What is life like for a woman in the village of Koyan? She grows up spending most of her time farming, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of her little siblings. She goes to school, but she finds it boring and discouraging; her teacher ignores her and she flunks out by fifth grade. She finds joy in playing with her younger siblings and selling fruit in the market so that she can buy fried dough for ten cents to bring home to her siblings. She dreams not of being an astronaut or a pop star but of having a rich husband who buys her things and raising many children, her boys going on to make lots of money and her girls going on to find rich husbands of their own.

At 16, her father announces she will marry a 22 year old farmer in the next village over who’s a distant relation of hers. He’s cute, but he’s not rich. He’ll make an average husband. When she leaves her parents and her siblings to move to her husband’s house, she cries. She’ll still get to see them anytime her husband lets her leave the house for a few days to go visit, probably once every couple of months. In her husband’s house, she’s not so much under her husband’s rule as that of her mother-in-law. She wants to go on birth control but her mother-in-law won’t let her.

She feels ambivalent about her husband. Sex is a duty. They never have conversations; their main interaction involves him assigning her chores like fetching his bathwater and sweeping the house. At first she’s very unhappy but gradually she develops friendships with the other women in the house (her husband’s brothers’ wives) and her status rises as she gets older and has her first child.

No man has ever told her he loves her; nor has she ever told anyone she loves them. Love is not something she daydreams about; instead she thinks about her children growing up to be rich and building her a large house and buying her beautiful clothes.

She has probably never seen her husband naked. He enters her house in the dead of night and has sex with her as she lies on her bed, awake or asleep, then leaves.

After the birth of her second child, her husband decides to take a second wife. He doesn’t tell her; instead she hears about it through village gossip. She feels jealous, and yet she knows that a second wife will mean less housework for her. When the younger woman comes to live with them, she treats her pleasantly but they never become friends.

As an American, it is easy to pity the women (and men) of Koyan for the lack of romantic love and good sex in their lives. And yet, you have to look at the bigger picture: their society does not place an emphasis on romance or love; in fact I’ve never heard anyone in my village make reference to either of these concepts unless I raised them. They’re simply unimportant to them. For the people in Koyan, marriage is about having children and running a farm. And no one ever gets divorced.

As the days lengthen and the heat beats down ruthlessly on the fields of Koyan, with their time freed up by the lack of farming activity, more adults are becoming literate, more kids are learning English, and I finally feel almost fluent in Bambara and able to pull eight buckets of water from the well without resting. It’s a good feeling and sometimes I almost forget about the 110° heat – but not quite.

Having spent a year and 10 months in Mali, I’ve grown to love the joyfulness of the children, sitting under the stars at night with no TV – just chatting, laughing, and dancing, the heartfelt string of greetings that starts every encounter, business or personal, waking up with the sunrise and the roosters, learning to truly appreciate water, the excitement of the first big rain after six months of drought, and the way I’ve been incorporated into the community as if I had been born here after only two years.

At the same time, I’m ready to leave. I was raised to be an efficient, on-time, motivated, detail-oriented, cleanliness-loving, individualistic person and these traits don’t always serve me well in Koyan. I hope to take some aspects of Malian culture with me when I return to the States: the greater friendliness and openness, the value of family and children, the value of group consensus in decision-making, and the appreciation of and refusal to waste material goods and food, but I look forward to leaving many aspects behind: meetings that start an hour late, the attribution of all outcomes, both good and bad, to God’s will, a man’s ability to beat his wives, a mother’s ability to beat her children, a teacher’s ability to beat his or her students, polygamy, the seat of village power residing in a group of old men, resistance to improved health and sanitation practices, and, last but not least, my daily bowl of to, which does in fact taste more less like a foot.

I’m not the first volunteer to remark that, despite what I consider extreme conditions of poverty, lack of opportunity, and poor public institutions, my friends and host family in the rural village of Koyan seem on average much happier than my friends and family in the States. The people in Koyan know they’re poor, they know the government doesn’t provide them with the services it should, like a school with well-educated teachers, and they know how hard it is to find a job in Mali – and yet they smile more, laugh more, dance more, and are more resilient to the travails of their daily lives than almost anyone I know in the States.

Amartya Sen writes in Development As Freedom:

. . . [D]eprived people tend to come to terms with their deprivation because of sheer necessity of survival, and they may, as a result, lack the courage to demand any radical change, and may even adjust their desires and expectations to what they unambitiously see as feasible . . . It is thus important . . . to favor the creation of conditions in which people have real opportunities of judging the kind of lives they would like to lead. (Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. New York: Anchor, 2000.)

Does this apply to my friends in Koyan? Have they adjusted their desires to what they see as possible – so that they don’t expect to make a decent living, always have a full belly, or have all their children survive – and can’t be disappointed when these seemingly universal desires aren’t fulfilled?

I recently had a conversation with my host mom, Sitan Kane, in which I explained to her the rights American women have in the divorce process and generally the different American norms regarding marriage. To Sitan, divorce is an impossibility because if she were to divorce her husband, her four children would remain with him. And while she certainly complains about her husband’s philandering to me, she doesn’t see it as a reason for divorce; she accepts it as a relatively normal aspect of a Malian marriage. So when I told her that if she was an American woman and she divorced her husband because he was cheating on her, she would almost certainly have custody of her children, she was quite shocked and more convinced than ever that she’d like to move to America.

Sometimes I worry that I am planting a dangerous seed in the minds of Sitan and her younger co-wife Mama, that I am making them unhappy in a marriage they don’t have the means to change. But then I think, as Sen claims, that it is more important that these two women have the ability to judge the kind of lives they would like to lead than that they be ignorantly satisfied with their current situation. As Sen writes, I believe Mama and Sitan have adjusted their expectations to the possibilities available to them. Therefore, it is possible to see their happiness as a product of a world view in which the ideal of womanhood involves obedience, hard work in doing household chores, conformity, and having many, many children. Based on this worldview, it is easy for Malian women to be happy since they spend their lives doing household chores, obeying their husbands, and bearing and raising numerous children.

What I have tried to do is to expand Sitan and Mama’s world view by showing them the possibility of a different ideal of womanhood: that a woman can be her own master. It’s too late for these women to change their marriage; my hope for them is that they do not have so many children that they don’t have time for anything other than raising them and that they take the initiative to start small businesses that will give them some degree of independence from their husband. Unfortunately, I think that their first priority is having a lot of children and they’re willing to give up their ability to gain financial independence for the sake of reaching this goal. Sitan and Mama were brought up in an environment in which child-bearing is what women’s lives are all about and it’s very difficult to change that mindset now. I hope that it will be different for the younger generations, especially now that girl’s education has become more of a priority.

So I may have lodged a little speck of dissatisfaction in Sitan and Mama’s minds, but I can’t do much to change their ultimate happiness, which they get from their children and their place in the community. If you’re going to talk about the happiness of Malians, you have to talk about community. Each individual has his or her own well-defined role in the community, which is organized along gender and age lines, and thus fits into the functioning of the whole like a well-fitted cog in a machine. Malians reap an extreme amount of joy from friendships and family relationships and they get to spend a lot of time with their friends and family, so they tend to be happy. And yet still, I have to believe that if they were more fully conscious of the rights they were being denied (the right to not have one in five of your children die, the right to clean drinking water, the right to a year-round food supply, etc.), they wouldn’t be this happy. There’s a way in which they know that they’re screwed compared to the rest of the world, but it doesn’t register with them on a daily basis; they’ve adjusted to their situation.

So what is the moral of this story? First of all, it is a valuable activity to try to expose Malians to different ways of living and to teach them the basic human rights that they’re being denied, even if it may cause them to become slightly less satisfied with their lives. Secondly, development work is important because, even though Malians may seem satisfied with their current situation, the ultimate goal of development is not to make people feel good, but to enable people to choose the kind of life they want to live.

The school management committee meetings are theoretically scheduled to begin at 8am. I don’t think I’ve ever attended a meeting that started before 9, and meetings have been known to start as late as 10:30. Yet the on-time mentality has been so well drilled into me that I continue to be the only person who shows up to meetings at 8. The people in Koyan have a strong sense of the importance of everyone being present for a meeting (a fascinating example of how democracy works best on a micro level) and also have a great deal of patience, which is why we wait around and chat until everyone shows up to start the meeting.

The way meetings proceed is very unorganized: someone will bring up a topic, it will be discussed, someone will bring up another topic, and so on. Another very democratic aspect of life in Koyan is the way Malians form consensus in a meeting. When an announcement is made, each person repeats the announcement to the person sitting next to them, a kind of way of making sure everyone is on the same page. The same goes for making a decision. Everyone must have their say, or else a decision will not be taken. The committee consists of eight men and two women. The women talk less than the men, but when a decision is being made the men insist the women give their opinion.

Zan Diarra is the vice president of the school management committee and my assigned work partner or ‘homologue’ in the strange terminology of Peace Corps Mali. He is short but muscular, wearing a dirty, torn old suit that he farms in and a crocheted prayer cap. His eyes are very small, dark, and penetrating. He is the man who, before I moved to Koyan, siphoned off some of the money given to him by Peace Corps to buy my windows and doors, leaving me with termite-eaten, falling apart windows and doors that my host dad had to replace out of his own pocket. But Zan is smart and occasionally motivated: he attends every meeting, knows some French, and is good at leading a discussion. He’s very good at telling people what to do but less good at listening – a bit American in this way!

