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.