En Afrique

When the rains fail and when the rains fall

2012-02-16T09:31:00.000-08:00

So Corinna posted up an update about the realities of life on the ground next to the national park. You should read it. We feel terrible for our friend who's house was attacked by elephants.

She also mentioned right now that the rains are failing and everyone is desperate. It is a hard year for rural Malawians. I also wanted to mention that it isn't just an issue when the rains are failing, it is also an issue when the rains are falling. Every year, the rainy season is known as the hunger months. That is because everyone is running out of maize or other grains from the previous year's harvest, the new harvest isn't yet ready and during the rains there are so many pests and insects that gardens don't do well. So people are short on maize, short on vegetables, short on money from other income generating activities to buy commodities such as oil; essentially, they are short on everything.

It is always a hard contrast between what seems like it should be a time of plenty since there plants sprouting everywhere, and the reality of hunger surrounding us.

The State of Education in the Developing World

2012-02-16T09:11:00.001-08:00

So, education is a tricky issue in development. So many children do not even have the opportunity to attend school because of cost or distance to school or lack of space or perhaps that there isn't even a school present. Many development goals have addressed this issue by increasing the number of children who attend primary or secondary school.

There is another issue though: in many developing countries the quality of education is abysmal. If you are interested to learn more:

This begs the question: should we be pushing to increase participation in a disfunctional system? How do we address the much more difficult question of how to increase learning outcomes? The specter of No Child Left Behind is on my mind; it is not as if we have managed to sort out these issues in America where there are plenty of resources.

As I am always telling Corinna, if development was easy it would have happened long ago...

New Goals

2012-01-31T09:35:00.000-08:00

I have a new life ambition: to be a driver for an NGO in athird world country.

So, we have sort of gotten our Toyota Land Cruiser running.It is a high clearance, four wheel drive (though that is not working yet),massively tired diesel beast. I have never driven a large SUV and thought theywere pretty silly in the states. Now I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. When our LandCruiser is running, I love driving it through the mud and slog of the awfulroads around here. I haven’t gotten stuck yet, which I'm pretty proud of because sometimes it's like driving a car through a giant bowl of oatmeal.

At the moment, there is only a couple of us that can driveit, and one is usually out on his motorcycle so I have become the unofficialdriver. I also am the only one that can get it started, having spent a lot oftime with the mechanics trying to get it working.

Here are some of the advantages of being a driver out here:

· Challenging work. Slogging this beast throughthe mud and keeping it operating is a major task.
· Rewarding work. When I get from point A to pointB there’s a sense of something accomplished.
· Driving a real 4x4 (even if the four wheel driveis broken) through terrain we call Normandy because it’s so messed up is just areal pleasure.

But alas, I will never meet all the requirements of adriver in a third world country. Sigh…

Dream... crushed.

2012-01-18T10:24:00.000-08:00

So, Corinna and I no longer have a house in the mountains. We were really house sitting for two years in it, and it's become likely we cannot fulfill the house sitting responsibilities because it's becoming very likely that we will not be able to stay in Malawi for more than a month or two longer. There is a good chance we'll return here, but in the meantime, opportunity lost.

I hope that there are some development wonks slapping the foreheads right now

2012-01-18T10:06:00.000-08:00

Reading this piece just made me close my eyes and think "I should have thought of that". It is talking about Conditional Cash Transfers, the hot new way to work on development issues. Of course, one could also say that the real objective is wealth transfer, something I'm not opposed to. Anyway, quote below:

Seeing a child like a state: Holding the poor accountable for bad schools -- Guest post by Lant Pritchett
SUBMITTED BY ANONYMOUS ON TUE, 2012-01-03 19:24
In the early 20^th century Helen Todd, a factory inspector in Chicago, interviewed 500 children working in factories, often in dangerous and unpleasant conditions. She asked children the question: “If your father had a good job and you didn’t have to work, which would you rather do—go to school or work in a factory?” 412 said they would choose factory work. One fourteen year old girl, who was interviewed lacquering canes in an attic working with both intense heat and the constant smell of turpentine, said “School is the fiercest thing you can come up against. Factories ain’t no cinch, but schools is worst.”

The recent expansion of the “ASER-like” simple assessments of literacy and numeracy skills of all children in a village based approach provides an accurate, and chilling, picture of just how little learning is going on inside schools in many poor countries. The ASER data can show the learning profile, the association of measured skills and grade completion, by showing what fraction of children who have completed which grade can read a simple story (expected of a child in grade 2) or do simple arithmetic operations.  Take Uttar Pradesh in 2010. By the end of lower primary school (grade 5) only one in four children could divide. Even by grade 8, the end of upper primary only 56 percent could.   Similarly, by grade 5 only 44 percent could read a level 2 paragraph and by grade 8 still only 77.6 could.   A large plurality of children, even of those that had persisted and been promoted through eight full grades or primary school—roughly 8000 hours of available total instruction—were either illiterate or innumerate or both.

Even these children can however see the disparity in accountability between them and their teachers. The regular civil service teachers in Uttar Pradesh are massively privileged: making over three times the market wage, no accountability, not even to show up for work, and able to mistreat students with impunity. Data from the 2005 India Human Development Survey (Desai, Dubey, Vanneman, and Banerji 2008) show that 29 percent of parents report their child was “beaten or pinched” in government schools in the previous month. Worse, a child from the poorest group of households is almost twice as likely to be beaten or pinched in a government school than a child from the richest group of households. This is in contrast to private schools which show no income favoritism in beating. Studies consistently find absence rates of regular teachers in government schools in UP around 25 percent—not to mention low rates of effort when in attendance.

Recent research (Atherton and Kingdon 2010) shows that if somehow UP in 2009 had been able to replace its regular teachers making around 11,000 rupees a month with contract teachers working for 3000 rupees a month that UP could have saved more than a billion dollars (Roughly 600,000 primary and upper primary teachers times 8000 rupees monthly wage differential (11000 less 3000) times 12 months divided by 45 rupees/$). This replacement of regular with contract teachers would appear to double child learning per year as the estimated “contract teacher” impact on learning, controlled econometrically as finely as possible for cofounding effects like selection using student and school fixed effects, is roughly the same as an additional year with a regular teacher.

Suppose you are a child from a poor household approaching adolescence in Uttar Pradesh who has struggled through years of schooling without learning anything, been promoted from year to year with no attention to your actual learning, perhaps even regularly beaten or threatened by teachers.   You might consider dropping out of this “fierce” thing called school.

But wait. The development technocracy with its latest rigorous research methods and can-do, expansion of “what works” attitude has the solution to your drop-out problem: they will threaten your mother.   This is a wildly new popular class of programs called “conditional cash transfers” which has spread from its origins in Mexico and Brazil to over 30 countries. The design is simple, use some targeting method to determine eligible households and offer the eligible households cash (often paid to the mother of the household) but only if all their school aged children stay in school. These conditional cash transfers, to no one’s surprise, have been rigorously proven to reduce child drop-out.

For the state and those that see for the state and like the state, see the problem of child drop-out is a problem of the household not complying with the state’s objective to universalize enrollment. The obvious solution is to make the poor child and poor households more accountable to the state’s narrowly drawn objective of increasing enrollment. That the real goal was to properly educate the child gets lots in the counting. Once the problem of education is re-defined so that the state can easily see and measure it as schooling then forcing a child back into a disastrous school counts exactly as much in increasing enrollment as attracting children to stay in school because they are learning.

Of course in cases like Uttar Pradesh it is obvious the reality is that the functionaries of the state are not accountable to citizens for adequate, or even humane, service delivery. However “seeing” that teachers should be more accountable for a quality of schooling experience that would retain students however requires seeing what even a child can see, but which the state has no interest in seeing, and hence no capability to see. Holding powerful teachers accountable, while cost-saving and learning increasing, is politically difficult. Even giving poor people a choice in where their children attend school is politically difficult to get by the educationist lobby. But holding poor people accountable is always politically easy.

Of course when CCTs force children back into school the children might not learn to read and might not learn to divide, but they will learn an important, if tragic, life lesson: when you are poor the state has power and you do not.

Moving up

2012-01-16T22:34:00.001-08:00

Mark Lawrence, International Program Manager... just spent an hour bailing out a flooded, half-sunk boat on a crocodile infested river.

Yup, definitely moving up in the world...

Home away from home away from home

2011-12-18T10:59:00.000-08:00

So, as luck would have it Corinna and I have arranged to have a weekend/vacation home in the mountains.

Don't worry, it's ok to be jealous.

So, the place is a 3 bedroom, 2 bath house with a long front veranda, living room, kitchen, cooking hut, garden and a good bit of land. It sits on top of a hill overlooking a farming valley and forest reserve, and we can watch sunsets from the front lawn. There is a live-in guard and gardener and his family. I really like all of them, and they are very helpful. The place is amazing. Here's some photos:

Front Veranda

Living Room

View on a somewhat hazy day

The Garden, planted with Rape and banana

The backside of the house with the cooking hut

Getting a mango snack from the front yard

We like it here - even if I look a little bedraggled

Watching a rainstorm blow in

Me peeling a mango on our veranda

One of our banana trees will have nice ripe fruit soon.

Relaxing after a busy week.

Corinna's update for 2011

2011-12-15T08:08:00.000-08:00

Corinna has posted an update with a Christmas letter saying what we did for 2011. I'm amazed at all we've been doing! You should check it out here.

Surprise!

2011-12-07T10:07:00.001-08:00

Last night I was having a hard time sleeping when I heard a strange sound. I thought - could that be? No way... that couldn't have been a lion roaring, there are only 2 lions in Liwonde National Park.

Then, right after, I heard groups of elephants trumpeting and moving around. It was incredibly loud and woke up Corinna. We weren't sure what all the fuss was about.

This afternoon, I talked with one of that staff here who confirmed that yes, there was a lion prowling nearby and it did in fact roar. He thinks the elephants were trumpeting to raise the alarm against the lion or perhaps to scare it away.

This thing called life is pretty crazy.

So here I am

2011-12-07T10:01:00.001-08:00

I’ve done an appalling job of giving any information aboutmy situation here, so let me do that. We live in Mvuu Camp in LiwondeNational Park. Mvuu means Hippo in Chichewa, the national language of Malawi alongside English. The camp is a rustic environment with really great amenities –good food, bar, beautiful patio, swimming pool. We don’t regularly partake inthose amenities because we are staying here as part of our relationship withour partner organization, Central African Wilderness Safaris, but it is a greatplace. The park is also beautiful – all the pictures I’ve posted of animalshave been taken in the park. In fact, there are hippos, elephants, monkeys,baboons, warthogs and impalas all around our house. The other night I couldn’tsleep because of the all the hippos and elephants eating outside the tent(hippos munching grass is quite loud!)

We are staying in a permanent tent house with a wood beamstructure supporting canvas and netting. We have electricity and internetbetween 7 am – 12 pm and 6 pm – 9 pm. We also have running water.

We primarily work at Nanthomba Primary school, and alsosupport and work with 3 other primary schools and a Health Clinic that ourorganization built and transferred to the government of Malawi. To get to theschool, we take a boat across the Shire (pronounced Sheer-ay) river and thenhire a bike taxi (think budget richshaw where you just sit on the luggage rackof a bicycle) for the 2 km ride through the edge of the park to Nanthomba,which is less than a kilometer from the national park.

Our program has after school activities, in which we teachtrades to primary school students and sell the products to meet the cost of theprogram, as well as income generating activities that are just meant to coverthe costs of the school but for various reasons we do not heavily involve thestudents. I am in charge of the tin smithing and permaculture after schoolactivities. On the income generating side, I am also in charge of supervisingour gardening activities, maintenance activities, and research into anear-future poultry program, as well as developing new initiatives. Corinna isin charge of the bead-making, tailoring and music afterschool activities, aswell as the mushroom income generating activity.

To leave the area to partner with another organization,grocery shop, travel or whatever we take a dirt road (or sometimes a path). Wegenerally take an hour bike taxi ride to the nearest town on a paved road andthen pick up transport from there.

So now you know a little bit about our life here!

Things To be Thankful for

2011-11-24T07:55:00.001-08:00

This being Thanksgiving, I thought I’d put together a listof things to be thankful for. Today was just a normal working day for us(actually a rather exhausting one), but on Saturday we will be celebratingThanksgiving with some chickens, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, braisedcarrots… it should be good.

Anyway, here’s the list. I am thankful for:

· Having a supportive family
· Friends that reach out to help me from across thecontinents
· Just having heard from a friend in Mali (How Imiss my friends there and hope they are reaping an excellent harvest rightnow!)
· The availability of Soya here
· The opportunity to go to amazing places aroundthe world
· A loving girlfriend
· My new Malawian friends
· Living in a national park
· That the hippo we hit in our boat today did notget angry and attack the boat (he was submerged under water and we hit himpretty hard!)

What are you thankful for?

I feel dumb

2011-11-20T22:46:00.001-08:00

So, apparently after 2 years I still don't understand how blogging workings. My account just told me I should check my spam folder for comments, and I accidentally checked my regular comment folder instead (whoops) - and found dozens, if not hundreds, of comments I had never seen before.

Double whoops.

I was under the (apparently) mistaken assumption that I was receiving an e-mail when someone posted a comment to my blog.

Triple whoops.

So if I never replied to some message you tried to write me, it's because I'm dumb. I know to check that from now on, and if your old comment has any relevance to today, I'll reply via e-mail or facebook or some other bizarre new-fangled method of communication. If you've despaired of writing me insightful messages because I'm an insolent jerk who never replies, you're right. But I can change!

Malawi Safaris

2011-11-20T22:17:00.001-08:00

Malawi Safaris, a set on Flickr.

Photos from our safaris in Malawi

First day of work, laziness style

2011-11-17T07:58:00.001-08:00

Corinna wrote a good description of our first day of work with HELP Malawi on her blog, and rather than duplicating effort I am aiming for efficiency. So basically, I'm taking the easy way out. See it here:

Corinna's blog

I've... arrived!

2011-11-15T22:12:00.001-08:00

So I know it's been 2 and a half weeks since I left and I haven't posted a thing since Johannesburg. Well, we did safely arrive. Until last Tuesday we were living in a different house with no access to the internet. A week ago we moved into our house and have started settling in, but last Thursday the internet went down and just came back up. So, internet will still be spotty, I think.

Once i've caught up on work from the past week I'll be aiming to put up some pictures and give a description of my new home.

Touchdown!

2011-10-26T09:42:00.000-07:00

Well, Corinna and I have arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa! After 23 hours on planes and in airports it's nice to stay the night in a nice hotel before the day-long trip to Malawi tomorrow.

One month back and it's time to take off again

2011-10-20T20:03:00.000-07:00

Well, it's official. Corinna and I have both accepted positions as National Program Manager/Program Development Manager at H.E.L.P. Malawi, a non-profit organization based in (surprise surprise!) Malawi.

This organization has some innovative ideas that they have applied to a school in southern Malawi. Even more importantly, they are interested in sustainable development. To that end, we will be in charge of implementing, managing and improving revenue generating programs that will eventually fund the operations of the school. I'm really excited for this opportunity!

We will be living in rural Malawi but with amenities like internet and electricity so I should do a much better job of keeping in touch!

Amazingly, we leave on Tuesday - meaning we will have been in America for exactly one month!

Fire those coal bunkers! Build up steam! Movin' Out!

2011-09-09T01:38:00.000-07:00

So, after a couple of months lolly-gagging around, making Spanish and French friends, working on farms and just doing all sorts of things to bum ourselves across Europe, it's time for Corinna and I to head on home.

Tomorrow we board a cruise ship for America. It's a long one, so I'll be in California on the 25th. Looking forward to seeing everyone, and I'll keep folks posted once I have my particulars, like a phone number and an address.

See you soon!

Mark

Things I will miss (and won't) miss about Mali

2011-07-20T06:51:00.000-07:00

So, reflecting on my time, here's what I love about Mali that I will dearly miss:

Friendliness: everyone is many, many times more friendly and welcoming than your average American
My friends and, truly, my Malian family: I've become incredibly close to people here, who have been so kind to me.
Street food: so cheap! so good! What will I do without my Furu furu? My achetke? My egg sandwhiches? My sho and juga? Probably get less diarrhea. But I'll pay the diarrhea price for achetke any day.
No pressure, high stress: If someone tells you that being a volunteer is stress free, that ain't true. But it's good stress: it comes from within, pushing you to do well, and it comes from without, challenging your language and cultural integration and knowledge of your surroundings. But there really is no such thing as pressure here
The fruit: Ok, here in Mali there isn't that much, but there are delicious mangos and guavas briefly (up in the north by me, down south they are plentiful). And in Guinea, Ghana, senegal, etc? I dream about it. Straight up.
Animals: what am I going to do without all the goats and chickens and cows and donkeys wandering around? I'll be lonely! Also, goat is delicious! Why don't we eat more goat in America?
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity
The village: I love living in village! We could throw out 90% of our crap in America and not miss a thing.
Joking: Everything is a big joke here, EVERYTHING. Fart jokes abound. My dad would love it.
Having my own personal tailor, and being able to wear the most ridiculous (to us) fabrics.
Being. A. Rock. Star. No kidding. I'm the only American, only Westerner, only non-West African living in a 30 k radius. Everybody knows me. Children organize parades to take me down the street to lunch. Let me tell you, it's kind of nice.

Things I won't miss about Mali:

I'm sure you're expecting lots of physical hard ship, but honestly I don't mind. Bring on the no electricity and heat and hauling water and desert and ruined buses. Turns out none of that really matters at all, nor (for a single person with no kids and no need to be connected) is even that inconvenient really.
Always having the same conversations: People have fixed ideas about Ameriki. It takes a lot to change those ideas.
Bureaucracy: 'Nuff said.
Malaria, ameobas, heat rash, ant bites, termite attacks, scorpion stings, etc...
Foolishly set up non-governmental organisations & projects
Broken promises to villagers (not mine)
Corruption.
Watching my good friends suffer, get sick and sometimes die because they had the misfortune to be born in such a poor, inhospitable place.

