Lots of stuff

Sorry it's been so long since I've written. I can't believe two months have passed! In May I set up a project called hearth. The idea is that you select six to ten malnourished kids and invite their mothers to come make ameliorated porridge every day for 12 days, and you discuss a health topic each day. My Hearth was an utter failure. I stopped it after 5 days because of poor attendance and bad attitudes. Basically, it was already to close to rainy season and there were a lot fo weddings in my village that week.

I felt pretty discouraged when that happened, and now I'm trying to reassess the way in which I do work in my village. I spent a week in Sikasso at the regional program for malnutrition, thinking about what I wanted to do. When I returned to village, I didn't really say a big change in -- well, anything, but I do enjoy being there even when work is frustrating.

Two weeks ago we had a campaign to distribute Vitamin A and de-worming medication, so I was busy with that.

Another thing that happened was that my cat disappeared for almost 24 hours. I was a bit worried because people sometimes eat cats in Mali. I hadn't really heard about it happening in my village though. He came back, and i was relieved. But the next day I told the story to my host family, and they were like, "Oh, yeah, a male cat will wander to find females, and the kids will kill him and eat him." I was a little freaked out by the nonchalance with which they said that! So I got him a collar, and one day when we went to tell people there were going to be vaccinations the next day, we told everyone that the cat with the collar was mine so they should all tell their kids to leave him alone. The imam even announced it in the mosque.

More recently, for the 4th of July, I traveled to Manantali, a place in western Mali. There is a big dam there, and a Peace Corps house on the river. It's very green (although not noticeably more so than my region), and there are monkeys! Also hippos, but I unfortunately did not see one. About 40 PCVs came, and we grilled a pig and made potato salad, macaroni salad and cole slaw.

Getting there, however, was an odyssey. First I had to travel from Sikasso to Bamako -- a 6-hour bus ride. We spent the night in Bamako. In the morning we went to the bus station to go to Kita. The bus was late, and when it arrived, they couldn't get the door open. Half an hour later someone figured out that there was a release button inside the bus that needed to be pushed.

We were finally on our way, and the bus even had windows that opened! (you know you've been in Mali too long when you consider it a luxury that your un-airconditioned but has windows that open). But something was wrong with the transmission, so every time the bus stopped (which was frequent) they had trouble getting it back into gear. It takes about three hours to get to Kita, but when we were 2km outside, the bus broke down for good, so we walked the rest of the way.

We got some food, then found the place to get a bache to Manantali. A bache is essentially a van with evrything stripped off the inside so it's just a metal shell with wooden benches in the back, in a rectangle around the sides. We had to wait for hours for the bache to leave. It was a four-hour trip, mostly on a dirt road. We were all getting really sleepy by the end, but if you fell asleep, you fell off the bench when we hit a bump.

We had left our hotel at 7 a.m. and arrived in Manantali at 10 p.m.

Luckily the trip back was a bit easier.

On my way back from Sikasso to my village, however, I got to experience rainy season worst-case scenario. As I left Sikasso, there were clouds, but there had already been a shower that afternoon, and I'd beat storms back to my site before. Unfortunately, the rain started just as a got to a village about 4 km outside Sikasso. So at that point, turning back didn't seem like a good option, but it was too rainy to go on. I stopped at someone's house, and hoped the rain would lessen quickly.

After about 5 or 10 minutes it did, though it wasn't clearing up. I made a run for the next village, and got soaked on my way. Once there, I stopped again and got shelter. As the rain lessened, I made another run for it, but the next village was even farther away, and by the time I got there I was so wet that I figured I might as well keep going, especially since it would be dark soon.

The road was a patchwork of mud and lake-sized puddles. I've discovered that the most impossible substance to bike on is wet sand. I arrived at home just as the sun was setting, covered from head to toe in mud. It was the talk of the village the next day.

The other day I went to the ricefields with my friend Salimata (she is my host father's daughter-in-law). These days the women are gone every day farming rice, and I had only gone to the fields once during harvest time, so I was curious to see what they're up to every day. Rice is grown on land that will flood later in the rainy season. We walked about a mile and a half to reach the field, which will be the last field Salimata plants this season. As far as I could see in every direction was rice already growing, about thigh-high. It looks like grass.

A man and a younger boy had begun to plow the field before we got there. They had two cattle to help. The boy controlled the cattle with ropes through their noses, while the man directed the plow itself.

