I feel like the lone bicyclist in a sea of gas guzzling cars.. full of people who are so busy text messaging and listening to their iPods that they are unaware of the beautiful world outside their metal boxes that is being slow-cooked and destroyed by our thoughtless behavior.

I ride my bike through rain and cold and dark.I eat responsibly - very few animal products, local, sustainable.I don't consume stuff in crazy excess.

These things make me healthier, happier, and more connected to my world.But still... in terms of making an impact on the planet, it sometimes feels so futile...

Leaving

I remember the posters for Peace Corps recruitment in the US. Written in white print above a photo of a child in a worn t-shirt with a giant smile: The Toughest Job You’ll Ever Love. Trite, of course. But now, ten hours before I board a plane to leave Mali, it rings true. Joining the Peace Corps was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

On Sunday M’Pedougou held my going-away party. After a morning of soft drizzle, they hauled the balafons and speaker system out and set up in the center of village. People trickled out and gathered, kids, women, men, old people, everyone was there. The mayor showed up with some bigwig politicians from Sikasso, and the speeching got underway. There were long greetings and many thanks. Another village gave me a massive rooster. M’Pedougou gave me a giant mud cloth depicting the history of Sikasso. Finally I got up and gave an impromptu speech:

“ I left my house two years ago with no idea what was waiting for me in Africa. But I discovered you. We’ve now spent two years farming together, making tea together, eating together, cooking together. We dance together and take care of each other when we’re sick. You have become the largest family I’ve ever had, and I will never ever forget you and the warmth with which you welcomed me. …” and so on.

I choked up a bit as I looked out at the sea of faces that smiled back at me. I knew everyone. Every face I paused on brought a fresh memory and I had the overwhelming sensation that I will never experience anything like this again. I won’t know the names of all my neighbor’s kids and go help them grow their food. I won’t run from rainstorms through wet corn fields. I won’t sit under ripe mango trees listening to soft keys of balafon on the radio and greeting everyone who passes. But the memories will rest with me forever.

So now for some more fun: A self-interview

How has Peace Corps changed me?

-I’m infinitely more patient, more laid back.

-I value family and friends and spending time with these people much more highly. It is so easy in the States to get caught up in seeking. I was a very achievement oriented person before Peace Corps – getting good grades, pole vaulting, whatever it was, it was always my most important priority. I think living with a small village has opened my eyes to the importance of putting people first and valuing relationships.

-My intestines will forever be scarred…

Best parts of Peace Corps?

-The time span. It is so special to be able to spend two years with people, to see people change and to gain their trust. My friend Alimatu got pregnant, gave birth, and now her little baby is starting to walk. I also loved planting the fields, weeding, then harvesting, and then eating that same food. Seeing the entire life cycle is a huge benefit to the two year time span of Peace Corps.

-Being able to speak Bambara fluently.

-Balafon music and dancing under the stars

Worst parts of Peace Corps?

-The illnesses…. From intestinal amoebas to malaria, and I even once had a giant swollen lip that looked like a horror story: “Collagen Gone Wrong!”

-Boredom.

-Getting harassed by little children constantly chanting “Tubabu! Tubabu! Tubabu!” (white person).

-Transportation…. Goat pee dripping down from the roof into the window, 10 hours delays, breakdowns, crazy busdrivers, sleeping in bus stations...

I guess the "worst" parts do make the best stories.

________________________________________________________________

I have a heart bursting with love for this country and the people I grew to know, but I am ready to come home and spend time with my own people. It’s been an adventure of a lifetime. Truly the toughest job I’ll ever love. n

I’ve often enjoyed awkward pauses in conversation, laughing inside at the clumsy silence hanging between two people. This evening, however, the pause lingering in the air presses against me like a growing balloon, and there’s no inner smile to break its taut skin. “I ni su Yaya. K’u jooni? Pi-ar-denni?” I’ve crossed paths with my close friend Yaya in the faint blue afterglow of twilight, and his white smile glows at me in the darkness. We exchange greetings, which flow naturally between us, overlapping, advancing and retreating like waves. When the tide ebbs, I complain about the topic that no one can avoid, “I was sure rain was going to come this afternoon. The wind kicked up, the sky darkened, and then it vanished.” “I thought it was going to come too.  I really did.” “How many millimeters have you measured so far this month?” “Not even twenty. Last year we had more than 200 by this time. I’ve never seen anything like this. No one has.”             His words drop into the night air and leave only a hole, a gaping silence that I don’t know how to fill. I look up at the emerging stars, that lovely sight that has become ominous in its unabashed verification of a clear and cloudless sky. It’s been twelve days since the last rain fell in M’Pedougou, and everything and everyone watches the sky in angst. The corn plants, poking their puerile heads out of the ground, complain amongst each other in soft parched murmurs about the drought and the noisome clouds of dust.             The silent balloon pressed against my flesh starts to hurt, but I don’t know what to say to Yaya. He rescues me with a gentle, “A be na nogoya,” It’ll get better. We’ll get out of this. I nod and affirm his blessings, and we continue on our paths. The silence, though broken, still clings to me and I can’t shake off its sticky tendrils.             What if it doesn’t nogoya? What if this is a symptom of global warming, and Mali (and the world) is in store for more and more extreme weather events that will disrupt our ways of life and of living? I look up at the sky again, trying to locate the shreds of guilty silence still weighing on me in the darkness. The sticky part of the silence is the part gnawing its way into my conscience: the awareness of my own contributions to that unseen but present layer of greenhouse gases. The stars wink down at me through these layers, and I remember with greater guilt that I’m going home soon. Back to the land of gas-guzzling cars, heaters, air conditioners and TVs and rampant, blind, blithely rapacious energy use that we use to entertain ourselves and to make our lives “comfortable” and “easy.” [I’ve been reading a truly life-changing book called “The Gift of Good Land,” by Wendell Berry, and in it Berry notes our tendency in the US to look too narrowly at a problem, and thus invent solutions that either do not solve the problem, make more problems, or make it worse. Case in point: air conditioners. Because of increased global warming, on hot summer days (let’s be honest here, not hot compared to Mali), people want to be comfortable, so they turn on their air conditioners. This consumes electricity, which is made in many areas of the country by burning coal. The burning coal adds more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and we’re back to square one. ]             Standing here in the dark on a well-worn footpath in this small African village, I have felt no greater shame. It will be Yaya, the man with the warmest smile I’ve ever known, who will have to sell some cows this year to help his family get by. It will be Alimatu, my host mom who tells stories late into the night, who will have to scrape at the dry earth with her short-handled hoe to re-plant crops when the first planting has died of thirst. It is these people, who have worked outside under a blistering sun their whole lives, who have never known the luxuries of light switches, running water, refrigerators, or cars in which to zip down to the 7-11 for a slurpee and a bag of chips, who will suffer (first) through the consequences of our behavior. The true irony lies in their desire to be like us. They are people who traditionally lived only off the interest of their “natural bank account,” leaving the principal alone so their kids would have something to live of off. Then they see and hear of America, which is eating away directly at its principal and proclaiming itself “wealthy,” and they are envious of our wealth. It’s normal, it’s only human, but it’s also tragic.  How can I go home and go back to the American life, after seeing and knowing what I do now? Now that I know that when I hop into a car or buy food shipped from across the country, doused with fertilizers, and processed in a fume-emitting factory… that in merely participating in the American lifestyle, I’m (in an indirect way, but as part of the larger problem) making the soil just a little bit dryer for my dear friends Yaya and Alimatu. They won’t blame me. When I leave they’ll thank me profusely with heaps of peanuts and chickens for coming to “help” them, and I’ll smile guiltily and glance up at their dry skies. That will be an awkward pause that sticks with me for awhile. 

The shea butter movie was aired on ORTM, Mali's national TV station last week! People called me from all over Mali to say "Jessie!! (or Sita!!) your movie's on TV!!" Pretty exciting. We just started shooting the second edition. Suffice it to say, it's the first time I've ever seen one of my projects on TV.

This is the first e-mail I’ve ever written IN village! I’m in my hut in M’Pedougou with my laptop. I brought it to village just this once to show my movie stars the video that is the talk of Bamako! They really enjoyed it - I had to play it three times.

We’re on the cusp of rainy season, but it’s been a fitful start. Everyone’s seed is in the ground, waiting desperately for the next rain to come. This morning is market day. Sellers carefully stack their wares (okra, mangoes, bike parts) into the smallest sellable unit (5 or 10 cents a pile) and people drift about socializing and drinking rounds of tea. I suffer through the endless cycles of “Sita! You were lost! Now you’ve been found!” (the Bambara way to say you’ve been gone for a long time) I say, “Yes, I was indeed lost. I won’t get lost again!” But they’re glad I’m back, and I’m glad to be back. I know so many faces, so many names. We’ve hoed fields of corn together, we’ve danced into sweaty starry nights together. It feels like home. After a week and a half without rain, the air clings around us like viscous soup. Sometimes I wish we humans had more conscious control over our unconscious bodily functions; I’m awed by our bodies, don’t get me wrong, but… when it’s 100 degrees outside and 95% humidity with no chance of evaporation, maybe sweating profusely (It’s like my body’s sprung a serious leak) isn’t the best strategy. So when the Western sky “speaks and splits” as they say in Bambara, I’m overjoyed. Swirling black clouds bully in a fuming dust storm that whips over piles of mangoes and sends us all scurrying for home. But, as luck would have it, the clouds leap frog right over us. I stand bemused in my yard, surveying my parched tomato beds and my tree nursery, contemplating the broken pumps and the difficulty of getting water (strapping an old 20 liter plastic jug on my bike and riding across village). In three directions I see gray sheets of rain, but above me shines a patch of blue sky. It is difficult, even after two years, to imagine what life is really like for my neighbors. My garden is for the joy of it, not to feed a family. If the rains don’t come… well, I don’t really want to think about it. I can’t fathom it. We are so conditioned in the West to having control over just about everything in our lives. We believe that if you just work hard and apply yourself, you’ll be okay. But here, there’s a lot more simply left to the swirling clouds of Chance. (and, of course, whether the chickens you sacrificed in April fell on their stomachs or their backs. J )  

My shea video is on YouTube now - with English subtitles.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7ktkxQuCjI

Chronicles from Guinea.

It's called a "sept-place" taxi. A used station wagon shipped over from the US after its so-called useful life is over. In West Africa, the sept really means nine or ten human bodies crammed into every last square centimeter and some spilling out the windows. You can only hope your traveling mates are skinny old men.

Luckily, there were seven of us traveling, so we pool our money and buy out the "extra" seats. And we're on the road for Guinea, hiking shoes ready.

We cruise into the gorgeous hilly countryside of the Fouta Diallo on our second day of travel. I wish for a helmet for the final three hour stretch of road (slamming into the ceiling as we careen over washboards and pot holes that make Kangaroo Island or the McCarthy-Kennicott roads look like super highways). We show up after dark at a little village named Doucki and meet the irrepressible Hassan Ba, a little bundle of energy (fluent in English, Spanish, Fulani, and French) who guides us around the surrounding country for a few days. We hike into Guinea's Grand Canyon, clamber up little wooden ladders strapped together with natural fiber twine, dive into swimming pools, and ooh and aw at the countryside. It feels good to sweat from sheer activity, to cool off in fresh water, to swing on rubber tree vines, and to marvel at nature's beauty.

After three days, we reluctantly pile back into a "sept-place" to head for Sierra Leone. But visions of sugar sand beaches dance in our heads and we're on the road again.

Our only concern is the glaring hole in our passports where we should have a visa. A group of volunteers went to Sierra Leone a few weeks earlier without visas and managed to 'bribe' their way across the border, so we figure, well... maybe we can too. It sure beats the alternative of paying almost $250 US dollars. We're volunteers, after all. (According to a recent Economist magazine definition of poverty, Peace Corps volunteers' wages fall below the international poverty line. We don't even qualify for the global middle class, at $8 a day) We're willing to pay up to $100, but if that doesn't cut it, we're going to head back. So we press on towards the border a bit nervously. We reach the turn-off road to Sierra Leone and get into another sept-place taxi. Two muscled guys climb into the front passenger seat and lean back to warn us, "They'll ask you for money, but don't give them any." We exchange glances. Okay. There's four of us across in the middle seat, shoulders and hips and arms and elbows rubbing and sweating in unison. We reach our first gendarme stop and as we see a camouflaged figure sidling up to the car, I plunge into the mess of legs to roll down the window. A mouthful of yellow (palm oil) rice and teeth lowers down into our frame of vision. More rice kernels cling to the gendarme's right hand (that he holds out to his side) as he surveys the carload of white girls. He grunts that he wants to see our ID cards, and we obligingly hand them over. After a cursory glance, he says "the price of water." I look at the guys in the front seat for clarification, and they say "he wants a bribe." Kyle picks up his water bottle and says to the gendarme "Are you thirsty? Here, have some water." The gendarme chuckles (spraying some rice) and waves us through.

At our next official bribing station, the gendarme is cleaner. He's also fatter, taller, and drunker. As he approaches our open window, we hush our chatter to gauge our oponent. His eyes are wide and red, slightly watery and without the slightest hint of humor or compassion. I smile and greet him. "Passports" he spits. We hand them over in silence. He looks without looking, his eyes slipping transparently past our IDs to rest on our white skin that drips of money. "Il faut donner dix mille francs." As the sole French translator for the group, I tell him that our passports are in order and we aren't going to pay any money. We argue for a few minutes, me and his red drunk eyes. He yells at our taxi driver to pull back and park on the side of the road, then he shouts "You'll spend the night here!!" We shrug and call his bluff. I plop my head in my heads for a nap. A minute later we're cruising down the road again.

Before the border, the road turns to a dirt track riddled with potholes (an international highway!) We have to make our way through check point after check point, joking about why we are six women with one guy. ("Yeah, these are my six wives. One for each day of the week, and then I rest on Sunday"). It's weird to be back in a place where people speak English, so we start speaking to each other in Bambara when we want to confer privately. We decide to walk the final mile to the border in order to avoid the scamming cab drivers.

At the top of a hill looms a giant building. A billboard in front of it reads "Stop corruption." Then I see the sign on the building: Sierra Leone Immigration, Customs and Excise Department. We're ushered up the steps and down a long dark hallway, then filed into a small office in front of the desk of a lanky man in a well-ironed uniform. He flips carefully through our passports and looks back at us,"Why have you come here without visas?" We tell our story of "no embassy in Bamako, we heard we didn't need them, blah blah blah." Sweat beads pop out on our foreheads as he continues flipping through our passports and says "You're chances of getting in without visas are very very slim." He points to the wall where it says American citizens must pay 650,000 le to enter, approximately $250. He asks us to read it out loud. I notice that the next nationalities only have to pay 100,000 le and I ask him why they don't want Americans coming to their country. He says, well, America doesn't want us coming to your country, so it's foreign policy retaliation. He asks us why we can't pay, and we say we're Peace Corps volunteers. Immediately his face brightens and he says, ah yes, I learned English from a Peace Corps volunteer. His name was Martin... Then we discover that he speaks Malinke, a close cousin to Bambara, and we joke around and call each other bean eaters. We monkey back and forth for an hour, but eventually they turn us away. We're unwilling to pay, and he's an honest guy who wants to do his job right. With a forlorn glance, we cross the border back into Guinea. Our passports are re-stamped (exit Guinea, 4:30 pm. Entry Guinea, 6:30 pm... Where were we for those two hours?). We stone-face our way back through bribe-hungry policemen and finally crash in Conakry at 1am at the Peace Corps transit house, a true vacation destination.