Some Pieces of Advice

2011-07-20T06:18:00.001-07:00

So, there's a vast network of Peace Corps blogs that new folks use to figure out what the heck they're getting into. With having a slightly, er... unusual service over 2 countries I'm not sure if people coming to Guinea and Mali would ever find this one. If your just one of my friends you may want to skip over this one. But anyways, here's some pointers:

Packing:
You don't need it. Leave it at home. You can apply that statement to almost anything you want to bring. Remember, people live here already, so if it's necessary, you can buy it here (and almost certainly for a lot cheaper than in America. A few things I AM glad I brought (or wish I brought):

a tiny laptop: it helps with PC work a lot. Small is better, you have to carry the damn thing
Ipod, Ipod charger
converter from American to french wall plug system
rechargeable batteries (you can find batteries here, but it cuts way down on waste and there's no good way to dispose of batteries here)
a decent backpack to schlepp your crap
chinese folding fan: it'll save your life on transport on hot season
razor blades and shaving cream
portable hard drive - it's easy to have electronics fail here, it's good to have back ups.

Almost anything else would have been cheaper and easier just to get here. Some things that people often say are important to bring that I disagree with are:

good knife: my Malian one was cheaper, easier to sharpen, and lasted better
fancy camping clothes
really, any sort of camping equipment if you're not a die-hard camper who is determined to camp in Africa. People don't camp here.
American nice clothes. Peace Corps tells you to bring a nice outfit for functions or whatever. Don't. You probably won't go to many, and if you do, you'll be wearing that sweet new Malian complet you just got made.

General advice on being a volunteer:

Stay at site, stay at site, stay at site: Many volunteers find it hard at first at site; there's unfamiliar food, people, customs, language, daily routines... basically, every part of your life will be unfamiliar to you. And that's stressful. But here's the thing: if you leave because when you get a little stressed out, it's never going to become comfortable so you'll always be leaving. The staying at site for the first three months things is particularly important, but it continues to be important throughout.
Don't box yourself in. So Peace Corps recruits you to be a volunteer in this one area, but there's nothing preventing you from really doing whatever you want once you get there. So use this freedom productively by finding out what interests local people, is achievable with local resources, makes sense and interests you, and do that - even if it's not in your job description. One of the best parts is you get to make your own job description.
Remember: you probably came to your post to meet local people from that culture. Never forget your goals. It's easy to fall into the "volunteer trap" where you spend more time with Americans (volunteers or expats) than you did with Malians, or Guineans, or whoever. Go the path less traveled.
If your not happy and productive, go home. Lot's of volunteers won't leave service even if they're miserable. But if you're miserable, you're not going to be productive. So you're not helping yourself and you're not helping anyone else. In fact, some people would say you are doing a disservice to the people at your site, because they end up disappointed by lack of progress, and less likely to take future risks to improve their livelyhood.
Remember, stay at site!

Bonne chance! ala k'i ko nogoya!

The Left Handed Shake

2011-07-15T01:25:00.000-07:00

In my last week here in Mali, I've decided to put up something once a day or so, as a way of saying goodbye.

Before coming up to this point, I was never sure how I would feel about leaving Mali. I once was with a volunteer during her final hour or two at site, and she seemed to feel relief at the idea of getting out of here more than anything else. Many people seem to feel that way. At the time, I couldn't imagine being relieved to leave, but I also knew that this has been one of the most difficult places I've lived, and one of the most difficult - perhaps not in the usual sense, but difficult - jobs I have ever done. There's been times that the sheer challenge of life here was more than I wanted to bear, times when I was so frustrated with the culture here that I would do anything to get away from it.

In the end, I've come full circle to where I had hoped I would be now from my hopes and expectations of 3 years ago when I applied. I love Mali, and West Africa in general, in a way that nowhere else I've been or lived has ever matched. Life here is daunting - lack of water, limited food, extreme heat, poor materials and everything breaking down under the twin forces of sand and heat - but immensely satisfying and rewarding. Everyone is in it together and I've made better friends here than I ever imagined I would. I'm proud of the work of done; there is nothing as satisfying as successfully accomplishing your goals in an environment like this.

In Mali, when saying good bye for an indefinite, long time, one shakes with their left hand. The left handed shake is a cultural faut pas, an impoliteness that you must come back to correct.

I'll be back.

Packages and whatnot

2011-05-09T05:05:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone!

I want to thank everyone who has sent letters, e-mails and packages for all their support. I guess I'm wrapping up relatively soon (in a couple months) and, well, in Africa 2 months is very soon. So please refrain from any more packages as it's possible they would not arrive before I leave. Letters tend to get here quicker, and also aren't such an investment, so that's fine for maybe another month or so.

After that, it's back to e-mail!

Twin Frustrations, Part 2

2011-03-10T08:15:00.000-08:00

I mentioned how frustrating I found the New York Time's article "Mali Rankled by Rules for Life in Spotlight". In my first post, I discussed my frustrations with the article itself, but I also percieve a more underlying difficulty.

I've noticed that often people will blame their circumstances or troubles on things outside of their control here. Now, I'm guessing that's a pretty universal problem, but it can be particularly frustrating when you are attempting to empower people to sustain a development project. This article is a great example, in that the article claims that people are frustrated that they are placed under rules by their leadership that come with being a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but are not seeing the benefits. The article also states that the benefits accrue to a small elite, including the Imam of the mosque and his advisers. This is hard for me to know, but seems plausible. Wouldn't then the appropriate place to direct anger and resentment be to the leadership who is siphoning off the rewards of tourism, rather than the organization that helped funnel tourist dollars into Djenné?

Often people will blame France (who played a horrible, atrocious role in the colonization of West Africa but I don't see much evidence for them continuing that negative role) or the United States or the west in general for the situation in Mali. If only we contributed more, or contributed differently, or changed this or that policy, things would be better. But Djenné is a good example of how a benign foreign presence can not resolve all problems, though it can assist strong, positive local leadership in resolving those problems.

I understand people's rationale here. Criticizing the developed countries or the UN is safe. Criticizing your national - or worse, local - government is dangerous. When I discuss the unrest in North Africa with Malians, I see a people rising up against corruption, mismanagement and totalitarianism and demanding their rights. Yes, it is awful that people are being assaulted by their own governments, but they must forge on. Most Malians, on the other hand, see people being assaulted by their own governments, and pray that this instability doesn't reach Mali. Accountability is a scary concept to apply when you don't know what the president or army might be willing to do to you.

Photos

2011-03-09T06:36:00.000-08:00

Plenty new photos, and some videos available at my Flickr website. Many of them are from our trip to Ghana, though there are some random other things as well. Also, if you have facebook, Corinna tagged me in a bunch of photos there.

Speaking videos, I can do this sweet dance:

I did it for our independence day celebration. Men do it, and women give away head scarves to their favored dancers.

Also, how awesome is this:

Twin Frustrations, Part 1

2011-03-09T04:04:00.000-08:00

So, one of the sadder and more frustrating parts of living in Africa is how hopelessly wrong our media gets it's portrayals of life, conflicts and politics. It's no surprise that American's views of Africa are so distorted when they read such crap in the paper (and watch even worse crap on the nightly news).

This New York Time's article "Mali Rankled by Rules for Life in Spotlight" is a perfect example, especially because the city discussed, Djenné, is less than 25 miles from my town and I have been there more than a dozen times and have many friends there.

The article discusses frustrations within the city of Djenné over their status as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The first problem is that the article is factually incorrect at times and factually misleading at other points. For example, the article states that the art of hand-making mud bricks is dying out because of lack of raw materials, such as rice husks and tree paste, when a cursory look around Mali would reveal that the vast, vast majority of houses are made of mud bricks. The real issue is that people now make bricks by wooden form instead of by hand, presumably because it is vastly easier.

Also, the article states that rooms are not big enough to accomodate double beds and that families want to add armoires too, but the mud architecture does not leave enough space. I have been in more than a dozen homes in Djenné, all or nearly all of them historic, and have never seen a bedroom that small. The article implies that this is a common problem in Djenné when it seems more likely to be a problem particular to one of the two interviewees in the article.

Finally, the article implies that UNESCO's designation and subsequent projects are responsible for the raw sewage that sometimes ends up in the streets in rainy season and the trash that is everywhere. But these are problems everywhere in Mali. In Segou, one of the tidiest, most modern cities in the country, there is sewage in the streets as everything overflows from rainy season and trash can be found all over. In fact, trash is a major problem in my town.

In reality, it's easier and safer for the residents of Djenné to complain about UNESCO than to complain about the leadership of their town. The town is not going to change because of UNESCO's actions; it will only change when the residents demand accountability from their leaders. This article, by failing to fact check even the most basic statements given by their interviewees, promotes misinformation in America and allows Malian leaders to avoid responsibility.

Whoops!

2011-01-28T03:09:00.001-08:00

I seem to have been writing posts and then forgetting to upload them later when I actually have internet! Silly me. Hence the deluge of posts right now and the relative paucity in the past few months.

Anyway, I tried not to duplicate but one that I did in fact post might have snuck in there. If so, enjoy reading it again!

Detective Mark

2011-01-28T03:03:00.000-08:00

So waaay back when, perhaps it was July, I was sitting in a bus heading back from Segou when I was approached by another American. It seems she had been a Peace Corps Volunteer and was returning to Mali to visit old friends and whatnot. She had been entrusted a letter from another former volunteer to be delivered to a family in Djenné, and as I live not far from Djenné I agreed to deliver it. It wasn't until much later that I looked more carefully at the envelope and realized it was addressed to "The Host Family of Tenenba". This, as information goes, was pretty inadequate. It didn't say the name of this host family, or what quarter they lived in. It didn't in fact list any Malian names. It only had the Malian first name the volunteer had taken, not even their last name.

So I couldn't contact Peace Corps - they generally know us by our American names - and I had absolutely no idea who to talk to in Djenné, which is a city of roughly 15,000 people. In Madiama I could just ask "who's friends with the white girl?" and be good to go, but Djenné has a fair number of white tourists around. So I asked at random, which, predictably, didn't gt me very far.

So I set the letter aside, promising myself I would come back to it when I had a bright idea. Then part of my rough collapsed during the rains, soaking a lot of my papers, including the letter. Then crazy mice started eating old correspondence of mine and then dying because it turns out a mouse can only digest so much bleached white paper and cardstock.So when I randomly found someone recently who knew the old volunteer in question, there wasn't much left to deliver. But today I delivered the remains, which turned out to once have been 4 photos that had been glued together by the water damage. I would have felt bad for the condition of the letter, but that's what all my stuff looks like too.

Getting to see a host family reminisce about an old volunteer was really enjoyable. It was clear that, regardless of the volunteer's project work, they had made an impact on this one family and had successfully learned something about each others' cultures. The family insisted I now had somewhere to stay any time I was in Djenné and gave me fresh milk and rice and sauce for lunch, which was very nice of them. They were shocked that I ate Malian rice and sauce, which was confusing. What had the four volunteers that had lived with this family eaten?

No, what are YOU doing here?

2011-01-28T02:57:00.000-08:00

So one day I was sitting at the side of the road waiting for a bus. I had been sitting for some hours, hoping to flag down any transport I could that was heading in the right way, when my friend Fak?r? said that there was a toubabouce (white guy) coming. I looked, and at first thought he was wrong and there was an albino swaddled in a turban coming. Then he got closer and I realized the turban was a dirty, mange-y white beard and it was in fact a white man.

He was biking down the road in an ancient road bike loaded down in every possible way. There were bags hanging off the rack on back, bags tied on top, bags hanging off the front, bags on the handle bar, a 1 gallon water jug stored in the center of the frame. He wasn't moving very fast. He pulls up, spouting rapid fire German at me. I'm stunned, and would likely not have responded to him even if I did speak a lick of german. Just to be clear, I was way the heck out in the middle of no where. What was this guy doing here?

Finally he decides that my blank stare means I don't speak German and tries English (an odd choice in a franco-phone country, but then, he was an odd fellow). I - just - manage to confirm that I do speak English before he is off, talking a mile a minute. It seems he is a guy who has been biking around Africa for the last 20 years and decided to bike up to Timbouctou, but turned around because too many people were telling him he'd be a damn fool to bike through the desert where there were folks wandering around trying to kidnap germans. So now he had time on his hands and was sort of meandering around Mali, offering to help wherever he went, though I couldn't imagine that was going very well since he didn't appear to speak any language intelligible to people here, including French.

Eventually, he realizes that it is a bit odd that he found me randomly on the side of the road and asks me "What are you doing here?"

"What do you mean, what am I doing here?", I reply. "I live here."

"What do you mean, you live here?"

"I live here. Well, not here, here. I live a few kilometers that way."

I point off to the North. We both lapse into silence, each of us looking at the other like they are absolutely bonkers.

"Right then," he says, "where can I get some food? I only ate a banana since yesterday."

I give him directions to the next town, watch him bike off, and then turn to my friend: "Ça c'est bizarre."

A few differences

2011-01-28T02:43:00.000-08:00

I thought it might be enlightening to compare my different experiences in West Africa after returning from Ghana and passing through Burkina Faso.

So, some broad and likely misleading generalizations:

• In two and a half weeks, our transport never broke down in Ghana. This might not sound like much, but we were traveling most days. And really, the only time in the last year and a half that I have gone two weeks without a car or bus breaking down is when I haven't traveled for two weeks. Honestly. As an example, once we left Burkina Faso and entered Mali, there were four seperate breakdowns between entering Mali and arriving at my site.

• Not only did transport not break down, but it was fast, efficient, clean, not overcrowded, sometimes air conditioned and cost the same as similar transport costs in Mali and Guinea. This was frankly astonishing. I could accept transport being better in Ghana (and for the most part, Burkina Faso as well) since the standard of living is higher, but that they can offer a service a hundred, a thousand times better for the same price is frankly mysterious, especially given the intense competition in the transport industry in Mali.

• Chinese food, and in particular, Chinese fast food, is considered haute culture in Ghana.

• Ghana seems to take more pride in it's history and culture than anywhere else I have been in West Africa. There are numberous museums throughout the country with well-presented, interesting and informative displays, where as Guinea has no museum to speak of and the museums of Mali are not of the same level. The only place of similar quality in terms of the ability to explore pre-colonial and colonial history that I have been to is Senegal, but people in Senegal did not seem to take the same pride in their culture and history. What was even more interesting is that there were a significant number of Ghanaians exploring these cultural sites, whereas other places I've been it is just foreigners and a handful of Africans from other countries

• Ghana is predominantly Christian but has a signifcant Muslim minority in the north of the country and has higher levels of religious tensions than Mali, which is predominantly Muslim, or Guinea, which is predominantly Muslim but with a much larger Christian minority and incredibly smooth relations between the two. Of course, Ghana's religions get along much better than many of the other surrounding countries.

• In Mali and Guinea, if someone approached while you are eating it would be rude not to offer to share. Throwing away food is unthinkable. In Ghana, it seemed to be rude to offer to share a partly eaten bowl of rice with stranger.

• Coconuts, when taken still fresh off a coconut palm and eaten taste almost nothing like coconuts you get in America or in Mali. They are amazingly refreshing, filled with juice, the meat is soft and succulent and has none of the bitter flavor of the cocnuts we're used to eating.

• Beer appears to be watery, bitter and with a weird chemical taste, and yet somehow still a delicious treat throughout West Africa. Except that love of my West African life, Stone!

Tropical Paradise

2011-01-28T02:28:00.001-08:00

In the past, I've made the mistake of not updating about something until I could upload pictures, which leads to delays of some months. So this time, I'm going to make a different mistake and do the update without the photos - i.e., the best part.

Corinna, Yik and I went to Ghana for Christmas and New Year's and had an amazing time seeing a whole different side of West Africa. We did a pretty good tour of the country, seeing a lot, though certainly not all, of the major things to see and spent a lot of time on the coast. By the way, the coast of Ghana is where it's at. Warm, clean waters, beautiful beaches, waves if you want them or tranquility of that's your preference, coconut palms everywhere, the most delicious pineapple I've ever tasted, canoes coming in with fresh fish, scenic forts and castles moldering on hill sides and even $5-10 lobster if you want it.

We spent Christmas on the beach and New Year's Eve in the capital, Accra and a good portion of the rest of the time moving up and down the coast sampling some wonderful spots. We took land transport to and from Ghana

Now, Ghana is still Africa and so we kept waiting for the other foot to fall - transport breaking down, being unable to get places, strange, inexplicable problems or hassles propping where you least expect it, no food, bad food, no water, water that you rnot sure you should be eating, realizing you are paying the same prices for something as you would in America even though you are decidedly not in America - and it really never fell, at least not too hard. (We did laugh one time on entering a restaurant adorned with beautiful pictures of all the food they served only to find out that they didn't have any of the items on their menu, they only served fried rice, a Ghanaian urban fast food staple. Yep, still in Africa).

We met up with some other foreigners and expats and heard the usual frustrations people have here, exasperated as usual by a lack oof understanding or willingness to accept the culture here, and I tried the best I could to listen since we all need to gripe about that kind of stuff sometimes. But at a certain point It seemed necessary to interject and add "foolish us, we've been looking around and seeing practically paradise".

Ghana is known as the "Black Star" of Africa, after it's football team the Black Stars and it's relative economic success brought on some wise decisions early on, relatively successful integration of different ethnicities and religions and abundance of natural resources. Being there gave me so many thigns to compare with Mali, which is relatively successful politically but endowed with so few natural resources, and Guinea, which is incredibly richly endowed with resources but econimically crushed under the weight of dictators and corruption.

Sometimes Ghana could be a little disconcerting, such as seeing Africans on jetskis whizzing by poverty stricken, collapsing fishing villages. But it would be overmuch to focus on the contrast between the two. Instead, it helped me to contrast this image with those of other places, where the only people economically secure enough to enjoy this sense of leisure is rich foreigners, and the poverty stricken, collapsing fishing village is just the same, or poorer. It would also be disconcerting to enter a place seeming entirely Western, only to discover that it still wasn't quite home. This happened when we entered the new, shiny shopping mall of Accra, fancier than many of the malls I've been to in the states, and ate at the food court only to discover that we couldn't get food from different establishments and then sit together - we were supposed to sit in front of the restaurant we bought food at. This seemed ridiculous. Isn't, after all, the whole idea of a food court that you and your friends can choose to eat different kinds of food together? But just because something is borrowed from America, doesn't mean it has to stay exactly the same. In all, Ghana gave me a great sense of hope. This is what development really means, what developing countries are becoming - not only somewhere where you can verifiably see progress made, but in the very air there is a tingling anticipation of future advancement in the air.

