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!