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.