Explanations are thin on the ground

2011-01-28T02:16:00.000-08:00

Villagers in Mali don't really have that much interaction with foreigners, or even people from more than a few hundred kilometers away. Being surrounded by only your own culture does not equip you to explain cultural practices or nuances, you just display them and children learn them by, well, osmosis really. That makes cultural exchange interesting here, because often times I'll be trying to figure out the meaning behind a practice, or it's raison d'être, or even just what exactly we're doing and my questions fall on deaf ears. It's just not the kind of question that ever gets asked.

For example, Corinna and I are both often called Coulibali. Coulibali is a last name here, and it's pretty normal to call someone by their last name. The thing is, our last names are Keita and Konatε, respectively. And the relationship between the Keitas and Konatεs (who are basically from the same origin) and Coulibalis is what is called a "joking cousin" relationship, where Keitas and Konatεs will say that Coulibalis are no good, they eat beans, they eat dogs or cats or donkeys, they are thieves, etc., and the Coulibalis say the same thing about the Keitas and Konatεs. Example dialogue follows:

Coulibali: You Konatεs are no good!

Konatε: Yeah well, Coulibalis only eat beans! They never eat any meat, just beans!

Coulibali: Dog's taste good to you, you Konatε!

Konatε: I haven't seen my dog lately. What, did you steal it? Coulibalis are no good!

Coulibali: I didn't steal your dog. See, Konatεs are always lying!

etc, etc, etc...

So no Keita or Konatε would ever accept being called Coulibali, and it's not culturally okay to call a Keita Coulibali or vice-versa. So it's been always frustrating on a variety of levels when people call us Coulibali. First, it seems like a reminder that we're not from here, that our last names don't really matter. But it's really important to Malians that we integrate culturally as much as possible, and we have worked really hard to understand Malian culture and integrate with it. And then, it seems disrespectful in that no one would ever call a Keita Coulibali here, and since we're expected to live according to Malian culture, it seems like we are being disrepected.

I've tried hard to find an explanation for why people do this, and failed continually until recently. It may be hard to understand outside of the culture here, but it could be literally infuriating to have people constantly mocking my name, not by saying I eat beans or am a thief (which would be fine), but by calling me Coulibali. Finally though, Corinna and I were walking and a shop owner called me Coulibali and corrected him and asked, as I have asked others many times before, why he would say Coulibali. He said that the Coulibalis were the founders of the kingdom of Segou, the kingdom that united most of present day Mali under the leadership of the Bambara ethnic group in the late 18th and early 19th century. Calling a white person, who obviously does not really have a Bambara surname, is really a sign of respect.

Oops. Would have been good to know that a year ago.

Unless a Coulibali does it of course, because they are donkey eating, farting, thieving liers. Hey Coulibali, do you like your dogmeat grilled or in rice and sauce?

You know your a Tellem when it takes black voodoo magic to make the climb to your house

2010-12-10T03:23:00.000-08:00

So back in September I went on a hiking trip with Corinna and our friend Dorian to Dogon country. Sorry it took me so long to blog about it, but it can't be done justice with pictures and pictures requires a decent internet connection.

Dogon Country is a series of cliffs running 100 km in the north of Mali near the border with Burkina Faso. The people there are are for the most part the Dogon people, who split off from other Mande people such as the Bambara (the largest ethnic group in Mali) a long time ago, possibly around the time Islam began to penetrate Mali, but also possibly long before that.

I've heard two stories: that when the Dogon came the other people in the area had already moved on, but also that when the Dogon came the Tellem people were still around. The area was richly forested and the Tellem were hunter gatherers that went into the forests to hunt and returned to the cliffs for shelter. They lived high in the cliffs and were said to ascend to their homes by way of putting magical substances on their hands and feet so they could climb straight up the walls, and bridging vast canyons with rope bridges. Their houses are incredibly inaccessible, like nothing I have ever seen. This picture is of the MOST accessible ones, but it is also the best photo I have:

The Dogon cleared land for farming in the valleys, and eventually deforestation drove out the large animals, and with them, the Tellem. But the Dogon adopted compromise villages that were still high in the rocks and unaccessible, but more accessible than the Tellem. This protected them from outside influence and leaves an outstanding glimpse into life here for the Mande peoples before the influence of Islam, Christianity and trade.

We spent three days hiking and learning about the culture and receiving some of my deepest, and most intriguing glimpses into animism, the religion that predates Islam in these parts. The people were great, the scenery was gorgeous... and the hike was grueling. I loved it, but of course I was there for three days. There are people there that spend 6 days of the week walking between villages as traders. For some villages, there is no access for any sort of transport at all, not even a donkey, so everything must be transported by hand. Women and children in some villages haul EVERY drop of water they use 500 meters or more up a cliffside to the village. And at harvest time, every scrap of the harvest must be hauled up the hills. Its truly an amazing and difficult life.

Here is a couple more photos, but there are many more here to check out:

No Doom, No Gloom

2010-12-10T02:33:00.000-08:00

One of the things I occasionally hear is that aid is ineffective because of any number of reasons. People may admit that there are folks that really need help, but we do such a poor job giving it that we should either start over from scratch or give up.

Well, the problem with such doom and gloom is that it's nonsense. There has been real progress around the world fighting poverty, even in the most challenging area, sub-Saharan Africa:

Our main conclusion is that Africa is reducing poverty, and doing it much faster than many thought.

The growth from the period 1995-2006, far from benefiting only the elites, has been sufficiently widely spread that both total African inequality and African within-country inequality actually declined over this period.
The speed at which Africa has reduced poverty since 1995 puts it on track to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty relative to 1990 by 2015 on time or, at worst, a couple of years late.
If the Democratic Republic of Congo converges to the African trend once it is stabilised, the MDG will be achieved by 2012, three years before the target date.

We also find that the African poverty reduction is remarkably general.

African poverty reduction cannot be explained by a large country, or even by a single set of countries possessing some beneficial geographical or historical characteristic.
All classes of countries, including those with disadvantageous geography and history, experience reductions in poverty

I strongly encourage you to read the rest of this report, "African poverty is falling…much faster than you think", as it is pretty short and challenges a lot of conventional thinking on Africa.

Baptism by Baby!

2010-12-08T02:38:00.000-08:00

er... of fire. no, of baby!

So I recently went to a (relatively, by village terms) wealthy baptism and also a baptism of a poor family. My teacher friend, Kulu, had a baby boy. My counterpart, Fakoro, had a beautiful little baby girl. I thought it would be a good time for some compare and contrast. Also, some photos (mostly of Fakoro's baptême).

So, a baptism here (ideally) works like this: the baptism is the 8th day after the birthday of the baby (generally it falls on the same day of the week, which I always find confusing... isn't that only seven days?). Early in the morning, the oldest, most respected men of the village gather together to name the baby. They normally consider the wishes of the father, though it is ultimately their decision. (Every third daughter is named by the mother). The father has to bring money and dates to give to each of the old men, which typically costs in total around 10-20 dollars - substantial money, especially after paying the midwife or doctor. The men pray for the baby, bless the baby, call out a name and shave the baby's head. (In bambara, a baptism is called a denkundi, or baby shaving). The old men also give a small token gift of money to the father.

Later in the morning, the women gather with the new mother to offer small gifts and small amounts of money. The baby is passed around among the women and admired, while the mother generally insists the baby is ugly. This is because many people believe by giving the baby a name that means something ugly or saying the baby is ugly they are highlighting the blessing that a baby is. Afterwards, the women sing and dance - it is beautiful and fun and full of joy at the new life.

Meanwhile, the men gather and drink tea, eat peanuts and chat until the women make them a big meal at the expense of the father. He will kill chickens, a goat or even a sheep depending on how wealthy he is. The party lasts all day. This is pretty much* what my friend Kulu is, since he has a state job and is thus pretty wealthy in the village.

My friend Fakoro did the old man stuff in the morning - that's obligitory - and the women stuff is free and organized by women. But he couldn't throw a party for the men as it was too expensive for him.

*I said that's pretty much what my friend Kulu did but there was one exception. Kulu is one of 2 Christian families living in my village, everyone else is muslim. It's never a source of tension or problems, up to this baby. Kulu was concerned about naming the baby, because he wanted him to have a Christian name but also wanted him to fit into a muslim village. My friend Niete sensibly suggested naming him something that worked in both religions and was similar. So they decided on, I believe, Daouda/David. But the old men didn't follow his wishes and named the baby Mohammed. Kulu wasn't very happy with the decision, but there was nothing he could do about it. Likely the baby will acquire a nickname, and then Kulu will rename the baby when he moves.

Remember kids, say no to Malaria

2010-12-08T02:24:00.000-08:00

(and yes to your anti-malarial drugs)

So, I can now confirm that having malaria really, really, really is no fun. I started feeling the effects Sunday morning and luckily figured out what was going on pretty quick and got on the right meds. Now I'm not yet malaria-free, but I feel much, much better. I'd say it ranks up there in there in the worst I've felt, but it seems like I got off relatively light.

Anyway, I'm fine now, just stuck in the capital for a few days until all my blood work comes back perfect. And yesterday, as you may have noticed from the massive number of pictures I uploaded, the internet is back up. So expect to hear some from me.

New photos

2010-12-03T09:24:00.000-08:00

Some new photos are up of various hijinks, and some videos too. I've been having a hard time getting them to upload recently which has slowed up some posts I wanted to make.

More on their way.

La Fête d'Independance

2010-12-03T08:13:00.000-08:00

September 22 is the Malian Indepence day, and this is year 50 (photos). A little before the fête I was in the capital, Bamako, and the attitude of both volunteers and Malians seemed to be very negative towards the fête. Even the international news was saying what has Mali really accomplished in 50 years? Is this really something to celebrate? I went back to village before the fête to celebrate there, and having left all the new concrete and buildings behind it wasn't too hard to see what Madiamans have gotten in 50 years. They went from no schools in the entire commune to a primary school for almost every village and a secondary school in one. There are chatêaux which give clean, safe drinking water in 2 villages. There are many wells and not a few hand pumps. There are two dirt roads and one paved road. The population of the town has increased enormously. There is a community health center. Call me crazy, but isn't this progress? I don't recall Europe going from feudalism to modernity in 50 years, and they didn't have the devastating effects of colonialism to deal with.

Generally, I don't think that villagers fête (party, celebrate) - their idea of a fête is to do the exact same thing they do every other day. I'll say Bonne fête! What are we doing today? And people will heerily respond nothing! There's no food!

But it turns out I'm wrong. Madiama kɔw (the people of my village do know how to throw a party! Villagers from all 11 villages commune came the night before and there was lots of music and dancing. In the morning, there was music, dancing and games. There was "bobbing" for sardines, raw milk and other treats, sack races and a bike race to a neighboring village and back. The bike race turned out kind of dangerous; since the bikes don't have brakes the bikers just crashed into the crowd at the end of the race. The winner's face found a tree. He had to be carried to accept his prize, but after a few minutes he was back to himself.

One of my favorite parts was the troop of hunters that came from Bankassi, another village in my commune. There were many of them, dressed in mostly traditional hungers garb. One, Lasinε, was the singer and he sang very well. Another planed the ŋɔmin, an instrument similar to the guitar. Their music was beautiful and throughout the day they fired ancient muskets (often!). Many times the muskets jammed, and I was a little worried about a misfire killing people. It became clear that I wasn't the only one concerned when my friend Fakɔrɔ was convinced he took some shrapnel to the head (he was fine). The charges were massive; each one sounded like a canon.

Later, I was asked to dance in a circle with some of the other men. We danced to drums and a filε (wooden flute), slowly at first and then the tempo almost imperceptibly built. Women gave headscarves to the men who were dancing well until the air was filled with the flashing colors of dozens of headscarves. I collected so many scarves and danced so long my fist was locked around them. After a long time the tempo hit a feverish pitch; the sky became flashes of pink, green, blue white and black from the scarves. We all cheered, exultant, to cries of "i ni don!" and É ye donkε de!" You and the dance! You danced very well!

Cooking

2010-10-31T09:46:00.000-07:00

I love to cook, but ingredients in an African village on the edge of the Sahara are limited - unless you want to make the village staple of to (and you don't want to, trust me). So here's some tricks I've learned:

Need butter? Mix milk powder, water and peanut oil. Keep adding ingredients until the consistency is like oily, funny looking melted butter.
Need flour? Sift it through a piece of mosquito netting several times. It WILL be chock full of bugs and worms. Even the best mosquito net sifter won't catch the eggs, so you have to sift every time - and enjoy eating the eggs!
Speaking of eggs... if you find some, buy them. All of them, no matter what bird they come from. Eggs are extremely hard to come by, and will last a month or more without a refrigerator (who knew!)
Whatever you're making, add lots of garlic and onions. 10 months out of the year, that and okra are the only veggies happening. Of course, for a moth or two even the onion runs out. Maybe chop up some vitamin pills in your chow...
Remember, stale bread is better than no bread at all
On water: It's going to be dirty. If it's so dirty as to clog up your water filter, boil it instead of filtering until you can get a new filter. It'll still be dirty, but you'll feel better about drinking it. If it's brown, drink it down!
Small amounts of bleach in water = good for you, as it kills bacteria. Medium amount of bleach in water - makes you really gassy and uncomfortable. More bleach than that poisons you.
Gatorade. To make your own Gatorade: 1 liter water, 8 tablespoons sugar, 1 tablespoon salt, 1-2 limes, squeezed. It is easiest to make just after rainy season, when limes are plentiful. But it is most important to drink during hot season, when limes are nowhere to be found. It tastes bad without the limes.
On cold things: In the absence of electricity, a big clay pot does a surprisingly good job of providing the illusion of cold water. It's worth it to bike with a cooler and a block of ice 4o miles or more to have cold water at the end.
Using the power of the sun: In the heat of the day, you can make tea by putting tea bags into a glass container and leaving it in the sun. Be careful on hot days; you can burn yourself on the glass. For an extra treat, add lime juice and sugar and place in your big clay pot to make "iced" tea.

Well, I got what I bargained for

2010-10-18T06:08:00.000-07:00

So, it's a year and a bit since I became a Mali volunteer, which is as good an anniversary as any, I guess. Spurred on by lot's of reflections from my fellow evacuees (a year since coming to Africa, since becoming a volunteer, since evacuation, etc...) I figured I'd say a couple things.

First, I'm not going to say anything trite about how hard the evacuation was or any of that. It was a lot harder on the Guineans who stayed there, of course, not to mention those that died or lost a loved one in the violence. Guinea is approaching another election deadline on October 24th, and for the sake of everyone there I hope that they occur f reely, fairly and peacefully. I have a deep respect for all those who have pushed for change in Guinea, and I hope the government will see through it's promises and start on a brighter path.

Coming to Africa, I wanted a "vrai" experience. I was more interested in local language then French, knowing even then the French would sharply limit my ability to interact with those in my village. And I wanted to be out there - I wanted to focus as much time as possible on meeting and getting to know my West African counterparts, rather than interacting with Peace Corps. And I had a romantic notion - that I recognized as foolish even back then - that I wanted to be the first volunteer, to establish my own rapport with the people in my site.

Well, I got all that in spades coming to Madiama. I came here without local language skills (thanks for that french after all, Guinea!) and slowly, painfully built up my Bambara skills so that now I rarely speak french - or English, for that matter. And I left behind the support network of my fellow Guinean volunteers, without really an opportunity to build that with the volunteers of Mali. And I ended up pretty far out there, where I can really spend some quality time without much interaction outsite.

But of course things are changed too. I'm working in a sector for which I recieved very little training. Dating Corinna was a surprise - both of us insisted we didn't want to date in Peace Corps even as we began dating. But, in addition to all of her merits as a person and girlfriend and friend, I've been surprised to see her as a whole new window on Mali and, of course, Guinea. From turmoil, I have had great luck. I wish that on to my all of my friends in Mali and Guinea.

This blog's a survivor!

2010-10-01T10:06:00.000-07:00

Despite reports of this blog's unduly demise on facebook, I assure you it's still here! I always link on facebook when I put a post, but if you do not see posts there you can also find them at mark-en-afrique.blogspot.com.

Thanks for your concern, it's good to someone's still reading! (If a blog fails to post in a forest and no one is around to read it, what sound does it make?)

Massive termite mound

2010-09-16T14:58:00.001-07:00

Massive termite mound
Originally uploaded by lomamaestro

Termites. I hate termites. If I'm not careful, this'll be my house!

Planting okra, traditional style

2010-09-16T14:47:00.000-07:00

This is a video of a friend of my planting okra seeds. Okra is a crop planted only by women that can earn a bit of cash for the women. Except for plowing, which is usually done by an ox-pulled plow (and sometimes done by hand) almost all farm labor is done by hand, like this. People spend most of their time in the fields from July to December. Some people even have houses in the fields.

Speaking of plowing by ox, here's pictures of Corinna and I trying our hands at it:

Moringa Training

2010-09-16T14:17:00.000-07:00

I gave a training recently on Moringa in my town last week which went really well. It was a little unorthodox, but I'm really happy how it turned out. Corinna and the new volunteer Devon, who is somewhat near me, came out for it. Here they are coming with the tree brigade!

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Moringa is a tree originally from India that does really well in Africa. There are many uses for it's leaves and seeds, and it does really well with long dry seasons, heat, and a general lack of water. In a word, it's perfect for Madiama but hasn't been introduced here yet. Typically, volunteers will raise a crop of Moringa and give them out with information about the plant. Unforunately, most villagers never actually use the tree after that so there's no lasting change. So, I decided to do something else.

I planted these Moringas about 3 months ago, and recently they were ready to move from their bags into the ground. We started talking them up around the town and got people excited about the trees. We planted one in my compound for future volunteers and as an easy place for someone to come by and check out the tree. After we had a good buzz going, we started taking orders for trees.

