A friend of mine was doing grad school research on improved mud stoves. He came to my village recently to help a friend of mine build one for his wives!

We finished the fourth and final "Active Management of the Third Stage of Labor (AMTSL)" training sessions in Koutiala, Mali this past Saturday. Although everyone was exhausted by the end after having worked for two weeks straight, I'm happy to report that the trainings were a success!!

The staff of the hospital in Koutiala was essential in making this project a success. The training was run by two OB-GYN doctors, Dr. Coulibaly and Dr. Magassa and a nurse midwife, Madame Traoré. They had all just come from a training-of-trainers workshop in nearby Sikasso, so they were raring and ready to teach their colleagues all they needed to know about preventing post-partum hemorrhaging.

Figure 1 Dr. Magassa demonstrates proper glove removal technique to the women.

The training consisted of two parts: theory and practice. The doctors spent two days prepping the women using PowerPoint presentations on the ins-and-outs of AMTSL before switching to the most exciting part: the hands-on practice. The women were split into two groups, each group with its own dummy. Each woman was in turn asked to formally go through the steps of a birth, and was critiqued afterwards using a checklist created by a consortium of international NGO's. Not only did this list include the essential medical protocol, but it emphasized the importance of bedside manner, something that is often completely overlooked in Mali.

Figure 2 A midwife practices umbilical cord traction, an essential step in preventing post-partum hemorrhaging.

Dr Coulibaly watches behind to make sure AMTSL steps are followed correctly.

Along with the AMTSL training, Nicole Warren, the head of Mali Midwives, used these two weeks as an opportunity to do research about the living and working conditions of the rural midwives. Nicole is also a professor at the Johns Hopkins University of Nursing, and was able to get approval to formally interview the women in an attempt to fully understand their situations in order to bring them trainings tailored to their specific needs.

We found out that some of the women have been working essentially by themselves in their villages for years without support or continuing education. I learned that one woman was obliged to buy all the supplies for her clinic by herself because her village couldn't find the money to help her. Another older midwife has been working in her village for 22 years without support or classes to bring her up to date on the latest birthing techniques. Can you imagine if the first person you had to go to for the birth of your child was a woman who was trained years ago and lacked the basic supplies necessary to do her job? And yet these women persist, some working for free as their villages refuse to pay them for their vital and often life-saving services. I heard woman after woman plead for Mali Midwives to come back with more trainings for them because they were desperate to learn as much as possible. They want to do their jobs well, but nobody but Mali Midwives is offering the training or support to help make this dream a reality.

On the part of the midwives in Koutiala, Mali, I thank you for your continued support. Stay updated on the latest Mali Midwives activities at www.malimidwives.org as we move into the next and most critical stage of the AMTSL training: on–site follow-up and evaluation.

                                

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A Malian proverb says that a woman in labor has one foot on earth, and one foot in the grave. The proverb is all too true: a woman in Mali has a 1 in 25 lifetime chance of dying from childbearing complications.

Last May, three midwives (two from my village and one from my local health center) and I were fortunate to be able to participate in a training about the essential care of newborns held by an American non-governmental organization called Mali Midwives. The group is run by a Mali Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV), Nicole Warren, a registered midwife and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Mali Midwives is a charitable organization committed to supporting continuing education efforts for auxiliary midwives in Mali, especially those who serve in rural areas where most Malians (and Peace Corps volunteers!) live. Last year's training was (to my knowledge) the only follow up training my friends have had since they received their initial midwife training many years ago. The sad truth is that the Malian Ministry of Health simply does not have the funds to provide these women with any support, so it's up to private groups to step in and provide the training they so desperately need.

Last year's training was so successful that Mali Midwives is hoping to come back again this August for another training, this time focusing on a new technique called Active Management of the Third Stage of Labor (AMTSL). AMTSL is a technique to prevent postpartum hemmorage, the major cause of maternal mortality in the world. It has been identified by the Ministries of Health as a training that they'd like to give all the midwives in Mali, but don't have the money available to reach everyone. The fact that Mali Midwives is coming to fill in where the government can't make ends meet is exciting to me because it shows how in-touch they are with what's really going on in Mali. They're not establishing priorities and trainings based on what they think needs to get done, but rather on what the national government has said it hopes to offer all it's health professionals.

I've been invited to formally participate this year, as Nicole Warren's schedule won't allow her to spend more than 10 days in Mali. I've been told that I'll be taking care of logistics and hopefully doing some academic research, as well. The real training will be done, like last year, by certified doctors located at the regional hospital.

Mali Midwives needs to raise $25,000 by the end of June in order to make this year's training possible. They have already collected around $13,000. The money will cover travel, lodging, food and a set of resource materials for trainers and participants. This cost will also cover site visits by an expert trainer to small groups of midwives in rural sites. Site visits are crucial because they will provide midwives the opportunity to ask questions and clarify techniques in the field.

I've never put a plea for donations on my blog, but because this is something I'll be personally involved in, and because I think it's so important for these women, I've decided to ask for your help. By contributing to Mali Midwives, you will help cover the expenses to train 82 auxiliary midwives in Koutiala, Mali. These women will return to their villages with life-saving skills that will prevent unnecessary deaths related to childbirth in their community. You'll find the information you need to donate below.

Thank you so much in advance for your support. As you know, the need is great and the resources few.

Mali Midwives is grateful to The Village Project, Inc. for serving as their fiscal sponsor. The Village Project, Inc. is a 501c3 with experience in organizing educational activities abroad. Contributions to Mali Midwives via The Village Project, Inc. are tax-deductible. Contributions can be made on line with PayPal at http://www.malimidwives.org/donate.php Checks payable to The Village Project, Inc. with Mali Midwives written in the memo section can be sent to Mali Midwives c/o Nicole Warren, 4509 Schenley Road , Baltimore Maryland , 21210 .

To learn more about Mali Midwives contact them at malimidwives@gmail.com. To read more about postpartum hemorrhage and AMTSL, visit http://www.pphprevention.org/amtsl.php.

My villagers and I just finished a latrine project. We built three latrines in common areas in town - one at our midwife clinic, one at the chief of the village's house, and one at the mosque. More details to come later, but check out the photos in the album on the right!

last updated by the handsome peter scheuermann

"Wedding season" almost sounds like a Sex and the City Episode. Or, for Americans, it may conjure thoughts of _____ (insert your favorite sport here) season, or even restaurant week. Sports seasons and restaurant weeks are concentrated periods of time when Americans get to go all out and indulge in their favorite passion. Whether it be in the sports arena or the realm of gastronomy and good eating, fanatics tend to spend a disproportionate amount of time and money engaged in thinking about, preparing for and engaging in this short-lived, seasonal rite. To bring it to a very local level, wedding season in my village is the equivalent of football season in Pittsburgh. People can't seem to think about anything else. Similarly, March is the perfect time for Malian men (young and old) to engage in what I like to think of as one of their favorite pastimes: weddings. Rainy season ended last August, the last of the crops were harvested in November, most of the cooking wood has been gathered in the past month, and the temperatures just keep rising. No real work will be done in the fields until at least early June, so with little else to do, and with little desire to do anything else, Malians choose to distract themselves with getting hitched. A friend once told me that the reason Malians have so many children is because they have nothing else to do at night. I think wedding season is just about the same: there's nothing else to do now, so they take advantage of the 4-wife allowance in the Muslim faith and take another wife. In small villages like mine, every wedding in the village happens on the same day. Anyone who wants to get married has to wait until this specific day to make their union official. People start talking about and preparing for it months in advance. There are bonbon invitations to be distributed, distant relatives who need to be notified, excessive quantities of corn and rice and millet to be pounded, and money to be rounded up. Malian weddings run on a very loose invitation system. In the weeks before the wedding, a member of the family goes around the village passing around candy to people in the village. They'll hand you a piece or two of candy and tell you that this is so-and-so's wedding candy. If you've received candy, you can consider yourself invited and you or someone from your family is expected to attend. Nothing more needs to be said. It's very confusing to Americans who are used to formal, typed invitations and specifics about who, what, where, and when. On the other hand, much like their American equivalent, Malian weddings are expensive affairs. That poses a slight problem in country where nobody has any money and everyone is expected to take multiple wives as a sign of age, class, and status. Part of calling the distant relatives, aside from informing them of the event itself, is to ask for a financial contribution. Oftentimes, distant relative means educated and well-placed relative, someone in a position to offer significant financial support. When all is said and done, a bride can cost a groom's family upwards of $600, a sum that very few Malians can muster up on their own. Above and beyond the liquid cash offered to the bride's family, Malian husbands are expected to offer their wives much, much more: A friend of mine is in the process of getting his younger brother married, and is expected to pay the bride's family 175,000CFA (about $300). He's also expected to bring them: 17 brand new outfits, 5 pairs of matching shoes, 5 head scarves, 150kg corn, 100kg rice, 1 goat, and 5 chickens. And if that's not enough, a woman also requires a house of her own (basically a one-or two room mud building), a free-standing kitchen hut, and all the equipment to fill both. It's no small undertaking, and for this reason, it's understandable that Malians look to their families and friends for help. People keep asking me when I'm going to get married. At almost 26, I'm too old not to be married. A woman at a wedding last week actually laughed at me when I told her I wasn't married -- she didn't believe me! Surely, someone as educated, rich and beautiful as myself MUST be married, n'est pas? The conversation usually goes something like this: "C'est pas possible!" they tell me. What in the world could I possibly be waiting for, they wonder? I try every excuse I can come up with, but they still have trouble understanding why I'm single. "I'm still a kid", I say. They laugh. Malian women, especially those in small villages, often have two or more kids by the time they're my age. "I haven't found a good job yet". They tell me I won't need one; that's what a good husband is for. I cringe. I'd like to be able to provide for myself, thankyouverymuch. They sigh and conclude, "It must be that you must not like Malian men. That's it, isn't it? Your parents must have one waiting for you in America, no? They're going to give you to him when you get back." I shake my head. I tell them in America, we don't give women to men. We're not commodities to be bartered and traded. When I decide to get married, it'll be a mutual decision, not a business transaction. "You know, it's just not normal for a woman your age to be unmarried. It's just not good". I assure them that I'm OK with it. But they won't have it: "There are so many great Malian men out there. We're happy to look for one for you. You can even be the second wife". They're trying to flatter me, cajole me, but I won't have any of it. I explain to them the one wife, one husband policy Americans adhere to by law. In Mali, it's customary to be required to accept a first wife that's chosen by your family. That means that you might not always like, or even love her. But men get to choose the second, third and fourth themselves, which means they'll actually like them. I politely decline the offer to be a loved #2. "If a Malian man can take 4 wives, I want to take 4 husbands", I declare, putting my hands on my hips defiantly. They, of course, laugh, and I continue my explanation, "I need the first one to cook my food, the second to clean my dirty clothes, the third to clean my house, and the fourth to give me foot massages". By this point, they're usually doubled over laughing. "Oh no, no, no. That would never work. The men would kill each other. You simply cannot have four men for one woman. They'd be too jealous". Then why are four wives ok, I ask silently? I'll never get an answer I can understand and agree with for that one, so I let it drop.I'm an exception to the get-married-early rule because I'm not a Malian woman, but it's true that the modern, educated Malian woman faces an important dilemma. Back in the beginning of my stay here in Mali, I wrote an entry about the a comment the doctor at my health clinic made. His point was that Malian men don't want women who are more educated than they are. I was irate when he said it and thought he was backwards and demoded. I've heard it from lots of other men by now, and I'm starting to understand the social consequences of the phenomenon he's referring to. In my village, the generation that's of marrying age (both men and women in this case) are uneducated, which doesn't pose a problem for either party when it comes to marriage. They get married, have kids, farm their fields and live happily ever after. But what about the kids (and especially the girls) who are currently in school? Do they stand a chance of finding a partner in village? Especially the girls, who are usually expected to marry older men? Educated women are often schooled in bigger towns and cities, and then married off there, as well. But here's the catch: Mali is still a society in which someone needs to be at home to take care of the housework. With a rampant lack of any and all household technology, all tasks are done painstakingly by hand. Food is cooked over a wood or charcoal fire, clothes are cleaned by hand, water either pulled from the well, or pumped from a communal source, food bought fresh daily in market, and the house and yard need to be swept out twice daily because the dust from the dirt roads gets kicked up by passing cars and motorcycles, coating everything with a thin film of grit. Someone absolutely needs to be home to keep the place standing. Gender roles are firm here, and this role always falls to women here in Mali, leaving them little time for an education or work outside the home. Married life in Mali is both a curse and a blessing. The majority of Malian women find themselves married and without work outside the home, and thus with no financial contribution to offer their families. The men see this as a blessing for the women, because according to them, this lessens the burden on the woman, an Islamic ideal. I tend to see it as locking women into a situation that they may or may not have chosen or even enjoy. Divorce is almost unheard of in Mali, and because children are the property of the father, divorced women (a rare breed, for understandable reasons) are required to leave their children with their father. These divorced women are not desirable, and have a very small chance of remarrying, thus essentially becoming a burden to their families because they cannot contribute financially. But the exact reason a woman can't contribute financially is because her family chose to sacrifice her education in hopes of finding her a suitable husband, which she no longer has. So where does that leave the state of women and education in Mali? Probably about where America was about 50 years ago, although even then, I'm pretty sure American women weren't being deprived of an education. They just weren't allowed to do anything with it once they got it. Thankfully, America moved forward, and Mali is slowly following suit. Women still find themselves in a bind: those who want to get married early are refused an education, and those who want to get married at all are not encouraged to search advanced or terminal degrees. Overly educated women supposedly pose a threat to the equilibrium of a marriage, as they risk making more than their husbands, which will logically lead them to disobey him and refuse to remain his subordinate. Women with brains are undesirable. A strong woman is intimidating. What does that say about Malian men? With all this said, Malian men don't seem to be having a problem finding women to marry. That may not say much for the state of girl's education here, but it does make a very busy period in the lives of my villagers between the months of March to May. I went to my first wedding extravaganza a few weeks ago and needed a few days after to recover from the lack of sleep. When I jokingly asked the groom (a friend of mine) when wife number three would be arriving, he resolutely responded that after this (#2), there won't be any more. "The money's all gone - weddings are expensive, and two wives are enough". "Just give it a few months", his friends chimed in, "things will cool down, you'll get bored, and you'll change your mind. You'll come around", they assured him. Maybe he'll have a few extra dollars under his mattress in a year or two, and a month or two to spare planning for the event, and will decide to find himself another wife. Because, really, what else will he have to do after the harvest and before the following rainy season?

I ended my last entry with the question "what makes it worth it?" and I realize that I have yet to answer it. It's mainly because I'm not exactly sure what drives people to choose to live in such terrible conditions.

The more I think of it, the more I liken what we saw to how I'd imagine an American "wild west" frontier town to be. And in a sense, that's exactly what it is. So it's definitely not the first time in history that folks have chosen adventure and unpredictability over relative comfort and the "known", but it's the first time that I've experienced it first-hand. I've boiled my rationalization down to two main points: I think people choose to live in the mining zones because the alternatives (village life and big city life) aren't always better, and in fact, can be worse for those who can't find work. Furthermore, for the stir-crazy, courageous, and maybe even foolhardy,the mining zones provide a change as well as a constant challenge.

