Change is in the air

Well, things began to go terribly wrong in Mali, and I am writing now from Colorado Springs. Well, things went wrong for me, anyway. I went to our doctor with what I thought was a cold, which I still think was a cold, and was subsequently diagnosed with a condition that is incompatible with PC service. Well, the condition I was diagnosed with is incompatible with life, but luckily that was a bogus diagnosis. And I'd like to congratulate my brother, the newly minted Dr. Jones, for being the first to make the correct diagnosis, and for making sure that diagnosis was one (a) compatible with life in the short term and (b) completely curable.

So after the initial diagnosis, I had the opportunity to go down and spend a couple weeks in the new Regional Medical Office in South Africa, and that was fantastic, and I'll tell you about that later. And then I came straight home. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. It was a shock. A very unexpected shock, especially for a healthy 27-year old. But so it was.

I've been home for almost a month now, and I haven't updated my blog, even though I keep fielding veiled hints and outright questions. There are a couple reasons for this. Making the adjustment has been hard, in different ways than I expected it to be, even in the few days I had to consider coming home under these circumstances before I actually flew. I expected to be cold; I expected to miss the thrill of misspeaking languages all day long. I expected to be shocked by the over-consumerism, by the waste and by ignorance. But I haven't been. They say that will come, but for now, I appreciate so much of America, and I am appreciating the base that leads to these issues: that people are always striving for better, that people are free to express an opinion. And when I woke up to a dusting of snow the other day, I was nothing but excited. What I didn't originally expect was that I would come back here without that extra year to think about my plan, to start making connections and sending out letters and resumes and have an idea about what I would do. I didn't expect to be living in my parents basement because I have no money and am rejected from three jobs a day. I simply wasn't expecting to jump into this with no warning. Its kind of depressing, but I know that just means I haven't figured out what my new opportunities are, that in ten years I'll be able to look back and say, well, at least it meant I was able to do this...

But it is the other reason I have put off writing that is the really tough one. It is because I want so badly to be able to write one of those flowery, tear-filled, heart-wrenching celebrations of my time in the Peace Corps. But I can't. I just don't have those kinds of good things to say about Mali, and I really don't have those kinds of good things to say about the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps is a great idea. And it has so many good people that have been and are involved in it. But I just feel that JFK, Sarge Schriver and the crew would be saddened to see the ego of the Peace Corps, to see how badly their five-year-plan has failed, to see the support that could be that isn't, to see that forty years in Mali without us having learned how to communicate our message is celebrated as a great accomplishment. There were obviously some great things about my service. I learned so much and met so many people and saw something I never would have seen otherwise and will never see again. There are things about the last year I would change in the blink of an eye, there are other things I don't think I'd want to change at all, and that the price might have been worth it. I hope that with time and the perspective I will gain in that time I will be able to articulate those ideas fully, but for right now, I can't say what I wish I could, and therefore have not said anything at all.

But so, yes, now I am back, no longer in the Peace Corps, and it has been nothing but thrills and giggles since I've been here. My immediate future is filling up nicely. Next week I'll start a yoga teacher training program with my old teacher at my old studio, which I am very excited about. I apply for dozens of jobs a week, and even though I'm not getting them, it is interesting and inspiring to see all the possibilities out there. It's great to be back with my friends here, and I miss my friends there, but you know what this means? It means I don't have to miss a single Christmas Cookie season (I had put last year's in the freezer before I left)! So you Mali PCVs expect a box sometime soon! And I've already written the 2012 winning Pillsbury Bake-Off recipe (unfortunately I missed the entry deadline for the 2010 Bake-Off - I am learning patience). So maybe I have already found my opportunities, and I now my job is just to watch them unfold.

And for those interested, I have included an important educational video, which will hopefully help to eliminate some of the confusion. Provided I can make the link work. I don't know how to embed this in my blog, so I just put in the link, and also there is no sound, so just watch, and you will learn what you need to know. Very educational, if I do say so, myself!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUO0JyTjSSA

And once my stuff gets here from Mali, I have some other things to share, so hopefully (fingers crossed) in the next couple months I will be able to post some other interesting things.

Peace Corps

I believe my mother read Monique and the Mango Rains, which happens to take place pretty close to my site. I have not read it, however rumor has it that it is a pretty inaccurate description of life in Mali. So much so that I don't know anybody who has actually been able to finish it, it is so bad. I have here, though, two titles of other books that come very highly recommended. They may not be as geographically proximal to my experience, but it sounds like they are much more realistic to what Peace Corps in West Africa is really like. There is another one about fish farming, something to do with River in the title, but we can't remember that one. NB: I have read neither of these.

