real short

This will be short and probably have lots of typing errors because the keyboard is bad and making my poor fingers hurt and it is hard to find things like punctuation and sometimes when i know where they are i still cant figure out how to make them show up on the screen. But im getting better at this. just in case you are curious, the rteal trick with two finger typing is that you have to use both hands on both sides not just use the right for what you would only use the right for if you were using all your fingers.
My new site is such an incredible improvement. i mean, dont get me wrong its frustrating and i had to come to town today because i was going crazy, but i am looking forward to going back to site and working there. I am hoping to work with children to help them start a youth garden. Im really excited about it and they are really excited about it, but right now we are struggling with finding a space. my one young boy said, really? youll help me grow onions? ive never seen a teenage boy so excited about growing onions.Dont tell them, because they just want a garden of their own that theirmothers dont control, but i have an ulterior motive to show them how much they can really do if they want. my new town is highly educated and fairly well to do - these will be the leaders of tomorrows Mali if they decide that they want to stay in Mali instead of leave and go someplace else.
i promise to put out a really good post within the next two months - I might come back to town next week, or maybe the second week of January, but then we have training and it is going to be crasy.

New site, an introduction

Well, for various reasons, I decided that my stay in Behon was going to be unsustainable, and (miracle of miracles) the Peace Corps allowed me a site change. So now I am in a site towards Burkina Faso (actually I'm basically in Burkina Faso, but I'll get to that later) called Koury. It is going great, so far. Of course, I've only been there a week, but I've already met all kinds more people than I did in all my time in Behon. There is the possibility for me to eat more than just oatmeal, I don't have to traipse through schisto rivers every day, I feel like there could be help forthcoming if I needed it, I'm not afraid to be alone with my homologue, my host family is not embroiled in an escalating civil war, my site doesn't seem to be neglected by the federal government, and I am actually looking forward to going back to site. In general, I'm happy this change got made.

So Koury is on a main shipping road between Mali and Burkina. I think that this is the main source of the difference between Koury and Behon. Nobody (and I'm talking Malian nationals here) goes to Kita unless they are going to Kita - or, I guess, Manantali. And so there is not a very lively flow of ideas into and out of the region. In the Koutiala region, however, there are always people coming through, people who have seen other parts of the world, and even if they haven't seen them, they at least know about them. The world is simply a much bigger place in Koury than it is in Behon, and I think that that means that the future is bigger and broader. Its nice to be working with people who are as much interested in being part of a larger world community as getting things. Not that I'm saying everybody must be connected all the time, but don't want to put my two years into connecting people that don't want to be connected.

Koury is really, really close to Burkina. I accidentally rode my bike to Burkina the other day. Luckily - and I don't know if this is because I am just so pathetic looking or what, but this kind of thing seems to happen to me a lot - the border guards were really, really nice, and I didn't get in trouble at all, and they let me go back home to Mali. But you just have to watch out a little around here, because its pretty easy to accidentally end up somewhere where you ought not be.

So my banking town is Koutiala, which seems to be a pretty nice town. I haven't spent any time there at all, but I have passed through twice, and both times I was impressed. When I told Boo, our driver, and possibly the greatest Malian employed by PC, that I was going to go to Koutiala he was very excited for me. Koutiala is a great town, he said, and they have a bakery! I'm looking forward to finding the bakery. They also have ice cream! A little bit backwoods Malian ice cream, as I understand it, but ice cream none the less. How lucky can a girl get? And apparently Koutiala has the best Malian hospital outside of Bamako, which unfortunately for me, is a huge benefit for me. The other PCVs in the area are also all really enthusiastic and supportive and I am looking forward to tech exchanges and other fun times with them.

My host family in Koury is great. I live with a man and his one wife and their youngest child, and there's some other guy and another boy who live with us, and our maid. Yeah, I have a maid. Kind of weird. She's really sweet. Her name is Adis. She's not a very good cook, but I only eat with the family one meal a day. I think I add a little amusemet to her life, because I am a little incompetent at some things. But I'm learning, and she's helping/letting me learn. She works an excessive amount, and I'm interested to find out exactly what the deal is with her. I need a little more language and a little more cultural understanding before I get to that one, though. My one young man that lives with us, I'm going to have to try to get his picture up here. We are having a t-shirt mis-match contest for our January training, and while his isn't really a t-shirt, the fact that every afternoon he pulls on his soccer fishnets brings me daily joy. His name is Ismael, and he took third in a footrace the other day. I was so proud. The two young boys study very hard and are very smart. We are learning English songs and poems together, so if anybody has any they want to share, I'd appreciate some ideas. It's really funny for me, because by the time a lot of these little songs have made it this far, they are only echoes of the songs as I know them. Their English alphabet song has numbers in it. They liked Jack and Jill, though Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star fell flat on its face. Oh, well, you win some, you lose some.