Let me explain:

In general, the folks who choose to work in the mining zones have two, three maybe options in life: they can stay in their small villages and farm for a living, or they can move to a big city and search for work, or they can move to the mining zones. Financially, these three decisions play out as follows: staying in village is a tough life physically, but from what I've experienced, it's not the worst alternative. Villagers are not guaranteed lots of money, but they are surrounded by family and fields, who (in theory) consistently provide everything they need. Because of the family-based society that still dominates here in Mali, village life definitely has it's perks. Moving to a big city in a risky proposition for someone without an education, ie your typical villager. Assuming they're able to find one of the very few available jobs (the number of idle men sitting around big cities in this country is striking; my parents made a point of mentioning it when they visited), they'll probably make around 1,000CFA (2USD) per day, the daily wage of an unskilled worker here. Ends don't meet at 1,000CFA/day in a big city. So that leaves the final option - going to work in the mines. The money's not guaranteed, and as I mentioned below, it seems folks can go days or even weeks without earning any money. But I get the impression that when the $$ does come, it makes up for the weeks of drought that preceded. Still, the combination of harsh and unsanitary living conditions, inconsistent wages and grueling manual labor can't convince me that moving to the mining zones is worth it. But I wasn't born in a rural African village, and I've never known poverty that exists here. A Malian friend’s story counters my initial impressions and raises points that I'd never even considered.

Hady was born in a small Malian village of 250 people. He never went to school, but nevertheless taught himself to read Bambara and speak French. In his early 20’s, he left his village to go work in the mines, where he stayed for several years before one fateful visit back to village. He tells me that he returned home one year to find a wife waiting for him. He’d expressed no interest in getting married, and had actively refused this particular woman several times. But this time, his father was serious. And a serious father is no laughing matter in Mali. When dad says it’s time to get married and you’ve refused the girl twice already, there’s only one chance left before the family threatens to disown you. It was either stay in village and get married or leave forever. Hady chose to stay home, thus ending his stint at the mines.

But even today, some 20 years later, he insists that he didn’t want to settle down, and would have much preferred to return to work at the mines. Judging by the way he talks about his life there, he really enjoyed it. I suspect that the diverse population, the challenging work and the chance to strike it rich called to this smart, ambitious village boy. He’d found his outlet, his release from the monotony of daily life at home. It was during his time there that he taught himself French and learned to enjoy and cook non-Malian food. To this day, he refuses to eat traditional Malian toh (the tasteless mushy corn dish I think I mentioned a while back) in favor of more nutritious fare such as eggs, meat and a variety of fruits. Hady’s reaction surprised me, but part of me understands where he’s coming from. For him, it was worth giving up the stability and support that come with village life in return for something unpredictable and thus stimulating and invigorating.

So where does that leave us? The mining zones are clearly not for me, and I still don’t think they’re a good place for anyone to raise a family, but for single men like Hady, the answer is different. They're not analyzing the place in terms of HIV/AIDS rates like we were, and they can probably learn to overlook the communal bathrooms and ramshackle stick and plastic houses. They're in it for themselves, and life in the mining zones fill a hole, both financial and emotional, for them.

You’ve got to wonder: if it wasn’t worth it or if it didn’t have a certain draw for certain people, would this many villages have sprung up and would people be content—or even eager –to stick around for so long? Despite the outlaw culture that reigns down south, life in the informal mining zones of Mali IS worth it for a particular cross-section of the Malian, and the West African population.

On a related note, the Malian students we did our project with just finished filling out a proposal for $10,000 that would give them a full year to go back into the mining zones and do HIV/AIDS education sessions, testing and advocacy work. Keep your fingers crossed!

We thought we had seen the worst by now. During a year and a half in our villages, living in mud huts and eating corn mush "toh" every night for dinner, we patted ourselves on the back for being "hardcore" for accepting to live and work in conditions few other Americans would tolerate. We flee to the big cities every few weeks under the pretense of "mental sanity" - we want to eat familiar foods, speak English with friends, check e-mail, and watch TV. We had gotten used to this new routine, come to accept it as normal. We thought we had seen it all, and were starting to think it wasn't so bad.

Returning to Mali in August from my trip home to America, a fellow PCV and I were approached by two Malian friends, students at the national University, and trained HIV/AIDS educators, about doing an HIV/AIDS awareness project in December in the mining zones near the Mali-Cote d'Ivoire border. We agreed to the project, not entirely too sure of what we were getting ourselves into, but figuring we could pull it off anyway.

The "AIDS boys", Lacina and Camara, one cold morning

We numbered five - two Malians, two PCV's and my brother who's visiting from America. The trip wasn't long distance wise -- 100k south from Sikasso to Zegoua, on the border, and then about 65k west into the bush. It would have been straightforward in America and taken only a few hours, but nothing is ever straightforward in Mali. After 10 hours in buses and cars of questionable quality on paths that no sane American would ever drive their car over, we arrived sore and tired in the mining town of Massiogo, our first stop on a tour that was include five villages.

We likened our surroundings to a refugee camp. None of us had ever actually seen one, but we agreed that this is probably what one would look like if we were to happen upon one. Not a permanent structure in site, just rows and rows of low-slung ramshackle houses and shops. They all looked exactly the same - a stick frame wrapped with some combination of black industrial plastic sheets and grass woven together in long strips. No windows, and very small doors made out of rice sacks. There were streets in this town, but no signs, no landmarks, no obvious way out. Where had we landed?

Home, Sweet Home for two nights, a typical miners house (the white is the front door).

It had three bedrooms and a living room, but had dirt floors and no electricity.

We slept on the floor on sleeping pads in our mosquito net tents.

Needless to say, we weren't looking to stick around much longer.

The "main road" through town (we only knew it was the main road because it was wider, lined with shops instead of houses, and we almost got hit by motos zooming by ever 5 seconds. The stores sold the same food and clothes and plastic household items one could expect to find in any big Malian city, suggesting a sense of permanence in a town where everything else reeked of transience. People were sticking around long enough to need new shirts, sandals, dishes and nutritious food, but not quite long enough to find the time to build themselves a mud hut. Or maybe it just wasn't worth their time. There's gold to be mined, after all, so who has time to waste building a house?

The main road through town

Even the doctor's office was a far cry from the one's found in the rest of Mali. This one was built entirely out of corrugated tin, including it's matching bathrooms. Because we were in town on a health mission, we went to the doctor first to introduce ourselves. To our surprise, the town had a rather evolved social structure and the doctor introduced us to the chief of the village, the head of the hunters association (a well respected group in Malian society) and the head barman, as they referred to him. We'd probably call him a pimp in America, as he was officially in charge of all the girls in town -- 160 officially registered sex workers of all nationalities.

They told us repeatedly that the mining towns "knew no borders", meaning that Malians, Ivoriens, Burkinabe, Ghanians and Nigerians were all here living together with the same goal: to make as much money as possible. Something was off. Ethnicity and nationality is everything in Mali; the idea that these notions didn't matter seemed almost as out of place as these squatter zones themselves. Ethnicity in Mali is where you come from, who you are, and what you will become. How could something this primal be dismissed so easily? What else would miners be willing to overlook in order to get rich?

The ubiquitous prostitute bars seemed to answer my question. Most Malians are devout Muslims, and it can be hard to find a bar in some Malian towns, but we had no trouble tracking them down here. Does knowing no borders also mean knowing no religion, no morals? Or were the Christians the only ones visiting the bars and the ladies? That didn't seem likely. The barman took us around to his bars and facilitated meetings between us and the women who worked there. We were told, however, that the officially registered sex workers was only the tip of the iceberg/ Young girls often come to town looking to help the miners with household tasks like cooking or washing clothes. We were told that these girls often get forced into less desirable after hours employment for these same men. Some of these youngsters will become part of what Malians call a "furu fitini", literally a small marriage, but really a marriage with an expiration date. Miners will take girls as young as 12 or 13 years old as their wives as long as they have money in their pocket, with the understanding that when the money's gone, the marriage is over, and the girl will be passed onto another man. Sitting at the doctor's office, we were handed a photo of a man and woman seated against a white backdrop. There was writing at their feet that read something like, "Curse the cheater who committed such adultery". There was only one living person in the photo. The man had cheated on his wife, she stabbed him repeatedly and then took his dead body to the photo studio. Morals were superfluous in this work, or so it seemed.

There exists a sort of desperation in these areas, if desperation is even the right word. Capitalism reigns and money is king. Water from the communal pump isn't free, and a trip to the pit latrine will cost you 10 cents, a bath in that same space about 50. Nobody has private bathrooms or wells, and the pump owner has a monopoly on the water supply. I've never had to pay for water in Mali before. The prices of goods in the stores on the main road are inflated, suggesting a certain level of income that may or may not exist. We were told not too take too many pictures the morning we went out to the mine pits -- you never know when you'll take teh wrong person's picture, they told us. The miners may have been working for weeks with no reward, and we didn't want them to come at us demanding money for their photos. Tensions must run high.

Working at the pits.

One man in the hole, filling up the bucket, one man above pulling it up.

The first site we visited had a school, but judging by the number of young children we saw around during the day, it didn't look like many were taking advantage of it. The boys were probably more valuable working in the fields, and girls in the house or kitchen.

Personal health seemed to be low on the list of priorities, as well. 50,000 people densely packed into one area sharing pit latrines without any sewage system or water treatment system. The lack of trash in the streets and the scarcity of mice was a pleasant surprise, however. A walk through the streets of a typical Malian village is a game of hopscotch as you try to avoid trash piles or latrine water runoff. These two eyesores were missing and we were led to the designated trash piles each time we needed to throw something away. Beyond environmental health hazards hid occupational ones. Men digging 50, 60 meters down in search of a gold seam to follow in either direction as long as it will go. Along with the photo of the slain man we saw, we were handed a photo of a corpse that'd been pulled from a collapsed mine shaft. We too thought it was a bit odd to be taking picture of dead people, but that wasn't the point. There are no safety measures in place to protect these workers. As long as there's someone to do the job, lives will be expendable.

The stress and pressure must get to people, as well. During a 9am visit to the pits, we ran across several workers so buzzed they couldn't form coherent sentences. And a 10am trip to the bars brought us in contact with the guys who didn't even make it to work that day. They weren't many, but it was clear they'd been there a while already.

So what makes it all worth it?

To be continued......

For those of you who saw my Obama outfit when I was home and thought it couldn't get any worse, here's proof that it indeed can and did. It appears she's sporting the Ghanian version, which is far worse than the one currently being sold in Mali.

By the way, we just celebrated the muslim holiday of Eid-al-Fitr, and I wore my Obama fabric for the occasion. Everyone in my village commented on it, and many asked me why I hadn't brought them some fabric so they could have an outfit, too. Judging by the way they talk about it and admire it, you'd think it was haute couture straight off the Parisian runways.

The New York Times recently had a NYTimes Magazine feature called "Saving the World's Women". You can find the link here.

And the Malian government has been trying to pass a law that grants women greater rights, but it recently got sent back to parliament because so many people have been protesting it. Read the BBC article here.

Because I mentioned that the kids and I ate sunflower seeds, I thought I'd give you an update on my garden, or what's left of it. Aramatou and I tried to fertilize my plants a few weeks ago, and I came back after a week away from site to find almost all of my plants dead! Turns out if you add too much fertilizer in the wrong way, it'll kill your plants. Whoops. We're onto round two now: corn, watermelon, morning glories and radishes. Anybody with gardening know-how is welcome to chime in to help these ones survive!

In other news, Sali's husband and I walked around the village the other day to count bath areas, toilets and wells. Most people had wash areas, but the lack of toilets was gross. More people "bush it" than I'd thought. My village really wants to start a bathroom project soon, and I'm all for it. Once Ramadan's over, we're going to carefully start the planning. Because it's a huge undertaking, we're going to start slowly and gague people's interest first before jumping into an overhaul of all the toilets in village. It would be unfortunate to gather all the money and supplies only to find that everyone thought WE were building the toilets for them. We need to make sure everyone's on the same page before any proposals are started.

And finally, two good stories to add to the "Things That Go Bump in the Night" log that I thought you might appreciate:

1. I've been trying to come home earlier at night these days because I've been getting up so early to eat breakfast. But because I can't always fall asleep, I'll lay in bed listening to podcasts or the BBC. The other night, I was listening to NPR under my mosquito net, when I shifted slightly. Oddly enough, my bed seemed to shift or almost squirm beneath my shoulder blades. I thought it might have been my bed settling, but it felt too animated to be considered in the normal range of movement for a cotton mattress. So I flipped over and started feeling around. I didn't find anything until I pulled up the sheet and saw some scales, part of a tail, and a round black souvenir. I was just in time to see the rest of the tail disappearing off the edge of my bed. Seems like a lizard liked my bed as much as I did.

2. The new batch of volunteers came down for their site visit recently, and I spent a week as a "site buddy", biking to each of their sites to spend a night with them, helping them get settled and get their bearings in their new homes. I came home, and the minute I opened my door, I could tell something had died inside my house. The smell was unmistakable and overpowering. I looked all over my house and couldn't find the dead, decomposing mouse until I moved my bed away from the wall. As if having to deal with the carcass wasn't bad enough, I think he'd been trapped in my room before he died, and it seems that he'd spent his last few hours running around on my mattress, marking his territory there and in the corner by the head of my bed. Once I got rid of the dead smell, it took a few days of airing out and lots of scrubbing to clear the area of the smell of concentrated mouse pee. Nothing says "welcome home!" like a room christened with Eau de Sourie. Needless to say, I moved my mosquito net into the other room and slept there until a fellow volunteer came and confirmed that the place was odor free!

I tend to think that Malians pick and choose aspects of Islam at will. That is to say, social norms in Mali are dictated partially by Islamic law and partially by long held customs and beliefs that date back to the days before Islam was introduced to West Africa. I liken the current culture to an American at a buffet picking and choosing their favorite foods. Except this time, I think someone made a terrible decision.

It's Ramadan here, which means getting up before the sun rises (usually between 4:30 and 5:30am) and not eating or drinking until the evening prayer call issued from the mosque at about 6:45. There are other stipulations, as well, such as a ban on cigarettes, parties, and "ill-natured" or excessive activities. For someone like myself who's not farming intensely right now, Ramadan is a challenge, but not a health concern. But from what I can tell, it's the hardest time of year for the folks in my village. My work counterpart (or homologue, as we refer to them around here), Sali, is a great example.

Sali is her husband's 3rd wife, and the mother of a 1.5 year old boy, Ali. I went to break fast (not breakfast, but the evening ritual of breaking fast that happens at 6:45pm) with Sali and her family the other day, and started asking about the specifics of Ramadan. It seemed to me that most people are overworked and underfed these days, and I wanted the specifics. Sali said that she's been getting up, like everyone else, to eat a breakfast of rice and sauce and millet porridge (millet and water). And then, when it gets light out around 6am, she leaves for the fields. Yesterday she was out in her family's rice paddy from 6am - 5pm without a break, and without food or water. And now, to make things worse, it's her turn to cook for the family. So she comes home from the fields, cooks everyone a dinner of millet porridge and then starts cleaning the rice for breakfast the next morning. She says she usually sleeps until midnight when she gets up to put the pots on the fire. Then she'll go back to sleep until 4am when she's up for good to deliver food to the family and start her day. I was really surprised to hear that some nights, her family only eats porridge for dinner, and I've come to find out that it's because money is tight at this time of year. The manioc harvest is just starting, and it's been a year since the last big harvest, so money is running low. They simply cannot afford to eat rice twice a day.

Sali's been leaving her son Ali at home while she's in the fields because she says he was getting in the way. But that means Ali and his siblings stay home with grandma or Ali's 7 year old sister as the primary care taker. From what I can tell, they're OK with grandma, but I'm not entirely sure that the kids are getting lunch or water when grandma has to go into the fields. Ali's still breast feeding (not exclusively, but Malian doctors recommend that women breast feed until the child is 2), so I wonder if he's really getting all the nutrients he needs when mom's in the field all day. He's been sick twice in the past three weeks, and has definintely gotten skinnier.