We drink beer and eat pizza at the beach bar 50 meters from the house, and then we get a boat out to the little islands off the coast of Conakry. The port is the biggest sewer I've ever had the pleasure to visit (an olfactory nightmare), so in order to swim we have to get out to the islands.

I was reading Cradle to Cradle Remaking the Way we Make Things, a waterproof book made from fully re-cyclable plastic polymers. The author said "You can even take it in the bathtub." So I took it to the ocean.

My last vacation in Africa. Now it's back to work! Lots to do in the next few months.

A lot more pictures are on Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2375449&id=3408340&l=199bc6888d

Today was why I joined the Peace Corps. Today was why I went to film school. Today was why I spent months struggling to learn Bambara.

I came into Sikasso yesterday to finish up editing the shea butter training video that I shot in my village last month. I stayed up late into the night last night (taking advantage of the temperature falling below 100), sitting with the glow of my computer screen on our porch under a soft moon. Out of habit, I still woke up at 5:45 with the roosters this morning, and the buzz of the city (the motorcycles, the goats, the jabbering radios) pulled me up. 

Like every Tuesday, I went to Radio Kenedougou - the radio station where I have my weekly radio show - "Aux bords de l'amitié"  (on the banks of friendship). With my ever-improving language skills, the show has really come into its own. This month we've talked about tree planting, global warming, and we did a really great show exploring the question: "What is development?" One of my friends in village came up to me last week and said "I loved that point you made on your show about how Africa may be physically decolonized, but we can't advance until we decolonize our minds and allow ourselves to develop as Africans, not imitations of the West." Indeed. This morning's show was on individuality vs. communalism, and we compared American and Malian attitudes (from how we eat to how we treat old people).

My work partner Abdouleye came in to Sikasso around lunchtime and we got a ride with my friend Alou out to another volunteer's village 10km from Sikasso. We showed up an hour late and had to wait another hour for everyone to show up. Nothing unusual. Abdouleye and I just hung out under a mango tree, cooled by a gusty Western wind. We made observations about little differences we noticed in the village. Once the crowd had grown to more than fifty women, I opened the meeting to an enthusiastic murmuring of "Eh! Ala. She speaks Bambara fluently!" The women were wide-eyed and attentive. As seasoned shea butter trainers, Abdouleye and I stepped right into our element, asking the women about their current shea practices and then using our visual aids to go step-by-step through the improved process. When we finished I thanked the women for their attention span and then asked them, "If you can still sit still, I've made a little movie about shea butter production." We moved into a dark spot behind a building, and I pulled out my shiny, sleek MacBook, and propped it on a hand-carved wooden stool. The crowd huddled around and shhed each other into silence. I pressed play.

For twelve minutes, they were glued to the screen. They let out gasps of surprise and clicks of agreement, and when the credits finally rolled they erupted in applause. Success! I'm using my skills for something good in the world. Thy gave me a giant bag of mangoes and the women exhorted me to come back again. 

Next up? Trying to get the movie broadcast on national television!

I have also finally uploaded a little video clip to YouTube. It is a balafon party in my village in December. Just rough footage, but you can see just what incredible dancers they are!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5JjDOJD4P0

These photos are taken in Kandiandugu, a neighboring village where a friend of mine works. We went to dance under the giant village tree, escaping the brutal sun but not the heat.

Abdouleye, the multi-tasker, hard at work with my home-made bounce board (it bounces light into the faces and illuminates dark skin).The finished butter, ready to cool into the hardened form.

I finished filming the first installation of my shea butter movie, and I've started editing. It was a riot to try and get my "actors" to understand why I needed to do multiple takes, why we had to get the kids out of the scene, why they shouldn't look at the camera, etc, etc. It was a lot of fun all the same, and I'm looking forward to showing the finished product.Thanks again to all of you who helped me get this project rolling!

They showed up in a shining white SUV. We had been waiting for almost two hours, dressed in our matching outfits from last season's village festival, sweat beads rolling down our backs and dripping onto the red dust. When the glimmering vehicle finally rolled up the road, we ran forward, clapping our hands and stomping our feet to the patter of drummers lining the path. The doors opened and three ghostly creatures emerged, two women and a man. Their clothes were crisp khaki (with nifty zip-off legs) and they wore boots and wide-brimmed hats. They were whisked away to the school, and I rode the wave inside a crowd of women, all dressed from head to toe in matching fabric. It was my turn to be in the other end of a village greeting.

When the hubbub had died, the dust had settled, and the figures were finally left alone, I approached, slightly unsure of what to say, of where to begin. They gave a start to see me, a white girl, emerging from the fray of color and sweat and dust. I introduced myself and noted their crisp French accents and pale winter skin. They were astonished to learn that I lived here, that I spoke fluently the local language, that I was going to spend an entire two years in a mud hut. I was astonished that they expected to hop off an airplane from Paris, plop down in a small village, and be able to contribute.

I learned that they had indeed, just gotten off the airplane. This was their first time in Africa, and they were going to spend a week in M'Pedougou in what development workers call "needs assessment." This is where the aid worker ostensibly takes a comprehensive survey of the community and identifies areas of need. Peace Corps volunteers spend more than three months learning about the local customs and values before even beginning to attempt a "needs assessment." But, they were on a limited time frame. They were working for an NGO called Electricians Without Borders and their goal was to see about bringing electricity to M'Pedougou. 

The women asked me if I could help organize a meeting with village women, and serve as a translator. I said of course, and two days later we all met under the main thatched shade hut. The meeting progressed through a series of Yes or No questions. "If you were to have electricity, would it help you to study at night?" ...um, Yes. "If you were to have electricity, would it help your children study at night?" ...um, Yes. "If you were to have electricity, would it help you access the outside world through television and radio?" ...um, Yes. One of the women kept nodding and saying "Very good." At this point I suggested maybe they stray from a Yes or No format. She agreed and asked what they did during the day. The women just looked blankly at me, implying, what are these women asking us? I told the French women, "They have no frame of reference. Their daily activities are the norm for them, and they have no idea what you want to know. That they get water at 5am? That they pound millet for hours? That they collect firewood? What do you want and why?" I suggested that she keep it related to electricity, so the women would understand what we were getting at. One of the French women suggested "What if you got a communal television and placed it in the middle of the village, and people could gather in the evenings and watch it together, learning about the outside world?"

I could feel my insides knotting up. Occasionally I have a sensation of floating outside my body and seeing myself from above, and it happened at this moment. I could see my white skin and the white skin of the two French ladies. I could see our crisp manufactured clothing (manufactured by sweatshop labor in some other 3rd world country), my fancy Lexan water bottle, all glittering of money, modernity, and technology in front of this group of rural women. I could see the earnest expressions of good will on our faces, and I thought of the tragic title of a book I read a while back: "Despite Good Intentions." We mean well, but we might actually be doing more harm than good.

(And my knotted up gut spills into my head: A television? First of all, there are already several in the village. For access to the outside world? Have they ever watched television in Mali? If they had, they would know that it consists of nothing but Brazilian soap operas that paint life as a constant drama of sex, infidelity, murder, and money. Intercut with commercials for cars, MSG-laden cooking spices, and cell phones. I thought, wow, they came all this way from France to a village they've never even seen, to bring electricity. Why? Why do we need electricity? How will that help us? They study by lamplight. And watching more television just makes them want things they can't have and don't need.)

The next question was "What do you need?" Ok, this is a bit more open-ended. The answer is "a machine that makes shea butter." Ok. After the meeting one of the French women says to me, "We should look into this shea butter machine. That would be really great to get them one." I just shut my mouth and nod. I'm in no state to speak. 

There is, first of all, no way for a small village like M'Pe to create a manufacturing plant, and the machine is expensive, difficult to maintain, and is only profitable at very high volumes. In all of Mali, there are only two. I've been working with the women of M'Pedougou for a year and a half to improve their local production methods in a sustainable manner, and then two French women can hop off a plane and everyone runs for the lure of low-hanging fruit. 

I joke with one of my close Malian friends here about our "money trees," because white people are synonymous with money here. It is frustrating, tiring, and depressing all at once. What matters in life are things that our money and technology can not buy. Malians have just about everything that truly matters in life: friendship, family, spare time, food to eat. They lack a few things that we consider pretty important, from the 21st century perspective of the West: clean water, sanitation (every single person lives with amoebas and giardia), dental and health care, and other things like that. What they think they lack, but in fact do not need (in my opinion) are things like motorcycles, pollution, fancy buildings, cars, depression, suicide, homicide, gated communities, and Blackberries. But they see us, they see our TV shows, and they think we're better off, so they want it too.

But we can't all have it. The world is finite, and with almost 7 billion people, I have no idea how we expect to "develop" the "undeveloped" world and continue to maintain our current so-called high standards of living. The average environmental footprint of an American, that is - the resources consumed by an average citizen - if expanded to every citizen of Planet Earth... would require at least 5 or more planets to support the human population.  (see redefiningprogress.org)

So there I am, watching the drama unfold in M'Pedougou. Let's help the poor people and bring them machines and electricity and advertisements for consumer goods. That's what we call progress. That's what we call development. I go home and lay in bed that night, wondering if perhaps maybe we've got it all wrong. I've thought this for a long time, but it really starts hitting home when it gets off an SUV and walks right up to my doorstep. We need to be changing the US, not Mali. I guess when I get done with my work here it will be time to go home and get to work on a more monumental task than teaching people about germs and eating beans. I need to teach Americans about riding bicycles, recycling, buying less junk and appreciating friendship over a pot of tea. That would be development.

A few days later the white SUV rolls out of town. They're wonderful people, don't get me wrong. I just wonder if we really know what we're doing.

FESPACO, the Pan-African Film Festival takes place in Ouagadougou, BurkinaFaso, every two years. I've been looking forward to it ever since I arrived in West Africa.

INSPIRATION

Films are a bit like the stars: old light shining through darkness. Just as one stares up with wonder at the night sky, dreaming offar-off places and catching a brief glimpse of our (small) place in the cosmos, so too do we sit in a movie theater gazing at flickering photographs, twenty four images of old light per second, telling us stories that help us glimpse our place in society.

Like seeing the stars on a clear moonless night (far from citylights), a good film ignites awe and inspiration and reminds us of life’s ultimate paradox: that nothing matters and that everything matters. We are tiny particles of dust, and yet particles that have significance.

So there I was last week, sitting in dark movie theaters in Ouagadougou, a particle of dust perched on a chair, peering forward at projected images of old light. One evening the patterns of light and sound waves coalesced to represent the story of another particle ofdust: Wangari Maathai. As the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in environmental activism in Kenya, she is a human being who understands the meaning of our short existence, and who shares it with the rest of us. I spent an hour and a half getting to know her in the darkness, and I left the theater filled with awe and excitement. Since Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in the1980s, Kenyans have planted more the 35 million trees on their (once deforested) soil. But I already knew all this; I’ve written papers about her and read her books in college. What left me suffused with inspiration was the moving, living, breathing being: the twinkle in her eyes that reminded me of starlight. A light that said to me, yes, this life is worth living. So go out and make it meaningful.

PERSPIRATION

On my way home from Ouagadougou I was mooshed into a battered bush taxi, literally kneaded into a sliver of space over the engine, and then topped off with a three layers of voluptuous African women filling every last crevasse with their giant hips and flowing meters of fabric. I cracked the window and let my hand escape into the wind. I closed my eyes and tried to drift off in the blackness to another place.

I dreamt that I was a little dough ball and a woman (towering before me) was opening a giant oven that was spitting out flames, and she said to me, “In you go, three months in the furnace for you,” and my little dough ball lips stuck together as they tried to burble out,“No! No!” and she shoved me into the oven. So here I rest, a cooking dough ball, waiting for the rains to come along and open the door to let me out.

There have been several films recently about the rippling effects of our actions: The Butterfly Effect, and several years back I remember Pay it Forward. I have another tale of repercussions to tell.

STICKS

It’s a quiet evening at the roadside. Like every evening in M’Pedougou, I’m sitting on a bench outside Jakalia’s little “butiki,” leaning against the solid post of his thatched shade structure. In the doorway to his shop, a single fluorescent bulb glares out at the black night, casting a bluish glow on the objects in its path. My host brother Amadou appears under it, carrying the evening bowl of corn toh. I slide out a piece of wood to sit on and pour water into the hand-washing bowl. As I’m looking for the wandering bar of soap, a pair of dogs passes near us, barking and carousing as dogs are wont to do on a full moon.

Before I can register it, Amadou grabs a stick and hurls it with full force at the dogs. And it’s followed not by a high-pitched canine yelp but by an equally shrill howl of pain, coming from behind us. Our heads whip to the sound, and there is Bakari, Amadou’s younger brother. Bakari’s hands tightly clasp his forehead as he emits a relentless piercing scream. My eyes pop out of my head, and Jakalia runs towards him. Unprying Bakari’s small hands, a squirt of blood waters the dusty ground, and Jakalia lets them spring shut. He takes a t-shirt and wraps it around the boy’s head. Amadou fires up the motorcycle and before the toh has even cooled enough to eat, the two brothers are two glowing red taillights in the night, riding to the doctor in the next village.

The dog-intended stick had ricocheted off my leaning post. The dogs, meanwhile, went on about their business. Months later, Bakari still has a scar on his otherwise smooth chocolate forehead.

STONES

There are certain risks to owning a pet, especially in Mali. First of all, there is no Alley Cat to pour into my cat’s bowl, just a steady supply of mice and, if she’s lucky, my neighbor Yaya’s fresh cow milk. Just keeping her fed is a challenge; then there is TB and rabies and worms and Ala knows what else. These challenges, however, are small compared to what lurks in wait beyond the safe walls of my compound: children.

Cats are not typically pets in Mali. If someone has a mouse problem, yeah, they’ll get a cat. But they won’t name it. They laugh when they ask me, “How is Mawa doing?” and I respond “She greets you.” (the standard greeting in Mali is a long exchange inquiring about family members; it is now a joke because my only family member is Mawa, my skinny calico cat). Malians put cats very low on the pecking order.

Thus, every time I go on a trip I say goodbye to Mawa and just cross my fingers that some kids won’t have eaten her when I get back.

When I get back from Bamako after January training, I’m home for a day before Mawa comes bounding in. They didn’t eat her. They just took a slingshot and launched a rock into her eye. The whole side of her face is swollen and oozing blood and puss. When Abdouleye, my work partner, stops by I erupt into a long tirade…. “Why would they do this? What was the point?... If they were going to eat it, that’s one thing… at least it was for a reason, but this?... There’s enough pain and suffering in the world, why do we have to go around creating MORE? All living things feel pain.”

Abdouleye just sighs and apologizes for the kids, saying essentially “kids will be kids.” I retort, “No, kids will be what they are taught it’s acceptable to be. If men beat women and treat women like their slaves, and older kids pick on younger kids, it leaves little kids to pick on the only thing they can: animals. And none of this chain of abuse helps anyone. I once saw a kid tie up the fourth leg of a donkey and then ride it for fun. That’s not okay. Violence for violence’s sake is not okay.” Then the strain of saying this in Bambara wears me out, and I give way to silence.

MAY BREAK MY BONES

Kids will be kids. And some kids will start investigating what happens when you try to peck in the wrong direction. Yousouf is my favorite little trouble making 2-year old, just discovering the power of his own voice and of his actions. He still wears a string of bells around his plump belly, which now serve as an alarm system for all those within hearing: first you hear the jingling, then you look around for unfolding mischief.

