Holidays

My host father and his three wives, plus some of the grandkids.
Two of the grandsons stretch out the sheepskins to dry.
My kitten likes the window!

Thursday was Seliba, the biggest Muslim holiday – 70 days after the end of Ramadan. Basically, every family kills a sheep, then everyone gorges themselves on meat and everything else. My host father, Zange, told me to come to his house at 11. I was relieved to have such explicit instructions, because holidays can make me feel rather out of place here. They all go to the mosque to pray at 9, then slaughter the animals, so I hung around the house and waited. I even slept in (ha, till 6:50), but was luckily awake when the guy came with the chickens I’d ordered to give as gifts.

There was a slight difficulty with the chickens just before I left the house, as I was planning to give one to my host family, but the four of them were all in one box. I wasn’t sure if their legs were tied, so I opened to box just a little. They weren’t tied but they didn’t seem to be struggling to escape, so I had the box open just a little as I contemplated how to grab one by the legs. Just then, the most feisty of the chickens made a break for it and escaped. I chased it around my yard for a while, but if I couldn’t even grab one from in a box there was no way I was going to capture a loose chicken.

I was going to leave it in the yard and count on the high walls to keep it in while I got someone from my host family to help me. But I made one last lunge for it, which made it flap it’s way over the wall. I found some kids to help me, and they caught it and got it back in the box. I concluded that all I could do was take the whole box to my host family and have them help me sort the chickens out when it was time to take the rest of them to their recipients.

Anyway, when I eventually arrived at my host family’s, we started by eating sorghum tho (sorghum is a grain, tho is a pasty starchy food staple made of corn, millet or sorghum) with okra sauce (why?! We eat that everyday!) while they were frying some of the organs in oil (my host family slaughtered five sheep). Then we ate liver and some other parts that I don’t want to know more details about. Liver is considered the biggest delicacy, so they gave me a lot, which is unfortunate because I’m not a huge fan, but I ate it.

From that point on, people were continually coming over bringing huge bowls of rice and sauce, and platters of meat. My host father is the head of a huge household – probably 100 people – and the former mayor of the commune, so lots of people sent him stuff. And everything was cooked in huge amounts of oil.

This led me to reflect on cultural differences in attitudes toward eating. In the U.S., we often eat when we’re not hungry, but we still think that we should only eat to satisfy hunger. Here, when food is available, you eat as much as you can, when you can, while you can. And this makes sense here, because in rural Mali, food is fuel in the most literal sense. People in my village burn an enormous number of calories each day because they do so much physical labor.

Meat is a special case. It’s an extreme delicacy here. On a normal day in my village, I’m surprised if there’s even a morsel of meat in a sauce. Fish, especially dried fish, is pretty common in my village, but usually each person only gets a small piece of that. On the rare occasion that meat is in a dish, again, each person gets just a taste. So this holiday is really special – it’s the one time in a year that people get to eat large quantities of meat, and you eat all you can.

On the second day of the holiday, my host father told me to come over at 8 and we would go together to greet the chief of the village, imam, and mayor, and bring them the chickens I’d bought. Getting the chickens for them turned out to be a stroke of genius. They were all really surprised and clearly immensely pleased, especially the imam (and it’s thanks to my language tutor that I thought to include him). We then proceeded to continue greeting at different households for several hours. Many people gave me meat to take home (I gave it to my host family). In some households I saw a pile of the heads of the slaughtered sheep.

The other thing that goes on both days of the holiday is that children get dressed up and go house to house, and people give them coins, candy and balloons. The children’s attitude toward the money really highlights the communal culture here. Some girls came to my house (I gave out candy, not money), and stayed to chat. I asked them if they’d gotten a lot of money, and they showed me a pile of coins. I asked them what they were going to buy, and they said, “we’re going tot share it.” In the evening at my host family’s house, some of the grandkids came back and tried to give their money to their parents or grandparents (who told them to keep it).

To go back to before the holiday, last week there was a nationwide integrated vaccination campaign. Targeting children under 5, we were vaccinating them against polio and measles (even if they’d already had those vaccines), plus giving them vitamin A, deworming medication, and an insecticide-treated mosquito net. All of this was completely free.

A mosquito net costs about 2,000 CFA normally. That’s about $4. But that is a huge amount of money in village. All the CSCOMs were supposed to have enough supplies for all the children under 5. If a woman had two children under 5, she got two nets, but two was the maximum, even if she had three children under 5.

Most women don’t know their kids’ ages, but we had to be really strict about the age limit if we were to have enough of everything, especially nets. It turns out there is a way to tell if a kid is 5. You put one of their arms over their head and see if they can touch their opposite ear. If they can, they’re 5.

We had three teams to execute the campaign – two teams to go out to other villages served by our CSCOM, and one team to stay at the CSCOM to do our own village and the village that’s one kilometer away. I was on the team with the doctor, staying in our village. Since we were going to be there for four days, I expected things to be spaced out. Ah, how naïve I was.

As I explained, mosquito nets are valuable items, and we were giving them out for free. Also, the women know how things work here –- supplies run out. And they wanted those nets. The first day, hundreds of women showed up by 9 a.m. Americans are taught from a very early age to stand in lines. Whenever there’s a lot of people, we usually line up automatically. Malians don’t do lines.

The result? The first day was pretty ugly. We worked till after 5 (we had to stop to report our numbers to the regional hospital), but we didn’t get to everyone who had come that day. There was pushing, shoving and yelling. At one point there was practically a riot.

The second day was much better because the crowd control was much stricter. We finished with all the people who had been waiting before 2, and everyone got mosquito nets. After that, people trickled in slowly, and we did eventually run out, but no one was angry because they knew they had come late. And total, I’d say it was less than 15 people who didn’t receive nets.

I’ve been intending for a while to write about the experience of learning Bambara. What makes Bambara difficult, and is very different from learning French, is that you just can’t translate things literally. It has a very small vocabulary, so more things are conveyed through structure, which is difficult to learn because you can’t just memorize words. I’m at the point with verbs where, if I want to know how to say something, it often turns out I already know the word, but I didn’t know that it generalized to have that meaning too. (Example: “nafa” means important, advantage, and benefit; “don” means know, discover, and realize).

Some nouns have multiple very different meanings, for example, stomach and bird are the same word, as are mother, goat, and river. A few words have ambiguities that mean you have to tread very carefully. “Wulu,” the word for dog, is also the word for penis, as is the word “foro,” which also means field. In “proper” Bambara, possessives are expressed differently for body parts, so if you’re careful you can avoid this, but in my region, you can do possessives however you want, so there’s not necessarily a distinction.

Not being an agriculture volunteer, I had pretty much avoided getting into this, until a couple of weeks ago, when the vaccinator’s wife asked me if I was going to go help him in the field. This was a joking conversation to begin with, because, being a fonctionnaire, he doesn’t work his own fields anyway. I replied that I didn’t know where his field was, and then realized I was in dangerous territory. Luckily I said it right and she didn’t notice, because if not I never would have heard the end of that. They think everything I say is hilarious and repeat it over and over no matter what, and this could have been juicy.

