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!

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.