How to eat a sheep stomach

In Mali, you occasionally find yourself in situations where, to be polite, you have to eat something you find really repulsive. This is especially pertinent during the holiday of Tabaski, called Seliba in Bambara (it is the most important Muslim holiday, occurring 70 days after the end of Ramadan). Last year I got pretty lucky and escaped eating anything but liver.

On a day to day basis in my village, the eating of animal parts isn’t really an issue, because we very rarely eat meat at all. But this year we celebrated Seliba on December 8 and 9, and my host family killed 7 sheep (keep in mind that when I say “host family” that refers to a household of about 75 people), so there were a lot of organs to be eaten.

Back in training, my host family (richer and more cosmopolitan than my village host family) usually had a little meat with their meals. And often, this part would turn up that I found absolutely revolting – it looked like a sea sponge. Those of you who know me know that I’m not particularly squeamish about food. But I gave this thing a wide berth. My family never pressured me to eat it, but to be honest I found it so gross that I really would have preferred that it not even be in the bowl.

I later learned that it was the stomach. In retrospect I think it must have been cow stomach, which is even spongier-looking (and therefore ickier) than a sheep stomach.

Anyway, on the second day of Seliba, I was eating with my host father, and there was a stomach in the bowl. After giving me several pieces of liver (the choicest part of the sheep), my host father pushed the stomach to my eating area and commanded me to eat it.

This is the process I’ve developed for eating things I don’t want to:
1) Stay calm! Just remember that it’s not poisonous. It may taste bad or have a nasty texture, but you are unlikely to suffer adverse effects from eating it – it’s edible.
2) Take an experimental bite to see what you’re dealing with.
3) If it’s really bad, down it as quickly as possible. If not, eat normally.
a) If it’s REALLY bad, casually dig a little hole in the dirt with your heel, and when no one’s looking, drop it in. (I’ve used this most with meat that is really a big chunk of cartilage.

In this most recent case, I could have made an excuse, but I decided to bite the bullet and go for it. And amazingly, it wasn’t nearly as bad and scary as it looked! In fact, it was better than many non-organ chunks of meat that are loaded with fat and cartilage.

Seliba has been the big hubbub recently. Just a few weeks before we had a large gathering for Thanksgiving in Sikasso – 45 volunteers came. We managed to make all the traditional Thanksgiving foods. We had arranged in advance to get four large turkeys (pretty available in Sikasso but very expensive – the equivalent of about $35 per turkey), and I went the day before to the guy’s house to finalize the arrangements. He insisted on having the turkeys brought in to show me – they were all very large males and started fighting with each other. It was quite an experience to see the live turkeys the day before! His wife cooked the turkeys for us (we would not have had the oven space).

In fact, the secret to the success of the large Sikasso Thanksgiving gathering, at least for the last two years, has been outsourcing. We got the turkeys cooked for us, and we also had a Malian woman peel and boil 30 kilos of potatoes (then did the mashing ourselves), and cook green beans and squash. We did the pies ourselves, as well as stuffing, vegetable dishes, and fruit salad. Luckily there is a squash readily available in Mali that is almost exactly like pumpkin. Apples are kind of expensive but easy to find. We made seven pumpkin pies and five apple.

Back at site, I’m preparing to do five lessons on HIV with the sixth grade class this week. I’m a little nervous, but I’ve done quite a lot of preparation so I really hope it goes well. My homologue, Assanatou, and I went over all the lesson plans the other day and she was enthusiastic about it. It’s a younger group that I might ideally do the lessons with, but the school in my village only goes to sixth grade. If it goes well, I might do more with them on other health topics.

My cat has been on a bird-hunting spree recently. In the mornings they fly around my yard a lot, and he will grab one and bring it into the house. However, when he tries to then play with it before killing it, half the time the bird ends up escaping and flying out of the house! What a silly cat.

To Timbuktu and Beyond!

I apologize for the lack of spacing in the entry but blogger isn't being cooperative.

Unfortuntately, I had an entry all ready to go, and then I didn't put it up, and now I can't even remember what it was about because so much has happened since then. I am in Bamako to drop off my dad at the end of his two-week visit.