An agriculture volunteer, Jesise, was telling me that there’s all sorts of hilarious possibilities, because the word for “far” is the same as “long,” so if you ask, “is your field far?”…well, you get the idea.

Oh, Bambara. (As we always fondly exclaimed in language class during training.)

Kittens and Twins

This is the Maternity of the CSCOM (Centre de Santé Communautaire) where I work. There is an identical building acroos from it (where I took the picture from) about 50 feet away.
My homologue, Salimata, washes clothes at the well next to the Maternity.
This is what the kitty thought about not being allowed on my bed.
This is what she thought about not being allowed in my bedroom.
And this is what she thought about not being allowed on the counter!

I got a kitten! Here’s how it happened. One night last week I was sleeping very soundly, when I was suddenly awakened by a loud scratching sound directly under my head. I jumped out of bed and grabbed my headlamp to inspect. I saw nothing on the bed or on my pillow. Then a lifted the mattress and saw – a rodent. And it looked bigger than a mouse. I shrieked and dropped the mattress before I could look at it more closely. I have a traditional cotton mattress, and I was immediately convinced that there must be a nest of rats in the mattress itself. I was sleepy but nothing in the world coul dhave convinced me to get back in that bed. It was the middle of the night, so I didn’t want to wake anyone up to borrow a mattress or sleep at their house. After a few moments of reflection, I grabbed my sheet and blanket (it’s cold at night now!) and slept on a straw mat on my porch.

The next day I was too afraid to disturb the presumed rat’s nest, but luckily my language tutor, Lassina, was kind enough to come look into the situation. We found – nothing. He said it definitely couldn’t have been a rat because there were no holes in the house (we looked carefully), so if anything, it was a mouse. However, I think he privately believes it was actually nothing and I just freaked myself out. I know I saw a rodent, so I said I wanted a cat. And two days later, he showed up at my house with a kitten!

She’s adorable (he says it’s a she but I kind of hope he turns out to be wrong because I probably won’t be able to get her spayed here), but also quite the pain in the butt. When I get up in the morning, she keeps climbing on my feet and nibbling my toes while I fling her off with increasing force. After I was concerned she wasn’t eating, I obtained actual cow milk yesterday which she only drank a tiny bit of. I left milk (from powder) with some oatmeal in it for her yesterday morning, and came home to find that she hadn’t touched that but had ripped open the bag of powdered milk on the counter, and a bag of flour for good measure. When I plucked her off the counter (and by counter I mean high table that I use as a counter) and deposited her in front of the oatmeal, she finally ate some.

If I shut her out of my bedroom (since she’s too small to kill rodents yet, plus wants to play when I want to sleep, plus likes my mosquito net to sharpen her claws on), she climbs up the screen door and can’t get down, and mews pitifully till I rescue her. Luckily she’s cute. In fact, I feel really bad about leaving her to be in Sikasso, but Lassina is looking in on her for me.

On a much soberer note, two weeks ago I went to the baptism of twins. The mother was the woman at one of the two shops right near my house, owned by Bozos (ethnic minority from the Mopti region). I hang out with them quite a bit. Anyway, she had given birth at home and I was dismayed when I saw them – it was a boy and a girl. The girl was too small, but the boy was frighteningly so. On both of them you could see a diamond shaped indentation on the top of their heads where their skull hadn’t closed yet. But the girl looked healthy by comparison. I was there with Salimata (my homologue) and when we left, I asked her if she thought the boy could live. She said yes.

But about a week later, I was leaving my house in the morning and encountered a group of women leaving that house – they told me that the baby had died, and they had just been there giving their blessings (when someone dies here the family sits in a house for the following day and everyone comes and says blessings and sits with them for a few minutes). I went to do the same.

On Saturday night another set of twins was born, this time at the CSCOM. They are my djatigi’s grandchildren (or great-grandchildren, or related to him, I’m not a hundred percent sure of the exact relationship). Yesterday Salimata and I went to go visit them, because she said one of them (two girls) was too small. On our way over there, a man flagged us down to come into the Bozo woman’s house. The other twin, the girl, is now sick. Without the boy as a comparison, she looked very sickly to me, and her stomach is horribly swollen, which is what the problem was. The woman had gone to the CSCOM and the doctor gave her some medication, but she was concerned because the baby wasn’t better yet.

There wasn’t really anything for us to do. Salimata specified some further instructions about preparing the medication (this is a huge problem here – many of the medications for children are “oral suspensions,” which means that it is a bottle of powder and the woman has to mix water with it – and water here is like poison for babies if you don’t take extreme precautions in treating it). When we saw the other twins however, they were both fine. One was a little small, but seemed to be doing ok, and Salimata said it was much better now.

This really brings home how risky it is to have twins when more intense medical interventions aren't a possibility. The other set of twins that I saw at a baby weighing were severely malnourished -- they were a year old and still only drinking breast milk, which would be a problem for one baby but for two led to disaster. We talked to the mother about what she should give them, and she seemed extremely concerned and eager to improve their health. She even made the 8 km trek from her village to our CSCOM to show us some ingredients for their porridge. I hope that the next time we go to her village, we will find that they are doing better.

Thanksgiving in Mali

Me, Anna, and Katie at the falls.
The upper falls at Woroni.

The road to my village.
My language tutor, Lassina.
My djatigi's compound.
My djatigi (host father), Zange.
His first wife, Bintu.

I apologize for the long delay between entries. At the beginning of November I had to take a short trip to Bamako, after which I didn’t want to leave my village again until Thanksgiving because I knew I would be gone then for a while. Not too much to report from village – vaccinations and baby weighings, etc. An NGO called Keneya Ciwara had done some “monitoring” of the CSCOM, which was basically an audit of the records, and we had a meeting about the results. They found (shock shock) that the CSCOM is underutilized – something that we definitely already knew. One of the main problems is that the pharmacy is empty right now, but they are supposedly restocking it within the next couple of weeks. Once we have medication again, the ASACO president (the ASACO is a community organization that manages the finances of the CSCOM) has asked me to go to each village in the commune with him to announce that the pharmacy has been refilled.

This all feels pretty far away right now, because last Tuesday morning I came into Sikasso to kick off the Thanksgiving festivities. It has become an annual thing in Peace Corps Mali that the biggest Thanksgiving party is in Sikasso, because we have the best selection of fruits and vegetables to cook with. This year over 50 volunteers came. The Sikasso volunteers from last year’s training group took the lead in organizing everything (fortunately), and did an amazing job. When people arrived, they had to “register,” which meant paying a flat rate that covered both Thanksgiving dinner and Mexican night the following night. Then they signed up for a cooking team (this was actually optional, but I think most people helped cook).

