On my first day of work in the date orchards of Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, something gigantic, majestic, and bright yellow caught my eye, captured my heart, and inspired my soul. It was like the apatosaurus in "Jurassic Park," huge of body, long of neck, and lumbering along through between the trees, its long neck easily overreaching them. It was the cherry picker, the hulk of a machine that was the most valuable tool in the date orchard team's arsenal. And I knew immediately that I wanted to use it. It was the golden yellow of a school bus, with in impressive body that housed the engine, hydraulic systems, and wheels for moving around the tractor. The platform at the top of the hundred-foot crane was not just a little cubby. It has easily enough floor space to live in, with a radio that constantly blasted Israel's favorite music station, Galgalatz, and the floor panels could open and close like a claw to allow 360 degree access around the entire perimeter of the tree that was being worked on.

I could tell just by looking that this was no ordinary piece of equipment that would just be lent out for use to mere volunteers like myself. Operating the cherry picker was something that one had to earn. The last time a kibbutz volunteer was allowed up there to chop down date branches, her machete cut down a couple of her fingertips along with the branch. Seeing how this was only my second day of work, I knew it was going to be a long time before I even had a chance of riding the big yellow dinosaur.

After leaving Sweden on October 18, with the usual amount of nostalgia for the past and anticipation of the future that comes with my itinerant lifestyle, I made my way to Israel, for the first time since 2006. This was partly to please my parents, who had decided that if I was going to travel around the world farming and exploring and living in a developmental limbo as far as future plans towards life and career go, I might as well do it in Israel and get some nice kosher food out of it, not to mention see some friends and family, some of whom I hadn't seen in too many years. And while I was doing that, I might as well check out what it's like to live on a kibbutz. A kibbutz is an Israeli commune, originally socialist by nature, although in recent decades most of them have sold out to private industries and are now just nice places to live and work, without the original romance of living off the land that the kibbutz movement was founded with.

So, I saw friends, family, and the gorgeous expanse of Israel's geography that I've missed since my last time here, a winter vacation during my sophomore year of college with some friends. At the same time, I was also applying to kibbutzes, which was more disparaging that I thought it would be. I would look up interesting kibbutzes online, send them an email telling them that I would like to volunteer for a couple months, and then hear back from them the next day that they would be happy to have me, and all I need to do is go through the Kibbutz Programming Center. Unfortunately, for an organization that was created for the socialist kibbutz movement, the KPC is one of the most greedy, demanding, and un-user-friendly organizations I've come across. They make you pay around $600 for the program, just to volunteer, half of which is a non-refundable deposit, and then it takes a month to do the paperwork, so that people who just want to show up and work are out of luck, plus there is a rigorous amount of paperwork, medical exams, and recommendations which are required. If you get through all of that, then you can be sent to a kibbutz to volunteer, but you don't get told which one until basically the day you leave.

Well, lucky for me, I have some contacts on the inside of Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu who got me in past all the paperwork and hullabaloo and I was able to show up just a couple weeks after calling, after space opened up for me, and start working and seeing what the kibbutz life is all about. Sde Eliyahu happens to be one of the last successful, traditional-style kibbutzes in the country in that it is a socialist commune, where everyone works, is given equal compensation, and live for the kibbutz itself, and not some corporation that has bought them out. As volunteers, we are given basically the same treatment, only lighter in scale. We work 6-8 hours a day, are given 3 square meals a day, a dorm to sleep in with sheets, towels and work clothes, free laundry, free medical care, a monthly stipend (not much, but we don't spend much either) and a general sense of being taken care of by the powers that be. Sounds like a good deal, I figured.

When I first arrived I told them I had agriculture experience and I would like to continue it, and be able to work outside, as opposed to washing pots and pans all day. Actually, I had been told by previous volunteers, of which I apparently know dozens, that I should absolutely expect to be put in the dishroom at first (when I told this to my cousins in southern Israel, their 10-year-old son asked me, "Why would you want to come all the way to Israel just to wash dishes?" He made a disquieting good point). Fortunately, they decided to assign me to the date orchard, where the dates were being harvested. This involved the professionals going up on the cherry picker and chopping down date branches which were wrapped in bags. We then shook the dates off the branches into the bags, then emptied the bags into crates to be processed elsewhere. I was working with some fun Australians on a Jewish youth group program, and while the work was hard, it gave me the satisfaction I was hoping for, which I have found I often get from doing useful, manual labor. I kept expecting to be moved to another job, but apparently the pros on the date team liked me and saw no reason to get rid of me, so I stayed on. There was also the fact that after two weeks, the Aussies left, so there were half the number of volunteers working. Since out of all the other volunteers, plus the Hebrew students who were there to learn and work, I was the only one assigned to dates who showed up every day, worked hard, and didn't disappear in the middle of work, I was made to look even better.

Overall, life moves at a pretty slow pace on the kibbutz. We, the volunteers and students, almost never go off the property, since most of what we need is located on the kibbutz. Only a few times a month do we go into the nearest town for some cheap beer, fast food, and a bit of a break. Otherwise, it's a pretty straight routine I have found, waking up at half past 5 to report for work at 6, breaking for breakfast (hardboiled eggs, herring on toast, maybe some shredded veggies) and coffee, working until 1, going to lunch (usually some elaborate meat and chicken dishes, fancy salads - basically the best food I could dream of, served on a daily basis), and then the rest of the day to hang out, go online, read, nap, go for walks, or do whatever else I want with. It's simple, I'm happy, and there's not much else to it.

And it seems like that is the general consensus for many people here. After talking to some kibbutzniks (the residents, there are about 800 of them) and some volunteers and students who have made their own impressions, kibbutz life is just slow and simple by nature. There is not much to do for entertainment, either on the kibbutz or in town, and residents are given plenty of money to live on and save up, but they rarely take vacations, or live with any kind of luxury or elaborate lifestyle. In terms of work, for those who work on the kibbutz, there seem to be few jobs that have much hierarchy, meaning there are not too many promotions and only so far one can climb up the professional ladder, or cherry picker, so to speak. But at the same time, the people who live here don't really seem to mind that. As the volunteers' "house mother," Henia, told me, it takes a very special, and a little bit crazy, kind of person to live on a kibbutz. It is like a life-long womb, and as long as you are happy with that - protection, providence, and routine - then a kibbutz can be a wonderful place to live. During the early days of the Sde Eliyahu, when her husband's parents were building the place, they were working hard, living in tents with malaria and all sorts of hardships, and happy as can be. People worked for the sake of creating something they loved, and it became that they were living for it too. So if today, kibbutzniks are still living and working for something they love and need, then they probably don't need to move much higher than where they are now. They can do their jobs and be happy that they are making their community a better place, without need for ambition or greed.

As for me, I had just one thing that I wanted to aspire to. Weeks went by and after a slow period of sewing shut the holes in the date bags for 6 hours a day, I started to ask if I could please go up on the cherry pickers. I told them that my service here on the kibbutz if they would only give me one day up there, in the golden tower of authority, at the tops of the date palms. They told me that the only way I would be allowed up there would be to watch a two hour training video, all of which was in Hebrew. It was a nice way of saying "No." But one day, actually 3 days ago, I arrived for pre-work coffee and found only 3 of the men on our date team waiting. The supervisor came by and told them what to do that day, in Hebrew too complex for me to understand. I only understood them saying that there weren't enough of them, and the supervisor saying to take me along as well. Was he sure? Sure, why not, let him try it out. I assumed this mean pruning olive trees or digging up irrigation hoses or something like what I had been doing for the last week. But we got in the van, drove out to the furthest date fields, and pulled up right alongside that regal, elegant piece of accomplishment that we call...well, I don't remember the Hebrew word for it, but you know what I'm talking about. They told me that we were going to be pruning the date tree branches, if I thought I was up to it. They sent me up on the platform, turned on the ignition, gave me a giant, heavy pair of hydraulic mechanical pruning clippers, put Radio Galgalatz on full volume, and got to work. And it sucked. It was terrible. The clippers were heavy, it was hot, the music was bad, the trees were short so were were never more than 5 or 6 feet in the air anyway, and the date branches are covered in massive thorns and leaves with dagger-sharp tips so that I was in constant danger of having an eye poked out or an ear perforated, and by the end of the day, I was sore, tired, soaked in sweat, and poked so full of holes, I felt like I had been given a full body massage by a porcupine. And then the next day, we went back for more. Now I have cuts and pinholes all over me, my hands and arms are sore from holding the heavy clippers, and I'm actually glad I came down with strep throat just in time to call in sick today.

But the point is, I managed to make it to the top. I rose to the top of my ladder, and I accomplished what I've been waiting over a month to do. Even if the result was not what I wanted, the taste of success was still as sweet as I had dreamed. I guess it helps that my hopes and aspirations for the two months I am planning to be here are fairly low, but I guess that is one way I can relate to the kibbutz lifestyle. If I am well taken care of, given good work to do, and allowed to rise to accomplishment every so often, well, I can be happy enough. But I've also decided that after a couple months here, there is nothing about Sde Eliyahu, or even Israel as a whole that really pulls me in and makes me want to make a long term commitment.

So what's next for me? Tune in for my next posting, where I will tell you how I'm managing to come full circle and end up back in Peace Corps Mali.

For those of you who have been wanting a more visual look at my life WWOOFing abroad, I finally figured out how to give non-Facebook members access to my Facebook album where I have been uploading the photos. So take a look at the best, strangest, or most self-indulgent pictures of Ireland and Sweden!

Ireland, the begining of the adventure: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.869139739912.2347600.8107797&type=1&l=a9a4c5a34f

Sweden, from Ekero to Stockholm, with a bit of Euro-tripping thrown in for good measure: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.927157002852.2363840.8107797&type=1&l=a7a86652b0

Today is my last day here at Rosenhill, and afterwards, my as-yet-undetermined plans for a couple months in Israel commence. I have literally no idea of what I will be actually doing there or where I will be or how long I will be doing it, so I'm probably just as excited as you to find out. I have been trying to contact kibbutzes to come in as a volunteer but most of them require me to go through some umbrella organization which charges hundreds of dollars and takes a month to process the paperwork. Hopefully before too long, I can find something a little more user-friendly for people like me who are more prone to living life by the seat of their pants. If anyone out there has any solid leads for something like that, let me know. Otherwise, you'll get more news when I do. For now, I have to pack my bags and get ready for the last Rosenhill party of the season, coincidentally taking place the night before I leave, so that I will feel nice and exhausted for my 5 hour train ride to Gothenburg tomorrow morning to see an old Rosenhill buddy, who we all call Clean Steve.

So that's the news for now. As always, this blog is for all of you friends and family out there, so to whoever is reading this, email me at jmasher85@gmail.com. I would love to know what you are up to in your lives as well. I would hate to think that I'm the only one having any fun out here.

Long before my current WWOOFing site, Rosenhill, had volunteers, before they had Saturday night parties every weekend, before they had a cafe even, there was the Musteri. The Musteri seems to be the be-all and end-all of the Rosenhill entity. It is the sacred shrine, the Holy of Holies, the bustling commecial center of the empire. It doesn't neccessarily bring in the most money out of all the Rosenhill enterprises, but it demands the most attention, recieves the most love, and uses the most WWOOFer manpower.

"Must" is the Swedish word for "pressed juice," and the Musteri is a great machine that turns, apples, pears, berries, and more into juice through a grinder and press that looks like a machine The Once-ler would use to make Thneeds in Dr. Suess's "The Lorax." Originally, when Lars and Emilia, the owners of this place, first bought the farm from Emilia's parents, it was just a farm, an orchard, and a giant, loud, clunky apple press. People would come from miles around to pick apples, or more often bring their own, since it seems that every house outside of Stockholm has a few apple trees. They would bring the apples to be pressed, but eventually the lines grew too long, so Lars and Emilia opened a cafe for people to wait, drink, eat, and spend money while waiting for their turn at the Musteri. Over time, the cafe has become an entity of its own, and as we who work hours and hours in the dishroom and kitchen can attest, there is plenty of draw there as well. But from the time the Musteri opens in early September to when the last of the apples have turned too rotten at the end of October, there are lines hours long and the crunching and roaring sounds of the apple grinder can be heard steadily for 7 hours a day.

It is also, on a busy day, as chaotic a workplace as you can imagine. The process of pressing apples in a perfect world would go like this: 1) Customer's apples are dropped into a bathtub to be washed and cleaned of big leaves, snails, rotten apples, and the like; 2) Customer's apples are dropped, one basket at a time, into the apple grinder, where the apples are chewed, scraped, crushed, and bludgeoned into pulp; 3) Said pulp is sprayed through a funnel into a large cheesecloth, where another worker folds, straightens, and piles the stacks of cloth on top of each other; 4) The tray holding the pile under the grinder is spun around to the other side of the machine, where a hydraulic is turned on and the tray is squeezed, pressing out all the juice into a bucket, while a second tray is loaded with the next customer's apples on the other side of the machine; 5) The juice is pumped from the bucket to the bottles, the bottles are sealed, the reciept is written, money is collected, and a happy and hopefully thirsty customer is sent on their way.

Now since this is not a perfect world and the Musteri is mainly operated by minimally trained volunteers, plus Lars and Bo, our Musteri-guru in residence, here are the kinds of issues we usually have to deal with: 1) Sometimes, the customer has about three pounds of apples, enough to make maybe 5 liters of juice, which frankly, is just a big waste of time for us on a busy day. Other times, the customer has an obscene amount of apples, like the 285 liter load we spent 40 minutes on the other day, while other customers watched and waited, politely feigning patience. Even with an average amount, say 25-75 liters, there are some customers who come in bragging about how they have the most beautiful apples all from one tree, which they picked last week, and now we open these garbage bags full of apples and have to spend 5 minutes picking out all the ones that have turned black and moldy since their were first bagged a week ago.

2) Apples come in all different sizes and consistencies, so some of them clog up the grinder, some of them blast soft juicy pulp in every direction, like Steve Buscemi being stuffed into a woodchipper in "Fargo," and sometimes, the spinning blades decide they can't chop up the apples and instead, launch them like cannonballs into the air often nearly shattering windows or nailing bystanders in the noggin. 3) Proper folding is perhaps one of the most important things to get right in the musting process. If you fold the cloths poorly, they will pop open while the apples are being pressed, and streams of thick apple pulp will erupt out like Old Faithful. This is also one of my favorite mistakes people make, because lets face it, it's hilarious to see your friends get a juicy, brown spurt of applesauce right into their unsuspecting faces.

4) As often seems to happen to me, the job that is one of the easiest to screw up is also the one that Bo has chosen as the best one for me - filling the bottles. We use a powerful pump, so when you turn it on, you better have the end of the hose in the bottle you want to fill, or once again, apple-stuff everywhere. If you turn it off too early, the bottle isn't full enough and the customers feel ripped off. Too late, and, you guessed it, juice everywhere. Or, if the bottle is too small, like less than a liter, or if the opening won't allow the hose inside, you need to time and aim your pumping perfectly, or, thaẗ́'s right again folks, apple juice everywhere.

But all these hazards and potential mishaps are part of the fun of working in the Musteri. We have fun rushing around working the machine, singing and dancing to Balkan opera, James Brown, or whatever other random music has been chosen to blast at full volume so that it can be heard over the roaring machinery. There's a sense of pride that comes with coming off a 2-hour Musteri work shift with juice dripping down your arms, and chunks of apple pulp all over your face and hair, and wherever your clothes weren't covered in the orange plastic overalls we wear. And the customers get one hell of a show out of the whole spectacle. This past Saturday night, a huge party was thrown here, organized by a collective of artists who wanted to showcase their installations. At around 11 pm, a bunch of us WWOOFers got bored of the party, so we all got some beers, went into the orchards to pick apples, turned on a disco light and trance music in the Musteri, and had ourselves a midnight musting party. Afterwards, we suggested to Lars, with semi-seriousness, that we close the Musteri during the day, and from now on, only work mildly intoxicated and at night. Lars told us, with semi-seriousness, that he would consider it.

This blog entry is dedicated in memory of Amy Winehouse, who I recently decided I don't like anymore. Ever since Amy died, our cook at Rosenhill's Cafe, Johann, realized just how much he loved her music, and with the same voracity with which he smokes cigarettes and cooks hamburgers, he went full-tilt, turning our own kitchen mp3-speaker system into an all-Amy, all-the-time jukebox. From morning until night, Amy would wail and croon in her nasal alto with the strains of earnest piano and horn sections comforting her betrayed heart, over and over again. She went "back to black" at least 9 times a day, and jokes were flying left and right about Johann's need for some Rehab of his own get off his Wine-house addiction. But still she played on, day after day, week after week. Every Saturday night, we would throw a party with live music for locals to come on down and have a good time, and Johann would whip out his guitar and together we would all stumble through the words to all the Amy songs we knew from all of our hours spent cooking and washing dishes in Johann's kitchen.

But it was one of the bravest things I've ever said to anyone when I told Johann one day, "I'm sorry, but I've hit a wall. I can no longer stand listening to her. I hate her voice, her songs are all the same, and frankly, she bores me to tears. Please make it stop!...no offense..." While initially a bit taken aback, Johann did come to understand my exasperation, and then Amy became a more of a big joke between the two of us. But while it's been toned down of late, Amy has continued as an occasional kitchen and party mainstay, and I needed to get revenge on her, or her ghost, for tormenting me so, being one of the sole sources of drudgery for me in the otherwise delirious bliss of Rosenhill.

Vengence came in the form of a pig. There are three pigs who we raise here, who eat our leftovers during the summer, and are in turn slaughtered and saved for food for the Sillen family in the winter when they close Rosenhill until the air is warm again. A few weeks ago, the pigs decided that they no longer cared for their pen, and braving the 6000 volts of electric fence and 4-high chicken wire, began a daily routine of escaping their pen and running into the garden, the street, or the woods. It was decided that the ringleader, the largest of the pigs, the one with the black spot on his eye, would have to be sacrificed for his bad influence, and also to make sausages for the massive annual Harvest Festival that is thrown every year. The pig was killed, and posthumously named Amy, in honor of the other dead and beloved Amy, whose heavy mascara-job looked a bit like our Amy's black spots. Since I was the only WWOOFer here with butchering experience, I volunteered to help carve up the carcass. It certainly was quite a bit more grisly than anything I've ever had in mind for Miss Winehouse, but I'll take my closure where I can get it. As it turned out later, I was also on the sausage-making comittee, despite my innate Jewish aversion to taking any enjoyment from pork (and Winehouse being Jewish herself), and with my blind blend of spices, herbs, and raw pork meat, I stumbled upon what were universally heralded to be 20 kilograms of fantastic delicious sausages, to the delight of Rosenhill's workers and hundreds of Festival Patrons alike. So as it turns out, I have something to thank Winehouse for afterall - if, as is often the case with art, hatred begets beauty. . . or something like that.

Other than brief hiccups in music taste, things are basically splendid around here. The farming season is on its way out, other than some harvesting and tomato plant pruning. Even the cafe has been getting lazy during the week while students and professionals have finished their summers and go off to do things that are probably more important but a lot less fun than being here. It's hard to put a finger on exactly what makes Rosenhill so nice. It's partly the people, who basically don't come out to this countryside cafe unless they are already the kind of nice, friendly people who would enjoy a rural madhouse like this.

There's also the work in the Musteri, Swedish for Juice Press, where everyone in the greater Ekerö and Western Stockholm with an apple tree (and it feels like it is everyone with the lines we get) comes out to have their apples washed, crushed, wrapped into cloths, and squeezed into fresh juice for them to take home. On weekdays there might be between 5 and 50 people thoughout the day coming by, and on weekends, the line does not end from 10 am to 6 pm. Sometimes, working in the pressery is a chaotic, stressful, rushed affair with people running around shouting orders, trying not to let juice spill all over the floor and look desperately for more bottles to fill the juice into. But when we are working well, it becomes an elegant ballroom dance, people switching partners, twirling around the pressing machine, everyone knowing the pattern of what to do and when. At the end of a long shift, we all come out with chunks of apple pulp in our hair and splattered across our faces, our shirts smelling like cider vinigar, and breathless from hours of non-stop hectic movement.

We are allowed two days off per week, but most of us only bother to take one. Last week on my day off, I went with my camera for a walk in the woods. The woods around here are literally carpeted in blueberry bushes, and if you go just a bit off the trails, you will find endless berries that, even this late in the season, nobody has picked yet. I just walked through the patches of berries, picking off handfulls at a time and eating them, and making barely a dent in their population. It was one of those moments that hits me every so often when I'm in places like this, or back when I was in Mali, when at the same time I was both delighted that I was blessed enough to be able to be alive in the moment that I was living in, but profoundly depressed that I only had a short amount of time left here before I someday had to go back to what is commonly referred to as "the real world," where instead of frolicking in the woods, staying up late every night talking or watching movies with friends, and exploring the world at my own whim and fancy, I'll have to find somewhere to settle down and actually work towards a career. I wish, as all little boys like me wish, that I could have those blueberry fields forever where nothing is real and there's nothing to get hung about, but since I'm not actually a little boy, or a Beatle, but a 25 year old man, I'm going to have to face the facts, go home, and find work. These are difficult prospects to face while I'm still in rural Sweden having as much fun as I could hope for, and so I don't face them. Instead I just sit here, write my blog, chat with German women, listen to Soundgarden, and think about a good way to end my blog entry before I go back to my caravan and practice playing my Jaw Harp. In fact, I don't really need a good way to end this entry, so I'm just going to end it now.

Nearly due west of Stockholm is a lake. It's quite a large lake, and it meanders and winds its way through the Swedish countryside like an amoeba, dispersing its mass over the flat lands with only the highest points of land rising up above the water level. One of the largest of these islands is the township of Ekero, which seems to be a pleasant, rustic and simple community. It's an easy trip to the city, the locals are friendly, and the general store has very limited weekend hours - basically a nice place. But tucked away on this island, not far off the main road and up a shaded woodsy driveway is the Rosenhill Tradgard, Cafe, och Musteri - a farm, cafe and apple juice pressing business all rolled into one delirious, and many say magical little alcove.

Rosenhill, the place that I've called my new home for the last two and a half weeks, looks a bit like Pee Wee's Playhouse might look if it were redesigned by aging hippie farmers who inherited an ancient farm and turned it into a wholesome organic retreat center - which is basically what it is. Cafe decorations include archaic farming equipment hanging from the walls and ceiling, a model human skull who always has a pair of fresh crab-apples resting in its eye sockets, ashtrays which look like the title character in The Old Man and the Sea, and a wide variety of coffee mugs from every background, from Swedish driving schools, to Marlboro, to one of my favorites which ambiguously just has a "dinners" logo on it. Most of the furniture is and looks handmade, much of the produce sold and cooked with in the cafe comes straight from the gardens, and except for the professional kitchen staff and the family who runs the place, just about everyone working here is a WWOOFer, like myself.

It didn't take long after arriving for Amanda, Matt, and myself to fall in love with the place. Actually, it really didn't even take more than a minute from walking up the front driveway. There is a cozy, home-made summer camp feel to the place, which despite never really having enjoyed summer camp, I quite liked. We took a flight from Ireland to Stockholm after having a fantastic final few Irish days in Dublin, and after a full day of travelling, we arrived at Rosenhill just in time to hear the dinner bell ringing across the fields. This turned out to be fortuitous timing, since we got to meet everyone altogether, and eat a fantastic meal of cafe leftovers all at once. Every inch of the place seemed to be drenched in simple happiness. The WWOOFers and everyone else were all smiling and joking, eager to tell us newbies just what a wonderful place we've picked for ourselves to live and work for the next...how long?...three months??...wow, you guys are lucky! Most volunteers only tend to stay a couple weeks but wish they could stay longer, or only intend to stay a couple weeks and end up putting off their departure for a day, or two, or a week, or two...

This ain't no easygoing laissez-faire hippie commune though. It could be, and we'd all be pretty happy, but we came here to work, to do something useful, and that makes us even happier, to get stuff done. Morning tasks generally have to do with cleaning the cafe and bathroom areas before we open for business. I've lucked out lately by getting animal-feeding duty - taking the leftover scraps from yesterday's food and feeding some to the chickens and ducks in their pen, and the three pigs in theirs. Nothing puts a smile on my face at 9:30 am like watching a medium-sized hen snatching up and entire foot-long hot dog and greedily running around the coop with it, trying to keep the ridiculously-sized prize for herself, or tossing a bucket of slop food into the pigpen and listening to the grunts, snorts and wheezes of three pigs going nose-deep into their meals, chowing down on every possible morsel. After morning routines, the daily jobs tend to involve weeding, planting or otherwise tending the gardens, bussing tables and dishwashing in the cafe, running the apple-press now that the apples are in season and it seems like half the households in the region have an orchard they want to drink, and other assorted maintenance tasks. Lars and Emilia seem to encourage us to find a project we like and stick to that as long as there aren't more pressing jobs at hand. Amanda's been painting the family's house, my new friend Steve's been building a solar panel, which while very powerful, is still an appreciated effort and a good model, and I've been mastering my tractor skills. Okay, mastering is probably the wrong word, since as good as I might be becoming at driving the thing, I'm pretty sure the lawn-cutter attachment I've been using it with is either haunted or just hates me. All three times I've taken it out for a spin, something has broken, so that just doing a two hour job of cutting the overgrown grassy areas has been taking me about 4 days, with most of the time spent trying to fix the beast.

But when I get too frustrated or tired from labor, and after dinner, after our nightly movies or hanging out is over, I can retire to the second most interesting house I've ever lived in - my converted Volvo city bus-turned-trailer (the most interesting being my Malian mud hut). The bus still has a ticket insertion slot and other commuter-bus standard gear, but has also been outfitted with beds, a non-working sink, a non-working fridge, non-working lights, and a set of keys which are still in the ignition but, expectedly, don't work. It does however offer a lovely easterly view of our far-northern 4:30 am sunrise, which wakes me up every morning like clockwork, and gives me the chance to look outside at the view, look at my watch, and be happy that I still get another 3 and a half hours to sleep before wakeup call. What a great invention!

Of all the things there are to love about Rosenhill, perhaps the best, the true source of magic here, is the people. There are the WWOOFers, who more or less stumbled upon this place much the way my little group did, just looking for a cool experience, and it takes a certain kind of generally interesting, adventurous, and open-minded person to want to do something like this in the first place. There are also the employees who, as some of them have told me, came here once, decided it was their favorite place in the world, and decided to get a job so they could come back every day. There are the owners, Lars and Emilia, who do a good job of making sure that we know that we are expected to work, but do everything they can to make sure that we enjoy it as much as we can. And there are the locals who come out to the cafe and to the concert/parties every Saturday night. After the relative seclusion and limited interaction with others that we had in Ireland, where Amanda, Matt, our host Flo, and I mostly just had ourselves for company outside of work, it was a godsend to arrive here to not just other WWOOFers - five to ten others at a time - but also an endless stream of local visitors and some regulars who, as would be expected at a place like this, are as friendly as can be. If you haven't gotten the point of this update yet, it's that Rosenhill might well be one of the happiest places on Earth, and I am one lucky S.O.B.

It took me two years of living in Mali before I even came close to running out of things to blog about, and even when I left, I would read other fellow Peace Corps Volunteers' blogs and kick myself for not having written that entry, or coming up with that joke, or publishing that aspect of Malian culture for my readers to learn about. Well, here I am with a week and a half left in Ireland, and I simply don't have the time or creative energy to keep coming up with things to write about everything interesting I've seen and done in this country. So instead, I'll send you all a series of "postcards;" little snippets of some of my favorite things about Ireland.

Irish Hospitality: Of course our host Flo was going to put us up and take care of us - that's part of the agreement when you ask for WWOOF volunteers. But in my book, when a man is raising two kids, chronically in a state of financial uncertainty, and is still happy to have us live in his house, eat his food (and we eat a lot of it), drink the plentiful bottles of wine which he brings home from events he caters (and we make quick work of those as well), give us rides, beds, and takes care of us without a harsh word, well, that's quite a man. And when we needed a place to stay in downtown Galway one weekend, we were introduced to his friend Daniel (the Jewish New Yorker and pet crow-owner of my previous entries) who has many times since put us up for a night or two and still gives us free fresh donuts at his stall in the market the next day. And just this past Sunday, Kenneth, the other farmer we work for, took us for a day trip out into the Burren, one of the most scenic areas in southwest Ireland, just for a good time. Overall, while they can be a bit reserved and shy at times (Kenneth blames this on all the Catholic guilt they're bred with), just about everyone we've met so far here is friendly, chatty, and eager to help with whatever we need. To illustrate the point, I would have to say that in our two months here, I have paid for less than half, and perhaps only a third of the alcohol I've drunk. Which brings me to my next point:

Beer: All stereotypes, no matter how false they might be, come from somewhere. The one about the Irish and their love of beer comes from inside places like the random pub co-WWOOFer Amanda and I walked into one Sunday morning while looking around town for a restroom. We saw half a dozen men chatting lazily around a cluster of empty and half-empty pints of Guinness, and immediately upon entering, the bartender began reaching for another glass, asking us, "Will ye's be having a pint then?" Yes, the Irish love their beer, and they really love their Guinness. From my own observation, I would guess that between 45 and 65 percent of the beer drunk here is Guinness, and those in the know will even be able to tell you which pubs have the best Guinness. Apparently, Guinness is a very volatile beer, and things like temperature, air pressure, and even passing over a body of water are liable to change the taste and texture of the drink. Luckily, the pub nearest where we're staying has - according to some award it one once - one of the best pints in all of Ireland. But even if it didn't, we'd have plenty of others to choose from, since as the saying goes, "You can't throw a stone in Ireland without hitting a pub."

