It looks like little has changed since I wrote my last entry. I took vacation in May to visit Tyler in Korea, and now rainy season has started. I had really been looking forward to hot season ending, but I'd forgotten how much of a pain rainy season is. As soon as a storm arrives, everyone runs around to move furniture, cooking equipment etc. inside. It's like having a living room and dining room with no roof. Then, paths fill with muddy water and no one can walk anywhere. It's also planting season, so everyone goes to the fields all day, leaving the village emptier than normal. I wanted to try going out to the fields, but after the one day I went, everyone was so horrified by the blisters I got that they told me that I really shouldn't anymore. The "doctor" where I work told me that I was "making myself ill". So it looks like if I want to farm anymore, I'll have to do it secretly or something.

And, I will write another post soon, I promise.

Note: Pictures are posted below this entry

Hi everyone, I’m finally updating this! I have been in Bamako for a few days to do a Peace Corps training with my homologue. The last three months have gone by quite fast. Not long after the last training here in Bamako, I attended the Festival on the Niger in Segou, a city a few hours East of Bamako. It was a big, three day cultural festival featuring music from famous Malian musicians and some from other countries as well. There were also lots of vendors selling art, jewelry, etc. from different regions in Mali. Plenty of Malians attended, but overall, the vibe was really touristy. It was kind of strange because tourists almost never come to Kita, so even when foreigners are in Kita, we are not harassed and people are not even surprised when we speak Bambara. In Segou, people were much more aggressive towards us, including children, who were successfully begging for handouts of money and presents from people visiting. I couldn’t believe how different their behavior was, and how other foreigners seemed to encourage it. All in all though, it was a lot of fun and nice to see another part of the country. Besides leaving for the festival, I have spent most of the past few months in my village. I have been in village for long enough now that everything about it seems normal and I have a hard time remembering what it would look like from an outsider’s perspective. This is good in a way, because it makes daily life easier. It also carries the disadvantages of making me blinder to problems in my village, which is not helpful. People in my village are also much more accustomed to my presence, and know me better as well, which is so nice. During vacation periods, there are always new people in my village coming home from school in a city or just to see family for the holidays. Often these people have never seen me before and are obviously startled. I laugh to myself when I think how strange it must be for them to see a white girl wandering around, speaking in Bambara, wearing Malian clothes, and all their old friends from village acting like this is perfectly normal. Sometime in February, the cold stopped and it has been slowly getting hotter and hotter, both during the day and at night. According to my thermometer and weather forecasts online, it gets over 100 Fahrenheit during the day, which I have a hard time believing, because it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as I thought it would. At one point, I actually witnessed one of the members of my host family, an 8 year old boy, wearing snow pants, the kind with the bib (lots of secondhand western apparel is available in markets here). I have mentioned this before, but I have a vegetable garden. I have never had a garden in my life until now. The secret to success for gardening is to let people (correctly) believe you have no idea what you’re doing and then they either do everything for you or tell you exactly how to do it yourself. In my case, it’s usually the former. I do water it myself everyday. This is probably one of my least favorite chores, not because of carrying heavy buckets and water back and forth, but because the pump is always so crowded at this time. I was really impressed with my village at first for always being so gung-ho about drinking the cleaner pump water instead of the dirty, more convenient well water, until I realized it is just because the water from this one particular pump near my house tastes good. So every day, donkey carts filled with huge plastic bottles line up, managed by teams of little boys. The other people at the pump are teenage girls who slap each other to fight for their place in line, and maybe a couple adults here and there. I used to get a preferred spot, people always having me fill my bucket ahead of everyone, but as they get used to my presence, this happens less and less. Plus sometimes they think it’s funny to watch me fight for my place in line. A few weeks ago I decided to attend a meeting at the mayor’s office. Mali is broken up into eight regions, which are subdivided into circles, which are a cluster of different communes. My village is the capital of its commune, and this meeting was for all the representatives of the commune to talk about budgeting and upcoming plans. During the first part of the meeting, the secretary read a list of all the specific taxes which should provide income for the commune, and the projected amount. For every type of tax, it was reported the citizens of the commune had only paid about ten percent of what was expected. This is the money that the commune should be using on things like improving the schools, health services, etc. I can’t say that I was very surprised, but it was really depressing. I still do baby weighing at my health center, which is slowly getting more organized. Another volunteer and I started doing a weekly radio show at the local station in my village. Supposedly it is broadcast throughout the commune but I think that most of the listeners are in my own village. We play American music and then we talk about whatever issue we feel is appropriate, either health or something related to her sector, agriculture. It seems to be pretty popular. People like to repeat lessons/phrases they learned on the show when I walk by. Or reassure me that they understand the dialogues we wrote in Bambara. That’s all for now…I will write more the next time I have free internet, in a month!p.s. thanks to the RPCV who sent me the nice care package. I shared it with the other volunteers in Kita at the time. Please tell us more about your volunteer experience if you have a chance.