See, we weren't giving these away; we were selling them for 75 CFA (about 15 cents) a tree. This made them affordable to my villagers, but meant that we would only get those who were truly interested in exploiting the trees. See, anyone would want a free tree here, but now these people are making an investment.

I also wrote a guide to Moringa in Bambara and French to distribute to literate members in the community. We sold color copies (there are lots of pictures) for 200 CFA (~38 cents) and gave away black and white copies to anyone who bought a tree. When we gave out the trees, we gave a series of small trainings about how to plant, care for and harvest the products of the tree to anyone who took a tree. Here is a few people recieving training:

We sold all of our color guides and all of the trees we planted, about 100. The money went to they pepiniere (tree farmer) who raised the seeds with me. There are many more people who want to buy trees, so we immediately planted a new round of seeds.

Not only did we get lots of interest, but when I asked people to tell me what they had learned they were able to tell me, in their own words, all the information we gave them about Moringa. Of course, the real test will be as we watch over the next few months to see how people care for and use their trees.

You can find the rest of the pictures of the training here.

Literacy training

2010-09-16T14:08:00.001-07:00

The association I helped organize got an NGO to come give literacy training to my villagers. It's really helpful for villagers to be literate in Bambara - they end up in high demand on various village committees and groups so they can keep records. Since I had a (very) small part in helping this get off the ground, they invited me and Corinna to the awards ceremony and had us give out gifts. I'm giving out a box of soap above. Here's Corinna giving out 3 pagnes (about 4.5 yards of fabric):

And who says you can't have fun at an awards ceremony:

Seli Fitini

2010-09-16T13:44:00.000-07:00

So, every year in the muslim calender there is a month of fasting, called Sunkalo in Bambara or Le Mois de Karem in French (both are literally (the month of fasting). During this period, muslims do not eat or drink from sun up until sundown.

In village, this means that everyone wakes at about 3:30 am to eat and drink water, then fast until about 7:00 pm to eat a big meal. Last year I tried fasting, but immediately got sick and had to stop. This year was more successful - I'd say I fasted about 2.5 weeks out of the 28 days, almost all of it right at the beginning. I fast because it's enjoyable to break fast with people, not out of any necessity. I ate with both a rather well off family and with a prtetty poor family during the month of fasting. With the rich family, we would start the fast with a bowl of rice and sauce and perhaps some lookwarm, sugary tea. With the poor family, we would start the fast with to (a sort of pasty bland starch made out of millet) and water.

With the rich family, we broke fast with a glass of lukewarm sugary tea. Then we would eat a small bowl of diced meat in sauce or scrambled guinea fowl eggs with rice cakes or bread. Then we would perhaps have a soda or juice. Then we would drink seri (rice porridge). Afterwards maybe we would have some degue (a sort of curdled milk with millet seeds) and drink some tea.

With the poor family, we would break fast with gingembre (a spicy juice made out of ginger root), and dablini (a sweet habiscus tea, served room temperature). Then we would eat to with honey. After that, we would drink some seri and maybe drink tea.

One interesting tradition in village is that people give sugar to the poor during sunkalo. So I bought a big bag of sugar to give out to friends and the poor in my village. Here is my friend Fakoro helping me to divy up the sugar:

At the end of the month, there is a celebration called in Bambara seli fitini (literally, small celebration). It's celebrating the end of the fast and looking forward to seliba (big celebration) that comes in a month. On seli fitini there is a big prayer and everyone gathers in their best clothes. The rest of the day is spent eating and greating all your neighbors. Here is Corinna, Fakoro and I in our best clothes on seli fitini:

This is why I don't eat much meat

2010-09-16T13:38:00.001-07:00

This is why I don't eat much meat
Originally uploaded by lomamaestro

So, this is the meat counter in Segou where you can get meat. It's a big step-up from the situation in Madiama, where I tend to avoid anywhere that meat it prepared.

This also explains while people boil the dickens out of meat whenever it's in sauce.

Madiama from my roof

2010-09-16T12:46:00.000-07:00

It's always difficult to get a good perspective on the village because you can't really see more than one house away - it tends to be winding mud lanes. So the other day, I was on my roof making some repairs from rain damage and took some pictures of Madiama from the air:

Pictures galore

2010-09-16T12:04:00.000-07:00

So, I've been in Bamako, the capital, for a few days. I'm doing mid-service medical checkups (don't worry, nothing's wrong it's just procedure).

I've sort of gotten stuck here far longer than I wanted to while I try to meet with Peace Corps folks on some work things, which has been frustrating. But on the upside, I've gotten many pictures uploaded!

I'll try to put up a bunch of blog posts explaining some of these before I leave.

Sεbεn

2010-09-15T12:44:00.001-07:00

Fakoro's seben
Originally uploaded by lomamaestro

I want to talk about another animist practice, Sεbεn. I mentioned it briefly, but not in any depth. You can see some pictures here. The other day I spent several hours with the leather workers who make these fura for people. Fura means medicine, but medicine here includes not only traditional medicine as we would think of it, but also spiritual charms and gifts for the gods. Basically, if your illness comes from spirits or gods acting malignantly toward you or a rival cursing you, as was traditionally thought, it makes sense that medicine would include spiritual means of protection.

Basically, words of power are copied (in arabic, typically) onto paper which is tightly folded up and then folded into a piece of leather, which is sealed and made into a necklace. This type is most often bought by parents or relatives for their childrene or nieces and nephews. The person chooses their words of power, so they could ask for health or wealth or good marriages or strength. Hardly anyone speaks arabic, and it's even rarer to write arabic, so this is often done by the Maribout, who is an Imam (Islamic spiritual leader) who is also knowledgeable about traditional animist practices.

Women will sometimes wear Sεbεn with leather belts that can either (depending of the benediction) aid or prevent pregnancy. Men will sometimes where ones that increase their virility.

Sεbεn (literally: writing) can be also put into rings that stick way up on the finger, worn most often by men.

I made one for my nephew, Asher, hopefully he'll get it soon! I've attached a picture of my homologue, Fakoro, with his Sεbεn.

How to cook Zamε

2010-08-28T14:44:00.001-07:00

Zame
Originally uploaded by lomamaestro

Here's a Malian recipe, complete with all those little touches for making it here (ignore these and you can make it just fine in America!)

Ingredients:

* 1 onion, chopped
* 1/2 lb beef cut into small pieces
* 1/4 liter oil
* 1 head garlic
* 1 cube maggie (chicken or beef bullion)
* 1 small can (approx 1.5 oz) tomato paste
* 3 medium-sized sweet potatos chopped into large chunks
* 3 bay leaves
* 4-5 cups (1.5 kg) washed white rice
* 2 tbs whole pepper
* 1 tbs salt

Instructions:

1. Boil 3 cups water
2. Crush onions in morter & pestle
3. Add oil to water
4. Add tomato paste and onions to water
5. Chop and crush garlic
6. Add to water
7. Brown meet in pot
8. Add 1.5 liters water, bring to boil
9. Add sweet potatos
10. Demand the baby remove the knife from her mouth. Carefully disarm knife-wielding baby. Treat any wounds
11. Fan the charcoal to keep it hot
12. Change into new complet (outfit)
13. Boil for 45 minutes
14. Crush pepper in morder and pestle (or grind, as you wish)
15. Remove sweet potatos and set aside
16. Let almost all the water boil out, stirring every few minutes. It will look like orange-ish tomato juice. (approx. 45 minutes)
17. Remove the meat and set aside
18. Add 1 liter of water
19. add pepper, salt
20. Add maggie (bullion) cube
21. Bring water back to boil, add rice
22. Add coals and fan the coals to make them hot again.
23. Boil for 25 minutes, until the water is gone.
In the mean time, repair the house, sweep the floors).

Voila! A delicious meal of zamε! It's really quite good!

Updates about Marriage

2010-08-28T13:53:00.000-07:00

My friend Shahnaz gave me some more information about polygamy in Islam. Thanks Shahnaz! I'm glad to hear from someone more knowledgeable than I:

That’s interesting that polygamy is being practiced there. Yup you’re right that Islam allows up to four wives, but that is not the complete story. In Islam, monogamy is actually the rule, and polygamy- the exception. The verses in the Quran that refer to polygamy, only allow it in times of war or EXTREME hardship in a society, such that there are widows and orphans who have no where or no one to turn to for care, shelter and food. So polygamy was allowed only in these circumstances to help these women.
Also – divorce is a right all women have in Islam… and I’m sorry that Hadiara doesn’t feel like she has that option, which I can understand due to cultural pressure
On the whole, it is sad how a culture can misconstrue what a religion actually teaches for its own advantage, and for reasons of power and control… and ufortunately this happens all over the world.

Of course, religious practice is influenced by culture a great deal. Many people do not have direct access to the teachings of the Quran because they are illiterate, and also the Qurans that are around are generally in arabic. Very few people can read or speak much of anything of arabic. And I should say that polygamy is common here, but still most men only have one wife. Also, sometimes a man will take his brother's wife when his brother dies to provide for the widow, which is intended to help the woman.

What people say here is that a man is allowed to take up to 4 wives if they are able to take care of each wife and their children equally, as well as love each wife equally. In practice, all the women I talk to say that very few men are able to provide for the wives they have, and if they can, they do not love them equally.

I also want to clarify that I did not mean to imply divorce is not allowed here. Divorce is legally recognized by the state (although very difficult) and is possible religiously according to the interpretations of Islam here. It is extremely rare. I have not heard of a rural woman getting a divorce anywhere in Mali, though I am sure there are cases. The woman I knew of was in Guinea, where the culture is more relaxed. I would say it would be very culturally frowned upon, though probably possible, in my village.

I actually just found an English version of the Quran, so I'm looking forward to reading that and learning more about the religion. In any case, thanks for the information, Shahnaz!

Marriage - the downside

2010-08-27T10:47:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I said that the first marriage is arranged by parents. Many African cultures have a tradition of polygamy, and in Islam a man can marry up to 4 wives as long as he loves each equally and is able to take care of each wife. (That is my summation based on the explanation I have recieved here - my muslim friends, please let me know if I have that wrong and I'll correct it!)

First, the arranged marriage is generally non-negotiable. Neither the man nor the woman can refuse their parents. If they say they do not like their soon-to-be spouse, very kind parents will change their mind, other parents will delay the wedding to allow for the two to get to know eachother better, and others will say tough cookies - or more likely, never have the concern brought to them, since everyone already knows what the outcome will be. Some of my friends have said that these traditions are more lax now, but that seems to mostly be for larger cities.

After that first arranged marriage, the man can choose when and who they marry. Most men I know, though certainly not all, aspire to have multiple wives. Of course, paying a bride price and the dispense (sort of living allowance to buy food, clothing, etc.) is expensive, so many cannot realize this dream. The men negotiate the bride price of a woman with her parents, and it is the choice of the parents whether or not she will marry him, not the woman. Some parents will consider the preferences of their daughter, but it is ultimately their decision, not their daughter's.

For a long time, I've had very uncertain views on polygamy. Polygamy seems automatically wrong to us, but this is a very different culture and we should be careful about passing judgement. While other volunteers have told me stories of acrimony and jealousy amongst the wives and constant tension in the family, but both of the polygamous families who have been my host family were not like that. In one family, the three wives were friends and worked and chatted together all day long. There never seemed to be a moment of tension between them, and they seemed to be the core of the family - their husband was either working in the fields or in his forging hut, and there was little interaction between the women and husband throughout the day. In the other family, the four wives co-exist peacefully. They each have their own courtyard in a larger compound, and have divided the labor. For example, one does a lot of the cooking, another pounds millet, etc. The husband spends a fair amount of time with his wives, but alternates - the morning he works, the noon meal is with Aminata, the early afternoon is with Koulibali, etc. The women don't interact much, but there doesn't seem to be any real tension and of course the (many) children are everywhere.

Also, women here have a very heavy workload. They prepare all the food - including grinding grain by hand to make flour - clean all the dishes, clean the compound, do the laundry, care for the children, sell sundries for extra money around the house, and garden for vegetables. In addition to these responsibilities, the women also work in the fields. The men have a much lighter workload, in my opinion. Polygamy brings an opportunity to share the workload and save time.

However, it's difficult for a man to have deep conversations with women here, so I wasn't sure how they actually felt about polygamy. Adult men and women's worlds just don't intersect that often. They eat apart, they do different jobs and they have different roles. It is easier as a volunteer, since I work with many women, but those are not usually the right time to have deep discussions about how they feel about the institution of marriage. Generally, I felt that women lacked empowerment in Mali, but if they were empowered to make their own choices in marriage, polygamy seemed like a side issue. If the women were to gain enough power to actually refuse a marriage, it seemed like polygamy could be just a cultural question.

However, recently I spent several hours while waiting for a business meeting with a female friend of mine. It was just the two of us, and eventually I brought up the topic of marriage with her. Hadiarra is the second wife, and it's clear she does not like her husband. She was scathing about polygamy and marriage in general in Mali. She said that men were supposed to favor all women equally and give the dispense to each wife, but husbands did not favor their wives equally and they frequently married when they couldn't afford the extra dispense. The effect is immediately obvious - women everywhere have small businesses selling odds and ends to put enough money together for ingredients for their sauces or clothes for the family.

I asked her, if a husband was able to afford the dispense and women had the power to refuse a marriage, would she be okay with a polygamous marriage then? She said absolutely not. She said if given the real, honest choice, no woman here would accept a polygamous marriage. Women accept the institution because they do not feel there is an alternative, but it is not something they would freely choose. Hadiarra is a teacher, one of the few people in my villlage with a steady salary, and earns more money than her husband, who is a maribout. A maribout is and islamic teacher, who parents send their children to learn a little arabic and to recite the Quran. I told her that in America, being the "breadwinner" would bestow a certain amount of power on her and asked her if she felt she had any additional power from that. Hadiarra is a strong, independent woman who has become moderately successful on her own accord coming from a difficult background even by the standards of my village. I have a deep respect for her, and yet she told me no, she did not have any power. She wants to work in a larger city where she can earn more money and have some luxuries (like electricity, and cold drinks) and her husband refused, so here she stays.

I told her of some women I knew in Guinea who had moved out of their husbands compounds or had sought a divorce. She was happy for those women, but did not feel she had those options.

Marriage - the up side

2010-08-27T10:35:00.000-07:00

I recently went to a marriage ceremony - see pictures here. There were a suprising number of familiar elements - women in all white, veils, a civil ceremony were the marriage license was granted, photos taken of wedding parties - but also, some different things. For one thing, it was all so plural. There were five couples getting married at the same ceremony, and the day before there had been 3 weddings. I mentioned to my friend that this was a lot, and he said they might do as many as 12 in one sitting. I think it's mainly a matter of pooling the costs of some things, such as music, entertainers, etc. The other thing that really surprised me for such a religious country is that there was no religious ceremony, at all. I had understood that in the big cities, people often got married religiously, but waited for their civil marriage to avoid taxes, but apparently it's often the other way around in smaller villages. My friend Diallo explained to me that there used to be only a religous ceremony near the mosque, but when the state established civil marriages, things changed. You see, many first marriages in Mali are arranged. The parents of the man search for a wife for their son, and make an agreement with the father of the bride. The religious ceremony was the opportunity to formalize the bride price and dowry amoung the heads of the family, and also to bless the marriage. But the civil ceremony has now taken on the role of officially marking the marriage, so just the vieux - the old men - go to the mosque now to arrange the bride price and dowry.

But back to the beginning. So on the day of the wedding, friends of the groom gather at the groom's house dressed in nice clothing. Everyone who has one rides their moto, and there's two or three adults on each moto (plus maybe a child). They collect the groom, who is dressed in his best, and drive around town beeping their horns loudly and constantly, celebrating the marriage. Then they go to the brides house and "abduct" the bride, again driving through the village making lot's of noise and celebrating. They arrive at the office of the mayor, where the ceremony will be held. In the mean time, those that can swing it get a horse cart ride over to the mayor's house - everyone wants to arrive in style for the ceremony - and those who can't join the big crowd who walks over, complete with several jeliw - storytellers and musicians - who beat drumbs and dance.

Once all the couples have arrived, the ceremony begins. Everyone stands around the officials from the mayors office, who record the marriages in a logbook. There is one jeli - usually called jeliba, or big griot - who holds everyones attention, shouts praises of the families gather, and repeats everything said by the officials in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear. There is another jeli or two who use the drums to shush the crowd at appropriate moments or attract their attention. The question asked of each man and woman would be familiar to us: "Do you want this man or woman?", and each person in turn says yes, to which the mayor shouts "clap your hands!"

After the ceremony, the wedding parties take off on their motos to the "reception" where there is music and photos of the couples. But after that, the newlyweds go straight to the man's home to start the konyכ, which is basically the honeymoon. For three days, the man and wife do not leave their house. All food is brought to them and they stay at home, greet well wishers, and consumate their marriage.

Stretching the truth unto death

2010-08-27T09:27:00.000-07:00

Way back when we were rebuilding the Imam's house, someone told me that the old Imam's house was 102 years old. It seemed possible - it's definitely the nicest house in town and seemed very well taken care of. If one remuds a mud house often enough, there isn't an immediately obvious reason why it couldn't last a long time. In the end, I figured on two theories: it either really was that old, or the person just wanted me to understand that it was really old but didn't literally mean 102 years. I left it at that.

But recently another conversation brought up this old mystery. I was chatting with my friend Oumaru, better known as Cɔkoroba, who is an endearing, incredibly kind old man literally bent in half with age. He was telling me about how he was from a village near Segou, but he came to Madiama when he was very small with his family. His father was a great hunter, and at that time Madiama was where ti was at. (Fast forward to today: no animal larger than a monkey exists in the bush and the only bush animals people hunt are birds. Once there were hyenas, antelope, buffalo and even lions around here).

Cɔkoroba's father died when he was too young to remember, and Cɔkoroba says he is 70 years old, which is in the balpark; he is clearly very old. But Cɔkoroba says his father died at 142.

Now, clearly, Cɔkoroba's dad didn't live to 142, so I went to a friend who often explains little cultural details to me. He said that long ago, food was plenty in Mali and people lived long lives. So today, people assume anything relatively old - the father of a really old man or an important house - must have been around for a really long time since they came from before the current time of relative destitution. Hence Cɔkoroba taking his age and doubling it for his father.