Castles: "You can't throw a stone in Ireland without hitting a castle either."

Dogs: Okay, dogs aren't one of the major things people think of when they talk hear about Ireland (except for the Irish Gypsies in the film "Snatch" - Ya like dags?), but they've been the source of some of the most fun we have here. Everybody seems to have a dog, at least out here in the country. There's Flo's dog, Bella, who we love just as much as we think she's a complete nut job. She chases every single car except Flo's as it drives off the property, barking directly at the front right wheel while it rolls, except for sometimes when she barks at the front left wheel. Most people are cautious and drive slowly, pleading with the dog to leave their car alone, but then there are those like our neighbor who just chuckles at Bella and then barrels full speed ahead, letting Darwinism have a chance to take its course. Bella also used to steal the duck eggs from Flo's duck pond and leave the empty shells next to her bed outside. Co-WWOOFer Matt started yelling at her every time she did it and shaking the eggshell in front of her face. He did this until she started hiding every time he came home and I figured he had just convinced her that he hated her. But then one day, when we came home from town, she greeted us happily, walked in a bee-line over to her bed, picked up a duck egg which she had captured, and deposited it entirely intact at our feet, still wagging her tail. There are also Kenneth's dogs, Molly and Cara. Molly sits on peoples' feet when they pet her and gazes longingly into the living room window hoping to catch a glimpse of the cats inside, whom she apparently terrorized during their last encounter. Cara, our favorite dog in Ireland, loves to play fetch and has endless patience. The means that she'll find a stick, toy, or rock (all of her teeth are broken in half from too many rocks), lie down in a prone position wherever we happen to be working - between a row of carrots we're weeding, for example - and wait for us to throw her fetch toy. And wait. And wait. She'll wait for us, and if in the course of our weeding we move too far away from her, she'll just crawl up the row a bit closer, resume her prone position and wait some more. Finally, there are the dogs who just meet us on the street near their house as we're walking - to the park, or the lake, or anywhere else - and just start walking with us. Sometimes they want to play fetch, and we oblige, but sometimes, they just want some company on a stroll, and when we return or they get tired, they just go back home.

Peat: Man, do I wish it was cold again. When we first got here, it was in the 40s in the morning and on a nice day, it would go up the low 70s, before coming back down again in the evening. And that meant houses had to be heated, and since firewood is somewhat scarce here and the electric bill is expensive, people threw peat bricks into the stove to heat their homes. Peat, or turf, is like clay. It comes from peat bogs, where chunks of it are dug up and cut and dried into bricks, where they turn into the the nicest smelling fire fuel you can imagine. (It's what they use to roast the grains for scotch, which is where that lovely smokey flavor comes from.) The scent is like a combination of Christmas, New England, barbecues, autumn, happiness, and love. And when a whole town is cold and everyone starts burning the peat to warm up, no matter how cold it is, the peat smoke aroma wafting through the wind will put a warm smile on your face.

Gaelic: Yes, they still speak it sometimes here. In fact, there's a burgeoning movement to have it taught more in schools, and there are areas where it is how the locals converse with each other, speaking it as a first language. Sadly, I haven't really had a chance to learn a lick of it, except for a few words that get tossed around here and there, most of which I won't be able to spell, translate or explain as well as the internet would be able to. . . which I suppose is kind of a tease, but you're on the internet now anyway, and I mainly just wanted to point out the fact that the language is still very much alive, despite common belief that it's gone the way of Latin.

Well, that's enough for now. Perhaps I'll squeeze out a few more snippets of life for you folks before I leave. Thanks for reading, and if you want to send me any love or hate, or just neutral feedback to tell me you're still reading this, go ahead!

If you read my last blog post, you know a good deal about what I've been doing here in the rural farmlands of Western Ireland. It's often hard work, long hours, and fairly early bedtimes. But lest you think that all work and no play makes Jake a dull boy, my travel-mates and I have still been managing to have ourselves a grand old time here, trying to squeeze as much juice from the pulp of Irish culture as we can. After all, we didn't just come here to work, we came here to have the most awesomely fun time of our life!

Unfortunately, the local Sheep-Shearing Festival was too far away, and Bog Week was happening during our work schedule. We did hear on the radio that last year's sheep-shearing champion was planning to attempt to shear 800 sheep that weekend, and we wish him the best of luck on that endeavor (those famous Irish woolen sweaters don't grow on trees, you know).

Despite our despondency over missing these two epic events, we spent the first two weekends hanging out in downtown Galway to try to explore the best of what the city had to offer. The first stop, of course, is the outdoor market where our host Flo works in his falafel stall. It must be said that as humble as it may sound, Flo has operated his stall in countless festivals and catered events and has easily the most professional-looking cart in the market.

After getting our complimentary falafel sandwiches with our WWOOFer's discount, we head further into the market, which is populated by all sorts of interesting folks and friends. There's Mick, who runs a creperie and has in his past starred as the "evil white guy villain" in several low-budget Japanese action flicks. There's also Daniel, who is originally a New York Jew, but after 10 years of living at sea among Irish fisherman and another 10 years of living in Galway selling freshly made donuts in the market, and recently adopting an injured wild crow as a pet, there seems to be very little of the N'Yawker left in him. We love Daniel, first of all because he's endlessly friendly and entertaining, regaling us with his life stories I probably shouldn't submit into the public forum. He's also let us sleep over at his house a few times after late nights in town when our ears are blown out from too much live music and our coordination is off from too much Guinness.

One such night was during Galway's Latin Street Party. Apparently, to the surprise of us WWOOFers and even several locals, Galway has a Latin Quarter, and it's big enough to warrant its own cultural festival. This was no cheap pinatas and mariachi band festival either. This was three days and nights of music, salsa dancing, street performers, some of the most terrifying clowns I've ever seen, and Cuban Rum specials at every pub in the area.

As far as I was concerned, however, the highlight of this festival was a pub hosting Australian Pearl Jam, a tribute band that is, as the singer said, "Not Australian and not Pearl Jam." This wasn't just some kitschy throwback party celebrating a 20-year-old band either. Co-WWOOFer Amanda and I entered the pub to the sight of a hundred plaid-clad Irishfolk belting along to the songs and partying like it was 1991, and we happily joined the fray (easy enough for me, I knew all the words and I am almost always wearing a plaid shirt and jeans anyway). As the concert let out, and we worried that the night had hit its peak, Amanda and I went bar-hopping for a little while, trying to see what other fun we could conjure up before retiring. Our travels landed us in The Western Hotel bar, which, at shortly after midnight, is populated entirely by drunken Irish out-of-towners of the AARP-age variety. One particularly indecipherable old man came up to Amanda and I at the bar and asked us, or rather, asked Amanda, "Scooze meh, ung layd, woz ur nemme? Yoo frm roond her? Her ya liiike de pless?" The conversation went on in that manner for a few minutes, and when the tired musician in the corner - warbling out of tune to country songs lazily strummed on his guitar - picked up the tempo, Amanda was escorted to dance by her new gentleman friend. I sat back smugly and watched this happen for a song, but as the next song began, and Amanda was twirled in my direction, she snarled at me "Finishyourdrinkandlet'sgo!" before being pulled back onto the dance floor by her old and drunken lothario. The night was officially over.

There are plenty of good discoveries I've made just wandering around Galway, like kayak-water-polo matches on the river, or the plethora of random buskers. But after a couple weeks, we were feeling stir-crazy and decided to head to Cork for the weekend and see the Street Performers World Championship we had read about in the paper. Every year, in several Irish cities, the SPWC is organized and famed performers of every kind from all over the world are invited to come in and perform for thousands of people, who will in turn hopefully throw a few euro into their hat at the end of the show. We saw quite a few acts, among them beat-boxers, illusionists, acrobats, pogo-stickers, flaming teacup-balancers, weight-lifting midgets, and at least half a dozen people juggling flaming torches on unicycles insisting that what they were about to do is "one of the most astonishing and dangerous tricks you've ever witnessed." (I'm not about to discount how hard it is to balance on a single wheel and juggle fire, but with the number of people there doing it, it goes from impressive to downright tedious and predictable - "Come on, try juggling chainsaws, ya pansy!")

Among the events was also planned an attempt to break the world record for the most people gathered in one place dressed as Waldo of Where's Waldo fame (Wally, as he's known here in the UK), because apparently the World must be starting to run out of useful world records to break. Nevertheless, for 12 quid, with the proceeds going to the Africa Aware charity, thousands of people bought their official Wally costumes and shortly thereafter became very confused, since the newspaper said the event was at noon, the organizers said it was at 6, and radio said it was being canceled for rain. The result was the city of Cork being overrun that Sunday by hordes of damp, frustrated, and very easily spotted Wallys. Eventually, the misinformation was sorted out, the rain ceased, and two-and-a-half thousand of us descended on the public park for our picture to be taken. We did end up breaking the world record, and keeping our title for a full week until the SPWC and the record-breaker organizers held the same event the following weekend in the bigger and less rainy city of Dublin, where our record was shattered by nearly 1000 souls. But now, if nothing else, I have my next Halloween, Purim, and any uneventful Sunday's costumes sorted out.

After spending a month with hardly any good long solo time, I decided to take a vacation and spent last weekend on the Aran Islands, which Flo told me was the one place I must see before I left Western Ireland. I took a ferry out to the largest island, Inis Mor and got myself an overnight hostel room and a bike. The island landscape is basically an amalgamation of most of the Irish postcards you've ever seen. It's nine miles long by two across, with two main roads going up and down the length of the island. Those roads tend to be crowded by speeding tour buses, and offer a fairly restricted view of the landscape. Once on the smaller, unpaved roads, I found myself biking through endless grids of stone walls dividing the pasture lands between different farmers' fields. Cows and sheep grazed everywhere in the electric green pastures, and dotted among the new modern homes were the remains of old stone cottages and churches where the thatched roofs had long ago rotted to nothing, offering a view inside of the old fireplaces now filled with grass and thistles. On top of one of the hills is what claims to be the World's smallest church (more dubious world records) built centuries ago in memory of one of St. Patrick's disciples. Elsewhere is the island's main attraction, an ancient stone fort built right up to the edge of the cliffs which look like God had taken a chisel and split a mountain cleanly in half so that there was a straight drop from the top where we were and the bottom where the waves were smashing against the side. Since this isn't America, the Land of Liability Litigation, there was no fence or protection from the cliff edge, save a couple guards stationed way off to the side, so just about every visitor who came was able to force themselves to work up the courage to crawl up to the cliff edge and look into the abyss, over 3300 feet straight down.

This weekend is taking us back the joys of simple country life. Thursday night was a bonfire for St. John's Day, where Flo and I lamented together the burning of tons of perfectly good free firewood - a bit of a scarcity in Ireland. Sunday will be what is the local Irish equivalent to the 4H Club festivals or county fairs held in the States. There will be livestock and horse competitions, vegetable judging, and probably more country fun than you can shake a stick at. It's all part of the fun, here in cloudy, wet, and lovely Ireland.

Here in Western Ireland, there are quite a few people who still speak traditional Irish, or Gaelic Even among those who don't, there's still a healthy sprinkling of terms thrown into everyday speech, not unlike fourth generation Jewish Americans like myself who still toss in a bissel Yiddishe for emphasis. One of my favorite expressions that is heard all the time here is "What/how/where's the craic?" The craic, pronounced crack, is the news/state of affairs/good times, and the uses are plentiful. So now, for this blog entry, I will regale you with the news, state of affairs, and maybe a couple of the good times being had by me and my WWOOFing buddies here on "Uncle Flo's" farm.

In general, we work five days a week, but usually only three days at Flo's garden. The reason Flo brought us in as volunteers in the first place is because he's got a head full of ideas that he wants to actualize since moving into his house in January. Some of it is pretty basic, like turning his ragtag gang of vegetable and herb beds into a proper garden, which will provide produce for his house and his falafel stand. He's got a polytunnel as well, which we've been filling to its maximum capacity so that Flo can add an enormous lettuce battalion to his "Gourmet Offensive." Ideally, we'll be creating a permaculture, where the placement and variety of what is grown works to benefit the greater good of the garden, like stacking plants on top of each other for efficient use of water runoff, or growing nitrogen fixing plants next to nitrogen users.

I've also been recruited for the odd household task such as cleaning out the old rainwater catchment tank that came with the house and had a thick murky layer of sludge on the floor that needed scooping-out with a dustpan. One of my proudest accomplishments was when Flo told me he needed to prepare tapas for a wedding that he was catering, while also filling a bakery order for 15 bags of 50 falafel balls each. In one Friday, over around 6 or 7 hours, I rolled, fried and bagged nearly 800 falafel balls, while enjoying the company of constantly skipping CDs and an anxious, angry, and foul-mouthed Dutch-Irish chef. It was a good day, until Flo admitted that if I wanted to work in his falafel stand someday, I'd have to make that same number of balls in about a third the amount of time with a broken deep-fryer, and my dreams were shattered, just like that.

We've also been working at a larger-scale organic farm, Green Earth Organics, run by Flo's friend Kenneth. Over there, we've been doing fieldwork more typical of a big commercial operation than what Flo has. Lots of weeding, sowing, more weeding, other sowing, sandbag-filling, more weeding and sowing, and soon, when the sun has come out long enough to let the plants grow to fruit (which takes a while under the fluffy, gray skies of Ireland), harvesting. Kenneth has acres and acres of fields and a half dozen polytunnels where he grows all manner of vegetables and herbs. Fruit and more specialty items are imported, and then he sells it all to try to make a living, using the same land that has been farmed by his family for three generations.

Since most of my farming experience comes from weeding my Mom's tiny garden bed in the backyard 10-15 years ago, and then going to Mali and working with my neighbors in their fields before starting my own plot of corn, I am accustomed to pretty low-tech agricultural methods. Organic farming, despite being closer to a natural way of agriculture, can't be sustainably done without tractors, fertilizer sprayers, and the tools of industry. The thing is, while I knew in my head that there are tools and machines for everything, I didn't know that this was literally true until now. To illustrate, when I was in Mali, people would often talk to me about Malian farmers versus American farmers.

"In America, they have machines to do everything!" they would say. "Do they have machines that plant the seeds too? And machines that tie up the sacks of rice for you? And that roll up the bales of straw?" I would tell them yes, assuming that it was true, but never having actually seen any of these things for myself. Then I came to Kenneth's farm, and I realized that there is, literally, a machine for everything. There's a machine you put on the back of a tractor, and you just sit on a stool, feed the machinery seeds or saplings, and it will plant them in perfect rows with even spacing. There's a tool that will grab wire ties and with a couple yanks, twist the wire up to close up the burlap sacks of potatoes, or sand or whatever. And there's a machine that also goes on the back of a tractor that cuts grass, rolls it up into massive bales, tightly wraps it in plastic to keep out mold, and deposits it upright on the ground, while you just keep your foot on the accelerator. I saw these things in action, and all I could think was "Damn, my Malian buddies would be jealous!" Of course, I have to admit that I miss my daba, a small, cubit-length scooping hoe used by Malian villagers for weeding, which frankly seems to work much better, faster, and more easily than much of what we've been doing here.

But all things considered, I'm still getting a very classic Irish farming experience here. I've weeded acres of potato and cabbage fields. I've plucked boulders from between rows of crops (the very same unpicked boulders that have built perhaps millions of Irish houses and countless miles of stone walls over the centuries). I've been taken out to the pub after work and had whichever farm-owner was my boss that day buying us all of WWOOFers rounds of Guinness (which really is better here - common wisdom dictates that Guinness changes every time it passes over water) and if we're lucky, a live "trad session" of traditional Irish reels and ballads.

It's not all fun and games though. There are days when I spend so many hours weeding stinging nettles that my hands feel like pins and needles, and when I close my eyes to sleep at night, all I see are endless tangles of leaves, vines and stems until I jolt upright in a cold sweat, half expecting to find soil on my hands and my bed sprouting scotch grass. And there's the intimidation factor, when Kenneth says that today's job is to sow a bed of onions, five sprouts across, and what seems like billions of rows long. At least in Mali, where there were no tractors or expensive fertilizers, the fields were big but at least managable and the days were hot enough that most people didn't work past lunch. Well, nobody said that this would be a total holiday, and anyway, I am enjoying both the good hard labor getting me in shape for once, and the fact that this is the closest thing to a normal full-time job I've had since Summer 2007. Speaking of which, it's past 10pm and work starts early tomorrow. This weekend I'm off to the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway. I'll fill you all in with my next blog post about all the fun we've been having, including the Street Performers World Championships, the Where's Waldo world record attempt, and Galway's Latin Street Festival. Until next time, see you next time!

"Well, based on his email to us and his website, it looks like he's some guy named Floris Wagemakers who moved to Ireland from Holland a while ago and started up his own organic, self-sustaining falafel stand to make a living," I told my Mom when my travel partners and I first got our invitation to WWOOF in Ireland.

"So you're going to be making falafel with a Dutch man named Wagemakers? This doesn't sound like it'll be a very 'Irish' experience..." my Mom responded, skeptically.

"Ach, nah! Flo? He's about as Irish as they come! A real nationalist, he is!" countered a friend of Floris a few weeks later, after I had related the skepticism which my Mom, not to mention quite a few others, had expressed when I told them what I was planning to do in Ireland. To be honest, I myself was not really sure what to expect initially. I'd seen his WWOOF profile and his website (thegourmetoffensive.com) and had communicated with him by email once, when he invited us to come down and stay with him as helpers. All I really knew about him was, well, just what I told my Mom in the first paragraph of this article. And of course, as is usually the case, once we got here, things became a lot clearer and a bit more interesting as well. So who is this guy anyway, other than Galway's premier falafel baron who decided to take in three American kids he didn't know to work in his garden for two months?

For starters, Floris Wagemakers's name isn't pronounced the way you think. Supposedly, the Dutch people, of whom Floris is natively a member, never had last names until that idealistic tyrant, Napoleon Bonaparte, came through and decided that surnames were the way of the future, and so Flo's ancestors decided that since they were wagon makers by trade, than wagon makers they would be henceforth called. Hence, Wagemakers - pronounced not like makers of wages, but more similarly to the old Philadelphia department store Wanamakers.

Flo (who's out of town right now so he'll have to forgive me for any factual inaccuracies) moved to Ireland around 1998 hoping to start a new life for himself. He'd had some professional kitchen experience and knew how to make falafel and after a few years of one thing or another, he decided to fill in the falafel niche that was sorely empty in this part of Western Ireland with his very own organic falafel cart. That's how The Gourmet Offensive began operating on weekends in the Galway market.

There were a few stipulations that were very important to Flo upon opening his business. The first was that he would do this on the weekends so that he would be able to grow produce in his garden during the rest of the week. This served a few functions. One of them, as is advertised on the front of his cart, was that he could grow as much of his own produce as possible, creating a more personal connection from himself to his food to his customers. While this is mostly limited to greens that go into the salads that fill his pita sandwiches, his garden is full of other goodies, which I've been helping to farm since arriving here and which often find themselves on Flo's dinner table as well. More importantly to the garden, though, was the fact that Flo has been growing most of his whole life (growing produce, that is; not growing physically, although he is quite tall).

This ties into the other stipulation of his business. Everything is organic, produced not by the machines of modern warfare in the fight of agri-business versus nature; or the genetic manipulations of the likes of Monsanto, who strive to make tomatoes that will last in the fridge for ages at the expense of flavor and diversity. No no, Flo insists that mankind must narrow the divide between themselves and the food they grow. It's one thing for people not to grow their own food; there has always been a divide between the agrarian sectors of society and the rest of those who benefit. But in the Western world, there is a disturbing lack of interest in quality produce, and an abundance of ignorance of what it is we are actually eating. What the hell is in a commercial hot dog anyway? And how can anyone expect to be able to manipulate a plant to grow all year round or be shipped across oceans without suffering in taste and nutrition? Flo firmly believes that people maintaining a closer connection to their food, and the natural world at large, is the key to improving lives, enriching souls, and getting our society that much closer back to where he says, and I agree, it should be.

Of course, these aren't easy ideas to put into practical action. Most people appear perfectly content to eat the same half-dozen or so varieties of apple, narrow-mindedly selected for mass distribution from among literally thousands of varieties that once covered our planet, despite the fact that this means that in a world of supply and demand, all our other choices will most likely soon become extinct. The pitfall of this is not only the lack of aesthetic options, but also the creation of a monoculture, the worst possible outcome for the natural world. The Irish potato famine, for example, occurred because there was primarily one variety of potato farmed throughout the country, and when the blight came along, there were no resistant strains of the plant. The result was that all the potatoes died and the people starved, and there is no reason to think this can't happen again, despite, or because of, all the efforts to create produce that can resist disease. (There is also a lot of science that assures us that the more disease-resistant strains of produce we create, the stronger the diseases will become until - worst case scenario - we can no longer overpower Mother Nature's adaptive abilities and have a planet full of super-blights flying around destroying all our food.)

Even closer to home, reaching a mutually-respectful relationship with agriculture is a complicated issue. During dinner one night, Flo was serving a lamb stew. His 7-year-old son, Idris, asked at one point, "Flo, is this from a real lamb?" Flo offhandedly answered, "Sure it is. Like it?"

Idris's face instantly sank and tears began to well up in his eyes, as he underwent one of those epiphanies that many poor children find at some point in their youth, like when they realize the Tooth Fairy is really just a sneaky parent with some pocket change. "But I don't want to eat a lamb!" he cried.

"Aww, Jaysus! You're not eating it now?? But you always ask me for meat!" Flo and I have had a couple conversations about meat, and the idea that peoples' perceptions towards it would change if they themselves were a more active part of the "foodification" of animals. In Mali, I regularly found myself becoming personally acquainted with livestock who I would later watch go through the whole process from bloody death, cleaning, and finally to being turned into supper which the whole family would voraciously consume, knowing how much effort they put into raising this animal and keeping it happy until it was time for it to serve its purpose. As I said before, it's been ages in Western culture since agrarianism was universal, and there have always been people who did the "dirty work" of food for the other branches of society, but in today's world, where there is such a wide disconnect between us and something as basic as our food, the idea of having the casual carnivorous American businessman kill his own cow to supply his 16 ounce steak sounds...well, it might be interesting to see how that turns out.

I guess what it all comes down to is prioritizing. Flo has been doing a lot of that. He spends a good amount of time thinking and talking about the problems the world is facing: political unrest, human rights and freedoms, and the rest of the issues that plague humanity on a daily basis. But he also realizes that very few people can effectively take on more than a few of these problems, and even those who do have made little headway in the grand scheme of things. The best approach to making effective change is to choose your battles. Flo's is food. He's not a vegetarian, or an all-organic, all-the-time crusader like some folks I know, but he has his agenda, and he's taken it to the front lines. You can see him there every weekend, making falafel sandwiches with pride and determination, and selling them to all walks of life who pass through the Galway marketplace. Whether they share his agenda or just want to fill their tummies, be they young or old, tourist or local, from every denomination of humanity that comes through, Flo will sell them healthy, humanity-centered food that everyone agrees tastes damn good. The way I see it, every falafel ball sold is more ammunition spent, and every patron is another soldier enlisted in The Gourmet Offensive.

How does one pack for five months of living in a foreign continent where temperatures will range from the low-70s to the low-30s? How does one dress accordingly for 7 hours of outdoor work, when regularly can one see half a year's worth of weather patterns over the course of half an hour? And why does one go from living the simple, free-room-and-board, yet unpaid easy life in the parents' house, to the toilsome, unfamiliar free-room-and-board, while doing unpaid labor, life in some Irish stranger's house?

Well, to quote some guy I've never heard of named Bolitho, "Adventure must start with running away from home."

Hello, family, friends, and fans, and welcome to the revival of Jake Asher's traveling blog! I've been completely flattered and delighted by the number of you who told me you enjoyed reading my blog when I kept it in Mali, and when some of you expressed hope that I would continue to write through my latest travels, I figured I would give it a try. Knowing that there is regular internet access here, at least for the first couple months, will make it easier for me not to disappoint.

I'll assume that most of you reading this now are the same folks who started reading my blog at some other point during the last three years, but for the consideration of those of you just tuning in, I'll briefly backtrack. I entered service with the Peace Corps in July 2008, being assigned to Mali, West Africa. As Peace Corps Volunteers, we are given three goals to fulfill while living in our host country: to engage in technical exchange of ideas and knowledge, to inform our hosts about our life back home and outside of our service, and to take what we've learned and bring it back home. This blog was my way of fulfilling the Third Goal, not to mention my way of keeping in touch with everyone at home en masse, and a blueprint for the memoir that I have vague pipe dreams of someday, possibly, thinking about trying to perhaps get around to writing...maybe. For more about my experiences in the Peace Corps, just read any of my earlier entries.

So why have I again picked up the quill to play cultural liaison? Well, it all began like this...

I was bored. I was, aside from a small tutoring gig, unemployed. I was developing an unhealthy habit of Facebook, streaming online movies, and going out drinking with those of my few friends who were still in Philly until 1 or 2 am. I needed to change things up. I had tried job hunting, but between the market being bad, my own standards being admittedly too high, and my own lack of personal oomph, plus the fact that I was living at my parents' house for free and relatively comfortably at that, things were going slowly. Between having no woman, no job, no dog, and only a bottle and a guitar for company, my life was beginning to resemble a country song, and while it might well have been a very good country song, it lacked the romantic quality that those Hank Williams classics portray. Some of you - well, my parents more than anyone, who I know are less than thrilled about this latest frivolous excursion of mine - might be a bit put-off by my candor. I understand that I'm not painting myself in the best light right now, but the truth is, I'm more interested in being honest and frank about my situation, because otherwise I would have to lie for my story make sense, and I'm not about to do that.

Anyway, I was looking for some direction to go in when a friend of mine suggested that I go with him to Sweden to work on an organic farm. It would be through the WWOOF program - World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms - and we would get housed and fed in exchange for labor, and hopefully a fun working experience. Those of you familiar with my previous exploits probably won't be all that surprised that I spent fairly little time thinking about this idea before giving an enthusiastic "Yes!" To be fair, I did carefully weigh all my options and talk with my parents before agreeing. I knew I would be setting myself back in the job search, depleting a good chunk of my savings account, and making myself appear to the casual observer like an aimless itinerant, travel and adventure being my narcotic high of choice. But on the other hand, I wasn't doing a whole lot better for myself back home, and a plethora of nostalgic cliches kept entering my mind: "Youth is wasted on the young"; "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take"; "It is regret for the things we didn't do that is inconsolable"; and "Europe is nice this time of year!"

So we made our plans - my friend Matt, his friend Amanda whom I had not yet met save through mutual internet-investigating, and myself. We expanded our plans to include Ireland as well as Sweden, planning to spend two months in the former and three months in the latter. We scoured the WWOOF website, looking for the few organic farms who would host three volunteers for a relatively long period of time. There were a few interesting options: a Viking historical recreation site where workers dress in period garb and live on boats or in huts (I, for one, had taken my fill of living under a grass roof for a while), and an Irish goat farm which provides tourists with the experience of strolling along the nearby scenic cliffs accompanied by goats (nothing else was said about why one would want to be accompanied by goats, so we figured we would keep that option left up to the imagination).

Finally, we found our winners, or rather, they found us. For Sweden, our application was picked up by Rosenhils Tradgard, a combination operation of farm, garden, bed & breakfast, cafe, music venue, and flea market, with apparently quite a bit of experience hosting WWOOFers as well. Our Irish hosts were a bit less...conventional. According to his profile and the email he sent asking us to come out, he is a native Dutchman named Floris Wagemakers who moved to Ireland years ago and started up an organic, mostly self-sustaining falafel stand in the Galway market. He'd never hosted WWOOFers, but he had just moved into a new house and wanted some volunteers to come out and help him realize all of the many ambitions to improve the place that he had in his head.