Zan has attended many, many NGO-sponsored trainings over the years – on sanitation, on health, on farming, on accounting, on democracy, and so on. This is why it is so depressing for me to go to his house, which is composed of four small mud buildings and an outhouse surrounding a narrow courtyard. The courtyard’s ground is made of dirt and is always strewn with chicken feces, peanut shells, dirty kids’ clothes, and old plastic bags, flies swarming over the putrid area. Zan has three wives, the oldest of which is about 45 and the youngest of which can’t be over 25. Whenever I go to Zan’s house, his wives always seem down-trodden, exhausted and slow to laugh. This is unusual: I am normally surprised at how happy Malian women are in spite of their lower position in society; in Zan’s case, his wives are tragically as I’d expect them to be in this kind of sexist society. I suspect that Zan beats them. He also has an absurd number of children: I’m not sure how many, but I would guess at least 20. He is exactly the person in Koyan who should have a clean home, treat his wives well, and have fewer children since he’s educated! But somehow these trainings have not registered with him. At the same time, he is very motivated to work on improving the school in Koyan and realizes the importance of sending his kids to school.

October and the beginning of November are the mini hot season in Mali, following the heavy rains and preceding the sanity-saving cool season that begins at the end of November. The days are hot and humid, the sky free of clouds and the landscape getting browner every day. In the late afternoon a slight cool emanates from the forest and sneaks into the family compound by night.

It is peanut time. Days are spent in the field gathering the dirty little root nodules, still dangling from their clover-like plants, nights waste away as everyone in the family from the toddlers to the musokorobas (old women) cracks open the tough shells to get out the sweet nuts, piling them up in a basket for roasting, or simply popping them in their mouths for dessert.

My host dad, Fablen Jara, told me something very disappointing recently. He said that before the desks arrived in Koyan, many people in the village gossiped, saying that I was useless and had done nothing to help the village, but that once the desks came they were ashamed. It saddened me to hear that people talk this way about me. First of all, I feel like this is how you talk about a foreigner, not your friend and neighbor, which is what I’d like to think I am to the people of Koyan. Secondly, they don’t recognize the value of the work I do that doesn’t involve a huge amount of money coming into the village: the Bambara literacy training, the afterschool groups for kids, the organizational training for the school management committee, the soap-making training, the water sanitation education. Is this because of their background, the fact that they’re farmers who never went to school so they’re oriented towards tangible things and they can’t understand the importance of knowledge? Or is it because so many NGOs have come into the area and given away schools, hospitals, chickens, seeds, school supplies, etc., so this is what they have come to see as the proper role of an NGO?

Some Peace Corps staff members from Bamako recently came to Koyan and conducted an appreciative inquiry, which is a means of deciding what the most helpful development project is for a community by discussing the community with community members. I learned that what they really want to work on, in addition to getting a new school building, which we’re already working on (they will apply for funds from the U.S. Embassy Self-help Fund), is to get a grain mill, so that the women can grind their millet in a machine instead of pounding it by hand, which takes hours. I think this could really help the women of the village, hopefully freeing up more of their time for studying literacy and doing income-generating activities like soap-making and developing a shea butter cooperative. At the least, it will make their lives a little easier, giving them a break from the intense physical labor they engage in every day just to run the household. However, I’m worried this is another big money project, where the village will get something that may very well break in a few years and which they may or may not be able to raise the money to get fixed.

There are other, cheaper ways to make women’s lives easier and provide them with more free time. The first on my list would be for them to have less children. I do work on family planning education, but it’s not something people get really excited about or want to work with me on. This is the real challenge of being a Peace Corps volunteer: you are working on behalf of the village, so you really have to work on the projects the village wants you to work on, but at the same time you think you know better and want to work on other projects. Of course if people aren’t receptive, your work is pointless. Is it paternalistic for me to work on projects I perceive as good, but villagers don’t really care about? I think it is. But I have had a lot more education than them. This is something I struggle with here.

1. Rainy Season

They wake up at 5 everyday to farm. Eyes encrusted with sleep, even the 6 and 7 year olds are up, looking for a daba*. The procession to the fields begins: the grandma and grandkids, husband and wives. Around 11 a girl will come with a giant round bowl full of millet mush and steaming leaf sauce. They’ll rinse their dirty hands in a bowl of well water and scoop giant handfuls of mush into their mouths. They’ll farm again until afternoon, then return to the household, tired, proud.

It is easy to understand why Malians believe so strongly in God. If it rains in just the right way, they’ll have a good harvest and enough food for the next year. If not, by May or June of next year they’ll start to go hungry, eating smaller portions and less meals. In a way, they have much less control over their own lives than Americans do. As they say, it’s in the hands of Allah. When their babies die, it’s in the hands of Allah. When their men get severely injured in motorcycle accidents, it’s in the hands of Allah. I’ve never heard anyone in my village blame the more logical causes of their poverty – colonialism or the present incompetent government. They either say “there’s no money here” as if it were a static, unchangeable event or “it’s up to God”.

There is one person in Koyan who gets it: Babo Kulibaly. She’s also the most devout Muslim I know. She would be fasting now for Ramadan but she has a heart condition. She is the matriarch of my host family: she claims to be 55 years old (no one really knows how old they are here) and has 5 children and 10 grandchildren (so far). She gets that what’s missing in Koyan are creativity, dedication, and critical thinking. She’s noticed that I’m very different from the 22-year-olds in Koyan and it’s not just that I’m white or can speak 3 languages – it’s that I show up to meetings on time, participate actively, and even plan and come up with ideas for meetings. She’d never seen a 22-year-old like that before – those kinds of qualities are rarely found in Koyan and if they are, it’s normally in a middle-aged man.

There’s just something about Babo. When I first came to Koyan, she asked me to teach her how to make soap. I organized a soap-making training and now she is running a successful soap business and saving the profits for future community development projects. The dedication and stubbornness she has shown in getting other community members to work with her on this project and working through the kinks in the business are unprecedented in Koyan. And it was Babo’s son, Nfabilen, who came up with an exciting idea for the money we had left over from the desk project: for the School Management Committee to buy party chairs and start a chair rental business.

How do you change a culture from one in which respect is bestowed based on age, wealth, and gender to one in which respect is bestowed based on competence? How do you get people trained either to take orders (women and children) or to give them (men) to function in a democratic way? These are some of the key problems we face in Koyan.

*Farming tool made from a short piece of wood with something like a narrow shovel head attached to it, used for weeding.

2. Desk Project Update

I just got off the phone with my exuberant host, Nfabilen Jara, to learn that the desks are safely on their way to Koyan. I am currently stuck in the Peace Corps volunteer transit house in Bamako with a sprained ankle, unable to make it back to Koyan to see the action. Yesterday the second shipment of desks was supposed to arrive in Koyan, but the road was so muddy that the truck had to stop in Ngalamadiby, a village 5km away from Koyan, and store the desks in that village’s school. Today the villagers of Koyan will haul their donkey-carts with their sad, undernourished donkeys and wobbly wheels to Ngalamadiby and trek back to Koyan’s small mud-brick school with the shiny new desks.

There have been some exciting new additions to the project due to the fact that we found a desk-maker who makes desks for $80 instead of our original projected cost of $90 and the fact that the currency conversion rate worked in our favor. In addition to the 45 desks, 3 teacher’s chairs, and 3 teacher’s desks originally planned for, we are also building a director’s office and equipping it with 2 file cabinets, 2 tables, and 2 chairs. What we’re really excited about, though, is an idea that my host Nfabilen came up with: to buy a large number of the chairs that people here rent out for parties. These will be useful when the School Management Committee or Student Parents Association holds large meetings; more importantly, it will enable Koyan’s School Management Committee to run a business renting out the chairs. With their own small business, the Committee members will have a new source of funding for future projects and will gain valuable business management skills, as well as providing a service to the community (because people in Koyan love to party!). With the leftover project funds as well as a $100 cash contribution from the School Management Committee, we were able to purchase 46 party chairs.

After finally receiving the project funds, the School Management Committee held numerous meetings to evaluate and re-evaluate our action plan. I was really proud of the new ideas that the committee members came up with to make the most out of the project funds and their professionalism in conducting the meetings. In the rainy season, it is not easy to hold a meeting since everyone is busy farming and the rain makes the road very difficult. The committee members trekked through the mud again and again to ensure the success of this project.

I greatly look forward to the start of the new school year in October, when the students will get to use their new desks. Last year there were 180 students in the school; this year the Committee expects there will be 250. Some of the old desks will be moved to the adult literacy center, which is badly in need of them.