So here are some assorted photos since I've been at site:

neighborhood kids at a wedding

the wedding procession walking through the middle of village

baby naming ceremonies can get pretty wild.

a lady in the women's garden.

The head of my CSCOM in his office.

With Founeba in her garden, in my Tabaski outfit.

Brr!! January has arrived in Mali and I am feeling it, especially since I made the mistake of bringing no closed-toed shoes to the training I am at right now. I really have no idea how I used to survive in places like Boston and Iowa. In village, everyone builds fires at night in their yards to keep warm and it’s very, very nice. What else is new in village? There is no more old woman chanting early in the morning, but she has been replaced by an old man! I suspect they are from the same family. Long before sunrise, his voice wakes me up yelling, “A ye wuli! A ye wuli!” (“Everyone wake up!”), before he continues into a discourse about the importance of praying every day and then calls out specific people’s names who should be getting up to go to the mosque. Then he continues even during the mosque’s prayer call, as if that itself were not sufficient. But apparently I am the only person who is bothered by this, because I have never heard anyone else in my neighborhood say anything about him. Many people in my village associate me with the community health center where I work, especially vaccination days. We have both routine childhood vaccinations every week at the CSCOM, as well as special national campaigns that occur several times a year. I don’t actually put needles into people’s arms but I do a lot of the paperwork. As a result, I’ve noticed that a favorite discipline technique for parents in my village when I’m nearby is threatening children that I will give them shots if they don’t “shut up and eat”, or “take their medicine”. This tactic is startlingly effective but it makes a lot of children keep their distance from me. So besides this and the baby weighing I talked about in my last post, I don’t do a lot of work at this point. In Peace Corps, the training I am at right now typically marks the point at which volunteers start attempting projects in their villages. I was really nervous about this period because I was afraid that people in my village would expect a lot from me. But then I realized that as the first volunteer at my site, no one really has any idea what I’m supposed to be doing. Plus, I don’t think that any one in my village will ever be more impressed by anything than they are by the fact that I water my own garden. People literally gather around the fence that surrounds it as I water, marveling at the fact that I can indeed carry buckets of water. A few weeks ago was Tabaski, the Muslim holiday that takes place a couple months after the end of Ramadan. I ate so much sheep. Traditionally, you are supposed to have a new outfit for the holiday so I used it as an excuse to take lots of pictures with people. And I promise I will post these pictures soon.

Sorry to anyone who's wondered why I haven't posted anything since September, but I am on the internet now for the first time since I got to my site. I came into Bamako for Thanksgiving and have been enjoying the world of hamburgers, pizza and ice cream. And of course turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes. I looked at myself in the mirror in decent lighting for the first time in months and felt that had gotten way tanner than I have ever wanted to be.

Life in village has been intense and frustrating at times but not as bad as I'd worried about before I came. Peace Corps tells us that our first three months are our "settling in" phase and we're not supposed to be starting projects or anything, so I've been working on my Bambara and hanging out with people. I have some job-like activities I guess, like conducting a survey of families about their health-related habits, which I am slowly working on with my homologue. I have also been helping conduct vaccinations and baby weighings at my CSCOM which is incredibly disorganized but pretty exciting especially since I know they didn't do baby weighings in the commune before I got here.