One night his mom Alimatu and I are sitting and talking next to a low-burning fire in the cooking hut, when we hear mischief erupt. From the next hut over a hot jet of little-boy Senoufo voices shoots into the crisp night air. Alimatu giggles. What are they saying? She listens a bit more, then chuckles, “Yousouf went in and peed on his older brothers.” What?? Yes, he just walked in and peed on them. Pissing in the face of the pecking order. I shake my head. Then another shriek erupts and this time Alimatu’s smile fades. Hamadou comes barreling into her hut, blood spewing from his mouth. He curls down his bottom lip to reveal two missing teeth. Sambara, he wails. “A shoe.” Yousouf had defended himself by throwing a shoe at his brothers, taking out two precious teeth. There is no dental care for Malian villagers. Once a tooth’s out, it’s out.

********

The moral of this story: don’t throw things. Be it sticks, be it shoes, be it words. Don’t go hurling things into open space with a vague destination. It might hit an unintended target or do more damage than we wanted. And we have enough pain in this world.

PHOTOS at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2303541&l=2c663&id=3408340

the ACCRA INTERNATIONAL MARATHON

When my alarm wrenches me from sleep, I lay for a moment relishing the pleasures of a soft bed. What the -- am I doing? On the nightstand is a white square of sheeny paper (like money, it doesn’t tear) with the number 546 on it. I get up, and I’m already dressed: in the one pair of (knee-length-for-modesty) running shorts I came to Africa with, and the pale orange wicking t-shirt that, by the looks of it, won’t be wicking for much longer. I sit in the dark and pull on my grubby running shoes, who also look like relics from war. Why, I ask myself, do human beings, or some of them anyway, choose to engage in activities that they know will be difficult, painful, in fact, down right dreadful? I’m about to run the Accra International Marathon in the capital city of Ghana (south-east of Mali), sandwiched by the Ivory Coast and Togo, and I have to ask myself again what it’s all about.

When I was “training” in Mali, battling bouts of intestinal amoebas (which seem to be a permanent fixture for me), fevers, and herds of cows, I thought about it too. I run in the late afternoon, when the worst of the heat has abated, and people are beginning to come home from the fields. I run out into the ‘bush’ as they call it in French, past fields of corn and sorghum glowing gold, through herds of cows and goats in search of pasture, and … of course, past the people. The women appear as bright splashes of color, their heads loaded with giant baskets or bowls overflowing with the day’s harvest and carefully tied bundles of firewood. From their bright plastic flip flops, to the striped fabric wrapped as for skirts and the equally brilliantly patterned shirts that invariably slip off one shoulder, their bodies glide forward, the necks moving slightly in barely perceptible weaves, left, right, left, right, as they effortlessly balance their loads and chatter and bob their way home. Our paths cross. Their steps are those of exhaustion after a day’s labor, and mine are those of an American in my fancy running shoes, my knees showing, my sunglasses glinting in the sun. We greet and inquire about families, bless the remainder of the day, and continue on. I can’t help but feel a ball of guilt lodge in my throat. Here I am, with such excess energy that I not only can, but I choose, to go running for some ungodly reason. In a place where never-ending back-breaking labor is the norm, the word for happiness or well-being is one and the same as “rest.” Lafine. They don’t need to supplement their lives with extra labor, and they can’t understand why I would choose to do so if I didn’t have to.

So at 3am my friend Bess and I load into a shuttle that will take us to the starting line, 42k, 26.2 miles outside of Accra. There are at least a dozen Peace Corps Volunteers from around West Africa, and we swap stories of training for a marathon in the climactic and nutritional conditions of the Sub-Sahara. We spend at least an hour in the shuttle trying to find the starting place, and when we unload we are alone, until 4:30 when another group arrives. Just as the sky is starting to turn a dark gray purple, someone comes and tells us to walk down the road to the starting line. So the group strings along down the road, everyone muttering about where the start line is, and we walk for what seems like a mile, maybe longer, everyone counting every step as one extra they shouldn’t have had to take in addition to 26.2 miles. Finally a big bus passes us in the opposite direction, filled with neon-green-shirt-wearing runners, and it halts, people get out, and call us back, so we turn around, again, begrudging every step that we walk back, and sit down to wait for the start. An hour and a half later, after more buses full of Ghanians (pronounced Gha- NAY-un) arrive, and the sky has heated up into a milky white soup, the race starts.

Bess and I, both severely undertrained due to illness, allow ourselves a slow start and plod along. The road is a paved country road heading through several smaller towns before passing through the outskirts of Accra and into the city itself. As there are only about 400 runners, the route has not been closed to traffic, so we run in the shoulder. Every so often the race coordinators have put out kilometer markers and they have people in lime green t-shirts handing us bags of water. The sun starts peeking its head out from the clouds, glaring down on us, who are trapped between its angry rays and the smoldering black pavement. Yuck.

At the halfway point I am exhausted, just boiling hot and my knees are telling me that my running shoes are what they look like: junk. I pass “21 km” and my heart plummets. There is no way I can do this. And, as if by magic, the sun’s anger ebbs and it agrees to slink back into the clouds. I grab a bag of water, break it onto my head, and just then the road turns a corner and the Atlantic Ocean spills out in front of me, deep blue with little white diamonds dancing across its surface. Ok. I’ll just go slowly.

The runners are, at this point, spread out, and Bess and I have separated. There is no one around, so it is just me and the ocean. When the road finally turns back inland, I thank the waves for their moral support and steel myself for the final legs. The last 15k run through the outlying areas of Accra, and for one long, interminable stretch of road, I dodge public transport buses, taxis, push carts, women with heads stacked high, dogs, and bicycles. The shoulder devolves into a slanting patch of dirt. I’m getting thirsty, it’s been a long time since I have seen a race vehicle. I look as far as I can behind me and ahead of me, and I see no bright lime green. Oh no, what if I missed a turn and I’m just running off into some market of the sprawling mass of Accra? I stop and ask someone if they have seen runners go by. They say yes, and I heave a sigh of relief. Twenty six miles is long enough, I don’t need to get lost.

It was as much suffering as I could have hoped for, and I felt glad when it was all over. I don’t know what I learned or gained from the experience. That I can make myself suffer? One aspect that always intrigues me is the mental side: the power that your mind has to determine your perspective. My body may be suffering, but I can choose to look at the waves crashing on the beach and just recognize the pain, be with it, and not do what humans always try to do: get rid of it. When we can be with suffering, understand it, not run away from it, then perhaps it loses its power over us. I remember at one point passing a runner and commenting on a funny billboard in front of us, and he gave me a sigh, (how can you be thinking about a funny billboard when we are suffering like this??). It’s all relative.

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Speaking of relativity, our trip to Ghana was eye-opening. We traveled overland the thousand+ miles, going through Burkina Faso and moving gradually from the dry sahel to the lush sub tropics. We also noticed a gradual shift, from Islam to Christian, from Bambara to French and Mossi, to Twi and English. The first time we got out of a bus in Ghana, at a legitimate “bus stop,” our jaws dropped. Pavement, everywhere. Trash cans. Ice cream sellers. General cleanliness and orderliness the likes of we haven’t seen for awhile. I wondered what my impression of Ghana would have been had I come directly from the States or Europe. My relative perspective was that Ghana was the promised land. When we left Ghana we were flat broke, scrounging our last coins and made the journey up to Burkina with just enough money to pay for the use of public drop latrines and the occasional bag of filtered water. We spent a night on benches at the Ghana/Burkina border before it opened the next morning, and then we gradually transitioned back into the Africa we are used to: inconsistent transport, swelteringly hot, and no ice cream on carts. We spent the last night of our trip wrapped in a mosquito net in Bobo-Dioulasso, waiting for the bus that never left (they said 10pm, we left at 5am). My friend Sarah asked me, “Jessie, when will it no longer be ok to be sleeping on the ground in dirty bus stations with overflowing latrines?” I couldn’t answer. I don’t know. For now it’s an adventure.

HOSPITALITY

It’s becoming almost a ritual for us now- every Monday morning Abdouleye and I pack up our materials and head out to a neighboring village to do our shea nut trainings. This past Monday we went to a village for a second training session.

I show up at Abdouleye’s hut on the roadside around 8, and he isn’t there. I sit down under the big mango tree, already seeking shade from the brutal sun, and watch donkey carts bumping past on their way to the fields. Abdouleye comes up the road, and we greet. Then he says “Sita, my bike is broken. The frame itself has snapped,” and he shows me his bicycle, a patchwork of teal and light blue and rusted metal. Indeed, the frame is broken. “I’ll get one to borrow,” and he disappears again, then comes back after a bit with another bike. We load up and set off.

The path to Zhiworodougou winds its way back from the road for some 10k. We pass through fields of towering sorghum, sweet potatos, people picking peanuts, thrashing rice. We dip through mango groves and weave through small gatherings of huts that are invisible until the very moment you reach them because of the sorghum. By the time we reach Zhiworodougou we are both drenched in sweat. We dismount and pull our bikes into the shade. A woman in blue and white fabric greets us and comes towards me, dipping down to her knees. How are you? How is M’Pedougou? How is your family? How are your work partners? Did you arrive safely? Welcome. I awkwardly respond. I’m fine with the Senoufo, it’s the kneeling thing I’m still not comfortable with. Women don’t kneel to other women, they only kneel to men. I’m an honorary man here, but it makes me feel uneasy to be in such an unbalance of power.

I hear the ringing from a distance – they have struck the metal gong that serves as an effective telephone tree “Meeting! Meeting!” and Abdouleye and I are guided through the village, past the chief’s house to greet, where he gives us a bag of peanuts and blesses us for several minutes. It is fully 11am by the time we sit down in the meeting hut. The sun is melting my skin off and the respite of shade is diminished by the oppression of 70 bodies crammed into a small mud building. Our host, Adama, puts two chairs out, and no sooner have we sat down then another man walks in with more chairs and insists that I move into the more comfortable chair. Fine. Anything to make sure the white girl is as comfortable as possible. Adama sits by the door and before I can blink he begins tending to a small stove and pours loose-leaf black tea into a teapot.

The meeting starts and I greet, bless, then turn it all over to Abdouleye. We have a picture series depicting the steps of shea nut and butter production, and he goes through them one by one, explaining, answering questions and quelling debates. There are at least 60 women, and behind us sit about 10 older men, seated around on a low mud bench. Beside me, Adama is pouring tea back and forth from the teapot to a shot glass, from shot glass to tea pot, and then he adds another shot glass worth of sugar. He interrupts loudly, “Sita,” to give me the first shot of tea, and I take it with my right hand (supporting it with my left to show deference) and I drink the tea somewhat guiltily, seated in front of a crowd of women (women rarely get to drink tea), and hand the glass back.

I flash back to my very first day of homestay, only a week after arriving in Mali, when the village greeted us with a ceremony and gave each volunteer a cold Coke in a glass bottle. Coke wasn’t sold in that village. Someone had had to go on a motorcycle to buy the drinks and bring them specially for us. I remember sitting guiltily in front of the villagers, drinking a cold soda that I didn’t even want.

The session takes a few hours, and when Abdouleye finishes I’m as drenched in sweat as when I arrived in Zhiworodougou. I think we’re done. But oh, there’s more talking. Abdouleye says something (this is all in Senoufo, I only catch pieces) to Adama, and then I notice that Adama turns to the man next to him and says, Sedu, did you hear what Abdouleye said? And he repeats what he heard. And then Sedu turns and repeats what he heard, around like that. I ogle. That’s why our meeting had been taking so long. Then a woman comes forward with two large bowls. “Sita, you came here once before and told us about these new shea butter techniques. We heard what you said and we did what you told us. Here.” She opens the bowls to reveal one bowl containing a yellow ball that looked like soft margarine, the other filled with a hard off white substance with a soft sheen. The women gather excitedly behind her, “Ok, now which one was dried in the sun and which one was smoked over a fire?” I laugh and clap my hands for the women, and I point to the clean white bowl and say “sun –dried.” The women erupt in clapping and that’s that. We are presented with a giant bag of sweet potatoes, more bags of peanuts and a chicken, and we are ushered out to lounge in the shade and enjoy another round of tea while we wait for the heat to fizzle out a bit. Around 4, we strap our gifts on the backs of our bicycles. The chicken’s legs are tied and she dangles awkwardly upside down from Abdouleye’s handlebars. He pulls on his 2008 brand sunglasses (the zeroes are little soccer balls), and we are escorted to the edge of the village. I thank them for their gifts, and for their work, and as they hold my bicycle and take turns shaking my hand, wishing me a safe return, I feel the true meaning of hospitality.

To my friends,

For one year now I have lived in M’Pedougou, a subsistence farming village in the fifth poorest country in the world. I wake up in my mud hut at dawn to fetch water, I hike to the fields with my host family and help them hack the dry Sahelian earth with short-handled hoes, and I try as best I can to help them improve their lot in life. As an ‘Environment’ Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, West Africa, my job is to help people manage their natural resources in both an ecologically and economically sustainable manner.

Mali suffers from several unique distinctions: in addition to being ranked 173rd of 177 countries on the United Nations’ Human Development Index, it also ranks among the worst for gender inequality. Women carry the heaviest load in the struggle to survive in the harsh climate of the Sahel. They wake up before the roosters to collect firewood, heat water for bathing, pound millet and corn into flour in order to cook three meals a day over smoking fires, and when the rains have come they go to the fields to eke out an existence on depleted soils. All of these duties are performed with infants strapped to their backs and several more children in tow.

The United Nations recognizes that in order for rural, agricultural, illiterate societies to develop, women must be given an opportunity to lighten their burden. In villages like M’Pedougou, women are responsible for feeding their families and caring for their children with little access to an independent income. All field crops, such as peanuts or cotton, are sold by the men. All garden produce, such as bananas or tomatoes, are sold by the men. In rural Mali, the sole domain that remains for women is the shea tree.

The shea tree produces a small fruit with an oil-rich nut that women collect, dry, and process to extract butter for cooking, medicinal purposes, and for selling. This income from shea butter pays for children’s clothing and school fees, vegetables and sauce ingredients that provide valuable nutrients, salt, soap, household supplies, and medicine for the women and children.

In recent years, the international market for shea products has expanded, from use as a cocoa butter substitute to pharmaceuticals, leaving Mali (which has the second largest population of shea trees in the world) trailing behind other shea producing countries in West Africa. Malian women traditionally dry the shea nuts by roasting them over a fire, which introduces smoke and carcinogenic compounds which are forbidden by international regulation. According to the NGO ProKarite, ”A lack of product quality standards and technical proficiency of producers has greatly constrained market opportunities for rural producers of shea, particularly in Mali which has long suffered from a reputation as a source of poor-quality shea kernel and shea butter.”

Last year when I was living in Paris I bought a small pot of shea butter in an upscale boutique for 15 Euros. The same quantity sells for 15 cents in M’Pedougou. In order to give at least a fraction of that higher share back to the women who deserve it, many groups and NGOs are working across West Africa. In Mali, USAID (the US Agency for International Development), several local organizations, and the US Peace Corps are working together to provide women with the training and the organizational skills they need to improve Mali’s reputation as a shea producer and to give rural women higher prices for their shea products.

The first step in this process is teaching women how to improve their shea processing techniques, to shift from smoking their nuts to sun-drying them. In my past year as a volunteer, I have participated in several educational meetings and trained my Malian “counterpart” (a farmer in M’Pedougou) how to lead more trainings on improved shea butter production. Together, we have travelled to several local villages and we are poised to organize an area-wide group that will sell improved butter (at higher prices!) next year.