It’s a hot, humid day. I hear the weather’s about the same in New York, but here this weather is a way of life. The humidity signifies the rainy season: a season of hunger, work, and deprivation. This year’s staple crops have been planted (millet, corn, peanuts, and beans) but won’t be ready for harvest until September at the earliest and last year’s crops are running out fast. Families scrape by using whatever means they can: some are lucky enough to have relatives in Bamako who send them a little cash, some sell their livestock, some have enough profits from their vegetable gardens to buy grain. Does this mean people are depressed and worried about their families, tired and visibly distressed? Not at all. People don’t expect to have more food than they need to get by and their bodies and minds are used to it. Life continues at its usual lackluster pace – people farm together, eat together, chat, laugh, and dance. I would never have known that this was ‘hungry season’ in my community if it wasn’t for the food security survey I conducted for the Peace Corps. I’m sure there’s a sense in which people are suffering, but it’s subtler than what we’d expect – the inability to buy a new pair of shoes, getting a little skinnier than you were before, having to put off paying your kid’s school fees for a couple months. For an American, this would cause a great deal of stress and anxiety; Mali is different. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an adult in my village look stressed or anxious.

I’ve been in Mali a year and three days now. It is a Peace Corps cliché that volunteers enter as typically individualistic, efficient, work-driven, consumption-loving Americans and leave having learnt about what is really important in life - family, friendships, and community. Is there a causal relationship in the fact that poor communities often have a stronger sense of community and family values? I’m sure there are a number of contributing factors, including being in a rural location, having an economy based on agriculture, and others, but in general it seems to me that there is a sense of family and community that exists here that is hard to find in developed countries. When I walk down the dirt path that forms the main thoroughfare in my village and every single person spends at least five minutes inquiring into the well-being of my family, my health, and my garden, I know I’ve come a long way from Manhattan. I feel a sense of contentment sitting in my host family’s yard with three toddlers on my lap, eating a disgusting bowl of millet porridge, complimenting my host’s wife’s cooking, and seeing how happy it makes her that I haven’t felt before.

This is not to say that I don’t crave the satisfaction of work accomplished and American efficiency: this is a pleasure you largely have to relinquish in a country where a meeting may be re-scheduled three times before it comes to fruition (due to unforeseen events such as births, deaths, and rain).

The rain here comes as a revelation. The first rain was in mid-June (before that it hadn’t really rained since September) and it felt like the sky was falling. The clouds grew dark and heavy, then opened up in a relentless downpour. You have a new relationship to water after 8 months of drought.

Do we have to give up some community and family ties in order to develop as a capitalist society, valuing the individual, the worker above all else? I’m not sure. My village has very little specialization. Everyone farms, everyone raises animals, everyone builds their own house, everyone engages in the entire food production process. All these are cooperative endeavors and the family members work together on them, divided along gender and age lines. Farming employs everyone and I think there’s a deep satisfaction the family gets from doing this work together.

It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around things here – I rarely have access to the kind of quiet environment I need to sit and process things. Even now, in Bamako, I’m sitting in a volunteer transit house in a room full of chatty Peace Corps volunteers. In Mali, you’re never alone. This has been wonderful for me, but makes it hard to reflect. I know I’ve only conveyed a sliver of my experiences here, but I hope it gives you some idea of what it’s like.

Lastly, I want to announce that we successfully raised $4,234 or 2,258,161 fCFA to provide Koyan’s elementary school with 45 new desks to seat about 135 children. Thank you so much to everyone who supported this project! I can’t wait to tell my village that we can start getting the desks.

Now that it is hot season, I sleep outside except when it is raining. I never sleep very well because there’s noise throughout the night – my host playing loud Malian music until midnight and chatting with his friends outside, donkeys braying at every hour, and the odd rooster who doesn’t seem to know it’s nighttime. But it’s better than being inside where it’s so hot you never stop sweating. I wake up with the sun and the roosters. The other day a rooster was standing on the wall that separates my area of the property from my host family’s. This rooster was crowing so loud that I threw a shoe at it. That quieted him down for about 30 seconds.

When I wake up, most of the family has already been up for a while. The women wake up especially early so they can cook breakfast and lunch for the school children. First they pull water from the well, finish pounding the millet, then cook the ceri or millet porridge we eat for breakfast. I put on a pot of water to boil for coffee using my gas camping stove, whereas the women do all their cooking using firewood that they collect daily in the bush surrounding our house. When the ceri’s ready, I go over to the kitchen area and greet the old women of the house, Babo and Nyakuruni, two co-wives of a man who passed away, my host’s father. Every morning they give me a long string of blessings in Bambara. My Malian name is Sali:

Babo: Good morning.

Sali: Good morning.

Babo: Did you have a peaceful night?

Sali: Peace only.

Babo: How is your family?

Sali: Peace only.

Babo: How is your host?

Sali: No problems.

Babo: How are his wives?

Sali: No problems.

Babo: How are his children?

Sali: No problems.

(Note that my host’s wife and children are generally standing a few feet away while this questioning is going on.)

Babo: May God grant you a peaceful day.

Sali: Amen.

Babo: May God give you strength.

Sali: Amen.

Babo: May God protect you from evil things.

Sali: Amen.

Babo: May God give you breasts. (Meaning may you have many children.)

Sali: (reluctantly) Amen.

Babo: May God make peace between you and your husband. (Meaning future husband.)

Sali: (reluctantly) Amen.

Babo: May God make your work develop.

Sali: (enthusiastically) Amen.

Babo: May God make your studies develop.

Sali: (enthusiastically) Amen.

When this is done, I take my piping-hot bowl full of millet porridge back to my house, let it cool, and add peanut butter for a little protein and flavor. Malians eat their ceri plain or with sour milk. Sometimes, Malians will eat breakfast after they have already watered their garden or done some work in the field. Their breakfast is accompanied by strong, sugary green tea that they brew three times.

The morning is a time I like to have to myself, sitting in my separate area of the compound eating my porridge and listening to the BBC. Of course, it’s not that separate and I often have little visitors wander in (my host’s kids), as well as any Malians who have a message to give me about work (to which I begrudgingly grumble a response ), or who just want to say good morning. Then I take my ‘bucket bath’ (each time I bathe I pull water from the well and scoop it over me – no plumbing in Koyan!).

My days are extremely varied. Sometimes I have no definite work to do and I spend my time washing clothes, cleaning my house, reading books, writing letters, and playing with my host’s kids. Washing clothes is pretty tiring since it involves pulling lots of water from the well and scrubbing the clothes on a washboard. Sometimes it’s so hot I can’t do anything but sleep or read.

At least once a week, I attend a meeting. The school management committee meets almost every Tuesday, all the women of Koyan meet up once a month (they base their meetings on the lunar month), the students’ mothers association meets about once a month, and there are other meetings that come up.

My means of transportation is the bicycle. Many of the men in Koyan have mopeds and people don’t understand why I don’t have one or ride other people’s. It is a Peace Corps rule for the sake of safety. Sometimes it is very frustrating and I just wish I could hop on a moped and get somewhere quickly, but I really like the solidarity it creates between me and the less wealthy villagers that I use the same mode of transportation as them. As I ride my bike through Koyan, all the kids in the village run out onto the street or just wave at me and yell “Sali, Saliii, SALLLIII!” until I respond. You’d think they’d get tired of this but they just don’t. They’re still in awe of the one white person in the village.

To be continued.

Thank you so much to all who have donated to the desk project! We have already raised about 25% of the project funds! Aw ni ce, aw ni baara!

Here is what is going on at the school recently: Sadly, there is a national teacher’s strike. This means that the one teacher provided by the government is not working, although fortunately the two community-paid teachers are working. On Sunday I am starting a program with the sixth grade girls on “Life Skills” which is a curriculum developed by Peace Corps to empower girls. The lessons cover goal-setting, the importance of education, birth-control, and HIV/AIDS. I am really excited about this since I have come to realize what a big problem girls’ self-esteem is here, as well as early pregnancy.

The other night I was sitting chatting with my host family under the moonlight as usual when my host’s second wife, Mama, brought up a subject she returns to constantly: how her husband is no good since he wanders around at night meeting up with his girlfriends instead of staying at home with the family. According to Koyan custom, women cannot leave the house at night (because their husbands are afraid they will have boyfriends) but men can. However, my host is especially bad and is away from home a lot, often spending the night at a friend (perhaps girlfriend)’s house. Mama directly asked me to tell Fablen (my host) to stop going out at night. I told her that it wasn’t my place to get involved in that. I told her that what she should do is start some small business, like selling fried dough at the market, to make her own money. If she is not dependent on Fablen for money, I feel like that would give her more power in their relationship. I also told her to work hard at studying Bambara. Of course, I felt very powerless since in general this is not something I know that much about (marital problems!), but I do feel like there would be less women in Mama’s situation if more girls were educated and able to support themselves financially, which is something I can try to help with.

The desk project I wrote about in my last post has gone online – any amount you could give would be a great help! Here is the website:

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfmshell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=688-330

A summary of the project is below. If you decide to donate, please email me your mailing address so I can have a student in Koyan write you a thank you letter.

My village is very motivated to get new desks for the elementary school! The school was started 6 years ago by community members so that the village’s children would no longer have to walk one hour to the nearest school. The elementary school is growing every year and currently has grades two, four, and six, with 70 female students and 110 male students. With the project funds, the villagers will buy 45 new student desks (each desk seats 3-4 students), 3 new teacher’s desks, 3 new teacher’s chairs, and will repair 25 old student desks.