I stopped by Sali's house on my way home from market Monday afternoon to find the place closed up and empty except for a clan of 6 kids who had the rule of the roost. I hung out with them for a while, and then jumped on my bike to go home. I'd been home about five minutes and was putting my bike away in my kitchen when my gate swung open and in came the same gaggle I'd just left on the other side of town. They'd followed me home (I'm still a novelty after a year!) , and their single file entrance into my compound reminded me of a mama duck and her ducklings waddling around, the 7 year old at the front of the line with Ali strapped onto her back, and the other toddlers following close behind. We entertained ourselves by picking the seeds off the sunflowers in my yard to shell and eat, chewing children's multivitamins, drinking water and "reading" the July 2008 Atlantic Monthly, which is fascinating because of the glossy color photos. Their favorite activity is looking at the ads and trying to guess which white woman is me. Once I tell them it's not me, they immediately want to know said woman's name. There are now 6 Malian kids children who think The Atlantic Monthly is filled with women with names like Awa, Djeneba, Rokia, and Aramatou.

Later that night, a friend and I were sitting around brewing tea and I went to get Sali to come join. I caught her mid-rice washing, but she put the rice basket back in her kitchen and came to join us at Mariatou's house, anyway. Sali sat down on her stool, helped us make the all-important foam for the tea (neither Mariatou nor I have quite mastered the technique yet), and fell asleep. Before she faded, she told me that she felt bad because she hadn't come to my house to greet in days. She's afraid I'll think she abandoned me!

I used to chuckle in disbelief when people in my village would mutter "fantan segenna" (the poor man is tired), but now I see that there's some truth to it. I told my host mom the other night that "Toubabu muso segenna" (the white girl's tired), and she just laughed.

A friend of mine is fund-raising to build a midwife clinic in her village. Check out her project, and other Peace Corps volunteer's projects here.

Here's a question for you: If I told you that if you didn't do x, then you risk "y", which could potentially be fatal, is it my job to bail you out when, having ignored my initial advice, you find yourself in a bind? At what point do I get to say "no more", and leave you to deal with the consequences of your actions without my nagging voice in the background?

This is essentially my current dilemma.

X can be anything from washing hands, to vaccinating kids, to treating well water, to going to the doctor when you're sick, to feeding kids nutritious foods, to sleeping under mosquito nets....the list goes on and on and on. And, well, we all know what y is.

It's just not me encouraging folks to practice good health. There are people on the radio who tell them multiple times a day, there are people on TV who tell them, there's a doctor at the local health center who's supposed to tell them, there are classes in the schools to tell the kids, and yet for some reason, they're still not quite getting it.

So where does that leave us? Should we keep banging our head against a wall to get people to change their ways? Or is it true that behavior change takes years, or even generations? Are we planting a seed that's still germinating in the minds of Malians? Or maybe there's something wrong with the way we're approaching the problem?

Hand washing is a good example of a practice that I think Americans accept without a doubt. It's easy for me to observe (easier than family planning methods, for example), non-intrusive, frequent and inexpensive to practice. Or so you thought.

I spent every day of the past week at my health center (something I've never done before) and I got to watch their personal health practices. And guess what I found out: THEY DON'T EVEN WASH THEIR HANDS WITH SOAP BEFORE EATING! This they includes a university trained doctor, and he eats every meal with his hands. One of my best friends is the pharmacist (our friendship being founded on our mutual stubbornness), and we have regular spats about why he refuses to wash his hands with soap before eating. "But Rokia", he'll say, "we've been doing it for years, and we're not dead yet, and we even let our kids drink the dirty water after everyone has dunked their hands in it. And guess what? We're not dead yet!".

This "saving the world" business is not easy. I've been beating myself up a bit recently looking back on the past year, mainly because I don't feel like I've done much with my Peace Corps service. But as I think of things I could do to be more productive and effective, I always end up at the same roadblock: the idea that whatever I do won't change much. Let me try to explain.

I'm the third PCV in my town, the other two having been environment volunteers. They were responsible for, among other things, the construction of a classroom for our school, soak pits for people's latrines, and the formation of a chicken raising group. When I think about these projects, and where they are today, here's what I see: the school is barely holding on because of bad politics in the village, the soak pits are over-flowing raw sewage into the streets because they haven't been properly maintained, and the chicken group fell apart long ago (update: they actually came to me recently and told me they wanted to have a meeting in the near future. My knowledge of all things chicken related is about to expand exponentially!). My villagers tell me they want to get our maternity up and running, but then whenever we suggest doing something, the idea either gets shot down or they agree that it's a good idea, and look right at me to do the work. Oh, and I'm my host families third volunteer (that's 5 years of daily interactions with an American) and they still don't wash their hands with soap. So....what can I do that will change anything in this village? And if my definition of a successful service is creating something sustainable (which hardly seems possible at this point), why would I spend another year here?

Well, let me tell you. First, because despite the fact that sometimes working here makes me want to poke my eyes out, I really do enjoy what I'm doing. My job on a day-to-day basis basically consists of hanging out with people talking about either the differences between America and Mali (we've come to the conclusion recently that "an te kelen ye" -- we're just not the same), and talking to them about their health practices. We eat lunch, I ask for the soap, and make them wash their hands (I actually found out yesterday that lots of people in my village don't even wash their bodies with soap on a normal basis. I believe the exact quote was, "Rokia, I can go an entire year without ever washing my body with soap!" Yes, they're right: an te kelen ye at all), and ask why they don't normally do it on their own. Recently, we were sitting around after lunch talking about nothing in particular, when one of the women started making fun of a specific boy for getting his girlfriend pregnant. Whoops on his part, but what a perfect time for me to bring up condom use and birth control!

As I mentioned, I spent everyday this past week at my health center. It was vaccination week, and since I've decided to shift my midwife clinic project to the back burner for a while, I decided to go help the health clinic folks with their vaccination runs in local villages. I'd done it once before, but it'd been a while. They (the vaccinator who's a woman about my age, and a midwife) rode their motorcycle out, and I followed on my bike. We hit six villages in three days, and I was able to discover really beautiful parts of my area that are especially pretty at this time of year when everything is green and lush. But more importantly, I was able to restore my faith in the local health system in Mali! I've heard stories about arrogant, condescending, and lazy health workers, and fortunately for everyone in the surrounding towns, ours are nothing like those horrors! They're the exact opposite, in fact!

Kadia (pictured left at the training we went to in Koutiala in May), the midwife that went to do vaccinations, has been doing her job for more than 30 years and has been at the clinic since the center opened in the 1970's. Her husband was a nurse there until his death a few years ago. She knows the villagers, and seems to have a really good relationship with them. This past week, a woman came to my village from somewhere up north, and brought her small bodied, huge headed child to be vaccinated. Kadia didn't directly say anything to the mother (which could have been rude, since she had never met this woman), but instead found a man from the family where the new woman was staying, and told him that he needed to do something about this kid before it was too late. She really cares about the women and kids, and seems to go above and beyond the call of duty to take care of folks. Whenever there was a pause in the baby weighing (that was my job -- only got peed on once, which might be a record!), she'd start asking the women about good breast feeding practices. Kadia is doing exactly what we were told that a midwife should be doing in her community!

So why do I stick around? Because I think there are good people here who are stuck in a system that's not giving them the credit or respect they've earned. Because I've made good friends like Kadia who're doing their jobs really well. Because the kids who come hang out with me anytime I'm home are simply adorable. Because my new strategy involves finding something that's already up and running, and adding my energy to the effort. There's no point in trying to reinvent the wheel, right? And ultimately, I stick around because I get paid the big bucks to ask the big questions; so, where's the soap?

We had fajitas for dinner last night, but the meat was tough, and the sour cream nonexistant. The mango salsa was good, but not good enough. I've been dreaming about food, and have even gone so far as to make a menu for the dinners I want to eat when I come home. We hit the "1 year in Mali" mark this coming weekend, and to celebrate, I'm coming home!!!

I stumbled upon a great video about maternal health today. It's called "Avec Nous" (With Us). If you've got 10 minutes to spare, it's worth the watch.

The film is set in the capital of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou, and the landscapes and challenges are essentially the same here in Mali as they are in Burkina. The film raises important questions about issues like free health care, gender and marital relations, inadequate health systems, and incapable health workers without making viewers feel bogged down by the desperateness of the situation.

And yet, everything from the dying woman who couldn't get to the health center to the husbands who control every aspect of their wives lives, to the husbands who beat their wives to death is realistic, unexaggerated, and happens here in Mali. These horrors are constant topics of conversation between PCV's here in Sikasso, as we wrestle to come to terms with the fact that these atrocities are occurring in our villages.

What I found most striking were the testimonials of the women at the health center that appear about halfway through the clip. I've never heard women in Mali voice such desires openly, and while I suspect they secretly long for birth control and access to schooling for their kids, I'm afraid they don't voice these concerns because they don't think they could ever become a reality.

A recent slogan for International Women's Day here in Mali was something like, "Letting women's voices be heard, and increasing their role in decision making in Africa". My translation is rough, but you get the point. Empowering women in this country is on people's radar, but it's going to take a while for the full effect of the efforts to trickle down to the village level.

Shea butter is huge here in Mali: it's used in cooking as an oil (and when most things are fried or contain lots and lots of oil, that makes for a lot of butter) , as a moisturizer, and soap, but most importantly, it's a much needed source of income for women. There's a push on the part of Peace Corps to get our village women to start making export quality butter to sell to large cosmetics companies like Bath & Body Works, etc... This requires women to change the way that they make the butter, and for this, we (the collective Peace Corps body) have staged lots and lots of trainings to teach people how to produce a higher quality, cleaner butter. A friend of mine just made a movie about the new process. Check it out on YouTube, it's called Shea: From Nuts to Butter. It's worth a watch even just to see what our villages and villagers look like, and also to hear the Bambara language.

How does your garden grow?

With silver bells, and cockle shells,

And pretty maids all in a row.

Well, my name's not Mary, and there sure aren't any silver bells or cockle shells, let alone pretty maids in my garden, but we're just starting. My thumb is getting greener daily.

Last December, my mom sent me seeds to start my own garden, which I finally did this past week. So two Sundays ago, my favorite 10 year old Aramatou and I started by digging up strategically placed plots for the cucumbers, carrots, marigolds, green beans and sunflowers I had. The truth is that I provided the supplies and guidance and Ara did the rest while her sister Sita and I watched. I went and borrowed the spade from my host family and she did all the digging. I started walking to the pump with my bucket and she threw down the spade, and ran after me. She was gracious enough to let me pump the water (she's good at it, but she's still small enough that it gets hard fast!), but she carried the bucket back to my house on her head. And then when it came time to put the seeds in the ground, I read the planting directions on the back of the seed packet, and she counted out the seeds and dropped them in the hole. 7 year old Sita was there for moral support, and did a very good job covering up the seeds once they were in their holes. School's still in session, which means that Ara misses the morning waterings, but she's at my house religiously every afternoon, helping me assess their daily growth (The seed packs said they'd sprout in 14-21 days. It took most of them about 5! We've had fun watching them shoot up!), and waiting to help me with the afternoon watering session. Again, I pump the water, but she carries the water back to my house and does the rest; she will not have it any other way. Now that I'm gone for a few days, she's solely in charge of the twice daily waterings.

The adults in village think it's hilarious that I'm gardening, especially since they're all waiting for the rains to come so they can plant their crops. Several of my friends have asked me for some of my seeds, and I've been happy to oblige.

I'm currently in Koutiala, the former cotton capital of Mali, for a midwife training with the American NGO (non-governmental organization) Mali Midwives (www.malimidwives.org). Nicole Warren, a former PCV, raised money with her NGO to hold a training for all the midwives in the Koutiala area. I'm not in the Koutiala area, but I first heard about this training through a Chicago Public Radio story that I got via e-mail (http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?segmentID=32386). I e-mailed Nicole and asked if she'd mind if I brought the two matrones from my maternity in town, as well as the two matrones from the health center down the road.

Three of the four women I invited were able to come, and we're here for three days of training. The training is lead entirely by Malian staff drawn from the area, and they've chosen to focus on neonatal care. It's really cool to see a room full of 40+ Malian health workers sitting together, asking questions, and sharing ideas. My matrones seem excited about it, and they leave everyday pumped about what they've just learned, as opposed to down trodden and exhausted (ok, so maybe they're a little tired), as they tend to be after a full day in the village.

If all goes well, I'd really like to try and raise money for a similar training to happen again next year in my area. Sessions like this serve to remotivate and refocus health workers in a country that demands a lot of these women and gives little back. Everyone needs someone to tell them every once in a while that their work is important and that what they're doing is valued. And if the national health system isn't going to do it, I think Peace Corps workers and NGO's are great folks to step in and lend a helping hand. Some people refer to us as catalysts, but I think cheerleader is more appropriate. I'll have to pick up some pom-poms when I'm in the States.

A few friends and I took off (in a very grounded sense. The airplane tickets via Abidjan were too expensive to make it worth paying) for Ghana in early May. We'd been secretly wondering if we really wanted to go, thinking that maybe we should stay in village and keep working before rainy season hit full force, and quite frankly, I'd been much more excited about my trip back to America than this short jaunt to the ocean. But boy, was it worth it.

Some people call Ghana Africa for Beginners, and PCV's we'd e-mailed during the planning stages told us to stay away from Accra, because it was like little America. It turns out that Ghana is for "beginners", and in many respects, Accra is very western, but we couldn't have asked for a better combination of Africa and "civilization"! Check out the latest round of photos.

First and foremost, new photos are up! Check them out!

I read a book recently called "Dancing With Skeletons". It's by Kathrine Dettwyler, a nutritional anthropologist who spent several years here in Mali studying malnutrition. If you're interested in a pretty comprehensive picture of life here in Mali, I'd recommend picking up a copy. I found a lot of similarities between her experiences and mine. Amazon.com sells it, although I think $15 is a bit pricey. It's worth checking out your local library or used bookstore first: http://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Skeletons-Life-Death-Africa/dp/088133748X

Additionally, I heard a report on NPR in the last year that claimed that there were more pirates circulating in the oceans these days than ever before. I didn't take much notice until recently, when the BBC started reporting on the kidnapping of an American captain off the coast of Somalia. Is anyone talking about it in the US? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7999350.stm

Now for the latest from site:

I thought I chipped a tooth while eating a carrot one day for lunch in my hut (it wasn't even a ripe carrot - it'd been sitting in the trunk where I keep my food for a day or so and was getting limp!) Turns out I just popped off the metal retainer that's been cemented in my mouth since 8th grade when I got my braces off. I took a quick trip into Bamako to see the Lebanese Peace Corps appointed dentist, who glued me back together, and off I went again, back into the brush.

It's mango season around here. Mangoes left, right, and center. Mangoes for breakfast, mangoes for 10am snack, mangoes for lunch, mangoes at 4pm, mangoes before dinner, after dinner, and before bed. That's a light exaggeration, but for a while, there were trucks coming into town daily to take loads and loads of mangoes out. Unfortunately, and for some reason I can't figure out, they're all gone now. I wish I would have known better, because I would have eaten more, and taken more pictures of the piles and piles that were around village. Here's the one I did manage to take.

I was invited to attend the sacrifices of one of my school teacher's elders late last week. From what I understand, forty days after the person dies (although I think they took some liberty with their counting on this one), the Senufo people (it's weird calling people I consider friends a "people". It sounds very academic and scholarly, and entirely removed) have a sacrificial ceremony for the deceased. The ceremony was scheduled for some time on Friday morning (basically whenever the religious leaders showed up, they'd start. Nobody would give me a definite time, no matter how many times I asked). People started arriving Thursday morning, and the family's compound just got more and more packed as folks moto'ed in from surrounding villages. We sat around Thursday afternoon and evening, chatting. I'd been more or less on my own with my school teacher's family Thursday morning, and was getting pretty bored, as they speak Senufo, a language I don't understand. I'd arrived before the rest of my village and had been passing the time spending napping, talking to various members of the family, and reading. And then, all of a sudden, half of my village rode up on their motos. And it was like night and day. Well, sort of.