Finally, I was in discussion with my director at the Peace Corps over the difficulty of training illiterate women on something that can’t be demonstrated. At trainings, we must discuss the process in the abstract – as there is no way to collect nuts, wash them, dry them, store them, pound them, and make them into butter in a one-hour meeting with a women’s group. We alighted on the idea of making a training video that could visually demonstrate the process, from start to finish, and enumerate the steps clearly in Bambara (the language I have learned, spoken throughout Mali). Once finished, the video could be used by USAID staff, Peace Corps volunteers, and several NGOs in their regional training efforts. It could be played on laptops, DVD players (frequently found even in small villages!) and projected on screens in larger towns and cities. Finally, the video could be shown on the Malian TV station, ORTM.

As a graduate of the film production program at the University of Southern California, the possibility to use my skills during my Peace Corps service excites me greatly. I have with me in Mali a high-definition video camera, but I lack the means of turning my raw footage into a movie. All I need is a computer and editing software in order to turn my mud hut into a miniature MGM, M’pedouGou Movies (ok, I don’t have electricity, but Sikasso is close).

My own salary as a Peace Corps Volunteer doesn’t include an allowance for new laptops or editing software, so I am asking for donations to help me in this project. My parents are coming to visit me in December. They have offered to deposit checks in my account and to order the computer and bring it to me when they come.

My goal is to raise $3500 to cover the costs. Please donate what you feel you can afford. You can mail checks (payable to Jessica Luna) to:

John Luna

24663 Ervin Rd

Philomath, OR 97370.

In love and light, saying goodbye to the rains and hello to the cool Harmattan winds,

Wishing you peace

Jessie

Making shea butter.

My women's group, who are ready to form a shea butter association.

The hitchhikers are barely visible in the dim glow of a rising moon, but we pull over to pick them up. I hop off my bike seat and re-roll my pant leg so it stops catching on my broken pump handle that sticks out. The hitchhikers are two preteen girls, just old enough that their tee-shirts aren’t flat but no older than 12 or 13. They aren’t old enough or lucky enough to be bike owners though, so tonight they decided to walk and hope they could catch a lift on the back rack of some guy’s bicycle. I am with M’Pedougou’s 20-year-old-boy posse, a rowdy pack of testosterone and hormones, all dressed up in their decorated bleached European-style jeans and tight t-shirts. It’s “soiree season” – the time of year when the young men of each village put on a big night of dancing and invite all the surrounding villagers.

The M’Pe posse convinced me to come along, so when we finished our round of tea at my host family’s around 10, a group of 15 or so saddled up and we peddled off into the darkness. I held my flashlight awkwardly gripped on my handlebar, veering around potholes in the dirt path. I noticed that most of the boys were riding blindly, and some of them didn’t even have brakes – they just put their foot on the back wheel to slow down. When we reach the first hitchhikers, the girls hop on side-saddle onto the back rack and then appear impervious to the rattling and bouncing that is making my flashlight look more like a strobe light.

After about 5 miles we reach the water. Under the fresh light of the low full moon, I see currents rippling and the whole posse dismounting to roll up their pant legs. “Sita, roll them up pretty high.” Ok, I think, this time’s as good as any to get schistosomiasis (the water-borne illness because of which we are told to never wade or swim in fresh water). I roll up my pant legs and we forge our way across, picking slowly over the unseen and rocky bottom. One guy tries to show off and ride across, until he hits a rock and falls off and everyone laughs.

We show up at the soiree with wet feet but well warmed up. I ogle a bit at the production. A beat-up old taxi had brought a generator, lights, speakers, and they walled off the schoolyard with whatever burlap sacks or tarps they could find. The lights are surprisingly bright after our quiet ride under the stars, and the speakers bump out fast Cote d’Ivoirian dance anthems. A crowd teems at the entrance, and the M’Pe posse globs on to the amoeba. There are two bouncers at the door taking money and giving tickets – it is CFA 500 to enter, about $1.25, and that includes a soft drink. In one of the few instances where I like sticking out because of my whiteness, they pull me up to the front and usher me through for free (I don’t want a soft drink). Inside, the school desks and tables are arranged in the schoolyard and groups of people are hanging out talking and flirting. It reminds me of a high school dance. When the M’Pe posse finally filters through, we go into the school house to dance. The main room is an inferno, a boiling, dripping, sweaty sauna of a dance party. I get the expected curious looks and stares (what is a white girl doing out here?) but a good share of greetings and waves from the people I know. The Sikasso DJ is a giant of a man (I know immediately he isn’t from a village – no one can get that fat eating corn toh!), and he sidles my way and tries to pull me into a circle and dance with me. Just as quickly, the M’Pe boys circle around and close him out. I smile and think, ah, it’s good to go dancing with 15 brothers who look out for you.

As the night wears on – we move inside and outside as the sweat drenches us and then evaporates in the brisk night air – I notice that there are very few women at the party. It is at least two thirds men, from the age of 12 to 40, with a heavy concentration of 20 year olds. But the girls, that is important, girls, not women, are few, and they are mostly of our hitchhikers’ demographic – preteens and early teens. I think about what I’ve read and heard, that women are married off as early as 12 and not much later than 16, and I stop to wonder if all this really is the equivalent of a high school dance, with the men all looking at these girls as prospective hook-ups or wives or second wives. They even play the requisite slow song now and then and everyone but a few couples rushes outside to cool off (isn’t that familiar?).

I also can’t help but reflect on my own place at this soiree. Ha. I’m the only white person. The only woman. The only college educated person. I’m just an anomaly – a pale, unmarried, childless 24 year-old woman who likes to go dancing. I would expect to feel “out of place” in the situation, but I have come to realize in my Peace Corps service that I am just different here, that I do not have a ‘peer group’ or a social place in this culture. All the women my age are married with three kids and never went to school, so the closest peers I have are the 20-year old guys who make good buddies for drinking tea and forging rivers at 5 in the morning. By the time I crawl into bed the moon had crossed the sky to pass the baton back over to the sun.

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My host mom Alimatu and I are out collecting shea nuts one afternoon when I ask about her uterus. In the fall she had sharp pains in her reproductive system and she had gone to several doctors. She says that she and Jakalia (my host dad) had been told that her uterus was spent, just worn out from bearing four very large boys. She says that the doctor told her she shouldn’t have any more children. She stops, and it is just the breeze and the sounds of our nuts plunking into our buckets. So, I ask her, what do you plan to do about it? Are you going to take birth control? She says that she doesn’t want any more kids, that she is tired, and she doesn’t want to risk another pregnancy. But birth control, that is Jakalia’s decision, and he hasn’t said anything to her. I pause. Alimatu, have you talked to him about this? I think if you point out that he doesn’t want you to die, that he wants you to be there to raise your four boys, he might agree to put you on birth control… And we continue collecting nuts, plunk, plunk, and I speculate that rain might come later.

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I've heard and read a lot about women's rights... but until now I have never understood how important the 'right' part is, that aspect of freedom, the aspect of choice. The differences between me and Alimatu are many but at the core is that I have choices in my life. I can decide to take birth control if I want to, without consulting anyone. I will decide when and to whom I marry, and if and when I have children. I ride my own bicycle to the soiree because I have economic rights and I can buy my own bike.

But... it isn't a simple picture. I don't know how I feel about this yet, but I know it is anything but simple.

Kama, one of my host family 'little brothers' and a beacon of sunshine. He told his dad that he wanted to drop out of school, so he became a cow herder for three months during the dry season and now he farms.

One full year. The days go by slowly, but the weeks and months have flown by, and now here I am in Bamako welcoming a new group of trainees, telling them stories and assuring them they will survive. It is a fresh dose of perspective to be reminded that only a year ago, I too was struggling to say the most basic phrases, that I thought the food in my homestay was terrible (I look back on it now and say, hey, that was pretty good!), that I was truly a child in terms of my ability to function in this society.

And now... here I am, having passed through the growing pains of adolescence and arrived at adulthood (well, pretty close). I don't have to ask questions about how to say such and such, what's appropriate, how things are done, or what organism is living in my gut. These things feel like second nature to me now (and my amoebas are like well-loved house pets... I feed them well).

The past two months have been the best yet. After months of sweating and waiting for the rains, the sky finally darkened and the village shifted from under the shade of the mango trees to back-breaking labor in the fields. Every morning the women wake up at 4am and trek out in the pitch black to collect the shea nuts that have fallen in the night. By daybreak they have returned, heated water, cooked, and they head out to the fields again, with hoes slung across their shoulders and bowls of food on their heads. Some are lucky enough to have cows, and the men till the fields with cow plows before seeding, but others just hack at the dry crusted earth with their sculpted, weathered muscles, and little by little they plant hectare after hectare of peanuts, rice, sorghum, millet, and corn. Once the seed is in the ground, the first field is already weed-infested, and the frenzy of weeding begins. It is truly back-breaking labor, and I marvel at how they tackle such a seemingly hopeless task(eleven hectares of corn stretches for a loooong way).

Last week my host dad 'hired' the women's group of my family (the Bengali women) to come weed his field for a day - 40 women for an entire day for about 10 US dollars. Wow. The old women came with their 'chichira' shaker gourds and sang, and women would rise to dance and sing as they hoed, drenched in dirt and sweat. Abdouleye told me that when he was a kid it was always like that, that when people went to plant, the drums came too, and their was dancing and singing in order to urge people along in their work. But, he says, the cow plow came and it is hard to play drums, and that the tradition has mostly disapeared. I can't help but question what constitutes progress Yes, the cow plow is good, I won't deny that, but it saddens me to see how quickly their society is being overtaken by new technology - at such a speed that they don't have time to adjust their cultural practices... they just get lost. Abdouleye (my work partner) and I have pushed full steam ahead with field experiments. Several farmers are trying out new sorghum varieties in controlled plots, some are putting urine on corn (a free source of nitrogen), and one farmer just planted an alley cropping trial (nitrogen fixing trees in a crop field). I have also taught my womens group about Moringa, a tree whose leaves are rich in vitamins, iron, and calcium, and they have planted them throughout the village. So, slowly, slowly, I feel like I am starting to be useful. Yaya and Abdouleye, my two best friends in M'Pedougou. Yaya measures the rain every day for logging in our sorghum trial notebook. This is in the middle of his peanut field.

Abdouleye with a jug of watered down pee, getting ready to go "water" our corn test plot. Hmmm, nitrogen. -------------------------------- On Language

Speaking a foreign language means learning to see the world in a new way. If it is true that “I think, therefore I am,” than thinking lays the very foundation of ‘being.’ Our patterns of thinking are, in turn, deeply trained by the linguistic tools that we use to organize our perceptions of the world around us. As my Bambara progresses, I realize how my mental habits are shifting as well. Significantly, there is no word for “late.”

Some fun ones -

I forgot – A bora n kono – It was inside me, it left

End of the month – kalo ka sa = death of the moon

Fruit – yiriden = tree children

Airport – pankurunjiginyoro = jumping boat landing place

To do physical activity/sports – farikolo nyenaje = bring body bones together for amusement

To spit – dajibo = to put out mouth water

N t’a don = I don’t know, I don’t enter, I don’t wear it, It’s mine

Yele - to smile, to laugh, to open, to go up, and light

And I realized just how mixed up the word order can get. Learning French was hard because of the masculine feminine nonsense, but at least the word order stays relatively similar – Not so in Bambara. The sentence ‘N be na mangora ja cogo kura jira dugo muso ma,’ translates word for word: I am coming mango dry way new show village women to.

On White Skin

I have yet to silence the complete pandemonium of emotions – anger, confusion, exasperation, and sadness – that arises every time the glowing apparition of my skin falls under the gaze of Malian children. It is the soundtrack to my existence: a high-pitched chipmunk warble of a broken record spinning the same three syllables into eternity, “Tubabu! Tubabu! Tubabu!” Occasionally the record progresses into loud nasal “Ca vaaa? Ca vaaa? Bon soooir,” as they say good evening at 10 o’clock in the morning.

Some days I eke out a smile and a soft greeting, “Aw ni che.”Some days I grit my teeth, avert eye contact, and hope that if I ignore them maybe they’ll go away. This only makes it grow louder.

Some days I burst a seam and I call back “My name is not Tubabu!” in Bambara.

The word Tubab comes from the Arabic word for doctor – tubib. So. I guess I’m a doctor. I come bearing news of washing-hands-with-soap and beans-beans-the-magical-fruit. Amazing how these two things could in fact produce a significant impact on their well-being. The Tubab-shouting children are only one group, the excited, eager, swarming kind. The others are no less curious, but they stay silent behind shy, shell-shocked eyes as they gape unashamedly at the wonder of my skin. Some, in rural villages, take a quick appraisal of this ghost in the shape of a woman and run screaming in horror. I’ve even seen one trip and fall on his flight from my ghastly presence.

If white children had never before seen black people, would they behave in the same way? If so, why do children respond this way? Why do kids get so outrageously excited by me? Why do I get so annoyed? What role does the history of French colonization play in all of this? Do they have a persisting "pyschological colonization" that manifests as an inferiority complex?

I reflect on these thoughts and I try to understand the complexities of my reactions. I have a quote on my wall that reads:Treat every person you meet as if they have a sign around their neck that says ‘Make me feel important.’

So there I am on my bicycle riding home from Sikasso through packs of chanting children…. Sighing and trying to smile and remain relaxed and to practice unconditional love. I can’t change Malians, I can only change my reaction to them ("if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and then make the change”). Yet if I could change one thing, it would be to hide my skin. I guess I will work on that patience thing some more.

And MORE pictures are at

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2265565&l=68f84&id=3408340

We're on the cusp of rainy season. The heat builds up until we think we're going to suffocate, and then the Western sky boils black and comes riding in on sheets of wind. I run inside and watch eagerly as the rain pummels the parched, thirsty earth, giving life, giving food, giving green.

M'Pedougou is not a Muslim village. They call themselves "josonnaw," which translates to "fetish waterers." It is what Westerners loosely lump into the category of animism. What I've gathered is that they give sacrifices to the genies and the ancestors, and each year they kick off rainy season with a giant village festival to give offerings and to dance until they ancestors too must get tired from watching. It is called a "dugu son," which might mean "watering the village," and people come from villages near and far to take part in the fun.

DAY 1

We've finished hauling buckets and buckets of water (carefully perched upon our heads as we weave through the maze of pathways connecting pump and hut), and the rice and sauce have been cooked in the light of a hazy orange sunset. My host mom Alimatu thrusts a bowl of rice at me and says "Wu si!", lets go! My host moms, host sister Nawa and I each take a bowl and scuttle down the road that winds past the mango groves and towards the great sacred tree where the genies live. They gracefully balance their bowls atop their heads, hips swaying, heads perfectly motionless, while I must hold on to mine with a hand. Other groups of women and children join us, and as we reach the mango groves, more women come running towards us, their bare feet flapping on the dusty earth, their mouths carved open into giant grins. They grab handfuls of rice out of our bowls and eat some, then throw some into the air. We pick up the pace and snake our way along the edge of the old cotton field towards the tree.

The tree is a giant, its roots curling up out of the ground and its pale skin stretching skyward before slender arms emerge and twist and tangle into each other. At its base, we approach one by one and throw our few remaining handfuls of rice (most of it having been eaten on the way there) upon its smooth, exposed roots. We say our prayers to the ancestors and to the genies, "May we have a good rainy season," "May all of our children be fed," then turn and work our way upstream through the incoming swarms of women, grabbing handfuls of rice out of their bowls and sharing smiles and moments of laughter.Back in our compound, we fill more bowls of rice and take them to the Bengaly family meeting house, placing them in the midst of a circle of people. Dusk has swept the harsh African sun past the horizon, but a few men hold up flashlights, so I can make out some old men sitting around with a crate of chickens beside them. One man starts uttering blessings in Senoufo and another slits a chicken's throat over a calabash of fetishes and other mysterious, secret-society things. Once the blood has drained, he tosses the limp creature into the middle of the circle, where the crowd watches in anticipation. The scrawny bird lays still for a moment, then its body leaps off the ground, flailing and flopping. There is no "running around" of the proverbial chicken with its head cut off, as these chickens are too weak to run in the post-life. The best they can do is flap their wings and make a few desperate hops. After watching about a dozen chickens die, some of whom manage to flop their way into the bowls of rice, the crowd lets out a roar and the women start shaking their chichara gourds, and a few burst into song. I turn to my host mom, "Mun kera?" what happened?. She responds, "It landed on its back. If it lands on its back it is a good sign, it means it has pleased the ancestors." ah. of course.