Village of Waiting by George Parker/Packer (we didn't have this one and the last name is questionable)

Nine Hills of Nambonhaha by Sarah Erdman (the last name is right on this one, but I couldn't read my own handwriting, so the name of the village might be wrong. Whoops.)

Look, it's me and Heath. We so pretty. This isn't my picture, it is Caitlin's.

So, yes, the new stage has been here for almost a month! I can't believe it, and I'm sure they can't either. They are really great - a lot of fun to be around. They are working hard and learning Bambara, French, Fulfulde, Dogoloso and Tomokan like its their job. Which it is. Because we're the most fun sector, we are also growing gardens. Their gardens are doing really well. We planted rice sack gardens a week or so ago, and they are doing sort of well. One or two of them are doing really well. Mine are doing great! Except we seem to be having a tomato rot thing going on, and a caterpillar problem. Boo caterpillars. But I'm growing container potatoes, which is fantastic, and they are really starting to come up now! I'll describe the process in detail sometime, because it is amazing. But I feel it deserves some pictures, and it is raining outside right now, so I'm not going to go out and take them. Later, though.

That's not me, it's Moussa and Audrey. But apparently all the other old pictures of the rice sack gardens are in my camera, which is in my hut, which is not only through the rain, but on the other side of the mudroad that in the dry season is the driveway into Tubaniso. Moussa is a great gardener, exect that he keeps burning all our little lettuce seedlings with rabbit manure. But see the little bag? I planted lettuce in that and we are letting it go to seed, but it is huge!

Hippos (=Mali in Bambara)

This is one of the Hippos we saw in Manantali.

You can't really tell, maybe, but she has two wee bebes behind her. We kept our distance.

And have I mentioned that, yet? That "mali" is the Bambara word for "hippopotamous?" And "bamako" means "crocodile river."

Long time coming

I see it has been a couple months since the last time I posted on this blog. In fact, I was chatting with Ryan the other day, and he very pointedly said, I see you haven't posted anything new on your blog... Well, I've been meaning to sit down and write a really nice entry, but it's been a busy time, and now it's been so long since I've written anything that I lose my momentum after just a little while. So instead of writing you a really nice entry, I'm just going to give you a really quick overview. But there is good, good news. My mother tried to teach me how to resize photos a little while ago, and I didn't really learn, but then necessity forced me to really learn it afterall. So now I know how to resize photos, and that will make it much easier to upload them. So I will do that sometime.

I did, indeed, go to America, and it was fantastic. America really is a great country. And I'm not only talking about the concrete and the steel, though that is a good thing, too. It was really crazy while I was home - had to graduate people, marry other people off, and drive all around the country and then the state. And I had to go to Kennywood. Which was fantastic. I went on almost every single rollercoaster and didn't even cry once!

But now I've been back in Mali for over a month. Wow, I didn't even realize that. Good for me. And I've been busy here, too, even though some of you think, yeah right, all you do these days is be online. Well, yeah, there's been a lot of being online, but that is because I have set up shop at Tubaniso. You see, our new trainees are coming in tonight. Alyssa said this morning "I couldn't sleep last night. It was like the night before Christmas and all I could think was 'Santa is bringing me friends!'" So we are excited about them getting here, but it turns out that organizing and preparing for a training like this is a HUGE ordeal, and we have been working our little fingers and other things off since I got back from America. Hopefully we are ready for them. And if we aren't, hopefully they are forgiving.

I did get to go back to my site for about a week during all this, and it was nice to be back. It actually wasn't great, because our well ran dry. A manye dat! There was still water in town, just not in our concession. I went with Adissi and Abi to go get water, because we had to go to the neighbors and pull it out of their well and put it on our heads and bring it back and put it in a big barrel in our concession. So they carried these giant twenty gallon jugs on their heads. I, on the otherhand, carried a salad bowl half full of water on my head. I tried to convince Addisi that I could carry a salad bowl entirely full of water on my head, but the one time she let me try I spilled three-quarters of it and ended up with less water on my head than when I started. So she went back to only letting me carry half a bowl full. Despite the fact that I was useless more than helpful, everybody seems to have been quite impressed and very appreciative. Hmm.