The people assigned to work with my in my community are, luckily for me, great. My homologue, Safi, shows up at my house at sunrise to fertilize my garden while I am still asleep, and sends her kids to my house with food for me. She works incredibly hard at the CSCOM, delivering babies at all hours of the night and still showing up to do consulations with patients the next day. My Bambara tutor, Bokary, is probably the person without whom I would have left sometime during the first few weeks when I was a human zoo exhibit for local children to torture. Even though he's supposed to be teaching me Bambara, I speak French with him more than anyone because I spend so much time complaining to him about stuff that other people in the village do that annoys me. I've had some great conversations with him, like explaining that non-Africans have varying hair and eye color (despite its seeming obviousness, many Malians have not picked up on this), trying to describe cheese, the concept of keeping animals as pets.

Every morning I get up a little after sunrise and throw on my pagne to walk to my nyegen (toilet) so that no one sees my immodest shorts that I have been sleeping in. I usually eat bread that I bought at a local bakery the night before with peanut butter that my host family gives me. I either walk to have a lesson with Bokary or to the CSCOM. It takes me forever to walk whereever I'm going because I have to greet everyone I see and because it's me, the white girl, I am not allowed to pass without answering the questions of where I am going, why, do I like Malian food, would I like to go into the fields to cut millet today, etc. There is little for me to do at the CSCOM on any day besides vaccination days so I just hang out. I've become friends with the wife of the vaccinator, Funeba, who lives in the same yard as the CSCOM. We brew tea and she tries to teach me how to cook Malian food like peanut sauce and leaf sauce. Eventually I go home and eat lunch with at my jatigi's (host family) house which is white rice with peanut sauce, leaf sauce, or onion sauce. The head of the family is an ex military officer who did service both with the French military before independence and with the Malian military after independence. His two wives, various children, their children, other people's children, and an assortment of animals all live within the concession. One three year old boy, Bakou, used to scream in terror when he saw me because he thought I was "not human" because of my skin color. We worked our way through him being able to approach me to give high fives, to him finally sitting on my lap and now him showing up at my house at all hours screaming my name. So that's great. After lunch, I try and escape to my hut for a rest. I like to have only my screen door/curtain closed while I'm inside to let some air and light in, but doing this means that people know I'm home and kids can come in and try and look into my room and observe, so I turn the bench that is normally outside my door on its side to discourage curious visitors. In the afternoon I try and work on my survey, do laundry, or else I visit people. Malians have an obsession with meticulously brewing tiny cups of green tea with lots of sugar in it at every time of the day, so anywhere I go, I am invited to sit down and drink. I need to be home before sunset so that I can water my garden. Right now I have peppers, peas, tomatoes (not doing so well) and papaya trees. I get the water from the pump by my house, but I am rarely allowed to pump my own water; any group of children there always insists that my bucket cut ahead of everyone else's in line and that someone else does it for me. Then I take my bucket bath and head to my jatigi's for dinner. We watch a Brazilian Soap dubbed into French that I thought was the most horrible thing I'd ever seen when I first saw it at my training village, but now I can't go without. At night I go hang out with Funeba and others or else one of my co-workers' houses. When I'm ready to go to bed, I try to ignore the noises of gangs of children playing in the street next to my house. Gradually, I've stopped waking up at every scratch that the bugs in my roof make, every donkey hee haw, every rooster crow, every dog fight outside my house. What's harder to ignore is the early morning prayer calls from the mosque loud speaker, and the voices of the women chanting over and over and over again.

Things that would have shocked me about living in my village when I first got here barely register any more. It no longer seems odd to me that everyone in my village knows every movement I make, that I go running in the morning sometimes, that I ride my bike at such an hour, who I hung out with yesterday afternoon. The CSCOM and maternity are both extremely run down, dirty, and poorly supplied, but even this does not even strike me until I think back on what doctor's offices and hospitals look like in the U.S.