It was amazing how well everything worked out. This year the organizers decided to pay Malians to do some of the work for us – all the potatoes for the mashed potatoes were peeled and boiled by a Malian woman and then brought back for the mashing. We also got green beans and squash prepared by Malians, and four of the six turkeys (two of the turkeys were deep-fried by PCVs). The squash that is available here is very similar to pumpkin, and made for delicious pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread.

Friday evening was Mexican night, and on the weekend we organized a trip to Woroni Falls, some waterfalls about 65 km south of Sikasso. Another PCV, Jessie, and I were responsible for organizing the waterfall trip, so we basically just showed up at Mexican night and enjoyed the food. Because all of the dishes available to PCVs in Sikasso were being used for Mexican night, we had to prepare some of the food that we were bringing to the falls that night, after people had finished eating.

About 20 people ended up going to the falls. We had organized “sept-place” (seven-seat) taxis to take us there and spend the night, bringing us back on Sunday. The funny thing about the sept-place taxis is that they base their prices on the assumption that there are nine passengers, not seven. And we had to fit 10 people in one of the cars, plus each car takes two drivers in case they need help pushing if the car breaks down. Despite being cramped, we made it somehow.

The falls were absolutely beautiful. It felt like we were in another country because everything was so lush and green and tropical looking. On the lowest level of the falls there is a flat, shady, sandy area, perfect for camping (and I didn’t get a picture of this part, unfortunately). Further up is another set of falls, and above that is a third one, but I didn’t make it up there this trip (there’s not really a path). In the evening we made a fire, and one guy had brought marshmallows that someone had sent him from the U.S., so we even got to make roasted marshmallows! In the morning one of the cars left very early, but those of us in the second car hiked around a little more before returning to Sikasso.

Today I have errands to do (including posting this), then I’m planning to return to my village this afternoon. I’m admittedly feeling a little bummed about the holiday and all the fun stuff we planned being over, but I know I’ll feel better once I’m back in my village. Also, I have a stack of People magazines that my mom sent me to console me.

babies and children and sheep, oh my!

I’m back in Sikasso after a little over a week in village. Salimata, Soumaila and I have continued to go to the other villages in the commune doing vaccinations and baby weighings. It’s been really nice to have some scheduled time where I feel like I’m actually doing something useful. Plus I’m getting to see some other villages and ride my bike a lot. While they had been weighing babies at the vaccination days before, according to the records they weren’t weighing nearly as many of the babies.

Now that I’ve been there a few times, I’m sure this was because it’s really hard to coordinate with all these women who are trying to get their baby vaccinated as quickly as possible, while filling out all the paperwork and actually administrating the vaccinations (not to mention crying squirming babies that don’t want to be shoved into the baby shorts and hung from the scale). I’ve definitely been useful as another set of hands.

I’m looking forward to expanding the activities that we do on these days even more. I was supposed to do my first “animation” (an informal education session) yesterday, but the vaccination day didn’t end up happening because somehow the women didn’t end up being informed that we were coming that day. Right now we’re not really doing nutritional counseling with the women after we weigh the babies. With our current system, I haven’t figured out yet how we can incorporate that smoothly, but I think it will come.

I’d heard a lot of stories about children that wouldn’t leave volunteers alone in their villages. For the first few weeks, I had no problems. Children didn’t even try to come to my concession. Then, about a week ago, some children started showing up to visit. It was a small group of girls, and they came, stayed for a while, and left, and it was no problem. However, this caused more children to come. A few days ago I started kicking them out after a few minutes. First of all, because they wouldn’t respect the fact that if I locked the door to my concession in the early afternoon, that meant I was resting before my language tutoring session and didn’t want company. One night they also came in the evening, when I was just reading and winding down before bed. Again, the door was locked, and despite the fact that I’d explained to them (that afternoon) that if the door was locked I didn’t want visitors, they wouldn’t go away.

I just need to be firmer about kicking them out. Even when it’s just a few kids and they’re not doing anything, I can’t comfortably go about my normal activities in my concession with them staring at me. They don’t come to talk or anything, just to watch me. I had an older girl come in the other day and tell me I should “shoo” the kids away, so I did. I was glad she’d told me that, because I had been worried that it was culturally inappropriate to send them away, but now I know it’s not.

I have, however, started to welcome sheep into my concession. The yard is supposed to be just sand, but lots of weeds grow in it. I sometimes will spend some time weeding, but it just grows to fast to keep up with. Sometimes sheep would wander in and I would chase them away, but then one day I thought – hey, maybe we can work together on this. Soon an entire herd of sheep was in my yard and doing a better job than I would have done spending an hour weeding while sweating profusely.

A few things I forgot to put on my previous list of stuff I would love to receive:

granola bars

CDs! Please please burn CDs and send them to me!

I just want to mention that now that Ramadan is over, I'm able to watch Au Coeur Du Péché again in my village. There is a car batter-powered black and white TV at my homologue's house. Au Coeur Du Péché is a Brazilian soap opera dubbed into French (and for the non-francophones, that translates to "at the heart of sin," so you can imagine what an awesome show it is). For the duration of Ramadan, they had moved it to 10 or 10:30 at night -- or so I heard, because that's way past my bedtime! Two nights this week it wasn't on because of soccer, and I was very bitter.

Next

I spent 10 days at my site before coming into Sikasso again this Saturday. This week my homologue, Salimata, and the vaccinator, Soumaila and I went to some of the surrounding villages serviced by our CSCOM to do vaccinations and baby weighings. I was really excited, because having some planned activities really helps to break up all that unscheduled time. We would leave between 8 and 9 in the morning, and Sali and Soumaila would go ahead on his moto while I biked. When we arrived in the village, they would notify their contacts there, and people would set us up with a table and chairs, usually under a shady tree. After a while, word would get out and mothers would start showing up with their babies.

Friday was the holiday at the end of Ramadan, called Seli Fitini in Bambara ("little holiday" -- Seli Ba, or "big holiday," is 40 days after the end of Ramadan. In my village, they buy and prepare beef for Seli Fitini. Basically people dressed up in nice clothes and went to the mosque and pray, ate a lot of rice and meat, and went around greeting each other. Children get dressed up and go around to different houses and people give them coins. There seemed to be a huge number of children on bikes, which confused me, because there aren't usually that many bikes in the village.

When I arrived in Sikasso on Saturday morning, I discovered that things were not back to normal. The whole weekend was an extension of the celebration, and the market was much quieter than usual and lots of businesses were closed. I'm hoping that when I return to my village this afternoon, things will be back to normal.

If anyone wants to send me a package, I have a general list of things that I can always use here:

trail mix (fruit and nut kinds)
M and Ms
dried fruit (craisins, raisins, apple, mango)
peanut butter
sudokus or crosswords
dial soap
sponges (like for the kitchen, preferably with the scrubby thing on one side)
sauce mix packets (instant packets to make pasta sauce, taco seasoning, etc.)
spices (now I just need thyme and cumin)

Ok, sorry for the shortness of this post but I'm just not in the mood to write more right now.