And then, as you know, we had the dual occurance of the death of Michael Jackson and the Fourth of July, so I got another weekend off for that. Michael Jackson dying was pretty funny in Mali, (sorry, that sounds harsh now that its out there), because while it didn't really affect us volunteers all that much, it seems to have devastated a lot of Malians that it didn't devastate us. They are curious folk. So we went to a place in Mali that isn't really very much like Mali for the Fourth of July. It is called Manantali, and the thing that sets it apart is that it has a nice, large, German-built hydroelectric dam. The electricity, of course, is sold out of country. But it was beautiful. And downstream of the river is the frequent haunt of hippos! So I saw some hippos. Hippos, if you don't know, are extremely dangerous and could kill you if they cross you and are very, very fast runners, but actually prefer cabbage to people. I know all this because I read Congo. We played cards, dressed in red white and blue, looked at the hippos, and roasted and then ate a pig. It was a lovely celebration of independence.

Independence Day was interesting here, because the Malians were shocked that we had to have one, too. They were shocked, but I think they were impressed. I think it made them feel like I had a little more legitimacy. So those were some interesting conversations.

Oh, and we got lucky enough to go to Manantali from Bamako in a Peace Corps vehicle, so it took us about five hours or so. We had to take public transport back, though, and it was a more than ten hour journey. Aahh, Mali!

Scary, scary

One of my last days in village before going "en vacance" to, Inshallah, Ameriki, Inshallah, I was caught in a little miniature cattle stampede. Little and miniature because it was just me and one cow. But still. Now I was taking a - shall we say "creative"? - path home, mainly because I have yet to make it all the way from the garden to my house by the back channels without getting lost. But every time I am more adept at getting myself un-lost, so at least there is progress. Anyway, there I am on my bike, and its very sandy, which is very hard to ride in, and this cow, with no provocation, just starts chasing me! I figure he must have someplace to go in a hurry, so I take a quick (slow, wobbly, and slidey) turn and continue on, assuming my troubles are over. But when I look behind me (just to make extra-special sure) he's followed me around the corner! So the race is on, with me, panicked, pedaling as fast as I can without risking losing control in the sand - because if I do lose control and fall off, he'll come up and trample all over me, pop both my kidneys and my gallbladder, and then I'll really be goners - and he's chasing behind me, snorting and shaking his great big curly horns. Even at this point I still think maybe I am just extraordinarily unlucky and I just happen to still be on his pre-chosen path of rage, but then I double back around somebody's house (to the great delight of the family on the other side of the low wall) and he's still there so I know that for whatever reason it really is me he's after. So I'm looking around for anything familiar, thinking to myself that if it comes down to it, I can probably pull one of those jump over really tall wall moves that rodeo clowns sometimes do, when they don't just get gored, instead. But it doesn't come down to it and eventually I do know where I am and I turn into out courtyard, leap off my bike, and slam the gate shut. And my host family is curious and I say "there's a great big beast out there trying to kill me," but panic Bambara not construct good and all I really say is "Cow Is!" And their eyes say to me, "sometimes we're not sure how your country got to be so powerful," but all I can think is, "if one cow with crooked horns is that frightening, how scary must it be to be caught in an elephant stampede?"

Koutiala shea formation

This last week my teammate Maridee and I hosted an improved shea butter training in Koutiala that was both successful and inspiring. It had been a frustrating journey up to the launch - we didn't feel PC gave us the support we needed and our host service had visions of aid money piled on their tables. So, instead, we pulled it off on our own and had an incredible learning experience, and we explained in a way that I think was understood about the rules of this game preventing over-inflated budgets. Maybe. But regardless, half-way through this project I swore I would never do anything like this again, but my community just approached me with a valid need and a genuine interest, and armed with these lessons I'm ready to start again.

It was an interesting group of women we had in town for the training. We had originally budgeted for 15 women from Koutiala and 15 from the brusse. This is interesting in itself: half the city women who were slated to come failed to show up. Their slots, however, were filled by the plethora of brusse women who just appeared. The first day they were nervous around each other; the city mice dress, hold themselves, and speak differently than their country mouse counterparts. Maridee and I despaired a little that 5 loud and bossy voices would monopolize the whole training and the shyer ladies weren't going to get their bit out of it. But luckily, by the afternoon, a couple of boisterous country voices had prod their sisters into participation and there was a good dynamic in the room.