My friend said that 30 years ago, you could buy a liter of honey for 200 CFA. Today, you can't buy honey in village for any price. It would cost perhaps 1,000 CFA in a large town. Thirty years ago, you could get cow's butter in village. Today, the only butter is imported - in big cities only. People drink all the milk now; there's none left for butter. He said people threw back fish as big as your hand because they were too small to bother with; today most people are content with fish as big as two fingers.

In 1983 a drought hit Mali and the rains failed. In 1984 the rains failed again. He was in his late teens at the time, and he said the dust and sand storms we get pretty regularly now - which last for a couple of hours and then stop - blew for two weeks straight at a time. People died because they couldn't breathe. Then the goats died. Then the sheep and cows died. People foraged in the bush for tree fruit. Then the trees died. Then people starved to death.

With the trees dead, the wind picked up the soil and blew it away. In effect, the very land died. For the villagers of Mali, nothing has ever been the same since.

Numbers

2010-08-27T08:53:00.000-07:00

When it comes to money, the Bambara have a curious quirk. Numbers are simple enough; one two, three... ten, ten and one, etc. But when qouting the price for something in Bambara, you divide by 5. Thus if a plastic bag of habiscus juice costs 25 CFA in French, they would say vente-cinq (25), but in bambara they would say duuru (5).

Now many Malians, even if they don't know any other french they will know their numbers. It just makes good sense to be able to qoute prices in case your customer doesn't speak Bambara (perhaps they speak fulfulde, tomashek, bobo, bozo, sonhrai or... ). It always amazed me that someone who was innumerate (unable to read or write numbers) could quickly in their head convert the prices for the half a dozen things I'm buying. Doesn't seem that hard? Try dividing 1675 CFA by 5. Took you more than a second? Too slow.

The secret is that they aren't converting at all. When they see a 100 CFA coin, they have two lavesl for it: cent (100) francs and mugan (20). They can't read the numbers of the coin, they just recognize the coin in each language.

The story is the same everywhere for why there is this difference between languages. At somepoint there was bad inflation, and rather than change prices, people just relabeled the currency. So what cost kεmε naani (400) still cost kεmε naani, you just paid for it with a 2 mille (2,000) CFA note. Makes sense, doesn't it?

Except the Bambara of Mali and the Maninka of Guinea both divide by 5, even though Mali and Guinea have never shared a common francophone currency. And the fula divide by 3. And the sɔsɔ - who speak sɔsɔ, a relative of the Maninka language, of which Bambara is really a dialect - divide by 2.

Confused yet? It gets worse. When a numerate (numerate in Bambara that is, some people can read in write in french but not Bambara and vice-versa) Bambara speaker writes down an amount, they will use Bambara counting numbers, so they will write 100 CFA as 20 CFA. But someone who is writing in french numbers will put 100 CFA - with no way to distinguish.

But, if someone is reading french numbers in Bambara, especially large numbers, it is too hard to do the conversion, so they would read 150,000 CFA (US $300) as wa kεmε ni bi duuru (150,000) rather than as wa bi saba (30,000). How do you know whether they are referring to 150,000 or 750,000 (150,000x5) CFA? A vilager, hasbeen going to the same meetings long enough to know what is what. But as a Peace Corps volunteer, it's all about the context of the situation - and if Ireally care about the numbers in question, I ask.

2010-08-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

This might seem a little random, but I want to discuss something I was working on in America before I left for Africa that came up in the news:

Clean them up

MANY of the rebel groups still fighting across swathes of the Democratic Republic of Congo get their cash from rocks. Apart from gold, they illicitly sell cassiterite (used in laptops), coltan (mobile phones) and wolframite (light bulbs). Hundreds of the mines containing such treasures, especially in the country’s troubled east, where conflict has long been fiercest, are targets in turf warfare. Reducing the illicit trade will not bring peace, but it may help.

New legislation passed by America’s Congress is intended to curb the black market and boost the legal one. Companies that report to the American Securities and Exchange Commission now have to reveal whether they buy minerals from Congo or from any of its nine neighbours and, if so, from where. New regulations likely to be proposed by the State Department next year may follow guidelines being drafted by the UN and the OECD, a rich-country club, that will advise companies on how best to trace the origin of their materials. (More here)

Back in my pre-Peace Corps days, I worked with some friends on an Oxfam: America initiative to achieve something similar to this effort world wide. I'd post a link, but unforunately my internet is now working so poorly that I can't seem to access the internet. Here's the Oxfam website.

The idea is simple: make available information on what exactly is happening when minerals are extracted in corrupt, developing countries and people will be able to act with that information, rather than in the absence. The legislation that has passed in Congress for the Congo is a smaller, more limited version of what we wanted to pass that would have incompassed the hold worked, and I have no idea if this legislation is related to our legislation, so I'm not claiming any credit. I'm just saying how could a little transparency not be a good thing?

It's not just languages that are melanged

2010-08-23T11:19:00.000-07:00

(The title of this post references an earlier post: Melanging Kanw)

So, continuing on the theme of religion, I'd like to talk about animist traditions in the Islam and Christianity that's practiced here. You see, the monotheistic religions have incorporated some elements of the older beliefs, just like Christianity, and before that, Judaism did in the middle east.

My counterpart, Fakכrכ, is a good example of this. He is a very good muslim - he prays 5 times a day, every day; he is unfailingly generous, even though he is quite poor even by the standards of our circle of friends; he does not drink, or smoke; he is good with his wife and daughter. But when he got a temporary job teaching adult literacy, he came to me asking for a chicken egg to sacrifice. This is not at all unusual - you could call it covering your bases. And people in no way see this as a conflict with what they would describe as their only faith, Islam. So I gave him an egg, which he sacrificed and then eat (one nice thing about the culture of sacrifice here, if it's food, it's not wasted) basically to ask for luck and success with his job. He also, before I knew him, used to be a seller of traditional - often animist - medicine. He only got out of that business because of a change in family circumstances meant he had to work on the farm full time for awhile.

Other examples abound. Many villages have a central point that protects the spirt of the village. The people in my old village in Guinea, Kinieran, said they had the power to turn into hippos and that they could teach me this magic. (Sadly, the evacuation prevented me from learning how to assume my hippo form. Perhaps it's for the best, though). Any reasonable sized market will have someone selling traditional medicine - including such things as porcupine skin, dried monkey heads and dead birds. I stopped recently at one of these to answer some questions of a visiting American; we confirmed that the white twisted beaded bracelets are what is generally known as fura - medicine - but more properly understood buy us as a protection from sickness or misfortune. She bought one.

Most people make sεbεn for their children, a type of animist charm that is supposed to protect them from misfortune and illness. And many adults have their own types of sεbεn: rings with words of power inclosed inside, or bracelets with their initials engraved on them, or special beads. I actually wear a piece of sεbεn all the time, which I am always complemented on.

These aren't seen as "cheating", it's more like I said, covering your bases. Why take chances with the supernatural?

Me and my goat

2010-08-23T11:01:00.001-07:00

Me and my goat
Originally uploaded by lomamaestro

This is my goat Baba. I bought her a while back for 10,000 CFA (about $20). This was a little high for a goat her size, but you see she's pregnant, so really I got two goats for one, making it a steal!

Plans for Baba? I'm either going to give her to my homologue for being a great guy when I complete my service, or I'm going to eat her. Yum! Either way, it's good she doesn't particularly like me, it wouldn't do to get too attached.

Baba means all sorts of things. It can mean goat, big goat, mother goat, big water (like a lake or a river), or also a name. See if you can figure out this sentence (sort of a word puzzle in Bambara, answer below):

Baba ka baba ba be baba la

(hint: ka: the possessive, as in Mark ka blog, i.e, Mark's blog. be - is )

Baba's (the name of a person) big goat's mom is by the big lake
or,
The (goat) mother of Baba's big goat is by the lake

Work

2010-07-26T04:11:00.000-07:00

So, since it's been a long time since I posted a summary of work, and since my real reason for being online - submitting a booklet I wrote in Bambara and french about cultivating a certain type of tree to my boss to hopefully publish - isn't working, I thought I'd give you an update on what I do all day...or for the little bit of time I'm working, anyway.

Microloans - I've been working a lot to extend credit to village women lately, on my theory that one of the things that is lacking in Madiama is credit to extend small businesses, farming, etc. It's been a lot of work, not least because when I start talking money it's hard to get past the assumption that Im giving it out, but we worked out something with a bank in a nearby town of Sofara to give loans. The interest rates are pretty crazy at 18% plus some fees and whatnot, but the people I'm working with are desperate for capital and have convinced me that they can make enough money to pay off the loans. So we've set up loans for 2 groups of women farming okra (very much in demand here) and 1 group of men farming millet, rice, and sorghum and raising livestock. One other group of women turned down the loan as too expensive. The loans have been approved but not dispersed, so everyone is crossing their fingers that the money will show up soon, since people want to plant now. Now we're expanding to give information on loans to individuals - tailors and others - who want to expand their business or start a new enterprise.
Nerekoro school construction - the Nerekoro school construction project is going great. The school is almost finished, just lacking a roof. My part, equipping the school, is just waiting delivery, which means waiting for the roof now that the rains are here. We're actually under budget on both the equipment and school, thanks to good business contacts.
School Cantine - After months of waffling, I've finally been convinced that school cantines - basically cheap school lunch programs - are the right thing to do. Maybe someday I'll put something up about why it was a hard decision for me. Now we're working with an Non-governmental organization which will hopefully fund it.
Moringa Trees - I obtained some Moringa trees and planted them with a friend, so now we have a nice collection of almost 100 saplings that we'll be able to transplant in a few months. Moringa is an outstanding plant - every part is useful, and it is very good nutritionally which should be able to help with food security here if people will use it. To help promote that I...
Wrote a book - I wrote a manual on how to grow, care for and utilise parts of the Moringa tree in Bambara and French. I'm going to give it to anyone I know who does literacy work to share with their students, since I've observed the students are often wanting for things to read to practice. Hopefully this will be good practice and a good way to get the word out there. I was coming in today to send the corrected book to my bss to hopefully get it distributed around Mali wherever there are volunteers working on literacy. But alas, I can't my USB key is dead.
Literacy - Unfortunately, our literacy center is kaput right now, waiting on funding. I'm hoping once the harvest lightens up we'll get it going. In the meantime, we'll distribute the Moringa book once it's printed.
Jekamiirikalan Association - This is the association I created way back when to diagnose and solve problems in the village. It hasn't really worked out, because people are already able to figure those things out on their own. But it did attract the attention of an NGO to that did some literacy work, so that was great
The Bakery - has become very political, but I think we are still a go. Unforunately, with all the wrangling it may be too late in the rainy season now, we'll see. In any case, it's still going to happen it might just have to wait until post rainy season.

I guess that's about it for now.

Shapeshifters beware

2010-07-26T04:00:00.000-07:00

I may have mentioned a long time ago that in my old village Kinieran in Guinea, people claimed that the people of Kinieran could become hippos. They also offered to teach me this trick, but alas, I wasn't around long enough to go stomping around all hippo-like.

Well, the other day a guy pulled up and told me a he was a maribout. He asked me do I know what that is? I said yes. A maribout is animism meets Imam - sort of a sage who combines knowledge of arabic and the Quran with traditional religious knowledge and fuses them together. So he said I'm a lizard, do you agree with that?

After double checking with some friends to make sure I understood right (people claiming to be lizards is not that common even in my life, after all). I said yes, of course, sure why not. Then I leaned in and gave him a word of warning: he better watch out, my cat had caught three lizards that day!

The Myth of the Desert.

2010-07-19T05:58:00.000-07:00

Coming to Mali, I knew desertification was a problem in the Sahel, the vast dry scrub brush plain that stretches from Senegal to Somalia, but I still had an image of the Sahara desert as a dead, inert thing. Nine months later, the Sahara in my mind has changed, and now I recognize it.

From arriving at my site in November, through the end of hot season, I watched as the sand slowly built up on the bush paths I used to bike on, until some of them slowly became impassable on bike. Everything seemed to be slowly buried in sand in dust, but surely it was just a matter of waiting for the rainy season to knock all the dust again and fuse the land back together. Towards the end of the season, the dust storms came, and then the sand storms. These were infrequent, but epic - the sky turns orange, grit fills your mouth and eyes, the air feels like sandpaper against your skin. Everyone gets inside, any man who has a turban puts it on. People start wearing masks over the mouth and nose that they normally reserve for the dust while motorcycling. Again, surely it was just a matter of waiting for the rainy season.

Then the rains came, but to my surprise, as the rains came more frequently so did the sandstorms. Now, virtually every time it's going to rain, first a terrible sandstorm is comes. Trees are blown down. I close the windows and doors to my house, and still find everything inside buried under sand. I thought I could use the sandstorms to predict rainstorms, but sometimes we just get the sandstorm and no rain.

A big problem is trees. It's very hard to plant trees here, because the cows, goats and sheep tend to eat saplings before they can grow big enough to survive grazing by livestock. Each tree has to be individually protected, and that's difficult and expensive. I've talked to people who are very old, and they tell me how many trees there used to be and how much more sparse they are now. The process can be visually seen - massive, old growth trees which have been around for many, many years slowly die, and crash to the ground where they are chopped up for wood. That is completely natural, but there are not enough young trees to replace them.

Some Facts of Life

2010-07-16T11:41:00.000-07:00

Now that you know a little more about how Madiama is situated in the economic strata of Mali villages - above average - I want to share some of the things I've learned over the past 9 months or so. Awhile back, I conducted a Food Security survey, asking heads of households in my village many questions about their food situation. Here's a few things I learned:

Almost everyone in Madiama farms. Including those with another business, such as blacksmithing or a shop, must farm
Most frequent problems experienced by farmers: no water, and no money to buy fertilizer/no access to fertilizer
Many people have a handful of animals - a cow or two to pull their plow, a couple of goats maybe - but very few have anything approaching a herd
Everyone I asked is concerned about being able to give enough food for their children
Every family but one I talked to ran low on food for the last few months before the next harvest
The average amount of time spent per year without sufficient food to feed their families: 3 months

People work hard here, but there just isn't enough to go around. The food shortage typically starts around August and lasts until the havest starts coming in in October or November. Last year the rains came very late and the havest was really bad, so I'm concerned the food shortage will hit harder and sooner this year. In many places, this is called The Hunger Season. Northern Mali, Niger, Northern Nigeria and Chad are now facing famine. If you have a little extra, please donate to Oxfam or another charity of your choice to help prevent starvation in these countries. I have worked with Oxfam for years, and have built up a lot of trust in the effectiveness of this organization.

People said they coped with the yearly food shortages by:

Reducing the number of meals per day
Reducing the size of meals
Borrowing food from others
Working from others in exchange for food
Selling animals to buy grain
Sending people to cities to look for work so they can buy extra food.

A little about Madiama

2010-07-16T11:25:00.000-07:00

I want to put together some posts about the economic realities of village life to illustrate what people have, and don't have, here in Mali. But first, I want to describe Madiama a little better so you know how it figures, wealth-wise, in Mali and can draw some broader conclusions from this one village.

Things Madiama has going for it:
We are the seat of the commune - meaning the mayor's office is here, and more projects come our way. There is also more "salaried" people living here, spending money
We are a large village - 3,325 residents, according to the 2009 census.
We are a market town - once a week people come from other villages to buy and sell goods
We are the largest village more or less on the way to Djenné, so many people come here to buy or sell grain and leave some money behind
The Secretaire-Generale of our Mayor's Office, my friend Diallo, is trained in rural economic development and has earned the trust of many NGOs with his good work, so many people come here to implement projects
We are close enough to the river that some can farm rice, which fetches a higher price than millet or cous-cous.
We have an efficient local mayor's office, whose employees work hard despite often not being paid
As far as I can tell, there is very little corruption in Madiama.
We are close to the guidron, so we have easy access to larger cities

And on the flip side...
We are not on the guidron, the paved road, which means no buses or trucks stopping to buy refreshments on the way through
We are too small to have access to credit for loans, etc.
The water table is REALLY low - almost 100 feet down - meaning the water situation is never good
There is no electricity

In sum, I think Madiama has many advantages not shared by other villages in Mali. And yet it pains me how difficult life is here.

But aren't you worried about burning in hell?

2010-07-12T08:01:00.000-07:00

When I was in stage, a common piece of advice I heard was that you will be asked about your religion here, and if you are, you should say you christian (or muslim, if your muslim - but definitely don't claim to be muslim if you are not). Of course the issue would come up here; religion is a very important part of people's lives, and they are naturally going to be curious. Plus, if you pray five times a day you're going to notice the one person who isn't doing it. If you claim to be christian, well, in most areas there are no churches, and even if they exist you have no real obligations. People here understand that there is Islam, and Christianity, and someone who is well read may have even heard of Judaism or Buddhism (but this is quite rare in village), but naturally, everyone in the world must belong to one of these groups. All of this applies just as much, if not more so to Mali. After all, in Mali, you stand either on gateway to North Africa or in North Africa itself.

I am an agnostic. It's an important part of me. And an important part of Peace Corps is sharing in my culture with the West Africans I meet. So, I don't go out of my way to declare my "faith", but it comes up very often. It almost always goes in the same way:

African: "Come pray!"
Me: "No, I don't pray."
African: "What? Why not?"
Me: "I am not muslim"
African: "Ah, you are a christian, then"
Me: "No, I am not christian, either"
African: "Then what are you?"

I explain then that I respect all religions, including Islam (which is true), but I am not of any religion. Almost always, after some verification ("Really? No, REALLY really?!") that's the end of it. They are happy enough that I think their religion is good and I have respect for it (I have so much respect for their devotion! West African Muslims are the most devoted people I have ever seen, in every sense of the word). They shake their head at the crazy toubab, and leave it at that, content to leave me be.

Ocassionally the conversation does not end there. People will say, well, if you're not any religion, you should become muslim! I say no, I'm not going to become muslim. THey usually just laugh, as if this is crazy talk. But if they ask why, I say that I respect Islam, but I do not believe it. They ask me about god, and I say I don't know if there is a god.