First Week at Site

Ok, so in case you didn't notice, I just posted pictures. I did it as a separate posting so nothing could go wrong. I'm back in Sikasso after spending a full week at my site. One thing that was a bit stressful during my first 5 days or so at site was that the Peace Corps had misplaced one of my pieces of luggage in transit, and didn't find it until yesterday morning, so I was pretty worried about that. I originally planned to come into Sikasso today to buy some necessities to help me hold out until the bag was found (or in case it was permanently lost), but when I got the good news I decided to come in anyway to get my mail, use the internet, and buy some fruits and veggies.

It's an 18k bike ride in. My language tutor, Lassina, had told me that it is 4k from my village to the "siraba" (big road, which is also unpaved) but I think it's further because just that took about 30 minutes. Once I was on the big road though, things went much faster and the total trip was about an hour and 10 minutes. Anyway, it was a fun ride. There are several villages along the way, and everyone was really friendly and greeted me. People were so shocked to see a white person -- at this point, everyone in my village knows a white person is living there. On the road, however, I saw people driving mopeds literally turn around to get a better look at me.

As for my site. I've been trying to get up at 6:30. If I sleep any later, I'm guaranteed to feel really lazy, because even at 6:30 everyone is up already. I've been heating my water for coffee (instant) on a charcoal stove because one of the components of my gas stove was in my bag that was lost. Anyway, it takes 10 to 20 minutes to light my charcoal stove (I've been getting better at it). At first I hated doing it but now it's a kind of enjoyable part of my morning ritual. I get together the rest of my breakfast while the water heats. Bread is available in my village, if I feel like venturing out of my concession that early in the morning, which sometimes I honestly don't. My host family has been giving me millet porridge most afternoons, so sometimes I'll eat that for breakfast. It's really grown on me -- with powdered milk, sugar and cinnamon, it's delicious!

Anyway, once I've eaten I go to the well next to my concession to draw water for my morning bucket bath. If I need drinking water as well, I'll make a second trip. It's lucky that the well is so close, because water is heavy! I have a really big bucket, and I don't even fill it because if I do I can't carry it. I need to master carrying stuff on my head.

By the time I've gotten dressed, it's after 8. I've been spending my mornings out and about. I usually stop by Salimata's house (my homologue), and then either go to the CSCOM if there is anyone there (which there hasn't been), or I sit with her family a bit. After she's done some of her morning work, we have been going on marathon greeting sessions. That means going to one section of the village, and going to each concession looking for the elderly people that haven't gone to the fields. We sit with them for a few minutes while Sali introduces me and tells them what I'm there for. We chat a little, then move on.

I usually come home before lunch, then eat lunch at Sali's. I'm looking forward to having my gas stove working so I can at least cook my own lunch, because during Ramadan that would really be better. I spend the hottest part of the day at home. I read or nap, and every other day I have my language lesson from 3 to 4.

I've been going running almost every afternoon once it cools down. I try to stop by my djatigi's house either going or coming, because the path I go running on goes right by there. Everyone thinks it's hilarious that I run. Yesterday I had a kid follow me for a few minutes, continually asking me where I was going. I kept saying "I'm just running", but I don't think he believed me. There is a Fula (an ethnic group, usually pastoralists) guy who I always run into herding his cows. He also didn't understand at first, but he's gotten used to me. Yesterday he offered me some milk. I was curious but didn't think it would be a good idea mid-run (also, unpasteurized dairy products can carry TB).

Once I get back from my run, I draw more water and bathe again, and read/relax, then go to Sali's at 7:30 for dinner. They have a black and white TV powered by a car battery. Unfortunately, TV has been sucking because of Ramadan. They've taken my beloved "Au Coeur Du Peche" (a brilliant Brazilian soap opera!) and moved from 7 to 10:30, which is way later than I'm ever up. Anyway, I hang out, eat dinner, and come home around 9 and go to bed.

To explain about my djatigi. So, that's kind of like a host family, except I don't live with them or eat with them... The host father, Zange Koné, is the former mayor of Kafouziela. He was the one who originally submitted a request for a PCV. Most PCVs do eat with their host family. However, Lassina really wanted me to eat with Sali at the fonctionnaire's concession. I think that he and my host father think that I can't handle real Malian food or something. Anyway, I try to go hang out with his family at least a little every day. Zange himself is really, really nice. He has three wives, one of whom I'm named for (I'm Bintu Koné now). They are Senufo.

The Senufo are an ethnic group that is very prevalent in Sikasso. I'm lucky because while the majority of my village is Senufo, the language is only spoken by elderly people. Everyone speaks Bambara. I say I'm lucky only because PC doesn't ever teach Senufo during stage, and I know other volunteers who are in villages that do speak it. It's a dilemma for them because it is an exceptionally difficult language to learn because it's tonal, and dialects vary a lot so it would only be useful in their own village. On the other hand, the situation in my village is sad but typical -- less and less people are speaking it, and linguists are trying to preserve the language.

Back to my host family. Yesterday I went to their house because they were making shea butter and I wanted to see what they did and help if I could. They had already done something the day before to turn the shea nuts into brown goo. The step that I was there for was mixing that goo with water until it began to turn white. We stuck our arms in big basins of it and turned it for a long time. It was really fun. Of course, the women I was with somehow managed to get only a small part of their arm covered in the shea stuff -- my arm was covered to my elbow, and they thought it was hilarious. Once the white part separates, they transferred that to another bucket and threw out the remaining brown water. Then they heat the white part for an hour, and it turns to oil.

After we worked on the shea butter, I sat with my host father and we ate together. I asked him some questions about his family, including how many children he had. He told me that in total he had 8 children living -- 8 had died. This is a typical response. I've asked women the same question, and they'll say something like "Five... but 3 died." It's pretty shocking.

Pictures!

The view over my wall at sunset.
My house! This picture now looks darker than it did on my camera. Oh well, I have 2 years to take more flattering photos of it.
Moribabugukaw!
Making shea butter. The woman on the right is one of the wives of my djatigi (host).
One of my lovely roommates. Next time I'll try to put something next to it so you can see how big it is.

Off to Site

Swearing in was good, my speech was successful, and the party was really fun! Now I'm in Sikasso City with the other volunteers in my region, waiting to be "installed" in my site. I'm scheduled to be moved in tomorrow morning, which is a little scary.

We left Tubani So at 6 a.m. Sunday to take public transportation to our regional capitals. We met up with our regional coordinator yesterday morning, who took us to meet the governor and chief of police. The other major thing we need to be doing here is shopping for supplies for our houses. Volunteers that are replacing someone have a lot less to buy. Yesterday I tried to buy a bunch of kitchen stuff, but was unable to reach an agreement with the seller about a price, so I ended up walking out. Today I went back to the same place, and he was more reasonable. My other favorite purchases have been a mortar and pestle (which are heavy, by the way), and a canary -- a clay jar to store water in, that keeps it cool.