We had a great time but it was pretty arduous. We went to Timbuktu and my village, and that took two weeks. My dad definitely got the full Malian experience.

The night after he arrived was the election, so because of the time difference we had to stay up all night to get the result (at 4 in the morning here) and see Obama's victory speech. A hotel bar near the Peace Corps office stayed open all night and had a projector and a big screen playing international CNN. We went straight from the bar to the bus station to catch an early morning bus to Sevare/Mopti (about halfway between Bamako and Timbuktu). It was a 10 hour bus ride. Please refer to the map at the top.

We were intending to take a large passenger boat to Timbuktu, where my father would have gotten a cabin with either a fan or air conditioning, and Ben and I were planning to sleep in the deck (aka 4th class in Mali), but when we got to the boat company's office the boat was delayed for more than 24 hours. Afraid that the boat would be further delayed and we wouldn't have time to take a boat to Timbuktu rather than go in a car, we looked for other options.

We found a cargo pinasse. A pinasse is a very large (think 100 feet long) canoe-shaped boat with a roof and a motor. They showed us the boat, and told us we would be sleeping on sacks of peanuts, which seemed pleasant enough, and the price was very inexpensive. Things we were not told include: there was no accessible bathroom on the boat (if you didn't want to climb around the outside), they would pile extra sacks of sorghum on top of the peanuts (which is much less comfortable and meant there was less space between us and the roof), and we would sit on the boat for 5 hours before we left port. But we managed to look at the whole thing as an adventure, and it was an interesting experience. Luckily my dad coped very well. There was a cook on the boat so we had rice and sauce for every single meal (and pretty much the same sauce every time). The trip took 49 hours, so that was 7 meals. It got my dad good and used to eating with his hands.

We found that Bambara seemed to be the trade language all the way up the river, until we got to Korioume, the port for Timbuktu, when it suddenly turned all to French and no Bambara (fine because Ben and I both speak French, but eroded the "I speak Bambara so I know the real price, jerk" advantage).

Timbuktu has a pretty thriving tourist industry, so it turned out to be very easy to arrange a guide to see the city sights (which aren't that numerous or interesting), a camel ride into the desert, and our transportation back to Sevare. Our camel trip was fun -- camels are tall! Unfortunately I'm not posting pictures with this because I don't have any of the necessary appliances with me.

The way back was exhausting. We were taking a four wheel drive vehicle from the 70s. The middleman through whom we arranged the ride swore up and down that it would only take 7-8 hours. But we had to wait for three hours for a ferry across the river. First because we were the only car, and then because a bunch of trucks came, and managed to bend a tow bar while trying to get one of them on the boat. They were blocking our car, so we had to wait for them to work that out.

The driver turned out to be a !#$&$ing $%&, so when we stopped in Douentza after being on the road for 10 hours (and that's still 2-3 hours from Mopti) with no sign of leaving in the near future, I called the middleman. He asked to speak to the driver, and who knows what he said, but the driver yelled something in Songhai and practically threw down the phone. And we left immediately. When we reached Sevare/Mopti, he refused to fulfill our agreement of taking us all the way to our hotel, so I called the middleman again. Again, the driver was enraged, but he ended up taking us there. The whole trip took 13 hours.

The next day we took a bus from Sevare to Sikasso. Again, an entire day on buses. We left Ben in Koutiala, and my dad and I proceeded on. We rested in Sikasso for a day before going to my village. He really enjoyed seeing my village. We had tons of obligations about greeting different people, eating with different people, giving out gifts etc, so there was not much down time (and thus it was not much like my normal time in village!), but I think he got a pretty good feel for what it's like. We biked 8 km to go to do a vaccination and babyweighing in another village one day. We also biked to and from my village, which impressed the Malians because to them my dad is pretty old to be biking, particularly for someone who has enough money not to!

Change of Phone Number

Ok, I promise to write a real entry, maybe even tomorrow, but just in case I don't...

Mali has gone to 8 digit phone numbers, so add a 7 after the country code and before my phone number, and that's the new number.

Ramadan and Hearth Success

Economics are exhausting!
One of my Hearth participants with her baby.
The most malnourished baby in the Hearth with his mother.
This baby gained 1.1 kilos!!!
Anna, Chelsea, Trinh, Katie, and me at Trinh's going-away party.