Here's a question I've been wondering about. This is for American people who live within hearing distance of mosques. Do mosques in America broadcast their calls to prayer? Because I can see how that would definately not go over well in some communities in America. But its such an important part of the daily spiritual cycle here that I don't know how they could not. So if anybody has any insight on that, please do share, because I am interested to know. My new mosques in Koury have Imams that can really sing. Its nice.

Koury is in the Sikasso region which is the region that feeds Mali. So I've gone from peanut land to potato land. I love potatoes. And I'll tell you what, I make a mean potato soup these days. And somehow even though we have the moisture and the good dirt, we aren't too mosquitoey. One of my women's associations is in a village 5 km brusse-fe of Koury. As I was riding there the other day, I realized it was 5 km of solid shea resources. Amazing. The region seems to work well with its local Eux et Forets representatives (Department of Natural Resources) and recognize that there could be money in these trees. There are big, old trees, too. I don't know what that means for their nut production, but there are so many of them that there must be a good diversity of tree ages in the forest, so if the old ones have stopped producing, I think there must be a new up and coming generation available to take its place. USAID is doing a GIS shea project, and I'll just have to get on that.

So, the out of town women's associations: I haven't really figured out what exactly the deal is, but I think that even though in town they speak Bambara, I'm no longer living in a Bambara area. I think this because all my village associations speak Mianka. Which apparently is related fairly closely to Songhai, which I thought was a Mauritania-ward ethnic group so I'm going to have to look into that, but it supposed to be a very difficult language. My homologue says I'll have no problem learning Mianka within the next four months, but he says he doesn't understand a word of it because it is hard. I think he's being optimistic about my prospects. But I laugh because people here are always talking about how PC is different (the word better may be recklessly tossed around every once in a while) because we don't just live in our cities with our air conditioning and indoor plumbing and show up in our white SUVs and speak only French and hire local translators and come and rescue these people from their lives, but here I am and I'm coming in from my big town that has some daily power and pumps, on my bike that cost at least a year's salary and being translated from one local language to the vernacular of the area. And right now I still need somebody to translate my Bambara into Bambara for the person who then translates into Mianka. So that's a little funny. Mianka, though, sounds to me right now more like Chinese than it does Bambara. I am going to focus on Bambara and French, though, for the time being, and then move on to Mianka if I develop any sort of competence in those two.

I'll try and get my thoughts a little more organized for the next time around, but it may be a while between posts now that I can more easily stay in site.

to Julie

Hi Julie - I read your recent comment.  If you get a chance to see the movie Freedom Writers, it also is pertinent to this whole topic!

That's my Kelly - she's a profound one!    

I talked to Kelly today. She has moved sites and will probably have less access to the internet, so it may be a little while before she can add to her blog.

She is living in Kouri (or Koury), on the road to Burkina Faso,  now, and sounds very happy with the switch. She'll have lots to tell us next time she gets a chance.    

The Moon

11.16.2008
The Moon
I was talking with one of the other PCVs the other day and she mentioned something about Mali that I find really fascinating. We were talking about the moon. The man in the moon. In Mali, they don’t see a man in the moon. They see a woman carrying wood on her head. So I looked at the moon, and tried to see either a man in it or a woman carrying wood on her head. I only see a bunny rabbit. A squashed bunny rabbit who looks like he’s trying to escape and got a bunch of fun balls dropped on him. Once I had a guy in my boat who told me I should retire from raft guiding and become an air traffic controller because people who can see imaginary things in rocks and clouds make good air traffic controllers. He was on honeymoon with his mail order bride from Russia. She was really pretty.