The morning of the second day, which does involve a bit of standing around as water is boiled out of the butter, I overheard a conversation that went something like this: We have a lot of nuts but we don't really process them; if you give me your phone number, I'll be in touch and we can arrange for your village to buy our nuts to process. Warms my little heart.

Oh, yeah, and I got a boyfriend. His name is Mamidou and he's probably about 3 and he sat on my lap and wore my sunglasses and didn't even pee on me. He thinks I'm awesome and isn't even afraid of my skin. We have a lot in common, and his mom offered to give him to me, but I 'm afraid the timing might just not be right, what with him being only 3 and all. Oh, well, its good to see that quality men are, in fact, still out there.

Malian trainers - well, this is just another one of these lessons from this that I am in the process of learning. I know that I'm from a different culture, but if I were treated like that by a trainer, I would stand up and leave. Maridee assures me that it is appropriate, and that the women like being yelled at and belittled. They don't look unhappy, so I guess its just another one of those things that I'm not sure I'm going to learn to understand.

After the end of the formation, it was incredible. I had at least three different people come up to me and say, hey, I want to have a formation on this, or I want to teach a formation on that. I love to see them interested in learning new skills. I would love even more to see them interested in applying the new skills they've learned to better the lives of themselves and their children. But that, I believe, is something that people have a lot of trouble with in the States, too, so if anybody has any ideas, I'm all ears.

If you're in the Peace Corps, I can't emphasise enough that the most important lesson I learned doing this is: Do it with a partner your first time!

Rain Gardens

This is one of the coolest things I've seen in nine months. Wouldn't work in Mali, and might not work in Colorado, but would be a great project to try.
http://www.kidsgardening.com/Dig/DigDetail.taf?ID=2140&Type=Art

Lots doing!

We did accidentally hit three cows on the way into town. Actually, we only hit one, then that one hit another, and the second hit the third. However the hitting happened, at the end there were three cows down, but only a teensy little dent in the bumper. So, alls well that ends well?

Been a busy time in Koury. As busy as it seems to get in the Peace Corps, anyway. My homologue and I (read, Kelly with Ami Sanou watching) built a mud stove. Mud stoves are great, actually, because if they are done correctly, they use less cooking wood. Less cooking wood is great because women either have to spend less money buying it, or they have to spend less time out in the bush cutting it and then carrying it back on top of their heads. Less cooking wood is also great because we must always be ware of the encraoching sands of the Sahara. Ooooh. Imagine scary haunted house music here. But it is for real. Ooooh. This one looks great, and works well, too. It works especially well as a drying rack. Who knew that mud stoves were the African equivalent to excercise bikes? Well, the deal was, we build a mud stove in her concession and then she is responsible for pointing it out to women who come over, and if they are interested in building one for themselves they get sent over to me. So far, no takers. Except Ismael (little Ismael my host brother) who wants to do everything I do. He said (brace yourself, this was actually enough to make a Peace Corps Volunteer go into her house and cry because she felt like maybe she wasn't wasting her time afterall) "I want to learn everything that you are doing, because then when you leave, if people have questions, then they can still come here, and they can keep building them even if you are gone." So we are going to build one in our gabugu.

But first, Ismael and I have many other projects going on. I gave a demonstration about natural pesticides in the garden the other day. It was because some of those poor ladies' gardens are getting the snot eaten out of them. And when I say poor I mean it twice. The women who can afford chemical pesticides have beautiful plants, nary a bug in sight. So this will hopefully turn into an interesting efficacy experiment - if there are no untreated plots, which will the bugs preferrentially destroy, chemical or natural? I fear the answer may not be what I want it to be. Cross your fingers that the bugs will simply move on to bigger and better things - flowering trees, cow poop, things like that. Anyway, Ismael was my sounding board, and directed me to some very important Bambara phrases (a ka nafa ka bon - that means it is very important) and helped me practice my speech, and then we applied the extra pesticide to our own nursery. Which, by the way, is growing EXCELLENTLY! We have trees that are almost a foot high, and only one looks like it is suffering tremendously. But that is not the only garden project we have going on. We are in the process of trying to build a "keyhole" garden. Which is really cool, and you all should go on the Send a Cow website and look at them, because you can build one at your own house even if your house is in America, and it would be a really good thing, especially if you learned a little about companion planting and planted correctly - you will be amazed at how much vegetable matter you can cultivate in a tiny little space and how easy it will be. Ismael is taking the most pro-active role in this endeavor I have ever seen out of a Malian. Of course, Malian pro-active means we've been working on it for two weeks and have nothing to show for it, but we do have inquiries out to the community about the availability of some of the material we need. So hopefully soon, we will have a keyhole garden. And Ismael also really wants to build a garden with a trellis, because he saw a picture of a climbing pumpkin plant, and I think he thinks that'll attract the ladies!