Once a swath was plowed, Salimata scattered rice seeds. Then we went over the area with dabas (a tool similar to a hoe but with a short handle, so you work bent over), to fully uproot the grass and other plants. It's hard work. While the weather is such now that it's pleasant in the shade, the sun is still blazing hot. I was sweating before we even started working.

I stayed for a couple hours (part of which was spent resting under a tree), then went home. Salimata stays till sunset every day.

And now I'm in Bamako, because tomorrow my mom is arriving for a visit!

Pictures!

Ben and Mary Virginia in the campement we stayed at in Dogon Country.
Ben climbs up to the cliff dwellings (now uninhabited).
Me and Ben up in the cliffs.
The mango tree in my concession.

My kitty thinks he can sweep!
Giving the Peace Corps bus a push-start on the way to April training in Bamako.
A Dogon village with cool rock formations.
A Dogon village. If you look in the cliffs above, you can see little houses.

Sorry these pictures are out of order. I don't have time to mess around with the format.

Weddings

When I got back from a weeklong Peace Corps training in Bamako, I discovered that wedding season was in full swing in my village. In Mali, marriages are almost always arranged. It is very costly for the family of the groom, because he has to present the bride’s father with large amounts of kola nuts. Kola nuts are a traditional stimulant – they are chewed and spit out. As a gift, they are a symbol of respect.

Anyway, the reason that weddings all happen in April and May in my village is that our main cash crop is potatoes. Potatoes are planted in December and January, and once they are harvested and sold, families can repay their loans and use the leftover money to build houses and pay for weddings.

Weddings always take place on Thursdays in my village, and last Thursday was the first time I was around to see it. The wedding is composed of two parts – a civil ceremony at the mayor’s office in the morning, and a religious ceremony at the mosque after the two o’clock prayer.

Early in the morning, the brides are brought to the CSCOM, where the matrone examines them to determine if they are already pregnant. One was. The matrone explained to me that the civil ceremony would still take place and the bride would still move in with her husband’s family, but the Muslim wedding couldn’t happen until after she had given birth.

Around 10 the wedding parties began arriving at the mayor’s office. They drive across the village in a caravan of motorcycles, honking as loudly as possible. (This is fine in a village but I’ve seen it in larger cities where it’s technically illegal because it’s so dangerous). At the mayor’s office the brides and grooms and their various family members crowded into the conference room. Many children from the village gathered in the courtyard, hanging in the windows to watch the proceedings.

The couples were lined up in the order they would be married. When it was their turn, they sat at the head of the table next to the two officials from the mayor’s office who did the paperwork. They would record the names of the bride and groom and their parents, date of birth, and which village they came from. They recorded the dowry (always 10,000 CFA, or about $20, to be paid to the bride), and whether the couple chose the options of polygamy of a polygamous or monogamous marriage – except I asked both the secretary and my host father, the former mayor, if anyone had ever chosen monogamous, and they both said no.

As the brides waited, they covered their faces with veils. I eventually realized this was because most of them were crying. When it was their turn, they had to take the veil off, and they all managed to stop crying except one, who cried through the whole process This was somewhat alarming to me because crying is regarded very differently here – it’s really serious, and in general, adults just don’t. Although these girls were all 16-18 years old.

The grooms each had a folded piece of cloth over one shoulder, and I was told that the bride’s father’s older brother gives that to him as a sign of his approval.

Anyway, once all the info was written down, the official would ask the groom three times if he wanted to marry the bride, then ask the bride three times if she wanted to marry the groom. He also said some stuff about polygamy, then asked both if they agreed to polygamy. When he was done, the bride, groom, and a witness for each signed the documents (actually fingerprinted because most were illiterate). The witnesses were not their parents, who did not come to the mayor’s office, but a brother of their fathers. Then the couple went into the mayor’s office, where I was told the mayor gives them advice before they leave.

Afterward, celebrations are held at both the bride’s and groom’s families’ houses. I knew the family of one of the brides (from a nearby village), so at noon I went to their house. Groups of men and women were sitting separately, and people came by to greet the family and say blessings. And eat. After the 2:00 prayer, I went with the women to a hut outside the mosque, where we waited fro people to emerge from the religious ceremony. When they came out we went back to the house, so I don’t really know what happened.

Then I went home. In the evening I was having dinner at my host family’s, and a neighbor came over with the head of the cow they had slaughtered for a wedding in their family. They gave me a chunk of the meat, and I have to say, while I was mentally repulsed, it was delicious. It clearly wasn’t brain and I didn’t ask any questions. My strategy with meat in Mali is to just remind myself that it won’t poison me, so whatever it is, don’t over think it.