So we had our plan, we had our assignments, and after going through the usual steps taken when one goes on a five month farming excursion in Ireland (as I asked before, how does one pack light for two seasons of volatile weather?), I made some last minute visits to friends in New York. They were were duly credulous as to what I was doing (Floris what?? Do they even eat falafel in Ireland?? What the hell is a Woof??), and predictably jealous once I explained it.

So we met at the JFK airport, myself and Amanda formally meeting for the first time, and a hop, skip, and a non-stop flight later (since people always ask: I watched "The King's Speech" in-flight...I was not too impressed), we landed in cloudy, misty, 50 degree weather we would soon learn to be typical of the region this time of year.

And here, dear readers, I will leave you. Tune in next time where I fill you in on what life is like as an organic farmer in Ireland, living "Real World"-style in a house with an old friend, a new friend, an even newer Dutch/Irish friend, a pair of youngsters who do not ever seem to run out of energy, and a duck-egg-stealing mutt. And, I answer the one question that's on everybody's mind:

Who Is Floris Wagemakers?

Until then, "Pogue mahone!"

How does one pack for five months of living in a foreign continent where temperatures will range from the low-70s to the low-30s? How does one dress accordingly for 7 hours of outdoor work, when regularly can one see half a year's worth of weather patterns over the course of half an hour? And why does one go from living the simple, free-room-and-board, yet unpaid easy life in the parents' house, to the toilsome, unfamiliar free-room-and-board, while doing unpaid labor, life in some Irish stranger's house?

Well, to quote some guy I've never heard of named Bolitho, "Adventure must start with running away from home."

Hello, family, friends, and fans, and welcome to the revival of Jake Asher's traveling blog! I've been completely flattered and delighted by the number of you who told me you enjoyed reading my blog when I kept it in Mali, and when some of you expressed hope that I would continue to write through my latest travels, I figured I would give it a try. Knowing that there is regular internet access here, at least for the first couple months, will make it easier for me not to disappoint.

I'll assume that most of you reading this now are the same folks who started reading my blog at some other point during the last three years, but for the consideration of those of you just tuning in, I'll briefly backtrack. I entered service with the Peace Corps in July 2008, being assigned to Mali, West Africa. As Peace Corps Volunteers, we are given three goals to fulfill while living in our host country: to engage in technical exchange of ideas and knowledge, to inform our hosts about our life back home and outside of our service, and to take what we've learned and bring it back home. This blog was my way of fulfilling the Third Goal, not to mention my way of keeping in touch with everyone at home en masse, and a blueprint for the memoir that I have vague pipe dreams of someday, possibly, thinking about trying to perhaps get around to writing...maybe. For more about my experiences in the Peace Corps, just read any of my earlier entries.

So why have I again picked up the quill to play cultural liaison? Well, it all began like this...

I was bored. I was, aside from a small tutoring gig, unemployed. I was developing an unhealthy habit of Facebook, streaming online movies, and going out drinking with those of my few friends who were still in Philly until 1 or 2 am. I needed to change things up. I had tried job hunting, but between the market being bad, my own standards being admittedly too high, and my own lack of personal oomph, plus the fact that I was living at my parents' house for free and relatively comfortably at that, things were going slowly. Between having no woman, no job, no dog, and only a bottle and a guitar for company, my life was beginning to resemble a country song, and while it might well have been a very good country song, it lacked the romantic quality that those Hank Williams classics portray. Some of you - well, my parents more than anyone, who I know are less than thrilled about this latest frivolous excursion of mine - might be a bit put-off by my candor. I understand that I'm not painting myself in the best light right now, but the truth is, I'm more interested in being honest and frank about my situation, because otherwise I would have to lie for my story make sense, and I'm not about to do that.

Anyway, I was looking for some direction to go in when a friend of mine suggested that I go with him to Sweden to work on an organic farm. It would be through the WWOOF program - World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms - and we would get housed and fed in exchange for labor, and hopefully a fun working experience. Those of you familiar with my previous exploits probably won't be all that surprised that I spent fairly little time thinking about this idea before giving an enthusiastic "Yes!" To be fair, I did carefully weigh all my options and talk with my parents before agreeing. I knew I would be setting myself back in the job search, depleting a good chunk of my savings account, and making myself appear to the casual observer like an aimless itinerant, travel and adventure being my narcotic high of choice. But on the other hand, I wasn't doing a whole lot better for myself back home, and a plethora of nostalgic cliches kept entering my mind: "Youth is wasted on the young"; "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take"; "It is regret for the things we didn't do that is inconsolable"; and "Europe is nice this time of year!"

So we made our plans - my friend Matt, his friend Amanda whom I had not yet met save through mutual internet-investigating, and myself. We expanded our plans to include Ireland as well as Sweden, planning to spend two months in the former and three months in the latter. We scoured the WWOOF website, looking for the few organic farms who would host three volunteers for a relatively long period of time. There were a few interesting options: a Viking historical recreation site where workers dress in period garb and live on boats or in huts (I, for one, had taken my fill of living under a grass roof for a while), and an Irish goat farm which provides tourists with the experience of strolling along the nearby scenic cliffs accompanied by goats (nothing else was said about why one would want to be accompanied by goats, so we figured we would keep that option left up to the imagination).

Finally, we found our winners, or rather, they found us. For Sweden, our application was picked up by Rosenhils Tradgard, a combination operation of farm, garden, bed & breakfast, cafe, music venue, and flea market, with apparently quite a bit of experience hosting WWOOFers as well. Our Irish hosts were a bit less...conventional. According to his profile and the email he sent asking us to come out, he is a native Dutchman named Floris Wagemakers who moved to Ireland years ago and started up an organic, mostly self-sustaining falafel stand in the Galway market. He'd never hosted WWOOFers, but he had just moved into a new house and wanted some volunteers to come out and help him realize all of the many ambitions to improve the place that he had in his head.

So we had our plan, we had our assignments, and after going through the usual steps taken when one goes on a five month farming excursion in Ireland (as I asked before, how does one pack light for two seasons of volatile weather?), I made some last minute visits to friends in New York. They were were duly credulous as to what I was doing (Floris what?? Do they even eat falafel in Ireland?? What the hell is a Woof??), and predictably jealous once I explained it.

So we met at the JFK airport, myself and Amanda formally meeting for the first time, and a hop, skip, and a non-stop flight later (since people always ask: I watched "The King's Speech" in-flight...I was not too impressed), we landed in cloudy, misty, 50 degree weather we would soon learn to be typical of the region this time of year.

And here, dear readers, I will leave you. Tune in next time where I fill you in on what life is like as an organic farmer in Ireland, living "Real World"-style in a house with an old friend, a new friend, an even newer Dutch/Irish friend, a pair of youngsters who do not ever seem to run out of energy, and a duck-egg-stealing mutt. And, I answer the one question that's on everybody's mind:

Who Is Floris Wagemakers?

Until then, "Pogue mahone!"

There aren't many places in our society where the cereal aisle attracts as much conversation as it does among Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. There were at least half a dozen times during our Close of Service Conference, six weeks before I left Mali, when we were cautioned of the perils of visiting the supermarket upon first arriving back in the U.S. after our service ended. They warned us of the feeling of being completely overwhelmed by the massive variety of flavors, styles, shapes, and colors of cereal we would have to get used to again when we walked back to those food emporiums. One epic cereal aisle, 5 shelves high, 300 feet long, and packed full of different things to pour milk into and eat for breakfast – breakfast, of all meals! One speaker at the conference openly admitted to breaking down into tears while contemplating whether to buy the Corn Flakes made by General Mills, Post, or the generic Shop Rite variety. Corn Flakes, one of (in my own personal opinion) the blandest, most simple and unexciting cereal products in existence, and there is still too much of a variety to contemplate, while in Mali, I would wonder hopefully if tonight's dinner would be millet porridge with a saltier okra-powder sauce, or the slightly peanutier sauce variety, and then be disappointed to discover that it was in fact the peanut supply was low and there wasn't enough money for salt, so we were stuck with straight okra paste.

For me, though, it wasn't the cereal aisle that first took my breath away. It was on my second day in Tunisia, my first destination on the long and windy road back home, and I went to the central market in the Tunis Medina, the old city where the most interesting and traditional markets were located. My travel partner Zac and I saw a giant decorated warehouse surrounded by hustle and bustle and decided to see what all the commotion was about. We walked in and it came to me as a slow realization. I looked forward and I saw an apple cart.

"Oh, sweet! Apples!" was my initial reaction. Next to it was a cart of differently colored apples, and next to that, a third variety, and next to that, yet another variety. "Sweet! Tons of apples! This must be the apple guy," I realized to myself, and then I looked further and saw another guy, further down selling just as many apples in just as many sizes and colors: red, green, reddish green, green with a red fade, yellow, green with a yellow fade, red with a yellow fade, smooth, speckled, round, oblong, ovular, lopsided…And at each apple seller's stall, there were also carts of just as many varieties of pears, peaches, nectarines, figs, oranges, dates, clementines, lemons, prickly pears, pomelos; and they were literally everywhere. And don't get me started on the vegetables. All in all, this was a gigantic produce market – it could easily house a football field – and all I could think was "In my entire life, I will never be able to sample each variety of fruit they have here," which was sad, because enveloped as I was in this world of smells and colors, I just wanted to hitch up in the middle of the market and do nothing but sample this Garden of Eden for the rest of my life. This coming from a world where a good produce section meant that at the best of the season, you could find an entire gross of bananas or mangos that were still ripe, if you ate them in the next 2 days.

I'm writing this article because one the most common questions I've gotten since arriving back in The States about 6 weeks ago has been "How is your adjustment to America going?" My usual vague and concise answer to this loaded question is to say that America is a pretty easy place to get readjusted to. The answer is usually met with a chuckle, and it really is true. We live in the lap of luxury, compared to the rest of the world, recession or not. Not everyone is doing well these days, but for the most part, and especially where I was coming from, simply arriving in Italy on my way home to find that even the cheapest youth hostel has hot running water in every bathroom was like G-d himself was cutting me off a little slice of Paradise every time I went to take a shower, and even now, those little things are all I really need to stay happy. That and my CD collection playing pretty much all the time.

Another answer that I was fond of at first was that America has not drastically changed in the two short years I was away. I liked that answer in the beginning; it was a good smartass answer that gave people an honest opinion that nonetheless might have come as a bit of a surprise. Sure, the political atmosphere has changed, with Tea Parties and Health Care taking up headline space everywhere, but the Mid-East is still in crisis, and unemployment rates are still scaring the bejeesus out of everyone. The fact is that when I left, there was a big election right around the corner and I got back just in time for another one. When I left, it was Hannah Montana, now it's Katy Perry. When I was a senior in college in 2008, people would kill time by watching the best YouTube videos and sending them around, and as soon as I got back, those same friends were telling me about all the new YouTube videos that have become viral sensations while I was away. Harry Potter has retired and surrendered his throne as the king of teenybopper literature to the sexy vampires in Twilight. The last few years leading up to my departures, everyone was buying the new iPods, as they grew ever sleeker, more functional, and cheaper, with the iPhone becoming the pinnacle of American technological achievement. Now, everyone I see has phones with internet-ready touch-screens, innovations that went from luxury-class to pedestrian in only 2 years. And, The Simpsons, after 23 years, is still making new episodes.

What I'm trying to say is that, like a teenage vampire romantic-thriller novel (and the subsequent television series/major motion picture spinoff), the details may change here and there but the basic story remains the same.

But as I've taken time to really live here in America, remembering what everything is like, getting accustomed to how everything works again, I start to miss the things that I knew I would miss about Mali, and it becomes just a little bit harder to be here than it was when I first returned. And I'm noticing that when it comes to readjusting to life here, the big differences are not in how the country is different, but in how I am. To borrow a line from Pearl Jam's song, America has changed by not changing at all. I'm the one who has started to become slightly offended when random strangers don't greet me on the street anymore. I'm the one who is shocked to see someone eat apples without chewing them all the way down to the core, tossing out at least 20% of the perfectly good and edible fruity center. And I'm more frustrated than ever by the fact that I need to get out of my pajamas and into jeans and shoes to drive to the closest 7-11 to get juice or eggs, rather than walking a minute down the dusty path in whatever outfit I like (although luckily, while living at my parents house, I haven't really had to do much shopping, but it's the principle of the matter!). Perhaps more than anything, I miss the fact that I was getting paid to basically do whatever I want. While it's a paltry stipend by American standards, I was making far more money than any other locals in my village and I could basically set up my own schedule, work or not work at my leisure and if I had a little extra saved up every few months, I'd skip out and go on another cool exotic vacation somewhere in West Africa – the cheapest place to travel imaginable.

I try hard not to romanticize my time in Mali and to remember all the problems I faced over there, and trust me, there were problems. But there was something about that simple life that I can't get away from, and the knowledge that I won't be able to replicate that ever again is almost enough to make me want to go back…almost.

For now, I'm doing my best to keep a little bit of Mali with me here in The U.S. I still listen to my Malian CDs, I speak Bambara while chatting with my other Returned Volunteer friends, and a couple times with the Malian parking garage attendants who my Dad patronizes downtown when he goes to work and with merchants at the recent Mali arts and crafts expo in Philly. And one of these days, maybe I'll even break out the apron and make some good old fashioned millet porridge and okra-paste…

…okay, maybe not.

My parents have always said that the best part of having kids who move abroad is that it gives you an excuse to visit somewhere new. They were thrilled with the chance to send my oldest sister Simma to study abroad so we could take a family vacation to Edinburgh and go (mini)golfing in St. Andrews. Just as exciting was my other older sister Aviva's stint in Hawaii working on organic farms so we could spend a Passover break eating pesticide-free avocados the size of rugby balls on cheese and matzoh sandwiches while hiking around active volcanos. But it was with a good deal more trepidation that they agreed on a vacation to come see me in Mali, a place that maintains an off-the-beaten-path sense of romantic danger and uncertainty, in spite of – and I'm sure also because of – all my enlightening blog entires.

Deciding that the best thing to do to break in my mom and little sister to Africa before continuing to Mali would be to have them come with my dad to Ghana, the "Africa for Beginners" country, to make sure that continuing on to my mud hut in the bush was something that could be handled. They talked to their travel agent, I talked to my fellow PCVs who had travelled, and we decided on a general itinerary to see X, Y, and Z, hiring a guide to drive us around and help us out. It seemed like a fun plan, and as a well-adjusted resident of West Africa, finally moving to an Anglophone country, I figured I'd feel perfectly at home. So I wasn't expecting it to be there that I experienced some of the strongest culture-shock I've ever felt .

In Mali, I could speak Bambara fluently, I knew the value of the CFA Franc, could bargain accordingly, knew how to converse the way Malians do, eat rice and sauce with my hands, and basically feel like I fit in, aside from the glaring exceptions of my skin color and accent, and the odd unavoidable screw-up that even the most seasoned ex-pats are bound to make. I could walk down the street feeling completely unself-conscious because I knew that as soon as I opened my mouth, I could become, for all intents and purposes, a Malian. In Ghana, I didn't know the language, other than English, I didn't know the currency, the foods, or the proper way of addressing others. To make matters harder, I was staying in the fanciest hotels in every city (per my parents' insistence), I was being driven around by a local professional guide in a big white van, eating almost exclusively at hotels and mostly-white restaurants, and visiting all the typical tourist attractions. The whole country seemed almost like a exhibit in the Smithsonian: "look, but don't touch." I quickly began to feel like the thing I'd begun to pray I'd not soon again become: a Tourist.

I took some steps to make myself feel more like I was still living in the Africa I'd adopted as my home, but I knew deep down that all these steps were merely signs of self-consciousness and denial. I only drank the local tap-water, as opposed to the bottled mineral water the guide supplied us, despite how saline or rotten it sometimes tasted. I bargained hard for souvenir masks at the Artisan's Market, using the same benchmarks of etiquette and price-value I'd learned in Mali, but without the Bambara to give me "street-cred," I ended up feeling less like a savvy shopper and more like a stingy tourist brat. Within a few days, I was aching to get back to Mali, where I could feel the little thrill that comes with knowing that you are home, and can make a snappy retort in an obscure local language to anyone who says otherwise. Thinking about my situation, I began to worry whether I would ever feel comfortable traveling as a tourist again.

That all happened this past January, when I was still a Peace Corps Volunteer. Now I'm not. I COSed (closed my service) August 12 and that night, I was heading to the airport to fly north, over the Sahara, to Tunisia, with fellow PCV Zac for a romp around the country for a few weeks before I meet my little sister Rena at her study-abroad program in Rome and Zac heads home for the LSATs. I'd been excited to see the country from having read through the Lonely Planet's guide. Ancient Roman and Carthaginian ruins, endless desert landscapes, elderly Berbers wearing those red fez caps sitting in cafes all day, Troglodyte pit-homes and four-story-tall Ksour granaries that look otherworldly enough to pass as the setting for George Lucas's vision of Luke Skywalker's homeward in a few of the Star Wars movies.

*Danger Sign #1: Everything I was planning to do in this country was pulled straight from one of the world's best-selling travel guides.

Before I left Mali, I made sure to stock up a lot on AA batteries to power my discern and my camera, since I was worried that Tunisia, like Mali, would only be selling good AA batteries in the capital. The only frame of reference I had to Africa at all was the impoverished West Africa, which other than a few examples like Dakar, Senegal and Accra, Ghana, are places where one would be well advised to come over-prepared as opposed to insufficiently so.

*Danger Sign #2: I was planning to take a lot of pictures.

*Danger Sign #3: I don't speak Arabic or French, Tunisians don't speak English or Bambara, which means that even if we do get some respect from Zac's functional Arabic, and his more useful Fluent French, I'm still playing the "Silent Bob" to Zac's "Jay" and if we are a step above the standard tourist, it still doesn't help me feel any less out of place.

So clearly, all the signs point to me being sucked back into tourist mode. We acted like tourists and in turn, we were treated like tourists. We wanted a tour of the Ksour surrounding the southern desert town of Tataouine, tall, Dr. Suessian structures used as granaries and sometimes homes, and we couldn't even get the Lonely Planet suggested prices for renting a cabbie. We tried to bargain down, but with the combination of a strong tourist industry that allows for high pricing and the fact that we had fairly little in the way of bartering tools (there was usually only one tour guide in sight), we basically had to take what we were given or go through the whole painful process of looking for somebody else. Knowing that this kind of exploitation can happen at all means that we are constantly vigilant against the next perpetrator, and instead of spending all our time enjoying the views of the country and partaking in friendly banter with the locals, we are mostly just paranoid about what that friendly guy in a turban is REALLY trying to peddle.

One of the few saving graces is that unlike Mali, being a tourist in Tunisia is not nearly as brutally soul-wrenching an experience. As a tourist in a desperately poor country, one is constantly hounded to buy souvenirs, give money to beggars, help out "unfortunate" locals who come up with all sorts of rip-off schemes to lighten your wallet ("I was robbed at X festival! I only need you to come to the bank with me and loan me some money. You can give me your phone number and I will pay you back as soon as I get home, I promise!"), or simply pay ridiculous exorbitant fees for everything from taxis to bellhops. Here, bargaining tends to have a very take-it-or-leave-it mentality. If you don't want it for their price, somebody who does won't be far behind. And rather than shopkeepers who follow you down the street to hound you until you go into their store to buy something, they simply put air conditioning units in their shops – a perfect example of passive-aggressive marketing. Overall, compared to Bamako or other Malian cities, I never have a sense of doom when I go out into town that my affluence will precede me and lead me into a constant struggle to avoid taking the Sucker's Bet.

Anyway, we certainly weren't as ridiculous as some of our Western World compatriots. There was the middle-aged man walking through the Tunis Medina, a place cluttered with

mosques, Muslim theology schools, and women buying produce, wearing a button-down shirt but making no use whatsoever of his buttons; rather, he was exposing his corpulent stomach in a manner that's as offensive to a traditional Muslim as seeing girls in flashy miniskirts, who were also in no short supply. Just as bad was the number of people smoking cigarettes in the marketplace. I never would have guessed that it was taboo, but all we had to do was ask one cabbie who gave us a rundown of all the things Tunisians hate that tourists do – something anyone could find out easily. There are also the camera-fiends. Now I hate to stereotype and make cultural generalizations, so I will let one of tour guides do it for me. He saw me taking perhaps an excessive number of pictures and remarked that I was "almost like the Japanese people. They take pictures of EVERYTHING! Are you sure you're not Japanese?" Technically, there is nothing inappropriate about taking pictures, as long as they are not of other people, but the implication from the guide was strong: stop looking at everything through the camera and use your eyes and ears.

Now the fact of the matter is that not every trip I can take can be a two-year Peace Corps stint. I won't be able to count on knowing the language and being able to relate and empathize with the locals everywhere I go. If those are my demands, I won't make it very far beyond JFK International Airport. So why can't I just suck it up, treat the world as my oyster and be a tourist like everyone else? Why can't I just travel the world, see the exciting things there are to see, and hopefully have some serendipitous encounter with a chatty, English speaking local who enjoys being able to expand my mind me as much as I enjoy having my mind expanded?

Because I myself have been the main attraction too. In Matmata, where I began writing this article, there were at least a dozen huge tour busses and countless other small rented or touring company-owned 4x4s that come through the town every day, giving Europeans a look at the exotic Troglodyte houses carved out of caves and pits in the ground, giving a bird's-eye view of the town a moonscape crater-like quality. It's unique, fascinating, and quite photogenic; and it's very easy to forget that this is where Berbers live. This is literally their hometown that hundreds of people every week come to drive through, stare at, take photos of, giggle about, and leave without contributing anything except the odd souvenir or coffee purchase. Seeing this makes me think back to my Niantanso days, where starting two years ago and occurring even as recently as a month ago right before I left my village, I was the tourist attraction. With a combination of having a house situated on the corner of high-traffic intersection and the fact that I never lost my curious New White Guy appeal, I consistently and frequently saw locals and strangers alike strolling past or through my yard, often greeting, sometimes not, and usually making some comment about me and what I was doing which about half the time I could hear and understand. I felt like a zoo animal, or a diorama in the Museum of Natural History, and no amount of social integration ever really changed that.

It was the people who stopped at my house and talked to me who made me feel less like an exhibit. The out-of-towners who came by, asked me my business as a white American in a poor Malian village, and even invited me to come with them to drink tea were much more welcome than the mothers who pointed me out to their kids as they trailed behind, "Hey M'bamisa, look at the white guy! You see the white guy? I think he's sleeping. Bonjour, White Guy!!" They had no reason to think that I understood Bambara, and were probably too shy to come over and find out, but their garish excitement at seeing me at all is just as obnoxious as the flashbulbs of Nikons and the chatter of immodestly mini-skirted women sipping soda bottles on Ramadan in a Muslim country as they pass through the town that has become, through no wish of most of the locals, a living museum piece.

This is what I've come to realize in my travels, and this is what I beg for you all to adopt. I know you only get a couple weeks of vacation time a year and you want to take your tours of the new exotic destination as efficiently as possible. I know the most stress-free way to do this might be hiring a van to take you to all the most photogenic spots around the country inside of a day so you can get back to the hotel with the buffet of familiar Western-style foods in time for dinner. But ask yourself what you are really getting out of this trip? How different is it from watching the Anthony Bourdain special on the Travel Channel? Find locals who speak your language and try to get a more in-depth perspective on what you are seeing. Eat at the hole-in-the-wall restaurant where other tourists fear to tread – if it's freshly cooked, it's safe to eat – and eat the cuisine the way everyone who lives here does, and save a bundle of money on it too. Learn even just a tiny bit of the local language, even if it is just the greetings and thanks you and how to find the restroom. Ask people before photographing them or their homes, and when you do, if possible, engage in conversation so they don't feel like they are being used. Buy souvenirs not at the major artisan's market in the middle of the capital city, but from independent merchants who sell their own products on the roadside by the less-frequented sights, since they charge less, need your business more, and generally sell the same quality products anyway. Learn the standards for dress, PDA, and other general public behavior and abide by it and you will see far fewer glares and snickers directed at you. Do all this, and you will find yourself having a richer, more memorable experience, acquire a deeper understanding of where you went, save a surprising amount of money, and dispel the stereotypes of the Obnoxious American Tourist.

It's my last day in Mali. I've been thinking for a week about ideas for the topic of my Grande Final Opus – the last chapter in the epic saga of "Dembele Be Sho Dun," the story of how I moved to Africa, changed my name to Dembele, and embraced a culture of eating with my hands, making jokes about eating too many beans (hence the blog title making fun of farting, bean-eating Dembeles). I tried to think of a suitable epitaph for leaving my work, leaving Africa, returning to my motherland, and learning how to be an American again. I needed some great statement, a commentary on how the last two years in Africa have effected me, or even better, how I've effected the last two years in Africa. I tried to capstone this point in my life with something that does justice to the weighty epoch I'm living.

But instead, I went out with my fellow PCVs to the bar to get some drinks. Just like I used to do back in The States, just like I will soon be doing again. Later, lying in bed, beer still sloshing around in my belly, I fought with all my might against the spins that accompany lying down while still drunk, and it occurs to me that this too is just like it was back in the US, and I don't plan to learn my lesson before I head home again. And it hit me right then and there, the reason I couldn't think of any great way to express the feeling of finishing this part of my life is that this part of my life isn't really ending. Or more accurately, "this part" of my life doesn't really even exist. Life isn't divided into chapters. Nothing really ends, it just sort of melts into something else that likewise doesn't really "begin" so much as become noticeable. There is no Big Bang in life, it is all just a continuous flow of events that change from one thing into another, like a camera panning from one side of a room to the other, rather than a series of jump-cut shots.

It's not that leaving Mali and finishing the Peace Corps isn't a big deal, or a momentous occasion for me. After all, I did celebrate by buying a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label Scotch. But this is not the end. My life isn't over, my travels aren't over, my relationship with Mali and the people there, African or American, isn't over – not even this blog is over. The only thing ending is my Peace Corps service. I could try to summarize everything I've learned, all the new ways that I will understand the world, but I don't really think I could articulate want I want to convey while I'm just sitting here writing. I'm not even finished learning everything I will learn from doing the Peace Corps. I know there are thoughts that will come to me long after I've left Mali, long after I've arrived in America and only realize months later after when something hits me all of a sudden.

Last night, we were drinking in a bar in Bamako called Appaloosa. It is the most ludicrously contrived American-style institution I've ever seen. All over the bar are statues, memorabilia, posters and wall-hangings of cowboys and Indians, American whiskies, race cars, rifles, flags, and more of the most over-the top Americana possible. Wednesday is Karaoke Night, so we rocked the night away with "Bohemian Rhapsody," Creedence, and more. It was as if in honor of the dozen of us who are on their way back to America, we spent our last big night in Mali being as heavily American as possible. And in this way too, American life has begun before Malian life has even ended.

More accurately, there isn't a difference between American Life and Malian Life. America and Mali are as different as any two countries can be, but it's all part of My Life. It's like going from a best guy friend's house to a girlfriend's and the two have completely dichotomous personalities. You talk with one about favorite athletes and beers, and get nice and cozy with the other, but you love them both to death. I came to Mali partly to get away from American Life for a little while and try something new, but not to completely break off my American Life. More accurately, I am just adding more to My Life as a whole. Besides, part of the mission of the Peace Corps is to draw bridges between America and the areas where volunteers serve (as outlined in a previous entry, "Scoring the Third Goal). I find that I'm doing this, not just externally, telling people how others live, but in my own head, I'm creating new paradigms for how to look at the world. I'm adapting what I've learned and seen in Mali for the last two years, and when I come home, I will be that much more able to deal with the unfamiliar and exotic.

All that said, I'm still pretty psyched to be leaving here. There is a pretty cool sense of accomplishment for having done a complete Peace Corps Service. And there is a reeaallyy cool sense of accomplishment for having finally finished all my paperwork, closed all my projects, returned all my Peace Corps property, picked up my last paycheck, and, as I will soon be doing, getting on an airplane and getting the F*** out of this crazy country! My plans for the immediate future take me and my fellow PCV Zach to Tunisia, Italy to meet my sister, and perhaps even a treck to Munich in time for Oktoberfest. There's a great "graduation" sort of feeling in the air, as we all depart this bizarre version of our lives that took up the last two years. I'll eventually go home at the beginning of October and start trying to, not "start my new life" or even "embark on the next chapter" as the cliches say, but just move forward. So here's to moving forward, but continually looking backward to what is being left behind. Here's to my friends, the food, and the life that is Peace Corps Mali!