As is perhaps normal, there have been times recently when I've wondered if all my time spent in village was really amounting to anything. After all, they speak Samogo, and I understand about three words of Samogo, so I spend a lot of time listening, or watching. It wasn't clear that I was actually making friends or acquaintances. But when the folks from my village showed up at my teacher's family's concession, I put those fears aside. It was like night and day. Well, maybe not night and day. Maybe like night and day in Alaska during the summer. I'd been sitting around with nothing to do and while I was still sitting around after the folks from my village arrived, at least I was sitting around with people I knew and recognized. I sat down Thursday night with one of them who I'd seen in passing in village before, but had never sat down to have a real conversation with. Madu, a 40ish year old father of 15 and husband of two (pictured below with my camera case in his hand ), and I had roughly the following conversation:

Madu: "Rokia (that's my name), in America, do you have mud?"

Me: "Yup!"

Madu, picking up some of the dust we were sitting on, "No, like real dust. Like this stuff?"

Me: "Yup"

Someone else from behind: "But Rokia, I thought everything in America was paved?"

Me: "Nope, behind my house in America, we have grass and dirt".

Madu: "Rokia, do you farm in America?"

Me: "We do, but machines do most of the work. But my parents have a small garden at their house where they farm corn and tomatoes with their hands"

Madu" Rokia, is there wind in America?"

And once the moon had risen, "Rokia, is there a moon in America? Is it the same as this one?" At that point, I turned on my flashlight and tried to illustrate the moon and it's relation to the earth and it's rotation.

Madu: "Ooohh...so once the moon leaves here, it continues on to America? What time is it in America right now?"

And on and on we went, comparing the things they know here in Mali to life in America. A conversation similar to this one happens often between me and folks in my village. They think America is only what they see on TV.

The next morning, folks woke up early (most of them had slept outside on mats) and sat around waiting for the teachers (the literal translation is teacher. They're really the Muslim spiritual leaders) to arrive. And suddenly, with no announcement that I could discern, people started heading to the hangar across the street from the concession to sit and listen to these teachers talk. The sacrifice ceremony included these teachers talking about Muslim teachings (from what I could tell). My school teacher got up and said a word or two, as did some other folks, but the ceremony was over in about an hour. And everyone went back to the concession, ate some rice and sauce for lunch, drank some Malian tea, and then got on their motos and went home. Just like that it was over.

Here are the "teachers":

And here's my friend giving his little speech:

There's more that's been going on, but unfortunately I'm out of time. Take a look at the photos for more shots of my village, the folks at the sacrifice ceremony, and the latest round of vaccinations in village.

Lots of times, I'll meet someone (a Malian, to be specific) once, either in my village or at market or at the health center - we'll greet, exchange names and towns, and then we'll go our separate ways. Most of the time, I do not remember them, but they remember me. This can lead to some very awkward situations that usually start out with the person calling out my Malian name (Rokia), and then approaching me to greet( how are you, how's your family? and your health? and the people in your village? and your host family?), and I have to smile and respond and pretend like I know who they are. Sometimes I do a good job pretending, other times my performance is sub par and they catch on that I have NO idea who they are. This can be embarrassing. Fortunately, I'm getting much better at recognizing folks and identifying where I've seen them before, and I'm even starting to remember their names (this is huge because Malian names can be tricky -- Afochatou, Bintou, Diakalia. Can you pronounce those, let alone remember them? Neither could I for the longest time).

In any event, I had a breakthrough in the most inconspicuous of places last week. A friend and I had gone out to get eggs at a small neighborhood market in Bamako, and were walking home when I saw someone on a moto who looked really familiar. This happens often, especially in village, when lots of people are related. I get them all confused all the time. But this guy looked too familiar to be a random guy on a moto in Bamako. And so I slowed down, did a double take, and sure enough -- I DID know him! So I stopped and greeted, in awe that I would actually recognize someone and be able to correctly place them. Turns out he's the brother of a friend who lives wwwaaayy down south in a town near the Mali/Burkina Faso/Cote d'Ivoire border. And he just happened to be in Bamako on business. And we just happened to be in the same place at the same time. This all might sound trivial, but I was thrilled. It was almost like seeing a long lost friend from elementary school on a street corner in New York City. This country is slowly becoming more and more familiar, and for this I am grateful.

I went to church this morning. Babcia (my grandma) would be proud of me. A friend here in Sikasso goes to the one Catholic church here every week, and convinced me to join her today.

We got there at about 7:45 for the mass that started at 8. As we were walking into the church, my friend warned me that women sit on the left, and men on the right. In mosques here (and I suppose, all over the world), men sit in front, with the women praying behind, but I never thought that the genders would separate in church, too. But they did. So we entered the big concrete building and found a spot to sit at the end of a row of rigid wooden benches so close to one another that I wondered how other people were going to climb in. My friend also warned me that when other women came and wanted a seat, they would unceremoniously clamber over us in order to get to their seats in the middle of the row. I'm not sure if it's especially polite to do this is Mali, but it happens all the time.

We had a few minutes to sit and chat, and look around the place before mass started, and I took the time to note the differences between this African church and other Western ones I'd seen. First and foremost, it was a pretty plain building. The walls were concrete, and while the ceiling was high, it was still tin. There were, however, some rather artistic details that surprised me. For example, the windows along the sides of the church were stained glass jalacy windows. Anyone who's been to my house in the US knows that the jalacy window salesman made it to both Mt Lebanon, and now apparently, to Sikasso, Mali. They're the slatted windows that have individual panels that open up in unison. I think I'm probably doing a bad job of describing them, but maybe you know what I'm talking about? In any event, these windows ran from floor to ceiling and each panel was a different color, and about every third one was topped by a simple stick figure rendition of the stations of the cross, all labeled with a Roman numeral at the top. As for the altar, there was a simple altar and lecturn, both adequate, and nicely adorned in green striped Bazin cloth, one of the richest fabrics available here in Mali . Three huge stained glass windows framed the altar from behind: the one on the left was a simple cross, the one in the middle was a round depiction of a black Mary and Jesus, and the one on the right was a typical farming scene from a Malian village. The tabernacle sat on a plain table off to the right, and was made from a dark metal and shaped like the typical grain storage hut that's pictured below in another post.

The mass was conducted almost entirely in Bambara, with a few snippets of French, meaning that I understood very little. The music was provided by a small choir, and was all in Bambara. as well. It was great, though, because they didn't sing the traditional church songs we're familiar with in the States. I'm not entirely too sure what exactly they were singing, but I do know that it was infused with Malian rhythms and had a characteristically West African feel to it. But my favorite, and most Malian moment of all was communion. Instead of orderly ushering to go recieve the Eucharist, everyone just decides when they want to go, and they get up and start forward. It sounds more chaotic than it really was, because though they don't go up in any order that I could discern, they do form lines in the isles once they're up. But it was just funny, because all along I'd been expecting to wait my turn while those in front of me got up and walked forward, but that didn't happen, because folks from the back started forward before I even really knew what was happenning. Another surprise was that several times during the service, the priest blessed the crowd with greetings that make reference to Ala, the Muslim god. These blessings are extremely common occurrences in daily life, and there's a blessing for almost every situation, but it was weird to hear a reference to another god in church. I started to wonder where the lines between culture and religion are drawn here, and I think they might be a bit fuzzier than I'd imagined. Church let out with a recessional hymn, and everyone filed out into the yard, and stood around socializing for a while before heading into town for Sunday's big market.

I'm trying out a new format (and taking advantage of lots and lots of free internet time!). Not sure if I like it quite yet.

We had a session during IST about ways to fund our projects, and I recently stumbled across a few other international aid sites that seem to have great ways to donate money. So I thought I'd post them here, just in case anyone has any extra cash floating around. As PC volunteers, we haven't exactly felt the sting of the US economic disaster quite as acutely as those of you back home, but I can tell you that living on $8/day makes finances a bit tight. I don't think I like being poor.

I like the sound of these websites because (with the exception of the PCPartnership Program) they're ways to donate money almost directly to people, and usually through loans, which I think is a more sustainable and responsible way of giving. After hearing stories about the World Bank putting their workers up at the Hilton in Madagascar, or Millennium Challenge workers being housed at the Radisson in Mali (if not the nicest hotels in these countries, then definitely in the upper echelon), I've started to wonder exactly where all their money really goes. And even if you decide not to donate to any of the organizations, I still think it's interesting to learn about the different ways people are tackling the financial side of development. Hopefully you'll agree.

Here they are:

1. First is the Peace Corps Partnership website which allows volunteers to post descriptions of their projects online for those back at home to donate to. It's a great, tax-deductible way to support your friends in the PC. I'm sure you'll be hearing more about this from me as I start bigger projects in my village.

http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors

2. An organization whose name has come up a few times in the past year or so is Kiva:

http://www.kiva.org/

3. And finally, Nicholas Kristof, a journalist with the NYTimes who you might be familiar with, recently pointed to the following two organizations as great "Do-It-Yourself Foreign Aid" sites:

http://www.globalgiving.org/, and https://www.givology.org/

I think I've finally found a good way to get lots of pictures to you. Here are the links to my friend Carissa's photos that she took during her time here in December:

Sikasso photos: http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=19100142&k=54EYQZS4U3VM51FISE33QV

more Sikasso: http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=19100142&k=56GXX4R6SW4M51FISE33QV

Pictures from our Christmas destination, Manantali. Be sure to look carefully at exactly what it says on the top of the overturned van and the wall behind it: http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=19100142&k=54C263UXW63M51FISE33QV

And photos from the captial city, Bamako: http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=19100142&k=52B552W4P56M51FISE33QV

I'll thank Carissa later for letting us look at her photos, and more importantly, for doing a much better job of recording my life here than I've done so far.

The third what, you ask? You didn't know that existed, did you? Well, it does. And I'm living proof of it here in Mali.

Being a white American woman in Mali grants me specific priviledges I wouldn't otherwise have as a 24 year old woman in this patriarchal Muslim society. We talk about it a lot amongst ourselves here as PCV's, and it's become almost natural to me, something I didn't even think about mentioning on my blog. But it's a huge part of who I am here, and thus far at least, it's granted me a position of authority amongst men that I wouldn't have otherwise. I think it will have great implications for my future here, especially as I begin working more and more with my village.

I mentioned it to my mom on the phone the other day, and she thought it was fascinating. It started after she saw a photo of me sitting around at a community planning session with a group of Malian men. It hadn't occurred to me that my friend Carissa I were the only women there until my mom mentioned it. She suggested I write a blog on it, and I think it's a subject worth writing about because it explains a lot about Malian culture and society and my place therein.

While I think women are often included in decision making in this country, the amount of sway they have is a far cry from that afforded women in Western societies like the US. It's hard for me to precisely describe the role of women in Malian society, because I think there are a lot of subtle power dynamics that I haven't picked up on, and because I think age factors into these interactions more than I realize. Both gender and age carry significant weight in terms of one's position in society and decision making capabilities here. I'll talk about what I've experienced, because I don't want to make false or over-arching generalizations.

Gender roles are rigid and well-defined in this country. First and foremost, fathers are always the head of the family. No exceptions. Much like in the US, however, the severity and sheer amount of control varies. Women rely on their husbands for the bulk of their spending money for both them and their children, although some have small income-generating activities that they do on the side for added income (like my bean lady that I sit with every night -- I'm pretty sure she gets to keep the small profit she makes). Women always cook, clean and take care of the kids. It sounds like a short list, but when you recall that there is no local supermarket or washers or dryers, the enormity of the tasks at hand becomes a little easier to understand. Men tell me they know how to cook, but I have yet to eat a meal prepared by a Malian man. Women serve men their meals, and some even go so far as to do everything in terms of preparation. For example, my host mother has to put the sauce on my host father's rice before he eats it. That's akin to a woman in the US preparing the plate of food, and then cutting up her husband's steak into bite sized pieces before serving it to him.

It seems to me that men have a lot more leisure time than women, but that doesn't mean they too don't work hard. They are in charge of taking care of the animals (if the family has any), as well as a large portion of the family fields (there seem to be some crops that only women farm -- rice, for example -- but I'm not sure on the specifics of that quite yet). Currently, men and some women in my village are spending their days making bricks, a surprisingly labor intensive process. And women are going into the fields in the afternoon after they've cooked and eaten lunch to collect firewoood. But that's neither here nor there. On the worst end of the spectrum, domestic violence is socially acceptable in many villages, although fortunately, I've never seen it myself. But I have had conversations with Malian men about how they wouldn't hesitate to physically reprimand their wives if they disobeyed.

Men always hold positions of authority in the village and typically make up the majority of any organization. The chief of the village, imam (Islamic religious leader), and even the tailors in town are men, which I thought was a bit bizarre. There are elder women who seem to occupy an important part of my town's hierarchy (they're at every meeting, and have their own organization), but they're still women.

So where do I fit into this? The fact that I'm white, American and female makes me neither man nor woman in Mali. I'm not expected to spend all my time cooking and cleaning, and while they do think it's weird that I'm 24 and not married yet, they seem to accept that fact. I'm invited to all meetings, including those where Malian women are not. I'm never sent to fetch water, or sweep after meals like other Malian women (although that might have more to do with the fact that I'm a guest). Villagers often ask my opinion, and I voice my opinion perhaps more openly than a woman my age normally would. My hope is that this status as a member of the third sex will help me be a productive volunteer in my community. Because I'm neither here nor there, I can use my newfound freedom to move around in society in a way that nobody else can. It's like being in another realm and being able to watch and interact with them at the same time or watching everyone from the outside of the fishbowl they're in. How's that for a flip-flop of roles? I'm typically the one being watched, poked and prodded because I'm so different. But now, my outsider staus might have the potential to work in my favor.

Here's one happy friend, and some unhappy guinea fowl that became our dinner! Yum!

This is our little hangar outside the house in Manantali, our Christmas destination. I slept outside in the tent on the right.

That's my friend wearing her great Christmas crown -- we all had one! The river was off to the right, and the house was right behind her.

Most Malian women "bamu" babies between the ages of 0-2years. I decided to pick up a 9 year old and throw her on my back. Surprisingly enough, she loved it. She did get a little bashful when I suggested going into market with her on my back. Guess she didn't want to be seen wrapped like a baby in front of her friends. The shame!

Howdy!

We’ve been back at our training center outside of Bamako for the past two and a half weeks doing an In Service Training. In the past, PC conducted a two-week training in January and a one week refresh/remotivate course in April, but this year they decided that it’d be easiest to combine them into one. So here we are, attending sessions every day from 8am-5/6pm for three weeks. It’s been a long three weeks, but we’re chock full of ideas to take back to our villages to work on. Our homologues (the people we’re supposed to work with in village) have been here studying and attending sessions with us since Sunday morning. It’s nice because it gives the Malians a chance to learn about Peace Corps, our methodology, and I think (at least I hope) they’re actually learning things that’ll be helpful when we go back to our villages together. My first project will be to create a health committee to run the maternity in my village. Someone needs to be responsible for making the important decisions there, and it can’t and won’t be me, although sometimes I think that’s the impression my village has of my job here.

Additionally, training gives our homologues a chance to see us in our “element” (or as close as our “element” as we get in Mali). That means that we’re with our American friends, wearing normal clothes (I don’t usually wear pants in village, but have worn almost exclusively pants in the past few weeks), and eating American-style foods. We get Malian rice and sauce dishes for lunch everyday, which is fine because we typically get more American dinners. We had pizza last night (my homologue had no idea what it was, but thought it was good), and we have salad and dressing at every meal (Malians don’t usually eat American style salads). It’s funny watching the Malians fill their plates at meals because a lot of them don’t have any idea of portion control. Our theory is that since they’ve always eaten out of communal bowls with their hands, they’ve never had to visualize how much they’re actually eating. We’ve seen lots of Malians with plates piled high with food that they’ll never be able to finish.

In other news, it’s been cold here! They told us that January got cold, but we didn’t realize that it actually got cold! It’s been getting down into the low 50’s at night, and it wasn’t higher than 80* during the day for the past few weeks. It was definitely a welcome relief!