DAY 2

I get up late, exhausted by the night-after-night of balafon dancing. My legs hurt, I've got ghiardia again, and a cold. But eh, that's life here, so I haul water from the pump, water my tree nursery, take a bucket bath, and head over to my host family's house. Today is the 'big day.' All the women in my extended family bought matching fabric, so today we gather and don our outfits for the first time. In the distance we can hear the deep echo of the "bum-ba" drum, literally 'big boom,' a fitting name I think. Two black masked creatures appear - hunched over like old men, leaning on canes, dancing a slow knee-lifting side step. Wiry 'hair' flows down from the masks over their backs, and someone sticks corn cobs into the extended carved mouths. One of them apparently has bad vision; he's got funky black glasses perched on his pointed nose. They chase the swarms of children, who run screaming in terror and delight.

A balafon mysteriously appears and soon the drums are wailing. After a song or so they pick up, the instruments float up onto the tops of womens' heads, and the whole crowd is moving along towards the sacred trees. Behind us more people are gathering at the Boom-ba.

Once we reach the sacred grove, tucked into the lush greenery by a stream, the musicians set up post and start pounding out rhythms, and groups of women tap-shuffle their flip-flopped feet, kicking up clouds of dust that we cough on and laugh at.

We don't spend long before the instruments are hoisted up again. There are still hordes of new musicians and dancers arriving, but we're the first wave, so we move out through the forest, traipsing across dried out crop fields, picking over millet and sorghum stalks. We pass by the giant tree, give it our blessings, and move into the fields to dance. Like transient worshippers, we soon pick up and wind single-file back towards M'Pedougou, skirting around the mango groves towards the dugutigi's house (the village chief). We all remove our head wraps and bow before the chief, who is blind and mostly deaf, but still a smiley old man who showers us with blessings and chews on bitter kola nuts. We dance for him and then dance outside as new groups move in, dancing until our feet hurt and we're thirsty and tired. Women start slipping away, to get water, to wash, to cook the evening meal of rice and sauce. The sounds of pestles pounding sprinkles the air, already thick with shaking gourds, hands thumping leather, and agile drum sticks dancing on the resonant planks of the balafon.

DAY 3In the morning, again exhausted, I come to greet my host moms. We sit down to eat rice and sauce, and Fatimata seems tired. She has been pregnant for months, and I wonder at how she got through all the festivities. We don't talk much, and then when we have finished eating she says "A be so kono," it (or he or she) is in the house." I look at her blankly. She nods at the house. I look at her stomach, and a wave of comprehension slides over me. "FATIMATA!" I shriek, "You gave birth!" She nods, and smiles towards her hut. I leap up, then slow down and cautiously enter the dark hut, pushing back the curtain in her door. I look on her bed, seeing only piles of clothes, pieces of fabric. I make out a bundle, then a tiny face, its eyes closed, its face scrunching up as it stretches. I sit down softly. The doorway darkens and Fatimata enters. I look at her tired slender body and the miniscule human being, and she picks him up and places him in my lap. She shrugs, profers a wan smile, and I wonder what she's thinking. What does this kid mean to her? Her eldest son is 18, a grown man, and here she is with a newborn, its fingernails barely visible, getting ready to nurse it into toddlerhood and strap it on her back as she heads out to the fields.

Soon it will be time to plant. To watch the skys and hope for rain, to sow the seeds for next year's food by the force of muscle and a hoe. To hope that this year will be better than the last. MORE PHOTOS

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2239022&l=2b1df&id=3408340

Harvesting "nere" seed to make into a sauce. This is my host sister Nawa.

One of the many mud stoves that the women have built to save firewood.

A village elder making traditional cotton fabric on his loom.

Yesterday afternoon I rode into the bush to get my friend Calita and ride into Sikasso. We got roped into drinking a round of tea and finally managed to get on the road at 4:15, a bit late, and with dark clouds building up in the Eastern sky that we were riding towards. The air was hot, heavy, humid, ready to burst.

Packs of schoolkids raced past us on their one speed bicycles, and when we reached the big mango groves 5 miles out of M'Pedougou, the wind blasted down the road upon us and within minutes the sky started pelting pebble-sized-hail, raining down in sheets and bouncing across the road. I was laughing so hard I could barely hold my bike up in the wind. I ran off the road to find shelter under a mango tree, but the hail started knocking down mangos, so I stood out in the open and was thankful for my bike helmet. When the hail passed we started riding again in a gentle rain, laughing and savoring the novel sensation of goose bumps. An hour later, as we crested a hill we were met by another blast of wind and a wall of brown fog. I said, 'Is this a duststorm?' Calita responded, 'I don't know but let's get out of it, whatever it is.' We pushed our bikes DOWNhill into the wind, dust flying towards us and sticking to our wet skin, swirling into our eyes and teeth and ears. We turned off the road towards a little village that we were passing, pushing our bikes between some huts and looking for signs of life. A man came out and said, 'Come, get inside. We'll wait out the storm.' We ducked into his hut just in time. Chunks of dirt and sand and rock pummeled the tin roof, and at one point the wind lifted the corner and I thought for sure it was going to fly off, but it didn't. We huddled for 20 minutes, until it had subsided and we had to get going to make it to Sikasso before dark. What an afternoon. This morning we did our radio show - we discussed global warming: What is it? What causes it? What can we do to lessen it? What can we do to mitigate its effects? We gave a big shout out to all the women in M'Pedougou who had built mudstoves. It was a fun show; I'm getting into the groove now and I like the chance to share ideas with a lot of people all at once. Until next week; this is Sita Bengaly.

THREE WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL

April 20

There is something magical about waking up to drumming. It happens quite regularly, as I go to bed early and the drums wake up late.

On this occasion it was the night after my friend Issa’s wedding. There were actually three marriages that happened on the same day, and I went with Abdouleye to the dowry ceremony. This entails a gathering of old men in a hut, chewing on bitter kola nuts while they exchange the dowry and give gifts. Next to the wrinkly men I noticed the sacrifice block, with fresh streaks of blood. The “dugu son” season is beginning, the season of offering sacrifices to the ancestors and the genies in order to get good rain this year. Outside the dowry hut, villagers were gathered at the newlyweds’ concession to chat, play cards, drink tea, and eat. It had started the night before and would go for several more days, with dancing at night. M’Pedougou is not a Muslim village, so the customs are rather informal compared to a lot of Mali. Soon a child came and asked to speak to Abdouleye. He went out and came back, “Sita, let’s go home.” I looked at him curiously, wondering why he wanted to go, and of all things, home. We started walking and he said, “My mother, she’s passed away.” I nodded and as we walked I quietly gave him my blessings (Bambara fills that gap we have in English – that awkward sticky feeling of oh gosh, I want to console you, but I don’t know what to say… Um, I’m sorry? In Bambara there is a string of ‘death blessings’ that smooth over that gap. May Allah return her to the Earth. May he cool her resting place. May her children live out the life that she gave them) At his mom’s hut, the family was beginning to gather, trickling in from marriage festivities, their gaiety muffled. Abdouleye’s brother was sitting on a carved wood stool sobbing, tears making dark lines on his dusty cheeks. Their older brother, my language tutor Adama, drunk on millet beer from the marriage festivities, was preaching to no one in particular about the naturalness of death. The women began to gather and the singing began that afternoon.

By the next night, I’m flat worn out from the day-in-day-out festivities, the dancing circles of women, the cha-chas, the calabash drumming, the rice eating, and the all night balafon dancing. All, of course, taking place under a burning sun and even at night the moon seems to give off heat. I’ve gone home to tuck myself into my mosquito net and sweat myself to sleep.

I’m tugged back into consciousness by a deep resonant drumming, a sound I’ve not yet heard in village. Its deep voice is soon joined by the playful rising notes of the balafon. My mosquito net flaps against me in a thick wind, urging me, go, go, go to the music. I slip on my new tafe (fabric that wraps as a skirt) and, like many other nights, forage out into the dark. I pick my way through a dried out cotton field, letting the wind lift up my tafe and brush the silky fabric against my legs. I savor the cool air and the dark, turbulent sky. The balafon players are circled under a mango tree next to Abdouleye’s mom’s hut, illuminated by a pair of fluorescent tube lights. Above them swollen mangoes swing like violent pendulums in the wind. Dancers circle around, their feet flying in impossibly fast, impossibly intricate egg-beater patterns. A sheet of sand whisks through the air, and some of the pendulums fly free, their thuds drowned by the drumming. My friend Jeneba comes up behind me and smiles a great, yellow fleshy smile and hands me a mango. I pile a few into my shirt just as fat drops of water start spitting from the black boiling mass above.

Flip flops flapping, tafe whipping, rain drops splatting, I sprint through the cotton field to get home to move my bed inside. Just in time. Rain hammers down on my tin roof. Gusts of wet air burst in through my windows and I happily let the cool spray splatter across my floor. Outside the parched soil cries hallelujah and drinks long, deep gulps of sky water. I peel mangoes and I smile, savoring each bite of this sweet existence.

MOTIVATION

Monday, April 28

My women’s group meets most Monday mornings at 9am. The women trickle in, usually in spurts, and most weeks we are lucky to start by 9:30 with about 15 of the 20 women. We’ve talked about how to reduce women’s workload, child spacing and birth control options, starting a garden, and we did a formation on mud stoves about a month ago (mud stoves are an improvement over the tradition three-rock stove because it holds heat in and thus burns less firewood, reducing the time spent collecting wood and helping slow deforestation). I set the group up with 2 women represented from each large family within M’Pedougou, hoping that they could act as ‘representatives’ for their women, spreading what they learn within the village.

So when I taught them how to build mud stoves, the idea was that the 2 women would then go build their own mud stoves and teach their family’s women how to build them, and knowledge transfer would multiply in an almost exponential manner.

This Monday I was still eating breakfast (a bowl of sorghum and peanut porridge) at 8:30 when I heard “ko-ko” from outside (roughly meaning…hello, I’m here, can I enter?). I came out to find five women with chairs and stools on their heads. I gawked and said, well, you’re half an hour early, no one else is going to be here for awhile. They sat down anyway. I went back inside to collect more stools and I heard it again: “ko-ko.” Huh? I went back out, to find another group of women. Within ten minutes my concession was packed with women. Afu, a boisterous joking women with eyes that crinkle as if she’s got an inside joke, turned on her radio and stretched herself out in my hammock. I sat down and counted… 19 women. It was only 8:40. What was going on? Was my watch off an hour? This kind of … timeliness, EARLINESS in fact, is just about unheard of in village life in most of Africa. At 8:50 Abdouleye showed up, his jaw dropping at the gate. The last woman came and we started the meeting at 8:55.

We talked about Moringa trees, a tree that is sometimes called “the miracle tree.” The leaves provide vitamins, protein, and fiber that most village Malians severely lack, and it incorporates easily into their cooking. I have three of them in my yard and I have started a tree nursery, with 50 little saplings so far.

Near the end of the meeting Adama arrived - my language tutor who had helped me with the mud stove formation. Abdouleye and I were planning on making a tour of the village to ‘inspect’ the mud stoves. Adama (his eyes puffy and, as he is most mornings, still a bit tipsy from the previous night’s millet beer) said he’d come just to “add some words.”

He moved into what I call his motivational speaker mode, switching between Bambara and Senufo, using dramatic pauses for emphasis.

“ If you don’t build your mud stove, WHO will? If M’Pedougou’s children (Bambara’s expression for citizens) don’t work for their own advancement, WHO will? Each of us has our own skills to add, our own contribution to make, and if we don’t do it, WHO will?”

The women were nodding and murmuring, adding punctuations of “Amiina.” It was a clichéd Peace Corps moment that I think few volunteers are actually luck enough to experience – as few villages understand that development isn’t about charity, gifts, or white skin.

When Adama had finished I said “I too want to add some words.”

I paused, and spoke in slow crisp Bambara, “Long ago, the first people of America, those who were there before the white-skinned people came, they had a saying.” Pause. “They said, in everything we do, we must take into account the lives of future generations.” Pause.

The older women nodded in knowing, and the younger women with baby’s sucking on their breasts added their tongue-clicks that signal agreement. “If we cut down our trees today, what will our children do?”

And with that Abdouleye and I started our village tour. I had low expectations. As we reached each larger family’s area of village, one of the group’s representative women joined us and gave us a tour of her area. In and out of huts and yards, mud stove after mud stove after mud stove. Some had complex systems four up to four pots to sit on the same stove, some had smooth gray mud walls, some were dark, some had closed doors, some were open, but hut after hut, I started to get overwhelmed.

I said, “Abdouleye! The whole village has built mud stoves!”

He said, “Yes, what did you expect?”

“Well, I guess I just didn’t expect people to do it.”

“M’Pedougou is moving forward, and we’re doing it ourselves.”

I agreed. And pictures are athttp://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2233178&l=97e0e&id=3408340

I got a letter from someone requesting a step-by-step guide to making toh. Toh is the staple food of many Malians, and in M'Pedougou they eat it for lunch, dinner, and sometimes even breakfast for 350 days a year.

I've posted a picture tutorial, as well as a few other photos:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2221088&l=1e0f2&id=3408340

It's a hot birthday this year. I wake up before dawn, lathered in sweat, sticking to my sheet, and I look up at the stars, veiled by the white gauze of my mosquito net. 24 years. And here I am, sleeping on the red earth of Mali, thankful for chance to be alive, to think, to breathe, to interact with my fellow creatures.

By the time the sun blots out the stars, I'm up and about, going to the pump for morning greetings and a bucket of water. I mix up a bowl of basi (pounded millet) with thick milk that I got from some Peul women. It's my new breakfast staple for when I can't find eggs. At 9 am, women start showing up for my weekly women's group meeting. As each woman arrives (with stool on head), she claps at the entrance to my courtyard and says a loud "Ka ka," to announce her presence and ask for permission to enter. The greetings swirl around, all in Senufo: how are you, how are the children, the husband, the parents, the neighbors, and did the night pass in peace? Then the blessings come, may the day end in peace, may god help us, may we get along well, may we help each other. I nod and affirm the greetings: "Amiina, amiina, amiina." (Amen)

By 9:30 the women have all arrived and the greetings have been said, so we start the meeting with another round of greetings and blessings. My work partner Abdouleye translates everything into Senufo for me, and we talk about setting up a women's association to make improved shea butter for the export market. Shea butter making is a traditional women's activity in Mali, but primarily for personal use. Just recently the international market has started seeking out better quality butter for use in cosmetics, creams, and chocolate. For the women to sell to these buyers, however, they have to completely change their production practices. They currently store the nuts in holes in the ground for several months (where they mold and rot), then smoke them over a fire to dry them (turning them black and filling them with carcinogens). The new method means boiling and sun-drying the nuts instead. We discuss all this, and the women are interested in trying the new methods if it means a new source of income.

We end the meeting around 11, checking up on how many women have built mud stoves since we did a formation on them, and make plans to go around next week to look at people's stoves.