Lechaim!

P.S. There are a whole lot of new pictures up on my Flickr account: flickr.com/photos/29040473@N02/

Check out some newly uploaded photos from my adventures in West Africa! There would be a lot more, but I've temporarily misplaced my memory card from my camera. Hopefully more soon. http://www.flickr.com/photos/29040473@N02

Hey there, faithful readers! I'm remembering back to a day, almost exactly two years ago, when I published my very first blog entry here. Remember that? It was a nice day, probably sunny, since June in Philly tends to be sunny. Birds were chirping and I was sitting outside on the porch writing, for your reading pleasure, a basic summary of the Peace Corps application and my reasons for wanting to become a Peace Corps Volunteer. Those were good days; innocent days; naive days; they were days when all I knew about the next two years of my life were that they were going to be absolutely bucknutty.

Time and experience has proven the bucknuttyness of my life in the Peace Corps, the incredible degree to which I've learned, changed myself, changed others. I've experienced some of the most fun, insane, depressing, surreal, painful, and irreplaceable moments I imagine that I ever will. No, it was not all good. Some of my time here in Africa has made me a miserable as I've ever been, but that misery never held a candle to the thought that looped through my mind, like a never-ending LP record on the turntable of my mind: Cherish what you're doing now, happiness or suffering, because it will never ever happen just that way again.

I've been reading some of my oldest blog postings, recalling everything that was so new and crazy in my early days of PC, all the reasons I had for joining and the expectations I had for what Mali would be like. And I've been laughing my ass off at the Two-Years-Ago-Jake's expense. It's not just the fact that I was unaccustomed to the new rituals of my daily life and the idiosyncrasies of Malian culture. Of course that was going to happen. What I find most funny is just how much of an idealist I was. The Peace Corps sells itself as a great way for a wide-eyed adventurer to go out into the wild and do all these great work projects that will be welcomed with open arms and teach lessons that will make those who learn them wonder how they ever did without them. The fact is that these goals are noble, and in many cases they will be successful. In my case, and in the case of many others, our accomplishments are often minimal, the appreciation for them is often exaggerated, and the impact of them is fleeting. We try to use logic and reason to explain things like basic sanitation, and they look at us like we are speaking an alien tounge. We try to get them involved in community activities that will be a benefit to everyone, and they only try to pass the buck. This is certainly not the case all the time, but just comparing the outcomes of my service to my original expectations of it, I tend to feel a little bit impotent.

So what impact have I made in the past two years? I've made people aware of matters like health, hygeine and clean water, and given them the capacity to do something to directly improve their quality of life. If they choose to do nothing with the knowledge and ideas I've shared with them, that is fine by me. The worst thing a PCV can do is get depressed that they are not doing enough. I think it takes a lot humility to realize that the way Malians think of the world and their place in it simply does not translate to our way of thought, no matter how hard we try. Their traditions and life experiences are too different and too deeply engrained for a native Malian to readily and eagerly think about things from a Westerner's point of view. There are forward-thinkers and open minds to be found, but they are far less common than the Malian who will stick comfortably to the status quo because, with a lack of quality education and positive influences in life, he has no idea how to rise above it.

And there it is: positive influences. When I try to think about my greatest accomplishments here, the moments that made my service worthwhile, it's not the work and the projects that mean the most. It is the conversations I've had with my friends about how Americans see the world. I tell them that not every American is desperate to make money the way most Malians seem to be. I tell them that Americans like to think for themselves, and don't simply take others' words to be gold, as Malians are taught to do when addressed by their elders or respected peers. And I hope that I myself am living proof to them that where you come from in life does not need to determine where you go. If a man they think of as a spoiled, rich, lazy American can come out to the African bush and make himself a poor farmer (and a decent one at that), then they too can move beyond what they expect of themselves.

But I've also learned a lot from Malians. Those who have resigned themselves to a life of poverty and struggle do it with grace. They complain about their life, but not bitterly. They tell me how they sometimes cry themselves to sleep because of their total sadness, but they tell me with a smile. They may not think of it this way, but they have done a petty admirable job of compensating for their lack of livelihood with a surplus of liveliness. And while it may be confused with laziness or ineptness, their laissez-faire way of life makes America's workplace-hyperspeed seem almost barbaric in its lack of tranquility. Meanwhile, those who have not abandoned hope pursue it with a rabid determination. They will gladly shed their egos like perspiration on a hot summer day to make a dollar, or help someone in need do the same. The reason they are not taught skills like critical thinking comes from a very deeply seated sense of respect for elders and authority, respect that our sometimes overly liberal era neglects.

These are just a few thoughts that I've been dwelling on as my service approaches closure. These, as well as memories from the last two years of pet monkeys, Voodoo priests, train station sleepovers, 50-hour bus rides, Foreign Service Spies, mud huts, bucket baths, and eating rice with my hands every night are all the things I will take with me as I leave. I didn't know it at the time, but this is what my Peace Corps experience was destined to be. So be it, I've had a blast. And I think everyone in Niantanso has too.

**This blog entry is dedicated in loving memory of Peri Dansira, the best little monkey a boy could ask for who, despite being a totally uncontrollable mentally bipolar force of destruction and havoc, was also an adorable, entertaining, affectionate friend who relieved the doldrums of village life and will forever allow me to talk about the days when I had a pet monkey. Alah ka lawula sumaya; ka hina a la (May G-d keep her grave cool; may he pity her soul).**

In my small farming village of Niantanso, the average citizen doesn't drink beer, speak English, know who Radiohead are, watch "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," pay attention to global politics, know how to play Yahtzee, appreciate Taco Night with real cheese, or realize and joke about just how silly Mali can sometimes be. What is a poor Peace Corps volunteer to do when there's nobody in the village with whom to commiserate, make fun of locals, and enjoy the simple pleasures of White-Life? They get the hell outta there and hit the city! Sure, we all joined the Peace Corps to see what life is like in a different kind of culture, and we agreed on Mali because we are probably some of the most adventurous people you know. But even the most die-hard cultural integrators, the deepest burrowed-in site-rats, will sometimes have to leave the mud-and-grass nest of the African bush to plug themselves back into the electrical wiring of Americana. And that is why the benevolent souls who run the Peace Corps established the entity that recharges the sanity, soul, and mp3 players, of volunteers everywhere: The Stage House.

Scattered throughout the country, in the most centrally located hubs around which PCVs are placed, are houses, owned by the PC, operated and maintained by the local volunteers. Most of these houses are located in "banking towns," which as the name implies, are the towns where PCVs excitedly stream at the start of each month, like goldfish at suppertime, to withdraw our monthly allowance. We also take advantage of the trip to pick up our care packages (our immensely appreciated care packages, thank you very much), recharge our iPods and/or double-and-triple-A batteries, check emails, update blogs, stalk Facebook accounts, upload photos (I'll have some up soon, I hope), catch ourselves up on all the news, pop culture, and worldly goings on that we miss out on in our villages.

One thing I've always found a bit ironic is that while I'm practically living under a rock when it comes to current events here – I was in America as well except for when I accidentally read something in the paper or saw something on television, neither of which I get here – I am actually more up-to-date on the latest movies, pop music, and celebrity gossip than I ever was in the states, since that is what the people around me devour with the most vigor. The stage house in Kita, where I occasionally go to get online, is packed with the last six months of People, Us Weekly, and Entertainment Magazines, while when all is said and done, most people spend their spare time lounging around the house watching the DVDs sent by friends or pirated downloads of all the stateside hit new movies. I have also had a couple of real marathon runs, watching in a matter of days, entire seasons of the aforementioned "Sunny," "Entourage," "The Office," and my new favorite addiction, "True Blood" (come on, everyone else loves vampires these days, why can't I have my fun?).

The stage houses are also where PCVs get their supply of books. There are generations, literal decades worth of accumulated books in the library of each house, and since PC tends to attract a rather intelligent and creative bunch of folks, the stock is actually pretty good, although the entire shelf full of Star Wars novels in Kita is a bit of an oddity. Since even the busiest PCVs have periods where they are liable to slip into a coma on account of the sheer boredom alone, we go through enough books during our service to warrant granting each of us an honorary BA in English Lit. My personal tally is in the low 30s, and I feel embarrassingly far behind most of my friends until I remember that it's a really silly thing to feel embarrassed about.

Stage houses are also good places to party, because what would a bunch of rurally-stranded Americans rather do when they get together, aside from watching TV and movies, than party? I don't mean party in the sense of buying a few cases of beer, some cheap liquor, and hanging out with the music blasting and the revelry thriving. Okay, I do mean that. But I also mean the parties that help us pretend that we're still in America. Each major holiday has its own designated location so that by tradition, every year, Thanksgiving is in Sikasso, St. Patty's Day is in San, Christmas is a 3-day hike in the famous Dogon Country, and July 4th is in my own Stage House of residence, Manantali, which is often called the best stage house in all of Mali, thanks to a gorgeous rustic landscape and a property outside the city, a bar and pool right nearby, endless acres of mountains and woods to hike in, whole extended families of monkeys that regularly visit the house, and the Bafin River right next to the property where, as responsible PCVs, we never go swimming or wading because of the risk of river-born illnesses and hippopotami, and we most certainly never buy truck tire inner tubes and spend lazy afternoons floating downstream, though that, too, sounds like fun.

Manantali also just hosted the second annual Seder, the ritual ceremony and meal that celebrates the Jewish holiday of Passover and thanks to my parents and aunt, gave Mali a rare dose of such Jewish standards as gefilte fish, matzoh ball soup, and Manischewitz wine. I'm pleased to say we doubled last year's turnout with a baker's dozen in attendance, only four of whom were Jewish. We even invited the PC's medical officer to come while she was doing checkups in the neighborhood. She arrived just in time for dinner and stayed just long enough to find the Afikomen. (The Search for the Afikomen, for all of you Wikipedically disinclined gentiles who aren't in the know, is to the Passover Seder what, roughly speaking, the Egg Hunt is to Easter Sunday. The major differences are that rather than searching for a chocolate egg, we look for a broken piece of matzoh, the unleavened bread, and while the Afikomen was probably what Jesus ate for dessert at his Passover Seder which later turned out to be his Last Supper, the Easter Egg might well have been the first thing he ate a few days later, if you are of the belief that he awoke in time for Sunday Brunch on Easter.)

Many PCVs consider their banking/stage house town like a second home in Mali. Of course, it's not the US, but as I said, we didn't sign up to be in the US. We signed up to be in Mali, be it the sticks or the city, but even back home, staying in the same place all the time can be a bit of a drag. I think most of us also feel stronger personal connections to our fellow PCVs than our neighbors at site, and it is in the context of the stage houses that we build and strengthen those bonds. They are like our college roommates; the people we see the most of now, and will probably keep closest in touch with when we go back to the "real world." For my part, I have loved my life here in the Manantali area. I take a 2 1/2 hour bike ride from Niantanso to our house in the woods, and spend my time lounging by the river, hiking in the woods and cliffs around the lake (the dam is visible on Google Maps!), eating delicious and dirt-cheap local street food which I know I will never find again in the States, spending afternoons at the bar, and of course, being with the other members of Team MANantali (gender imbalance would be an understatement) and also my slightly further away Team Kita crew. But Manantali will always hold that special piece of high-class real estate in my heart. While other stage houses make you feel just a bit like you're back in America again, Manantali feels like your at your vacation house in America – the cabin in the woods. I could easily see myself retiring there, or at least, as well as I can see myself retiring period at this point in my life. And when it's time for me to leave West Africa and come home, I'll remember my stage house with as much fondness, and sometimes even more, than my house in Niantanso. Life at site is the real Peace Corps experience – it's what I came for, but Manantali is what made it just a little more fun, and that is justification enough for me.

*This bog entry is dedicated to Linda P. from Akron, OH.*

Each person who swears in as a Peace Corps Volunteer promises to try their hardest to accomplish the Three Goals of the Peace Corps: to provide technical assistants on projects and exchange of ideas, to "promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served," and lastly to "promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans." By simply being in my village and talking to Malians about myself, my home, and America, I'm fulfilling the third goal. This article you are reading right now is me doing a rockstar job on goal number two. Pretty much any volunteer can do those two goals, whether they try or not, unless they are a total reclusive shut-in. But it's Goal Number One that really tests a PCV's mettle. I've been trying the better part of my service to get some good headway on getting "real work" done in my village, and it's only been the last few months that have seen significant results.

Early on in my service, over a year ago, I tried to utilize the training Peace Corps gave us in prioritizing which projects were the most important and feasible to do first. I told my "homologue," the Malian counterpart who has attended much of the same PC training sessions as I have and is acting as my local go-to-guy for any work or social issues, that I wanted to organize a meeting for anyone interested in starting an informal committee, one where I could more democratically decide how my work in village would go. I had dreams of weekly meetings, enthusiastic volunteers who would take matters into their own hands, and help realize the Peace Corps model for letting me be a catalyst for taking change into their own hands, rather than turning me into Uncle Piggybanks. What actually happened was that the afternoon of the meeting, my homologue, Kaou, drove around telling a bunch of his better educated friends to come over for some meeting. When I began the meeting, I gave a little speech with some examples of the kinds of projects I could imagine being successful, and over the next half hour, the attendees listed back all of the examples I had named, talking about how great they would be and how they would love to see me accomplish all of them because my poor little village could not possible front the money to accomplish any of this on their own. Clearly, there was a miscommunication of intentions..

In the end, they decided that the project they all wanted was for me to fix a water pump in the middle of town, but after over a month of telephone tag and missed meetings, I finally found that the cost of the particular project was unfeasibly high. Going back to square one, I told Kaou again, and in greater detail, how I wanted a next meeting to go, organized, formal, and with useful results that could lead to productive followup. And once again, it devolved into people shouting out any idea that popped into their head, most of them expensive and non-development-friendly.

Without going into too much detail, my service since then proved to be minimally productive in terms of the First Goal and I found myself settling into a pattern of general inactivity while at site. I found myself things to do to keep myself busy by farming corn and helping my friends in the fields during the rainy season, while helping villagers with their own home repairs in the dry season. I also did some "real" PC work, funding out of my pocket a repair of the village's major water pump, with the overly idealistic expectation that the pump's supervisor would collect money from the village to reimburse me. I also went around town for a while leading sessions on how to use chlorine to monthly treat well-water, making it drinkable. This too, was done with the overconfident sense that after giving people the chlorine to treat their wells the first time and teaching them how to repeat monthly to keep the water clean, that they would follow up on their own. But, as I deep-down knew would happen, not a single family ever performed a follow-up, as they were simply content having received the gift of sanitation once, however fleeting it was. The fact is that in Malian culture it is impolite, not to mention foolish, to ever reuse a free gift, be it from a friend or NGO. Of course they would take the chlorine, let me teach them how to treat their drinking water, smile as if they were interested, and never think about it again.

I was used to this reaction, since it was basically the same one I'd been getting all along, every time I tried to enlighten my neighbors to the benefits of washing with soap, treating drinking water, other basic sanitary practices to avoid illnesses, or any time I tell them about the ways that Americans do things like marriage or religion differently. I find it interesting that no matter how many times Malians say that they love America, that it is the greatest country in the world, and that they all want to go there, none of them have any interest in adopting "the American way," being totally comfortable with a distant admiration only. I'm still wondering if it is fair to call this hypocrisy, worshipping an object or idea so strongly without doing anything to emulate it or learn from its example, or if special allowance should be given to a society that is simply sticking to its traditional roots for the sake of keeping the status quo.

Towards the end of last year, things began to change. A elderly friend of mine approached me, offering to let us help each other. He was president of a local credit and loan association, and he wanted my financial assistance with a project. The idea was to install an electrical dynamo to a millet and corn-grinding machine that the association owned which would store the electricity and make it available for people in the town to buy. This would allow families to wire electricity into their homes and pay for it monthly, or for heavy-duty electrical work like welding to repair farm-equipment to used in town. The money raised would go to fund the association's other projects. This project sounded like a good idea, development-friendly in the sense of the village building its resources from it, and since it would be funded by the association and myself, we would not have to worry about the villagers themselves raising money, which for an expensive project, would basically doom it from the start as rural Malians generally like to spend the little money they have on essentials like food or familiar luxuries like tea (too often the latter) and rarely on anything that's new to them or that they don't receive a very direct and obvious benefit from. (People would wash their hands with soap every day if there was a soap that magically and instantly cured all illnesses like colds or diarrhea. Short of that, it's just another abstract change that may or may not make a difference.)

Shortly after, I got funding for a soak pit-building project, the effect of which would be that families have a simple, cheap way to get rid of wastewater runoff that keeps the streets next to the latrines clean of urine and bathwater. (Funded through African Sky, with donations from the Linda P. to whom this article is dedicated.) After a year of seeing my ideas for village-improvement either proven unrealistic or unable to solicit great interest, it was good to finally see some headway and a chance to do something to vindicate my time in Niantanso, both to myself and my community.

Of course, neither of these projects went off entirely without a hitch. The soak pits were slow getting started because none of the interested families, despite my occasionally nagging, ever did any of the initial work like digging the water-drainage pit to demonstrate their legitimate interest. As for the generator, months after my funding had come in, the association running the project still had not gotten their 30% contribution together, waiting for some of their debts to come in. Both of these problems were quickly rectified when my supervisor from the PC staff came down to Niantanso for a visit to make sure things were on track and to find out if my village really deserved a replacement for me when my contract runs out. Seeing how little progress had been made, she let loose with a scolding, seething hellfire and brimstone like a Southern Preacher, demanding to know why my village seems to have no motivation, no interest, and no work ethic to get anything done. Kaou and the association president were almost shaking with fear by the time she was done with her reprimand, and within only a couple weeks, the association had raised the funds that they had not been able to gather in the last 4 months (since apparently they had five million CFA in debts uncollected around town, out of the paltry 160,000 CFA they needed for this project) and almost overnight, five gaping holes in the ground had been dug next to five of the dirtiest, smelliest latrines in my side of the village.

So far, a number of other soak pits have been built – though the enthusiasm has slowed down – and the generator has been installed and tested. Unfortunately, none of this happened soon enough for me to start any new big projects before the rainy season where everyone practically lives in their fields for 5 months, and even then, I'm still wary about having another large funded project begin, since even something as simple as raising pocket change from families around the town to fix a water pump desperately in need of fixing had proved a practically impossible undertaking.

Not too long ago, a French couple stopped in Niantanso for a couple weeks to do research for a development project they were planning. We had a few long talks about the best way for outsiders to do work in West Africa. Their findings were that the culture here too often seems to be more interested in handouts than participating in good projects that will better the community with their own involvement. Part of that is because they are used to organizations that do actually give handouts, the proverbial fish instead of the fishing lesson. There are occasional times when the handout is a capacity builder, like giving certain villagers goats to raise, so that when those goats have matured and reproduced, they can be redistributed throughout the town and everyone wins. These projects fail when the villagers fail to maintain the goats and eat them, neglect them, or horde them. The couple was much more confident in the classic model when we simply do "capacity building" and simply educate and enlighten those in need of aide, giving as little material as possible, but the more we talked, the more we just came up with endless examples where this approach also floundered because of lack of motivation or genuine interest on the part of the community, or satisfaction with the way things were, not wanting to do anything more productive than just complaining. We came to the sobering conclusion that there is still no surefire way to determine which projects and development strategies will be successful, and the best we can do is hope that not too much money and resources are wasted before the underdeveloped world can get onto its feet. There is little question that people in Africa, South America, and all the impoverished places of the world would be happier if they were richer, healthier, and more a part of the global community, but the difficulty arises in finding out how much they are willing to do to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. These questions are especially pertinent for people like myself, when I have to make decisions like whether or not a project should really be done, or if I should even be replaced by a new volunteer when I leave, or if the village actually deserves another American who, despite all his efforts, is unable to shake the conviction that Westerners are just here to throw money around. After over a year, I am finally feeing good about having done something to really help my community, yet despite my excitement, I'm still wondering if it's even worth it, or if it's just a temporary fix, and if I myself am really qualified to do anything more than that anyway.

*For two and a half weeks, I travelled through Ghana and Mali with my Mom, Dad and little sister Rena. I asked Mom to write a special edition of my blog with an outsider's perspective of the West Africa Peace Corps experience. Here it is.*

Jacob met his mother, father and sister in Ghana for a 10-day tour with driver and guide. Therein lay the first adjustment for Jacob, who was used to interacting with people on the African street, not as an observer driving in a vehicle to selected sites. We were definitely tourists. The second major adjustment was staying in upscale hotels with great buffets. This proved fortuitous for me, as it was an easy transition to the local diet (more on this later).

Jacob's friend Dave called Ghana "Africa for Beginners" - an easy first introduction. Here are some impressions:

- Cities teeming with crowded markets, women carrying bundles of every shape and size on their heads, and babies tied to their backs with a length of fabric

- Colorful African fabrics, including prints of Obama's portrait on clothing

- Every imaginable product displayed and sold on the street, from produce and dresses to sofas, auto parts and appliances

- Vendors coming up to the car window to sell their wares (you never have to leave your car to buy groceries!)

- Businesses with names like "Holy Be Thy Name Electronics" or "In God We Trust Beauty Supplies" in this religiously Christian country

- Stopping for fresh coconuts, cut open by boys with machetes on the side of the road

- Rural villages lining the roads, with cement huts and corrugated metal roofs

- Crowded fishing villages where the fishermen repair nets and row out in dugout canoes, and the wives grill or smoke fish along the side of the road

- Life lived out of doors; naked little boys playing soccer on the beach

- Open sewers with brackish water that cannot handle the mountains of trash

- The most memorable sites, the slave trade castles, impressed us with the magnitude of this horror (incredibly only 2% sent to the US, the numbers are staggering)

- And a personal favorite, watching the take-off at dusk from trees lining Accra, MILLIONS of bats flying out from their daytime lairs to feed during the night.

Rena and I returned to Mali with Jacob, leaving the lush coastal greenery for the drier Sub-Saharah, browner, more rural once out of the capital. A couple of important contrasts with Ghana:

- Population is Moslem, more conservative and somewhat secular; few women in jeans

- French is the official language, and I delighted in pulling out my high school vocabulary to order a bottle of water

- Villages of round mud huts, using mud bricks or straw, and thatched roofs so much more attractive (but less durable and cheaper) than the corrugated metals

- Dust is pervasive, often choking us on these dry dirt roads; we wash our feet frequently and can quickly detect the dusty odor on our clothes.

The day after our arrival in Mali, we headed to Jacob's village, Niantanso, home to 1,000 - 2,000 villagers, a school, hospital, mayor's office and fields. No electricity, running water, or cell phone / internet connection. Life at its simplest. Here is a sample of our day:

- Arrival is a big hit, we are instant celebrities as crowds gather with endless greetings and smiles from this attractive people

- Children are mesmerized, especially by Rena who quickly teaches hand games and hopscotch; they are adorable; dress varies from clean, pretty outfits to rags

- Enough space is cleared in the mud hut for our strangely incongruous suitcases, a large foam mattress was borrowed, and we laid out our sleeping bags

- A drum circle of 4 drummers parades into Jacob's compound, and we are given seats of honor during the drumming while women danced, drawing us to dance with them - the crowd grew so large, they brought down the roof of the kitchen porch - literally

- For our meals with the host family, we were lucky to have a family bowl for washing and for eating (with hands or wooden spoons), eating millet with peanut sauce

- We learned to squat and to wash from a water kettle

- We went to bed exhausted and listened to the nighttime sounds of crickets, sheep mewing, donkeys braying loudly outside the door, monkey's occasional whimpers, rooster crowing from 4:00 am, women pounding the day's millet by 6:00 am

- Next day, we accompanied the women to the field for the peanut harvest, learning to shake the chaff from the nuts (a good physics lesson); later watched the men threshing millet at distant fields while we joined them for a midday meal

- Visits in the village to distribute the gifts we brought to Jacob's friends and host family; we also gave pens to the children, who are not permitted to attend school without one

- A visit with the mayor in his yard; he said even if Jacob left tomorrow, he would have still accomplished a greater understanding of Americans by Malians, and of Mali by American visitors like ourselves

- A special honor was an evening concert in our yard by the local Griot (musician / storyteller) and 4 women who sang about Jacob's African namesakes (Ablaye Dembele).

A final word about getting sick in the village: Within 36 hours of our arrival in the village, I was incapacitated by the common travelers scourge and was unable to eat or drink or hold down the medicines I had brought. We were advised not to use the village hospital. How could I tolerate the tortuous 7-hour bus ride back to Bamako? Here is what we did.

- Jacob rode his bike an hour to get cell phone reception and call the Peace Corps doctor to describe the symptoms and ask advice

- Additional medicines were recommended, not available in the villages

- A villager with a motorcycle was prevailed upon to make the 3-hour round-trip to the closest town to purchase medicine

- By the 3rd day, my symptoms were controlled

Next morning, we packed to await transport, which was filled, but took us on when Jacob and Rena offered to climb on the roof and travel with the luggage. It worked!

Visiting the village quickly became like a parallel universe of a simple idealized lifestyle without all the STUFF (junk mail, email messages, schedules, etc, etc), but also too easily romanticized. The poverty is rampant and many families stuggle to make it from one harvest to the next. Water resources are failing, and waste management does not exist. Although we adapted surprisingly well to the rudiments of village life, we welcomed our return to a soft hotel bed, clean toilet, and restaurant fare. Peace Corps volunteers often report few changes resulting from their many projects. On the other hand, the mayor's comment reflected the fulfillment of Peace Corps goals #2 & #3 - no small thing.

If you go to the CIA factbook website and look up Mali, you will see that under the religious statistics, Mali has a roughly 90% Muslim population, 1% Christian, and 9% "indigenous beliefs." In my experience, if you ask the typical Malian about their religion, their answers tend to back up that statistic. However, if you ask questions that go into more depth, like which practices they observe or how much they really know about their religion, you'll wonder exactly how those numbers were arrived at. Much like in America, the number of people who strictly observe a religion is much smaller than the number of people who call themselves followers. However, unlike Americans, who as a trend move away from traditional religions and down new paths, Mali tends to have a mix of this, and also movement towards traditionalism at the same time. Peoples' religious observances mix both Islam, and the older, native Animist practices that predated the infiltration of Islam.

To be fair, I should say that I haven't really done any formal research on the issue, and what I am writing here is based on my own observations, mostly taking place in my village, which even by Malian standards is not a heavily Islamic area. During Ramadan, it seemed like the majority of people did not do any fasting, and on Tabaski, it seemed like only a third of the village showed up for the big morning prayer that "everyone" traditionally attends. If I were to count the number of religious, superstitious, or customary practices that I've witnessed, I would easily say that the majority of them were Animist, or if not specifically animist, they bore no resemblence to anything in Islam that I am aware of.

Imagine if most Americans were terrified at the sight of black cats crossing their paths, took detours to avoid walking under ladders, or fretted every time they stepped on a crack for fear of having broken their mother's back, and then thanking G-d with all their heart to learn that she has remained unscathed. This is how Malians tend to react to most of their superstitions and supernatural beliefs. In previous articles, I have mentioned the incontinence-inducing fear of frogs, the "no singing in the rain" rules, and the blame of many misfortunes on, not bad luck or irresponsibility, but evil spirits or malicious sorcerers.

One night, a few months back, I visited my friend's village down the road and when I arrived, I was greeted by my friend who looked at me with consternation in his face and asked me if I arrived OK. I told him I was fine, and he asked if I was sure that I hadn't seen any demons or witches on the road. I told him I was pretty sure I hadn't noticed anything unusual and he breathed a visible sigh of relief and thanked Allah. He informed me that there had been a lot of that kind of activity in the area lately. The previous night, a man riding on his motorcycle had been scared into a crash when he saw a ten foot tall, white "djini" – the Bambarification of the French word for "spirit" – and that a village-wide advisory had been announced to be careful during night travel for a little while. My friend also told me that there was witch activity going on in town and that I should not greet any old people unless I knew them. Later at night, when he asked me to guard his bike while he went on a quick errand, he reminded me to abolutely not tell anyone my name. When I asked him why, he replied nervously, "Just...don't." Another time, when he pulled into my property on his motorcycle that is less than a year old but looks well over five, I asked him why he and his brother do such a crummy job taking care of such a nice expensive bike, noting the broken lights, dials, exhaust pipe, the dents, and the engine which made more noise than a whole Harely Davidson Biker Rally. He insisted that it wasn't his fault, it was his brother who takes the bike on long trips into the bush and leaves them in dangerous places where djini activity is common, so the evil spirits come and mess with the bike out of simple maliciousness.