In between sessions (and sometimes during – ssshhh!), we’ve been planning trips and thinking about ways to avoid the awful hot season that is fast approaching. My friends and I have settled on a trip to Ghana in May, and I also decided recently (and I’m about 90% sure about this) that I’ll be coming home in July. They’re both a long way away, but they’ll give me something to look forward to during the long days in village, and will hopefully give me a chance to soak in some un-Malian food and culture. Although I should note here that Mali is slowly becoming more and more normal. It might have something to do with the fact that I haven’t been in my village since before Christmas, but it seems like the things that were weird before aren’t so weird anymore. We’re coming to appreciate a new kind of normal, which is both comforting and terrifying at the same time.

I keep trying to upload pictures (really, I do!) but the internet here is way too slow to make that possible. I’ll keep trying.

It’s been a while. My apologies. Where to start?

I left off at the election and it’s been an interesting ride since then. It’s been so long, and there have been several stretches of absolutely nothing noteworthy, so I think the best way to convey the past month is through anecdotes.

Halloween Fun Comes Back to Haunt Me:

After the Halloween and the election, I had planned to go back to my site until Thanksgiving, or about three weeks. I got a cushy-Peace Corps SUV ride back from Bamako to Sikasso on Friday morning, and slept the entire way. When you only have so much time with English-speakers, you’ve got to make the best of it, which means not going to bed especially early. So there I was, passed out in the PC SUV, content to finally be going back home. Or so I thought.

It turns out that Peace Corps may know a thing or two about the first three months of a volunteer’s service, and they may even make their policies accordingly. We’re not supposed to leave our region for the first 3 months (which, for us, was until December 12) without prior approval from our boss. But my friends and I decided to leave anyway (we did end up telling our boss), and spent almost two weeks away. It seemed like a good decision at the time, and I had a great time during the two weeks, but in retrospect, I should never have left for that long. Leaving and having more-or-less American amenities (running water, ceiling fans, yogurt, cold drinks, good food) was a huge relief, but it’s easy to get used to, and it makes the transition back to village life even harder. The first four days back at site were perhaps the toughest I’ve had in Mali, as I battled with physical discomforts and also the emotional challenges that accompany them, most notably, the question: “Do I really want to be here?”. I spent enough time in the last few years agonizing over whether or not I really did want to join the PC, so I knew deep down that that the answer was and will always be “yes”, but it took some serious convincing at that point.

And really, since when am I a quitter? Not to go on too long feeling sorry for myself, but this is all simply to say that life in Mali isn’t all roses and rainbows. And I think that’s good, because it puts things in perspective and makes me reevaluate why I’m here in the first place (I’ll let you know exactly what that is whenever I figure it out).

Disney Meets Mali

The concessions in my town are all roughly laid out the same way: square mud or concrete houses, and kitchens with either thatch or aluminum (my favorite!) roofs, in a rectangle/square shape with an open area in the middle. It’s almost European in that the outside of the compounds are unassuming (in fact that’s where Malians dump their trash, for lack of a formal waste disposal system), and there’s an inner courtyard where most things happen. Note that I said almost European, because I’m pretty sure goats, sheep and dirty children (as soon as they’re old enough to run around on their own, they’re dirty) don’t have free rein in most sophisticated European courtyards. The middle of the compound is usually the heart of the family; Malians spend most of the day outside, so everything from eating to socializing to cooking happens in this middle courtyard. If you have the means to bury someone important in your family, chances are that their tomb will be smack in the middle of the compound.

It’s also the grain storage location for each family. Malians build round, silo-like mud structures that they put their corn and millet in after the harvest (like the photo above). Each one of them is raised on foot-long asymmetrical rocks, presumably to keep the grain off the ground during rainy season. The roof of each of these is thatch, and looks roughly like a Chinese rice hat – conical, so it hangs out over the edge of the mud. About a foot or two down from the roof is a square opening that serves as the entry-route for retrieving grain when necessary.

This is all well and good, and probably rather unremarkable for most Malians, because everyone has them. But when you combine an American like myself with an anti-malarial drug like Mefloquine (known to cause bad dreams, as well as other unexplainable psychoses), with an inexplicably large amount of free time, funny things start to happen. In my host families’ compound, these structures are arranged in a rough circle in the middle, and I sometimes imagine them getting up at night and dancing around, Fantasia style, only to return to their original position at daybreak. I have yet to compose the soundtrack, but I can see the lights and frolicking and swaying now. I like the idea so much that I’m tempted to build one in my own yard. Maybe the accompanying soundtrack will serve as a much needed antidote to the grating, scratching mystery animal that’s still on my roof. No, it’s not gone yet; yes, I am able to sleep at night without ear plugs these days. I figure if I can hear it, that means it’s ON my roof instead of IN my house, so it can’t get to me.

Why I’m not an Education Sector Volunteer

Lots of people have asked me why, since I spent a year teaching, and have worked with kids for the past few summers, I didn’t choose to become a volunteer in the education sector. My response is simple: because I did my research. Let me explain.

As you know, my language tutor (ie moral/cultural compass) is the director of our school, and I’ve quickly become friends with him and his family, which means that I end up spending a lot of time at their house. I hadn’t observed a class until recently, but because of a first three month “needs assessment” that I’m required to do by the Peace Corps, I found myself in a classroom recently observing the afternoon’s lesson. The lesson started off really well, and I was encouraged by the structure and the pace, but it all disintegrated when the students couldn’t tell their teacher which mathematical operation they had used to solve their simple math problem. After asking several times, and not getting a response (probably because the kids had no idea), he brought out his rubber whip and began to beat the kids.

Now let’s back up a step-- I don’t agree with beating kids (or anyone for that matter), however I would have found it easier to stomach if they’d been misbehaving or acting inappropriately in any way. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.

The kids were given a simple math problem: if there are 234 boys and 456 girls in the class, how many total students are in the class, and then divided into groups with their hand-held chalk boards to solve the problem. I thought it was rather forward-thinking and interactive that my teacher was dividing them into groups and asking them to work together to solve a problem, which some groups did successfully. They got the right numerical answer, but when asked which operation they’d used to get their answer, they couldn’t say “addition”. And instead of stopping to go back and explain the different operations, the teacher resorted to pacing the room re-asking the same question over and over and over again. And then he got so frustrated and said to me “Pardon me, please” before he went around to the groups and asked the SAME question again, and when they couldn’t answer correctly, he beat them. Hard. This was no simple love tap, but a thwack that made them writhe and wince. It’s a sign of weakness in this culture to scream or cry, so the room was silent while he went around hitting the kids. It was awful.

I watched briefly, unsure of what to do, before finally deciding that leaving the room was best. I left the room shaking and on the verge of tears to get some water outside. I composed myself and went to a different classroom where the students were diligently copying a lesson in French about transportation methods of Mali, most of which they’d probably never heard of or seen. Maybe there’s something to be said for the tried-and-true copy and regurgitate schooling system that the French colonialists introduced to this country years ago. The kids may not understand what they’re learning, but at least they’re ignorant and welt-less, instead of the other, more painful option.

So the reason I’m not an education sector volunteer is because I’d read several Peace Corps memoirs written by former PCV’s in Africa that detailed the corporal punishment that occurs in schools. I didn’t want to have anything to do with that. To be fair, one of my friends is an education volunteer in a town outside of Bamako and he’s working in an experimental school, where they’re forbidden to hit kids. Yes, it’s such a common occurrence that kids are only NOT beaten in special schools. I think that would be a fantastic place to work. And the other three education volunteers that I’ve spoken with recently are supposed to be working at the large university, where I doubt any beatings happen. But I didn’t want to take my chances during the interview process and have my post be a teaching spot that required me to beat kids as a form of acceptable discipline.

I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas…

The high today in Mali is 96*, and they tell us it’s cold season. One of us did not have a white Christmas, but it nevertheless was a really good one anyway.

A friend of mine who I studied abroad with in Madagascar came to visit on the 13th. I came into Bamako to pick her up that Saturday night, and we spent Sunday here in the capital. Bright and early Monday morning, we got a ride to Sikasso, and spent the night there. Early Tuesday morning, we took off for my site and spent Tuesday-Saturday morning hanging out in village and meeting people. On Saturday, we started our trek back to Sikasso, back to Bamako and onwards, 6 hours west until we got to a small town called Manantali. I’m inclined to think it was a town in the middle of nowhere that nobody had ever been to before someone got the idea to dam the river and make a HUGE hydroelectric power plant there. Someone said that, at full capacity, this dam could power all of Mali and perhaps have some energy leftover for surrounding countries. That’s massive. If you google image search “Manantali”, you’ll find some photos of it.

We met some other Peace Corps friends in Bamako on Sunday and headed west early Monday morning. Our final destination was a Peace Corps stage house in town where we’d planned to meet more PCV’s to celebrate Christmas. What we didn’t realize when we’d first decided to head out there was how beautiful the place really was – the house is right on the river! Supposedly there are hippos there, but we never saw them, which is probably a good thing, because they can be extremely dangerous. We did have monkeys come right up to the porch where we were sitting one morning (sorry Elizabeth, I have no idea what kind they were). We spent the week relaxing, swimming and hiking, and thanks to all the Whole Foods deliciousness that my friend had brought, we had some pretty great meals. Our Christmas dinner had the works: guinea fowl, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, pumpkin mush (to substitute for the lack of sweet potatoes), and pumpkin bread (which I made without an oven! Gotta love double boilers). This may sound all hum-drum to you, but everything tasted SO much better with the addition of things from America. The stuffing had dried cranberries in it, the mashed potatoes had butter and spices, and there’s no cranberry sauce to be had anywhere in this country. It all tasted so good!

I'm back in Bamako now for New Years and then heading to a friend's site before coming back to Bamako for a three week long Peace Corps training. It'll be nice to see everyone again, and this is the last formal training event before Peace Corps officially releases us into our villages to start doing work. We won't have any other big-group, mandatory events before early 2010, when they gather us together agian to talk about the close of our service. Yikes!

This also means that for any of you who might like to call me, I'll have reliable cell service until Jan 2, and spotty, but better, service until the end of January. I'd love to talk to you. But drop me an e-mail before you call, because my phone number has changed.

I was in Bamako for the election last week, and aside from being a memorable election in and of itself, those of us who watched it here have something else to talk about.

The superficial details first:

Several ex-pats had parties that we were more or less invited to -- I think we were less invited to the one we went to until the very last minute. But boy am I glad we went! We met a pretty big crew of Peace Corps volunteers at a bar/hotel in Bamako, and carpooled (more or less) in taxis to someone's house slightly outside the bustling center of Bamako. I didn't know they had McMansions in Bamako, but apparently we found one of the few that do exist. Let me see if I can do their house justice without pictures: A couple (American wife, Malian husband) designed and built the house themselves and it is by far the most beautiful American-style house I've seen this side of the Atlantic. The rooms are spacious, and the artwork inside is probably (we got a house tour, but I didn't ask) from all over Africa and has TONS of character. Each room has a great piece from somewhere on the continent. And if there's just not enough room inside, there's a screened-in porch outside (key in this maliarial climate), as well as a tennis court, a swimming pool, a bar and a spacious pool house. They'd set up a big screen on their tennis court and connected it to CNN. We arrived, sat down to watch the election, and were immediately served pork!!! Yes, pork in this Muslim country! We gorged ourselves and settled in for a long night of anticipation. It was almost like Christmas, and frankly the food we ate then might very well turn out to be better than the food I eat this Christmas! It was a unique crowd - a mix of ex-pat Americans, as well as a handful of Malians. The big screen in the pool house was playing the election coverage in French so the Malians who didn't speak English could understand, but this also meant that they weren't in with the mix of English speakers watching outside, so we didn't get a good read on their reactions. I made it until about 3am, when the cold set in and the mosquitos biting got old. At this point, there was no way McCain could win, so a friend and I decided to call it a night and went in search of a taxi. We heard the results when our friends came back home, and were able to watch the speeches the next day online.

So what are the Malians saying? Well, on Monday before the election, my friend and I were walking around the market hunting for a paint brush when we stumbled into a store where a man asked us who was going to win. We were really surprised -- not that he knew America was holding an election, but that he knew it was the next day and that he knew the candidate's names. We told him that we hoped Obama would win and he laughed and agreed with us. That night while watching the election, most of the Malians present wanted Obama to win. And the next day, I got a text message from a Malian friend congratulating me on our win! The folks at my health center think it's great that Obama won, and I received yet another congratuatory note from someone in passing today. They Malians think it's great that one of "them" won, and the doctor at my health center even sees it as proof that racism doesn't exist in America. While I can't quite agree him on that last point, it's still really neat to see Malians so concerned and excited about our election.

And now I'm back at site putzing along at a rather slower and less exciting pace. Thanksgiving is coming quickly, and my region traditionally hosts the big Peace Corps party. We're looking forward to seeing everyone on our turf, and especially to eating turkey. I haven't had turkey since I left the States!

Scratch everything I told you about having a routine, or a daily schedule. I think the best way to recap my last few weeks is chronologically, so here goes:

I went back to site two Mondays ago, and spent Monday to Thursday uneventfully.

Thursday -- a friend of mine biked the 70k from her site to mine. I met her about 50k along the way, and we ate lunch and walked around one of my local market towns before deciding to head back to my site. My village wouldn’t stop talking about how crazy she was to have biked all the way from her town to mine. They wondered why she just didn’t take a car. We tried to explain that, since we have nothing else to do at site, biking 70k isn’t such a bad thing to do. Lots of conversations started between my villagers about whether they or their friends could have done the same thing. The general consensus was that no Malian could have biked all that way. They also don’t have brand new American-made TREK bikes like we do. Their bikes don’t even have gears. They ride single speed rickety bikes everywhere they go.

Friday – My friend and I decided to set off again on our brand new shiny bikes to try and find waterfalls that we’d heard about. Who knew there were waterfalls in Mali? And I’m lucky enough to have some of them about 10k from my site! On the way out to the falls, we decided to stop at the school in my town and greet the teachers. They all speak French and have been a huge help for me. I’ve started secretly calling my language tutor who’s also the director of my school, my cultural/moral compass. They, and he especially, are great. And once again, they didn’t fail us. When we rolled up on our bikes and told them where we were going, they suggested stopping in at the school near the falls and asking the director to show us the road to the falls. So we biked to the school (which is rather picturesque, I might add. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures) and found the director, who seemed to be in the middle of class. But this didn’t seem to matter, because he dropped everything, greeted us, made his entire class of about 40-50 little faces stand up and greet us in their extremely stiff and awkward French greeting. For some reason around here it’s polite to fold your arms across your chest and bow while saying “Bonjour, Madame/Monsieur”. It just makes the kids look funny and it’s weird to have kids that I know don’t speak French greeting me this way. In any event, the director greeted us and after going through the normal runaround of how’syourfamilyandyourhealthandthefolksinyourvillageandyourfamilyanddidyousleepwellandyourhealthandyourkids?, we explained why we’d come and where we wanted to go. Turns out he had worked with Peace Corps volunteers in the past and was happy to help us. Not only did he show us the route, but he sent us with our own personal guide. He walked into the 6th grade class and asked who could take us to the falls. The prereqs were simple: the kid had to be unphased by the sight of two goofy Americans, and the kid needed a bike. The director ended up pulling a 12/13 year old boy out of class and telling him to show us the way. We didn’t realize it at first, but we’d landed on a gold mine. First, this kid was adorable in ways American kids just can’t ever hope to be. Our genes will just never make us that cute. We set off on our bikes and he chattered the whole way to the falls. I’m not sure whether or not he realized that we only caught about ½ about what he said, but he just kept going. We thought he’d just drop us off there and go back, but after some confusion (he didn’t speak French), we realized that he was afraid we’d get lost if we tried to go back by ourselves, so he decided to stay. I initially thought he was trying to avoid going back to class, but since it was already noon, class had ended for lunch, so he was here on his own time. He joined us for some homemade spaghetti and tomato sauce and fresh cucumbers and dressing, and seemed to thoroughly enjoy them. Most Malians look at American food and pick at it politely instead of actually eating it. This kid sucked it all down. After eating, we spent an hour or two enjoying the mist coming off the falls and the view – they’re no Victoria falls, but they’re not bad for some backyard waterfalls a few hundred kilometers south of the Sahel.