Speaking of attracting the ladies, I think my dear cousin Marie may be suddenly without a suitor. I told Ismael the other day that American men cook for themselves, and if he goes to America he can't just assume that some woman is going to cook for him. And I think that was the final straw, and he has decided he is going to stay in Africa. Except when he thought about taking a Malian woman with him, because she'll have to cook for him even if she is in America, which just made me mad, so I don't know how that line of thought ended up. But what started this process of the disenchantment with America was an innocent disaster initiated by me.

It was my birthday a week or so ago, and for my birthday I made American lunch. I made spaghetti with tomato sauce. The cooking was funny, because they kept coming around, looking at my pots, and for the spaghetti boiling in water, they wanted me to add oil, and for the sauce, they thought I used an aweful lot of tomatoes. In fact, for the next couple of days, random Malian ladies would stop me in the street and say, "Did you really use bisegin of logo?" (approximately eighty cents worth of tomato paste) And I would say yes, and they would reel away from me like drunks due to the shock. Well, anyway, I had bought onions, garlic, tomatoes, and - these just happened to appear in the market that day - a zucchini, and so I had them in the sauce, and I'll tell you what! I made one fine sauce! Well, I put it all together, and we sat down to eat. Two of them seemed to enjoy it. Another choked it down - it was tough, but he overcame. Two of them refused to eat more than one bite. One spit it right out on the ground, and one other refused to even touch it. Which worked out for me, because then I had delicious Ameriki spaghetti for lunch AND dinner! But so that led to the discussion about how if this is what American food is like, they were absolutely not going to go to America. "Are you sure there isn't to in America?" "Nope, no to in America." America may have money, but they sure have lousy food!

Speaking of money, I don't know if I already mentioned this one, but it was really funny, so I'm going to go ahead and write it again. We were talking about poverty. Good, solid PC conversation. "There is no poverty in America," they said, "everybody there is richer than all of Africa combined!" "No, that's not actually the case, there are poor people in America, too." "Really?" - I heard - "Is there Fanta in America?" Fanta, of course, is orange flavored soda. Funny conversation, but, you know, these things happen. "No," - I later found out I was mistaken about that, anyway, and we do have Fanta in the US - "we don't have Fanta, but we do have Coca-Cola and Sprite." Coca-Cola and Sprite are the other American drinks we have here. They looked at me funny. I looked at them funny. "You have Coca-Cola?" "Yes, many people drink Coca-Cola." "What about Fanta?" "No, we don't have Fanta." So now my host mother breaks in, "Umm, I think you think we said is there Fanta in the US." "Yes, that's what I think you said, is that not what you said?" "No, we said is there fantanya in the US." "Fantanya, what's fantanya?" Fantanya is poverty. Now, all of a sudden, that conversation makes a lot more sense.

Back to Ismael coming to America. He is also disheartened because he thinks I am trying to limit his prospects. Although there is MUCH confusion about whether there are actually black people in the United States, there is also much discussion about Barack Obama. For instance, every morning I get greeted, Good morning, how are you? How's your family? How are your children? How is your husband? Do you have a husband? Will you take me as a husband? Why not? Well, will you give me your watch instead? No? How about your bike? No? Well, how is your family? How is your mother? How is Barack Obama? So the lesson that any child can become the president has sunk in here in a big way. Ismael says to me one day, "I think, maybe, I'm going to be the president of the United States." "You can't be, you aren't American." "But Barack Obama is, and he is black." "Yeah he's black, but he's also American." "Well, no matter, I can still be the president." "No, because the president of America has to be American." "No, he doesn't." "Yes, he does." (I wonder what would have happened if we had elected a woman president. I wonder if they would have simply expelled the Peace Corps from the country as an organization run by an irresponsible country.) "No, he doesn't. ATT isn't Malian, and he is the president." "But he's the president of Mali, and not the president of the United States. And the laws are different in the United States." "But ATT did it." "But that's different." We didn't get anywhere with that line of reasoning, and Ismael got mad.