As a community contribution, the villagers will be transporting the desks from a town 47km away from our village via donkey-cart as well as providing $300 of their own money for the project, making the total value of the community contribution 25% of the total project cost. The village now needs to raise $4,234 to complete the project. You can donate online at the website listed above. Your donation is tax-deductable. However much you feel comfortable donating will be appreciated! The cost of one desk is approximately $90. Even if you are not in the position to donate to this project, but could pass on the word to someone you think would be able to donate, that would be a huge help! The people of Koyan thank you for your help! Aw ni ce! Aw ni baara!

Please don’t hesitate to email me with questions. I can also give you updates as the project progresses.

I also started a Facebook group for this project, which has photographs of the school and students: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=115242305173596#!/group.php?gid=115242305173596&v=info

Thank you!!!

Dear friends and family,

Here are some new photos of Koyan:

http://picasaweb.google.com/laurenmbiggs/SiratigiJaraMilletWhacking?feat=directlink

I ni faama! This is Bambara for it’s been a long time! When you see someone you haven’t seen in a while in Mali, you always greet them with this and they may periodically repeat it throughout your conversation. It seems somewhere in between a declaration of happiness that you are finally coming to see them and a reproach for not having come to see them sooner. Well, I haven’t written in quite a while so I am the one who should be reproached! My parents came to Mali at the beginning of February and after that we went to Spain together for two weeks. When I returned from Spain, it was (and continues to be) extremely hot here and difficult to motivate myself to do anything (highs normally around 108 with no fan or AC!). Also, readjusting after Spain was difficult, a bit like coming to Mali for the first time except this time without the excitement and newness of everything. I do feel like my honeymoon with Mali is over and I am getting down to the drudgery of daily life. I still love it, but it’s work!

I realize I have not yet written very much about my work here or specifically the school in my village, which I’m sure many of you are interested to learn about. Part of this is because I haven’t done very much formal work yet and because my work has not really been with the school. But anyways, I’ll tell you something about the school in my village, especially since I am starting to work on a project with the school that I’ll need your help with in the near future!

Sitting in on a class in Koyan’s school, it immediately becomes apparent that the school’s greatest need is teacher training. It is an elementary school and should contain grades one through six, but this year only has grades two, four and six – next year it will have grades one, three, and five. The school is only five years old; this is the first year it has a sixth grade. Up until last year it was a community school, meaning that the community hired the teachers, determined the curriculum, and provided part of the teachers’ salaries, although the government also provided part. Last year the school’s management committee, a group I work with and know well, decided to apply to the government to make the school part of the government system. However, it has not yet fully transitioned to being a government school: this year it has one teacher, who is also the school’s director, who was sent by the government and two teachers who were hired by the community. Although in some ways there are substantial differences between the government and community teachers, for the most part they are all very poor teachers. The government teachers have had more training, it seems, and yet they put less effort into teaching. The reasons they are not very motivated teachers seem to be: they are paid automatically by the government whether or not they actually do their job; there is no supervision (when they are not paid it is because the government is having financial issues, which is often the case and results in frequent teacher strikes), they are often sent by the government to work in communities they do not have any connections to and are moved every couple of years, and many teachers actually wanted to pursue other careers but could not find a job in their field of choice. For example, the English teacher at the middle school nearby (in Dombila) wanted to be a lawyer and the biology teacher at the same school wanted to do scientific research. So now Koyan has one government teacher, who has lots of good ideas, especially about girls’ education (she is a helpful if somewhat controlling member of the Student Mothers Group that I started), but is unmotivated and probably is only actually present in the classroom for 50% of class time (she often leaves Koyan early to go to the big town of Kati for the weekend, where she is from and where her husband and child live, and even when she is in Koyan she spends a lot of time resting in her house instead of teaching – partially because she is obese and has health issues). In addition, Koyan has two community teachers, who spend more time in the classroom but have no better teaching methods than reading out French texts to students and asking the students to repeat the text even though they are completely clueless as to its content. The school is (theoretically) conducted entirely in French – this is the old style; government elementary schools are now supposed to have switched to a new system in which students start learning in their local language (in Koyan that would be Bambara) and during elementary school gradually transfer to French, which is the sole language used in middle and high school. However, the students understand extraordinarily little French (Bonjour!, Comment ca va?, Suivez! is about it) so of course the teachers end up reverting to Bambara to give directions and explain enough of the lesson for the students to grasp at the skimpiest threads of meaning.

Unfortunately, as a Peace Corps Mali education volunteer, I was not trained in teacher training and I don’t feel that I personally have the skills to conduct a training workshop. I would love to find an NGO or other partner to improve the skills of the teachers in my village, but I don’t know about any NGOs that do this. In addition, this is not something that the people in my village have identified as one of their needs. One of the difficulties of being a Peace Corps volunteer is coming to terms with the philosophy that even though you as a volunteer think you know better, and perhaps you do, you have to go with the wishes of the community. You are there to work for them and not to develop the community as you see fit (that would reek of colonialism or religious missions, two foreign influences I can’t help but compare myself to as a volunteer here). In addition to its seeming wrong, if you start a project the people of the village are not motivated to work on, the project is probably going to be unsuccessful. The two top education needs that the people of my village identified are a new school building and new desks. As you can see, these are both material things – obtaining them would certainly be good for the community, but it would not help nearly so much (in my opinion) as if the teachers or other community members were to undergo a training or organize an event that would provide them with new skills. My hope, though, is that the mere fact of organizing these projects (obtaining desks and a new school building) will help them develop their organizational and fundraising skills, which will probably be more valuable to the community in the long run than the desks themselves. Many of the desks the school has now are falling apart and they simply don’t have enough for all the students – some students have to sit on the floor, which is pretty awful. The school building is made of mud with a tin roof. Although admittedly cement buildings (which is what the community wants for the new school they want to build) are better since they are cleaner and last longer, there is something wonderful about the fact that the current building was 100% financed and constructed voluntarily by community members. Very interestingly, I learned recently that 300,000 francs (approx. $667) of the funding to build the school was donated by the women of the community, while only 100,000 francs (approx. $222) was donated by the men. Part of this is because there are more women than men in the community (most men have two wives), but I think part of it is also because the women of the village are better at saving money: many are members of groups that give a standard amount of money to a ‘bank’ every week (that is, a small metal case held by one of the women); this is something only done by the women. Many men in the community have motorcycles or bicycles; no women in the community do. I couldn’t figure out if this was cultural (it is not acceptable for a woman to ride a motorcycle or a bike) or because the women didn’t have enough money. I’m starting to see that it’s not that they don’t have enough money, but that they choose to spend their money on other things or save it. And I’m sure part of it is also cultural.

As I was saying . . . The community is very motivated to build a new, cement school even though I’m not sure how much that would really contribute to the quality of learning. It would contribute somewhat and would make the community feel proud, but it seems like it wouldn’t help as much as finding better teachers or training the teachers that do exist. A big disadvantage for Koyan in the area of education is that very few of the adults in the community have been to school at all and those that have been probably didn’t pass the sixth grade. This means that most people can’t read or write and they’re generally unfamiliar with how a school functions and how to tell whether or not their children are actually learning. They’ve realized that an education is important and that many people who get an education go on to get better jobs. In fact, many of the siblings of the adults in Koyan are living in Bamako, working as a bureaucrat, a police officer, or for an NGO. It is good that these people have gone on to have successful careers in Bamako, but unfortunate that they’re no longer in Koyan to help the community develop.

As to the desks: I have decided to take on this project! I kept hearing this demand from people over and over again and I realized that I should really help them get these desks. I thought it would be a nice, small, easy project to start with (as opposed to constructing a whole school building!), but it turns out these desks are actually quite expensive (about $90 per desk –they each fit three to four students) and the overall project is going to have a pretty high cost (about $5,400). Peace Corps has two methods that volunteers can use to fund their projects – the first is called Small Project Assistance and for this method the volunteer fills out a funding demand form including a budget, project objectives, success indicators, etc. and you pretty much automatically receive the funding. The community must contribute at least 33% of the funding for the project, which can come from in-kind contributions – especially things like food, labor, and transport. Peace Corps Washington distributes a certain amount of money for each sector (education, environment, health, business development, etc.) to its various posts (Mali being one) and this money is distributed to volunteers’ projects through the Small Project Assistance program. The second is called Peace Corps Project Partnership; for this method, the volunteer writes up a similar budget and description of the project and the Peace Corps puts this information up online. Then, donors from the U.S. donate money to the project online. With this method, the community only has to contribute a minimum of 25% of the project’s total cost. That the volunteer will get funding for their project from the States is not guaranteed and may take a very long time – it depends on the volunteer’s ability to fundraise.

So I explained these two methods of getting funding to my school management committee, which is managing the desk project, and they said they wanted to go with the second method, even though it’s not guaranteed, because raising 33% of the total cost would be nearly impossible for them on this project, but f25% is much more feasible. What this means is that once I’ve gathered all the information for the project, I’m going to need to start fundraising online so let me know if you have any brilliant fundraising ideas or know any group that’d be willing to help out! I don’t have all the information yet that I need to write the budget and put the project up online, but I’ll keep you updated.