Our theological discussions are always so good natured - people are very accepting here of all sorts of beliefs. They have never heard of someone not having a religion before, but in no way do they find that offensive, as has happened to me many of the times religion has come up in America. Not only do most of the people I know here follow all the strictures of their religion here - pray five times a day, ablutions, don't drink, smoke or eat pork, etc. - but they obey the ones the most ritually devoted people seem to forget. Kindness. Generousity. Compromise. Friendship. I have never felt uncomfortable being honest about my beliefs here, not once.

The last bout of this type of conversation I had ended on a new note. I barely knew this man, but of course it was prayer time so he was curious. After we got to the part about me not believing in Islam, he asked, evidently worried for me, "but aren't you worried you are going to burn in hell when you die". I said that if god was so nice, I didn't think he would do that to me over a matter of belief. But since I didn't believe in hell, I wasn't too concerned about it.

My new friend thought this was the funniest thing of all.

An interesting story

2010-07-12T06:32:00.000-07:00

So, this is a story I'm going to start with a disclaimer - I'm fine, perfectly safe, and there's no reason to worry.

Now that you've started to worry, let's get started. So I live in a village called Madiama, a few kilometers of what we call the guidron - the paved road that passes through all of Mali. Where I run into the guidron there's a village called Kessedougou, which is a Bobo village. I often walk the dirt road to Kessedougou when I'm leaving as there are rarely cars coming or going out of my village. It's not far, and often a horse or donkey cart will pass me and offer me a ride. So the last time Corinna came to visit me, right before she left for Ameriki, we mentioned to my friend Diallo that we were going to walk out to Kessedougou rather than take the commune car, as he is wont to offer to Corinna (figuring, I guess, that it's too far for a woman to walk but fine for me). We said we preferred to walk - it was a beautiful day, and it was some good last minute alone time for us before she headed out. Alone time is a precious commodity in village - people are very socialable here, and they really like Corinna so everyone wants to stop by and say hi. I'm sure, also, that their curious about what a toubab (roughly translated: white) man and woman do and talk about together, since they usually only see me.

Diallo insisted we cannot walk, as it is too dangerous. I was incredulous - I've been walking that road for months and months. I asked if there are now bandits along the road and he sa no, it's a seasonal issue. See, you'll remember in my last post, I mentioned that Bobos are more often animist. Animism isn't really a set religion, it's more a name for a broad category of... well I guess you could call it nature or spirit worship, though that might imply a connection to Wicca which doesn't exist.

Traditionally, animists make sacrifices to their gods for luck, or better health, or to be stronger or find money or a wife or have a good harvest. Basically, it's surrendering something spiritually in the hopes of getting your god on your side. Sacrifices can be very small - a chicken egg, for example - to something larger, like a goat, to something very large and expensive... a human.

So apparently, in the beginning of the rainy season Kessedougou and the villages south of Kessedougou have a lot of traditional animist ceremonies and make larger sacrifices. People tend to steer clear for a month or so, partially out of respect and partially out of fear. Part of what I'm telling you is true: Bobos are often animist, and sacrifice is an important part of animist traditions. However, it strains credulity that human sacrifice is still an on-going practice here. For one thing, Peace Corps or the US embassy would let us know if that is a concern. For another, I would be allowed to live so near a village if there was real danger. Still, I respect their warnings - now I always go to Kessedougou (which I have to pass through to leave site) with someone from my village. But what's really going on here is a religious misunderstanding, if you will.

You see, pretty universally muslims and christians in West Africa are very wary of animists, because they believe there is power in animist ceremonies but no longer have a deep understanding of animist practices. And animists, as part of the cultural practice of the religion, are very secretive, so people outside no very little about it. I asked people in my village to just describe an animist ceremony or an animist sacrifice, and the admitted they can't - they've never seen one, they're scared just of the rumors that cycle around village.

In any case, I am safe. There are other volunteers living in Bobo villages, who have said they are perfectly safe, though there are certain ceremonies they are not allowed to attend, it's not any reason to leave village, they just stay around the house for the day. I've contacted Peace Corps, who said I'm safe but to follow any precautions my village recommends, which I do. And I know the people of Kessedougou, who are very friendly (and have tried to teach me a little Bobo, but it's just one too many languages for me right now, I fear). And this happened about a month ago, so we're past the time of sacrifices now.

Hammock Down!

2010-06-21T05:10:00.000-07:00

So I have this great hammock in my compound, and awhile back Corinna was laying in it. If you swing it, the nylon rope makes a chafing sound against the tree it's tied to, but I told her she had nothing to worry about.

Well, two nights ago I sat in my hammock, swung my feet up to lay down, and snap! The nylon rope broke, dumping me unceremoniously on the ground. I thought, looks like Corinna's right! As soon as my tailbone had recovered, I checked out the tree and it turns out the entire thing was covered in termites. Literally covered. So the rope was fine, it just got eaten by termites! Perhaps the point goes to the termites, and Corinna gets half a point.

Termites are the bane of my compound. They are always attacking my trees or my thatch, and one time they ate an entire grass mat in my house. I usually catch them pretty early , smash their little tunnel network they build on whatever surface, and let the lizards eat 'em. They bite sometimes, but it doesn't hurt too bad. But they got their revenge this time!

Some ethnic differences

2010-06-19T07:43:00.000-07:00

So in my last post, I mentioned the bobo tried and that there are different traditional words for different tribes. I used the word "caste", but that's pretty inaccurate. There are many ethnic groups in Mali (many more than were in Guinea), and traditionally, each one specialized in different activities. Anyone can do any activity - a Marka can keep animals or fish, and a fula can farm, for example - but because traditional knowledge is passed down within families and villages, which tend to be predominantly of one ethnicity, there are some natural seperations. Here's a few of them:

Bambara and Marka - Bambara is the largest ethnic group in Mali, and Bamanan is the national language (one of three: Bamanan, Fulfulde and French). I speak Bambara in my village. A couple of times I've mentioned that my village is mostly Marka, which is different but very similar to the Bambara. The Marka have their own language but few people in my village know it; they grow up speaking Bambara. Bambara people traditionally are farmers. Bambara are of the larger Mandinga group who are spread throughout West Africa, so the little bit of Maninkakan that I learned in Guinea was very helpful in learning Bamanan, which is really a dialect of Maninka.

Fula - Fula are the second largest ethnic group, and are actually spread throughout West Africa. They speak Fulfulde, or puhlaar in Guinea (dialects of the same language). Fula are traditionally herdsmen, herding cows, sheep and goats. Traditionally, they were nomadic, but these days they are settled and most have farms as well. Because cows, sheep and goats represent capital that is easily convertible to currency, fula often tend to own many business as well (since they can amass the startup capital much easier). They also tend to wear gold jewelry. The Fula women in my village are too poor to wear bling like this woman though; the twisted hoops are usually, much much smaller

Bozo and Bobo - these are fishing tribes that traditionally live on the Bani and Niger rivers in Mali and, I think, Burkina Faso. They fish and also farm, but are known for their fishing skills. The Bobos in particular have tended to stick with their animist religion, rather than converting to Islam as most West Africans have, or to Christianity as a smaller group have. I'm going to put up a some posts soon about animism. Animist people tend to be more secretive of their culture, as well.

Dכgכn - The Dכgכn live in a small region Mali only called Dכgכn country. I haven't been there yet, but it sounds like a unique place. There are clifts and canyons, and the Dכgכn have built their villages into the walls of the cliffs. They are also more often animist (I think after animism, the most likely Dכgכn religion is christianity), and have great dance ceremonies in costume (See pictures here). I'm going to head out that way in a few months, so I'm sure I'll post up lots of good pictures about them.

Taureg and Tomashek - The Taureg and Tomashek tribes (Tauregs are a sub-set of the Tomashek ethnicity) inhabit the northeast of Mali, and often have strikingly arabic features. They are often nomadic, driving livestock or conducting the salt trade through the desert. The North of Mali is in the Sahara desert, so this is the poorest, most marginal areas and life is hard. However, the Taureg have beautiful artwork. A main reason I went to Hombori was to investigate their culture more.

So that's a basic picture of the tribes of Mali! There are other, smaller ones but this covers the most important ones. While I said there are different traditional roles, there is no reason someone can't branch out. It's just easier for people to learn the skills necessary within their own tradition.

What a nerdy post!

What's with all the posts?

2010-06-19T05:10:00.000-07:00

So, I've been posting a lot lately. My original plan was to stay in site for just a little shy of two months without leaving (except to Djenne and Sofara for day trips for work, but I mean extended time with other volunteers out of site). Well, Mali didn't agree with that plan, and I got a pretty bad eye infection. Don't worry, it's pretty much better now. But I wasn't able to treat it with the medicines available at my local health center, so I came up to Sevare to buy medicine and have been giving the medicine some time to make sure it works before I head back down to site. Luckily, things are much better so I'll be going back this afternoon or tomorrow morning, depending on when I can find transport.

Since I was up here, I got the opportunity to put down lot's of blog entries I had been storing up in my head for the past month, hence the inundation. I also have about 10 more written, but I decided if I post up much more than I already have, my chances of actually having this stuff read will drop to zero.

This was also an opportunity to the dreaded VRF - Volunteer Reporting Form - which is the main way we Peace Corps Volunteers report on just what the heck we have been up to. Because of some administrative difficulties coming out of the evacuation where us evacuees managed to not to have our names in the right places to recieve the paperwork, I just got my first VRF to do this month. So I'm actually reporting for the first time in almost a year in Africa (normally we do this three times a year). I was really intimidated because most volunteers consider it quite a difficult chore. It's long and complex, so I totally understand how they feel. I dug into it and completed about 10 sections, leaving for last the Activities Completed section. Why?

The real reason I was nervous is that I promised myself coming here I would not be one of those volunteers leaving saying that my host country did more for me than I did for it. Not that Mali, and Guinea before it, hasn't taught me a lot and been an excellent experience, it's just the opportunity for genuine, productive service was one of my most important goals coming here. As all volunteers, I could look back on any number of failed projects that just didn't work out for one reason or another, and i was worried that when I tried to quantify my work I'd come up with a whole lot of zeros.

Well, now I'm all done, and having actually committed to paper all the things my counterpart and I have done in village, I'm feeling pretty good. I've been amazed at my villages commitment, energy, interest in innovation, self-sacrifice and trust of my sometimes silly ideas given how much I have to learn about the environment and limitations here. Because of their dedication, and because any time I do 10 minutes of work the villagers I work with produce an hour of results, they've managed to make me look pretty good.

Madiama kכw, Aw ni cε! Aw ka Ŋi de! Aw ni baara, Aw ni baaraji kכsεbε! Anw bε Ŋכgכnfε.

Ala ka san wεrε Ŋuman kε. Here's to another successful year together!

Nerekoro School

2010-06-19T05:00:00.000-07:00

So one of the things I've been working on lately is a new school my commune is building in the neighboring village of Nerekoro. The commune was able to self-finance the school (which is really impressive), but did not have enough money to get the school desks, teacher's desks and chairs made. So I wrote up a grant funded through Peace Corps to close the gap. I'm really happy about this project. One, the commune is providing a school for a village where there isn't one. Many - perhaps most - of the Nerekoro villagers have never been to school. Those that can attend have to walk to my village, which is too far for the earliest primary school grades. This means that when they can start attending they are already hopelessly behind. They will now be able to attend primary school, and when they are old enough, they will be able to manage the walk to the secondary school in my village. The primary school in my village is also already really crowded, so building more schools in the surrounding villages will reduce the overcrowding as well.

My little part of all this means the school will be able to open a couple years earlier than if they had to keep saving to buy the furniture. So a couple hundred more students will be able to go to school.

I'm really impressed that the workers in my mayor's office put together the tax revenue for this project. You see, my village is extremely poor and most of the farmers cannot farm enough to put enough food on the table year round. There really isn't much left over for taxes. The mayor's office workers have not actually been paid in six months because they are paid from tax revenues. Rather then paying themselves, they decided to use the tax revenues to build this school. This is a huge sacrifice for them to make.

Anyway, I'm going down whenever I can to take pictures of the school as it goes up and to help out a little. I don't know much about concrete building, so I just do some of the menial labor: shoveling sand or gravel, moving bricks, cutting would and mixing cement. I'll post again when the school is finished with all the progress as it goes along. It should be done in a month, maybe a month and a half until the furniture is installed.

Pounding Millet

2010-06-19T03:36:00.000-07:00

So, traditionally (and still today), a morter and pestle is used to grind up grains to get ride of chaff, make flour or prepare seeds for planting. In french you would say piler, and in Bambara ka susukε, but I don't think there is a good translation in english - grinding immediately makes me think of machinery, but this is a difficult, labor intensive physical process.

One day I passed a number of women pounding millet to prepare it for planting, so I stopped and pounded some millet with them and took some pictures as well as a video.

There is a picture of two women pounding in the same morter. This is neat to watch in action. They alternate and throw the pestle high enough that they can squeeze a clap or two in before catching it on the down blow. They do this quite quickly and it makes a beat that seems to help energize them for what is difficult physical labor. I can pound alright, but I don't have the coordination or, frankly, the stamina, for that. The other woman is carrying a metal can of Ŋכ, or millet, that needs to be pounded.

There is also a picture of me and one of them pouring grains out of a calabash. The wind picks up all the chaff so you end up with all the seeds in a pile on a mat or bowl on the ground.

Anw bε taa mכnnike! We're a'goin'fishin!

2010-06-18T10:09:00.000-07:00

So a couple of Sundays ago, I went fishing at Kora. See pictures here. We left at about 8 am in a horse cart stuffed with nets and boys. Kora is past Bangassi and another village, Tatia - it's a ways, about 20 kilometers each way. Arriving at Kora, I was shocked to find hundreds of people surrounding the lake. The men lined the lake waiting for the jitigi (water master), the person in charge of telling us when to rush into the water and start fishing.

So as the dry season goes on and on, all the lakes and marshes dry up, concentrating all the fish in a few relatively small, shallow spots. Then, just when the water is at it's lowest, it's time to fish. Everyone and their brother (quite literally!) goes out on certain days to catch everything they can.

Most people here fish with conical nets when the water is low. You thrust the net straight down into the mud, capturing unsuspecting fish inside. You stand on the edges of the net to keep it stuck in the mud and reach down with your hands to feel if there are fish in the net. If there is, you grab it with your hands.

A few people have two nets that they swing together, one in each hand and trap the fish that way.

Most rare is a five-pinted sharp fishing harpoon people thrust blindly into the mud rapidly, spearing any passing fish. My friend Adama (pictured standing next to his horse cart) had such a spear, captured the most and biggest fish of anyone.

When the jitigi gave the signal, we all rushed into the water, screaming what sounded like war cries and driving the fish to the center of the lake. There we plunged our nets in over and over to capture as many as possible. Often we would form a line and several people would plunge their nets one after another, so any fish escaping one net would hopefully be driven into the next. I got 4-5 small fish, a pretty poor catch. My friend Adama (different Adama, pictured holding his net) who showed me the ropes caught one catfish about a foot and a half long, and I saw another one well over 2 feet long.

I also caught a pretty big frog and two massive water bugs that looked like cockroaches the size of my hand; I wasnt to pleased to find out those were sharing the water with me. No, people don't eat them; we threw them back. I augmented my meager catch with several fish Adama (the second one) ave me. When we ot back to Madiama the mayor insisted I take a lot more of their catch; I ended up giving more than half of "my" fish away so that it was down to what my cat and I could eat. The people are very generous here. In fact, one random guy saw I was having a really hard time fishing and just gave me a good sized one on the water! He had never met me before, and isn't even from my village!

People said that the catch was pretty poor. There are some bobo tribes near me, who in the traditional Malian "caste" are fishermen. I'll explain more about "castes" (which isn't really the right word) more in another post. My village is mostly of the Marka ethnic group, which only fish at certain times of year. Since the crops failed so badly last year, we think the bobo did a lot more fishing to augment their food. Anyway, there wasn't much left.

Sanji nana (The rains have come!)

2010-06-18T08:41:00.001-07:00

Awhile back, my friend Ian asked me in a letter is there a rainy season?

The short answer: yes, and I would have done anything to make it arrive during hot season! You see, now we are at the very end of hot season, a time when the temperature at night time can be a 100 degrees and it is sometimes over 120 degrees in the day time. It's unendingly, unremittingly, unwaveringly hot. It's so hot that:

the skin breaks out in rashes that my charming french friend termed "the rotting of the flesh from the sun". It's because, even in the shade, you sweat so much your body is never dry
5 of us when on a 5 k (3.5 mile) walk in the morning. By 10 am, 2 people were seriously considering laying down in the scanty shade available and waiting for rescue. It was too hot to walk.
Dogs pant so hard that they look like their hyperventilating
My Malian friends have stopped drinking tea (tea is a daily ritual. Before hot season, on an average day I drank tea 4 times)
When I wash clothes by hand, the first clothes are done drying before I've finished washing half the lot.
Sleeping inside is unfeasible
Sleeping early is unfeasible
water left in the sun for an hour is not that far from boiling

I honestly can say, I've never wanted something so badly, so deeply in my bones as rain. I thought about it constantly. I asked people when the rains would come constantly. It felt like my very soul was parched. Even the ground looked like it had shriveled up and died.

Finally, finally about 3 weeks ago the rains came. Corinna was in town, saying goodbye before her trip to Ameriki, and that first storm was glorious for the both of us. We literally danced in the rain. There was so much dust in sand in the sky that we got incredibly dirty; it was actually raining mud! After a few weeks of rains about once a week, it's starting to cool off - it's only really hot now. And over the next few weeks it will rain more and more often, until perhaps mid-late july it will rain every day. Now people can start farming, and mangoes will be everywhere, and the rains that come now will bring back my favorite of all: guava!

Sumaaya Waati ka Ŋi de! O Ŋe na n'a bεε ye! The rainy season is great! It's better than all the the seasons!

Genius

2010-06-18T08:22:00.000-07:00

A good way to tell a problem between two or more groups is currently insolvable is when each side allows themselves to be absolutely incapable of seeing the situation from the other's point of view. That has to change before any real positive change can occur.

This great cartoon is about the Israel blockade of Gaza, but how many problems, personal or global, could the cartoonist have drawn a similar cartoon for? If you've hit an impass, try giving up your iron-fisted grip on your perspective.