As superstitious as this kid is, he is also a devout Muslim who prays five times a day, refrains from alcohol, and does all the other things commanded by the Qur'an. He is a fairly typical example of various Animist/Islamic crossovers that occur in Malian culture. Many of the beliefs and practices I've witnessed, while clearly Animist in origin, are ascribed to Islamic ones. There is a leather sort of bracelet traditionally worn in Mali that often contains blessings or holy inscriptions from Animist priests, but often people go to the local Imam to have passages from the Qur'an written inside them. In other instances, people use traditional Animist statues to serve as intermediaries between themselves and Allah, essentially turning Islam into a idol-worshipping religion.

It is no surprise that Isam and Animism have become as intertwined as they are here. In the words of a villager friend of mine, "Malians do not ask questions, they only hear the answers and accept them." Having anything that resembles a religious conversation with many locals becomes an incredibly frustrating experience since rather than exchanging ideas, they simply mourn the fact that I am wrong, that I am simply too blind to accept the things they have been taught from birth, in spite of my Western Logic and rational reasoning. I remarked about this to an English teacher, Maiga who works in my village, but comes from a larger city in Mali and who tends to be one of the most educated, open minded people I've met here. I was telling him how peculiar Mali's particular brand of religious and superstitious acceptence was. Compared to Christianity and traditional Islam, which, while faith-based, have a heavy reliance on canons and records, and Judaism which has always impressed me with its philosophy of challenging its practicers to expand their knowledge and find flaws, all of which presumably can be accounted for, the Malian theological tradition is to simply do what your father tells you, since he is older and thereby wiser. I told Maiga how peculiar I thought it was that so much of the population believes in these magic traditions, powerful amulets, and incantations, and he replied, "Well, it is not that they believe these things, it is that they are true." I was shocked. And he went on to tell me about an elderly man in another village who has a ring of invisiblity, and a leather bracelet that some wear that literally turn bullets fired at you into harmless drops of water.

"Has anyone ever tested these magic powers?" I asked. "Have you ever seen it happen?" He had not in person, but the invisibility ring has quite a number of reliable witnesses, and powers like the bullets-into-water trick only works under certain (and rather infrequent) conditions, like an all-out war between two neighboring villages. I was stumped. I was not sure quite how to take this bit of lore from Maiga, the guy I could count on to be the most reasonable – at least to my standards – and sympathetic ear in town to exhasperated grumblings about what even other Malians will deride as "redneck country," the less-refined country folk of Mali's Wild West. He continued to tell me about Animist superstitions and secrets that some old people know that they might tell you if you kiss up to them and catch them off guard, but I was thinking to myself, This must be exactly how it happens. Here is Maiga, one of the smartest folks here, and I would believe anything that came out of his mouth. So if that's the case, why should I listen to him with regards to everything EXCEPT this? Logically, and reasonably speaking, he must be right!

And that's how it happens here. What need have they for scientists and professors and schools when the most trusted people they can think of live right there in the community. Sure, some of the people who are either old enough to be wiser or young enough to be more progressive will believe what they hear on the news and from whatever other information outlets they get a hold of, but most people don't have all that much access. The information, the politics and science and history that they hear is all so fragmented, that as far in the bush as I live, which isn't even all that far, even the best informed people are only so by a margin compared to their American or European equivalent.

Now the last thing I would want to do is imply that traditional religious practices are a sign of being uninformed or sheltered, and it is certainly not a bad thing to be . If anything, keeping the old rituals should be encouraged, so long as they don't hinder the progress and development of a nation that needs change for the bet. . . oops, now I'm breaking a cardinal rule of Peace Corps: making cultural judgement calls. What I am tempted to say is to keep around the music, the masks, the holidays where only devoted Animist practicers are allowed to even leave the house during the ceremonial parade so they don't witness the "heathenism." What such judgement calls inevitably lead to is the question of what to do with such equally valid customs and traditions as women being second-class citizens, legally subservient to men, or the Bomu people who live in the deepest parts of the Malian bush and still commit human sacrifices and cannibalism, at least according to many many very convincing rumours I've heard from PCVs and Malians alike. I think, as I write this, that I am quickly getting stuck in one of the oldest and most hopeless arguments in the history of my line of work: where do you draw the line between tradition and revision. And of course, I'm not even going to try to answer that now. I'll let you think about it and tell me how you feel.

"Ablaye, what time is it?" Mamadou asks me.

"It's quarter past four," I reply.

"Uh huh? Well, Ablaye, it’s been a good chat, and now I have to get off to afternoon prayers. You coming?"

"What? To pray?” I ask, with the half-feigned curiosity that is part of the pattern of any Malian conversation, speaking simply because keeping the conversation going is a good thing to do.

"Yes, to the Mosque! How come you never come to pray at the Mosque like a good Malian?"

I cycle through the half-dozen or so answers that I’ve stored in my head for use when I will inevitably need them, as this exact conversation is common currency for me. For convenience's sake, though I know full way it will not suffice, I settle on the simplest: "'Cause I'm not a Muslim."

"Yes, but now that you are here in Mali, in our village, you can become more like us and go to our prayers."

"Right, but I've told you before, I'm Jewish. Our prayers are not the same and I'm not even allowed to pray in your Mosque, even if I wanted to. Allah says so."

"I understand, but being a Jew is bad. Now you are in a Muslim village, you should become a Muslim like the rest of us. When you go home to France or Germany or wherever you live, you can be a Jew again."

I started having conversations that went more or less exactly like this about a year ago, when people noticed I went to the Tabaski service and was standing off to the side with the children, rather than praying with the two-hundred-odd adults. That was when my neighbors in Niantanso realized that not only wasn't I praying with them, but I was really not praying with them. I don't thing anybody took it as a genuine offense, but rather as yet another thing the dumb rookie white kid was screwing up. But as time went on, and word got around that the white kid was getting a tan – speaking Malinke, eating rice and sauce with my hands, working in the fields and adamantly refusing to be the only one to be resting at any given time – people began to wonder why I was doing everything else right, except being a Muslim.

Now here in the Peace Corps, we put a heavy emphasis on integration and cross-cultural understanding. This is not to say that we are expected to make ourselves indistinguishable from our Host Country Nationals (HCNs). It merely means that we strive to remember that those denizens of the Underdeveloped World (there's some good PC vocab for ya) aren't backwards, they are just unworldly. They have not been raised, as we in the West were, with Political Correctness and Universal Tolerance drilled into the deepest core of our noggins.

Therefore, to be told be my neighbours, or strangers I meet in busses and at egg-sandwich stands, that being a Jew is bad and being a Muslim is good is not really an offensive statement at all. If anything, it is a statement of fact. Talking to a good friend of mine recently, I was told that contrary to the popular global belief, true Islam is a kind, tolerant religion that does not wish harm on any person. This, by extension, implies that since one is supernally harming oneself by not being a Muslim, it is the Muslim's duty to do what they can to help others rectify their misguided ways and avoid an eternity in the place where "even the peanut and okra sauce is made of fire!" I've been given more or less this same line of logic before from Hell-threatening Christians or stalwartly scientific Atheists, and it is almost always delivered to me in a hostile change-or-die diatribe. Here, the approach is more along the lines of "It would be nice if you were a Muslim, and we really don't want you to burn in Hell, but heck, we don't listen to you about not drinking river water, so we don't expect you to heed our 'Muhammad-isms.'"

The only time I really hear any sort of aggressive conversion-based talk is when it involves a culture-based activity, like the aforementioned Mosque exchange, or when it involves financial importunities. Regarding the former, these conversations don't really bother me since they usually just lead to interesting theological conversations comparing Judaism and Islam. The latter is what most often irritates me: "You should give me your camera. You can always buy another one, but I'm poor."

"You want me to just give you the camera for free? You don't do anything in return??"

"I can give you blessings. . . Allah will reward you greatly in the afterlife! See, blessings have Allah attached to them, so they are much more potent than money."

"Oh, well in that case, if Allah can give me such a great reward, may Allah also provide you with a camera."

Back in May, when I took a brief trip back to the states for my sister's wedding, one of the most often asked questions was "What is it like living in a Muslim country, especially you being a Jew?" More often than not, people were surprised by my answer: it's totally cool. Islam has gotten an international reputation that it does not deserve. I believe that there are still a large number of people who are aware that true Quranic Islam does not support the Extremist tactics that so often make the news, but in Mali, all the Islamic stereotypes do not just prove to be bent or unfaithful, they fall as flat as can be imagined. Some people think there is a general dislike among Muslims towards Jews for whatever political and religious differences there are. Malian villagers generally know practically nothing about Judaism, and have no basis to form any opinions. In fact, the only people they tend to take up a major conflict with are Extremist Muslims. Any Malian Muslim will resolutely insist that nowhere in the Quran is permission ever given to kill. Those who do murder in the name of Allah or anything else are flat-out not Muslims. I have also heard such declarations made about those who do not pray five times a day and those who drink alcohol, be it the fermented palm wine or the watered-down rubbing alcohol which is the alcoholics' beverage of choice out where I am. If you are Muslim or not, that is your own business, but if you are going to be a Muslim, either get on your knees or get off the prayer mat. (I have often thought, half-jokingly, that Mali would be fantastic as a fascist nation. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, you are either doing things according to the status quo, or you are doing it wrong. This follows with religious observance, wood-chopping or garden-weeding techniques, and even day-to-day behavior. A friend of mine once observed that our Regional Peace Corps shuttle driver was too hostile and uncourteous when he came through the village. I told him that the driver was a bit of a tough guy and was sometimes unfriendly, even by American standards, until you get to know him. My friend was indignant: "He should not even be allowed in this country if he is not going to greet people and bring them gifts from the city! If you cannot be friendly, you do not deserve to be in Mali!").

The only time I have ever heard Allah’s name invoked in a hostile way was the other day when I was walking through the bus station in Bamako trying to find a good bus ticket. My party and I were followed for 20 minutes by a man who kept insisting that we give up our search for a nice, reputable bus and take his smoking Jalopy on the seven hour ride to Sikasso instead. We kept refusing, and finally got good tickets on a good bus, and as we left the vulture in our dust, he hollered after us “May Allah kill you allll!!!”

As to specifically Jew-Muslim issues, they are virtually nonexistent. Most people just don't know enough about Jews for any issues to exist. I have many times had to explain the pro-Israel side of the Mid-East conflict, which some people know about from listening to Radio France International, and for those of you who keep up with such foreign affairs, I'm sure you don't need to be told whose version of the conflict is being aired over French frequencies. Even in this case though, there is generally no association made between Israelis and Jews. I was once having a conversation with an Imam who, after listening to me tell him all about Judaism, of which he knew almost nothing, told me he knew of an ethnic group in Israel, naming the French word for "Jew." When I told him that they were the same people as the Bamabara word I had been using, he got very excited. "You're one of those people?? Wow, your people are the greatest! You are so smart, and you have such powerful positions in the world, and I hear you invented the cell phone..." and proceeded to tell me and everyone around why Jews are some of the most estimable people in world history.

Having described my general impressions of Islam in Mali, I should also go on to disclaim myself by saying that most of this is based on my observations of my village, which may not be the best litmus test to make general statements with. According to the census, Mali is about 90% Muslim, but a large number of these Muslims are mainly so on paper, observing very few Muslim laws, and still following a lot of the old Animist rituals. They will also say they are Muslim because Atheism is not considered a legitimate answer and Animism is not considered a religion but merely a collection of rituals and customs. This pattern holds especially true in my village more than many. The devout and observant Muslims lament the lack of fellow devotees, the miniscule turnouts at the Mosque, the drinking of the isopropanol/water cocktail. This seems to be the result of an paradoxical combination of steadfast conservatism and adherence to the traditional African beliefs, and (so-called) enlightened secularism, where, as in much of the rest of the world, people are praying before the Neon Gods and leaving behind Allah, who is just not as much fun as sex and beer. This is another one of the excuses I utilize to get out of my "Muslim obligations" ("My own host family doesn't fast for Ramadan, why would I?") but I do feel bad for using it, for reminding those who truly do care of the increasing nails in the coffin of their traditions. Secularization and general abandonment of faith: now there's something a Malian Muslim and an American Jew have in common.

And since the timing is right, happy Thanksgiving and Tabaski to you all!

I came to Kita, a small city east of my village, with grand plans of spending lots of time in the internet cafe, uploading photos, updating my blog, and sending messages out to all my friends. Instead, I spent the last weekend enjoying a big Halloween party, enjoying my time with Americans, and waiting out a citywide blackout that cut off internet for a day. Oops. That just means that instead of my normal witty insight and informative social observation which I know you all relish and enjoy, you're instead just stuck with a short and hasty "I'm still alive" letter to tide you over until my next trip out of town for Thanksgiving, which will happen a week early here so that w can have time to also celebrate Tabaski, the Muslim "Thanksgiving/Yom Kippur" holiday, with our host families in our villages.

In the meantime, as just a brief update before my bus leaves, the last few weeks have seen the end of the rainy season, and the start of harvesting. People spend the days gathering all their friends together to break off the corn, dig up the peanuts, and cut the rice and millet for harvest. This is another example of how Malians turn hard labor into a fun day in the field by making it a social event, egging each other to work harder and race each other, joking and jeering all the while. I myself hosted one such event, though rather than getting 30 men to come in and harvest two or three hectares of corn, I gave a bunch of little kids candy to come and work my quarter-hectare crop and husk all the corn. After leaving it on top of my porch roof to dry, and then putting all the cobs in a sck and beating them with a heavy log to break off the kernals, I ended up with about 100 kgs of corn, plenty to feed myself and my pet monkey for a good long time.

In the midst of all this activity, the funding came through for my first big funded project, a major step up from the smaller-scale, though equally important work I've been doing so far like teaching people how to chemically treat their wells to clean the drinking water or engaging in endless futile conversations about the importance of washing hands with soap before eating and after using their bare hands to wipe themselves on the toilet. This project involves hooking up a battery to the electric millet-pounding machine so that electricity can be efficiently stored and bought by people in the town, serving as an income-generator for the credit and loan association in the town which owns the machine, as well as a way for locals to do everything from welding broken farming equipment to storing food in refridgerators to watching the latest Jay-Z videos on their DVD players. I figure that the fact that I am not doing a strictly water/sanitation project as my work focus normally is, is made up for by the fact that I will get oodles of good street cred from the locals, who to this day often still see me as a fun little white boy to point at.

As of now, I am hanging out in Kita, waiting to get a bus home, following the wild and raucus Peace Corps Halloween party held here. In case you're wondering, I cut out cardboard boxes and dressed up as The Whereabox, the figurative message box PCVs send SMS or emails to when they travel alerting staff as to their whereabouts. In other words, you have to be a PCV to get the joke. Photos will come later.

Meanwhile, it's time I headed out, so until Thanksgiving, Peace!

The other advantage of rainy season that I negelcted to mention in my last blog is that once your field is sufficiently weeded and planted, there's not much else to do with everyone else out in the field, so you can take off with some fellow PCVs and ship out to Dogon Country. See the unique, goofy-looking houses! The villages carved out of the side of the cliffs! Walk the grueling hikes up and down mountains, through sorghum fields, and in and out of towns where even your obscure Malian language or basic French skills will get you next to nowhere! Sleep on top of mud houses under the stars, until the stars become obscured by clouds and the rain pelts you from every possible angle! Travel two hours through the midday heat only to find that the water pump at the end of the road is broken! Enjoy hiking rocky terrain and jagged cliff edges that would never be legal in the US without a telephone book-sized liability form!

Or just check out the pictures of me doing it...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29040473@N02/

One of the most popular games to Malians and Americans love to play together is what I call The "What Do We Have That You Don't?" Game (catchier name pending). It is played by a "Toubab" sitting boredly and awkwardly with a bunch of Malians who want to entertain each other, despite having far-too-limited language skills to say anything of interest. The conversation eventually turns into a series of exchanges that are essentially along the lines of "Do you have XYZ in America?" "Why yes, but ours are better and built with machines. Do you have ABC here?" "No, we are poor." Lately, with the start of the Rainy Season, or Samaya Waati for those of you who want to impress coworkers with your Bamabara vocabulary, the conversations have taken on a more percipitous quality (pun sooo intended). Through endless conversations, killing afternoons and nights over Malian tea, I am now confident that within months, the denizens of Niantanso will be more knowledgable of American weather patterns than they ever wanted to be. And now, so will you be, faithful readers, as I give you a Rainy Season Rundown.

The most basic thing to know about Samaya Waati in Mali is that it is one of the two or three seasons, depending if you distinguish the Cold Season from the Hot or not. The Mango Rains begin around late March, if they come at all, and are good indicators for whether we will have tons and tons of the best mangos in the world, or simply just a helluva lot. Then, there is a hiatus in which time people figure out whether they need to repair their grass roofs at the last minute or not, before the rains come in earnest, starting in June and petering out in October. Some of the rain is your standard issue drizzle-to-pouring fare, giving your crops a good moistening, lasting a half an hour, and leaving as quickly as it came. Of course, that kind is boring compared to much more dramatic, awe-inspiring, apocalyptic monsoons that come every so often. These begin with a deep heavy gray filling the horizon in the distance, much like the scene at the top of this very page (if you are reading this post on the original blog site jakeinmali.blogspot.com), picking up to gale-force winds that feel and sound as if they will rip the bamboo and grass right off the roof of your house, which would be very unfortunate if your roof, like mine, is made only out of bamboo and grass. Then the rain starts, inundates everything in site for an hour or so, destroys mud-made latrines, scares animals, ruins farmwork, and then bashfully slinks off, leaving the sun shining in its wake, like an awkward child who accidentally destroys his mother's china collection, and quietly exists the scene hoping nobody will notice.

Left in the wake of the rain are puddles, and from puddles come some of the most fearsome, malicious blights the average African will ever encounter. The days are swarmed with flies, the nights invaded by mosquitoes; the former landing on all manner of fecal matter and organic waste before alighting on a victim's food or open wounds, spreading disease and infection; the latter, the vicious harbinger on of the world's most merciless killers - Malaria. While I have been managing to keep myself fairly healthy (thank you, Joe Taxpayer and the inventors of Mephloquine), I have been victimized in my own way be the illness brought on by the rain. The only thing more painful than seeing neighbors and friends afflicted by the disease of the day is having them come up to you asking for help. Of course, I am all too happy to dispense my knowledge of cheap, all-natural home remedies made from various friuts, leaves, and other ingredients which can be bought, if not in the local market, then in the Manantali market, where they would be going to buy medicine anyway if the local pharmacist (and by default, doctor) is dry.

"But why can't you just give us your medicine? We have no money!" they explain.

"Because I'm not a doctor," I reply, with a fully-aware sense of futility.

"But you have medicine. You get sick and you treat yourself with pills here! Why can't you give us those?"

"Because the medicine you want to use to treat what you might have, not even I am allowed to take until I send a vial of my own preserved feces to a medical lab in Bamako for testing, so there is no monkey-frumping way I'm giving it to you to give to your 4-year-old!"

The kinds of illnesses they think they have and the medicines they want are generally not necessarily coupled together. For example, "Sumaya" literally means Malaria, but practially, it means anything with all or some of the same symptoms. This means that a Malaria treatment, which is quinine-based, will be used to treat anything from the flu to dysentary to an assortment of possible parasites, which are not killed by quinine. Similarly, some illnesses defy definition, and are just characterized by the location of discomfort, like "furudimi," which is a pain in the "furu," wherever that may be. (Although one Fulani shepheard with a surprising array of English phrases under his turban once translated it as "Pancreatic Cancer." He did not, however, know what Cancer was.)

One of the most unusual afflictions I've seen happened to a good friend of mine, and was honestly one of the most unsettling things I've ever witnessed, so of course it deserves its own paragraph. I arrived home one day only to discover that "a certain somebody's" adorable, friendly, pet Patas monkey, Perry Dansira, was looking rather melancholy and listless. On close inspection, she was covered in cuts and welts, and I assumed she'd had a run in with a dog. On much closer inspection, the kind of closeness only brought on by my own creepy sense of curiosity, I realized that these wounds were still wide open, and some tissue was protruding slightly, only to retract when touched by the twig I prodded it with. Following the hunch brought on by the most morbid parts of my imagination, I prodded the tissue with tweezers, squeezed the swollen area, and with Perry in full, clearly understanding cooperation, I removed a small, fat, white grub. In all honesty, I might have shrieked like a girl, and I might have thrown the worm and the tweezers far into the yard, panic-stricken after having an instant flashback to a traumatic leech attack I suffered ten years ago. When my hand stopped shaking and my heart stopped racing, I retrieved the tweezers, placed the specimen in a plastic bag and went off to my host-family for assistance. They, of course, laughed at my consternation and still shaking fingers and told me I had nothing to worry about. This was a "Tumbo," a fly larva burrowed into the flesh of all animals, and occasionally people, during the rainy season. They told me I could leave them be, and the monkey would most likely die, which was fine since she was too small to eat anyway, or I could search her whole body and pluck them out one by one. Grudgingly, I followed my ASPCA-inspired sensibilities and began "a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in that area" (with respect to The Fugitive) to find these worms, much like my obsessive hunts for wood-mites in my house a few weeks earlier when I realized what the munching sounds coming from my roof after every rain were. (Un)luckily, Perry decided to aid in the exraction of the worms, and in one of the most physically and emotionally nauseating scenes I've ever witnessed, she would pull away the limb that I had partly uprooted a worm from, and attack with her mouth, pulling it out the rest of the way, taking a few good chews, and gulping down the little monster which had just been doing the same to her own subdermal layers.

No description of Samaya Waati would be complete without mentioning the most important aspect of the season - farming. In the interest of cross-cultural integration, I decided to become a corn farmer. Limiting myself to just the area in my concession, which is about a quarter of a hectare (half the size of a real farmer's smallest field), I got my hands on some seeds, bought the proper equipment, a large hand-hough and a smaller one used as a trowel, gathered some of my friends to show me how it's done, and went to work. In a departure from the norm, rather than telling me to take a break and go slowly since I'm just a lowly American, not a real tough Malian farmer, everyone stared in amazement as they realized I do in fact know how to farm, and then insisted that my "field" was too small and I should at least quadruple it, and then pay others to farm it. Incidentally, working my own field has given me incrediple appreciation and sympathy to those who have to do much more work than I do to live. It's been hard enough doing my own micro-field as a hobby, and doing enormously more work every just so I can have enough to feed my family sounds like torture. My fellow volunteers and I are often talking about the absurdity of the Malian work ethic, or lack thereof, which causes so much stagnation in the development of this country. Even in village, much of the dry season is spent simply lounging around and drinking tea, but when the rain hits and there is farming to be done, almost every one of my neighbors, from the young children sent to the fields to boil tea for the workers, to the elderly women whose family have all left town and work their fields alone mobilize and turn into labor machines. It's partly out of necessity, and partly out of enjoyment of the work itself. It is what makes the Malians proud, defining their identity of people who may have very little, but work for every ounce of it.

It had been a long day of strolling around almost every walkable corner of Western Dakar, Senegal, with my friend Shelby, and all I really wanted to do was sit on a bench in a nice, grassy Rittenhouse Park-esque part of the city and smoke the Cuban cigar I had bought earlier that day. A comfy bench, good company, an expensive yet deliciously unpatriotic vice, and a pleasant view of what could easily have stood in for any Western vacation city were all I was in the mood for. Shelby and I found our park, we found our bench, I dug out my Cuban, and we sat. And no sooner did we sit, than we were descended upon, like the hapless heroes of the Hitchcock classic The Birds, not by pecking pigeons and psychotic sparrows, but by greedy Gerebous and belligerent belt-salesmen.

In all fairness, we should have seen this coming. This was my fourth day in Dakar (my extended pit-stop on the way back to the USA for my older sister’s wedding) and so far, one of the most notable differences I had observed between here and my more familiar capital city of Bamako, Mali, was the heightened number of strangers trying to get their hands on my money, and the aggressiveness with which they tried. In Bamako, I try as hard as I can to avoid places like the Artisan Market, where salesmen will call you out, occasionally using physical force, to get you into their shop, and then try to make you feel guilty for not wanting to buy anything. It’s the sort of experience that can be easily ignored with a good sense of humor for a short time, but the more the salesmen harangue you, imploring you to buy their goods if you so much as look in their direction, the more you become completely turned off from even trying to buy anything from them. And as if the shopkeepers were not enough, you have the Gerebous, youngsters studying Islam under an Iman who sends them into town to sing prayers to passersby and beg for money, and who are drawn to white people like mosquitoes to a bug-zapper.

All these things, you will find just about every day in Bamako, and their prevalence is magnified to absurd proportions in Dakar. Shopkeepers were even more aggressive and even offensive (though I’m sure “Young boy, buy my things now!” was merely ignorant word choice). The streets outside the shopping areas were no safer as random folks on the street peddling dolls, snacks, or “real” Gucci shirts would follow us for blocks, lowering their prices every time we told them that we were not interested rather than leaving.

So by the time my much-needed break in the heart of the prettiest part of downtown came, the last thing I wanted was to be interrupted by anyone whose only English consisted of “Five dollars! Very nice! Me, I love America.” And yet, sure enough, no sooner did I sit down and light up my Romeo Y Julieta than a belt salesman, about 17 years of age, sat down next to me and offered me what he assured me was a great price for a real Versace belt. I politely turned him down in the most articulate and clear French I could muster: "Non, monsieur." He continued to offer me the belt, and I continued to respond, but he was grating on my nerves and I was running out of French vocabulary. I asked him if he spoke English and he gave an awkward, unconfident nod to the affirmative. So I asked him if he thought I was an idiot, since I had told him repeatedly to leave me alone and still he pestered me. Misjudging my sardonically calm tone for positivity, he gave another, more confident nod "yes." "Really? You know English? And you say I'm stupid? And you still try to sell me a belt?" A thoughtful pause. "Very nice belt. Dix-mil francs. No expensive!"

Seeing that further conversation would be no less futile, I turned to Shelby and asked what she thought. What is it that makes Dakar and Bamako so different? Dakar is clearly a nicer city, a wealthier city, and I had been spending the last few days taking in what could easily be Bamako's Extreme Makeover, Western-Globalization Edition. Numerous tourist attractions, nightlife venues and beaches make the city beautiful and fun for locals and out-of-towners alike, especially those who want an "Africa-Lite" sort of vacation (not everyone has the adventurous constitution of a Peace Corps Volunteer). Gorgeous beaches and luxury hotels are easy to come by, and there is a plethora of restaurants and shopping venues for anyone with some money to spend. In fact, there is very little that you can't find in any Western vacation city - Bamako it ain't. The longer I stayed in Dakar, the more I wished my country of service was more like it.

As my friend the belt-seller continued to try to make his sale, lowering his price to 20% of the original, it began to occur to me that for someone to be this desperate to sell a belt to some tourists, one would have to be in pretty dire straits. He had been sitting with me for over ten minutes by now and showed no sign of letting up anytime soon. He's just trying to make some money for himself, I reasoned. In a city this expensive, it must be a lot tougher being poor than in a city like Bamako. In Bamako, poverty is rampant, suburbs look like slums, and the nice parts of town are few and far between. There's a lot less money there, but it's also a lot easier to live in poverty. If an urban Malian is short on cash, they can hit up a lady on the street who will be selling a filling plate of rice and sauce for about 50 cents, and these kinds of eateries are ubiquitous. In Dakar, I did not find a single meal to eat less than three times that amount, not even so much as a child selling froufrou, little fried-millet-powder "donut holes." Going by my theory that food is one of the most accurate barometers of the socio-economic climate of a culture, we can surmise that in Mali, plentiful cheap food reflects the abundance of urban poor who will settle for cheap rice and sauce dishes, and those unsatisfied by tradtional fare can hit up the Broadway Cafe for club sandwiches and milkshakes. Contrarily, cheap and easy food is less of an option in Dakar, reflecting the wealth and comfort of the city's inhabitants.

Does this mean that everyone in Dakar is rich? Far from it. What it means is that the economic gap between the rich and poor of the city is wide to Grand-Canyon proportions. The wealthy make out perfectly well, and the poor are almost too poor to exist. Which is why they stoop to such low levels of shameless begging to try to sell their goods. In Mali, a single sale makes little difference in the long run, since a tiny amount of money can go a long way, and the strong Malian sense of family and community means that each individual has a strong support structure to lean on. In Dakar, a merchant must sell or starve, and the city overall has less of the community feel of Mali, appearing, at least superficially, to be more of a Western-style, individualistic place.