My friend Calita from a nearby village comes over, and we make banana bread in my solar stove and lounge in my hammock, watching her thermometer as the temperature soars to 109. After a nice birthday dinner of toh and okra sauce, I head home, and hang up a lantern from my straw-covered hangar. Abdouleye, Yaya, Daouda and Baba come over and we make tea and chat until our eyelids droop and the milky way has crept up from the Southern horizon. I climb into the safe womb of my mosquito net and try not to think about the sweat already trickling onto my sheet.

--------------------------------

The last two months in M'Pedougou have been wonderful. After Yaya's mother's death, I decided that I can't live in this village for 2 years and not understand what people are saying. I just can't. So I have begun studying Senufo, an unwritten tonal language that challenges my patience every single day. I have invented four new letters to represent weird sounds, and I write little arrows to indicate up or down tonal inflections, with circles to represent nasal sounds. It's a riot. Really.

I have also started working. (!) After a great deal of reflection, (What is development? What is the role of a Peace Corps volunteer? How can I get around the "gift-giving" mentality that just cements the relationship of dependency between developed and developing nations? What can I possibly teach anyone about agriculture?), I decided to form a farmer's improvement group. My village is made up of 9 large extended families, so Abdouleye chose 1 man and 1 woman from each family, motivated individuals who can be leaders within their families, who want to learn, to experiment, and to share what they learn.

The group is set up with three goals:

1. To find new techniques, plant varieties, and information related to farming and natural

resource management.2. To test these findings.3. To share what is found with family members, friends, and neighboring communities.

I plan to act as a liason between my farmers and the NGOs and research organizations already here in Mali, and to teach several farmers how they can play this role when I leave. It is frustrating to go to Bamako and Sikasso and see all this incredible knowledge being accumulated, but with a weak or non-existent extension function, this knowledge just sits and collects dust, never reaching the people it is intended to help.

So this coming rainy season our work will begin: five farmers will be trying out new varieties of sorghum, five will be trying new varieties of rice, five will be alley-cropping (planting nitrogen-fixing trees in rows within their crop fields), and five will be collecting pee in jugs and using it as a nitrogen source for corn. We will take measurements, compare the old with the new, and determine what works and what doesn't. My goal is that next year the farmers themselves will seek out new information and we will try out whatever it is that they find. That is what I think Peace Corps Volunteers should do : help people discover their capabilities to develop without constant outside assistance. There are so many rhetorical catch-phrases (Capacity building! Self-help!) and yet I so rarely see it happening here in the development field. What I see is a lot of dependency-building and a lot of gift-giving. It is the difference between building a road and helping to build the political, social and economic infrastructure to maintain that road and to build new roads.

I am in Bamako for another training session right now (with Abdouleye! We can speak in code to each other in Senufo now, which is fun!). I am missing the mangos that have started dripping off the trees in Sikasso, the ONLY compensating and sanity-saving element of hot season.

Here is the 5-day forecast for Sikasso, just to give an idea:

102° F 77° F

102° F 80° F 109° F 84° F 105° F 89° F LOW !104° F 84° F

I think I will freeze to death when I return to Ameriki.

RACE

Feb.4

Yesterday my host dad Jakalia asked me a question that I can't answer. We were sitting in front of the electric glow of his butiki, waiting for the tea, and I looked at my watch for awhile. He asked "What is it?" I paused and replied, "It's really amazing how something so small can be so complicated. This little watch that I bought for a few dollars... it required metal mines and plastic factories and trucks and the whole history of thought that lead to time-keeping, and the complex machinery of a WATCH. And yet we rarely think twice about it." He nodded, and started looking around, his heavy eyes lingering on shiny objects with square edges: "Look at all of this, the tea pot, motorcycles, bicycles, cell phones, lanterns, flashlights, batteries, TV, radio, cold sodas... ALL OF IT, it came from white people. What have black people ever made?" I just looked at him. Then he said slowly "Our minds our not as good."

There are few things in life that annoy me, and in Mali I can deal with heat, giardia, and 62-hour bus rides ... but it is certain small things that start grating on me. First, the chanting of "Tubabu" (white person) by little children, wherever I go. I want to yell back "I'm not WHITE! I'm tan! And you're not BLACK! You're brown!" It is such a human tendency to dichotomize, to exaggerate difference, when in reality everything runs on a spectrum. Some Caucasians are ivory, some medium beige, while Africans too run from deep ebony to the honey or caramel of the light-skinned Peuls or the Touaregs.

My second pet peeve is the pump. Any time I go to get water, there are invariably a small gaggle of girls and maybe some women, and they take my jug and pump my water for me. Yes, I’m a guest, and their culture always treats guests with utmost hospitality, but…it just seems ridiculous that when I try to take the pump from them, they shove me away, … no, the Tubabu woman must not work. She can’t work. It is the same when I go to the fields. If I start breaking a sweat, I am immediately told to go sit in the shade and rest. I have come to terms with this cultural kindness of theirs, but I wonder all the time – Where does it come from? Where do their ideas of what white people can or can’t do come from? If we can build airplanes and cell phones, why is it so hard to believe that I can beat shea paste into shea butter?

The final thing that drives me nuts is the “We have no money. America is rich. Take me to America.” I always argue, I tell them, No!! You don’t want to go to America! We are sad, stressed out, lonely people who do not get to sit under mango trees drinking tea all afternoon. Why do you think you are poor? You have enough to eat. You have a roof over your head. You think you are poor only in relation to the mass consumption of Americans, which you think makes us happier.

I start to target television – the only window my villagers have into the world of white people. Every night they watch the Brazilian soap opera with rich white people who never work and argue about money while they cheat each other. Desperate Housewives is on tomorrow at 2, interspliced with some advertisements for LandCruisers and CocaCola. Little brown faces gaze at the flickering images, to grow up one day to say to a white person, “Your skin is beautiful. Mine is not. Your mind is good. Mine is not.” And I cry inside and wish I could throw the television off a cliff.

DEATH

Feb. 6

A new sound wakes me in the night. I lay in the dark, listening. Yes, human voices, women’s voices, calling and responding in high pitched wails. Beneath it I hear a steady deep patter of hands on taut leather.

I grope around for my flashlight, slip on my flip flops, and push open my screen door to investigate. I have heard that there are fetish rituals that women are forbidden to see, but the voices sound feminine, and I think this is something different. The air is crisp, the stars hang thick across night’s black ceiling, like glow worms offering their light to a giant cavern – each one insignificant, but combined their efforts allow me to walk towards the music without using my invasive metallic light.

The sound rises from my friend Yaya’s compound – Yaya, one of my best friends in village, with whom I pass many afternoons and whose smile never fails to brighten my day. As I near the entrance two older women come out and I ask them what is happening.

“Yaya’s mom died.”

…. the sweet, frail, toothless woman who always made an effort to greet me in slow Bambara (one of the few women who can), who showed me how to turn raw cotton into thread in the shade of her mango tree… I nod and enter.

Framed by the glow of three small campfires, a circle of women turns in measured steps, their voices lilting upwards with the smoke from the fires. Their song is not sad, their eyes are not moist. No! The women are celebrating, they have spread the message through the village, risen from their beds, donned their finest clothes, and come together in the darkness to embrace the life of this woman.

They greet me and usher me into the circle. Jakalia’s mom, my “host grandma” is in the center of the circle with three other elder women with gourds, pounding out the beat, dancing, lifting their arms, exalting in song. Another group of dancers gyrates nearby to a deafening staccato rhythm, and after I tire of the one circle I make my way to the other. As I near it, I realize it is next to the room with the corpse.

The rancid stench of urine clings to my nostrils, but the women gathered in the room do not seem to notice or to mind. They sit in a circle around the body, which is covered in a pale pink shroud. Their faces are lit by lamplight and they chat, they laugh, they sit in silence.

It finally dawns on me that there are only women. Old women sitting, middle aged women with their powerful voices, young women with babies strapped to their backs or nursing next to the fires. Of course. Those who bring life into the world are those who usher it out.

One group of dancers snakes across the courtyard through a doorway. Curious, I follow. On the other side, next to the road, sit the men. They are silent, circled around two low fires, many asleep, others just staring into the flames. The womens’ voices break their torpor, as they move slowly to stand around the men, holding them in the warmth of their voices, as a mother embraces a child, protecting him in her powerful, soothing grace. In the orange glow of fire light, I see a strange green speck. A cell phone! I edge closer. Some guy is playing tetris on his cellphone! Moments like this, of stark juxtaposition between tradition and modernity, never cease to amaze me. Just as I was reveling in the beauty, power of this tradition, here is a guy who could care less. He’d prefer the beauty and power of Western gadgets. I sigh and return to the women gathering close around the fires for warmth in the cool morning air.

Just sitting, listening, I feel how rich these people are. We may have more plastic and doohickeys, and yeah, better health and more opportunities, but I realize how impoverished we have become in spirit, in community, in our disconnect with the cycle of life and with each other. I think of an old woman dying alone on a white sterile hospital bed with no one around but a man in an ironed labcoat and the sound of a beeping heart monitor, and I shiver.

What better way to say goodbye to a loved member of the family, who has lived her life fully, than with song and dance and food, with the clank of shells hitting gourds, the plump breast of a nursing mother, an embrace of her life and the lives she left behind.

Feb. 7

As if that wasn’t enough, the celebrations continue for three more days. The day after her death, hundreds of people come from surrounding villages, the hunters dressed in their traditional attire, the women wearing their best matching fabric complets. Yaya’s compound transforms into a giant festival – people from all over the village bringing firewood to keep the fires going, food to cook and feed the throngs, and non-stop song and dance, telling the story of her life.

The men lift the body onto a wooden stretcher and carry it to a fetish house, then out into a field where they fire off guns, and then they RUN the body to the grave. On the way I pass a cow and a goat being sacrificed, but I keep running in the chaos, the dust, the yelling, trying to not get trampled.

We arrive sweating at the hole that the men had dug during the day, tucked back in the sacred woods, next to Yaya’s father’s grave. The women sing, and for the first time I see tears flow, and they place the body into the grave on a bed of song and gentle voices. Then sweaty, shirtless men frantically cover the grave in stones and branches. From dust to dust.

Yaya and his brother.

I think, I want to die like this. To have my spirit swept into the earth by exalting voices, pounding feet, clapping hands, smiles, and laughter. To have school stop for two days and no one goes to work, to have everyone whose life I have touched come to tell stories and cook feasts.

If I die and any of you are around to witness it, I want song and dance, food and drink, stories and celebration. There will be no black at my funeral.

Photos: http://usc.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2209082&l=b01cf&id=3408340

PATIENCE

Feb. 26

My reserves of patience have been pushed to new extremes. Friday morning we left our tranquil beach house in Senegal at 9am to head back to Mali... and I got into Bamako last night at midnight, 63 hours later. We rode two separate public transit cars to get back to Dakar, battered old buses with people stuffed in tighter than sardines, then got on our bus in Dakar to head for Mali that afternoon. The road between Dakar and the Mali border has to be the worst road I have ever experienced (worse than Kangaroo Island Australia, worse than the road to Kenicott Mines in Alaska). For hundreds of kilometers, our bus crawled along at pace I could have out-run, bobbing up and down in potholes big enough to eat a man. We "slept," while the "air stewards" sprawled out on the dirty aisle floor to catch up on sleep before their driving shift. There was a Nigerian sitting behind me who, every time the bus hit a REALLY bad pot hole (one that made us all fly out of our seats), would yell a stream of English swear words. It made me laugh that we EVER think flying is difficult, with their constant beverages, reclining chairs, seat back pockets, LAVATORIES, air conditioning, and ... well... they're usually only 10, maybe 15 hours, not 62.

My stomach wasn't feeling well, and by morning I was in desperate need of a hole in the ground. We stopped in a little village for the Muslims to pray at dawn, and I got out started asking around if anyone spoke Bambara. No, no. I made it clear I needed to "use the facilities," and a woman handed me a pot of water and sent me behind the huts, where I found a patch of dirt enclosed with straw where people can pee, and a field of peeing men who had just gotten off the bus. Shit. (quite literally). I saw another woman and told her in Bambara, "I need to poop." She understood and I made it just in time. Diarrhea and African public transport are not a good match.

The border crossing to Mali took us all day, with bus-searches, customs, bribes, gendarme stops, and a half bus-load full of people who didn't have proper passports or visas. Apparently there were sewing machines strapped to the roof that weren't Claimed... Another two hours of my life. We got into Kayes, Mali at 9pm and the bus owner decided to stop for the night. We were glad, because we all had grossly swollen ankles from sitting for 30 hours, and we have a Peace Corps house in Kayes with showers and beds. We walked there, glad for the exercise, and slept for a few hours, then walked back at 4am to get back on the bus.

We found no one. Gradually passengers started gathering, but no bus people. The hours ticked by, and we sat. The owner had told us (very forcefully, in a heated argument the night before) that we would leave no later than 5. He showed up, then disapeared. At 9am, there was a crowd of angry people, a woman who had a job to start, but there is no recourse in Africa. No "I demand my money back." We just had to wait. At 10 my friend Jacq sat in the driver seat and started honking the horn. She took one of his cigarettes and smoked it (even though she doesn't smoke). At 11:30 we finally left, ... and 12 hours later got into Bamako. Sweaty, dirty, exhausted, frustrated, with swollen cankles just to rub it in.

And today I get on my 7 hour bus to Sikasso.

Senegal photos: http://usc.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2209082&l=b01cf&id=3408340

The market in Segou, around New Years.

Watching the Africa Cup of Nations! The TV is powered by a solar panel on the roof.

On our way to go rock climbing near Bamako. Avoiding goat pee is a skill to be perfected.

I've reached a milestone... Six months in Mali! Some highlights:

Favorite Bambara word:

Pankurunjiginyoro. Literally: Jumping boat landing place. English: Airport.

Skill I've picked up:

Listening and clicking in my throat to show I'm listening, then nodding and saying "akanyi" to indicate I've understood when really I didn't.

Skill I still haven't mastered:

Pouring Malian tea - they pour back and forth for about 15 minutes between two shot glasses to make the tea foamy. When I do it I miss the glasses and before I make foam I've spilled all the tea.

How I've changed the most:

I eat meat. I crave candy bars and chocolate and cookies - all the foods I once dismissed as "environmentally damaging and nutritionally empty." The politics of meat is different in Mali - there are no factory farms, antibiotics, cleared rainforests, or complex energy-consuming supply chains involved - just free-range, organic, pasture-fed animals. As for the candy bars and cookies, after weeks of corn mush, ... they don't seem so nutritionally empty.

Number of marriage proposals: Close to 50

Most interesting package: A box of dried leaves from the banks of the Seine River in Paris.

What do I miss the most?

Coffee, broccoli, breakfast cereal, road biking, people being (and things happening) on time. Easy access to Wikipedia to answer pressing questions like "is MSG (the main ingredient in Maggi, the staple spice in most Malian cooking) really that bad for me?"

What do I not miss?

Traffic jams, being in a rush, never having enough time, fixed prices.

Possible projects: (i.e. What is Jessie actually doing in Mali?)

1. Doing a research trial (called a Farmer Field School) on alley cropping: Planting trees INSIDE crop fields to fix nitrogen in the soil and create mulch with the leaf litter. The idea is that it increases crop yields.

2. Doing another research trial to test out new higher yielding sorghum varieties, some of which are bred (not genetically modified) to be resistant to a weed that plagues the fields in my area.

3. Introducing free sources of fertilizer: Teaching them how to build composting "toilets" that you plant trees on after six months of use. We call them ArborLoos. And that's not all! Collecting pee - !!! - diluting it with water and using it on nitrogen-needy crops as fertilizer. Whoever said there was no such thing as a free lunch?