Last night we made Mexican food at the house of one of the volunteers who lives in the city. It was amazing. Also, one of the other volunteers, Kaleta, made a cake for the two of us that had birthdays this week. We spent a long time trying to pound sugar to made powdered sugar for the frosting. Conclusion: I don't know how they make powdered sugar, but it doesn't involve pounding it in a mortar and pestle. Luckily it was delicious anyway.

Not much more to report right now. From now on I'll only have internet access every 2 weeks or so, I think. I have cell phone service at site so you can call me, or try texting me. Also, I actually receive snail mail more quickly now that I can go pick it up at the post office myself.

Tomorrow I'm a PCV!

Ben goes Tamasheq while Katherine sleeps. This is where we had our classes.
My host mother Awa at a baptism, holding the newborn.

Alright, I had a third picture on here but the internet hates me. Also, I tried to upload more photos, but my patience has run out. Here is my entry:

Homestay is over, and we’re back at Tubani So for the last time. The last few days have been spent in sessions going over last-minute administrative details, and packing. Friday is “Swearing-In,” the ceremony where we officially transition from Peace Corps Trainees (PCTs) to Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs). Swearing-In is at the American Embassy, and afterward there is a brunch at the ambassador’s house. That night the current PCVs are hosting a party for us in Bamako, and most of us are staying in a hotel that night. We can spend all day Saturday in the city (and it’s Mali’s independence day – September 22).

I’m pretty nervous for Swearing In, because there is going to be a speech in each language, and I’m giving the Bambara speech. It’s not a long speech, but the event is going to be broadcast on Malian television! Our host families have been invited, but I don’t know if mine will be there, because they have to get to the embassy on their own.

On Sunday we leave for our regional capitals via public transportation. We’ve already sent the bulk of our luggage on Peace Corps vehicles. When we get to the regional capital, we will have some time to shop for the necessities for our houses. I’m going to have to buy pretty much everything since mine is a new site (I’m not replacing a volunteer) – that means furniture, a stove, dishes, cooking utensils, buckets, everything. Then a Peace Corps vehicle will take each of us to our sites with all our stuff.

And then I’ll be at my site! For the first three months, we’re not allowed to leave our regions. We are supposed to be focusing our efforts on improving our language and getting to know the community, rather than starting any real projects. For health, we are supposed to conduct a “baseline survey” and other needs assessment activities, and spend time hanging out at our CSCOM. I’ll also be going around meeting as many people as possible, and hopefully touching base with the already-existing community groups, like the Women’s Association.

In January we return to Tubani So for 2 weeks of in-service training (IST). This is supposed to be intensive technical training, preparing us to go out and actually do projects.

Today we had a session on snakes in Mali. They had this guy come and bring in a bunch of snakes that live here, and he told us which ones are poisonous, how to avoid getting bitten, and what to do if we are bitten. Then we got to play with the non-dangerous ones, especially the ball pythons, which roll into balls as a defense mechanism. They were cute. Apparently there has only been one incident of a PCV getting bitten in the last 10 or 15 years. Mostly it’s farmers, because they are walking through tall grasses or brush. They should really bring snakes into all the sessions because everybody was really into it.

As requested, pics that include me

This is me with my two host mothers. Awa is on my left, Kadiatou on my right.
This is the whole family. Minus my host father and uncle. They left on a business trip after I'd been there about two weeks and never came back.

Anyway, I'm going to take advantage of the internet connection to just post this without writing more.

Random thoughts

One of my first days in Mali, an American who had spent a lot of time in West Africa was telling us that one of her cultural limits is that she won’t suck juice out of a bag. I, on the other hand, feel the exact opposite – to me, sucking juice from a bag is one of the perks of life in Mali!

To explain: in markets here, many women sell juice in clear plastic bags – like sandwich bags, tied off at the end. They contain about 4-6 ounces of juice, and you bite off one corner and suck the juice out. Sometimes the juice is frozen, which is even better, because Malian juice is too sweet for most Americans’ taste buds, but when it’s frozen it’s like sorbet. Yogurt or porridge can be sold like this as well. There are a few common types of juice – dahblani, which is made from boiled hibiscus flowers with TONS of sugar and various other flavorings, jinbere, which is ginger juice (and a ton of sugar), and assorted juices, often bright orange, made from powdered mixes (and a ton of sugar).

There are a few health hazards associated with buying juice in this form. For one thing, you don’t know what water was used. Even though boiling is part of the process of making dahblani, some women make it by making a concentrated batch of the boiled flowers and adding cool water afterward. Besides the water, there’s other relevant conditions that there’s no way to know about (like hand washing). And of course, the outside of the bag can be dirty.

Every day, my host mother makes juice, freezes it (yes, we have a fridge, a huge luxury here), and sells it in the market in the morning to make a little extra income. It’s wonderful because I know that she uses robinet or tap water, which is treated, and I know that our courtyard is clean. This means I get a delicious supply of frozen juice that I know is relatively safe. Mmmmm. And back to my original point, I find drinking it from a bag to be vastly satisfying.

Right now I’m back at Tubani So, with only a few weeks left of training. There are four phases to training in Peace Corps Mali. Phase I was the first half of training, which was basically all language and cross-culture sessions. Phase II is now, which is some technical training and some “lang-tech” – i.e. learning vocabulary relevant to our jobs. Phase III is the first 3 months at site, when we are supposed to be integrating and doing needs assessment, and Phase IV is an IST, or in-service training, which will be two weeks of mostly technical stuff once we have an idea of what’s going on at our site.

Last week we conducted a baby weighing and a demonstration of how to make ameliorated porridge in our homestay village. Since our village has a well-organized CSCOM (centre de santé communautaire) that already has baby weighings twice a week, we just kind of helped out with theirs. They have a very efficient system. The babies that came to our CSCOM were mostly healthy weight, but there were a few that were slightly or seriously underweight.

But we did follow up with doing a little nutrition lesson about ameliorated porridge with the mothers, in Bambara. It is extremely scary to get up in front of a group and give a talk in a language that you can barely have a conversation in. But it turned out pretty well, because both the women and the staff were helpful, kind, and receptive. It was really good to get over doing that for the first time, since that’s a large part of what health volunteers do. You just have to realize that the worst that can happen is that they won’t understand you.

The purpose of baby weighings is to identify as early as possible which babies are underweight, because malnutrition is the underlying cause of most child deaths here. It can complicate basically any other disease. We are supposed to encourage women to exclusively breastfeed their babies until 6 months, then start introducing ameliorated porridge. Porridge is a common staple food here – it can be made from millet, rice, or corn. Many children who get enough calories do not get enough protein once they are weaned and no longer getting as much breast milk. This leads to the condition called kwashiorkor, which is when they have the swollen bellies and skinny arms, and sometimes pale, brittle hair. Ameliorated porridge is porridge that has peanut paste, peanut powder, bean powder, fish powder, or any other source of protein added to it. It’s easy to make and very cheap.

The kind we made had 5 different kinds of powder in it – millet, fonio (which is some kind of grain that I don’t really understand), rice, bean and peanut. It was actually pretty good. And it is really easy to make! You just mix the flours with a little water then add them to boiling water and keep cooking it for a while. Then you can add sugar and anything else you want. It tastes kind of like cream of wheat.