The other day I was in a neighboring village where there is another volunteer, doing more child health stuff. They pulled me aside to show me a snake that someone had caught and killed while harvesting millet. The head had been cut off but the body was still moving. I asked what they were going to do with it and they said they were going to eat it for medicine. Later, I asked the matrone I work with about it and she said it was very poisonous but didn't know the name in French. I asked what it was medicine for and she said yellow fever. Yellow fever is all but eradicated in Mali. I guess the snake just tastes that good.

That's all for now. Talk to you in January.

So, the homestay component of training is finished and I have to admit that I'm a bit sad to see it end. It was stressful at times but I was lucky to be placed with a great family and I will miss them a lot.

Ramadan started this week, but this didn't really affect me because my family is one of the few Christian families in Mali. The TV schedule actually changed though, so I missed my nightly viewing of French-dubbed Brazilian soap opera.

Training continued and we had Bambara lessons as always. We also had to practice giving presentations to groups on various health topics and evaluating families on their health-related habits, which we are going to have to do once we get to our sites.

Peace Corps gives every training group money to organize a party in their homestay village. We hired a DJ to have a dance. It was okay, as Malian dances go (or at least the ones in this village), which means really awkward and strictly controlled. In the U.S., when you have a dance, everyone dances unless they are tired or don't feel like it and want to sit down. In Mali, everyone (little kids to adults) forms a big circle several people deep, and the DJ calls up a select group to dance in the middle. The rest of the attendees just watch as 4-10 people do their thing. A lot of people end up not getting to dance this way. There are also people whose specific job it is to carry a stick and beat back the children who aren't sitting far back enough.

Our last night, we bought food and invited 2 members of our families to come eat. It was really good : filet brochettes from Bamako, fried plantains and potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, and garlic bread with Laughing Cow cheese (the only cheese you can find here). We invited a neighbor to come and do henna on our feet and left hands (never the right hand, because that's the one you eat with!) and it turned out really nicely.

I gave my family a huge bag of rice, as suggested by one of our tutors. I think they liked it but it was perhaps not the ideal gift, because then it was a struggle for them to get it home. I also gave them some candy, postcards, stickers, crayons and construction paper that I brought from the U.S. I told my host dad that the coloring stuff was for the kids but he liked the paper so much that he said he didn't think he'd let them each have more than one sheet so that he could keep it for himself! Oh well.

I'm looking forward to going to my site, where will I have lots of free time, instead of having to be in class all day. Except that I'll probably actually end up having too much free time...

I'll also have more control over my daily activities since I'll be in my own house. At my homestay, I was never allowed to draw my own water from the well, even though I kind of enjoyed doing it. Every morning, I would try to sneak out with my bucket and sometimes I would manage to get one rubber pail-full of water into my plastic bucket before one of the women saw me and grabbed the rope from me. It's not that I'm bad at drawing water (I think), it was just like I was never allowed to get my own chair, sit in the sun if there was shade available, or carry my own bag when there was a little brother around to do it. I'll also be able to have more control over my diet. I have analyzed my diet at homestay, and it is:

Fruits and vegetables: 10%

Peanuts or their derivatives: 40%

Refined corn, rice or wheat: 40%

Sugar and oil and tea: 10%

Rainy season is ending, which means that it's going to get hot before cool season starts. I'll be here with internet access for about a week until I go out to site. We swear in officially as volunteers on the 21st.

And now, pictures:

I apologize that I have to upload them so small, but the internet here isn't the best. You can click on them to make them bigger.

again, my younger host siblings are incapable of taking a normal picture.

My host dad and a family friend, who is also my tailor.

Rose and me.

Hey! I just finished with my homestay. Here's a few pictures, more plus actual update coming soon.

Road with fields, mango trees

My mom, Felicite.

Me and the baby, notice she isn't crying.

We built a soakpit and wash area at this nearby village.

Hey everyone

I have a new address now:

Elise Keller (PCV)

B.P. 25

Kita, Mali

West Africa

this should be faster than my old address, from now on.