4. Working with the women to teach them how to make improved shea butter, to form an organization, and help them learn how to find external buyers who pay a higher price.

5. Drying mangoes!! (Vitamin A defiency in kids being a major health concern, and tasty food deficiency being a major mental health concern)

And my personal goals for 2008:

Start a chicken coop.

Learn how to pour tea.

Read 52 books.

To be kind, generous, curious, and cheerful.

Aw San bee San bee!!! Seasons greetings from the Tabaski festival in M'Pedougou. I find it a wonderful change from the consumer feeding frenzy in the U.S., the endless Christmas sales, the loops of warbling carols following you down the blue fluorescent aisles of Target on Christmas Eve as you desperately grab stuff to use as stocking stuffers.

No, none of that here. The season here revolves around the Muslim holiday of Tabaski, or the festival of sheep, which falls exactly two moon cycles and ten days after the end of Ramadan. I was in Bamako for the preparations (the tailors working around the clock while flocks of sheep clogging the roads), and after my whirlwind week of meeting filmmakers, I was in a rush to get back to village before the festivities began.

Getting from the Peace Corps office in Bamako to the bus station is a 4 dollar cab ride across Bamako or a succession of 10 cent bush taxis that are crowded, slow, indirect, but a whole lot more adventure for the money. I've figured out how to navigate the system enough to take 2 hours to cross a distance that takes a taxi 15 minutes, in what I call the scenic tour of Bamako. At the grand marche I have to get off and switch cars, and the market swallows me whole, only consenting to spit me out after an hour of churning through its intestines. By the time I get to the main bus station I'm thoroughly digested. I buy some bananas, a bus ticket, and collapse on a bench to wait.

As I drift off into visions of sugar plums, a voice interupts, "Hey, you're a Sikasso Peace Corps volunteer, aren't you?" (in Bambara of course). "Yes,... do I know you?" It's a guy who lives in Sikasso and has seen me around before. He plops down on the bench and we start chatting in mixed French and Bambara. Pretty soon a crowd of young 20-somethings going home for Tabaski begins to gather; when they hear the white girl speaking Bambara, the cat's out of the bag. Three hours later we finally line up for the bus, and I realize that I forgot to buy a gift for my host family. I see a bulging cart of watermelons and buy a nice fat one to give as a treat to the kids. As we're getting on the bus one of my new friends, Sunkalo, asks me "So, we're going to eat the watermelon on the bus?" I laugh, "No, it's for my host family." The bus is crowded, the air crackling with the energy of kids going home for the holidays. I wedge myself into a seat between my bag, my melon, and my bags of fruit, and I comment "This watermelon has become a bit of a problem." Sunkalo retorts, " I know how to solve it!" But we find a place for it on a luggage shelf tucked behind a pile of bags.

Normally I attempt to read an entire book on the 8 hour bus ride from Bamako to Sikasso, but this ride is different. My seat partners are unparalleled. Relishing the chance to use my French, we launch into discussions of religion and the existence of God, the problem of the soul in light of evolution (do monkeys have souls, and if not, when did the soul arise?), polygamy and how women 'share' their husbands. A few hours into the ride Sunkalo, who is seated farther up in the bus, stands up and makes a mock speech to parliament, (fellow countrymen,...), making a motion that the watermelon be 'broken' and eaten. The entire front half of the bus cheers and starts chanting "Zeray, zeray, zeray" (Bambara: watermelon), stomping and building in volume. I laugh and ask if they have a knife. Sunkalo says no, he's just playing. I can save the watermelon for my host family. A little later the chanting erupts again, the zeray having become a bus-wide joke.

By this time it is dark and people are beginning to get off the bus as we pass their villages. And with them go their bags... In all the chaos and conversation I'm not paying attention to the little shelf holding the prized possession. We stop in a big village and quite a few people get off. The bus lurches forward into the thick, dusty darkness, and I hear (as if in slow motion) a rolling, then a distinct, squelching thump. The odor, sweet and fresh, hits us just before the bus driver flips the lights on to reveal the exposed red flesh of the sacred zeray. Both sides are up (we must have passed through a Murphy-free zone), broken in two clean halves. There is a brief moment of concern, a second glance my way to gauge my reaction, before I yell "Someone get a knife!" and soon wet, shining slices of zeray are floating around the bus, seeds and rinds flying out the windows and into our laps, the juice streaming down our dusty faces. As I bite into my own oversized slice (like the birthday girl who gets the big piece of cake) the bus erupts into a new cheer: "Sita! Sita! Sita!" (my Malian name). Best piece of watermelon I've ever had.

When I get off the bus I say my goodbyes, exchange phone numbers, fend off marriage proposals, and promise to call my friends when I return to the big cities. I heft my backpack and walk to my hut by moonlight, my face glowing.

It's a shock to the system. Wedged in a sputtering green bush taxi between voluptious women, gangly kids, subdued chickens and a film of sweat and grime, I crank my neck sideways to avoid the unfortunate . The crowds of people part just enough for the motorcycles, taxis, foot carts and the endless stream of green boxes to inch forward, then they close in again like an amoeba, a great pulsing, crackling mass of motion and life. Platters of pineapple and plastic shoes bob up and down over a sea of goats with fat bellies who are unaware of their impending glory as the main dish for the Muslim Tabaski feasts. The scene floods my senses, a hurricane-force storm after a long draught from civilization.

Last week I was riding my bike into Farakala to attend a training session for an upcoming health campaign to vaccinate children, when my phone rang. Startling, since coverage is spotty, and who calls me anyway? It was the Peace Corps headquarters - they wanted to know if I wanted to come in to Bamako to go to a function with the US Ambassador and Martin Scorsese. Um, well, I hesitated, I am pretty busy with the sorghum harvest, but I suppose I could carve the time out of my schedule to make it.

Huh?

On Wednesday I go to a screening of The Departed at the huge movie theater in Bamako, Martin Scorsese introduces it and talks about why he is in Mali - to work on world film preservation with his friend Souleymane Cisse, the great Malian film director.

Thursday evening (after a day wandering around market, stunning the Malians with the fact that a white person speaks Bambara!) I head to the Ambassador's house with the Peace Corps Admin Officer, adjusting my skirt and wondering if I will be hopelessly underdressed. Oh well, nothing to do about it now. The party is a swank cocktail social on the Ambassador's patio with an open bar and decadent hors d'oeuvres floating around on silver platters. My first conversation is with the US director of the President's Malaria Initiative, a $1.2 billion, five-year drive to fight malaria in developing countries. Next I meet the French ambassador, and then a few French filmmakers who are working with Souleymane Cisse and Martin Scorsese. Then Martin enters the scene and after a brief toast, the milling continues and I make my way to him, introduce myself, and we talk briefly about film school. I chat with Souleymane Cisse, he gives me his phone number.

Soon I become aware of musical accompaniment: Salif Keita, Habib Koite, Oumou Sangare, the heavy weights of Malian music are ten feet away singing and laughing, an informal tribute to Martin and Souleymane. Where am I? A few days ago I was in my mud hut chasing mice out of my extra mattress.

Life can be surreal and full of surprises. I don't know where this adventure is going, I don't know how my filmmaking aspirations will find their place in this sejour in the tropics, but everything seems to be connecting, concentric spirals of synchronicity and coincidence that appear to be going somewhere, sometimes I lead and I sometimes I follow. I think today I will go to the Peace Corps office and take my movie camera out of storage. It's time.

"How is it that in Ameriki it is morning, while it is afternoon here?" says my neighbor Musa, stretched out in a hammock, shaded from the scorching sun by a hangar of dried straw.

"Well..." I stumble, trying to buy time as I grasp for words like "orbit, time zone, and rotatation" in my limited Bambara vocabulary

"Yeah," adds his friend Nanturu, "And why does Ameriki have more than one time?"

I glance over at a pile of squash and pick up the roundest one I can find.

"This is the Earth." I point to the stem, "and this is Mali," then I slowly rotate it and point to the other side, "here is Ameriki."

I've been thinking a lot in the past few months; take away all my distractions (like a job, a road bike) and plunk me into an animist farming village, and that's likely to happen. I read a lot, I write a lot, and I have developed the ability to pass several hours at a time staring off into space thinking about things while I sit with a group of Malians speaking Senufo to each other. My thinking sessions are sometimes spiced up with conversation, and nearly always punctuated with the three rounds of tea, boiled in little blue pots on charcoal stoves, served in shot glasses with lots of foam.

So on this scorching afternoon, as I suck the last foam bubbles from my glass, I think about Galileo. He had this whole "earth going around the sun" thing figured out a really long time ago. Western civilization figured out a lot of things a long time ago - mathematics, calculus, physics, the whole concept of scientific inquiry, and a system of writing to write all this stuff down and share the knowledge acquired, literature, political systems and philosophy, theater, photography. My mind starts reeling and I blink a few times. A guy roars into the hangar on a Yamaha motorcycle. The faded, gangsta-rapper face of 50 Cent grins from his t-shirt, framed by the words "Get Rich or Die Trying." The layers of irony are almost too much for me to handle. How the world market brings in He greets in crisp Bambara, and I immediately peg him as a rich city slicker from Sikasso (yes, I stereotype non-villagers now). He adds a liter or two of crude oil to his tank and drives off. I think about African American poverty and how different it is from African poverty; I think about why people would (and do) die to get rich, I think about how the t-shirt was donated and shipped across the ocean to end up in the used clothes piles all over Africa. After my diversion, my thoughts return to Galileo. Why did the West develop all those things while African countries did not? Why? I've read Guns, Germs and Steel and I know that the answer is complicated; related to the unfair North-South continental axis that prevents the spread of innovation. I also know that without a food surplus created by efficient agriculture, people can't liberate labor to start doing other things (like sitting around thinking), which lead to what we call development and progress. With thoughts like this, I start to appreciate the value of my role as an agricultural extension agent.

I started holding meetings with my villagers to get to know their agricultural work; to know what they grow, how they grow it, and what problems they encounter. The soil is overworked and eroded, they have no equipment, no irrigation, no knowledge of pest management, and a fuelwood demand that leads the women out for hours in search of wood. To feed their families, they grow millet, sorghum and corn to fill round mud granaries. For "cash," they grow tiger nuts (a ground nut like peanuts, only sweet!) and cotton, neither of which actually bring them cash after they pay back the loans they take for fertilizer. And without equipment, without soil conservation practices, without cheap transport to markets that will buy their goods for a fair price, each year gets harder...and it is difficult to know where to begin.

To stimulate my thinking, I've been reading. Luckily, a series of incidents bestowed me with copious amounts of time to do this. Three weeks ago I started getting high afternoon fevers, and after a few days of that the med office thought I might have malaria, so I hopped a bus into Bamako. At the same time I got an infection on my lip and it started to swell. By the time I got to Bamako my cyclical fevers were gone (I had taken the emergency anti-malarial meds), but my lip was the size of a golf ball. I spent more than a week drugged up, reading books, and thinking about what it would be like to be deformed. I got to know what it feels like to be stared at, to having people ask me "What's wrong with your face?" I wondered what it would be like to have a permanent deformity. It finally pussed out of my lip and I returned to normal.

Only a week after getting back from Bamako I rode my bike into Sikasso to do some research on agriculture NGOs in my area. Walking through market, I got hit by a motorcycle - it knocked me over and then ran over my foot, taking a good chunk of my skin with it. I then spent a week with an infected foot, sitting in my hut boiling water to clean it and soak it.

I read Into the Wild, about a young man who leaves society to live on his own in the wilderness. It made me think about my own desire to see how humans can live with/in/against nature. In the West we have developed so much that we are starting to lose touch with our roots, so to speak. We don't know what it is like to grow our own food and wait for the rains to come. We don't kill our own animals, we don't wake up with the sun and go to bed with it. It's almost like we live outside nature - insulated by our walls and clothes and cars and electricity. There are a few of us who desire to get outside the insulation. We do it through backpacking, trips into wild places, and also through things like what I'm doing right now: living in a society that lives closer to nature. I get my water at the well, I write in my journal by lamplight, and I eat food that was grown less than a mile from my house. Funny thing is, the people here have an opposite desire. I can't tell you how many times I have heard "Ameriki is rich. Take me with you to Ameriki." I grope for words and mumble something about visas. I want to take off my watch and my sunglasses and hide my bicycle in a bush so they are not forced to see these signs of wealth that they don't have access to, and that perhaps they do not need.

This past week a gaggle of Peace Corps volunteers convened in Sikasso to celebrate Thanksgiving. We divided into teams- the turkey team (they made aprons), the stuffing team, the pie team, and cooked a feast beyond comparison. It was wonderful to be among friends, to be able to speak and express myself, to hear stories from my fellow volunteers. It takes time apart from something to truly appreciate it. Here's my thanksgiving toast: to friends.

NEW PHOTOS are at: http://usc.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2180021&l=7f9cd&id=3408340

NIGHT SOUNDS

The night starts with the TOK TOK of wood hitting wood, some resonant, others flat, some women pounding in unison in a steady rhythm, others pounding alone at a slower cadence. Having returned from the fields, the women are hard at work cooking the evening meal, but they have to pound the corn and millet for the next day's meals. The thuds slowly ebb as the moon peaks up, and my neighbor's radio replaces the void. He turns it up so that it exceeds the capacity of the tinny speakers, and warbled West African dance tunes waft into the air, the bass lost entirely, the treble coming in and out of reception.

As the moon rises higher the sound of children laughing and yelling permeates the darkness. The heat of the sun has gone to bed, so if their work is done, the children can play. They run around dragging tuna cans on strings, with sand and pebbles that clatter around and make a racket against the metal. Some little boys cut circles out of dried gourds and make wheels out of them, mounting them on an axle and then attaching it to a stick to make a little wheeled stick (a name doesn't come to mind). In this way, equipped with slingshots for killing lizards, some kids pulling strings, others pushing sticks, they run around the village in groups, and the sound of their laughter lasts long after I've blown out my kerosene lamp and crawled under my mosquito net, carefully tucking the edges underneath my mattress to keep out the bugs of the night.

But the net doesn't keep out the sounds. I've barely drifted into that half-sleep coma when I hear a scratching, a rustling that has a hard edge to it. I sit up, and of course it stops. I sit silent and wait for it to come back, and I locate it as coming from the corner, inside a trunk. I flick my headlamp on, and there on the floor is a baby mouse, squirming around helplessly. I grab a cup and trap the little dude - he squeals for mom, but he isn't going anywhere. Next I inspect the trunk - the lid is ajar. I press it shut and lock it. Next I take the trunk outside and leave it there to deal with in the morning. I do the same with the baby mouse, and crawl back into bed.

Next I'm woken by a whirr, a squeaking and then my mosquito net is under attack by fluttering wings and a bat's radar system gone bonkers. I sit up again and turn on my light. Two bats are bickering, whizzing around and hitting the walls and occasionally my net. I sigh... what can I do? I debate my options, and eventually get out of bed, find another cup and a broom, and I start trying to whack the little devils out of the air. I manage to hit one, and when he cowers on the floor my cup slams down. Trapped, sucker. No more merry making for you. He joins the trunk and the mouse cup outside. I crawl back into bed, and the nearby donkeys lull me to sleep with their piercing brays.

At 4:30 the prayer call sounds. Long, muted calls in Arabic that come even before the stars have winked out. I roll over and wonder how many people actually go to morning prayer. Then I hear the roosters, maybe the prayer call woke them up too. Then I hear the TOK TOK thunking of wood on wood, the women have heard - and their call is to the mortar, to the day's work ahead of them. I search around and grope for my earplugs. This may be the start to their day, but it's not yet the start of mine.