I am using the first method of fundraising to obtain the funds for a soap-making training that will be held in a nearby village in May that I’m really excited about. A woman is going to come from Bamako to teach the women of my village and two other nearby villages how to make soap and start a soap-making business. I think this could be a really great means to empower the women: they can both start a successful income-generating activity and come together as a group of female community leaders. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I think very highly of the women in my village and am more passionate about working with them than with the men! The women are such hard workers and their work doesn’t seem to get hampered by the political squabbles that go on among the men (I have especially been experiencing this among the members of the school management committee).

I have to briefly describe what happened when my parents came to my village, which was quite remarkable. We found a driver to take us out to Koyan (so that my parents did not have to brave being squished into a sweaty van for two hours and then bike-riding 7 kilometers!). On the way from Bamako, my host, Nfabile Jara, kept on calling me and asking me where I was and how soon I’d be there. I thought it must just be because he was excited to see my parents, but now I realize it must have been because he was trying to coordinate this welcome for them. After driving on a paved road for about an hour and a half, we turn off and enter the bush. It is already starting to get dry and the landscape is made up of red dirt, streaked with boulders and small trees. The road is bumpy and convoluted. At one point we drive down into an empty riverbed, where my parents and I get out so that the car is lighter and doesn’t scrape the ground. Eventually we start to enter Koyan and we hear loud hand-clapping and hundreds of children’s voices. We start to see them lining the road and make out that the high-pitched voices are chanting “Mama, papa.” Then we see the looks of joy and excitement in the faces of the children and also the adults who are there. My mom starts to cry. It is truly the warmest welcome you can get anywhere in the world. We pull into the empty space next to the school that the kids use as a soccer field. Our car is mobbed by children and adults wanting to take our hands and greet us and we are barely able to get out. When we emerge from the mob, we find that the school teachers (who are some of my best friends in Koyan) have set up a table with a table cloth and their best chairs for us to sit in. We all sit and the adults make the children quiet down. The teachers give a short speech welcoming us, which I translate for my parents and then we tell them how happy we are to be there and how wonderful this welcome is. The two xylophone players the village has brought for us start playing and the women start dancing. I start dancing with the women and my parents join in too. They are thrilled that we are dancing. All the kids crowd around and watch. Eventually we went back to my house, where my work partner, Zan Jara, gave a speech to my parents (that I translated) in which he said on behalf of the village how happy they are to have me there, what a good volunteer I am, and that they don’t want me to ever leave. My favorite part was when Zan said “We’ve never seen a woman like Sali before.” (Sali being my Malian name.) My parents only spent one night there, which the Malians found much too short. They made my mom promise to come back before I leave Mali and stay for 12 days. They loved both my parents, but they especially loved my mom. They kept on saying how healthy, happy, and energetic she is. They gave my parents Malian names: for my mom, Nyeba Coulibaly, and for my dad, Brahma Jara (that being the name of my host’s father, who passed away). One of the woman in my host family gave birth to a baby girl on that day and they named it after my mom, Nina. Apparently Nina is actually a name in Mali although I’ve never met a Malian named Nina. Now when I talk to someone about this baby they always refer to it as ‘your mom.’ As in, ‘Sali, your mom cries a lot!’

Well, I hope you all are going to come visit me now!

Best,

Lauren

Jan. 4, 2010

Dear friends and family,

Happy new year! I realized shortly after writing my last email about

funerals that it was quite a depressing and inappropriate topic for

the holiday season. I’m sorry about that. I’ll try to rectify it in my

email today. As anywhere, great joys and great sorrows co-exist here,

although my overall impression of Malians so far is that they are much

more ready to laugh than to cry. Humor, music, and dance play a huge

role in Malian society.

Here are some photos depicting the ngoni playing I witnessed as well

as other images of my life here, including a baby named Obama Jara:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2278967&id=121893&l=9d787784ba

Last Sunday I went for the first time to the church in Dombila, a town

about 5km away from Koyan and the capital of our commune. Although

most people in the community are Muslim, there is a significan

Christian population. The church is a small mud building with a tin

roof and benches made from mounds of mud covered with a thin layer of

cement. The table at the front of the church was covered with bright

African fabric depicting the face of Pope John Paul II with the words

Bamako, Mali, 1994. A small figurine of Jesus on the cross was nailed

to the back wall and on the side was a Madonna figurine. Before the

service began candles were lighted. Someone rang a bell outside the

church and about a hundred people streamed into the church, children

sitting up front on the left side, women behind them, and men filling

the right side of the church. A small stereo played Malian ballani

(xylophone) music while people sat down. There were almost no Malians

chatting, which is very unusual. When I attended the Muslim service

during the holiday of Eid everyone was chatting right up until the

praying began and even while the imam was speaking.

As I walked into the church I was quite shocked to find an elderly

European man standing outside the church greeting people in Bambara. I

was quite mystified and didn't know what language to greet him in but

fortunately he greeted me in French so I went with that. I learned

later that he is the priest of a church in a large town nearby (Kati)

and goes out to the little villages periodically, especially for

Christmas and Easter services. His skin looked awful, worn and

spotted, and his battered white t-shirt was full of holes - at first

I thought he was a Malian albino (albinism is very common here), but

later I realized he was just a European who had been living in Mali as

Malians do for a very long time. The church in Dombila has a local

priest, but on this day it was the European man who conducted the

service, all in Bambara. His age showed in his voice, which was raspy

and quiet, but amazingly enough he had a microphone and speaker system

so he could be understood. Before the service began he put on a black

robe adorned with the Malian chiwara or antelope motif (a design

traditionally used for headresses for masked dances). Unfortunately my

Bambara is not good enough to tell you what his sermon was about. We

sang hymns in Bambara with Western melodies. Some people took

communion, although many people did not.

The friend I went to the church with, Augustine Jara, did not take

communion and I later learned it was because of the fact that he has

two wives. I asked him why he, a Christian, had taken a second wife

and he said that it was because a relative of his had given her to

him. I pressed him on why he had accepted but he gave no further

explanation.

I found it oddly comforting to be witnessing a church service here -

the way I feel comfortable in a Malian classroom or a bank, structures

that I've grown up with in the States and whose customs and norms I

know.

After the service, Augustine and I went to the house of one of

Augustine's friends, a Christian woman named Safi Kone, an 18-year-old

married woman who lives in Bamako and is a fabric vendor, but whose

family is in Dombila and goes there periodically to visit. Her

outgoingness and self-confidence were markedly different from the

personalities of most women in our area, who tend to be passive and

quiet, and I assumed she was much older than 18. I think the

difference in her personality largely stems from the fact that she

lives in a big city and that her line of work is commerce. When I

arrived she was preparing lunch and I started helping her, which she

was happy to let me do. Normally when I try to help the women in my

area cook, they won't let me.

After lunch, about five of us sat inside a room and chatted. Someone

brought us a watermelon they had just harvested and we devoured it. A

man came in who seemed a little crazy, his eyes bulging and lips

curling up in a slight smirk as he spoke to me. I learned that he was

an ngoni player and asked him if I could see his instrument. He went

off and came back with a string instrument made of a guord, pieces of

scrap metal, and plastic strings. Little pieces of metal hanging off

the sides jingled as he plucked the strings. From the inside of the

instrument he brought out a piece of metal with a handle and hatch

marks that could be grated against with another small piece of metal

to create a rhythm. This small instrument got passed around among the

listeners and one man danced throughout the performance. The ngoni

player, Jean-Pierre Jara, squatted down very close to me and sang to

me. It was very intense and a little frightening but mostly wonderful.

He then moved on and sang to everyone in the group. After, we each

placed a small amount of money into an opening in his instrument.

I wish you all much happiness in the new year!

Best,

Lauren

Dec. 18, 2009

Dear friends and family,

I hope all is well and you are enjoying the holidays! I am at a

two-week 'in-service training' at the Peace Corps training camp

outside of Bamako after which I will go back to my village and

hopefully start my work in earnest. Some of the volunteers in my area

have organized a 4-day program where girls from the rural villages

will go to one of the larger cities to learn about professional

opportunities for women who complete school, so I'm really looking

forward to working on that. We are going to have an essay contest in

my village to determine which girls will go. Below is a description of

some things that have been going on in my village, Koyan.

Best,

Lauren

I was sitting one morning with my host family as they were sipping

ceri, the corn porridge they eat every morning, when my host Nfabilen

informed me that the young child of one of our neighbors had passed

away and that we would be going to the funeral that day, in fact that

minute. I rushed into my hut to try to find something respectable to

wear. The day was overcast and even cool. He and I walked together

down the cotton-bloom-lined path leading between our household,

Konibabugu (named for its founder and Nfabilen’s grandfather, Koniba),

and our neighbors’, Kefabugu (named for Koniba’s brother, Kefa). When

we arrived, a bunch of empty chairs were haphazardly placed around the

tree that shades most life there. The oldest man of the household was

sitting there and when Nfabilen went to sit down next to him, he

motioned for me to join. I decided, though, that this was a time to be

with the women.

