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.