It’s been one month at site. After swear-in and the ensuing late nights in Bamako (absorbing as much electricity, pastries, and cold beer as my body could handle), I hop on a sauna that also serves as a bus and clatter my way 7 hours South and East to Sikasso. I spend about four days in the bustling city, meandering through market and buying stuff to move into my new house. I begin to hone my bargaining skills; joking with the sellers and telling them that they eat beans when the prices are inflated due to my white skin.

On Sept 27 a Peace Corps vehicle takes me to my site, drops off my stuff, and bids me good luck! And there I am, sitting in my hammock, surrounded by my neighbors and villagers, wondering where to begin. The village decides for me: we start with music and dancing – a wild blur of feet and smiling toothless old women, shuffling in between the drums and the balafon, a big xylophone. A few men show off their footwork and the women shake their butts, their babies strapped on their backs barely moving. But the sun is rising and the fields are calling, so we wrap it up and everyone heads to the fields. It's barely even noon.

For the first week or so, I eat all my meals with my host family, Jakalia Bengaly and his three wives and ten kids. Jakalia runs a little butiki on the roadside and fixes motorcycles and bicycles. I arrive in the middle of Ramadan, the Islamic fasting month, where Muslims fast from dawn until dusk. My village is mostly animist, practicing fetishes and sacrifices, but a good portion of them are also Muslim. So every evening at dusk Jakalia and I break fast (his fast, not mine), drinking sweetened millet porridge with big ladles out of the bowl, then eating fried sweet potatoes and papaya and of course, the obligatory bowl of corn toh, the mushy staple of the Malian diet, dipped in an okra sauce that is the consistency of snot. It’s growing on me. I'd better hope so, because it's what I will eat for dinner every single night in village for the next 2 years.

The end of Ramadan is a big celebration - called the big feast - and the morning after the new moon the praying types come to the mosque to perform some sort of ceremony... the imam (prayer leader) stands with his back to the sun with a multicolored umbrella to shade his shoulders, while the villagers, all dressed in their finest outfits, splay themselves on the ground, rising and bowing in prayer. The women are all positioned behind the men so that the mens' pious thoughts won't stray. When the ceremony wraps up, a column of men (trailed by the inconspicious white girl) snakes its way through the village to a feast at the imam's house. We wash our hands and eat rice with sauce. Then Jakalia and I return to his house and find another big bowl of rice and sauce and his wives offer me to eat. I say, "but I just ate!" and she laughs - this is the big feast day - you can't ever be full. So I discover, as I wandered through town greeting and eating, greeting and eating. I devise the strategy of taking small handfuls, chewing really slowly, and then saying "I'm full" as soon as I had made a little dent in my corner of the bowl.

The whole village stops for two days - the women cook, the men make tea, the children run around saying blessings and getting candy (the Malian form of trick or treating I suppose). For once I can see women and men just sitting around, talking, lounging in hammocks, resting. With dusk the music starts, and all the food consumed during the day fuels the energy release of the night. The children start dancing first, running about practicing the moves that they see the adults doing. The women gather in small groups, leaning forward slightly to protrude their bums, shuffling their sandled feet. As the night progresses, the adolescent boys start gathering, all of them wearing white plastic shoes that reflect the weak blue light of the single fluorescent tube hanging above the balafon player. The shoes make their feet glow as they whisk around at impossible speeds, weaving impossibly intricate patterns. Then the men too join in and the butts start gyrating (yes, even the men) and it becomes one big booty shaking, foot flying, baby bouncing, sweat soaked frenzy. Two nights of this. Phew. Then it's back to the fields. I convince my second host mom, Alimatu, to take me to the fields with her finally. She keeps repeating, “I be se?” (“Are you able to?”) and I insist that yes, I can make it all the way out to the fields, I won’t die. So she straps on her baby and loads the enormous bowl of toh on her head and we set off. We get there after an hour walk, to find the rest of the family harvesting cotton and peanuts. I force them to give me a hoe and we start hacking our way into the field. The peanuts are interplanted with sorghum, which is at this point over 8 feet tall, and the leaves scratch my sweaty arms as we dig through the soil searching for treasure. At the peak of the day we eat under a tree. The 10 kids, not in school because it's Sunday, are already beginning to eat when I come thrashing out of the sorghum jungle. The image of their noses dripping with snot, white ringworm circles decorating their shaved heads, and bloated bellies and skinny legs recedes behind their warm smiles and our communal desire to eat. The bowl of toh jiggles with their grasping paws. I wash my own and scoop it into the mush, then dunk it, hand and all, into my mouth.

The next day I join the cotton harvest. There is an association of young men in my village named "Five O'Clock" - so called because that's when they stop working. They offer their labor on Tuesdays in exchange for about $30 (for about thirty people, for all day), and people in the town hire them to harvest fields or do whatever they need done. Five O'Clock then puts their earnings into a fund to do community improvements, feasts and dancing being included under that category. I head out to the fields with my work partner, Abdouleye, to the surprise of the men already hard at work. I strap a rice sack on with a strip of old tire and start pulling the cotton balls from their little cups. We are all drenched, completely dripping in sweat, but no one seems to mind … I guess there is no choice really. The men’s voices ping back and forth in constant banter and laughter, while now and again a whooping erupts and echoes across the field. We go back to the cart and dump our sacks into a giant pile of fluffy cotton. They ask me if I want to go home and rest. I give them a mocking disdain: “What, do you think I'm a salabagato?" ( a lazy person - the ultimate insult) That brings a round of laughter and we go back to work. But soon enough the Western sky decides to send us home anyway. Wet gusts of wind whip across the fields and we all run, scraping ourselves on the sharp cotton branches, racing across the field to reach our houses before the torrent hits. The donkeys struggle with the loaded cart- cotton balls flying, whips lashing. I start laughing, but I realize that it might only be funny to me. For my villagers, wet cotton is a very real threat to their primary source of income. I get back to my hut drenched, to find my muddy laundry strewn across the lawn (the second time that’s happened!) and my drying beans are wet again. Sigh.

A few days later I join the rice harvest - I'm an ag volunteer - my definition of "going to work" is to meander around and head to the fields. I ride my bike this time, and park it under a tree with all the other mens' bikes, take my sandals off, and start in on some real work. The harvest is done, today is rice thrashing. They ask me if we do that in the US, .. I say no, I think machines do it. When I tell them that machines also pick crops, plant crops, and yes, even make our coffee, they wonder ... well, what exactly do you do then? Um, we sit in offices and shuffle papers around and watch the clock? Here though, we watch the sun, because as they say here "the sun is mean." The men have piled the rice in huge piles in a circle, with big metal barrels in the middle on top of some old holey tarps. I grab some rice

stalks and start thrashing - the rice falls off onto the tarps and a lot of dust and the rest of the plant flies up in the air and sticks to my sweat-drenched arms and neck. They force me to rest, but I want to see the afternoon through, so we thrash away under the hot sun. Finally we're done; dirty, sweaty, physically exhausted. The women now move in to sweep the rice into bowls, pouring it to get rid of debris, and load it into sacks to put in the donkey cart. We eat big bowls of rice and peanut sauce in the shade of a mango tree. I sleep harder that night than I have in a long time, and the next day my shoulders and back feel like I'd started pole vaulting again.

Slowly, I have started making friends, mostly with my neighbors. To one side is Namongo and his quick laughter, his gifts of oranges and jokes. On another is sweet Mariam and her three daughters, who stop by my house when they go to the pump. My favorite is Yaya, who owns the millet grinder and has a smile that beams from a mile away. We hang out a lot in his hammocks chatting and discussing Mali's situation in development in comparison to other African countries (a lot of Malians are very opinionated about the difference between French and British colonies, the former being inferior in their eyes), and we talk about agriculture and the needs of the community. Other times we just watch the big trucks go by on the main road and the goats munching on their mango branches while we drink tea. And time slows down.

Enjoying life in a mud hut -

I swore in this morning as a Peace Corps Volunteer. There were 76 of us, outfitted to the nines in Malian attire at the United States Embassy. I was swimming in my own sweat in the 96 degree heat, but I still got goosebumps as I raised my right hand and swore to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic. It was a strange moment, 76 voices in unison, all wondering what exactly we were swearing to do, but understanding that the moment was symbolic and represented a pretty huge commitment. Two years of my life consecrated to serving a group of people and a country, to better their lives and hopefully, mine as well.

There are a lot of cliches regarding Africa and what one learns while living on this continent. One of the greatest, perhaps because of its inherent truth, posits that time moves differently over here. Things take longer. People aren't as hurried. Patience, a good deal of it, is a recommended strategy for coping with daily life.

Three hours by the roadside and I'm still there trying to catch a "bush taxi" into Sikasso. The late afternoon sun refuses to move faster; it hangs motionless, its heat waves burning into my sweat-soaked skin. I look at my watch, it too seems suspended. I swat some flies from my brow, and my mind drifts....

I watch my thoughts and where they go, both in space and time. I notice how hard it is to wait in the present moment, to just sit and be, to not be expectant. Instead, my thoughts meander into the past, to experiences and to people. More commonly though, they make forays to the future - conjuring up alternate realities and possible lives I may lead. It is such a human tendency to think about what if's to escape the present. And yet, the present moment is all that is. In these moments of stillness, with the sun, the flies, the very realness of just being alone and waiting, time does indeed take on a new meaning.

West African International Time; learning to wait.

I gave the farewell speech in Bambara to our host village. A lot of blessings! And here is the link to more photos that I posted:

http://usc.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2169812&l=51b31&id=3408340

A few photos from my site visit -

I apologize for the lack of pictures... my camera disappeared. I am relying right now on my friend's pictures. The one to the right is the village landscape near Sikasso; this is the village 3km away from mine and looks quite similar. Very lush right now because it is the rainy season.

Here I am in my hammock outside my house, which will be my HOME for two years! I plan to paint and plant sunflowers.

And this is the main hangout of my village - my host dad's bike repair station/ butiki on the side of the road. I will spend a lot of time here in the months... er, years to come trying to understand Senufo and drinking tea.

I come back from the daily grind of Bambara class, making a wide arc around the compound of children whose daily goal is to swarm the "tubabus" (white people) and pester us to take photos. I greet my way along the edge of the rice fields, dodging piles of trash and donkey shit. I duck through the arched door into my concession and greet my family; the greetings feel natural and easy now.

My host mom gives me my bucket of water and I bathe, peering over the top of my nyegen to see the kids pulling out the TV and the bench to watch the evening installment of "The Heart of Sin," a Brazilian soap opera dubbed into French and wildly popular. They plug the TV into a battery and fiddle around with the reception and sardine themselves onto the bench to watch surfers and scandalously dressed women. I eat my bowl of mushy sorghum stuff with an oily sauce, study for a bit, then go inside and read with my lantern.

I'm woken from my pages by women's voices outside my screen door, gentle but multiplying. I step out to a scene of more than a dozen women circled around a giant pile of Baobab tree branches, glowing in the blue halo cast by a fluorescent bulb that is plugged into the same battery that so faithfully powers the TV each night. The women are muttering, chatting, laughing, recounting the day, and still working at 9:00pm. They are stripping the leaves and placing them in buckets. I ask if I can help, and after the usual dose of laughter that follows anything I say in Bambara (I am a natural comedian in Bambara, just saying 'how are you' can sometimes elicit peels of laughter), they widen the circle and I start stripping leaves alongside them. I wonder how much the battery costs and how long it lasts; I wonder how my family affords it and how they bought the TV. What do they sell?

But back to leaf stripping. I don't watch the leaves so much as the women. I notice they are wearing nicer clothes than I usually see them going to the fields in; they glow in a panoply of colors and textures and patterns, wrapping, draping, with intricate necklines and sleeves and head wraps. I marvel at how beautiful they are, their smiles and their muscular arms carved from years of pounding grain and washing and hoeing. Many of the women have their babies wrapped around their backs as they work. I think West African women should have been marsupials, but they make up for their lack of a pouch by strapping the little ones onto their backs with a piece of cloth. They do anything with baby in tow.

When the leaves are finally stripped, the women begin chopping them into fine pieces to make into sauce. I wonder how the finished product is going to be divided; who gathered the branches? Who brought them back? How will they know who did more work than others? As I am wondering this I also notice that the leaf stripping and chopping almost seem like a background detail, a setting to facilitate the primary activity: socializing. When a woman is telling a story and especially animated she will stop her cutting and gesture and laugh. The stars are bright; the milky way seems almost like a cloud stretching across the sky, and they are in no rush to finish. There is no time clock to punch in and punch out; no boss measuring productivity or performance, just the rhythm of existence. The leaves aren't measured and divied and horded; they are shared among the women. It will take me some time to grasp the concept that the measuring stick of value here is community, not the individual.

The next day's lunch is a delicious dark green sauce; I compliment my host mom and relish the rare treat of Baobob leaves.

Most of us like to get a tester spoon of that chocolate hazelnut gelato before we buy it; to run the flavor over the tongue and decide yes, I do in fact want to invest in a more prolonged experience. The Peace Corps apparently recognizes this human tendency and sent all the trainees to our real sites this past week to get a sample of where we will be living for the next two years of our lives.

So last Tuesday I met with Abdouleye, a farmer from my region who will serve as my "homologue," a go-to-person and guide to help me work in agriculture in my region. He is a slight man with a furrowed brow that quickly flattens into a grin. We went to the bus station together and sat on some old crates to wait a few hours for the bus to fill. The bus station swarms with men and women balancing huge baskets and platters of fried cakes, bananas, toothpaste, jewelry and radios, all teetering with impossible grace on the tops of their heads. Finally the bus "boiled" (Bambara is a language that I have dubbed a "homonymic whirlpool" because each word has twenty meanings. The word wuli means to plow a field, to boil water, to stand up, to wake up, and for a bus to leave), and we sat in cramped seats, sweating in the stagnant air for seven hours until we reached our village in the South East of Mali: M'Pedougou.

M'Pedougou is a village of about 650 people of the Senufo ethnic group, situated on a main road; straddling the vein of modernity but still firmly rooted in tradition. When I arrived, I met my host family, Jakilia Bengaly and his three wives, beautiful people with big white smiles and thick Senufo accents that I don't understand. They gave me my new name: Sita Bengaly, and we sat out by the roadside in front of Jakilia's little butiki (store). Next they took me to my house, weaving through the village on a little path past thatched huts and gardens and big trees. There was my house on the edge of town: a mud brick cottage with a thatched structure outside for shade. Big vines and flowers fill my yard, and I plunked down in my hammock, realizing that this is my new HOME. I went to the pump and got water, set up my mosquito net, and went to meander in the village.

It turns out that well, Senufo people speak Senufo. Most of them have learned Bambara as a second language, but they speak Senufo amongst themselves and when given the choice. I spent a good portion of my week in village sitting around listening to the crazy sounds of Senufo and wondering if I will ever be able to learn a language that sounds like Chinese, but that has no written materials for me to learn from. We'll see. I will try.

The majority of the villagers are subsistence farmers farming millet, sorghum, corn, okra and peanuts. My goal as a volunteer will be to help them develop better gardening and farming techniques, increased compost production, and to do what I can to enable them to improve their quality of life, in whatever capacity I can. At this point I still have no idea what I will be doing, concretely, when I get to village and have no structure, no "job," nothing but the sunrise and the sunset to structure my day around. It will be a radical change, that's what I do know.

This is Youssouf, a guy who lives next to my classroom in my host village. I am working on convincing him to trade his bicycle for my "flashy" Trek mountain bike.