There is an expression used in Mali that roughly means "We are all in the same boat." People share, not only their problems, but their solutions as well, with the whole community. In Dakar, it seems that there are two boats: the pirogue and the yacht. The wealthy of the city live in the yacht, the lap of luxury, while the poor are in a smaller, less stable boat. They have no connection to the rich other than that they depend on them for their own income.

When all this occurred to me, I felt much more sympathy for the poor belt-seller with me. He was stuck on his figurative small pirogue, navigating waters made for much larger ships. In Mali, he would have been doing just fine, and so would I. If I bought or declined a belt from a street merchant, life would go on as before and nobody would notice. It would be the difference of the merchant having meat with his dinner that night. In the comparative paradise of Dakar, among the Barbie mansions and muscle beaches, I realized that as much fun as I was having, I really did miss the onion sauce, joking cousins, and ever-present friendliness that gives Bamako the charm that only the truly impovershed can afford.

Now that I'm in America for a bit, I have some time to spare on the internet.  I was deciding whether to update my photo album or my blog first, but since pictures are worth a thousand words each and my last blog post was only 2129 words, I figured the more efficient way to tell everyone about myself would be updating flickr, so go here:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/29040473@N02/sets/

...Including some from the latest vacation you just read about. Check them out at http://www.flickr.com/photos/29040473@N02/

Luckily, unlike the first person to use that line to open a literary manuscript, the only drug I was on was Imodium. When you’re on a 39-hour bus ride crossing over two international borders in the not-quite-as-developed part of the world, consistency and predictability are very good things to strive for. Of course, unpredictability will follow you everywhere in my part of the world, so when my companions and I realized that keeping to our original plan of going to Benin for a week before skipping back west to Togo would mean another six hours on a stiflingly hot (no A/C in an African Hot Season aperitif served flambé-style) and physically painful bus marathon, not to mention arriving in the most sinister hours of the morning, we stopped in Lovely Lomé. We dragged ourselves into the closest and cheapest hotel, thickly covered in sweat and grime, ankles and feet creepily swollen from sitting, sleep-deprived, and craving Fan Ice, the greatest combination of marketing and ice cream since Dippin’ Dots, and after eating and bathing, passed out.

But all that aside, I was in a good mood. I was on my first tour of the greater West Africa area with two other volunteers, Brooke and Dave, who live nearby Niantanso, and before the bus ride got to the point of excruciating, it was rather interesting. I met a few Israeli girls on the bus who, despite having just completed their requisite military service in combat-zones, still thought I was insane when I described my life in the Peace Corps (“You chose to live in a place like that??”) I also noticed a sharp contrast in scenery between the comparative starkness of the Mali/Burkina Faso landscape and the much more lush and dramatic views entering Togo. I’ve had enough training in PC etiquette that I feel comfortable saying Togo looks a lot more like “Africa” than anywhere I’ve seen before. Palm trees and thick green forests are everywhere, and the villages look much more like those seen in Africa movies from which I’m probably drawing my frames of reference, small huts sticking right out of the bush, rather than surrounded by burnt-out farmlands that I’m used to.

The first few days were spent in pure vacation mode, which mostly involved doing as little of anything as possible, save trying out some of the local dishes (Mali could learn a thing or two about how to make good toh, the staple grain-paste dish) and reveling in the variety of beer that a German-colonized country serves, as compared to the French and predominantly Muslim Mali. The trip only got better as we got lazier making our way to the lovely beach town of Aneho where we stayed at a tropical-themed but not-too-kitschy hotel right on the beach. That leg of the trip was amazing for three main reasons; We met an American couple who are in the Foreign Service and not only were staying at our hotel, not only knew that there were PCVs in the area to look out for, but actually came up to Brooke and I asking if we were the PCVs they had heard about who were on their way to Benin and where our third fellow was. I never did get a straight answer as to where their intel came from, and even as I write this, I worry that a little red laser sight is being trained at the back of my neck. The second reason for said amazingness of Aneho was that we could walk about 23 seconds outside our hotel room and be on the beach in the absolute warmest ocean water I’ve ever felt, and not a single annoying tourist in sight (other than us three). Thirdly, the hotel had a small zoo that included caged alligators, guinea pigs, and a chained monkey, who of course I felt an immediate affinity towards. The monkey clearly felt the same about me: as soon as I approached him coming off the beach, he started examining my toes; as I came closer, it climbed up my bathing suit, perched itself on my arm and started methodically and almost obsessively picking through my chest hairs looking for fleas, occasionally plucking a hair right out and chomping it down. When he climbed up to my shoulder to start giving my head a far-too-excited lice check, I decided that my new friend was getting a bit too close too quickly and I gently let him down to resume screeching at the hotel’s pet dog, while I took the longest shower of my life.

After a few days, we went to the Benin border, only to be told we had to return to the capital of Togo to get our visas at the Beninese Consulate, the location or existence of which was a mystery to literally every person we asked, including the passport and visa center. Finally, we made our way to the American Embassy with minimal assistance from a cabbie who had repeatedly insisted he knew where he was going and repeatedly failed to get anywhere until we gave up on him after an hour. Within 15 minutes on “American soil,” we had an Embassy car and security escort taking us exactly where we needed to go, renewing my faith in the US Government to get done what needs getting done, when major crises like ours emerge.

Finally in Benin, we first went to Cotonou, a generally uninteresting major African city, which is right near Ganvié, an incredibly interesting major African village, built literally over a lake. Ganvié could be considered the Venice of West Africa – it was originally settled and built about five hundred years ago by the Tofinu people who, to protect themselves from their enemies who were not allowed in the water for superstitious reasons, built the village on the water. In my head, I imagine Ganviens standing in the front doors of their houses, built upon stilts rising to a meter above the water level, and wagging their tongues at their hydrophobic adversaries. Going to the village required hiring a pirogue and tour guide, who took us around to see the houses, all of which are on stilts except for the areas with artificially filled-in land, and get a glimpse of how the people live. Their main income is from fishing, and even the town market was just an open area of water where venders paddled in circles with their goods. The only frustration of the trip was the general inhospitality of the locals, who are probably sick and tired of tourists and almost always refuse to allow their pictures to be taken, making it difficult to get good shots of the area.

And what trip to Benin would be complete without participating in two of the country’s most profound legacies, both in Ouidah: the Slave Trade and Vodun. The Africans that were sent to west to become slaves often were brought to the Beninese coast where a slave castle exists today as a museum, memorializing where countless Africans were kept waiting to be shipped off. From the castle, we took the same walk the slaves took down to the beach where the ships would be waiting, and where we saw the Point of No Return Memorial, one of Africa’s universal memorials to a terrible time in its history.

But vacation is no time for too much somberness, and since Ouidah is also a historical and still-surviving hubbub of the Vodun religion, the traditional form of what we know of as Voodoo, we decided to search out the real deal. After a surprisingly easy investigation, we found an old man to lead us across town to the house of a Vodun priest. We went into his shrine alone, which was a small dark room packed full of idols, animal (I hope) bones, paintings and eerie splatters on the wall, and dozens of assorted bizarre artifacts. Inspired by the Lonely Planet guidebook’s insistence that lizard heads and monkey testicles were aplenty, I was hoping to acquire an interesting assortment for myself more as an oddity than anything. But when the priest came into the room looking just like an black Hunter S. Thompson and wearing what may or may not be traditional Vodun garb of cargo shorts and a cell phone company’s polo shirt, and holding about half a dozen idols in his hand, I knew what I wanted to walk away with. When he asked what we were looking to accomplish, Dave said he wanted love and I, protection from harm. The idols Dave would need were two small white male and female figures who would be pegged and tied together to symbolize two people being joined. My idol was, for lack of a better word, a total badass: Ogu Aqboulekhan is the God of Iron and can be willed to protect travel or prevent that which the worshipper wishes to prevent. He is covered in locks, chains, horns, bones, and all the other things that make a real live Vodun idol really really cool. After paying to purchase the idols, the priest offered to demonstrate the ceremony needed to pass ownership and power of the idols to us. Not knowing when we would get to see anything like this ever again, we agreed. For the next two hours, the priest and we drank homemade spirits, tossed shells, poured baby powder and spat soda or gin on the idols and everywhere else (except for Ogu, who was spared the gin because neither the user nor idol is allowed to touch liquor), and recited unpronounceable incantations. But lest we would have gotten bored, at the end of the ceremony, the priest brings in a chicken and with little warning, he twists the chickens head around with a crunch (a “sickening crunch” is a fairly accurate way of putting it, evidenced by the involuntary sympathetic whimper I think I remember making), cuts it’s mouth all the way open and starts sprinkling blood and dropping plucked chicken feathers all over the shrine, the various fetishes, and our brand new soda-covered idols. Luckily for us, this was the grand finale of the ceremony, and before the priest had finished offering to let us remove our shirts to pray at his shrine, we politely declined and left as quickly as possible, Dave and I with our bloody, powdery, feathery and soda-y idols, and Brooke with what is apparently a very powerful marble-sized ball of string (local people have actually shrunk back from fear upon seeing it; I didn’t bother showing them my decidedly creepier and more powerful chain-man).

The trip came to a close and we embarked on what would be a 51-hour trip home, made longer by our bus arriving at all the borders after they had closed for the night and by getting stopped at every checkpoint to bribe the guards not to confiscate the undeclared goods being smuggled in by the merchants on board (don’t even get me started on the time and expense we would have saved by doing things the legal way rather than haggling over the bribe with every gendarmerie we passed). During the long journey (made actually easier by the bus having A/C), I had plenty of time to reflect on the differences between Benin, Togo and Mali. The major difference seems to be that the other two countries are, in many ways, nicer. There is clearly more money there, the reasons and results of that are far to lengthy to go into. But what I also noticed is the amazing amount of progress and variety in these countries as compared to Mali, which is very traditional in every sense of the word. Variety was everywhere in Benin and Togo, from the street food to the music. Malian street vendors all tend to sell the same foods and goods, people listen to the same (I think awful) Griot music that has existed forever (even the pop music sounds like Griot with a modern twist). Malians are, in my experience, generally adverse to take risks or trying new things, which are the two things most important to progress. Of course the issues at play are wide-ranging and complex, but it is beginning to occur to me that as much as people hate being one of the poorest countries in the world, the general societal mindset might be the major contributing factor to this stagnation. As far as my service here goes, I worry that I can educate my village all I want, but the actual change that occurs is entirely up to them, and the prospects are looking grim.

In general, the Malinke people do not outwardly embrace their traditional culture on a daily basis. Occasionally, you will find a donzo, a member of the hunter class, carrying his antique shotgun and wearing the traditional leather-and-seashell jester cap and talisman-adorned garb that have been worn for ages by their class. And of course, you will see the same food and superstitious customs that have been the standard for numberless generations. But for the most part, day-to-day, the Malinke, like any other developing culture, embrace the future heralded by motorcycles, cell phones, and Jay-Z.

So for me, and often for the villagers too, the most exciting events and ceremonies are celebrated by a return to the traditions of the past, the things that make Malinke as cool as they sometimes are.

Take dancing for example. On holidays or big events, the official villagers drummers go around town after dinner, banging their drums to announce to everyone in earshot “It’s party time, baby!” Once everyone has arrived at the donke-yoro, or “dancing place,” the crowd makes a giant circle, with usually half a dozen drummers along the outer edge. One by one, they start up their beat, with a boom-bum-biddy-biddy-bum, or perhaps a bum-diddly-bum-diddly-bum-diddy-boom, until it becomes a full-on symphony of rhythmic percussion from the djembes, tom-toms, and more cowbell than even Bruce Dickenson can handle. Inside the circle itself, random girls will shuffle awkwardly to the area in front of the drummers, only a few at one time, and stand around, swaying back and forth like the shy guest of honor who doesn’t want to dance at her party while everyone is watching. Then suddenly, like a fish snagged in a line, they catch the rhythm and jerk into motion, skipping in place on their toes, with their arms pinwheeling in the air. It looks at once spastic, but very deliberate, and it is nothing less than a trip to watch. Adding to the ethereal mood is the thick clouds of dust kicked up that glow in the fluorescent lights that look like spirits floating and dancing along (that would be the Tyndall Effect, thank you very much 8th grade physics). Over the night, the girls switch off, never more than a few at a time, with all sorts of exciting variations on the dance, some jumping into the air, some gyrating on the ground. By the end, even the onlookers are exhausted from watching.

The reason for this dance was to celebrate the next day’s arrival to the village of the governor of the entire Kayes region. (Mali is made up of seven regions. According to the villagers I’ve talked to, they are all under the same laws but unofficially make up their own rules, like the way the US would be if the world was just a little less organized but had a little more national-gumption.) In an unprecedented move, the governor was making a tour of some of the major villages and communes across the region to see the living conditions and hear the voices of his loyal subjects. Okay, maybe “loyal subjects” is not quite the expression to use; not one person I asked knew the name of the governor, nor quite how long he’d been in office. Since the position is governmentally appointed and only given to highly accomplished generals, and as I said, travel to the interior of the region is pretty rare, the excitement for his arrival, while high, was somewhat vague. All that was known for certain was that the mayor of Niantanso - my host-father - and the governor would both be speaking, and that the event would be heralded by music, dancing, and loads of food to feed everyone who would be coming in from all the other five villages in the commune.

The festivities started that night and went on until morning, then resumed again as the people waited for the governor to arrive around 10:00 am. By nine, the dancing, drumming and waiting began, and continued with shrinking energy and enthusiasm until nearly one when almost everyone had gotten sick of the sun and gone off to lunch. No sooner had we left than we were called back because “He’s really coming this time!” An hour later, he came. I was ushered to the front of the line of the greeting procession, alongside the mayor’s cabinet and other VIPs so they could show off the local American Whitey. So yes, now you can brag to all your friends that you know someone who shook hands and exchanged pleasantries with the governor of the Kayes region of Mali.

For as long and arduous as the wait was, the event was rather uneventful. The mayor spoke, addressing issues such as citizens refusing to pay taxes because they don’t trust him to not steal the money (but he didn’t want to have them arrested because in Malian villages, “we are all brothers,” especially during election years like this one), the CSCOM (public health center) that was built but never stocked or furnished making it now a glorified solar-powered cell-phone charger, and other local concerns. The governor then spoke very, shall I say, politically, promising to try his hardest to address these issues and raising a few of his own (“The Census takers are coming. Please cooperate with them; do not hide in the woods this time.”). I was unable to understand two thirds of what was said, but I had the local English speakers translate the rest so that I could be certain that I really did not miss anything important. From my own perspective, and in the opinion of most of the people I spoke to, this was a day made special by an in-person sighting of the governor, delicious food, dancing and a mercifully short hour of anticlimactic speeches.

There is a Malian phrase, “Do’oni, do’oni,” meaning “Little by little.” It is the most frustrating phrase I have ever heard in my life. It is laughingly employed when I am struggling through the language, having a hard time carrying the mud to build a house, and it basically means that (in what I see as the root of many of Mali’s various types of problems) everything will happen much more slowly than it should. It is the reason the governor took three extra hours to get to our village, and it is the reason it took three weeks to decide what to do with my Peace Corps service. I left the PC training camp at the end of January with a plan to immediately start having regular meetings of a new “Water/Sanitation Committee.” Our first objective would be to have a few organized meetings according to the PC guides on how to hold organized meetings to come to a good consensus on what would be the first major project I would help the village with. I had an idea that I wanted to fix a water pump that happens to be in my front yard and that had broken years ago. The pump head had been removed but the money was never raised to fix it, and in the meantime, some troublesome little children had taken to dropping rocks into the pump’s narrow well, making repair a lot harder and pricier.

It’s a long story about why the meeting took three weeks to organize, but it generally involved people going out of town later and for longer than they said they were, and other people doing absolutely nothing until I actually made sure I was with them to watch them do it. In the end, we had, not an organized first meeting, but a group of enthusiastic people who had been randomly gathered from around the town because they were bored and who agreed that every single one of my project suggestions was great and should be mounted immediately. After further explanation, they finally got the point and agreed that, much to the chagrin of myself and my need for personal privacy, the pump in my front yard must be made to work once more.

So after lots of do’oni do’oni, here I am now in Bamako, beginning to write a proposal for a grant to initiate the project and updating my blog. The “hot season” is kicking into gear, following a disappointingly un- “cold season” just in time for myself and two PC friends to embark on an exciting vacation to Benin, Togo and Bukina Faso, three countries that, like Mali, I have been dying to visit since I was barely old enough to pronounce “Burkina Faso.” A special update on that trip will come when I come back.

The only other major newsworthy news worth taking up your valuable time with right now is that I am expecting another vacation in a few months, this time to the USA! One of my three favorite sisters is getting married and I am coming home to celebrate. If you want to hang out with me when I’m there, I arrive in Philly on May 17 and depart May 27. Keep in mind that time for hanging out with me will be somewhat cramped as I have to do a lot of important things while I’m home like upload photos online and pick out new wedding shoes, but save the date and give me a ring!

That’s all for now, and please keep in touch. According to Google Analytics, this blog has been visited by people in nine countries, so I’m really curious to know who my Swiss compadres are =P

For those of you who have been as loyal as I hope you have been in reading what is written on this website, you probably know a good deal about my life here in Niantanso, Mali.  But what you probably know a good deal less about is the life of the average Malian.  Granted, that may have a lot to do with my own lack of knowledge on the subject, or perhaps simple narcissism on my part (‘cause I’m just so gosh-darn interesting!).  That said, I think the time is overdue to sit down, get myself into a good mood by listening to all seven versions of “St. James Infirmiry” I have on my computer, and give you. . . A Miniscule Morsel of Mali. First off, is the redefinition of most things which we Americans take for granted as the universal standard, but which simply don’t apply in quite the same way over here.  You remember those Australian Foster’s Beer ads a few years back: “Guppie, Australian for Shark” or something along those lines.  Well, as I mentioned in the last article, we have all sorts of our own fun examples.  The Malian Trashcan is simply the ground in front of you, behind you, or anywhere else that is not in your hand.  West African International Time, or W.A.I.T., works on the same principle as what those of us “in the know” call Jewish Time, only even more delayed.  And Malian Feedback usually involves a wide-angled, open-palm smack upside the head of the recipient (PCVs get very excited when the administrators ask if we have any “feedback” as to how things are going during training). Even such simple activities like making tea take on a drastically new meaning over here.  The Malian style of boiling tea, supposedly adapted from the Mauritanian style, involves taking a 25 gram sachet of “The Vert de Chine” and putting it in a small teapot with about three or four shot glasses of water.  The tea is boiled on a small charcoal stove, which is always available since there is always going to be someone with a fire going from which to get charcoal.  (Interesting gender-role revelation: when I asked a woman where charcoal comes from, she explained exactly how to make it from firewood.  When I asked a man, he told me it comes from whichever child you send to gather it.)  The water is then boiled and poured from pot to glass and back again several times to cool the water so you can boil it again and make it even stronger.  After one or two repititions, a shot glass of sugar is added and boiled again.  When the tea is ready, it is served one or two half-shots at a time, starting with the oldest or most respected person around.  Getting the first glass is quite an honor.  While it seems silly that people usually end up waiting up to a half hour for a shot of tea, this ritual is enjoyed at any and all hours of the day, whether lazing around in front of the corner store or in the middle of work in the field.  At first, I thought the whole idea was silly, in how much time it takes, how little tea it yields compared to how much it costs, and how sickeningly strong the tea really is.  Now, I have grown as attached to tea as any average Malian; that second round is worth waiting all day for! Another, even more significant part of Mali’s culture is the “Joking Cousin.”  Throughout history, in almost any culture, there has been strife, anger and war directed at those who are different in any way at all.  Some of the worst conflicts ever have been the result of one group believing so strongly that another group from another region, religion or race is wrong, that they deserve to die for their difference.  Malians have for the most part evaded this pattern with through Joking Cousins.  Lets say my last name is Dembele and your last name is Djarra.  Well, hundreds of years ago, our families had a fight and hated each other for some reason.  So did we go to war and kill each other?  Nope.  Instead, we said something along the lines of “You’re a Djarra?  Hahaha, you eat beans and fart up a storm!”  And Djarra responded “Hell no!  You’re a Dembele, and Dembeles are no good.  I greeted your brother this morning and he responded ‘mooooo!’ because he’s a skinny, ugly cow!  Hahahaha!”  Yes, Malians have successfully replaced racism, classism, or any other possible reason for conflict with toilet humor.  If a Coulibaly tries to rip you off for the price of a shirt in the market, laugh at him about how he’s your slave and he should be giving you the shirt for free, so paying him for it is an act of generosity.  Or if a Keita is being too slow in the field, tell him “Of course you’re lazy, you good-for-nothing urine-drinker!”  I have had conversations with one my family’s joking cousins, a 45-year-old Djarra man, over which of us had more penises (eventually settling on the fact that as a rich American, I had four, while he only had three).  There is no limit to the immaturity of joking, and I’m sure nowhere else in the world you can make fun of a respected village elder for farting too much. Some other fun snippets of Malian culture:   – Malians in village have very little money, but they also love music so they play it constantly by any means neccessary.  My favorite ways of enjoying pop music include people who walk around like something from the 1980s rap scene with radios around their necks, people who use their cell phone speakers as boom boxes, since there is no cell reception most of the time and they have nothing else to do with their phones, and of course the tape players powered off car batteries which are stuck in a sped-up playback so everything sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks. – Some of the biggest Western pop culture icons in Mali include Tupac, Nelly, Bob Marley, The Michelin Man, Cyndi Lauper, Kris Kross, Mike Tyson and most recently, Brako Bama, the first Black US president since JFK. – Malians, and West Africans in general, love action movies.  Let me rephrase that; they love action scenes.  It doesn’t matter what the movie is, as long as they get a good shootout or karate scene out of it.  Some movies are good for this, like “Once Upon a Time in China II” which are non-stop action and excitement with minimal emphasis on story or characters.  Some movies are less good for this like Steven Segal’s new film “Pistol Whipped” which was so painfully laden with plot, half the movie had to be fast-forwarded to skip to the next action scene.  In response to this is one of the gretest ever innovations in film marketing: movies that actually have all the story scenes edited out so it incoherently moves the film from one action scene to the next.  And considering how pathetic Steven Segal is looking these days, I think the African audiences might be onto something here. – Smiling in pictures is considered dirty.  Frogs are very dirty and dangerous.  Singing in the rain will get you struck by lightning, and singing when it isn’t raining will bring rain, and then get you struck by lightning.  The good news is that babies peeing on you is good luck, extra salt on food is a powerful aphrodesiac, and leaving a bottle of honey next to the bed will aid in fertilization, but a banana wrapped in a condom on the night table is a contraceptive.  Mangoes give you malaria, but tea, cigarettes and anything else without a clear benefit will generally give you a good head and a strong body.  Also, there are a whole variety of talismans and medicines, coming from traditional Animist religious culture, that do everything from cure diseases, curse your enemies, protect you from harm or turn you invisible.  Usually these talismans are rings, amulets, or small rods made of leather, wood, plants, or metal, though it has been reported that white-people hair is also quite powerful in this regard.  You may be asking why a predominantly Muslim country has so many Animist customs.  The truth is, to an extent in Mali as a whole and especially in villages like mine, that if you ask someone their religion, they will tell you they are Muslim.  Depending on the area, between 20%-80% of the time, they will really just be saying it to be cool, generally preferring their Animist heritiage. – The experts on rituals from both cultures seem to be the Griots, or Jelis as they are called here.  They have a few jobs: they sing songs of praise about you or your family, they officiate religious ceremonies, they greet anybody who comes from outside the village to visit or move in, and most conspicuously, they collect a special tax just for them in the form of money, food, tea, or anything else you want to give them.  Of course, it’s not clear what they actually do to deserve these taxes, and I was warned by villagers, only half-jokingly, that griots have “bad heads” and that there was no need to ever pay them, excpet perhaps on the major holidays.  The Jelis were not pleased with this advice, needless to say. – In America, if you are walking down the street in a black neighborhood and someone shouts out to you “Hey, whitey!” there is a good chance you’re going to put your guard up.  Really, there is no time when calling someone out by their race or ethnic group is a polite or safe idea unless the instigator is looking for a fight.  Here, white people getting called “White Person!” is not just regular, but almost endearing.  “Toubabu” literally means “Frenchperson” but since it’s never really clear or important where the white person comes from, Toubabu really means “White Foreigner,” sometimes even if the subject is still African.  So, walking down the street, be it a small village or a regional capital city, children and even the occasional adult will chant “Toubabu!  Toubabu!”  In Niantanso, I am regularly called by everyone “Toubabuke,” or “The White Man.”  This takes some getting used to by most Americans accustomed to such nicknames being vulgar or offensive, and it irked me a bit until I realized that in addition to myself, old people are called “The Old Man/Woman,” tall people are referred to as “The Tall M/W,” mentally ill or impared are “Crazy M/W,” and so on for just about any distinguishing characteristics of any given person. Well, I hope you enjoyed this all-too-brief glimpse into some of the most fascinating or at least entertaining elements of Malian life and culture.  Of course, this is an old country with a rich and diverse heritage and volumes could be written about all the things that I would love to tell you about.  Sadly, I don’t have nearly enough interest in writing these volumes yet, so you’ll have to settle for what I’m giving you here.  If you have any questions about anything out here that you want me to answer in future updates, post a question or comment and I’ll do what I can to find or make up a good answer.

‘Twas the month of December and all through the nation,

No holiday songs were heard on the radio station. No mention of Rudolph nor pictures of Santa Adorned “holiday” bottles of Coca Cola or Fanta.

No Endless hordes scrambling for late gifts to give spouses; No red and green lights glare from the trees or the houses. Yes, it’s that time of year but there’s no trace of snow, Nor anything "festive" anywhere I go.

Now to Americans, I may be committing high treason By saying I won’t miss this holiday season, But I’m sick of our culture, so fiscally frivolous, Spending all our spare cash on an Elmo that’s ticklish.

Each yard decoration tries to outdo its neighbors. (Click here for a “Star Wars” Nativity Scene with lightsabers!) There’s no Sandler’s “Hannukah Song” nor sleigh bells to ring-a-ling, But in this third world country, I don’t miss a thing.

Perhaps the reason is that in a small Malian village, with no strip malls or Wal*Marts for the locals to pillage, I’ve recently gained a new sense of perspective: Even those who have nothing, if they want, can feel festive.

A merry time was had with friends from Corps de la Paix, Though I got sick of hearing Christmas music all day. We had pumpkins and latkahs, menorahs and stockings, But I had more fun hiking and sitting ‘round talking.

Now, when Malians celebrate they buy a cow and kill it, And splurge on rice instead of plain old cheap millet. So when you think you’re the only kid in town without a Christmas tree, Remember your African friends who live at least as “modestly.”

I hope these rhymes weren’t too bitter or dour; I wouldn’t want your sweet holiday season to sour. Just remember for true happiness, one need not a dime pay, So Happy Holidays to all, and to all: Basi te!