Saturday – We decided that since my friend was leaving on Sunday for another marathon bike ride home, we would do absolutely nothing. And so we rode and took some pictures (below) of both the paved road to my site and the footpath that goes from there. Then we came home and took a nap. We woke up briefly when one of my neighbors came to the door to greet, and we ate some beans that my host mom had made us for lunch. And then we went back to sleep. Another tough day on the job.

Sunday – We left my village at about 6:30am to start the ride north to my friend’s site. I rode the 20k with her again to the local market town, and we got a lavish breakfast of a fried egg sandwich on a baguette and instant coffee. And then we took off in our separate directions. I went home and stopped by my language teacher’s house and spent the rest of the day “chatting” and drinking tea, Mali style.

Monday – As I think I’ve mentioned before, market is on Mondays in a neighboring town. This town also happens to have the main health center for our village, so I’ve started stopping by there and spending time talking to them and watching their activities before going to market. This particular Monday, I found my two matrons (midwives), including my homologue, there at the maternité (women’s ward?, although ward makes it sound like something more than the three rooms it really is) learning what there is to learn about prenatal consultations and baby weighings. The eventual goal is to have these two women, who spent time last year and earlier this year becoming trained in First Aid and midwivery (is that even a word?) skills, become competent and confident enough to start working full time at the maternité in our village. We spent the morning at the clinic talking to pregnant women and mothers who’d come in to weigh their babies.

Wednesday – I biked out to another market in a neighboring village, and did my shopping and then the fun started on my way back. Certain Malians (lots of times they’re men, but not always) have a way of tailing you when biking. I’ll pass them as we’re riding along, and then instead of giving me the American-expected amount of room behind, they’ll bike as hard and fast as possible to be right up on my rear wheel. I used to think this was annoying and do nothing about it, but now I think it’s annoying and have turned it into a game. Unfortunately, I lost at my own game this time. I guess I had some extra energy, so when the man behind me started tailing me, I decided to start biking faster and faster to see if he would keep up. And he was doing a pretty darn job considering that his bike was probably about 10years older than mine. But here’s the thing to understand – we weren’t biking on pavement anymore. I keep forgetting that Dorothy left Kansas a while ago and perhaps should think about changing her actions to fit the circumstances (like biking slower on unpaved footpaths). The view from the path to my site is beautiful (see photo below). The path itself is anything but beautiful. At it’s best, it’s wide enough for a small car, but it narrows several times to be just wide enough for a bike and a moto to pass semi-safely. And now since it’s rainy season, it’s in such bad condition that there are parts where the rideable path narrows to the width of a bike tire. And these parts when it narrows happen to be in the middle of rice paddies, where the tall grass lined path is the only elevated thing around. The ground drops off into dirty, dirty water right on the other side of these grasses. It’s pretty because banana trees and other palms grow there, but every time I ride by, I pray not to fall in so I don’t contract the various skin diseases that I’m sure are just waiting below to feast on my unacclimated American skin. So where does this leave me and my biking companion? Well, we were riding along at a pretty good clip, and we entered into one of these straightaways. I didn’t do much in the way of slowing down, and next thing I knew, I had ridden too close to the edge, and was launched off my bike, through the grasses, and into the brown water below. Somehow, I landed facing uphill and the first thing I could think after I stopped laughing was getmeoutofhere,getmeoutofhere,getmeoutofhere. My “competition” stopped and pulled me out and asked if I was ok. Then he proceeded to remind me that this path was really bad, and that I shouldn’t ride so fast. Thanks, buddy. So we picked all the stickers off my clothes, and rode home slowly, with him on my tail the whole way. I immediately took a bath when I got home.

That night at about 6, as I was about to go join my bean-frying friend, a woman walked into my compound and told me and my homologue that there was a woman going into labor and that we needed to come. We walked into the kerosene lamp-lit room to find this woman lying on a blue camping tarp surrounded by a few medical tools in an otherwise empty room. We pulled up chairs and stools and buckled down for the long haul. At 7:30, my host mom came by and told me I had to come for dinner, so I ate and then went back to the maternité. Nothing had happened. The women were tapping on her belly, and I think they put some kind of traditional suave on her to induce her labor, perhaps? Still nothing. At one point, food arrived for the women, and they took a break and went outside to eat their rice and sauce and toh. I sat there and watched this woman, who was clearly in pain. Then they came back and we sat around some more. And then, out of the blue, one of the older women said to me, “I hear you fell off your bike today”. It turns out that it was her son who’d been tailing me that afternoon when I fell into the rice paddy! I had thought the whole village might know about the incident, and here was proof that, in the land of big families, word travels fast. The only thing I could do was laugh and confirm the details of the story as she told the other women in the room. 10:30 rolled around, and still nothing had happened, so I decided that it was way past my bedtime. I excused myself, and went back home to go to bed.

Thursday – The next morning, I woke up and walked over to the maternité again and found that they’d closed up shop. My neighbors told me that the women had left last night and taken the pregnant woman to our health center 5k away. On moto. So I went home and had breakfast. Later that morning, I biked to the health center to hang out with the folks there, and they told me that the woman had come the night before and they’d called the ambulance to take her to the regional hospital 30k away. Supposedly she’d needed a C-section and they were the only ones who could do it. But here’s the cool thing: in Mali, if the doctor at the local health center thinks a woman needs a C-section, he can call an ambulance and refer her to the local hospital. And if it turns out that she actually gets the operation, everything – from the ambulance ride to the operation, is FREE. From what I understand, someone a while back realized that too many women were dying because the cost of the ambulance and the operation were prohibitively expensive. So now there’s a fund set up to pay for these expenses, and supposedly the maternal mortality rate has plummeted. What a good idea.

Friday, Saturday, Sunday passed rather uneventfully. I rode 30k to get free internet on Friday, had my first house guests on Saturday, and went to the fields to help my family pick peanuts off the plant on Sunday.

Monday – On Monday, we went back to the health center (CSCOM) in the neighboring village and then went to market. On the way back, I stopped in at the doctor’s house to chat and eat lunch, and walked into the middle of a conversation about the level of education of women. My doctor was talking to two students who just graduated high school and are on their way to the one Malian University (yes, they told me there’s only 1 university in this whole country. Yikes) in Bamako next month to start classes. The female wants to get a four year degree in secretarial management, and the boy wants to get a law degree. They were sitting and making tea with my doctor, who was trying to convince the girl that she shouldn’t go to university because if she did, no man would want to marry her. Yes, I wrote that correctly: women shouldn’t be educated because no man wants a wife who is more educated than he is. WWWWHHHAAATTT? This young (I think the doctor is about 30-35), educated man is trying to discourage a bright, aspiring young woman from getting an education because of concerns about her future mate? Wow. I told him that I absolutely positively did not agree, and that there were plenty of men who would marry her if she chose to be educated. Furthermore, this doctor friend of mine has a habit of calling Africa “l’enfer” (hell) and constantly reminding me about how America is paradise. I told him that there was no way Mali was ever going to be developed if it didn’t encourage its young people (BOTH men and women) to get educations. A country needs both sexes to be able to make decisions. But he didn’t agree. I was fuming. I went back to site for my language-turned-culture lesson and asked my tutor if everyone in Mali thought this. He assured me that, no, this was not a commonly held belief and that this poor girl would be able to complete her education AND get married. There is hope for Mali.

There are pictures to come, I promise.

Here, as promised, are the photos that wouldn't upload the last time I tried.

I'll have more text in the coming week, when I'll be out and about in the "real world" for Halloween and the election. It's been an interesting two weeks (I got a cat! But that's actually the boring part), so stay tuned.

Here's a photo of my current house:

And the other part of my yard:

And my kitchen and side wall of my bathroom:

First things first: Thank you, thank you, thank you for all your comments! Here are some quick responses:

Judy: I’ve never heard of a “swamp” contest. I’ll keep my ears open!

Bruno: no, sheep don’t have names. And thankfully, they’re not one other nameless animal that keeps me up at night. And as for alternative energy, there are some solar panels floating around, but I haven’t seen any wind turbines.

Matthew: You should probably come visit. You need to make up for lost time, right (I mean that in the best way possible!).

It occurred to me recently that you might want to know about my daily schedule. So here goes:

Every morning at about 6:30/7am, I wake up, emerge from my mosquito net and get ready to face the day. I wash my face (because it’s culturally inappropriate to speak to and greet people before you’ve washed) before going to my host families’ house to buy bread from them. They get their bread delivered daily from a town about 20k away, which means that there’s always a finite supply of bread. If I get there too late, I’m stuck eating fried dough, which I don’t really like. How’s that for motivation to get out of bed? I typically eat bread with peanut butter, honey and bananas (if I have any) and drink tea for breakfast. I’m fortunate to have a gas stove with three burners, which is really nice because the Malians cook on charcoal or wood stoves, which are slow and completely foreign to me. Anywhere between 1 and about 10 kids typically show up at some point during this process.

At around 8, my troubles start. I have done everything I “need” to do for the morning, and am faced with the decision to either sit around in my compound by myself with a book, or go wander around town to find people to sit around with. I typically choose the latter. I go walk around to either my host families’ house or my homologues’ house to greet them and see what they’re doing. Typically, we pretend to talk to the fullest extent possible. It’s really great when there are kids running around because then I can make faces at them and play with them, because neither of those involve language skills. I have one kid trained so that whenever he sees me, his eyes get really big, and he purses his mouth to mimic a facial expression I made the first time I went into his compound. It is absolutely adorable.

Note: Mondays and Wednesdays are days to look forward to because there are markets in neighboring villages. I go to them, walk around for a while, sit with people from my village, and sometimes buy things.

Then 11/noon rolls around, and if I have food in my trunk in my kitchen, I head home and attempt to cook something palatable. If not, I head to my host families house and hope, hope, hope that they’re eating rice and sauce. But if not, we eat corn toh and sauce. Toh is gelatinous, and the sauce is snotty. Delicious. In all seriousness, toh is a dish made from pounded corn kernels, akin to congealed Cream of Wheat. The sauce at this time of year is made from dried, crushed fish and pounded ocra (sp?) powder. It does, indeed, have a very snotty consistency – there’s no other way to put it to make it sound good while accurately describing it. I force myself to eat it 1. because it’s typically my only option, but 2. because I know I’m probably getting more vitamins from the sauce than I am from most other things I’m eating. I’ve rediscovered what being “full” means. If I’m actually hungry, I will eat a substantial amount of toh and sauce, but the minute it stops tasting good is the minute I no longer know that I’m hungry. I immediately stop eating when this happens.

After eating, I usually go home from about 12/1-2/3:00. I figure it’s siesta time in the rest of the country (and parts of Europe), so I probably shouldn’t go against cultural norms by actually doing anything at this time of day.

And then at around 2/3:00, I resume doing nothing. I’ll either walk around my village some more and see what people are doing or read a book. I’ve played a few rounds of UNO with folks, sat around and “chatted” some more, or just stared aimlessly into space.

Finally, 5:00 rolls around and I go to the pump that’s about 500m from my house (that’s close), and get water for my bucket bath. It’s really nice to have a pump this close because it means I can be slightly more sure about the cleanliness of my water. Most families in Mali have wells, and because they’re tapping into water that’s closer to the surface, it’s more susceptible to contamination in the form of dirty bathroom runoff or animal feces. As Peace Corps volunteers, we’re required to both filter and bleach well water, and even then we can’t always be entirely sure that it doesn’t contain contaminants. But pumps are dug a lot deeper and tap into water that’s (at least as I understand it) less contaminated. I filter my water with the large scale filter PC gives us, but worry less about bleaching it. So I get my water, and then put it on the stove to heat up so I can take a warm bath. If you’re going to have to take a bucket bath, you can at least make it a warm one, right? And then I go take my bath in my concrete bathroom with no roof. And actually, one of the mud walls fell down in a hard rain storm we had before I got to site, so my wash stall really only has two permanent walls and a door right now. The other wall is a thatch wall that’s propped up from the back by sticks. My village promises they’ll fix it when the rainy season is over. And I didn’t have a door until recently, when I told my village carpenter that everyone on the street can look in and see me bathing if they didn’t install another door for me. So now there’s a much appreciated tin door shielding me from the road.

And I think I wrote about the rest of my day in my last post, but I’ll repeat parts of it… After my bath (that sounds so…Victorian? So proper! Almost like I should go eat tea and crumpets immediately afterwards), I go and sit with one of my neighbors who fries bean dough every everning. It’s an excuse to a. check my voicemail and b. be social and c. eat beans! Cell service in my village is extremely limited, and it just so happens that there’s a stick with a knob on it near the bean-frying lady that gets great service. So I go, turn on my phone, and hang it on the knob on the tree and wait for messages. I typically leave it on for a half hour or so, but no longer because I don’t want the battery to run out. There are ways to recharge it in village, but I’d have to pay for that, and I’m a cheap PC volunteer, so I try to make my charge last two weeks until I come into Sikasso, our regional capital, again and get electricity that someone else is paying for. I sit, and sometimes talk and joke with the folks that have come to buy beans and sit around, too. It’s typically a group of men, because the women are at home taking care of the kids and making dinner and, well, running the household.

But here’s really why it’s fun (and this is more complicated than I think even I understand, but I’ll try to do my best in summarizing): in Mali, your last name makes a big difference. A generations long tradition exists in which different family names joke with each other. At the most academic level, it serves as a social stabilizer, a way to ease tensions and draw people together. For us PCV’s, it serves as a repetitive joke that doesn’t require many language skills to participate in because it progresses in the exact same way each and every time. Here’s how it works: You’ll either be meeting someone or buying something from someone on the street and they’ll ask you your first and last name. At which point you tell them, and they react accordingly. I’m a Coulibaly, which means that almost everyone jokes with me. I’ve been told I’ve set myself up for a long two years of being made fun of, but I’m ok with that. It’s something to talk about. So…once people establish that I’m a Coulibaly, people always follow with the following…Coulibaly’s are bad, and they eat beans. At which point, I tell them that people with their last name are bad, and that they eat beans. Sometimes, you can tell them that they’re your slave, although as Americans, we’re a bit hesitant to make that joke. There’s a little too much historical baggage with that one. My village consists of folks with the same last name which is different than mine, and I joke with them all. They constantly tell me that my last name is bad, and that I should change it. As I walk through town, they call my name and tell me that I’m one of them (ie I have the same last name), to which I reply that the folks with my last name are great, and I’ll never be one of them.

And then, at around 7 or 7:30, I head to my host families’ house to eat toh and sauce and drink tea. Different people pop in and out of the house, and come to talk and drink tea. Drinking tea is really nice because it provides a finite thing to wait around for.

Let me explain: it is very uncomfortable for me, as an American, coming from our busy-busy culture, to just sit around and do nothing. But, as a handy-dandy Peace Corps manual I read recently said, sitting around is perfectly normal in lots of cultures. And here’s the crazy thing: you don’t even necessarily have to talk while sitting around. It’s nuts! But I never quite know when enough sitting around and talking is enough. So tea provides the perfect out. We brew three rounds of tea from one box of loose leaves, and then it’s over, and I have a reason to leave. I can’t leave ‘till we’ve had three rounds (the glass is about the size of a shot glass, so we’re not drinking three 8 oz. glasses of tea), so I either find something to talk about because when they talk to me, they have to speak in Bambara (more on that later) and I can pick the topic of conversation, which means we’ll most likely be using a set of vocab I can understand. Or when the conversation fails, we eat or stare at the stars. Oranges are coming into season, so we’ve been drinking lots of OJ. They cut off the top of the orange, cut out a wedge at the top and then peel off the outside of the skin, leaving a layer of roughage on the outside so the juice can’t squeeze out. Then they squish the orange slightly, and drink the juice from the top wedge they cut out. It’s great! A friend of mine also fries fish every afternoon to sell and brings me some every evening. I never even really liked fish in the US, let alone fried fish, but they’re not bad here. I still don’t eat the head, but I’ve started to really enjoy fried fins. My host dad takes care of the heads in one bite for me.