So, Ismael is not coming to America. Which is good, because he's going to have my work to finish when I leave. My other project that I've been working on is one that is near and dear to my own heart. My Tante Charlotte makes this delicious stuff called Morgenbeere, or something like that, jam. It is wonderful. What I make doesn't even come close to comparing, but I am now the crazy white woman who walks around town with a jar and a spoon trying to trick people into eating something. I've been making jam. Jam, though it has a high sugar content, I believe is a good vehicle for nutrients. And nutrients or not, it is a good use of excess fruit that this town has lying around during the mango season, and if done correctly, could be a good source of income as there are indeed parts of Mali where mango trees do not grow. So, papaya jam was a huge hit. I ran out in two days and was afraid to venture out in the open for the angry Kourians who wanted more jam that I was withholding from them. Banana jam, on the other hand, seems to have the look of the devil about it, and few souls are brave enough to try it, and they quickly warn the others off. If I were a baseball player 500 would be a good average, right? And mango season is about to commence, so cross your fingers and hope and pray for me that this one will be delicious. Personally, I liked the banana jam, too!

A photo collage in honor of Kelly's birthday!

Kelly - the best of sisters!

Kelly - an athelete!
(she was heart broken when she learned that her team was not the "oreo's")

Kelly - the wildlife enthusiast!

Kelly - down & dirty!

Picture of a goat that I just realized there's a baby in

Baby goats are funny. Kind of like little rattlesnakes. They just go up between any two legs - usually they get the mama part right, but even that is touch and go sometimes, and they only really have about a fifty percent success rate with front and back legs - and then they just strike around until they happen to land a nipple in their mouth. I'm not sure how they haven't died out yet.

These are my friends!

This is what my friends look like!


But I make funny faces here, too.

For Dave

A long, long time ago, I promised David a picture of this great beautiful waterfall we went to go see. So finally, here are some pictures. NB: Mali does not typically look like this.
That little tiny person up there in blue is me. To which Liza would say, of course. Turns out that before you leave for the Peace Corps you should have someone else check your wardrobe to make sure that more than one color is represented, because if you get to country and only then discover that every item of clothing you own is blue, everyone will make a lot of fun of you. All the time.

This one's for Heather

Heather never got to see my bike, because I didn't post any pictures of it before hand. So you probably didn't even know how well my awesome new water bottle would match! If you look really closely and remember really hard, you'll be able to. I tell you what, I'm probably the cutest thing on two wheels out here!

Lots of Pictures

This was Koury community fishing day.

My fancy host mama in her fancy outfit. I loved this one, and she was tickled that I wanted to photograph her in it. Notice the two lights in the background. One is hooked up to the town electric lines, which run most of the evenings, and one is solar. There is a solar panel on the roof. I guess its a hold over from when there was no electricity in town. I have never seen it on, but once my host father was around, and they watched soap operas off of the solar all day.

Our beautiful garden!

This is my home. If you look really closely you can see my bike and my door behind the tree. The mango is where we sit, because it is the only shade we have that is not on concrete. We have a concrete porch! But concrete gets really, really hot. We usually have lunch under the mango, too. Except right now the harmeton is blowing, which is wind from the Sahara, so we try to shelter ourselves from the sandy wind a little.

I love this old man, and I love his hats! I love this one best. When I asked him if I could take his hat's picture, he laughed until he left.

This is Ismael's papaya. He is very conscientious about watering. He really likes growing things. Things that he can eat and things that he can sell.

Ismael (left), Zumana (right) at our house. This is kind of how they are!

They used to sleep all snuggled up together like this most of the time. This was pretty funny, because they kept sliding down, or one would slide down and pull the other with it, and then they'd sleepily clamber back up.
The cats are angry, angry, angry in this picture, because they just got a bath.

This is my favorite billboard in Mali. Maybe we need some of these in America.

In Memorium

Well, bad news Burkina Fasofe. Little Hal seems to have eaten a poison frog and succumbed. I think its a bad day when your cat dies anyway, but maybe its a worse day when your cat dies in Mali. And he made horrible dying noises, and there was zero sympathy for him or me, and the only thing that people said is, why are you so upset, there are lots of other cats? Quick body removal, and I think the little girl cat doesn’t know he’s dead and is looking for him. She keeps climbing up on me and howling really loudly in my face. Poor baby.

By the way, that's not him dead, that's him when he was waking up from a nap and rolling off of my bed.