Which reminds me of a funny cultural thing about hot and cold. Malians are really into cooling things off. In the U.S., if you have a cup of coffee and it’s too hot, you wait until it cools a little and then drink it. Here, that is unacceptable. If my family gives me my cup of tea in the morning and they see that it’s too hot, they take it away and pour it back and forth between two cups until it is cooled off. When porridge has been cooked, the last step is to scoop it and pour it with a ladle until it is cool. And it’s not just my family – I’ve had lots of conversations with other trainees about this.

Another interesting discovery I’ve had from eating with my hands is that my hand is actually more sensitive to heat than my mouth. Sometimes I’ll scoop up a handful of rice and burn my hand, but if I can just get it to my mouth it’s ok. After a lifetime of eating with their hands and/or cooking over an open fire, most Malians’ hands are way less sensitive to heat, and my host family thinks it’s hilarious whenever I can’t start eating because the food is too hot.

to Sikasso and back

I just got back from “site visit,” which is when Peace Corps trainees (PCTs) visit the village/town/city we’ll be living in for the two years of our service. Last Monday my homologue, Salimata, came to Tubani So. A homologue, or counterpart, is our closest work contact. They are supposed to help us integrate into the community and provide support/assistance/guidance for projects that we do. On Monday we had some workshops to help orient the homologues to what we Peace Corps is all about and how to (hopefully) successfully work together.

The next day we left early in the morning with our homologues to travel to our region. My site is in Sikasso, the southernmost region of Mali, bordering with the Cote D'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Guinea. I was thrilled with my placement there, because Sikasso is renowned for having tons of produce, including avocadoes and mangoes. Supposedly during mango season there will be more mangoes than even I know what to do with. Sikasso city, the regional capital, is near the Burkina border. Two other PCTs and their homologues were on the same bus. Unfortunately we missed the early morning bus, so we had to wait at the bus station in Bamako for almost two hours.

The bus makes fairly frequent stops, to pay tolls in small villages on the paved road, and sometimes to let people go to the bathroom. It also makes longer stops at prayer times so that people can pray. I realized that this is the problem with traveling later in the day. Muslim prayer times are dawn, 2 p.m., 4 p.m., sunset, and 8 p.m. Once you hit the afternoon prayer times (which we did) the stops really slow you down. One time we stopped for a really long time in the middle of nowhere, and I’m not sure why. Buses also break down, but this didn’t happen, fortunately. When it stops in villages, people come up to the bus selling snacks such as hardboiled eggs, cakes, cold drinks, and roasted corn. Anyway, the trip down took about 8 hours.

My homologue and I were supposed to stay in a hotel in Sikasso city, but it turned out that she had family nearby, so she went and stayed with them and I stayed in the hotel. The hotel was in walking distance of a current volunteer’s house. I went to her house and we made dinner together, which was wonderful after a month and a half of not ever getting to cook for myself. The next day she took me to the bank where I was supposed to open an account, then on a tour of the city. It is the second largest city in Mali, after Bamako. Despite this, it is not at all cosmopolitan. There are only a few paved roads, and no tall buildings....and no ice cream! Or if there is ice cream, the volunteers in the area haven't found it, which would mean that they're missing their biggest potential market! There are however, stores that sell candy, a good assortment of cookies, Nutella, cereal, oatmeal, flour, etc. There are some patisseries, there is a hotel with a swimming pool, a bank, a hospital, bars and restaurants.

In the afternoon a Peace Corps vehicle took me and Salimata to my future village, Kafouziela. It is only 18 km outside of the city, but the road is unpaved and there is no public transportation to it except on Sundays. I will have a bike once I’m installed, however, so I’ll be able to bike back and forth easily.

My village is beautiful! It is on a small hill. There are tons of mango trees, and most of the buildings are made of mud brick with thatched roofs. It’s a village of about 2000 people. There are several wells, and one pump, but it doesn’t work right now. My house is the former mayor’s office, and it’s in its own concession (walled-in yard). It is made of cement with a corrugated tin roof, and has two rooms. It also has a large porch, which is wonderful because it means I can be outside even when it’s raining. There is a mango tree in my yard, and a BRAND NEW NYEGEN!!! If anyone missed this before, a nyegen is a pit that you go to the bathroom in. Starting off with a brand new one is sooooo nice because it doesn’t smell at all, and the concrete floor is freshly poured. Some have a separate bathing area. Mine doesn’t, but the whole thing is big enough that I can bathe at a comfortable distance from the hole. It doesn’t have a roof, but it has fairly high walls, which is also nice (some nyegens have walls that are only about 3 feet high, which can be embarrassing).

There is a well right next to my concession. I’m also right next to the market, which happens on Saturdays. I got to see it, and realized that I’d had unrealistic expectations. There were basically peanuts, “Malian eggplants” (not like eggplants, believe me), and hot peppers. Not a single fruit. To be fair, this is kind of an in-between time for fruit, but I think I’m going to have to do a lot of my marketing in Sikasso, which is no problem now that I’m prepared for that. While produce isn’t readily available in my village, bread, pasta and eggs are. Bread is kind of a luxury “en brousse” – because I’m so close to Sikasso, it is brought in from there.

I’ll be working at the CSCOM (“centre de santé communautaire” or community health center) in my village. It’s about a three-minute walk from my concession, and across the street from the concession where Salimata and my language tutor both live (they’re in the “fonctionnaire” concession – they are government employees and not from the village). It’s pretty nice looking (especially compared to other ones I’ve seen). Salimata is the matrone of the maternité, the clinic where women go for prenatal consultations, giving birth, family planning advice, etc. I sat in on a few prenatal consultations. Other than that, I didn’t really get a good idea of the CSCOM on this visit. Once I get back I will make a schedule of hours that I will regularly spend at the CSCOM.

The chief of the village gave me a live chicken as a welcome present. First it was tied up in Salimata’s compound. The next day it was beheaded and lying next to the cooking fire. Later in the day they took it away and de-feathered it, then cooked it for me for dinner. I think it was the first time I had seen a live animal, then known that that specific animal was on my dinner plate. It was delicious though.

On Sunday the Peace Corps vehicle was supposed to come pick me up, but it turned out that a PCV had had a medical emergency and they needed the car to take that person to Bamako. This was good practice for how they would get me out of my village if I had a medical emergency. My language tutor, Lassina, rode his motorcycle to the village 1 km away where there is a guy that owns a car. He arranged for the car to take me to Sikasso if we reimbursed them for gas. And that was that.

Much to the villagers’ consternation, one of Peace Corps’s rules is that volunteers are forbidden to drive or ride on motorcycles/mopeds/scooters. This is a recent rule – PC even used to provide them for some volunteers. Then they did a study and found that they were causing an inordinate number of the injuries and even deaths among PCVs. Volunteers in some countries are allowed to ride on them with a helmet, because in those countries it’s basically the only way to get around, but not in Mali. Anyway, tons of people in my village have motos so it’s kind of inconvenient that I can’t, but I would be afraid to anyway. The roads are so bad here and everyone rides without helmets.