Pictures

These are all from one of the first baby weighings I did separate from vaccinations in my own village -- i.e. I weighed kids age 9 months to 5 years. I weighed 100 kids on this particular day.

We did a "tournée" of all the villages in the CSCOM's catchment area, which basically means we had a meeting in each village with the chief and other old men. Representing the CSCOM were me, the president and secretary of the ASACO (a community org that manages the finances of the CSCOM), and an NGO worker that works with our CSCOM. In this pic you can see me and the ASACO president, Agui, in the background, while a man sets up our lunch in the foreground.
Can you spot me in this group shot?
I push my bike up a really steep hill.
This is at the meeting in my own village. I am next to the ASACO president; on the far left is the chief of my village.
Agui and I wait for the meeting to start in his village.

Thanks to Abu Dramane Diarra for taking all these pictures and loading them on my jump drive!

WAIST

The mosque on Ouakam beach in Dakar.

Me, Lindsay and Holly at the lighthousem, recovering from teh bus ride.

View from the lighthouse.

Peace Corps Mali had the best uniforms! Those are Dogon hats.

Stephanie and Amy cheer on the team.

I just returned from the West African International Softball Tournament, which is held yearly in Dakar, Senegal. It was absolutely fantastic.



There were 50 Peace Corps volunteers from Mali going, so we actually chartered a bus to go from Bamako to Dakar. My dad checked online last night, and apparently this is a distance of 675 miles. Well. My trip began with a bus ride from Sikasso to Bamako, which I actually made in record time -- under 6 hours. I spent the night in Bamako, and in the morning we all boarded the bus, intending to go to Kayes, a city in western Mali, and spend the night there at the Peace Corps transit house. It took about 9 hours. There are about 8 beds at the transit house, so most of us were on the floor, including me. It was uncomfortable, but we left early the next morning for the really uncomfortable part of the trip -- the bus ride from Kayes all the way across Senegal. We were anticipating that it would take somewhere between 18 and 30 hours.



It took 20, and that was with absolutely nothing going wrong -- the bus didn't break down or anything. Basically, we were zooming along out of Kayes and across the border, but after a town in central Senegal called Tambacounda, the road turns into the worst road you can possibly imagine. It lookied like the surface of the moon because it was so covered in potholes. The bus could only go 15 or 20 mph the whole time. So we rolled into Dakar around 3 a.m., but we had no hotel reservations for that night, so we slept on the bus for a few hours until we could check into the hotel.



Having studied abroad in Dakar, I was surprised that even just glimpsing Dakar again at 3 in the morning, I was blown away. I was blown away by how developed and nice and clean it looked! Some people tried to pee near the bus and got yelled at! That would never happen in Mali! There were tall buildings, and we were parked by a wrought iron fence, that enclosed a LAWN. The streets were all paved. I wondered for a minute if it had actually been that nice when I was there!



In the morning I went straight to the Club Atlantique, the venue hosting WAIST, with a few other people because we were going to be staying at homestays instead of hotels. (Embassy workers and other ex-pats allow participants in WAIST to stay at their houses during the tournament. It turns out the embassy actually gives them mattresses to do so.) The Club Atlantique has baseball fields, tennis courts, a volleyball court, a pool, a bar, and a snack bar. After two days on the road we were filthy so we showered there, then relaxed by the pool and had some food, then went and walked to a lighthouse up the coast.



We hung out at the pool for the rest of the afternoon, and in the evening got paired with our hosts. My friend Amy and I were together, with a 30-something embassy worker. His apartment is in the heart of the downtown, and was just a few blocks from the hotel where the rest of PC Mali was staying. His apartment looked just like an American apartment. He had a great entertainment system, but most excitingly, a WASHING MACHINE! And a dryer. We did a little laundry every day. Four volunteers from Senegal and one from Benin were staying there was well. He was a great host and we were really glad we decided to do the homestay rather than the hotel.



Peace Corps Mali did really well in the tournament itself. We were late registering so we had only one team, in the competitive bracket, but the rest of us had a great time going to their games and cheering them on. After a four-game winning streak we were defeated by a bunch of high schoolers, but we figure, hey, those kids actually practiced!



At the end a bunch of the volunteers from Mali went down to the Petite Cote, the area of Senegal with the nicest beaches, and rented a house for a few days in a town called Popenguine. It was so much fun, so relaxing, and very inexpensive.



I ended up flying back to Mali. After encountering volunteers who left before we went to the beach to go overland and ended up in Bamako at the same time as me, and hearing their stories, I am glad.



