracle was busy at work under the bucket) I went to the women’s garden to draw plans of their broken irrigation system so that when I go to Bamako hopefully someone I can understand can explain to me how it is supposed to work. And just by chance I happened to come upon the annual fish. What I mean by that is that one day a year, everybody in the surrounding area is allowed to fish in the brick-making pond. So when I got to the garden, there were men all over the place. I asked what was going on, and they told me they were going to fish. I asked if they were going to fish soon and they told me in the afternoon. Then, about half an hour later (it is, oh, about nine o’clock in the morning now, which everybody in Mali also considers morning, and not afternoon) the fishing was about to begin. I could tell because everybody had taken off their shirts and shoes and rolled up their pants and were standing eagerly at the edge of the pond, with nets and baskets in hand. I accidentally missed the actual start, because I was talking to this Bobo guy who didn’t speak Bambara and could not conceive of a white person who didn’t speak French, and despite the fact that every other sentence I said was, if you speak quickly I can’t understand you, so please speak slowly, spoke to me in very, very rapid French. I also find that Bobo people stutter a lot more than Bambara people. So I was talking to him, and all of a sudden everybody started shouting and ran into the water. There were people all over the place, throwing nets, dropping baskets, little boys with mud on their faces, throwing fish to each other. An old lady hunted frogs, throwing them on shore, where her grandkids hacked them dead with machetes. Some of the fish were no bigger than my little finger. Some were as big as my whole hand. No brick makers made bricks today. The lady gardeners shook their heads and tsk-tsk’ed, but I’m not sure why. I guess the fishing went on until sunset, but I had a nearly dead chick to go check on. I did ask about the fishing on the way home – do they do this every year? Yeah, but I’m so rich that I don’t need to fish; so do you want to marry me?

NB Number four died again the next night, and didn’t come back alive again. I guess that was a one-time miracle.

1.08.09

WHO AM I?

This is something funny that I don’t think I’ve mentioned. And if I have, its so funny to me that I’ll mention it again. But my town thinks I’m Korean. My homologue told everybody so. I heard him say to someone who asked about America once, “No, she works for the American Peace Corps, but she’s Korean.” I don’t know why. Korean Save the Children is active in our town, so maybe that’s why. But if you put me and a Korean from Save the Children together, we don’t really look the same. Except, come to think of it, they speak English and not French, and I speak English and not French (very well), so maybe that is it.

Not speaking French very well, I describe my language learning experience here as linguistic bipolar syndrome. Sometimes I feel so hi because I am really understanding, and sometimes I feel so low, because I don’t have a clue. The best example is this one night when I understood so much of what was going on in Marina, and then the news came on and I was understanding everything! The president (our president) went on a trip, and he went to Kabul and Baghdad, and he talked to someone, and then someone threw their shoe at him. And that’s when I went from hi to low. Because that’s just rediculous. I clearly did not understand anything. George Bush probably wasn’t even on a trip in the Middle East. He was probably vacationing in Texas. And maybe Cheney was there and they were playing horse-shoes. Man, I’m never going to learn this stupid language. I hate French. But then they showed the clip, of someone throwing their shoe at the president! I am the queen of the world. I am so good at this language, in fact, I love French so much that I am going to vacation in Paris and talk to people. Ne kungolo a ka nye kojugu.

Thats what the inside of my head is like in Mali.