On being back in Koury

2.21.09
We just got a brand new baby goat. For clarity’s, lets call him New Dinosaur Face. He wasn’t really very interesting his first few days. Except that while kittens seem to be born with full-grown eyes, which makes them look like little aliens, goats seem to be born with full-grown knees. Except they definitely don’t have fully-developed stabilization muscles, so they weeble and wobble and bend in all directions. So if you’re a little newborn goat and trying to get to your mother by walking straight towards her, if you’re not careful you might just end up going some other which way. And goats don’t really end up all that smart, and they start off much less so, so that gets confusing.
Anyway, about day three New Dinosaur Face discovers that, indeed, ITS FUN TO BE ALIVE! and he decides that he wants to play. Now, a three-day-old goat about splits the difference in size between adolescent and adult chickens. When you’re young you evaluate play-mate potential based on size. Bigger is always better, but bigger rarely wants to play. And NDF looks around the yard and sees dozens of potential playmate options. So the young man starts weeble-wobbling around after all the chickens. Now adult chickens may not be big, but they also don’t want to play. And chickens, I’ve found, are teh most irritable animals I’ve ever encountered. And they’re not shy about expressing their displeasure. And baby goats are easily frightened but quick to forget. So its been noisy and rather comical lately.
And then I think the kittens must have staged a hunt with poor New Dinosaur Face as prey, because everybody used to live in peace all together, but now my cats are terrified of his mama, slink around all the time and five her such a wide berth that if she’s anywhere near my door they won’t even risk coming inside to eat. The just howl at me angrily from the other side of the yard. This could have happened, I think, because I’ve seen those two looking thoughtfully at the chickens. And the goat is about the same size, but obviously less fierce. But its good that they were put in their place, because I’m terrified of whats going to happen if they take it into their heads to actually start hunting chickens. Once little Hal stepped on a baby chick’s head with his claws out and it flapped its tiny ineffective wings and squeaked a lot, but that was about food, and he does that to his sister, sometimes, too. It might have been little Naani who later died, but I hope not. By the way, only one of the batch survived through IST, but I think he’s finally out of the danger zone. And we haven’t had any more chicken babies, since.
It was nice coming back to Koury. I hate traveling in this country, and the motoritigis on the way in made me super-angry, so I was hating life when I arrived, but everyone was so welcoming and I’ve been keeping busy (busy in the PC-Mali sense of the word) ever since. I think maybe its the dying season, which I find surpriseing, because I would have expected more people to die during the rainy season. Maybe they did die then, too, and I was just too clueless at the time to notice. But Malians are dropping like flies and there’s always some funeral or other to go to or people are going to some other place to go to funerals. I got to go to a traditional masked funeral dance, which was actually a lot more scary than I thought it would be. While it may be tragic that people’s friends and relations are dying, it has led to a great deal of information exchange, and I have had many opportunities to witness women discussing how much vegetables are going for in other markets right now. And if we learned nothing else from the Lion King, we learned that the Circle of Life is continuous, and deaths notwithstanding, it is also the birthing season, and there are babies popping up like weeks. Both of these things make for logistical complications at meetings, because women are housebound both after the birth of a child and after the death of a husband for a proscribed about of time. So after the meeting for the people who could attend is over, the whole lot goes trooping all around town to the homes of the members who couldn’t come, to greet and bless and chit-chat. And on certain unpleasant occasions, to make me hold the brand new baby. Which I do not like doing. But the fact that I obviously don’t like it just makes it that much more fun to watch. And once i think I might have eaten dog-head rice. But only the rice, because my host mom forbid them from giving me any meat. For which I was grateful.
NB: I found out that indeed, it IS the dying season. They call February the bad month, or the doctor’s month, because so many people die then. It is a lot better now than it used to be. The guy I was talking to said that it used to be – only twenty years ago – that a medium sized village would regularly bury ten kids in a day in February. It is because the wind blows off of the Sahara, and it is dusty which is bad for breathing, and maybe it brings along diseases. Because it is since the introduction of vaccines and Western medicine that people have stopped dying so much. But, of course they are still reproducing as if they were still dying so much, but that is a different issue. So there you have it, good observation, Kelly.

Happy Valentines Day, Kelly!

We love you!      Mom & Dad

Sam, Susan and I in a rare moment off of training.

Still in IST

So this upcoming week of IST our homologues are coming. Right now, my homologue a ma na follo. Which means she is missing. I am curious if she will come, because it would be really helpful!