I was brought into a dark, crowded room with a dirt floor, mud walls,

and a roof of thatch. A woman was sitting on a bed, crying

hysterically with her face in her hands. Another woman was seated next

to her, holding her hand and with her arm around the crying woman’s

shoulder. This was Ba, the woman whose baby had passed away. I was not

able to understand the cause of the child’s death, although the women

said he hadn’t been eating. When my eyes adjusted, I saw many of the

older women in my village. Over the course of the morning, many more

middle-aged women arrived. At first, some of the women were having a

vehement discussion I couldn’t understand but they eventually lapsed

into silence and the mother too stopped sobbing. We sat and sat for

hours, shifting our weight on the small wooden stools holding us up

and hearing the quiet benedictions of the women who entered the room.

Some women from my household had arrived and they eventually beckoned

for me to leave. As they left, each mumbled a long strain of

benedictions to the mother and I said the meager one I know, "May he

rest in peace."

Shortly after we arrived back at my house, my language tutor (the

local school's sixth grade teacher, Soungalo Jara) also arrived and we

started our Bambara lesson. As usual, various other family members and

children were coming and going, sitting around us, listening and

occassionally interjecting their comments. About halfway through, one

of the men said something I couldn't make out to Soungalo. Soungalo

then told me that they had just received some bad news: my host's

child in Bamako had died. I was completely dumbfounded: I had no idea

my host had another child in Bamako. As I asked questions, I learned

that my host had a second wife (the first, Sitan, had been living with

us in Koyan and I wrongfully assumed she was the only one) who had

been living with my host's brother, Ntossoma, in Bamako while her

child was undergoing operations at the hospital there. After this, we

continued our lesson. The strange thing was that my host went upon his

daily business as usual, going off to work in the garden, instead of

sitting with the other men of the village as had been done at the

funeral that morning. When I gave him the standard benediction, May he

rest in peace, he told me it was God's work and smiled at me. His

mother, Babo, and some of the older women of the village gathered in

Babo's house to sit. I went to sit with them and they asked me why I

wasn't talking. They started to joke with me, but I felt too sad to

joke. That night my host sat alone outside his house smoking

cigarettes and brewing tea under the stars.

Only later did I learn the cause of the child's death. My host's

brother, Ntossoma, works for the Peace Corps (he is the health

education program assistant) and speaks English. He came to visit

during the Muslim holiday of Eid and I asked him about the

circumstances of the death. He said that the child was born without an

anus and that after a number of operations, the child had finally

passed away at 11 months old. He also informed me that these kinds of

malformations can be caused by malnutrition in the mother and that the

child's mother, Ma, had gone to pre-natal counseling but had not acted

on the doctor's advice. He said that people here say when their

children pass away that it's God's work, but it is not God's work

since it is up to the people to listen to the doctor. The gap between

Ntossoma, who is educated, has a decent job, and lives a somewhat

Westernized life in Bamako (i.e. has only one wife and one child,

speaks both French and English) and his brother Nfabilen, who never

went to school, is a farmer, and lives in a rural village, is quite

remarkable.

Nov. 17, 2009

Dear friends and family,

I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written! It is hard to find the

time and place here to read and write – in my village, Koyan, there is

no computer, no electricity, no internet – and even writing with pen

and paper is considered unusual, especially the kind of writing I want

to do – reflective, descriptive. Students copy texts from the board in

school and the men who run the school management committee and the

small bank in the village write to record payments, but they are not

comfortable enough with writing to use it as a tool in the way I do.

Now, however, I’m in Bamako, Mali’s capital, typing on the Peace Corps

office computers (which, thankfully, have English keyboards instead of

the French ones in the internet café in Kati, a town between my

village and Bamako that I can get to and back from within a day).

Unfortunately, this office has only three working computers and there

are often up to ten volunteers waiting to use them – so it’s hard to

type long emails. However, I’m going to be selfish for once . . .

Note: I posted some pictures of my current village and host family as

well as my homestay host family to Facebook and if you’d like to see

them but are not on Facebook you can access them here. Enjoy:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2270723&id=121893&l=30ac6ed2d4

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2268639&id=121893&l=c4933600fe

1. Fêtes

Right after I first arrived in my village, Koyan, three large

celebrations took place (and no, they weren’t just to celebrate my

arrival, although people were pretty excited about that and have said

that if my parents come to visit, they’ll hold a celebration for

them): first, Seli, the celebration of the end of Ramadan, next, the

Malian day of independence, and lastly a celebration of the

circumcision of many of the boys in the village. This string of

‘fêtes’ (the Bambara use certain choice French words in their

vocabulary) involved three in a row all-night dance-parties. On the

day of the fête, people tend to congregate in their age- and

gender-groups, sitting together and drinking tea all day - the men

much more so than the women, since they can afford to take a day off

from farming, but the women can’t exactly stop cooking, doing dishes,

washing clothes, and getting water. Instead of the normal dish of to

(which is something like corn or millet polenta) with leaf sauce, they

eat rice with leaf sauce, which is considered a specialty as, unlike

millet and corn, they do not farm it themselves and so have to

purchase it at the market. In addition to the groups of elderly men,

elderly women, middle-aged men, and middle-aged women, the boys or

girls of different age-groups will save up money to buy their tea and

sometimes food to cook for the fête. Groups of women often buy fabric

of one pattern to wear on that day, which they call ‘uniformu’ (I have

gotten an outfit made in the same fabric as the women in my household

to wear for an upcoming celebration, Tabaski – it’s going to be pretty

awesome). Whereas regularly it is only the early afternoon and

nighttime when people sit around and chat, on fêtes this is what is

done all day. The act of sitting and talking or not talking (although

talking is seen as preferable, and wit is valued) makes up a big part

of Malian life and is probably part of the reason community bonds are

so strong. This was very overwhelming for me as I had just arrived in

the village and everyone wanted to talk to me – in a language I had

only started studying a few months ago, however I did my best to be

patient and not let their teasing get to me. (Villager: Can you farm?

Me: I can learn to farm. Villager: No, you can’t farm. Me: I don’t

know if I can until I try it. Villager laughs as though they’ve never

heard anything so silly in their life. I have this conversation at

least once a day – also on the subjects of millet-pounding, cooking,

clothes-washing, and pulling water – these being things I can do much

better than farming and therefore I can go ahead and show them that I

can do it – to which they respond with shocked stares. They clearly

don’t have the idea we do that you can do almost anything you want to,

you just need a good teacher and some perseverance – unfortunately I

think this also informs their lack of blaming the teacher for the

students’ failure and instead blaming the students.)

The dance parties were held at a different person’s house each night,

under the large shea or mango tree that shades the center of many

households (houses are built in a somewhat circular pattern around the

open area under the tree, where much work, play, and rest goes on).

Three musicians set up their instruments here, two ballafo players and

one man playing something like a tambourine with little pieces of

scrap metal hanging off the edges, making a jingling noise. The

ballafo is like a large xylophone and has a bouncing, steel-drum-like

quality. The musicians were all men, probably in their late 20s. Each

song seemed to go on for however long they felt like, often ten

minutes or longer and there seemed to be a lot of improvisation. They

would take brief breaks, people bringing them tea (the Chinese green

tea brewed almost to bitterness with heaps of sugar caramelized in the

pot) and water, but mostly they played all night, the sweat dripping

from their tense bodies as they threw themselves into their

instruments, the ballafo players’ arms flying up and down too fast to

see. A sound system and speakers were powered by a car battery, as

well as a single fluorescent light hung from the tree.

At the beginning of the night, the early adolescents danced and the

groups of boys and girls dancing progressively got older until it was

the 20-year-olds who danced till dawn. At any moment, there was a

rough line of boys and a rough line of girls in the center of a circle

of on-lookers of all ages. Little kids wandered about, dancing

individually on the periphery of the circle and generally having a

fantastic time. Each person danced somewhat differently, but the men’s

dance consisted of lots of quick footwork, while the women were often

bent over in a position similar to the one they are in to beat shea

butter, as well as making a similar motion with their hands. The boys

and girls danced facing one another, but not touching or overtly

observing one another – yet the tension between them was obviously

high and periodically they would weave in between each other and

switch places.

On the day of the circumcision quite another kind of dancing went on.

The circumcision was of about ten 7-year-old boys in the village. On

the day of the circumcision, I was sitting around my household with

all the men (unfortunately it often seems I tend to sit with the men –

their hang-out is right in front of my house and they’re

better-educated and easier to talk to, and Malians encourage me to sit

with them) when Soungalo Jara, the sixth-grade teacher and one of the

few people in the village who speaks French, invited me to go over to

the household where the operation was taking place to see the boys. I

was quite afraid of what I was going to see – but fortunately I

arrived after the operation and all I saw was ten boys lying on the

ground wearing white robes. I was happy to learn that a doctor had

come to the village from a city to perform the operation. The boys

started school about a month late because of recovery time and

throughout this time wore only their white robes. After I returned to

sitting with the men, a group of women came into our household,

singing, dancing, and wearing men’s clothes, with streaks of mud

covering their cheeks and arms. They formed a rough circle around some

of the men, dancing and singing to them for money (they get small

change and later use it for tea and food for a celebration). They

grabbed my arm, pulling me in to come dance with them, and I did. I

danced in the center with one other woman (the dance movements of

these middle-aged women are different from those of the adolescents –

their dance involves stomping and slapping both hands together onto

the crotch) and she sang a song about me, which I didn’t fully

understand but knew it was about me since she kept saying ‘tubabu

muso’ or ‘white woman’. The circumcision, the women wearing men’s

clothes, the suggestive dance moves – it all made for some kind of

statement about gender and sexuality that was beyond my cultural grasp

and made me vaguely uncomfortable.