Difficult Problems

2010-06-18T08:16:00.000-07:00

Two things frequently frustrate me a in development: one is the occasional (often liberal) voice advocating that all that's needed in Africa is training and skills, as if all problems here stem from lack of skills and we have all the answers and just need to educate these poor, uncivilized people. There are certainly some good projects that do skills transfer or work with local people to adapt new techniques to local conditions, but I often detect a strong whiff of racism to these arguments. The people of Mali are incredibly diligent, hard working, intelligent people who are ingeniously making money in places we would never think to look. Recycling bottles? Not a problem here: children collect them and sell them to families, who rebottle local juices in them for market day. There are women who sell repaired calabashes, which are bowls made out of big gourd shells. A friend of mine sells homemade potpourri. People buy batteries to charge for recharging phone batteries. People weave mats out of grass to sell. There are ingenius farmers associations to hold grain until the price is the highest, while still giving the family enough to live on in the mean time. Our Jεkamiirikalan classes (translation: tools for development) are overful. These are really smart people, working harder than almost anyone I know in America, and if there was a simple piece of knowledge they lacked that could solve all their problems they already would have figured it out, or networked with the people who know it.

The other is the counterposition (often conservative), that development aid is just bloat and all that Africa needs is markets and local solutions, and the development workers should just get out of the way. My response: go to any African market village on market day and look around. Markets are everywhere. People are buying and selling everything and anything they can get their hands on. And if you ever doubt there is an insufficient understanding of profitibility, just go into a market and start buying; you'll be amazed at how the prices suddenly change to accomodate the fatness of your wallet. Local solutions are everywhere, too: they are the traditions that have existed for who knows how many years, specifically adapted to local conditions. The thing is, some problems have existed for a really long time because they can't be solved locally. Not because local people are unable to think of a solution or unwilling to work to make it happen, but because the resources just don't exist locally.

Example: The other day I attended my friend's Jεkamiirikalan class and they practicing the gεlεya jiri (translation: problem tree). The gεlεya jiri is a technique for isolating a problem, discussing it's causes and effects, and determining a solution. The group had chosen the lack of water in Madiama, and had listed as one of the problems that too many trees had been cut down (which helps topsoil dry out and erode). I offered a solution: planting gum arabic trees in their fields.

Gum arabic is hardy, takes little water, fixes nitrogen in the soil (acting as natural fertilizer), preserves topsoil with its roots and you can tap its sap and sell it to be used in many commercial projects. As I explained they got very excited by this idea - it sounded like a p erfect solution. Then one woman asks what about fencing?

You see, cows, goats and sheep tend to eat most young shoots before they can grow into big trees, so you always have to fence in trees. In a nursery, you can do this economically with bush fencing - sturdy, thorny pushes grown in a line that livestock can't eat - or somewhat economically with western style fencing. But you can't fence off entire farms as the livestock need to pass through. And fencing off individual trees can't be done with bush fencing - your whole field would be covered in bushes - so you need to use non-local materials to construct the fences. But fencing off individual trees is way too expensive for the individual farmer.

Hence, something that could fight desertification, provide more food security, diversify income and preserve soil is beyond the reach of the farmers here because they are too poor. This could never get off the ground without substantial outside help or substantial changes in the financial circumstances of the average African villager.

In reality, it's not the ingenuity, or the work ethic or the ability of the African villager that's lacking (all stereotypes that exist), and it's not a lack of markets or understanding of markets. It's not lack of local people, trying to solve local problems. It's capital. People can think of solutions here. People can implement them. People can work with foreigners to bring new ideas to market here. But they have no access to the financial a to bring an idea to fruition.

EDIT: Since writing this, I had a friend talk to me about another fencing method: using thatch mats. My villagers rejected this, saying goats would eat it, but it gave me another idea: what if the thatch gave structure to cheap sheets of plastic you can buy in the market? And the plastic would be reusable... I'm going to look into this more.

Imam's House

2010-06-17T17:30:00.001-07:00

Imam's House
Originally uploaded by lomamaestro

So I never got to post up a picture of the Imam's house when it was actually finished, so here you go. This is by far the nicest house in Madiama, they really did a great job of it His house is reminiscent of the mud buildings of Djenne, which are famous for their architecture. Of course, in Djenne many of the buildings are too story, whereas his is just a tall one story.

While I helped build the house, I had nothing to do with the roof. They couldn't put it on right after doing the walls - which makes sense, you'd want the walls to be dry and firm - so they waited quite awhile. They actually put the roof on while I was out of town. I believe I was in Segou, recuperating from a bit of illness.

If you missed the pictures from building the Imam's house, you can find them here:

http://mark-en-afrique.blogspot.com/2010/05/building-imams-house.html

Complications of Race

2010-06-17T04:16:00.000-07:00

As Americans, we would probably consider all Africans as one race. I doubt most Africans would agree to that. Even putting aside the fact in North Africa, many have arabic features and languages, our stereotype of an African would probably say "no way!"

Here, people tend to identify by ethnicity, so that Peuhl, Bamana, Bozo, Taureg and Dogon people would all consider each other different races. But interestingly, their concept of race towards westerners is just as confused as our concept towards us. The universal word for a non-African in Bambara is Toubabou, most often translated as white. Hence, toubaboukε is white man, and toubaboumuso is white woman. However, toubabou is more complicated than than that. It is a bastardization of the arabic word for doctor, because the first "white" people were arab doctors coming from north africa. But it toubabou also means anyone light skinned - latinos and asians are also toubabou. But it gets more confusing still - black americans serving in peace corps are also called toubabou. And light skinned Malians (say tauregs or Malian arabs) are not toubabouw.

So I guess the best you can do is sasy toubabou means (rich) foreigner, rich being implied by foreigner.

Melanging Kanw

2010-06-07T02:59:00.002-07:00

So, when I first got to Africa I regularly mixed (melanger, in French), liberal amounts of Spanish into my French, and usually only figured out what happened by the confused expression on others' faces. Luckily, I've lost that habit (unluckily, French seems to be some kind of voracious virus, rabidly devouring all the Spanish vocabulary in my head. I hope to recover it with practice upon returning to the US. And I hope recovering my Spanish doesn't destroy my French!)

For awhile, I spoke only pure (African) French. Now I'm back to the melange, but it's Bambara and French these days, and it drives me crazy. I can hardly ask a question in Bambara with out adding Est-ce que, I use the french and "et" liberally in place of the Bambara "ni", and probably half the French sentences I utter include a random Bambara word dropped in the middle.

Where did I get this terrible habit? From Malians. They do it all the time. Est-ce que is a really convenient way of demarcating a question, and there are all sorts of expressions that, while they exist in Bambara, are a lot more wordy or difficult to use than the French equivalent. So French often serves as a kind of short hand. The thing is, while I have a knack for vocabulary and grammer, I definitely do not have one for accents. They can get away with it, I can't.

Gunean transferees to Mali often seem to wonder at my overzealous efforts to learn Bambara when, after all, we can speak French. Partly, it's practical: I can talk with a lot of people who don't speak french and get better prices, to boot. Partly, it's principled: I want to speak the language of Malians with Malians, not the language of colonialism. But after spitting out a particularly tangled mess of languages, sometimes I see their point.

P.S. I can barely speak a sentence of English without melanging some Bambara or French.

(The title above is melanger - to mix, the English gerund, and kanw - languages)

Trust can be very helpful

2010-06-07T02:58:00.001-07:00

When I first came to site, I was given just one key for my front door. I knew that was wrong; the type of lock I had here always comes with three keys. But I bided my time, focusing on some other issues that needed to be addressed. It came up awhile later when Fakכrכ, my counterpart, asked me if I had gotten the other two keys from Diallo, my supervisor. I said no and we went to Diallo, who said that he had given the keys to Fakכrכ. Fakכrכ insisted this was not the case. It became a huge argument between the two men that lasted for days. I had by t in both ofveloped a solid amount of trust in both of these people, so I was not overly concerned. Prudence would have been to change the lock, but I trusted both these men, and they seemed to think one of them had the keys so I didn't worry about it.

The other day, I walked to my friend Baki's house to say hi to people. I went over there, talked to some folks, and came straight back home. But when I arrived at home, I found that my keys had fallen out of a hole in my pocket. Oh no. It was market day, which meant it was possible to replace my lock if necessary, but also that there were many, many people in town who could have found my keys but couldn't be trusted to return them. I talked to Baki's family and explained my situation; they searched their compound for the keys. I walked up and down the short walk between our houses, searching for the keys to no avail. Finally, I gave up and decided to wait at my compound for a half hour. If word got out that I had lost my keys and someone had picked them up, perhaps they would return them. No luck. I called Diallo to help me - I really wasn't sure how we would get a locked door open here. There isn't really locksmith services.

Diallo comes by and says he will try searching his keys - and it turns out he does have the two lost keys and during this several day argument had never actually checked. Good job Diallo! And yay for me for trusting Diallo and Fakכrכ, so I could later get into my house!

That same day, I did change the locks on my door and the next day hammered off the padlocks on my trunk and changed those.

Desert Dunes

2010-06-07T02:48:00.000-07:00

Desert Dunes

Another expedition we went on in Hombori was up the sand dunes. Hombori is pretty clearly close to the border between the Sahel (very dry version of savanna) and the Sahara desert, because just to the north of town there are pretty massive sand dunes. I really wanted to some rock climbing while we were in hombori, but it is ridiculously hot right now and no one else was really down, so we settled for an approximately 4 kilometer hike the sand dunes.

We left in the morning and arrive at the dunes alright, which are amazing. They are quite tall - perhaps 100 ft - and the sand is dry and fine just like you would picture in the Sahara. We hiked among some of the dunes and I tried out a local sport - hurling oneself down the sand dune to roll as far as possible (Pictures here).

On the way back, the sun began to mount and it became quite hot. Often by 10:30 in the morning the temperature has climbed past 110 degrees. Some of our party got a little heat exhaustion, and it was rough making it back. We had planned a longer hike, but hopefully another day I will make it back to Hombori for rock climbing and some other hikes.

Tauregs and Dinosaur camels

2010-05-17T11:11:00.001-07:00

Dino-camel
Originally uploaded by lomamaestro

So, a big part of the attraction of going to Hombori, for me, was to get to speak with some Taureg and arab people. They are pretty thin on the ground near me, but much of the population in Hombori is Taureg and there are some arabs. The taureg are nomads in the northern deserts of Mali and are responsible for several famous things throughout history, including founding Timbouctou, founding Djenné, the desert salt caravans, the Sahara trade routes, and a notorious hostility towards Europeans that kept explorers out of West Africa for a long time.

I've posted some pictures of a couple of Tauregs I encountered online. I've also posted some pictures of Taureg camels. In the desert, Tauregs often ride camels, but these are not the camels you might have seen at your local zoo. I went to the local livestock market, and some of these camels are HUGE. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get any pictures of them up close, but to the top of their hump was easily 10 feet and to the top of their head maybe have been 15 feet. I talked with a taureg livest(ock trader who said that one particularly massive specimen could carry 2 20 liter bidons of water, 6 bushels of millet and 50 kilos of sugar, plus the rider of course. Paul and I conservatively figured that that camel could carry a metric ton (2,204 lbs). Of course, he was trying to sell us the camel, but even still!

Beware, Dangerous Rocks Ahead

2010-05-17T10:08:00.000-07:00

So recently I organized a trip for some friends to my friend Paul's site, who lives in Hombori. Paul is the volunteer to the farthest northeast in the country of all, and his site is really neat. It's principally famous for the rock formations getting out of the desert, some which make for some great rock climbing. But we wanted to go for a different reason, to see elephants.

Paul's Malian counterpart, Lelele, is an elephant guide - he takes tourists out into the bush to see elephants. So I worked out a deal with him for our friends and we went out into the Sahel to spot some elephants. The elephants make a circuit route, traveling near Hombori then up to the north, to the west, and then down south to Burkina Faso before returning to Hombori. During the month of May, the elephants are relatively far from Hombori so we had to go deep into the bush to see them.

We drove for most of a day out to the elephants, arriving just before dark. We were able to snap some photos of elephants, before the elephants started getting a little antsy and Lelele became worried they might charge us. At that point we backed off. Lelele was working with a new driver who came with the vehicle and was terrified of the elephants, so first thing first after he dropped us off he took off with the car and hid in the bush.

The elephants of Madiama have an almost symbiotic relationship with the taureg animal herders of the region. As the elephants make their migratory circle, moving from watering hole to watering hole, they eat the tops of acacia trees where the leaves are the freshest and most nutritious. The herdsmen follow behind with their livestock, and the livestock eats the copious amounts of acacia leaves the elephants drop as they move. That, with native grasses and the less nutritious leaves on the bottoms of the acacia helps make the cows some of the fattest, healthiest cows in Mali (meaning you can just barely see their ribs). That, along with the fact that the this type of elephant has short tusks of poor quality ivory, has kept these herds of elephants in relatively good shape.

Now, elephants are dangerous friends - they don't like to be crowded, and have sometimes been known to trample people - so the tauregs have a few tricks up their sleeve to keep the piece. Small groups of herdsmen will keep a fire going all night in the bush because that tends to keep elephants away. And in the villages, people will stay up all night drumming to keep the elephants from entering the village. Dorian and I came up with the term Dangerous Rocks to describe the villagers' attitude towards the elephants - just part of nature to be cautious about.

Later that night, we made camp out in the bush. In the middle of the night, Yik woke up to the sound of something sort of snorting in the bush. Eventually, he became worried and woke the rest of us up. It sounded like elephants not far off. Yik woke up Lelele, who made up a new fire. The fire seemed to attract the elephants though (later, we heard from another guide that elephants will come towards fire, but will not approach closer than 10 meters), so Lelele started banging on a metal pan with a ladle. That seemed to do the trick. We all started to bed back down, when we heard the elephant charging our campsite! Corinna was up to go to the bathroom, and her, Molly and Dorian sprinted to the car. I stayed in bed and laughed at them. But eventually Lelele decided we weren't safe there and we all packed up into the car and moved to higher ground, further away from the elephants.

Later that night - we heard them again! Most of us just went to sleep, since they didn't seem to do any harm the first time, but a few stayed up to listen. The next morning, Lelele let us know that that second sound was actually jackals around our campsite, though they didn't bother us at all.

The next day we didn't have any luck seeing more elephants, but all and all it was a great time in the bush.

La Tombe de la Jeune Fille

2010-05-17T03:51:00.001-07:00

The Tomb of the young girl
Originally uploaded by lomamaestro

This is the tomb of the young girl in Djenne, and it has an interesting story attached. (Caution - this is how I heard the story and it may be entirely wrong).

A long time ago, Djenne didn't exist. Instead, there was a nearby village on an island called Djenne Djeno. The people of Djenne Djeno were animists, the traditional religion of Africa before the coming of Islam and Christianity.

When muslim tauregs and north africans began crossing the Sahara desert to trade in central Mali (and other places), they came preaching Islam, and some people were converted. A particularly wealthy man decided to build a center of Islamic study and trade, the city of Djenne. He began to build a great city. But to live in Djenne, you had to be muslim. Over time, the people of Djenne Djeno were converted and moved into Djenne. Undoubtedly some converted genuinely, but others may have been attracted by this powerful and wealthy patron building a new city not far from Djeno.

Some of the new inhabitants of Djenne Djeno, despite being muslim now, required a sacrifice to consecrate the new city and ensure it's fortunes. Many West Africans, to this day, retain elements of animism in the way they follow Islam or Christianity. So it was decided a young, virgin girl would be buried alive as a sacrifice to consecrate the city. Since there were no volunteers, the village decided to randomly choose a virgin but excluded the daughter of the village chief.

The daughter of the village chief felt really guilty that she was not included and so volunteered for the sacrifice. The village elders were unhappy, but could not sacrifice someone else if she had volunteered. So they build the tomb and buried her in the tomb. The daughter became scared and started to cry, and did not stop crying for 3 months.

After 3 months of crying, the villagers went back to the tomb and told the daughter that it was no use to sacrifice her if she was going to keep on going, the sacrifice would be no good. They needed a dead virgin, not a virgin crying for eternity. So finally she agreed to die, and did.

To this day, people claim that sometimes you can pass La Tombe de la Jeune Fille and hear a girl crying...

How to use a donkey cart

2010-05-17T03:12:00.000-07:00

So there are numerous creative ways I get in and out of my site, since there are no cars regularly going to my site from the road. Recently, I was walking and I got picked up by a donkey cart, so I thought I'd give some advice on how to best ride in a donkey cart:

1). Prop yourself up against the side of the cart. It's going to be pretty jarring - you'll need the support.
2). Spread your butt and legs as bonelessly and as widely across the bottom of the cart as possible. You're going to need a maximum of surface area to take the shocks.
3). Try not to bounce too high. The higher you go, the farther you fall.
4). Distract yourself from the little boy beating the crap out of the donkey. The journey is much more pleasant if you manage not to notice how much the donkey is being abused.
5). Enjoy the scenery. Usually, when you're traveling through the bush, you're jammed in the back of a tiny car, roasting in the hot sun on foot, or furiously peddling your bike. So this is a great opportunity to really look at the sahelian bush with nothing to distract you (except holding on for dear life).
5). When you're bored of the scenery, marvel at how the boy beats the donkey. It really is a art form. He whips his stick around in the air, threatening the donkey and spurs the donkey on. Just when the donkey starts thinking it's not really going to be hit, WHAM! He lays one in. A good donkey-beater can get a donkey up to a gallop - quite unfortunate for any passengers.

Building the Imam's house

2010-05-15T04:20:00.000-07:00

Hot season is the time for building, which is unfortunate considering it's, well, SO HOT! But I have enjoyed working on some construction projects over the past month or so, including building the Imam's house.

So I was walking past the Mosque and noticed that the Imam's front house (really, the orphans' house, since all the orphans sleep in the front room at night) was knocked down and it looked like people were getting started on rebuilding it. My favorite story of what happened was that a woman became angry and made the walls fall down...but the other explanation, that the roof was really old and some of the wood was rotting, seems more likely.