I just spent five days my visiting my future site, starting to get to know my community and the people I’m working with. The region around Kita is really pretty, right now it’s very green because of the rainy season. Compared to the rest of Mali, it’s quite hilly, with lots of cliffs. Even though my town is on the main road from Bamako, it’s very quiet, which is a nice change from all the traffic in my homestay village. Also, there are less flies! Everyone in my village is of Fulani (aka Peuhl aka Fulfulde), but luckily they speak Bambara, which is the language I’m learning. They have still maintained the Fulani tradition of cattle raising, so there is quite a lot of fresh milk and beef. So far, I am really impressed by my village. They have already organized several projects on their own or with local NGOs, and seem to have a lot of energy for making more improvements. As I’m the first volunteer at my site, I don’t really have any idea what my role will be yet. My host organization is officially the CSCOM (local clinic) and the maternity next door. The structures are in reasonably good shape (although my perspective may be warped after having been here for a while now), considering that they are colonial era. It’s staffed by two matrones, one of whom is my homologue, a doctor, a pharmacist, and two vaccinators. I stayed with the doctor during my visit, since my house had not been completed yet. I really did very little during my visit. I did some language study with my local tutor, visited the volunteers who are nearby me, and then I spent a lot of time sitting around outside of the CSCOM and at the doctor’s house. One morning, I spent hours outside of the CSCOM with my homologue and the other staff, sorting peanuts. By the way, I never realized how many uses there were for peanuts until I came to Mali. You can eat them raw, roasted, in sauce on rice, peanut butter, peanut oil, peanuts ground and mixed with sugar and millet. People even make peanut soap. I also attended a wedding, which was a confusing experience. I never figured out who was getting married. The hardest part was knowing when to make these particular hand motions that resembled pantomiming cupping water, and then washing your face, but I just tried to follow what the other guests were doing. I’m still not really sure what my role is at my site, and there’s no former volunteer there who has already laid the groundwork. During the first few months, I imagine that I’ll be spending some of the time at my CSCOM, weighing babies and such. I’m also supposed to be surveying the community to find out what their needs are. If possible, I’d like to go to surrounding villages as well, because it seems that they may have fewer resources than my own. One downside of my site is that there is no phone access right now. All landline is out of service, but they are hoping to have cabines soon after my arrival. I have cellphone access but it’s a few kilometers away.

Back in Tubaniso, after another week and a half at my homestay village. I think homestay is getting easier, both because of getting used to village living and the training routine, and as a result of the Malians getting more used to our presence. My Bambara's coming along, but I still can barely understand anything that my family says to me, and they're not always great about speaking slowly.

I found out where I will be living! My village is a "grand" village of about 1500 people, between Kita and Bamako in the Kayes region. I really don't know much about it because I am the first Peace Corps volunteer to ever live there, so there was no one to pass information along. I met the man who will be my language tutor in village, who told me that I will have 2 huts to myself and that there is a market every Monday. Based on what is written on the papers I got, I will be doing nutrition consulting and plenty of baby weighing. Too bad most babies here scream every time they look at me. Tomorrow, my homologue will be doing training here at Tubaniso. Homologues are our "counterparts" in village, basically the person who will be working closely with us and helping us integrate. Mine is the matrone of the community health center where I will be working. I believe that the dominant language in my village will be Bambara, but luckily she speaks French too. On Tuesday morning, I'll be leaving with her to go to visit my new home for a few days, meeting people in my town and setting up a bank account in Kita. I'll also get to meet other volunteers in my area.

Last week at my homestay house, there was a scorpion that was several inches long in the house! Not my room though...my sisters brought it out to show me. At Tubaniso this morning, there was a bug in the dining room that was the biggest I've ever seen. Several inches long, flying, with huge pinchers.

We changed the location of where we're holding class at our homestay village. The nyegen (latrine) at the house where we were before was almost full and full of maggots that you got to stare at every time you used it. We paid a service to have it cleaned out, which seemed to slightly improve it, but it was back to the same after it rained. So now we are at the town kindergarten, which is a lot less pretty, but the nyegens are probably the best I've seen. Clean, hardly any flies, and a door!

I think my family has decided that I need to learn how to live on my own or something, so they have been gradually teaching me how to cook and do other things. They like to have me pound the grain, as my sister Rose is doing below, mostly because they think that my ineptitude is hilarious. Luckily, I do not plan on cooking toh when I have my own kitchen. I try to draw my own water from the well when I want to take a bath, and even though I have no problem doing it, they always run over and pull the rope from me and insist on doing at least some of it. My sister showed me how to do laundry Malian style (by hand, outside). It's not hard at all and actually pretty relaxing.