Elections

11.11.08
Earlier this week was the American presidential election, and the buzz in this part of the world has been pretty incredible to experience. It has led to what I think are very important conversations about tolerance and diversity and democracy more generally.
Mali, since its independence from France in the early ‘60s, has been help up as a fairly model fledgling democracy. There is a minimal amount of civil strife and the lack of violent governmental overthrow is truly astounding for this part of the world. Leaders are democratically elected and there is a well-established federal-regional-local hierarchy.
The Peace Corps gives us Newsweek. Six-week-old Newsweek, which I don’t understand at all. It’s the international edition, and I don’t imagine that Newsweek sends out six-week-old international editions to ex-pats all around the world. But also, let me tell you, Newsweek International Edition is Funny, with a capital F. It is clearly published for a different audience than the edition I’m used to. An audience with more money. Which I think is funny, because in my head when I am thinking of the kind of people who buy Bentleys and keep Rolexes in trust for the next generation, they aren’t reading Newsweek, but the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker. But, there are lots of good pictures in Newsweek, and maybe they, too, like pictures in their news magazines. Pictures with captions that make sense. And then at the end there is a section called “for people richer than you’ll ever be” and it is full of fancy stuff you can buy for your house and fancy places to eat and stay – I love it.
Anyway, six weeks ago, Fareed Zakaria wrote an article about freedom, democracy, and land liberalization. It’s a good article. I would recommend reading it. He says, “Holding elections is a defining feature of any liberal democracy.” But the article is about how that is not really good enough. That there are plenty of other elements that go into making a democracy and making it work. He focuses to a large extent on land reform. I’m interested in attitudes. Attitudes that could drive a nation to hold elections or reform their land tenure system. And also attitudes that underlie the way citizens treat each other, their children, and their futures. Respect, creativity, tolerance, ambition, compassion, and responsibility.
I think maybe the importance of these attitudes is easily overlooked by us Americans because they are so deeply ingrained in our collective psyche that it is difficult for us to imagine being without them. I’ve been having a difficult time with these conversations with the brussey village Malians I associate with about democracy because these fundamental attitudes that I take for granted don’t exist here.
School can seem a drag, but every day an American student goes to school it is because America as a collective believes that each individual not only has a future, but has the potential to make his or her future matter. And then when he goes to school and sees that there is more to his life than just eating and sleeping and Young American Citizen Doe realizes that there is a greater world out there than just the one he can immediately see, the ideals because of which America works are reaffirmed. In Mali, children don’t all go to school. Especially not girls. In part it is because feeding a family takes so much time-intensive physical labor that everybody has to help out – everybody goes to the fields to farm, and then the girls help prepare the meal – but mostly it is because it doesn’t occur to uneducated parents that there could be a life for their children other than the one they are living. And schooling is not a requirement for that life. And then without going to school, the younger generation doesn’t get the opportunity to develop the creativity to imagine a changed life for themselves or their children. And without the creativity to come up with new ideas they never develop the ambition to strive for them. In America we go for the opposite of that; in America we cultivate possibility.
One of the things that limits the cultivation of possibilities in Mali is that there is very little variety. Every day is the same, every meal is the same. In a lot of these villages, I am the first white person that many of the children have ever seen. It doesn’t make any difference to the really little ones, but when they get to be about 2 ½ or 3, they begin to see that I look different from everybody else in their world. Now, in America, diversity is celebrated, and besides that, it is unavoidable. But in Mali, differences are not celebrated or encouraged. Differences just don’t exist, and if they do, they are suppressed. So instead of reacting to this strange person who looks different from them with interest or curiosity or even suspicion, little children react to me with terror. They scream and cry and run away. And the reason this is so disappointing is because the first opportunity these Malian children have to see a way of life other than the one they are living is so traumatic that it re-emphasizes naturally conservative tendencies and makes them even more intolerant of diversity. And, in contrast, just being able to walk down the street and see people of different colors – heck, people with different hair colors – opens up a world of possibility to young Americans. Because everything is not always the same, and the world is not a static place.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that it is easy for us to overlook all the great things that America does have going for it, even and especially when the country is angry, confused, poor, and struggling. But it is as much the intangible things that set the first world apart from the third as the tangible ones, and it is also the intangible things that are the hard ones to figure out how to share.
As far as our elections go, I think there is a little confusion about exactly who Obama was elected president of. Because if I were getting all my world news from Malians I would be pretty sure that he had been elected Lord King of All Creation for all Time. And the idea that he might focus on America over Africa is also one that is a tough sell out here. Paolo, down the street, puts up Malian billboards about Obama, and in the latest, Paolo is predicting an end to terrorism in the world. I fear that when the world discovers that he is going to be the president of America, and that he is going to preside in America’s interest, there is going to be a little disappointment.

new address for Kelly

We just got a message from Kelly with a new address.

Kelly Jones, PCV

Corps de la Paix

BP 71  

Koutiala

Mali, West Africa

Kelly said she will move into her new site on Thursday, Nov. 20. She has been staying in Kita lately, but will go back to her village with the P.C. truck to pick up things. Then on to Kouri, which is on the road into Burkina Fasso.