Interestingly, the Imam's house was described as the oldest house in Madiama - at 102 years old. I've at various other times heard that mud houses are usually good for about 40 years or so, but it also seems like the maintenance on them is pretty sub par. I've also heard that the mud one uses to remud the house in Madiama is good for up to 15 years. Whether the house was actually that old or the idea was just to convey a long amount of time I'm not sure, but it seems plausible given how much more effort is put into keeping the Imam's place up.

So I've put up a series of pictures describing the steps to build a mud house here. At first yours truly mostly just took pictures, but as the days progressed (tearing down the old house took a day, rebuilding took three days), I was given other jobs such has hauling bricks, mixing mud, hauling water, and passing bricks to the mason. So the number of pictures goes down as the walls go up.

I haven't yet gotten pictures yet of the finished project, but it's impressive. When I do I'll let you know!

Enjoy!

Remudding my house

2010-05-14T12:55:00.000-07:00

So, when your house is made of dirt you have to seasonally add more dirt to replace the dirt that gets washed away during the rains. While Corinna was in town, the dugutigi (Chief of the village) came through with everything to remud my house.

Now, you don't use just any old dirt to remud the house - the dirt is a kind of clay that is different than the stuff they use to make mud bricks and morter to build houses. So first we hauled this dirt over. Then compost - bits of millet stalk and cow, sheep and goat dung - were added along with water to make a mud slurry. This mud had to sit a couple of days - presumably some kind of chemical reaction takes place - and then we got started. We hauled great quantities of this mud up to the roof to mud the roofs and upper walls. Finally, we came down and did the rest of the walls.

I guess using this mixture makes mud that's a lot more water proof than the standard variety - people told me that mudding the house as we did can last up to 15 years because the water just runs off the mud. I also heard tales that sometimes people mix motor oil into the mud to get that special water repellent consistency.

Actually mudding was quite fun - just take great heaping gobs of the stuff, splatter it on the walls, and then "wax on, wax off" to make it into a smooth, even coat. Predictibly, I got pretty dirty doing this. And smelly. The mud smelled exactly like it was - great quantities of feces mixed with clay and water - and attracted clouds of flies while it was still wet. However, it dried soon enough and didn't leave any lasting smell.

I've posted up plenty of pictures Corinna took of the whole process. Enjoy . You'll notice there are some great big cracks in the mud on the walls. I asked around, and people said that the mud at the edges of the crack soften when the rains come and the mud just sort of naturally oozes in to fill the cracks. We'll see about that.

Pictures

2010-05-12T01:02:00.000-07:00

Hey folks!

I've gotten lots of new pictures uploaded at flickr: Flickr Photostream

I'm working on blog posts related to alot of these, but that'll take awhile...so until then, enjoy the photos!

Monkeys!

2010-05-07T07:59:00.001-07:00

Cokoroba & monkey
Originally uploaded by lomamaestro

So, Madiama has recently become infested with monkeys. One day I was out getting some salad at night from a street vendor (potential source of my current intestinal ailment? Quite possibly... ) when this crowd of kids insisted I had to come see the sura. I was a little hesitent (I really wanted that salad!) but decided to go check it out while my salad lady was cutting up onions. It turns out the sura was a monkey in a neighboring compound, tied up on a rope leash. The kids insisted the monkey came from the bush around Madiama, but there were no adults around to get more specifics. I planned on getting my camera and coming back in the day time, and went back to my salad.

A couple days later, I was hanging out with my friend and shop owner, Baki, when his wife, Sali, insisted I come back to see something and to say hi to Cokכrכba (translation: Really Really Old Guy, but more respectful. It's a nickname.) So I went over to say high and it turns out the thing they wanted me to see was another monkey! Cokכrכba is a friend of mine, so I was able to get a good idea about where this monkey came from:

A friend caught out in the bush. Now there's two definitions of African bush: westerners, and city africans too for that matter, consider a small village off the road like mine "the bush". But "the bush" also means the vrai bush: out where no one lives it all. An apparently, out there there are monkeys. I'm pretty suprised because there are no monkeys around where we live and and little to eat out in the bush by me, even for a resourceful monkey. So this friend when out with some of his kids, had the kids climb the tree as fast as they could and grab the monkey by the arm and climb back down.

That way of capturing a monkey sounds...absolutely crazy to me. But I guess it works. I asked what the plan was with the monkey, and Cokכrכba said he can sell the monkey to a toubabu, white person, for 25,000 CFA (US $50) who will keep the monkey in a cage. Sounds like exotic animal collectors to me. He also said that if he can't find a toubabu that wants to the buy the monkey, he'll sell it to a malian for 10,000 CFA, who will eat it. I would guess then that person would sell the head to a fetishist, because dried monkey heads are sold by traditional medicine men in many larger markets.

I thought alot about how I feel about capturing while monkeys like this. In many western african countries, there are now efforts to stop chimpanzee capturing and selling or killing because chimpanzee populations are so low. This monkey wasn't a chimp, but it made it pretty clear why you don't see monkeys along the road in Mali like you do in Guinea - they are rarer here and people kill them by the road (I know people kill them in Guinea too, but there's a lot more to eat so they can put up with it better).

At the same time, Cokכrכba and Baki's family is really poor. Really Poor. So I can't fault them for trying to get their 25,000 CFA. So... I'm placing all the blame on wildlife collectors. Collectors shame on you! Bad collector! Bad!

(Picture is of Cokכrכba giving some sugar to the monkey)

I swear, I'm not obsessed with this topic

2010-04-24T07:56:00.001-07:00

So, awhile ago I wrote a blog post about breast feeding in West Africa, and mentioned that in general, the exposure of breasts here is not awkward - one gets used to it pretty fast. I would go so far as saying it's not hard for the brain to recognize breasts in a sexual context and not in a sexual context. Think the doctor's office - when you have to undress, it may be uncomfortable but it's certainly not sexal.

Anyway, here's the blog post about how this cultural difference about breasts can be intensely awkward. The other day I was on a bus, sandwhiched between my girlfriend, Corinna, and a rather enormous woman named Poku I had been amiably chatting with over the course of our busride. Corinna leaned over and told me "that woman's breasts are enormous! You have to look!" It was true, they were sheer down to her knees, and enormously full as well.

You see, we could tell this because many Malian men and women wear an robes that consist of a long piece of brightly colored thin fabric, with a hole cut for the neck and the corners stitched together making body length-sized holes for the arms. Men wear draw-string pants and women where skirts under this. Paku was wearing this type of get up and over several hours on the bus had shifted around so that the side holes on her robes were open. So here is my girlfriend telling me to look at another woman's breasts.

As I'm squished into my very narrow seat, my arms at either side, Paku shifts... and now her breast in it's entireity, is laying on my arm. In an incredibly hot bus. Where there is no room to move. Next to my girlfriend...

So that's how what I said is not awkward at all can in fact become quite awkward.

(this post at the suggestion of Corinna, who thought the whole situation was hilarious!)

Risen from the Dead

2010-04-24T07:27:00.001-07:00

Teri going for some cheese
Originally uploaded by lomamaestro

So, when I came back from my training in Sevaré there was some pretty unwelcome news. My cat, Tєri, has disappeared. The person I had asked to watch her, Diallo, was out of town, and the person he had asked to watch her, Pleah, was also out of town. The folks that hung out in front of my house every day said they tried to keep an eye on her, but eventually she wandered off "that way" and hadn't come back.

Now the thing is, this was really my fault. I left her with my most responsible and one of my closest friends because he was responsible and a good friend, so I figured he would do a good job with Tєri. But the problem was that Diallo goes out of town almost every weekend to his family's home, which I also knew. There is no real concept of pet ownership in Mali. Mostly, the animals people keep are of the goat, sheep and donkey variety, and they expect them to keep themselves out of trouble. If a family does have a cat, it's strictly to control a pest problem and generally isn't fed. This is especially true in more rural areas. So to expect him to change his plans for an animal that in his view, would take care of itself, was wrong.

Actually, the cultural differences with regard to pets go further. As I said, people do not keep pets for the reasons we do in America, and animals are generally valued - or not valued - for their practical uses. So actually, when I asked where she had gone people told me that she had left and been eaten.

It's relatively rare for a cat or dog to be eaten here, and as far as i know families never do so. But there are plenty of half-starved children - some orphans, some who just don't get enough to eat at home - who occasionally eat whatever they can get. It is relatively rare, but that's probably because they have a hard time catching cats and dogs, and there really are not very many to begin with. I myself have been offered meat by a half dozen children grilling scraps of raw bits over charcoal. I've never taken any.

I was pretty upset. And people's response to that is "well, we'll get you another cat". It was just a difficult to far to explain while I was so unhappy.

Anyway, it turns out she had wandered off but had not been eaten - my friend saw her one day wandering in a field, picked her up, and brought her over. She spent a day sleeping and eating and after that recovered pretty well. She was back to her playful, needy little self pretty quick.

This time when I left because I was ill I gave her to a different family to watch - cross your fingers!

So what is Mark doing online?

2010-04-24T06:59:00.001-07:00

So Corinna came and visited me in Madiama recently, and we had a great time remudding my house (more on that later), saying hi to all my friends, and just hanging out. Village time is great for quality time since there's no distractions (IE computers, TV, electricity, fans, ice, showers...err, anything) from having great conversations. So we had a lot of great conversations. Also, we sweated a lot since its rediculously hot and there is absolutely nothing one can do about it.

Unfortunately, toward the end I started getting a little ill. We finally decided on the day Corinna was going to leave that maybe it would be best if I went too and go myself checked out. So now I've been hanging out in Segou, doing my taxes (incredibly INCREDIBLY not fun to do all the way from here), dealing with some identity theft problems (even less fun) and having a good time with computers, TV, electricity, fans, ice...etc.

Don't worry, I'm fine. I'm still waiting on some test results but I'm pretty sure it's just a parasite that's really not too bad... as soon as we get that confirmed, there is some medecine that will clear the whole thing up in three days or so. So I should be good soon!

Whoops, I may have neglected to mention an important piece of news.

2010-04-24T06:45:00.001-07:00

Corinna & Teri doing a dance
Originally uploaded by lomamaestro

So this blog has two function for me: the obvious one of keeping up people up to date on my life, and the potentially less obvious one of fulfilling one of my goals of Peace Corps service, which is to inform Americans about West African culture. And, to be honest I tend to focus on the latter rather than the former. So anyway, I have a girlfriend.
Her name is Corinna and she's another Peace Corps volunteer (and evacuee from Guinea). We started dating right after Christmas and have been having a great time. Of course, Peace Corps dating is not like regular dating. We generally see each other about once a month, but get to spend awhile with eachother each time. She lives in Segou, Mali's second largest city, and my village is a few hours away by bus. So when she wants to get out of the big city, she comes out to me, and when I need to do things that just aren't possible in a rural African village.

So speaking of her coming out to village, we have run into a petite difficulté. When Corinna first came to my village, i introduced her to people as n tєrimuso ("my female friend"), as opposed to n dogomuso ("my little sister") or n sagurunun ("my girlfriend"). At the time she wasn't my girlfriend, and she's definitely not my little sister so I thought that was this the best choice, but here's where cultural differences led me astray. First, men and women aren't really friends in Malian society, so for a man to say he's friends with a woman....welll, as best as I can figure that implies friends with benefits or something else inapporpriate.

Girlfriend is official, like the word girlfriend in English. So... tєrimuso was probably a worse choice than sagurunun

Furthermore, brother and sister are a loose concept here. You can call almost anyone a brother or sister, even if your not that close really. But it also is innocuous - brother or sister implies platonic - so this is the closest concept to friends between a man and woman. Whoops again.

Anyway, it's worked out fine. Everyone in village is absolutely convinced that we are together, so I guess it all worked out?

Ok, let's talk about breasts

2010-03-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

So, I've been blessed with an abundance of time on the internet during this IST, so I've caught up on my sister's blog. For International Women's Day, she posted an interesting piece on the controversy of breast feeding in public in the US:

Life, Mommyhood, and Food....

Since I enjoyed it, I thought I'd give an West African perspective on breast feeding. Women breast feed everywhere, at any time. There is practically no time when it is inappropriate to do so. Often, a woman will remove her shirt entirely and breastfeed, or not replace her shirt immediately when done.

I think partially this is a practical matter - women have a great deal of work to do and no time or privacy to take care of breast feeding behind closed doors. But also, breasts are not viewed as sexual parts of the body in West Africa the way they are in the West. In any case, one quickly adjusts to this cultural difference and it is not disruptive or problematic in any way.

Photos

2010-03-24T11:58:00.000-07:00

I've got a system down with photos, so I got even more up! These are from way back when in Guinea that I never managed to get up - lots of white folks in funny clothes.

Check it out.

Now that I can somewhat reliably share them, I'll try to take more as well.

Baobab fruit

2010-03-24T11:53:00.001-07:00

Baobab fruit
Originally uploaded by lomamaestro

Awhile back I told a story with a small role played by the Baobab fruit, probably one of the most widely recognized African plant name, though you'd never find one outside of Africa. At the time, I couldn't find my picture of baobab fruit, but I finally did so here you go.

You of course don't get to see a whole fruit, but there is a hard outershell that is cracked open, and inside there is a white powdery substance with seeds. That white powdery stuff that you see is what you eat. It's dry and sweet and delicious, but it did make me rather thirsty.

Segou music festival - My Taureg friend

2010-03-24T11:30:00.001-07:00

Segou music festival - My Taureg friend
Originally uploaded by lomamaestro

My Taureg friend

So at the Segou music festival I met this taureg man and really hit it off with him. The tauregs are a fascinating culture from the north of Mali where we can't go, so we don't get to interact with them much. You can see above a picture of my Taureg friend.

Since I just posted about turbans, I thought I would describe his head gear. He is wearing a 5 meter brown turban. On top of that he has a 7 meter white turban. And on top of that he is wearing a 10 meter blue turban. These are his "special occasion" clothes of course, but he is still wearing a shocking 22 meters (72 feet) of turban!

The advantages of a Turban

2010-03-24T11:15:00.000-07:00

So I bought a turban, and put it on and promptly got laughed at in village. Apparently I hadn't done a very good job of wrapping it. So several people tried to show me and something immediately became apparent - wrapping a turban takes practice, and if you don't have it, your turban will seem just fine to you but look rediculous to everyone, even including the toubab (white person).

Some of the guys in my village just have no idea how to wrap the things, which make sense because only about 30-40% of them wear a turban, and that's only seasonally. Why am I wearing a turban then?

It turns out a turban is a fantastic device under a variety of conditions. During the hot season, it keeps your head cooler. During dust storms (which we have been having for the last week and people say will get worse throughout the hot season), it keeps the dust out of your nose, mouth, and crucially, your lungs. And if you are African, it keeps your head warm during the cold season. (If you're American, there is no need to worry about your head being cold during the "cold" season).

Anyway, now I'm pretty adept at wrapping a turban, though I'm looking for a new one my friends all tell me the one I bought is too heavy and too short (it's only 3 meters, 5 meters is easier to wrap and 10 or even 15 meters is often used for ceremonies). Alas, I have so far neglected to take a picture of myself in a turban, but I'll make sure I do so and post it up.

Questions?

2010-03-23T15:06:00.000-07:00

So, I now potentially have some students from America following this blog now, so I thought it would be about time to put out another call for questions. Post a comment/send an e-mail with any questions you've got, and as soon as I get a chance I'll be happy to respond!

International women's day

2010-03-22T04:05:00.001-07:00

International women's day
Originally uploaded by lomamaestro

So for International Women's Day (March 8th), I bought the fabrique that is printed for women to buy for the day. I made a shirt to wear to support he women. You can see a glimpse of this year's fabric on the far left - it's bright green.

I was probably the first adult man in the history of Madiama to wear a Women's Day shirt, and I expected to get a lot of crap from the men about it. What I didn't expect was that women were quite upset. Many women were very unhappy that they had been unable to find the fabric, yet I was wearing it. Some women said that the fabric was just for women. It got so bad that I offered to give my shirt to a female friend because the last thing I had wanted to do was upset women, I was trying to support them.

But as the day wore on I got better at explaining my purpose in Bambara - that I was wearing it to support women, that I believed that women's work was very important and that they had a lot of work to do, and I believed we should give them respect. Once I could explain that clearly, everything changed; the women were very excited for my shirt, and the men grudgingly conceded what I was saying.

Next year for women's day I'm going to cook for some female friends - that will really be a new experience for them!

Throwing rice stalks

2010-03-22T03:51:00.001-07:00

Throwing rice stalks
Originally uploaded by lomamaestro

I apologize, this picture is a little blurry but has a good story attached. Please check out the couple of related pictures as well.

One day I was riding my bike over to school to meet with a teacher about physics revisions , when I saw these women tossing huge piles of rice stalks in the air. I was really curious - what were they doing that for? what possible purpose did it serve? I stopped and asked, and they showed me how tossing the already harvested bare rice stalks could liberate individual grains of rice that had ended up in the stalks. This is very time consuming work to recover small amounts of food, but every little bit helps.

You can see about half the rice stalk pile they were working with here - it was a daylong project, and I would say the rice they recovered was about 10 kilograms.

I helped them toss rice for awhile and it's actually kind of fun (when it's not a daylong task!) and got a great picture of rice flying everywhere!

Djembe

2010-03-22T01:21:00.000-07:00

So, awhile back I posted how excited I was to have gotten a hand-crafted, professional Djembe (a traditional drum). Well, when I got back to site I was excited to start lessons when one of the frequent miscommunications occurred - no one actually knew how to play. So, disappointed, I put it aside for awhile and buried myself in work.

Well, the other day I was cleaning up in my hut a little bit when a little kid came by asking for my Djembe. Just that day I had a bunch of kids in my hut and had a really hard time getting rid of them, so I was honestly pretty leary. And this kid was tiny - maybe 6 years old. He spoke in a soft whisper and was smaller than the Djembe. But then he said Fakoro, my counterpart, sent him. So we went out with the Djembe and this kid just started wailing away on the Djembe and making the most fantastic music! He is really, really good. I later found out he is the son of Jiriba, the local griot. A griot is a traditional musician and story teller in the village (more on them later). So it fits, but boy I was shocked!