Yesterday we got to see a snake guy! He kept saying things like once I got bit by a python and it hurt a lot, but it wasn't so bad. And once I got spit on by a spitting cobra and was blind for fifteen days, but it wasn't so bad. And then this big old lizard peed on one of the LCFs.

Oh, and I starred (sort of) in a play that went over very well (sort of) about Food Security. I played the woman with the biggest musoro (head wrap). Malians are big on drama. So I played it dramatically.

I'm going to make this picture thing work yet. Slow going, but here's a sample!

My womens' irrigation system is currently broken, so apparently just now its the place where they store babies.

These two little girls are residents of Ngorola, which is one of the towns that I am now working with. This is actually the one that I am pretty sure is in Burkina Faso. The town showed up for a welcoming ceremony when I came to meet them. I love this town, even though it is very far away - it is a place where the women are awesome and the men are drunk.

Bamagan (big) and Sawu (little) were two of my host sisters in Behon. Bamagan was part of the dynamic duo who would have done really, really well in an American high school - except for that they couldn't read or write or speak English, of course. Sawu was the least snotty kid in Behon.

In-Service Training

I was going to tell this to just my parents, but my friends here thought that the rest of my friends would enjoy it, too, so here you go. We had to take a language test at the end of Pre-Service Training, and then we were supposed to get even better during our first chunk of time at site. So we had to take another language test first thing back here. I took mine, and my tester said to me, "You speak Bambara really well, but you would have scored a lot higher if you would think before you speak."

So almost everybody has said to me at some point in the last month or so, Kelly, sounds interesting, but I'm still not sure what you do out there. Well, I am finally starting to get a better idea of that, so let me share a little of what I do. I am an environmental volunteer, and our main goals are (helping to) increase food security, commercialize non-timber forest resources, and help fight desertification with appropriate soil conservation techniques and increases in biodiversity. So I have a wide variety of projects that I could work on. For instance, I will be working with gardeners to help them produce more vegetables both to consume and to sell. I can do this not because I am a master gardener (which I am not) but because I have access to information about new gardening techniques and where to get help and how to get money for things like fixing the irrigation system in the garden. That last is a project I am at work on. I will be able to interface with the NGO in Bamako who gave the garden the pump, explain how it isn't working, find out how it can be fixed, and hopefully, invite the NGO to my village to teach someone in village how to make the needed repairs on their own the next time. Mali also has an incredible resource in its Shea forests, which if women can learn to produce high quality butter (right now almost all Malian women produce butter, but maybe not high quality), or even high quality inputs to the butter, the export market is out there and chomping at the bit. Shea butter, for instance, has a higher melting point than cocoa butter, so would be great for chocolate going to hot climates. And Malian shea butter is better for that than more southern shea butter, because the species we have here is a little different than theirs. Again, I'm not a shea butter expert, but I can help out with emphasising some pretty basic concepts that are not at all basic if you have been brought up in Mali but would make a huge difference in the marketability of the product. For example, shea butter for consumption will only be bought by big western companies if the women who made it washed their hands with soap and used pump water instead of well water. So what I can do is get a group of shea-producing women together, show them how much money they can earn on bad butter and how much money they can earn on good butter, and tell them what kinds of changes will eventually produce that good butter. And more importantly, I can interface with buyers, and ensure that they understand that this is a source where they can get good butter. In addition to our primary environmental projects, there are also country-wide secondary projects, and then projects that the whole PC is involved in. For instance HIV/AIDS, which I'm not interested in working with, and development of women and youth. I'm obviously working with the development of women with shea, and my youth garden project fulfills the development of youth goal, as well as working for food security. What I'll do with that is basically just be a club advisor, as if it were a children's club in the states. But that concept is pretty foreign to Malians. So, basically, I am a conduit between knowledge and ideas that exist in Mali, and the people who will use them.
The other two goals of the Peace Corps are to help Malians understand America and the rest of the world, and to help Americans understand Mali. I hope that this blog in some small way helps fulfill that last goal, and sitting around drinking tea then also becomes part of fulfilling my job as a Peace Corps volunteer. And its actually an important one. Its important for me to be able to say, when someone tells me how bad America is for whatever political action, well, you like me, and I'm an American. Yes, America sometimes does things that you don't agree with, but there are good Americans out there who do care, and they deserve the same respect that I am offering you. Sometimes it may not be believed, understood, or even heard, but it is important that it is said.

Many, many blogs

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.