Here are some photos of my current house (the other one was my homestay village, in case there was any confusion). Those photos are all from times past…distant, faded memories of last month. J

Here’s the view from my front stoop, to the left. That’s my chicken coop in the back, and my bathroom door on the right. The trees are moringa trees planted by a previous volunteer. They’re chock full of vitamins and minerals. One of my plans is to get my village planting it and eating it daily. Off to the right is my bathroom, and the concrete slab at the bottom of the photo is my “porch”. According to my host father, once the rainy season is over, a thatch roof is in the plans to give me some shade as well as a roof to sleep under when the hot season hits and I can’t stand to sleep inside.

well, the internet is being too slow, so the other photos will have to come later. my apologies, because the rest show all of my mud palace...

I dont actually know how to make a photo album on here yet, so in the interest of saving time, im going to throw a bunch of pics up w explanations. sorry for the disorganization.

heres the road into town

here's my homestay family house, meaning the one i lived in....my door is the blue one, the sheep lived to the right

and some really adorable kids, ie my host siblings

and heres a bigger part of my homestay family, in a very malian pose

and heres my host brother

and my other one

we painted a mural on the wall in town

my language and cultural facilitators, the two lovely ladies i studied at homestay with and me in our malian best

this ones for all you carleton kids; its me and cherif's childhood friend who's the peace corps training director

and two adorable kids in town

Here I am, back again to tell you all about my homestay family.

Peace Corps puts trainees with host families to facilitate our integration into Malian life, and to help immerse us in the language.

As I think I’ve already mentioned, myself and two other female trainees were stationed in a small 400 person village not far from Bamako. Our days consisted mostly of language and technical training, with some time left over to socialize with each other and our families.

As is to be expected, the beginning was a bit rough. Both our bodies and our minds were doing their best to process our new surroundings, our new foods and meds, and a whole new language. The first week was the hardest because our stomachs rejected lots of the foods we ate, and our thermostats were thrown for a loop because of the new climate we’d just been dropped into (for more on the climate, see below). Our days were divided into about 6-7 hours of classes, and the rest for free time. Since our village was so small, we spent a lot of time hanging out with our families, which helped our language skills. Despite our limited language, we grew really close to our families, and it was really hard to leave last Sunday morning. I’ve had my fair share of host families in the past, and I’d almost go so far as to say that I had the most fun with this group of people ever. They really and truly welcomed us into their family as one of them.

Malians love to joke, and to make up for a lack of other things to say (mainly because we couldn’t say them, or understand when they were being said to us), we repeated the same jokes over and over again. My host father and my friend’s host father would not only make fun of each other, but they involved the two of us in the game, as well. The jokes started out because the two men would make fun of each other for not working. But then they started telling each other that we, the Americans, couldn’t do x, y, or z activity (like washing clothes, pounding millet, etc…), and then we just all started calling each other crazy. It was really great because it gave us a constant thing to talk about: how any one of us at any moment couldn’t do anything.

We also played a ton of UNO in my family. I first broke out a deck of regular playing cards, and we taught them to play go fish. But then, as you can imagine, that got boring pretty quickly, so we turned to UNO. We must have played at least 3-4 games a day for a week straight. They LOVED it and would constantly ask for it. And again, because it only required a standard, repetitious set of vocabulary, we were able to play it as many times as we wanted because we didn’t necessarily have many other things to talk about.

But at the same time, we had some great conversations. My Bambara really did improve, as did my family’s ability to tailor their speech to my needs. They knew the set of vocab I’d learned and would mush it together to form sentences that I could actually understand. They were really great about it! They would try, and try and try again to explain something I didn’t understand.

We had conversations about the stars, and how when Americans look into the sky, we see shapes and pictures. Malians do not do this. In the course of two months, we probably pointed to every object in our compound and even some in the village and determined whether it existed in America. It’s funny because we have most everything, it’s just in a different form in the US. The most interesting “is x in America” question I got was about my shadow. My family and I were sitting in their house one night and my kerosene lamp cast a big shadow on the wall. I started making shadow puppets on the wall, and they asked me if we had shadows in America.

On the last day, I went out with my two host brothers, 12 and 15, to see their fields and gardens that they’d been planting the entire time we were there. Somehow, my gregarious 12 year old brother ended up with my camera in his hand and, after figuring out how it worked, proceeded to document almost everything we saw on our little walk. I let him hold onto it, and when we got back into town, asked him to come into someone’s compound with me. It was great because he wasn’t bashful about taking close up pictures of people I didn’t really know, and thus would have been too shy to take a photo of. And they almost seemed more relaxed when he snapped the shot.

It's hard to do my family justice in a few paragraphs, so I'm not going to go on much further. My host father told me at our goodbye party in village that our presence in village had given him a purpose again -- he said he used to wander around town, but then we came, and he started coming home more often to hang out. And after "talking" to my American parents on the phone (he greeted them briefly in Bambara), he also told me that when they came to visit, he wanted to come to the airport with me to meet them. Our families are coming for dinner tonight, and we're all really excited for the bad jokes to continue. They really did welcome us in as their family, and did a wonderful job showing us how to live in Mali!

Seasons in Mali:

There are really only two seasons in Mali: dry season and rainy season. We arrived at the beginning of rainy season, so it’s been raining for the past few months, which keeps the heat to a tolerable level. According to a weather.com search I did yesterday, it’s supposed to be in the high 80’s to low 90’s this week. And that’s actually starting to be pretty comfortable. That doesn’t mean it’s not humid, though. Yuck. And so now the rainy season is coming to a close, and we’re expecting a mini hot season starting sooner than later. And then we have a cold season that runs roughly from October to Feb/March, if I understand it correctly. And then comes the brutal heat that lasts from March/April - late May. My friends and I will be strategically planning our vacations to the beach during this season.

I’m starting to think the Van Morrison song “Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This” might be an apt refrain for my Peace Corps service. You know?:

“When it’s not always raining, there’d be days like this…. (hot days when, no matter how

hard we try, or how little we move, we just can’t stop sweating)

[When] everything falls into place, like the flick of a switch…

When you don’t need to worry… (because maybe you’ve come to terms with the creepy

crawlies in your house?)

When noone’s in a hurry… (although somehow that seems to be everyday here in Mali)

When you don’t need an answer… (or don’t have the language skills to understand the

answer given!)

When all the parts of the puzzle start to look like they fit…

When it’s nobody’s business the way that you wanna live… (or when the kids stop

peering through your screen door to follow your every move)

When people understand what I mean… (now, now let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’ll

be a while before everyone can understand my Bambara)

Oh my mama told me, there’d be days like this… (well, she didn’t really say anything

like that, but I’m sure she’ll permit me a bit of poetic license. Thanks, mom.)”

Somehow, I don’t think Van Morrison was referring to my Peace Corps service in Mali when he wrote the lyrics, but his song sure rings true after my first week at site here in Mali. Let me start by telling you about my first full day there:

Day One started off pretty normally – I choked down my overly sweet instant coffee and bread that my host mother had given me, and then enlisted her help to clean my house from top to bottom. I think it’s been a few years since anyone’s lived there (from what I can gather, the last volunteer there left 2 years ago), so there was dust and termites to high heaven. Then we went to my host family’s house for lunch. I was about three bites into my bowl of rice and sauce when one of my male family members rode into the compound on his bike and nonchalantly handed my 3 year old host sister something. I couldn’t tell what it was until she came closer, and that’s when I lost my appetite. In her hand was a dead mouse, head severed at the neck and all. She proceeded to manhandle it in it’s entirety. I don’t think a single part of it’s body went untouched. It takes a lot for me to lose my appetite, but this did it. I stopped eating and stared for a few seconds, and then remembered that since it’s Ramadan, my mother had made this meal especially for me, and that not eating it was really not an option. So I took a deep breath, looked down at my full bowl on the ground, and dug in, not stopping to look up until I was sure that I had eaten enough to satisfy my host mom. I finished, thanked my mom for the food, and went back to my house to take a nap, never stopping to question what they were going to do with the mouse.

I got about 30 minutes into my nap when my host father rode into my compound on his bike to greet me (stopping by to say hello, and really only hello, is standard and polite practice in Mali. People have often come to my door recently just to say “hi” and then leave), so I got up, when through the normal “Good afternoon! How has your day been? How are you? How is your family? And your wife? And your kids? And your people? And where are you coming from?” greeting with him, and then went back to my bed (which, I should say, is pretty wonderful. I’m not typically one to worry about where I sleep, but I decided to get a double bed made from bamboo – very sustainable – and I haven’t regretted it!). A few minutes later, I realized I wasn’t alone. I don’t know what made me look up and towards my door, but I’m glad I did, because my company sure wasn’t welcome. A cute, thin green head and forked tongue was edging around my doorframe on the other side of the room. I moved, and my new snake friend backed away. I got up, tip toed across the room, my skin crawling more and more the closer I got to it and my front door. I bolted out the door and walked rather briskly to my host families’ house to get my host father to come back and help me kill the thing! After drawing a picture of a snake in the ground and hissing at my host mother, she finally understood what I was trying to say and went to get my host father, who was out chatting with his friends. He came back, got his battering ram (really just a stick, but battering ram makes it sound so much more dramatic) and snake poison (guess this wasn’t the first time he’d done this) and came and beat my mint green friend until his tongue hung out permanently. I decided nap time was officially over and went outside to read for a while.

Later that day, after having wandered around my village for a while, I came home followed (as usual) by a gaggle of kids to take my daily bucket bath. And there again, inside my bedroom this time, was another uninvited guest on the wall. This time it was a scorpion. These scare me much less, which is rather contradictory because they can actually hurt me, so I picked up my sandal and took care of matters myself.

Every night after my shower, I go join a woman in the village who sits near the road and fries bean cakes. It’s an excuse to eat beans and sit around with people in the village. Sometimes we talk, sometimes we don’t. But she’s started letting me try to fry the dough. And boy am I bad. Hers come out nice and round and fluffy and mine look like long, deformed aliens. Whoops. But after this and precisely at 7pm, I head to my host families’ house and wait and watch the stars for the 30 minutes it takes them to complete their Ramadan prayers. The starts out here are amazing. The Milky Way is so bright! And the other night, there was heat lightning, and it was a great show. Almost like fireworks, but without the colors or the smoke or the loud booming. We eat dinner, and then sit around for a while and drink tea. Again, sometimes we talk. Sometimes, we don’t. It doesn’t seem to matter one way or the other to them, which is nice.

But the real reason I’m mentioning this is because on the first night, I got fried rice and meat for my dinner, which was really exciting. Meat is really expensive in country, so I was thrilled to be served it. It was cut in really small pieces and was really tender, so I ate my fair share. And then the next night I got meat again, which I didn’t think was possible or even affordable! And then it occurred to me…they probably weren’t paying for the meat. That mouse I saw in my host sister’s hand wasn’t a child’s toy. It was dinner. I asked my host father and much to my chagrin, my suspicions were confirmed. I had just dined on mice and enjoyed it.

I realized later, after thinking about the critters, that while their presence in my house does make me uncomfortable, they’re not the real reason I get so scared. It’s because I don’t feel like I have the language skills to accurately describe my problem to anyone around me who could help me. Sand drawings and hissing got the point across, but it’s no confidence booster to have to use gestures to describe something as simple as a snake. And not only can I not communicate precisely what’s on my mind, but I am completely ignorant of the emergency response system in place in this country. And frankly, using the term “emergency response system” is almost a joke, because one doesn’t exist. It’s unnerving to think that something could happen and nobody would know what I’m saying. Which isn’t even entirely true because I do speak some Bambara, and there are people in village who speak French, so I am never completely unable to communicate. And while a formal ERS doesn’t exist, I’m not encountering anything that Malians have never seen before. They know how to deal with creepy crawlies and other worries, it’s just that their system doesn’t look or work anything like the one I’m used to.

This first week was a good wake up call for me. It’s been a while since the Rotary Club dropped me off in France, and I think I’d forgotten how hard it is to integrate into a place where you don’t speak the language. I’m a few years older, and I’d like to think I’m a bit wiser now, so I’m taking it in stride. I’ve done this before, but that doesn’t mean that a day hasn’t passed when I didn’t wonder whether I really wanted to be here. I think it’s good to question my choice, though, because it reminds me of the bigger motives I have for being here. A well-worn PCV I met in Madagascar told me that you had to have personal reasons for being in PC, and I think she meant that you couldn’t do it only because you wanted to be here for other people. According to her, there had to be another motivating factor, and I’m starting to think she’s right.

It’s nice to have other Americans around, too. In fact, my teammate and I (she lives 5k away from me) biked 20k the other day to join in the Independence Day festivities (September 22 marks Mali’s independence from France) in a neighboring town. And now I’m in our regional capital enjoying a wider variety of foods than those I’m eating in village, as well as the company of other Americans. I think I’ll probably be able to make it out of site every two weeks or so, and more frequently as the holidays approach.

Keep the e-mails and updates coming from the US, it’s great to hear from everyone!

First things first: Because I know you're all rushing to the Post Office to send me packages, please take note of the new address in the bar to the left. I'll be heading to my site shortly, and will be getting my mail at the new address.

I just returned to the Peace Corps training site from 20 days straight in village with my host family. Going in, we (me and my two other homestay site mates) were really worried that it would be the longest 20 day stretch of our lives. We could not have been more wrong. The 20 days flew by and we were all really disappointed to leave. I'll see if I can sum things up concisely so you can get the full effect without being bored to tears. Tonight's topic will be health training. We'll save my homestay family stories for later in the week.

Our training is roughly divided into two sections: Phase I and Phase II. The first part deals with language, language, language and then some more language. Phase II deals with technical training for our sector (I'm health education), done as much as possible in the local language as well as with the local people. This second half also incorporates formal language classes when time permits. The whole goal of the training program is to get us conversational in the target language, and get us started learning as much as possible about our sector. We did a lot of pretty cool stuff. We started by learning how to conduct an animation, which is basically a 5-10 minute informational session for local populations about a certain topic. From a large list of possible topics, we chose to teach the local women in our village about treating their mosquito nets, the benefits of oral rehydration salts and how to make them, and how to treat their well water so they don't get sick from drinking it. The local head of the women in our village got a lot of women to come, so we had a pretty realistic turnout for our first practice run. About 20 women came with their babies and toddlers to listen to us talk - it was really great because they sat and listened to our awful Bambara and then asked great questions, only about half of which we understood. Thankfully, our Language and Cultural Facilitators** (see below for the scoop on our LCF's), were there to clean up around the edges.

Our next task was to conduct a baby weighing morning in our village. Baby weighings are popular and important health tools in Mali because they provide a relatively easy and reliable way for both care givers and mothers to know if babies under the age for 2/3 are getting adequate amounts of nutrition. In short, they're basically the first line of defense at the community health level against malnutrition. Here's how it works: at regular intervals depending on the health center, mothers come to have their babies weighed. They stick them in what looks like a pair of shorts and hook them up to a hanging scale. They then ask the age of the baby and match up the babies weight and age on a color-coded malnutrition chart. Green means go and keep up what you're doing. Yellow means "Yikes, we need to talk about what you're feeding your kid". And red means "ohmy! It's time to step up your child's nutrition". We have a relatively wealthy village, so out of about 30-40 kids weighed, we only came up with a handful in the yellow zone and 0 in the red. It turns out that weighing babies can be a traumatic experience. The minute you take them from their mom, they start whimpering, and then when they get shoved into the plastic shorts and suspended from a hook in the air, the whimpers turn into full out screams of rage and humiliation. You'd cry too if you got put in plastic shorts and hung from a tree branch. The shame! Here's a photo I found to illustrate my point. I'll have photos of actual people I know up soon, but my camera's still being futsy:

Our next activity was to make ameliorated porridge for women and talk about nutrition. We made a breakfast type porridge similar to Cream of Wheat in the US. It's made of corn flour, millet flour and peanut flour, as well as a TON of sugar to sweeten it. This day wasn't especially interesting, so I won't talk much more about it.