When I got back to Sikasso, several other PCTs and volunteers were there. We went to the market and made Mexican food for dinner! We made flour tortillas from scratch and guacamole, plus ground beef, beans, and other taco toppings. It was so delicious.

I took the earliest possible but back to Bamako the next morning with two other trainees. It was a luxurious trip – the bus wasn’t full, so we each had two seats, and we barely stopped. It took about 6 ½ hours, so I think that’s about the least time it could ever take.

When we got back to Bamako, we learned that one PCT, who is in the same training village as I am, broke his leg that morning in Segou. It was one of those freak things -- he was just walking down a little hill and turned his ankle and it snapped. He is being MedEvac'ed to Washington because he needs surgery, but hopefully he'll be able to return.

That’s all for now. This is an excessively long entry.

An Ka Duminike!

I realized that I haven’t really talked very much about the ins and outs of my daily life, so I’m going to try to address that a little. First to describe my family’s compound. You enter through a gate, and there is a well to the left. My family uses well water for washing, but a boy with a donkey cart brings around robinet (tap) water every day or two that they use for drinking and cooking. Each of my host mothers has her own “domain” – a living room and bedroom. I haven’t actually been in Awa’s bedroom, so I don’t know about her, but Kadiatou also has a western-style bathroom. However, while the whole thing is set up like a bathroom in the U.S., with a toilet, sink and showerhead, there is no running water. Off the courtyard are also entrances to two bedrooms, one for me and one for my teenage host brothers.

There is also the “kitchen,” which is really a room where pots and pans and other utensils are stored. The cooking all takes place in the courtyard itself over either wood or charcoal fires. There is another storeroom on the other side of the courtyard where my Kadiatou keeps her supplies for the stuff she sells in the market.

In the courtyard there is also a double nyegen. A nyegen, again, is basically a hole in the ground. Luckily my family’s has a cement floor, which is much pleasanter than the ones with just a dirt floor. I use the nyegen about half the time, but I almost always take my bucket baths in Kadiatou’s bathroom, because they prefer that I do.

Cooking is really different here. Like I said, my family only uses charcoal or wood fires. There are no counters or tables. They prepare everything in the courtyard, usually sitting on a chair and cutting things up in their hands. We have a small mortar and pestle that they use to grind certain ingredients. In our back alley there is a large mortar and pestle used to pound millet or corn.

Which brings me to the food. My homestay family feeds me very well. There is not nearly as much variety in the food here. There are several staple starches that are eaten with a variety of sauces. There is, of course, rice. That can pretty much go with any sauce (tigadegenan, or peanut sauce, tomato based sauce, green leafy sauce, or prepared like fried rice, which is my favorite).

Then there is to. To is made from millet (it can also be made from corn), it’s basically ground and cooked into a paste, and eaten with okra sauce and a red sauce. My family has only given me to once. If you know what okra is like, you can imagine that okra cooked into a sauce ends up having the consistency of snot. Lots of Americans don’t like to, but I felt that maybe with a different sauce I would have found it tolerable.

Couscous, or bashi, is my nemesis. It is not like couscous in the U.S., which I think is Arab couscous. It is a much finer texture, and I always feel like I’m eating sand. My family really likes couscous though so we have it a lot. It is usually accompanied by a green leafy sauce but we had it with something else the other day. I just try to take a lot of sauce and a little couscous, and I can deal with it.

There is another starch that we only had one time, called nyenyesiri or something like that. It is made from ground corn, and it is kind of the texture of mashed rice. We had that with peanut sauce and I thought it was pretty good, but we haven’t had it again.

We eat from a communal bowl. The bowl sits on the floor and we all sit on low chairs around it, and eat with our hands. Before eating, everyone washes their right hand in a bowl of water. You never, ever, ever use your left hand to eat (there is a good reason). Women and men don’t eat from the same bowl. In my family, when there are no other men around, the teenage boys will occasionally eat with us, but not usually. Kadiatou (the first wife) is the one that spoons the sauce on to the rice, and gets puts more food out if she notices that everyone still seems hungry. Kadiatou and Awa alternate cooking days, but this is always Kadiatou’s role.

At dinner, I don’t eat from the communal bowl because they make me separate food for dinner. The Peace Corps gave the families some orientation before we went to live there, and told them that Americans like more variety in their food. My family almost always eats the same thing they had for lunch for dinner, so they make me something separate, which is usually either meat and potatoes or yams in sauce, or pasta and meat. I really like this because I get tired of rice and I almost always like the food they give me for dinner.

There are also two sweetened porridges that they make, siri and moni. Siri is made with rice, and in my family we usually eat it as dessert in the evening, but some people eat it for breakfast. I LOVE siri. Before leaving homestay this last time I was able to ask Kadiatou, in Bambara, if when I returned she could teach me to make it. Moni is made from millet and I can’t stand it. I know that I can like millet porridges prepared a certain way, but moni does not do it for me. My family usually eats this for breakfast.

For breakfast they give me bread and tea.

This was a lot about food, but it's actually proportional to how important a topic food is in the lives of PCTs. We talk about it constantly: what we eat at each meal, how we liked it, what we crave, and what we miss.

some pics!

My dogomusow (little sisters): Aminata, Mariam (called La Vieille) and Bintou.
This is a rooster in a tree next to where we have class. Whenever they decide to go in the tree they get really full of themselves and won't shut up, so we chase them out.
Wulu on a wall! My Bambara class is inside a family's concession. This dog patrols the concession from the top of the wall. She's adorable! And we think she's pregnant. She has rebuffed all attemts to make friends, however, so we just have to watch her.

This is the view of the Niger river at Tubani So (above).

This is the mother and baby at the first baptism I attended (above). Sorry it's sideways. The internet is slow; so I can't change it now.
This is a woman painting my feet. It's called Indu Jabi, and it was traditionally done with henna, but now they add something to make it black. After I had it done I heard that sometimes that something is rat poisoning. It's been 2 weeks and my feet seem to be doing ok, so let's hope it wasn't that.
This is Moribabugu, my homestay village. This is the paved road that runs from Bamako to Koulikoro. The rest of the town is dirt roads.

I originally tried to post this several days ago, but the power went out. So enjoy!

back at Tubani So

I'm back at the Peace Corps training site after almost 2 weeks in my homestay village. Things there have been going really well. My host family is wonderful. My host father has two wives, and they have four children: boys that are 15 and 17, and girls that are 9 and 10. In our household as well are the 14-year-old sister of the younger wife, plus the father's younger brother.

We basically spend all day learning Bambara (Bamanankan), with a two hour break for lunch. Sometimes there is a cross-cultural session thrown in as well. There are 11 PCTs in my village, but only 4 of us are doing Bambara (the others are doing French). Our village is actually more of a town. It's pretty big and pretty near Bamako. I haven't gone into Bamako yet though. It's nice to be in a larger town because there is a market every day, so we can buy fruit, cloth, cookies, whatever.