2. Madame Aissata Koné

Madame Aissata Koné is Koyan’s new school director. One day I arrived

at Koyan’s three-roomed mud-brick elementary school (this year they

have grades two, four, and six; last year it was grades one, three,

and five) only to see an obese woman dressed in a well-tailored Malian

complet (shirt, skirt, and head-wrap of the same fabric) sitting

outside alone under a mango tree. No one in Koyan has such

well-tailored clothes (most of their clothing has holes in it and is

often covered in dirt if they’ve come from the fields) or much fat on

their bodies (most people are getting enough food – although not

enough variety of foods – but the physical labor of their lives

prevents them from gaining weight). When I started talking to her (and

I can communicate with her fairly well, since she speaks French –

although she knows I’m learning Bambara and seems to prefer speaking

Bambara) I discovered she had just arrived on her friend’s moped from

Kati, a large town that is the capital of the ‘circle’ Koyan is

located in to serve as Koyan’s new school director. During the school

day, I sat inside one of the classrooms to observe the teacher and

students, while she remained outside sitting under the tree. However,

before the day was over she instructed the students to come to school

the next day with their cleaning tools – the girls with their brooms

and the boys with their dabas (a farming tool made of a rectangular

piece of metal inserted into a wooden club) to clean the school. The

next day, when the students arrived she had the boys use their dabas

to extract the weeds on the land outside the school and then had the

girls carefully sweep the outside of the school, watching over them

and threatening them with a switch if they didn’t do a good enough job

(this is used by almost all teachers in Mali). After this (which only

took about an hour), the students were dismissed for the day. Since

she arrived, Madame Koné hasn’t spent much time in Koyan. She has been

going back to Kati frequently – I imagine she finds it quite

uncomfortable in Koyan. She told me that in Kati she had a servant who

did all the chores for her, but in Koyan there is no one. One of the

main problems in the schools seems to be teachers from bigger towns

who get sent to rural villages but then have no connection to the

community and frequently leave to return to their home town. As of now

it is not a big problem for Koyan since there were already three

teachers when she arrived – but apparently the plan is for her to take

over the work of one of the teachers. Her arrival is the result of

Koyan’s school changing status from a community school, where the

community finds and directly pays the teachers, to a government

school, where the government assigns and pays the teachers. So far the

government has only sent one teacher, but I would assume that later

they will send more. As you can see, things don’t happen in the most

organized manner here . . . since Madame Koné arrived, the community

had to choose one teacher to let go in the middle of the school year

(the obvious thing would have been for her to arrive before the school

year began instead of a month into the school year . . . ). However,

the teacher chosen to be let go is still teaching and Madame Koné went

to Kati a week ago and hasn’t yet returned, so I don’t really know

what’s happening.

I did have an interesting conversation with her on one of the few

nights she stayed in Koyan (well, it wasn’t so much a conversation

with her as that I was listening to her talking to another woman). She

had just moved into one of the houses next to the school that the

community built to house the teachers, alongside one of the other

teachers, Soungalo Jara, and his two wives, Fanta and Nyeneba. It was

actually a ‘cold’ night (maybe around 70 degrees) and Soungalo was

resting in his house since he had a cold (people fall sick very

frequently here, especially with malaria), while the three women were

gathered around a fire outside: Madame Koné, Fanta, and Nyeneba. I

joined them and they chatted in Bambara about the prices they could

get for their sweet potatoes, the big cash crop in Koyan, then they

started chatting about Madame Koné’s husband and the fact that he was

the second person to offer to marry her. It seems that in Koyan and

most rural villages, a man will choose a woman to marry and then go to

her father to ask to marry her and negotiate the dowry – the woman

doesn’t have a great deal of say in who she marries, but in the bigger

towns the man may actually go to the woman and ask her to marry him.

Madame Koné said that she didn’t like the first wife of the first man

who asked to marry her so she turned him down. Her current husband is

a police officer.

It does sound cruel and unjust to not allow a woman much say in who

she marries and it probably is, yet it’s less so than it would be to

do such a thing in American society since in Malian society the

marital relationship is very different. It is more about a partnership

whose goal is to run a farm and a household than about emotional

support or love. What you really want in your partner is a good work

ethic more than anything else. Of course, you could argue that this

makes it even more important that the woman gets to choose her

husband. It’s a complicated and personal issue and I hope to learn

more about the matter in the future.

Well, I am headed back to Koyan now. I hope that gives you a bit of a

picture of things here.

Hoping you’re all well,

Lauren

Aug. 16, 2009

Dear friends and family,

I am at the Peace Corps training site again, about to take off for a

week’s visit at my permanent 2-year site! I will be in the village of

Koyan, near the town of Kati in the region of Koulikoro. It is fairly

close to Bamako. Koyan is a village of about 1,000. I will live there

in my own ‘house’ in the compound of a family. For now, that’s about

all I know!

Each volunteer has a counterpart, who is a Malian who works in the

volunteer’s sector and is supposed to be the volunteer’s partner on

all projects and generally help the volunteer with any of his or her

needs. This is the first year that the Peace Corps brought all the

counterparts to the training center for three days to do a workshop on

PACA, Participatory Analysis for Community Action, Peace Corps’ system

of determining a community’s needs and wants and mobilizing the

community to implement them. Most of the counterparts are from rural

towns and seemed a bit overwhelmed by being here. However, I am amazed

that the workshop seemed fairly successful since the day before

yesterday we went out in small groups to neighboring towns with our

counterparts to practice PACA and we were able to have a pretty

successful meeting in which we determined the priorities of a group

that operates a mobile bank.

The PACA trip . . . Friday morning, the volunteers and counterparts

trickled into the cafeteria between 6 and 7am, some carrying

mattresses and overnight bags. The Malians’ dress runs the gamut from

traditional-style cloth caps with pompoms hanging, something like a

poncho, and baggy gathered pants to the more standard bubu (long loose

dress with pants for men) in a beautiful iridescent violet fabric,

worn with Casio, a silver bracelet, and rings, to the young man in

distressed jeans, tennis shoes, and a button-down shirt or an Obama

campaign t-shirt. Most of the counterparts are men but the few women

wear long loose shirts in bright prints and abstract or quotidian

patterns (a tube of toothpaste with cream squeezing out, lemons,

chickens, or scissors cutting fabric) over a skirt, with a headwrap

and often a sheer scarf over the head as well, which they constantly

readjust. This dress signifies that the woman is married. Unmarried

women do not cover their heads and wear shorter and tighter tops (it

is rare to be past 20 and unmarried here). As a woman, being married

earns you more respect, as does having lots of children. (If anyone

knows about the production of the fabrics worn in Africa, I’d like to

know where the companies are based and where the fabrics are made.) In

the cafeteria we eat our daily breakfast of Lipton’s or Nescafe

instant coffee with powdered milk and hot water, fresh French bread,

and peanut butter or jam (most Malians would normally eat a porridge

made from millet in the morning). As usual, we do not leave on time.

We have been told we’ll be leaving at 7am, but our bus isn’t ready

until 8:30. Since most of us can’t communicate very well with our

counterparts yet because of the language barrier, volunteers chat

together and counterparts sit and wait. I greet my counterpart, Zan

Diarra, and he tries to talk to me, which I don’t understand. I smile

a lot and say in Bambara that I don’t understand. Finally we pile into

a big bus the Peace Corps has hired to take three groups to three

separate towns to practice community assessment.

The big bus leans over the narrow road and we sleepily watch the

shrubs and mango trees stretching out into the distance, the copious

trash on the side of the road, the small houses, donkeys, children,

general stores with their Orange (a telephone company) and Coke signs

displayed prominently, and the ‘Oui au preservatif’ billboard with a

hand wearing a condom on two fingers. As we pass children, they stare

up wonderingly and wave, while adults watch wearily and go on with

their business of farming, waiting unexpectantly at their roadside

stands for customers, and doing endless household chores. After about

45 minutes of driving the green of the landscape deepens and the mango

and shea trees become bigger and fuller. We pass a giant rock

formation and even a tiny waterfall. Some volunteers say with relief

that this is what they expected Africa to look like. Malian music

videos play sporadically on a small video screen in the bus. The sound

is rhythmic and peaceful, the videos caught somewhere between a Malian

and an American sensibility. A young woman wears a strapless top and

pants and sings, looking into the camera uncomfortably, in a few

different poses. She’s in a Western-style house. A young man wearing

M.C. Hammer-style pants dances with back-up dancers in a village

surrounded by children. The videos are a surreal reminder of the

impact of (in some cases the worst aspects of) Western culture here

and make me feel uncomfortable as Westerner.

We drop off two different groups (only after getting lost twice,

asking many people on the side of the road for directions, and turning

the giant bus around on the tiny road, which takes about 15 minutes)

and finally come to the village of Narena, where myself and five other

trainees get off, along with our six Malian counterparts and two Peace

Corps trainers/translators, Mama and Moussa (who are Malian). Dan, the

volunteer currently stationed in Narena, rides up to us on his bike.