One day, the Peace Corps took us to a malnutrition rehabilitation center in Bamako (I should probably say that Bko's the capital of Mali, and is about an hour away from both our homestay villages and the PC training center). The MRCenter is actually just a wing of a hospital that focuses on severely malnourished babies. There were only 9 kids there when we went, which seemed to be a pretty low number for one of Africa's poorest countries. And the funny thing was that they didn't look at all like those pathetic kids you see in the "Save the Children" or "UNICEF" ads on TV or in magazines in the US. I have yet to see anyone as pathetic looking as those ones, which could lead to an interesting discussion about the accuracy of those ads, but since I've only just arrived here, I probably should refrain from making sweeping generalizations. The long story short is that the kids at the center stay there and get huge amounts of calories in liquid form every 4 hours until they're better. The center's staff also talks to the mothers about how to feed their kids so that they won't get sick again when they leave. We learned that malnutrition can have many causes which range from the inability of the mother's body to produce nutritious breast milk, thus depriving the baby of the vital nutrients most little ones get, to the inability to rebound back to a normal weight after a bout of sickness such as malaria or severe diarrhea. I expected the center to be extremely sad and depressing, but it wasn't what we expected. We talked to the workers about the babies' progress (medical confidentiality in this country is a topic worth discussing later) since they arrived at the center, and the kids actually seemed to be doing pretty well.

I'm going to try to do my best in the future to balance my talk of the differences between the US and Mali with a sprinkling of the similarities. I think lots of people in the US view Africa as extremely foreign, and somewhere they'd never want to visit for fear of getting sick. And while parts of it are really foreign and bizarre to us as Americans, I'm finding daily that there are more similarities than you might think. Mali's not the place to come if you're looking for a leisurely stroll down Champs Elysees (but then again, whose ever heard of a leisurely stroll down one of Europe's busiest boulevards?) or a relaxing beach vacation, but I do think it has lots to offer the adventurous traveler. Yes, you will get sick and yes, you will be uncomfortable for parts of your stay, but the people you meet and the things you see make up for any discomfort you might encounter. And plus, don't you want to see the land of so many legends for yourself? Timbuktu really does exist, and it turns out that there's a lot of fascinating history hidden there. And it's right here in our backyard!

I'm still healthy and happy thus far. For those of you who think we're eating poorly, let me dissuade all fears of that. I've had several Mexican nights recently, as well as coleslaw, hamburgers, sloppy joes, ice cream and more. I actually started off my day with a 7am Snickers bar from a friend this morning. And we get driven around in plush, air-conditioned SUV's. We're about to watch the new Batman movie in the dining room of the training center now, and we're all talking about the upcoming presidential election in the US. A few weeks ago, Peace Corps bussed us to a pool in Bamako, and when we officially swear in as volunteers on Friday, we're going to swim again and dance the night away at a club. We wrestled a lot with the question wealth inequality during my time in Madagascar, and I actually haven't heard anyone here in Mali question it, which surprises me. We go to the plush grocery store here often (at least once a week), and are driven to the bakery almost as often. It's nice to the extent that these are the only places we can find familiar shampoo, toothpaste and soap. And well, it's nice to pay extra to eat ice cream every once in a while. We're still adjusting to life in Mali and this provides a slice of normalcy for us, but I've begun to wonder recently when enough is enough. It's worth remembering that we'll never be Malians, and so we shouldn't strive to eat, breathe, sleep, and live as Malians (and as a matter of fact, our Peace Corps country director made a point to say that he worries when people come off the plane on day one dressed as natives), but there's something about the American-ness that's been transported to Africa that still gets me. As supposed development workers in one of the poorest countries of the world, it seems like we should be doing something else. And I think my ideal something else starts this Saturday, when we'll all ship out to our local villages to spend the next three months living like most of the country. I'm not going to go on too long about this topic, as it's something I think I'll be dealing with for the next two years, and will have a lot more insight into in the future.

Take care and check back later in the week for an update on my host family.

** LCF = a Malian hired and trained by Peace Corps to live in village with us and serve as not only our Bambara teachers, but our insiders into the Malian culture and society. We had two women who spoke Bambara, French and English. We got off to a rough start with them, as their English was shaky and our Bambara non-existent, but by the end, we were spending most of the day joking around with them. They accurately picked up on my, should we say "strong" personality and hounded me relentlessly about it. I make sure to come back with appropriate responses, and now my comebacks are even in Bambara. They ended up being our saviors in village, as they got along really well with our host families, provided the insight into social ceremonies like the wedding we attended, and could translate anything and everything our families said to us that we didn't understand. We'll be sad to leave them, but they've been living in a small village away from their families for the last two months, so it's time for them to head back to Bamako and resume normal life.

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/dont-send-junk/#comments

I found this article today and think it's worth a read. It's especially interesting to those of you in Pittsburgh. Pete, Brother's Brother is mentioned in the comment section. It also addresses the very real idea that mass amounts of unnecessary stuff arrives in Africa every day.

We heard a story the other day about a church group from the US who donated a fire truck to a rural community in Mali. An American came to the city, decided that they needed the truck and set off raising funds for it. But he didn't stop to consider whether or not the folks here in Mali had the resources to use this fire truck. Nobody knew how to maintain/repair it, there was no fuel in the town, and here's the kicker: the people's houses were made of mud and brick, so they couldn't burn down anyway! So now the truck sits in front of the mayor's office, completely unused and rusting.

Peace Corps Trainees (like myself) fanned out across Mali this week, as we all went to our respective sites for a peek into the future. We still have a month of training (it's hard to believe I've only been here a month!) before we officially swear in as Peace Corps Volunteers (PCV's), but I think PC wanted to give us a chance to test the waters before we're in for the real deal.

My site is beautiful! I'm in the southern, extremely verdant region of Mali, which is probably almost exactly the opposite of the Mali you picture in your head. No sand, no camels and no desert. Only green trees, rice paddies, and fruit, fruit, fruit! I think I got really lucky, although I'd bet that every single other volunteer (minus a few, maybe) is thanking their lucky stars at this point, too. I have my own concession/compound, which in Mali means that I have my own two-room house, a cooking house, as well as an outdoor toilet and wash area. I'm also lucky enough to have tall trees in my yard for shade, as well as a chicken coop. I'm not sure I'll be running out to get chickens any time soon, but I do know that I'm getting a cat in hopes that it will eat whatever runs around on my tin roof each night between the hours of 1-6am.

For those of you who've never had the pleasure of sleeping under a tin roof, let me explain. Most roofing material in my region of Mali is a very traditional thatched roof. Supposedly, tin roofing is expensive, and thus only wealthier people can afford it. So I'm lucky to have it. Or am I? Sleeping under a tin roof is usually great. The rain falls on it and (assuming it's not raining TOO hard, because then it sounds like you're in a jet engine), creates a rather melodic drum to lull you to sleep. The tin roof amplifies the sound of the --rain and makes it rather pleasant. It's like natures wave machine --you know the nature CD's you can buy with tracks like "mountain rain", or "rising tide" -- it's like a surround sound one of those for as long as the rain lasts. Well, i thought this was great until I realized that tin also amplifies other less desirable noises as well.

I have an UBO (unidentified banging organism) on my roof and I need to get rid of it presto-pronto. First I thought the banging, sqeaking, grinding, boring, pitter-pattering noises were mice crawling on the rafters. I wasn't too thrilled about this because I didn't want the mice running all over me! Truth be told, this is highly unrealistic, but when you're all alone at night in a new place, your mind starts to exaggerate. And then you get very little sleep. And that was only night one. So on the second night, I laid in bed with the 15 LED flashlight my host father had lent me (presumably to use while I was actually looking at things in the dark, not as an investigative tool) shining up at the ceiling and nothing moved while the banging continued. So then I breathed a sigh of relief, put in my ear plugs and went to sleep. But the third night was by far the worst. At around 4am, something THUNKED onto my roof and it proceeded to run around, squeak and attack something else on my roof. I even had ear plugs in and I woke up from the racket up above!! Since I had to get up at 5 to leave town anyway, I decided just to get up and make lots of noise until the sun came up in hopes that it would go away. And eventually it did, but I had to make quite a lot of noise before whatever-it-is left. And that morning, I left town, and am thanking my lucky stars every night now that I don't have a mouse/bat/lizard convention happening around above my head as I try to sleep.

And now for the nitty-gritty of my week: Peace Corps gives each volunteer a homologue and a host family at their in-country site. These two basically serve as a support system and resource network, especially in the beginning when everything is brand new. I have both, of course, and I cannot understand a word they say to me. It turns out that Bamako (the capital city) Bambara (the majority language) is very different from the Bambara in Sikasso (my region), and I don't understand a word they say! I spent a lot of time this past week watching people, and staring at people, and asking people to repeat what they'd just said. Most folks were really good natured about it, though. I'm excited about my time there, although it's unclear at this point what exactly I'll be doing. I'm slated to be a health volunteer, working with the local midwives at their office (a maternite, in French). But I got to site to find out that the maternite is being used as a grain storage area right now, which means that no babies are being born there. Whoops! But at least I know that there's work to be done, so I'm more motivated to learn the language so I can communicate and figure out what's going on in town.

That's about all for now. We head back to our homestay villages for 20 days on Tuesday, so I'll be MIA for a while. Hope all is well in the US -- drop me a line, I'm reading all my e-mails!!

B

Hello!

I am still here and apologize to everyone for not keeping up with blogging. Internet is slow here at the Peace Corps training site and time is limited. It's hard having 70-some new best friends!

I've been living in my home stay village for the past three-or-so weeks now, and it's been going really well. I'd like to have some photos to show for it, but my camera isn't cooperating at the moment! Life is good in our teeny, tiny town of about 400 people. Everyone (and I mean everyone) knows who we are, and we know almost everyone! We've been spending most of the day in class, desperately trying to learn Bambara so we can communicate with our host families. My host father fortunately speaks peace meal French, so we get the big ideas across, but I need to speak Bambara to communicate with the 24 other people in my compound. Yes, I said 24. Immediately upon arriving into town, I had 25 new family members. Mali is a polygamous country and most rural people have lots and lost of children, which logically translates into huge families! So who exactly are these people? Well, there's my host family which consists of a father, two mothers, and lots and lots of kids (I think 10 in all). The oldest of that bunch is 15, and the youngest is a babe in arms. The other people in the compound are as follows: my host grandmother, her daughter-in-law (whose husband is gone, I think), and two other men and their wives. There aren't many adults, but there sure are lots of children. And the kids and I get along marvelously. I don't have much vocabulary, but that certainly doesn't mean there aren't things to do at home. Here's the quick run down of the ways I keep myself occupied:

I jump rope (over and over and over and over) with the kids with enough motor skills to keep up (and sometimes with those who jump and hope the rope will pass under them when they're up!), teach jumping jacks to the little kids who are too small to jump rope, do star jumps to those who aren't coordinated enough to get the hands and feet moving at the same time for jumping jacks (all the while saying the Bambara word for star -lolo- of course!), play Go Fish and War, play Go Fish again, and again, and again. I learned the body parts, counted, counted and learned the body parts again, and then jumped rope some more. They've laughed at me while I try to wash my clothes out of a bucket, they've watched and laughed as I've tried (successfully more often than not) to haul water out of the well, prepared my own bath water, brewed tea (almost a ritualistic tradition in Mali. And also something that takes up a lot of time, which is key when vocabulary is limited!). They've died laughing when I tried to pound grain with the women, and then laughed some more when they handed me a ho and told me to pull weeds in the farm fields. They've buckled over when I've almost wiped out (you should have seen the skid mark I left yesterday!) in the inch-thick mud in the compound after it rains. And they've whispered amongst themselves and then chuckled when my host father tells everyone who comes into the compound that this American loves peanut butter on her bread in the morning. Apparently, they only make peanut butter to use in sauce on their food; they never eat it on bread! They laugh when they find out that we have cows, donkeys, chickens, cats and dogs in America. They laugh when I repeat things like a broken record. They laugh when they point to someone and ask me their name and I smile sheepishly because I can't remember their name for the life of me (I'm getting better, though!). They laugh when I say yes (owo!), and when I vocalize an American uh-huh for "I GET IT!!!". They've started mimicking my "dum dum dum" noises I make when I'm trying to explain something with gestures because I don't have the words for it. And they laugh when I go to bed at 8:30 at night. Who is this un-married white girl who's come to Mali to work for two years with the vocabulary of a new born? Sometimes (more often than not) I wonder why they decided to host us in the first place! But slowly, slowly (doni, doni), I'm catching on and they're learning to interpret my gramatically garbled phrases and words. We start technical training in health soon, so hopefully I'll be able to start talking to them about something other than the time of day or what I just did, am doing at that moment, or am going to do in the near future. I'll keep you posted.

In other news, I go to my site this Saturday to see my new home for the next two years! I'll be living in the Sikasso region, which is in the southern part of the country. It's supposed to be great because of the year round availability of fruits and veggies! Hurray!

And my computer battery is dying, so I'm going to have to end this. Keep me updated on life in the US!!!

Hello!

Our initial honeymoon-ish stay at the Peace Corps training site ends tomorrow, and we all move into our respective homestays in villages! Bye Bye Club Med Mali! Our language skills are low, but our motivation high, so I'm sure we'll all get along fine. The rest of our two month training (with the exception of a few days here and there) will be done on-site in local villages. They'll teach us how to eat, speak, laugh, and dream Malian-style. Drop me an e-mail if you'd like specific whereabouts so you can look me up on a map.

I'll be learning Bambara, the language of the largest ethnic group in Mali, which I'm hoping will make it a lot easier to get around. We haven't actually gotten to see the world outside of the training site doors yet, so this will be a rude awakening for some (including myself, perhaps). We've been spending the last week getting what I've started calling the All-You-Need-to-Know-About-Living-in-a-Developing-Country primer: how to hand-wash clothes, eat out of a communal bowl, use Turkish toilets, etc... Yesterday they taught us how to properly tie our wrap-skirts (pagnes, in French) so as not to invite unwanted attention. They also took time to explain the art of a bucket bath! The PC invited local artisans and musicians to a cultural fair yesterday here at the training site, and we were able to buy beauitful cloths to get tailored into traditional Malian clothes. I'll get mine tailored in my village in the coming weeks, and will post pictures when the final product is ready!

I'm feeling pretty good about everything (except eating w/my hands, a skill I have yet to master), because thus far, it's pretty similar to the skills I used in Madagascar.

Hope all is well in the US!

The adventure began today, and I met my "staging" group in Philadelphia. Staging consists of three days where the Peace Corps prepares you (more or less) for what to expect in your host country. There are 71 of us going to Mali on Wednesday, which is supposedly one of the largest staging groups in a longtime! Several married couples, as well as some older (40+, I'm betting) volunteers are among the large gaggle of 20-some's. So you're probably wondering about my first cultural experience, and here it is: I ate my first ever Philly cheesesteak! Ha! And I'm sad to say that I was not that impressed.

That's about all I have to report for now. There will be other (and more interesting) posts to come in the near future!

Hi! Thanks for checking out my blog. As you can see, there's not much here now, but I will be adding to it once my adventure begins in July!