When you spend days at a time having only 2nd-grade-level conversations with people, if you manage to have any conversations at all, and when you still have no idea how to occupy your day, with the expectation that the next day won’t be much more exciting, you start to get really, really bored.  I have termed this class of boredom “Malian Boredom,” similar to the “Malian Trashcan,” which is the ground around you, no matter where you are,  “Malian Feedback,” which is a hard openhanded smack upside the head, or “Malian Time,” which is the same as “West-African International Time” (W.A.I.T.).  Malian Boredom is not like American boredom, where there is nothing to do, because there is plenty to do, but nothing for you to do.  There are people to talk to, but no way to talk to them.  There is work to be done, but either you don’t know where it’s being done or you don’t know how to do it.  So while everyone else is moving all over, left and right, busy as bees, you are conspicuously doing nothing, and are thus not just bored, but guiltily bored. It was after about a month of such boredom that I decided to start working.  Though the first few months at site are intended for integration, and starting real PC projects isn’t expected, little things like surveys or needs assessment work is perfectly fine.  But after a while, trying to survey all the families in town got too difficult when none of the interviewees could understand a word of what I said, or else I couldn’t understand their responses.  But one thing I did get out of these sessions was a general understanding of the kinds of work that people want me to do.  With this knowledge, I now had a new way to combat Malian Boredom: build a soak pit. For those of you who have never had Peace Corps Water/San training, and aren’t otherwise familiar with village-work-level sanitation techniques in developing countries (that many of you?), a soak pit is a hole in the ground filled with rocks.  Into that hole, flows water, which can come from a bathing area, washing station, latrine, or anything else that would otherwise leave stagnant water lying on the ground to attract mud, microbes, and mosquitos.  In this case, it was a deep-water pump, in the center of town, right next to the market.  It was visible, public, and disgusting.  I convinced the mayor that if we build a soak pit here on the village’s dime, it would make it easier to attract interest in building more in peoples’ own homes and other areas around town which could be turned into a large, funded project.  He agreed, helped organize workers, promised we would gather the materials, and said the work would begin any day now. After two months I got a bit tired of waiting.  The various people who were asked to get some materials kept forgetting, though I’m skeptical that some of them were even told at all.  And as the project failed to progress, people lost interest and a simple two-day project just didn’t happen.  Now, if nothing else, the two months were a great learning experience.  I did see how projects are organized, and the pitfalls of my own mistakes like expecting Malians to work the way Americans do.  From what I’ve seen, and what I’ve been told by others, it seems that Malians are happy to work on a good project, but they’re going to expect all the planning, supplies-gathering outside the village, and other preliminary work, not to mention the money, to come from the project leader, in this case me.  Like, no matter how many times they told me that a 6 meter pipe would be coming in next week, it was not going to arrive unless I brought it myself. So I did.  And of course as soon as I did, work began.  People saw me walking through town with a giant pipe and the very next day, they were already organizing laborers to get started digging the hole, gathering rocks to fill it, and mixing cement mortar.  The day after, we started working, and it was fantastic.  The work went just the way I had hoped it would go, that is, while I was the guy who told them basically what to do, they took it into their own hands to think of the best ways to do it themselves, changing my blueprints to what they thought and I agreed worked better, or thinking of things I hadn’t even thought of.  In short, they made the project their own, without fighting with me for power, or depending on me for total guidance.  The only major hitch was when nobody showed up for the second day of work because the hole had been too short and too wet after the first day of work, so when I was asked if “A ma ja folo?” meaning “Isn’t it dried yet?” I answered “No, it’s not,” which put off being able to keep working because I had heard “A man jan folo?” meaning “Isn’t it tall enough yet?” (to which a “no” would have just meant that we could keep digging, and then keep working). Though the work was a bit trying, and the whole process of getting the project off the ground was downright exasperating, I’m glad that I got my introduction to the Malian work ethic on a tiny, independent project like this soak pit, rather than a larger funded one where there would be a lot more at stake.  Now I have an idea of what problems I am likely to run into later, as well as what positive surprises I can expect.  I take comfort in my old philosophy that there are no mistakes in life, just discoveries of new ways to screw up. Other than that one adventure, life at site is more or less the same as it’s been.  Sometimes bored, sometimes not.  Sometimes work, sometimes idleness.  I spent Christmas/Hannukah in Manantali with 10 other volunteers and one visitor from the states who brought all the delicious and festive holiday foods like marshmallows and canned pumpkins.  We ate like kings and drank like Malians by indulging in “sebeji,” the fermented palm wine drank by even the strictest of Malian Muslims because “It’s naturally alcoholic, which doesn’t count.” Of course, I represented Jewish contingent (being myself only) by lighting the menorah every night and making latkahs for lunch.  I also represented the Philadelphia contingent with a proud Phillies World Series Champions banner sent by Mom and Dad.  This banner would later make its appearance in my village as perhaps the only time ever that a baseball banner was captured in the same photo as a mud-brick-thatched-roof hut and a couple dozen Malian children (pictures to be uploaded soon). New Years festivities were some of the best in memory as the weekly dance hall in Niantanso opened up for the whole town and we danced the night away, eating and drinking courtesy of the local restaurant.  I had a great time and learned a valuable lesson: paying a lot for real liquor is better than paying less for the watered down rubbing alcohol that the locals are drinking.  (Don’t worry family: Malians are not drinkers.  If I drank here a quarter of what I drank at a low-keyed party back in college, I’d be thought an alcoholic by everyone in town.) These days, I’m back in the mythical land of Tubani So for more intensive technical training, like how to actually build a well and create project proposals.  In other words, we’re learning how to be more useful than ever!  It’s also a nice reunion with all our PC friends and a chance to compare stories and survival strategies from the edge and show off our newest Malian threads.  We’re hear until the end of the month, when I go back to village for a month before a trip with two other volunteers to visit Benin, Togo and Ghana in a 2-3 week excursion.  After that, back to village again until (yes, the rumors are true) I come home for my sister’s wedding at the end of May.  That’s right, if you thought you couldn’t go another five months without seeing me, you’re in luck because you won’t have to! Also at Tubani So, we are learning how to get funding for our various projects, and this is where I put out an appeal to YOU, THE READER!  There are a number of agencies that give grants or collect donations to help us make our project proposals reality.  However, by far the easiest way to get money is to have a doner already set up who will fund the entirety of the project.  Now I know with the economy as it is, times are tough, and charitable donations are the last things on your mind, but if you or anyone you know wants to help me out, consider this: many projects only cost a few hundred dollars, some larger ones only a couple thousand.  Among many possible projects I am hoping to carry out in the next two years include repairing water pumps, improving dirty and eroding mud-brick wells, building irrigation systems to improve the gardens so the village can generate its own income, and expanding the village radio station so that programs on sanitation and hygiene can be heard in all the surrounding villages as well.  Unlike other charities or non-profits, donating to my projects means you know exactly what the money is going to and you know who is overseeing its proper usage.  If you are interesting in sponsoring a project sometime in the future, send me an email or if you don't have my email address, put up a message here and I will send you my address (so I don't have to post it here for the world to spam me).  Think of it as a thank you for all my awesome blogging.

In the meantime, I'm sure I'll try to blog again while I'm in Bamako, and certainly get some more pictures uploaded.  In the meantime, stay the same cool and loyal readers that you are and I'll see you next time!

Happy Thanksgiving Everybody! After a couple days of travel and (not) sleeping outside the train station, I just made the trip out to Kayes City, the hottest city in Africa, since it was built on top of a giant underground iron reserve. More optimistically, we also have internet here! Which means that in between spending the holiday with about a dozen other Peace Corps ex-pats like myself and having a full-fledged homemade Thanksgiving dinner with everything from pumpkin pie to chicken and stuffing to cranberry sauce and more, I also get to spend a little while updating my life and getting back to all you folks at home and thanking you for birthday well-wishes and other positivity.

As of now, I am in the beginning of my third month as an African villager and my life continues to get more interesting. I am developing more of a feel of how things work out here and almost as amazing as how different things are here is how similar they are as well. Every person is different and cultures around the world nurture certain qualities in those who are members. But when it comes down to it, I am seeing that even people in a place as remote from Philadelphia as Niantanso have the same qualities as anyone else: friendship and enmity, joking and sadness, pride and ego, selflessness and community, laziness and responsibility. As many times as I cannot relate to what people believe or how they act, I am equally amazed at other things that seem so familiar. For every time I am frustrated at Malians for acting with me in ways I find unacceptable or impolite, I realize they have as little idea how to relate to me as I do them in many circumstances. While at first I would get frustrated with how quickly many people grew tired of trying to converse with me and my inadequate language skill, I now begin to realize just how they feel as I speak English with the high school students who don’t understand simple phrases I say because of my accent, and I find it almost funny when they mumble something incomprehensible and get upset that I don’t understand their English.

A major part of my growth here is seeing things from angles I never previously had access to. Back in America, I never really experienced racism or discrimination in any meaningful way. Here, it’s almost constant. People go sometimes well out of their way to treat the local white boy differently. Of course as a white American, I don’t know the first thing about farming, so when I go into the peanut or millet fields with them to help harvest, they are so amazed that I would even attempt this hard work, they almost don’t even accept that I can do it. Every few minutes, someone new will come up to me to show me the proper way to work, identical to the way I had been working, or else tell me I’m tired and I should rest, seemingly as much to help me as to make themselves feel superior. It may be paranoia, but I get the sense that they patronize me and treat me overly hospitably as if to rub in my face the fact that all my American wealth and prestige aren’t worth a bag of rice in Mali if I can’t do the same backbreaking labor that they have mastered already. The first day I spent harvesting rice was one of the most exciting days I’ve had in village so far because despite the villagers’ skepticism, I grew reasonably good at it and proved without a doubt, in front of a field full of dozens of farmers, that I am not altogether as worthless as they many times make me out to be, despite being slow and cutting my fingers up pretty badly with the sickle. In my head, as I farmed, I drew parallels to the Civil Rights victories that took place in almost the exact opposite context in America — I was a white man in Africa proving he was as good, or as determined, a farmer as the skeptical workers around him and not a weak and pampered Westerner who got money for free. Not only that, but I am now probably the best millet/peanut/rice farmer ever to hail from Lower Merion, PA.

Equally valuable in my integration as a useful member of my community is the fact that I have actually begun to do my own PC work in the community. I have been doing baseline surveys with families all over the community to find information on water and sanitation-based behavior, like who uses treated drinking water, where they store food, which diseases are most common, etc. This has been an advantageous project for a number of reasons. First, it gives me an idea of what practices are common here so I can get an idea of what projects are most important to undertake in the future. Second, it gets me out of the house and into the village, talking to people and meeting families in concessions I otherwise would have little meaningful contact with. Third, it is a way of showing the community that I am in fact working and giving them a chance to tell me what areas of work they want me to help in, be it improving the wells by their concessions, teaching how to treat water, or just listening to them complain about life and hearing me promise I will do everything I can to help. I have also started trying to get a soak pit project started, but nobody has bothered getting supplies yet, so more on that later when I have something interesting to say about it.

Other than that, village life is slow, relaxing, and generally enjoyable. I am making friends, getting better at chatting (as long as people are speaking slowly, simply, and directly to me), and finding it easier to believe that I will be spending the next two years of my life going to sleep under a thatched roof and only eating foods that can be farmed in village or bought at the local market (Wal*Mart? We don’t need no stinkin’ Wal*Mart!) I also have plenty of time to sit around and think at length about important matters like the meaning of our life on Earth (hint: read chapter 2 of part 2 of book 2 of “War and Peace”) or the meaning of the boulder falling into the swimming pool at the beginning of the film “Sexy Beast.” And of course, as it is that time of year, I’ve been thinking that the standards of what I am thankful for this year have been lowered immensely. Thanks for my house not collapsing yet. Thanks for two months of a healthy gastrointestinal system. Thanks for being able to bike only 3 hours to the nearest electrical outlet to recharge my batteries (literally and figuratively) and for being able to buy (terrible) beer and Mars bars and take showers once I get there. And of course, thanks for what potentially could easily have been a terrible living situation (and what has been for some many) turning out relatively splendidly for me. That said, think about all the things you have in your life that you can take for granted, the things that other people don’t have, and the fact that with all the wealth and luxury America gives us, what are the things in the world that really make us happy? Is it a new Television or a newly engaged couple? Is it the Phillies’ first World Series victory in 25 years or the first Democratic president in 8 years? Is it the sense of pride you get when you accomplish what you wondered whether or not you could accomplish, or simply being able to win little victories here and there? Depends on where you are, I guess. Happy Turkey Day.

I thought I would be able to get internet access a month ago when I came into town. It turns out I was overly optimistic about the internet situation in Manantali. It’s a long story, but suffice it to say, this entry is a month old and is getting posted now because I already wrote it and it’s easier to do a short update for the past month in addition.

I have been installed in my site for a month now, and I can honestly say that, not surprisingly, this is one of the most surreal experiences I have ever put myself through. So many different elements of my life at site are completely different than anything I’ve lived through, including my first few months in-country. I am constantly reminded of one remark I found when preparing for service and reading some Peace Corps-provided literature that when you move to a place like a poor Malian farming village from a place like suburban America, everything that you once took for granted as a routine becomes a chore. If I want water, I fill up my gasoline jugs at the pump down the street. If I want to drink it, I have to wait until it goes through the filter and, for precaution’s sake, wait until the chlorine kills anything dangerous, all of which means a glass of safe drinking water might be a half hour in the making if I haven’t planned ahead.

More examples of routines becoming anything but are the greetings, which I mentioned in an earlier entry. Being accustomed to Americans’ general anonymity and not feeling the need to greet people on the street unless you know and like them, it’s tiring walking around a village where the expectation is to exchange greetings with everyone you walk past, even from a distance. All the more difficult if you know the people you are greeting, where the simple “Hi-how-are-you?” gets upgraded to an exhaustive run-down of every possible way of asking how the person and everyone they know are doing, plus a handshake. (This last part might be my least favorite as Malian hygienic practices in the bush leave much to be desired. Every time I shake someone’s’ hand, my mind automatically rolls through the list of all the germs and illnesses I am allowing to take up residence in my body simply for politeness’ sake.)

Chores and manners aside, there are a number of more significant things I have had to adapt to as part of my normal life. One of the most notable is the amount of time that I now go without having a decent conversation. Of course, there are no English speakers, and Bambara, the language I have been learning to this point, is spoken and understood sort of the way Spanish is in America. Niantanso is in traditionally a Malinke area, which means they speak a dialect that is similar enough to Bambara that I could communicate if I spoke Bamabara fluently, which of course I am not even close to being able to do. In the meantime, until I got into town here in the “electricity-ville” of Manantali, I have gone as much as 3 weeks where, aside from a few “normal” dialogues with the new English teacher who just moved into town, the only conversations I was having were in a language I scored “intermediate-mid” in when tested. What makes this harder is that when I do converse, even if I think I’m doing a decent job, Malians don’t have the same multi-cultural exposure we Americans do and aren’t used to understanding accents or improper sentence phrasing. It never occurred to me before how strange it would be to not be able to talk to people about what I was thinking, or recount something that happened, or even just tell a joke based on the situation, without having to resort to “Spot Goes to School” level dialogue.

When I am able to have something resembling a normal conversation, I find further difficulty adjusting to the way Malians converse. I keep thinking of one scholar who wrote that people tend to speak in “scripts” for every situation. There are established idioms, responses, and phrases used in all situations, so that even if what we are saying is an original thought, often it is the standard scripted response for that occasion. For example, if one man tells a friend he is sick, the friend will respond either with “Feel better” or continue in a standard line of questioning to learn more about the situation: “What’s wrong? Are you taking anything?” One would have to be very clever or original, or insane, to deviate much from the established scripts of communication. In Mali, all of these scripts are different. People are simply used to saying things differently, with their own idioms and expressions. They state the obvious often: “Hello Ablaye, noon has arrived,” or “You are looking fatter than usual today.” I find myself not knowing how to talk to people, not only because I don’t understand what they are saying, but because I have no idea why they are saying it or how to respond. I regularly get asked questions like “Does America have the same sun as Africa? Does it shine like it does here?” Another favorite is when at least once a day, someone who had not met me yet would point to a chicken or a sheep and ask “Ablaye, what’s this thing’s name?” Eventually I stopped answering “it’s called a saga,” and started sarcastically responding “It’s name is Mustafa, like you.”

Learning curves aside, I have been having plenty of fun little adventures as I get acclimated to my new home. I still regularly have very young children start crying or screaming as soon as they see me, which is hilarious and only encourages their mothers to shove them right in my terrifying white-boy face. My greatest accomplishment in this area was one time when a mother put down her two toddlers in front of me. The kids stared at me until I said good morning, at which point they started bawling with terror in their eyes, spun around, and ran as fast as their little legs could carry them down the street and around the corner out of sight.

Another exciting moment was my first experience with a goat slaughtering. The day before, my homologue and I had hiked up a hill outside the town and found a family of goats stranded on the top. We brought them down and gave them to the head goat-herder, and the next day, our town’s market day when everyone comes to sell food and wares, one of the goats was taken out to be slaughtered and portioned out for sale, with a portion going to my homologue and I as thanks. All I can say about witnessing the slaughter is that I now have a newfound appreciation for Kosher meat. Rather than a razor-sharp blade painlessly stuck through the neck as Judaism requires, the throat was sawed open with an old dull knife. With blood spurting all over the little kids holding the goat down, and the goat still jerking from nervous reflex, they skinned and gutted it, emptied the full intestines into the bushes nearby, chopped it up – meat, bones and organs – and divided them into neat little piles for sale. I know already that I have a weak stomach for gore and these kinds of “anatomy lessons,” so the knowledge that this anatomy was going to be prepared as peoples’ dinner, and with the prayer that the cooks have at least some sense of suitable meat preparation practice, definitely gave my nerves a workout that day.

Other adventures I’ve had involved clearing the weeds out of my field only to be told I was doing it wrong by everyone who walked by and eventually giving up and letting them do it for me rather than listen to them make fun of me all day, trying to build a table with exactly the same results, or my bike ride to the nearest cell phone service which I thought would be an easy 15 km bike ride on a road, and which turned out to be a grueling ride through the rarely-trodden bush-path just to get a cellular signal that barely worked. However, most of my time has been spent sitting around, reading, eating, listening to other people chatting and understanding very little, studying language, hiking or biking around, and trying my best to socialize with the locals and the kids who have taken a liking to the weird new “Toubabu” (ie. whitey). I have been doing a little bit in the way of trying to assess the community’s needs in terms of my eventual work, but for the most part, I’m just waiting for when I can finally make myself useful.

As of now, I’m taking a break from the bush in the lovely seaside resort just outside bustling downtown Manantali (no, of course not!! It’s a PC-owned house but it is right on the river and near the market area, and run-amok with hippos and monkeys galore). This is where I come when I feel like getting computer access and watching movies, playing the resident PCV Dave’s “Zombies” board game, getting good grub at the restaurants or street-food vendors and tossing back a few beverages I can’t publicly get away with in my Muslim village. And of course speaking English regularly. In other words, this is Club Med – Kayes region. It’s a 40 km bike ride from village, recently made a lot easier by the acquisition of my new PC-issued mountain bike, colored candy-cane red and white like “Speed Racer” and making me stick out more than ever as the rich American.

And now for some random entries taken from my daily journal I keep at site:

- After watching a Kung Fu movie off a generator at the village, I had to defend myself by saying in earnest “No, no, no, in real life, Americans aren’t mean and they don’t go around killing each other with karate.”

- Today, I ate an entire cucumber that measured 9.5 inches long by 5.5 inches wide. And that’s smallish.

- People here are always complaining about how miserable they are because of work, poverty, illness, etc. I try to tell them that “Money can’t buy happiness” but I wonder now if that is an expression one can only say when they have a cushion of luxury around them already. Here, money really is the only thing that can cure many of their problems.

- Clever idea for a Mother’s Day lunch special at restaurants: Eggs Over-Easy. Get it?

And now, stay tuned for the Thanksgiving Day Jake In Mali Special, coming up next!

I passed my language test.  I completed all of the cultural, medical, security and technical learning requirements.  I bought my ridiculous Malian “formal wear,” which in many cases is a terrific misnomer, for reasons to be described later.  And then, I swore in. Finally, almost exactly one year since I first submitted my initial application to become a Peace Corps Volunteer, I have taken the final step in the realization of that goal.  Not that there was ever really any question to me as to whether I would accomplish this feat, but the knowledge that I have still fills me with a warm glow inside.  Of course, that could just be a side-effect of my giardia. Since my last entry, Tubani So had mostly continued in the same way as it normally does: hanging around, playing cards, reading, attending technical skill classes and administrative seminars, and of course, counting the days until we could attain the closest thing to “job security” we can expect from this gig.  We also began planning what was for a number of us, one of the most important elements of swearing in as a volunteer, our outfits.  This was like preparing for senior prom, with a bizarre twist.  As I forget whether or not I mentioned previously, Malians have a unique sense of fashion.  The expression “anything goes” is taken to weird new levels as the common practice among Malians is to buy a fabric adorned with designs ranging from abstract or floral to more blatant pictures of chickens, batteries, cellular phones and factories with smokestacks, and then have a tailor sew them an outfit, either pants, shirts, or a matching combination of both.  So far, I have been embracing the tackiest parts of this culture and have purchased fabrics with pictures of loaves of bread in plastic bags, spats (you know, those fun Las Vegas shoes from way back when), fancy cocktail drinks, and one with an entire living room scene straight out of the tackiest part of 1978.  The latter two were made into a shirt and pants combo, which combined with a mustache/soul-patch facial hair design made up the outfit I wore for the formal swearing-in ceremony (photo available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/29040473@N02/ ).  It doesn’t sound like it should be true, but this really does make up Malian formal-wear, and I know this because I checked multiple times with multiple people, asking “Are you suuurrre this is actually appropriate??” Once I had established that what would barely pass for pajamas in the U.S. were in fact dressy enough for a televised event at the American Embassy, I went on with daily life at Tubani So, counting down the days until the big event.  On the night before, we invited our host parents from homestay over for dinner so they could get a chance to see the legendary school that we would periodically disappear to for days at a time.  They seemed impressed enough, though I doubt that the visit quite lived up to my host father’s high expectations of what this mythical place of learning and American comeraderie seemed from the way he asked me about it during homestay. The next morning, everyone showered, shaved, put on their dressy (and again, I use the term loosely) clothing, and took off to the U.S. embassy in Bamako.  The ceremony was more or less as unexciting as we expected.  Speeches were given by important heads of things, mostly in languages I don’t know well enough to make out any content.  Finally, we gave our oath, remembering not to actually say “I, state your name, do solemnly swear, or affirm...” and we were in.  The rest of the day was spent at various clubs and bars, dancing to that Romanian “Numa Numa” dance song 4 different times at 3 locations, and reveling in ways that only incredibly excited newly appointed Peace Corps volunteers can. So where does that leave me?  Well, I leave tomorrow bright and early for the lovely town of Niantanso for a few days, and then I get installed at my site, where I will be living on and off for the next two years.  I’m trying very hard to come up with something significant to say to mark the occasion, but the truth is I’ve been in and out of the bathroom all night, sick with a very bothersome giardia parasite who I’m hoping will be a little bit less aggressive tomorrow during my 6 hour trip.  But. . . this is it.  I’m starting.  I’m wondering what I’m going to be doing for the next few months with limited language ability and little idea of what projects to begin or how to initiate them.  I feel a bit like I’m being tossed into the deep end of the pool, and not for the first time either.  I’m not sure the next time I’ll get online, so send my some love to come back to and wish me luck.  Training wheels are off and I’m picking up speed.  This should be interesting...

Not only have I just completed the end of homestay training, but I think this is the longest I can remember going without internet access in years.  I really must be getting used to this place. The last 3 weeks have gone by a lot faster than I thought they would.  Language training has been put on the back burner, and instead we've finally begun to concentrate on the technical details of water sanitation work.  On one day, the entire Water San sector came to my homestay village and built a soak pit and washing area.  For those of you W.S.-ignorant as I once was, a soak pit is a pit dug near latrines, pumps, and washing areas, where the water can sink into the ground and be reabsorbed instead of sitting on the surface accumulating fungus and letting mosquitos breed.  Yes, it's valuable, important, and it was the first time that I felt truly useful in this country so far.  That grand feeling was fleeting though, as the next time we met as a sector, most of what we did consisted of unnecessary field trips to tour offices and hear dull speakers give lectures which could have been sufficiently consolidated onto a piece of paper and an explanatory sentence.  In some ways, it has been frustrating to be spending so much time doing so little other than preparation, but knowing that I will be officially installed at my site and back to feeling as if I'm in way over my head within a week makes me feel oddly better. Homestay wasn't altogether without incident.  I had perhaps my most culturally  frightening experience as I cut my hair on afternoon outside my house and watched the children living in my housing concession swarm me like moths to a bulb trying to get at my shorn locks.  At first, they were just gathering them from off the ground, but soon started shoving hands in my face to be the first to get the fallen locks.  After gathering a sufficient handful, they would run off somewhere and come back empty-handed for more.  I was honestly more creeped out that I had been since the first time I tried eating "to" (see earlier entries).  I was half expecting a voodoo doll or some West African equivalent to show up on my pillow the next day.  It was only later that I learned that the hair was buried and this practice was just a measure to make sure none of it would accidentally get into food.  However, there are a number of traditional medicinal and other ritual crafts still practiced that use white-people hair as the main ingredient, and apparently there might be a small profit to be made the next time I give myself a trim. As the end of homestay began to approach, so did the beginning of Ramadan, which was an exciting excuse for me to tell everyone in the village that as a Jew, I did not in fact fast on Ramadan but I had at least another half dozen excuses throughout the year to feel their pain.  The village spent a week planning a going away party for the 4 of us PCTs who were leaving, and only on the day of the party did someone realize that it was already the 4th day of the holiday and there were no parties allowed, so instead, a goat was sacrificed in our honor and served over dinner.   Coming back to Tubani So, it was good to see all the PCTs again in once place.  We've been retelling our wild stories, the most interesting involving 4-goat orgies, adult cats feeding from the breasts of dogs, and of course sharing news of all of our latest illnesses (so far, I've mainly just had to deal with a couple weeks of dysentery which has served to teach me only that dysentery isn't nearly as scary as its made out to be in "The Oregon Trail").  The rest of our time has been spent attending last-minute seminars about last-minute details involving such crucial issues such as how much we're getting paid and when, watching bootlegs of The Dark Knight that at least 3 people have had sent to them, and packing up and preparing for the next 2 years of our lives.  I've been thinking about a good number of things, some of them important like exactly which projects I will be trying to start up once I get to site, some of them more philosophical like what it would be life if I came back to America and "The Simpsons" has gone off the air (I can't remember a time before Homer and Bart only took vacations from their Sunday night schedule during baseball playoffs season). In anticipation of my impending beginning of service following Friday's Swearing-In Ceremony, I should warn you all that I have no real idea of when I will be able to have any internet access once I move to my site.  I will be living 40 km from the nearest electrical sockets, so finding a time and place to go online to update blogs and email is still up in the air.  In the meantime, you can now check out some photos I've managed to upload on our painfully slow server here at Tubani So.  This is only a small fraction of everything I've shot, but it's the best I can do for now, so check them out at www.flickr.com/photos/29040473@N02 and enjoy.  Also, drop me a line at yacob118@hotmail.com if you feel like you ever need to send some care packages or letters my way and I'll give you my mailing address.  Otherwise, perhaps one more update to come before I ship out to site, so until next time, keep on enjoying your happy rich country and know that at least one of your friends is equally enjoying his happy life in the developing world.

...But it certainly would have made for a nicer journey out into the bush where I have just been visiting my future site of work.  Before then, I had been at my homestay village, doing the usual studying of language, hanging out with the locals, and drinking lots of tea.  Since the last post, I spent a week in Marako ("We're off on the road to Marako/These bush taxis are killing my spine.").  On one occasion, we were able to attend the wedding of a sibling of the host of one of the PCTs.  Malians really know how to throw a party, and starting at around 10 pm, the xylophones, drums and terrible sound system were broken out and the dancing commenced.  The two other PCTs in attendance and I danced and wathced other people dance, marvelling at how much better at it they appeared to be than ourselves.  Partway through the party, the festivities were violently disrupted by a frog attack — attack being a term used liberally.  Among their many cultural quirks, Malians as a whole are terrified of frogs, and I mean terrified.  There are a whole number of superstitions that exist, such as if a woman touches one, it will literally and actually jump into her *ahem* reproductive cavity.  Suffice it to say, when the frog started hopping around the dance floor, nobody was particularly interested in stopping it, preferring to shriek and run out of the way.  Well, one elderly gentleman had decided that this was enough and when the frog landed in front of him, he starred right at it.  The frog stared back at him, and he at it, and it at him, and finally he stuck his foot out and triumphantly stomped on its head.  He n proceeded to pick it up by the leg and fling it over the roof.  Immediately, everyone cheered, the music picked right back up again, and normalcy was restored. Another fun adventure and "faux pas" learning experience was when my PCT friend and I decided to go for a run.  The first time we had done this, she had been wearing capri pants, but she decided that this time, it was too hot and shorts were the way to go.  Now, despite the fact that women often go completely topless around here without a second thought around their home concessions, showing legs is a big no-no.  So when my co-runner and I walked around to the front of the house where the family was waiting, everyone took one look at her exposed knees and started muttering and looking away... all except one boy who dropped his mouth open in complete shock, let out a high pitched yelp, and almost fell off the bench he was sitting upon.  To this day, anytime this boy sees her, or even doesn't see her but knows her door is open, he stares at my friend or into her room, probably hoping he'll somehow catch another glimpse of those oh-so-alluring kneecaps.