That's all for now. Hopefully next week I'll have pictures of my new home for the next 2 years!

some of my host brothers getting excited about the camera

This is Bijou, after eating couscous.

My host sister, Rose, pounding the corn for toh.

Here are some members of my family, in my compound. My room is the blue door in the background. They were excited about taking pictures but I couldn't get them to all pose at once.

My wonderful host dad, Isaac, and his youngest, Zeina. Until recently, Zeina cried every time she looked at me. At night, they put the (solar powered) TV against the wall, and we watch a Brazilian soap opera dubbed into French.

Front wall of my compound. I hate that rooster.

So, I've been in Mali for about 2 weeks now but I have got to say, it feels like so much longer. Our days are full with training sessions from breakfast til dinner, so we haven't had much free time.

After leaving Boston, I spent 2 days in Philadelphia with the other 80 or so trainees talking about safety, cultural integration...nothing too exciting. We arrived in Bamako and spent a few days in training sessions at the Peace Corps training center outside of Bamako. The training center is pretty nice by Malian standards, with electricity, running water, and even ceiling fans in our mud huts! Then we were divided up into different homestay villages, all of which are fairly close to Bamako. I live in a village of about 6000 people, fairly compact but with no running water or electricity. Adjusting to this lifestyle is less of a big deal than I thought it would be; adjusting to differences in culture and language is less easy.

I live in a compound with about 15 other people near the center of my village. My family is really great and they are doing a lot to make me feel welcome. My host father and one of my sisters speak French, which helps a lot, since my communication abilities in Bambara (the local language) are quite limited. I spend every day (even weekends) with the other 7 volunteers in my village and our teachers, doing Bambara and Malian cultural training. Our classes are held under a mango tree next to a house belonging to a village family. It's nice having class outside, and funny when donkeys/horses/chickens/goats distract us by running by. People in the village tend to stare at us a lot, but are very friendly, especially when we greet them in Bambara! Children scream "Toubabu!!" at us incessantly (actually means "French person" but has come to mean any "white person") , and run after us to shake our hands. Now that they are learning our Malian names (mine is Sianwa), they yell those instead. Walking through the village was at first really overwhelming, but has gotten better as people get used to seeing us. However, there are still those groups of children for whom I think I will always be a novelty.

Before coming to Mali, I was really worried about things like mosquitoes, spiders and snakes. Now that I'm here, I realize that the worst animals are actually flies and roosters. The flies are everywhere...no one bothers trying to kill them or even brush them off themselves because it's hopeless. I had this notion that roosters would crow once around sunrise, and then stop. In fact, they start around 3:30 and do not stop their incredibly, incredibly loud crowing until much later.

That's all for now...I'm going to try and post pictures in another post but the internet here isn't that great so I'm not sure if I'll be able to get them to load.

I finally started a blog to chronicle my adventures in Mali. I figured that this would be easier and more inclusive than doing a mass email. For those who do not know, I will be leaving Tuesday morning for Philadelphia to begin my Peace Corps experience. I will spend 2 days with everyone else going to Mali (I have no idea how many people, but probably at least 70) doing orientation stuff and getting shots. Then, I will be spending about 3 months doing intensive language, technical, and health and safety training. For most of this time, I will be living in a village with a Malian family. I have no idea when I will have internet or phone access during this time, but I will try and update when I can. For now, here is an address where I can receive letters and packages:

Elise Keller (PCV)

Peace Corps

B.P. 85 Bamako

Mali

The Peace Corps office recommends sending padded envelopes in lieu of boxes when possible. The postal system in Mali is not nearly as efficient as the one in the U.S., but any mail is greatly appreciated and I will certainly try and respond to anyone who writes. I don't have a lot of people's addresses right now, especially since many of you have just graduated and are still settling in, but if you want something from me, please email me your address. For emails now and in the future please use elisemk@gmail.com.