When we get off the bus, we are right by the main market area of the

village and see different parts of a cow and a cow hide lying on the

ground. Dan informs us that that’s what we’ll be having for lunch

(and, as it turns out, dinner, breakfast, and lunch again). We unload

our mattresses and bags and walk to an empty school, where we’ll be

sleeping for the night, all the volunteers in one empty classroom and

all the counterparts in another. Like most of Mali, the town has no

electricity or running water, although it does have water from a pump

instead of from a well, which means we have to filter it but do not

have to bleach it.

Greetings . . . Any time you arrive in a new place, the first thing

you must do is greet the important people there. We first go to the

mayor’s office and greet the mayor and his two aides. One aide is

dressed in a jean shirt, jean pants, blue-tinted glasses, and a khaki

trench coat. The mayor himself is wearing a bubu. The mayor talks

little. Mostly the aide in the trench coat talks on his behalf. Dan is

the third Peace Corps volunteer who has come to the village. The first

came 5 years ago. The mayor’s aide says they are really pleased with

what the volunteers have done and they welcome us and hope that we

will do good things for our villages. The meeting room at they mayor’s

is a modest but neat room with a central row of tables surrounded by

chairs and a bench running along the outside. There are four large

windows that look out onto the surrounding greenery, cows, goats, and

donkeys. Periodically during the meeting a goat or donkey will wail

loudly for a few minutes, an interruption Malians are well used to.

Politics . . . The town of Narena has two dugutigis or town chiefs.

Apparently when the last dugutigi died, he left the choice of the next

dugutigi up to his council and they split on the decision. The village

is split in allegiance. The village has a radio station, which only

one half of the village listens to because it is controlled by the

clan of one of the dugutigis. So we greeted both dugutigis, but only

invited one to our meeting. They are both old men who look like the

rest of the villagers and live in similar houses. They listened to our

trainers explaining why we were here and then said that we were

welcome.

Since it was Friday, we had to wait until after everyone returned from

the mosque to start our meeting. Dan had arranged it so that the

people who run the mobile bank would come to the mayor’s after the

mosque. Once people had started arriving, three women came carrying

giant plastic bowls of food on their heads. They set them down on the

ground and we all gathered around the bowls and dug in (after washing

our hands of course!). It was zamen, something like fried rice, with a

few pieces of beef (sogo), a hot pepper (foronto), and Malian bitter

eggplant (ngoyo). After lunch the mobile bank members (about 15

people) and the Peace Corps trainees and counterparts gathered in the

mayor’s meeting room. The meeting started with introductions from

everyone. The president of the bank, the mayor’s aide, and the PC

trainers gave speeches of introduction and welcoming. The president of

the bank, a fairly serious middle-aged man with a large belly, was

wearing an orange bubu with a pattern of hearts and the words in

English “I LOVE YOU.” After introductions (which took at least an

hour), the PC trainers explained the PACA activity, which was to

identify the problems of the bank and then prioritize them. The bank

members split up into a group of men and a group of women and came up

with problems, which they wrote down (all in Bambara – Dan translated

a little for us so we could understand some of what was going on). Our

counterparts helped facilitate all this. We were all very impressed at

how well our counterparts understood the PACA concepts and were able

to work with the bank members to help them identify their problems.

After the men and women identified ten problems each, they chose their

five most important and then voted as a group on an overall ranking of

importance. At first they identified the problems as being

money-related (not being able to purchase notebooks and transportation

means), but after they discussed the causes of their problems, they

decided their real problem was the fact that they weren’t having

regular meetings, which is what Dan was hoping they’d come up with.

All these discussions were remarkably democratic. This one meeting

started around 2:30 and ended around 7. The next day we further used

the PACA tools to find solutions to the meeting problem, having a meet

from 8:30 to 2 (although we did take a break from 10:30-11 to have

beef sandwiches made with bread cooked in a mud oven in the village,

which was delicious). It was very cool to see these villagers making a

group decision and really having a democratic discussion (although my

understanding of what went on is very limited, so I may have been

missing out on certain things that happened, for example I’m sure not

everyone’s voice was equally taken into account since some people were

much quieter than others. Normally women in Mali don’t speak up as

much, but this meeting had two women who were pretty vocal.).

I hope you are all well and love hearing from you!

Best,

Lauren

Jul. 27, 2009

Dear friends and family,

I am staying in a town here called Banankoro, which is about a 30

minute drive from Bamako, the capital. I will be in this town for my

training until September 11, when I am sworn in as a Peace Corps

Volunteer and will move to my permanent site for two years. In

Banankoro, I learn language and culture so that I will be able to work

effectively as an education volunteer at my site. Every two weeks

during training, I spend three days with all the other volunteers (67

people) at the Peace Corps training camp, Tubaniso, where we do group

trainings and information sessions. This is where I am now, which is

why I have access to a computer and the internet.

Banankoro is a town of maybe 1,000-2,000 people and is very poor.

There is no electricity or running water. The main road through the

town is the road that goes from Bamako to Guinea. Along the side of

this road are butikis (small general stores) and people sitting by the

roadside selling cucumbers, sandals, tiny bags of macaroni, and other

goods. Children wander around the town playing and doing chores for

their parents. There is garbage everywhere : people simply put their

trash on the ground and there is no system of sanitation. There are

also animals everywhere : oxen, goats, chickens, dogs, and the very

talkative donkeys.

It is very hot and the few trees in the town serve as serious relief

from the sun. Since it is the rainy season, it is supposed to rain

every day, but there is currently a drought (I believe this has

happened for the past couple of years and is a result of

desertification) so it has only rained a few times since I’ve been

here. Before the rain, it becomes very windy, dusty, and hot, then the

rain comes very intensely and lasts for about half an hour.

Afterwards, it is delightfully cool.

The family I am staying with is truly wonderful. The sotigi or head of

the household is Karim Coulibaly, who cultivates mangoes and does

other agricultural work including keeping bees. He has four wives,

three of whom live in the family compound I am living in. The two

people who do the most to look out for me are two of my host mothers,

both named Sali. Interestingly, the family has also chosen to name me

Sali, Sali Coulibaly. The older Sali is Karim’s first wife and is a

bit more reserved but firm in her doings and easy to smile. She has

eight children. The younger Sali is gregarious and pudgy (considered

attractive here since a sign of wealth). She has two children. Both

are very smart and seem to want to learn to read. When I start doing

my homework, they often come over and try to read the words with me.

There are about ten children always playing and working in the

compound. The children here find white people very exciting and

mysterious. The family compound is about 15 separate rooms constructed

out of cement with tin roofs in the shape of a square with an opening

to the street. In the middle of the compound is a room that serves as

the kitchen as well as stacks of firewood, pots boiling over fires, a

well, and donkeys. As far as I can tell the inhabitants of the

compound include Karim, his three wives, their children, two of

Karim's sons and their wives, two of Karim's brothers and their wives

and children, and Karim's mother. As age is respected here, when

greeting the family I greet Karim's mother first, then Karim, then his

wives.

We have our language classes in Banankoro's primary school, which

consists in a cement wall enclosing a courtyard, two tin roofs, a

small building used for storage, and a latrine. When it rains, we

crowd under the part of the roof where the least rain is blowing in

and cannot hear each other because of the noise. Our Bambara classes

are conducted by two Language and Culture Facilitators, Umu and

Nouhoum. Both of their families are in Bamako but Umu and Nouhoum live

in Banankoro during our training period, except for Sundays, which is

our only day off. Umu is also in Banankoro with her baby and niece,

who takes care of the baby and does the housework for Umu and Nouhoum.

Doing housework here is extremely laborious. Not only do people here

not have a washing machine, they've never even heard of one. The women

here spend all day long pounding millet, pulling water from the well,

preparing food, chopping firewood, washing clothes, and other chores

(not to mention having and taking care of children).

What do people eat here? Mostly millet, either in a porridge or in

something like polenta called to. They will have that with an okra

sauce or an oily tomato sauce. Rich people can have rice and small

pieces of meat or fish. As you can see, people are not eating a very

balanced diet. Fruit and vegetables are not a major part of the diet.

There are children in the town who have bloated bellies from

malnutrition.

Greeting is a very important part of daily life here. When I walk to

and from school every day, I greet almost everyone I pass. This

consists in more than a simple hello: you go through a series of

questions asking how they are, how their father is, how their mother

is, how their children are, and how they spent their night, then they

ask you this series of questions. It takes quite a while to walk

anywhere. In greeting, people will also often ask you your last name,

which is of significance here. There are only a few different last

names and people of certain last names have joking relatinoships with

others based on historical caste divisions. I am a Coulibaly, which is

historically a noble class, so pretty much everyone jokes with me. The

typical joke is to call someone a bean-eater. They love calling people

bean-eaters; it never gets old for them! 'Joking cousins' as the

relationships are called were apparently a way of historically

difusing social tensions between different castes.

Well, there is much more to say but this is just a taste of what it is

like here. I hope you are all well and I'd love to hear from you all.

Love,

Lauren