On Wednesday I fell off the wagon. The Ramadan fasting wagon, that is. Actually, I guess it’s arguable whether I was ever technically on the wagon.

In case you didn’t know, Mali is about 90% Muslim. The Senufo, the ethnic group of my village, are often animists rather than Muslim, but not by village; they are 100% Muslim. I have never seen any fetishes or animist rituals (which PCVs in other Senufo villages have), and there are mosques, and zero alcohol, and the imam is an important figure in the village.

On the other hand, while I can hear prayer call from my house five times a day (faintly, fortunately), not very many people pray five times a day. But EVERY adult fasts for Ramada, even some women who are pregnant or nursing and therefore technically exempt.

Anyway, I figured I would try fasting this year, at least while I was in my village. Fasting means that from the dawn prayer (5:30 a.m.) to the sunset prayer (about 6:40 p.m.), you do not eat or drink. That’s right, no water. Especially devout people won’t even swallow their own saliva – they spit it out.

Ramadan started Sept. 1, which was a day earlier than it was supposed to start, so I missed the first day. The next day I decided to try it out as a one-day-only thing, because after that I was going to visit Ben, which would involve biking and buses (yes, Malians fast and work in the fields, but I am weak).

I got up to eat at 5:30 rather than 4:30, which is what Malians do. And I did it, but it was painful. The good news was that I didn’t feel hungry because I was so overpoweringly thirsty!

I came back to my village last Monday, so Tuesday I fasted again. Again, I ate later in the morning than technically allowed. Wednesday I was fasting again, but at 1:30, I snapped. I actually was really hungry, not thirsty, and I couldn’t face the thought of sitting there for 5 more hours feeling hungry. Lacking religious reasons, I just didn’t have the motivation.

Great work news! I successfully did a Hearth in a neighboring village – I got together a group of women, most of whom had malnourished babies, to cook ameliorated porridge for 12 days in a row, and to discuss a health topic each day. It went soooo much better than my attempt in my own village.

A few things were different. The relai (community health peer educator) from the village paid out of pocket for the more expensive ingredients, sugar and peanuts, so the women only had to provide corn and millet powder. I didn’t think this was the best way to finance it, but my motto for this Hearth was “whatever you guys want to do.” I gave several options for obtaining the ingredients (and that wasn’t one), but that was what they wanted to do.

I did very little preparation for this Hearth. We had one meeting with the potential participants, and started 4 days later. I think this was a case of less being more. It worked. Also, I think it was good for the women to see themselves as a group from the start, and we had the meeting at the village chief’s house, which showed his support for the project.

Most importantly, since I was more of a guest in the community, I just had to show up with a plan of what we were discussing and maybe bring the peanut powder (the relai often bought the peanuts but gave them to me to get ground into powder). They took care of things like dishes and fire, which makes so much more sense. There is no reason for me to fumble around cooking on an open fires while they watch when they know how to do it far better than I do! One woman was the point-person for all the supplies, and they also organized themselves to have one woman come early each day to start the fire.

But the attitude of the women was what made it a success They came each day and seemed happy to hang out, chat, make porridge, and listen to some health information. When we divided the porridge up, some would take their kid’s portion and leave to do work, but several would stick around and feed some to their babies.

There were 14 babies (12 women – 2 sets of twins). Of those, 12 gained weight! To be fair, a few of those only gained 100g, which could be weighing error, but that still leaves 9 kids who unequivocally gained weight – some gained 600 or 700g, and one gained a whole kilo!

In August I had started painting a world map on the outside of one of the school buildings. I painted a blue rectangle, and a grid on top of that (to guide the drawing of the map), but then the Hearth began so my work on the map dropped off. Now I’m back to work, and should finish this week. I’ve drawn everything and outlined it in black, so now I just have to color the countries and work out how I’m going to do labeling. It looks amazing, if I do say so myself.

It’s been a great project because it’s helped me form a relationship with the school director and teachers, who come by to chat while I work on it, and I’ve seen them give several impromptu geography lessons to villagers to explain what I’m up to. One day the director brought out a globe to show an old man who had probably never seen a world map before. He was amazed at how much of the earth is ocean.

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!