Sadly, at the end of the week, I had to say goodbye to my homestay family for a while, as last week, we left to spend a few days at our future sites where we will be living and working for 2 years.  The travel out there was difficult, to say the least.  We were escorted by our homologues, the people who live in our villages whose job it is to show us around, introduce us to people, and be our basic support system in the village.  We took a bus from Bamako, the capital, to the city of Kita, where we were supposed to get a bush taxi out to the village 2 hours away.  We missed the first transport, so we had to catch the second one, 7 hours later.  In the meantime, we killed the day by waiting at the station, since the taxi could leave at a moment's notice and we didn't want to miss it.  So yeah, 7 hours sitting around doing nothing.  Finally, when the taxi did come, the trip took an hour longer than it should have since we changed the tire 3 times, despite only having one spare.  But it was okay, because I was perfectly comfortable on my seat which was a giant bag of rice, since the bench was broken and even more uncomfortable than the rice bag, which gave pretty good support as we drove in and out of potholes and ditches along the 100km unpaved road into the bush.  I kept imagining the line from the end of "Back to the Future," which is where I get the title for this entry.

But I'm being too negative.  Once we got to village that night, I was allowed to sleep in my homologue's house while my own house was still being prepared.  The next day, I got a tour of the village, which is a 2000 person farming commune which makes it large enough to have both a dugutigi, or village chief, and a mayor who is appointed by the local government.  I was introduced to both these men, who had extensive talks concerning what exactly I would be doing in the town and how glad they were to have me.  Of course, my Bambara being still very elementary and the fact that they were speaking another dialect called Malinke meant I understood nothing, but I would soon get used to this. The next several days were spent eating, walking around, and hanging out with people who tried their best to include me in their conversations but gave up quickly after deciding that all I knew how to say was "America is very nice" since their accents were nearly impenetrable to my unaccustomed ear.  I did manage to get in a few good conversations with my homologue, and even more with his brother who knows a bit of English and seems much more friendly.  We talked about America and even touched on some political issues such as displacement of wealth and separation of Church and State.  However, I mostly sat quietly for most of the visit and watched the world go by.  Niantanso is basically a typical poor Malian farming commune.  They have pumps and wells for water, but some of the pumps are broken and the wells are made of mud bricks since they can't afford concrete, and mud is not exactly something you want to use to support your water supply unless you want to be drinking it too.  They are also building a CSCOM center, the NGO which builds medical centers for areas like mine which are large enough to support them and remote enough to need them over simple locally trained doctors.  With the sanitation expertise I will hopefully be accumulating in the coming weeks, it seems that I will have quite a bit of good work to be doing once I get to my site in September.

After a long, slow 4 days, I was picked up to go to Manantali, my local city for banking and mail pickup.  There is a "stage house" there for PCVs and it is about as nice a place as one can find in Mali.  There is a river with hippos and monkeys cavorting about, running water and electricity, and plenty of supermarkets with Western amenities for all the Europeans and South Africans working on the hydroelectric dam there.  In short, America is just a 35 km bike ride away.  I spent the night there hanging out with PCVs and other trainees before spending 2 days at the stage house in Kita, which seems like just as fun a place.  We spent 2 days hitting the town, watching disney movies, eating homemade fudge, and getting devoured by bedbugs.  We also got the chance to really see a Malian city for the first time, and it is definitely one of the stranger experiences so far.  Even the major cities here are like nothing I've ever seen.  They are really truly poor, and the only buildings made of solid concrete and look stable are owned by the wealthiest businesses and entrepreneurs.  The local market is usually run by old women selling produce and minor household items in wooden lean-to shacks lined up in rows.  Children amazed by the presence of "tubobs," or foreign white people, follow us around and keep trying to get us to shake our hands saying "Bonjour! Bon soir!" regardless of the time of day or where you are going.

Essentially what I learned this week, while I wasn't cheating and living in the little pockets of American life transplanted here by ex-pats and PCVs, was that Mali can continually amaze me by how different it is than anything I expected.  Everything looks and smells different.  Donkeys stroll through downtown with their owners and everyone greets you on the street.  I am going to take a long time getting used to this place, but I fully anticipate it being worthwhile.  Coming up, I have a solid 3 weeks in Marako with the Samake family, and then I swear in as an official Peace Corps Volunteer.  I'm not even thinking that far ahead.  As far as I'm concerned, I'm living life here a little bit at a time; it's not 2 years in Mali, it's tomorrow in Mali.

This will probably be my last post for a few weeks, so send me lots of love to come back to.  Also, if you want my new address, which is different from my old one, let me know and I'll send it to you.  Thanks for reading, and see you next time.

When you turn on the television and see those commercials advertising that "for the price of a cup of coffee each day, you can save a poor starving African child's life," you tend to get the impression that all Africans living in rural areas have squalid living conditions, are malnourished, and miserable all the time.  I've spent the last 2 weeks living in some similar conditions in the 3rd poorest country in the world, and while there is obviously a poor food and sanitation situation,  I have seen very little misery, and nothing that resembles the constant pain that Bono and Sally Struthers have been advertising to the West as what dominates Africa.  What I have seen is playing children, hard-working farming families, some of the friendliest hospitality imaginable, and overall one of the most illuminating 2 weeks of my life. Tuesday morning 2 weeks ago, I awoke with a painful speech-impediment inducing canker sore on my tounge only to find that the previous night's monsoon had swept all my newly washed clothing off the clothesline and into the wet, muddy ground.  All this meant that as we left that day to our Homestay sites where we were going be learning Bambara, the Malian language, and culture while living with a local family, I had no clean clothes and couldn't talk without feeling pain.  Once we hit the road to our villages, I was feeling better.  The driver told us that the five of us going to our site, a town called Marako, were being spoiled since the community had slaughtered 2 goats in our honor.  It only got more exciting as we arrived at the village to see most of the community of 900 people having a whole elaborate welcome party with traditional music, dancing, and welcome speeches.  It was the best possible welcoming.  Afterwards, we were introduced to the families we would be staying with and went off with them to our homes.

In my compound, where the whole extended family lives, I was taken to my home, which is a room with a bed and some pre-supplied Peace Corps-issued goodies like mosquito nets, lanterns, sheets, and 2 buckets, one to hold our pump-water for drinking, and one for us to use as we have our bucket-baths.  The rest of the family, grandparents, parents, children, aunts, siblings, and wives, all live in different houses in the compound.  The buildings are made of cement with corrogated metal roofs, and there are seperate mud-brick and thatched-roof kitchens and storage sheds.  We also have donkeys, goats, chickens, dogs, and a rooster who I think is sick, because rather than a triumphant Cock-a-doodle-dooo! to wake up to, the sound he makes is more like a car engine failing to start.

Within the first day, I had been given a new Malian name: Able Samake, the same name as the family patriarch and the youngest son, who I, in the interest of cross-cultural exchange, have taken to calling Michael Jackson because of his enthusiastic dance moves.  Explaining the significance of his name was difficult, as was getting the family to learn the immense impact Mr. Jackson has had on American pop culture ("Michael Jackson bE donke.  Donke togo Moonwalk.").  Once that had been established, the following days only saw an increase in cultural sharing.  Most of our days have been occupied by learning Bambara and little snippets of Malian culture.   Some interesting rules of Mali: Never use your left hand for anything involving food or greetings - that hand is saved for post-bathroom cleanup using the teapot-bidet called a "salidaga."  Women never whistle, and men don't at night.  If you dig holes in the ground, you will be thought a sorcerer and regarded with suspicion.  The Earth does not spin - if it did, how come I never wake up on the other side of the room? (Think about it.)  Chairs, first dibs on food, and anything else that requires priority go to guests, and then elders.  Children are very much at the bottom of the pecking order, but that doesn't mean we don't love 'em.  Dogs and any other animals, though, are regularly beaten, or chased into the bathroom while someone is using it.  Tea is drank regularly, and often, and is a very long process that yields about 3 sips per person.  One of these days, I'll post the process here and you can introduce it to your friends and then they will feel so cool to be friends with you and your ethnic worldliness. Life in the village is fun.  Marako mostly consists of farmers, and that is what most people do all day during the current rainy season.  Nights, I hang out with other PCVs in Marako, or out front of my host father Seydou's butiki, or general store, and socialize with whichever random townsfolk stop by.  Slowly but surely, I am more and more able to carry on small conversations, and the last night there, I was talking about religion in Mali and motorcycles.  Food is another adventure here.  Breakfast is always a loaf of bread slathered in mayonnaise, lunch is rice with a peanut or fish or something else sauce which is occasionally good and usually at least edible.  Dinner has mostly been fantastic and consisting of eggs, french fries, potatoes, or vegetable stew.  It's not well-rounded nourishment, but it's edible and that's good.  I have tried "to," a dish of millet porridge and okra paste which is the national dish of Mali, and it is easily the worst possible food ever.  I didn't even know people could eat things that bad, but I suppose Malians are raised on it, and I give them credit for having stomachs of steel.

On a more serious note, I mentioned earlier that life isn't as bad as people usually imagine.  It's true, though there are problems.  Diseases are plentiful and easily acquired, malnourishment is rampant and babies with bloated bellies are probably the ones who don't live until the life expectancy of 50.  But, the kids play with me and laugh a lot, and while by Western standards they live terribly, you wouldn't get quite that response from them.  One thing I've learned is that those sad looking pictures of unsmiling Malian children are very misleading.  Africans simply don't smile in pictures.  They'll be screaming for me to get out my camera and get all excited, and then as soon as I aim, the adopt the "poor sad African child look" that we all see on TV.  It's actually a little bit offensive how much the West exploits the image of an impovershed Africa to pay for its charities, while ignoring the culturally rich and happy parts of the continent that is full of great people.  How miserable could a people be when they go back and forth for a full minute greeting each other every time they see a friend, and even strangers are waved to with:-Hi, good morning!

-Good morning!-How's your day!-Only peace!-How's your family?-They're all fine!-Yeah!-Yeah! Mali is not perfect, and I'm still nervous about the prospect of 2 years here, but I'm sure I will get to the point where I am happier staying than quitting and it will be worthwhile.  I called Dad one night and while he was talking about how I only get one body and nothing is guaranteed, my bed broke, I fell on the floor and lost phone reception.  That kind of irony is the reason I am happy here.  It may not be easy or fun all the time, but it won't be like anything else I ever do.  See you next time, and keep in touch.

I've had more computer time than internet access lately, so here are two blogs in one posting for you:

Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport is really nice.  It looks like what my parents in their somewhat dated stylistic sensibilities would refer to as “space-age.”  Red carpeted floors and a wood paneled cieling make up the interior, which in its airplane hangar-like shape and rows of lights above me that form flourescent trails like cars lit up on a highway at night seem like a stark contrast from what I’m anticipating in approaching days.  This is just one of the many things on my mind as I take a little bit of time to myself to update this blog and tell you about my last few days. There has been hardly any time to think between meetings, seminars, travling, meeting people and sleeping, the latter being sadly the least frequent.  Monday, I arrived at the hotel downtown, which was lucky for me since it was the national orientation and just about everyone else had to fly here and was already out of their home city.  The first day went surprisingly well, and despite my normal aversion to having to make fridns with massive groups of strangers at the same time, once I realized that everyone was just as new there as I was and just as eager to make friends with the whole group, it was easy to loosen up and “work the room.” Monday and Tuesday mostly consisted of icebreakers and educational general orientation seminars.  The staff members gave us a general idea of what to expect from life in Mali and how the Peace Corps runs, including little tidbits such as “The Maliaria prophylaxis doesn’t neccessarily give you nightmares, though I had some weird dreams about the local mosque blaring Pink Floyd” and that we should be expecting to eat our delicious millet meals three times a day, but some of the richer familiies we will be living with might splurge on chicken, eggs and spices.  There was a lot more information obviously, mostly running the gamut from inspirational speeches to remiders of protocal and all the ways we can potentially get kicked off the program, but a lot of emphasis was also placed on meeting people.  With 78 of us, the decided to split us in half, which allowed for much more efficient and friendly bonding, and so far, everyone I’ve met here seems to be intelligent, cool and very friendly.  I suppose it makes sense that Peace Corps would mostly be attracting the kinds of people who were outgoing, confident and smart, unlike say, at a college orientation where you could meet some of the best people ever or a room full of kids dumber then a shovel. Outside of the seminars, we spent a lot of time walking around town, socializing and eating as much expensive and unhealthy food as possible (I think the girl who downed 4 Philly Cheesesteaks in 2 days took the record), all on the free cash given to us by the program directors to spend away our last few days here.  Wednesday, we recieved our yellow fever shots and our first doses of malaria pills (not something I ever really imagined myself having to go through - me taking malaria medicine??)  However, a few hours later, and anxiety begining to set in deeper than ever, we loaded our luggage, got on the bus, and pulled out of the hotel - and hit a parking sign.  So after making sure we hadn’t caused too much damage to civic property right before fleeing the country, we took off to JFK, and then to Paris. The flight was fairly uneventful, except for seeing Bill Murray boarding our plane to Paris on first class and everyone having a mild freakout, and the plane serving us free wine, though I decided I’d rather let my body max out on the last dependably clean water supply I might have for a while.  And that brings me to here, about an hour from boarding a plane to Bamako, Mali.  I will probably post this once I get there since I don’t feel like paying for the wireless internet, so this entry will already be obsolete, but I’m also not certain what my web-usage schedule will be over there, so I  figure I’ll take advantage of the downtime here.   On another note, if you want to sent me a package or mail, email me and I’ll give you my address in Mali.  That’s all I’ve got for now so I will abruptly and uncreatively say goodbye for now. I’ve been here for about 2 days and already, I’m wondering if this whole blog idea is futile or not.  There are so many things to tell and nothing has even happened yet.  As a general overview, we got into Bamako airport on Thursday night without a hitch - and without hardly a wink of sleep in a day and a half - and were immediately bussed to the Peace Corps Mali training village called Tubani So, in Zamabunu (I think that’s what it’s called).  After an amazingly delicious dinner featuring some kind of Malian potato that is some of the best potato dishin’ I’ve had, we mostly grabbed our bags and headed off to our mud huts where I, with my two “hut-mates” went to sleep. *Sidenote about our training center: Tubani So is in a small town outside Bamako, the capital city.  We all live in mud-brick huts with well-thatched roofs right off of the dusty road to everywhere else.  Everywhere else includes assorted other mudhuts, the dining hangar, various other hangars for meetings, seminars and orientations, and a few sports courts and fields.   As for lavatories, because I know you all want to know, we use a “nyegen.”  It’s an outhouse...with a hole in the ground...that functions as a urinal, toilet, and shower drain.  That’s right, we have a shower here so that we don’t have to adjust to everything all at once.  But we also have a hole that we squat over and defecate into.  It smells as bad as you think, there are as many flies as you think, it’s just as uncomfortable and paniful on morale as you think, and the only saving grace is that they give us toilet paper here so we don’t have to immediately switch over to using a teapot as a bidet.  But we’re still never supposed to eat or shake hands with our left hand.  Yes, it is that bad. But all the time I’ve spent outside the nyegen has been wonderfully interesting.  Right now, I’m listening to the noises of the night, which has the standard crickets complimented by clicks, chirps, and squacks of all varieties.  Earlier today, I heard one of the most entertaining bird calls I’ve ever heard, which can best be described as a wood saw cutting a log to the tune of “weeee-awwww, weeee-awwww, weeee-awwww, weeawweeawweeaw!”  I’ve also see some huge millipedes, and one guy said he saw a nice big scorpion on the road, and right now, the dining room I’m in is getting swarmed by giant flying kamikaze termites.  Oddly though, when I’m outside looking around, I’ve seen a lot of trees and bushes not altogether different from those at home, and almost forgot I was in Africa for a little while.  It’s still strange for me to say aloud “I am living in Africa right now.” As for what we’ve actually been doing, a lot of it has been orientation, telling us what to do here, what to expect from training, etc.  Initially, it was a little bit of general information on medical rules, social customs, the typical orientation stuff.  Our trainers, some of whom are Malians, others actually being current volunteers, have been regalling us with tales of Malian glory, like when one girl who had been stabbed by a rose thorn and did not have the Bambara language skills to communicate the problem accidentally told her host mother that she had “been vaccinated by a tree.”   More recently, we have been starting to learn Bambara, Mali’s indigenous language which is actually a lot of fun to speak.  It’s kind of the stereotypical African-sounding language, minus the clicks.  We have also been learning the ins and outs offf dealing with “Mr. D.” a.k.a. diarrhea, and his wife, “Ms. C.” whose identity I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate on.  We’ve been warned about all the gorey details and potentially alien contents of our stools as a result of various exciting parasites, and now we are all scared to eat or drink anything outside of our safe and protected compound.  The major rule so far is just to clean the hell out of our water and not to eat anything made on the street.  On Tuesday, we leave for “Homestay” where we have more intense language, cultural and skill training while living with a family in a village near Tubani So.  For now, I’m running out of things to think of saying, so I leave you saying a ni walu and see you next time.

While my official term of service doesn't begin until July 10, I begin my orientation one week from today, where the Peace Corps office will administer our last round of shots, tell us a bit more about where we're going and what to expect, and do a final check to make sure they haven't accidentally recruited any bona fide crazies. In the meantime, I've been doing a lot in the way of preparing for my journey, carrying out such arduous tasks as visiting friends, lounging around the house, and buying all the fun new toys I get to take with me, like mosquito tents, headlamps, luggage with pockets in places that scream "part-time smuggler," and most excitingly, a digital camera. I've always been apprehensive about digital cameras, because it always seemed a bit like cheating for me, along the same lines as web-based dictionaries and Yellow Pages, online shopping, or anti-lock brakes. Don't we as civilized humans lose something when we allow our machines to do every simple thing for us? The answer is "yes, of course," but that doesn't mean my digital camera isn't cool enough to sell my soul for. This is probably old-hat to most of you digital camera vets, but for me, it's thrilling that my camera has settings that manually or automatically control light, focus, aperture, and every other option for every conceivable photo-taking situation: "kids&pets," fireworks, indoors, outdoors, mountains, parties, beaches, aquariums, and on and on. Not only that, but it has features like redeye elimination, image stabilization, and my favorite, a little targeting reticle that can find all the faces in the picture and focus on them. That last feature even worked on a C3P0 mask I was taking a picture of, which means the function either works very well or just gets easily confused.

Fun new toys aside, my other task, traveling and vacationing, has also been a blast so far. I kicked off my grand tour with a trip to Indianapolis, partly to see an old Binghamton friend, but more importantly, to see the Indy 500 Hall of Fame! (Just kidding Mal, haha! Please don't hurt me.) There, we had all sorts of adventures like doing embarrassingly poorly at bowling, seeing the Indy 500 HoF and track, and hanging out at the zoo (the best part of which was watching a walrus playing peekaboo with a little girl from the other side of his glass tank while evidentally either having much too much fun looking at her, or simply missing the presence of a female of his own species...and all of the adults in the audience were snickering when they realized the walrus could use his hands and feet at the same time to physically relieve his "loneliness," while the little girl playing with him remained blissfully unaware).

The next week was a trip with some other Bing buddies to Margate, New Jersey, where a grand time was had by all with the beach, boardwalk, and barbecue. Losing $45 at blackjack was less exciting, but one Atlantic City-priced martini later, I didn't mind quite as much. A day after returning home, I went for a vacation of boating, biking and hiking with my dad, where not even the constant threat of cataclysmic monsoons could stifle our fun. Heavy rain for nearly half of a 25 mile bike ride on a muddy trail? Feh! Nothing can stop us from having a good father-son bonding time!...especially when we already paid the deposit on the bicycle rentals.

The final leg of my travels began last Sunday when I drove up to Boston to cram 6 of some of my favorite people into 6 days of visiting. Part one of the trip included staying with my sister Aviva and munching on fresh strawberries from the urban gardens she runs, then going out to a bar with her and her housemates and trying to remember all the rules of playing rummy, and eventually just making a few up. Next visit was some newly engaged friends of mine, one of whom was a Boston native who lives in Israel but came home for a visit so that he could propose to his girlfriend in person, presumably because doing so over Facebook with a photo of the ring would have been in poor taste. Together, we took a Duck Tour of Boston, visited Mother Goose's grave and argued over whether Ben Franklin was a Bostonian or a Philly Boy at heart. Next on the visit-list and joining me on my pilgrimage to the Samuel Adams brewery was a close friend and radio co-host who patiently waited as my underage sidekick while I sampled the beer, some of which is still unavailable to the general public outside the brewery.  The day grew even more exciting as we shared a happy romp around downtown Boston, accompanied by a 3 1/2 foot tall inflated Sam Adams bottle bought at the brewery.  This being Boston, people were thrilled to see our blatant display of civic pride in the form of novelty beer bottles, and cheered, joked or just stared at us everywhere we went, including one 5-year-old boy who told me he liked my "balloon." The last leg of my journey took me south to see more friends, one of whom was babysitting the cutest baby imaginable who, when we would ring a doorbell near him, would look at me with a giant smile as if to say "See?? Isn't that the greatest thing ever?!"  I ended the trip seeing another Bingham-friend and fencing partner, who took me mini golfing and gave me a toy vibrating lion to take to Africa, where I can stand on tall rocks and sing "The Lion King" theme song.  To end my travels, I drove yesterday to a fantastic wedding of more Binghamton people, which was also a good chance to see everyone who I hadn't had a chance to say goodbye to. This brings me to the present, and the end of another blog entry which is a lot longer than I thought it would be.  I guess for the future, I'll work on being more concise, but frankly, you can read as much or little of this as you want, or space it out over time, and things like this always tend to be a bit self-indulgent anyway, so why shouldn't I write this however I want?  In any event, I'll try to update once more before I start orientation, but this week is mostly just packing and cleaning, so we'll see what happens.  See you next time,~JakeP.S. Here are some links to the photos of what I've been doing these last few weeks, and they're visible even if you're not on facebook:www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2131849&l=685d6&id=8107797www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2131907&l=53cc8&id=8107797

So here it is.  What you’ve all been waiting for, wrapped up into one neatly packaged website - the entire story, from beginning to now.  This is my new weblog on how I joined the Peace Corps and everything that has happened since.  This first entry is just a backlog of events that have gotten me up to the present, covering about a year of history, so it is a good deal longer than most of my future entries will be.  This is just for those of you who have no idea what I’ve been up to for the last year.  Also, keep in mind that once I get abroad, updates will be fewer and further between.  For now though, this little blog site should answer all your pressing questions, including “What are you doing?” and “Really? Are you insane?”  Hopefully, I can answer the first question fairly well, and the answer to the second will be determined with time.  For now though, just sit back, get yourself a nice little cocktail, plug in your favorite West African pop record and enjoy the beginning of the serialization of the Mali-bound life of Jacob “The Jakeman” Morris Asher

It was coming, as it did every year, like a tremendous tidal wave, starting small in the distance, but growing ever closer and ever larger, until it would inevitably reach the shore and swallow me up, pulling me into its maw and dragging me down into the bowels of the beast called “Responsibility.”  Yes, summer was approaching, and with it, the need to find myself a job.  I told myself, “Jake, this summer, you’re not gunna screw around.  You’re gunna find yourself a nice respectable position that you would be proud to show any future employer so that you can show off just what a jaw-droppingly fine candidate you intend to be for whatever it is you’re trying to con them into thinking you can do.”  Of course, I didn’t even know where to start looking.  My previous summer occupations had included among them such illustrious positions as summer camp counselor, door-to-door canvasser, and even a janitor on a couple of occasions.  This summer, however, was going to matter. As I delved deep into the information portal of the Internet, I began to find a few intriguing options.  I was looking for something that was meaningful, and related to the type of human-service and aid careers I would later want to pursue following graduation.  There were a lot of non-profit jobs and internships that I could apply for, and this summer was the first time I was getting a nice, early start on the job hunting, so I would be well-positioned to tear the competitive job market a new one. As I began to look into it, there was one prospect that seemed a step more appealing than all the rest.  I knew the Peace Corps was going to be coming to Binghamton’s campus for the job fair and to hold information sessions, and from a cursory look at the website, I was beginning to grow excited.  Here was a job, paid for and organized by the U.S. government, that would allow me to travel outside of the country, doing some important work, and it would lead to one hell of a summer for me.  That all sounded fantastic until I actually looked a bit harder at the website.  The Peace Corps does not do summer.  They don’t do school vacations at all.  It’s also virtually useless to apply without having a college degree already.  And the real kicker?  It was a two-year commitment.  Well, so much for an exciting summer plan. But wait!  I’ll have a degree by halfway through 2008.  And this whole crazy idea of going to work in another country, with everything I need provided by Uncle Sam, might just be worth looking into.  I did some investigating, looking into the logistics of the program and over the next few months, found out everything else I needed to know. Finally, the phone call: “Hey Mom…I’m good…So guess what?  I’ve decided I’m going to apply to the Peace Corps after I graduate…I don’t know why yet, it just seems like a good idea…I’ll justify it later…Why should I be careful when I tell Dad?…Well does his friend still have the parasite?…Oh, I see.  Well I’m pretty sure I want to do it anyway…”  I had barely begun to think about the idea and I was already getting dire warnings of “I had a friend who was a Peace Corps Volunteer.  He still hasn’t recovered.”  But in my typical fashion of not worrying about consequences of my stupid actions until they’re already upon me, I went online and applied.   Getting really fun and crazy ideas in your head is one thing.  Going through with them is another.  And justifying your willingness to go through with them to yourself, and to those who determine whether to accept you or not, is quite another thing altogether.  And spending a week filling out an endless online application form is, for lack of a better term, a royal bloody pain in the keester.  But there I was, at the start of the application, and I had to figure out how to explain in the most convincing way possible why I really wanted to dedicate two years of my life to a foreign country at the severe risk of life, limb and sanity. After much thinking, brainstorming, and practicing on anyone who asked me about it, here is the formal list of reasons why I decided to apply to the Peace Corps: *I need to get out of this place.  My whole life has been surrounded by rich, white, suburban Jews.  Granted, Binghamton gave me a healthy dose of diversity, but only just enough to realize that when it comes down to the basics, Americans tend to be essentially the same.  Especially New Yorkers.  Yeah yeah, take as much offense as you want and cry about how we’re all precious and unique, but aside from a few differences in wealth, personality, and interest, the people I’ve known in my life have mostly fit into the same cultural molds and niches, and everything starts to blend together after a while.  In short, I need to escape America and find something truly exotic. *I need to do something useful.  Sure, I’ve made friends, given charity, volunteered, and brightened the lives of just about everyone I come in contact with through my lovable charm, wit and of course, humility.  But here I am, living in one of the wealthiest nations on Earth, in one of its more affluent societies, with a relatively good education, and what am I doing with my privilege? Nothing.  I’ve been squandering all the gifts I’ve been given, and while anyone with a free Sunday can do some community service, not everyone really does, and certainly not on as massive a scale as I’m interested in.  Going to one of the poorest countries in the world sounds like just what I’m interested in. *Let’s be honest: it’s one hell of a cool vacation and a lot more interesting than some study abroad program in a school that’s full of Americans anyway. *I don’t really know quite what I want to do with my life yet.  I know, I should be on some track by now, and I do have some sense of direction.  Hopefully, the Peace Corps will focus my sense of direction a little more - and give me an extra two years before I have to make any real decisions. *I can help make sure that American tax dollars are going somewhere useful for a change.  Like buying me new socks!             That is a general list of reasons I came up with for myself, my curious friends, and of course the lady who interviewed me after my application was submitted.  Apparently it was a good enough list for her to submit my nomination to the Washington headquarters and launch me into the next phase of the acceptance process.   What followed over the course of the next several months was a long series of medical visits, paperwork, having my wisdom teeth pulled (one of the more unpleasant days of my life, but thank the Good Lord for codeine), and what seemed like endless waiting.  Finally, on the first day of Passover, I got a package.  I already knew what it meant, based on the size and heft of it, and as I eagerly ripped it open, I could literally feel my heart speeding up, beating so tremulously, it made my hands quake.  I carefully pulled out the first piece of paper I saw, and read it aloud to my dog, who was kind enough to be the only one home to congratulate me.  I don’t recall the exact wording, but it was something to the effect of: Congratulations dude! You’re going to Mali! In three months! After that, things began to move much more quickly, and a few more medical visits, a lot more paperwork, and much research into everything I could find out about Mali, its culture, languages (French and Bambara, both of which I need to learn from scratch), and lifestyle, the departure date began to close in on me more intensely than ever. And that brings us up to today.  Since school ended, I have been working daily on learning French, creating packing lists, cleaning up my room (maybenot) and seeing as many friends as I can pack into my final weeks in the country.  I have until July 7th to have everything that needs taking care of dealt with, and then I begin the official national Mali orientation in the distant city of Philadelphia (it’s okay, the Peace Corps pays for my transportation there).  That’s about all that has been going on up until now.  I will probably update this blog a few more times before I leave for Mali, and after that, who knows?  Feel free to shoot me emails ore respond to this blog.  In fact, please do!  That way, I’ll know that people are actually reading this, and home won’t seem quite as far away.  Meanwhile, I’ll see you next update, ~Jake