There was lots of stuff going on at my site before I left, but I don't really feel like going into that now. I'm going back tomorrow, so maybe I'll write about village when I go back to Sikasso again.

Old Pictures

This is Soumaila, the vaccinator, with one of his wives, Assetou (who is chopping green onions), and their youngest child, Bafin.

My homologue, Salimata, and her son, Farsi, who is a year and a half old. He was not cooperative with photographs.

My kitty wants to ride my bike!

I encountered this scorpion on a late night trip to the bathroom. It was 2 or 3 inches long. Not pleasant.

This is my kitten in the thing I use to draw water from my well. Cutest kitten ever!

My host family stores the harvested millet in a granary.

All of the women came with large bowls to gather the millet and pass it to the guy at the top of the granary.

Two of the women in my host family pound something (probably millet) in a mortar and pestle. They take turns on the upstrokes and downstrokes. The woman on the left has a baby on her back.

Training and beyond!

So it’s been a while since I wrote on my blog. I spent two weeks in January in Bamako for “In-Service Training,” with all the other volunteers that arrived in the same training group as I did. It was really fun to see everyone again after three months at site, but it was also pretty hard to go back to my village afterward. However, I had a bunch of new ideas for work. For our first three months in our villages we were just supposed to be improving our language skills and getting to know the community; now we can start planning what we want to accomplish at our sites.

One of the main things I needed to do right off was to start doing baby weighings for slightly older children. This was because since my arrival, the CSCOM staff wanted me to weigh babies at vaccination days. However, babies’ vaccinations are complete when they are 9 months old, which is before they are at the highest risk for malnutrition because they are not weaned at that point. During the months that I had been weighing babies, the vast majority were at healthy weights for their ages, and I wondered whether we really even had a problem of malnutrition in my village. The occasional baby that was underweight was usually an exceptional circumstance, like the mother had lost her milk or died.

I had brought up the idea of weighing older children (ideally we would monitor their growth until the age of 5) multiple times with the CSCOM staff, but the matrone did not think that women would come if the kids weren’t getting vaccinated. When I returned from training, I told them again what I wanted to do. I said I would weigh children once a week at the CSCOM. That way not too many people would be there at once so we could actually give nutritional counseling to the mothers of underweight kids, and the women would know that if they missed one week, they could always come the next week.

This past Friday I did the first weighing day for children up to 5, and more than 80 children showed up to be weighed. I was extremely pleased – we hadn’t even done a very good job of getting word out in the village, and that many women showed up. Furthermore, many one- to two-year-olds were in the “yellow zone,” i.e. somewhat underweight. These are the kids that we really want to find through this kind of activity, because by the time they are severely malnourished they need medical intervention, not just nutritional counseling. Even if attendance is not as good at future weighings, I now have some mothers that I can start working with on ameliorated porridge.

Speaking of, the most encouraging thing happened last week! A woman came looking for me, carrying containers of peanuts, millet and corn. She said that she and four other women wanted me to show them to make ameliorated porridge, and here were the ingredients. I told her to get the millet pounded into powder, and the peanuts made into peanut butter or powder, whichever was easier, and what other ingredients we needed. We all got together the next morning to make the porridge. Salimata (the matrone) wasn’t able to come (it was a Sunday), which was too bad because she understands my Bambara very well, but I think the demonstration overall went well. Mostly, though, I was just unbelievably happy to see women so motivated to improve their children’s health that they sought me out.

One of the interesting things about living in a farming community is seeing the seasonal changes in work. When I left for Bamako, the men were planting potatoes and women were “beating” rice – once it is cut and dried, they have to hit it with sticks to get the grain off the stalks. When I returned, the men were still working in the potato fields, but the women were done with the rice and instead going every day to collect firewood. I went with one of my host mother’s last week to see how it’s done. We walked to a place about a mile away, where there were a bunch of bushes that had sticks that were probably 4 inches in diameter. We cut them off with machetes and axes, then bundled them with ropes to carry them back to the village on our heads. Yes, I did carry some, but I have seen 10-year-old girls that can carry as much as I can. I was able to make it back ok but my head and back ached a lot since I’m not used to carrying things on my head.

In less than two weeks I’m going on vacation to Senegal, for the West African International Softball Tournament (WAIST). Basically, a bunch of PCVs and ex-pats from Senegal, Mali and Mauritania get together for a couple days of playing softball. About 60 volunteers from Mali are planning to go, and we’re chartering a bus to Dakar. More on that when I get back!