At my house we have luxuries like a refrigerator, which my mother uses to chill or freeze juices that she sells at the market every day. I know they are safe to drink because I know my family only uses robinet water, which is already treated, so it's nice to have access to that. I also have electricity in my room, and even a fan. My family is really respectful of my room and my belongings.

Our language classes are held at the concession (walled in compound) of a fisherman who lives by the Niger river. We have classes under some mango trees (no mangoes on them right now).

Can't write more now, but we should be finding out about our sites either tomorrow or Thursday!

N be Mali la

That means I'm in Mali in Bambara. I think. Anyway, I just tried to start writing when the computer I'm on decided to die, so I restarted it and I guess I can save as I go along. I'm at the Peace Corps training center outside Bamako; we arrived Friday night after quite a grueling journey. The training center is really nice. We are staying in huts with three people to a hut. They have ceiling fans, which I definitely wasn't expecting, and mosquito nets. Also, they provide toilet paper for the nyegen. A nyegen is a bathroom, but essentially a hole in a concrete floor. There is a shower with running water in the nyegen, which I was also surprised about. However, these luxuries are not for long.

We are here at the training center till Wednesday, when we will be "installed" in homestay villages where we spend most of training. I had been confused about the mechanics of this, but it turns out that recently they switched to a "community based training model," which means that we spend about two weeks at a time in rural villages, some right near Bamako, some up to 120 km away. There will be 5-7 of us per village, and an LCF (Language and Culture Facilitator) will be living in our village training us in the indigenous language we're supposed to be learning. Every two weeks or so we come to the training center for 2-3 days.

I don't know yet what language I'll be learning. I'm exicted for tomorrow, because we have a French placement test and our first interview with the APCD (I think that's Associate Peace Corps Director), which will have to do with site placement, and thus also which language we need to learn.

Today we had our first Bambara classes, which were really fun. No matter what language we end up learning, we need to know a little Bambara because it's the lingua franca in Mali (in addition to French). I may be learning a minority language (i.e. not Bambara, and the ones being taught this training are Dogon, Fulani/Fulfulde/Pulaar, Tamasheq, and Sonrhai), because they'll only teach you one if you already speak French (because if you only speak a minority language you can't get around most of Mali).

The weather had been pleasantly surprising. It's the rainy season, so I was expecting it to be unbearably hot and humid (because Senegal was when I was there at the end of the rainy season), but it's actually pretty pleasant. It's in the 80s during the day but really cools down at night, and it's less humid than Philly! I even went running this evening and it was just fine. It rained this afternoon which really cooled it down.

Tonight I had my first experience with to, a pasty millet porridge that I will probably be eating a lot. A lot of people don't like it but I didn't mind it. The food here at the training center is very good. I was dismayed to discover that it's apparently the end of mango season, but they gave us mangoes last night and for lunch today, and I just have to say, African mangoes are sooooooo much better than any mango you could ever get in the U.S.! Mmmmm. Besides the to, the food has mostly been rice and sauce dishes very similar to those in Senegal, but I'll have a better idea of authentic food once I've been with a family for a little while.

There is supposed to be wireless at the training center, but it's not worknig right now and neither is the power adapter for my computer. They have four computers available for us, so my time is probably up on this one. Everyone email me!

Staging

So I arrived safe and sound at staging after a perilous journey from Narberth to Old City. It turns out that there are 82 trainees departing for Mali with me! So many that we have been divided into two groups for staging. I arrived right on time for registration today, which meant that once I was all registered we basically sat around a hotel conference room for 2 hours as more people trickled in, sort of getting to know each other. At 3:00, the activities started. We talked about the goals of the Peace Corps, some statistics, how it was founded, the meaning of "development," etc. Later we talked about some of our fears and what we hoped to accomplish, and some basic safety issues. Things wrapped up at 7 or so.

I went out for dinner with a couple people, then swimming in the rooftop pool! I guess they don't want us to start roughing it right away...

Tomorrow morning we get our vaccinations, then have more sessions in the afternoon.

So I'm going to Mali...

On July 17th, I will be leaving to spend two years in the Peace Corps in Mali. In this post, I'm going to answer a few general questions about how it all works. The Peace Corps is a 27-month commitment. That includes three (ish) months of pre-service training, which takes place in-country, then two years of service.

What is the Peace Corps?

Here's the official party line from the Peace Corps website:

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps to promote world peace and friendship.

The Peace Corps' mission has three simple goals:

1. Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
2. Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
3. Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

Peace Corps has several general categories for the volunteers based on what type of work they'll be doing, including education, health, business, and agriculture. I am a health volunteer. My official assignment is "Health Education Specialist."

All volunteers in Africa do some work related to HIV/AIDS no matter what their primary job is. As a Health Education Specialist in Mali, I will most likely be living in a rural village with no electricity or running water. Much of the focus of the health program in Mali has to do with reducing child mortality. I may be doing stuff related to pre- and post-natal consultations, nutrition, promoting HIV/STI awareness, promoting breast feeding, family planning stuff, vaccine campaigns, malaria prevention. And that's not even the whole list. This doesn't mean that I'll be doing ALL this stuff; I'll know more when I get assigned my post.

Here's how the first couple months work. On July 17th, I meet up with my staging group in Philadelphia. This will be all the trainees going to Mali, both for Health, Agroforestry, and Small Enterprise Development. We spend two days in Philadelphia getting vaccinated and filling out paperwork, then we fly out on the 19th. After a looong layover in Paris, we arrive in Bamako late in the evening on the 20th. They take us to the Peace Corps training site, called Tubani So, where we stay for an undisclosed length of time.

Next we get broken up into smaller groups and go to villages near Tubani So, where we will live with families for basically the duration of our training period. I believe our villages are selected based on what indigenous language we will need at our future sites. This part I'm slightly unclear about because they don't know for sure what our sites will be.

Anyway, Pre-Service Training focuses intensively on language learning, but there is also "technical" training as well (i.e. how to do the job I'm supposed to be doing). Four or five weeks into training, they will tell us where our posts are going to be (they will have conducted some interviews with us to try to figure out a good match). The post is where I will spend the two years of my service. After we find out, we go stay with the volunteer that is currently at our post, or regional volunteers if we will be the first volunteer in that village, then come back to finish training. My training is supposed to end Sept. 21.



Here's some fast facts about Mali, from the CIA World Factbook and the Peace Corps' Welcome Book.

Population: about 12 million

HIV prevalence: about 2% (compared to about .4% in the U.S., about .8% in Senegal)

Official Language: French

Bambara is the most common indigenous language, and is spoken by about 80% of the population.

It is a landlocked country a little less than twice the size of Texas, with three climate zones: desert, sahel, and savannah. It's one of the poorest countries in the world, and third from the bottom of the UN's Human Development Index ranking.