First things first: Because I know you're all rushing to the Post Office to send me packages, please take note of the new address in the bar to the left. I'll be heading to my site shortly, and will be getting my mail at the new address.
I just returned to the Peace Corps training site from 20 days straight in village with my host family. Going in, we (me and my two other homestay site mates) were really worried that it would be the longest 20 day stretch of our lives. We could not have been more wrong. The 20 days flew by and we were all really disappointed to leave. I'll see if I can sum things up concisely so you can get the full effect without being bored to tears. Tonight's topic will be health training. We'll save my homestay family stories for later in the week.
Our training is roughly divided into two sections: Phase I and Phase II. The first part deals with language, language, language and then some more language. Phase II deals with technical training for our sector (I'm health education), done as much as possible in the local language as well as with the local people. This second half also incorporates formal language classes when time permits. The whole goal of the training program is to get us conversational in the target language, and get us started learning as much as possible about our sector. We did a lot of pretty cool stuff. We started by learning how to conduct an animation, which is basically a 5-10 minute informational session for local populations about a certain topic. From a large list of possible topics, we chose to teach the local women in our village about treating their mosquito nets, the benefits of oral rehydration salts and how to make them, and how to treat their well water so they don't get sick from drinking it. The local head of the women in our village got a lot of women to come, so we had a pretty realistic turnout for our first practice run. About 20 women came with their babies and toddlers to listen to us talk - it was really great because they sat and listened to our awful Bambara and then asked great questions, only about half of which we understood. Thankfully, our Language and Cultural Facilitators** (see below for the scoop on our LCF's), were there to clean up around the edges.
Our next task was to conduct a baby weighing morning in our village. Baby weighings are popular and important health tools in Mali because they provide a relatively easy and reliable way for both care givers and mothers to know if babies under the age for 2/3 are getting adequate amounts of nutrition. In short, they're basically the first line of defense at the community health level against malnutrition. Here's how it works: at regular intervals depending on the health center, mothers come to have their babies weighed. They stick them in what looks like a pair of shorts and hook them up to a hanging scale. They then ask the age of the baby and match up the babies weight and age on a color-coded malnutrition chart. Green means go and keep up what you're doing. Yellow means "Yikes, we need to talk about what you're feeding your kid". And red means "ohmy! It's time to step up your child's nutrition". We have a relatively wealthy village, so out of about 30-40 kids weighed, we only came up with a handful in the yellow zone and 0 in the red. It turns out that weighing babies can be a traumatic experience. The minute you take them from their mom, they start whimpering, and then when they get shoved into the plastic shorts and suspended from a hook in the air, the whimpers turn into full out screams of rage and humiliation. You'd cry too if you got put in plastic shorts and hung from a tree branch. The shame! Here's a photo I found to illustrate my point. I'll have photos of actual people I know up soon, but my camera's still being futsy:
I just returned to the Peace Corps training site from 20 days straight in village with my host family. Going in, we (me and my two other homestay site mates) were really worried that it would be the longest 20 day stretch of our lives. We could not have been more wrong. The 20 days flew by and we were all really disappointed to leave. I'll see if I can sum things up concisely so you can get the full effect without being bored to tears. Tonight's topic will be health training. We'll save my homestay family stories for later in the week.
Our training is roughly divided into two sections: Phase I and Phase II. The first part deals with language, language, language and then some more language. Phase II deals with technical training for our sector (I'm health education), done as much as possible in the local language as well as with the local people. This second half also incorporates formal language classes when time permits. The whole goal of the training program is to get us conversational in the target language, and get us started learning as much as possible about our sector. We did a lot of pretty cool stuff. We started by learning how to conduct an animation, which is basically a 5-10 minute informational session for local populations about a certain topic. From a large list of possible topics, we chose to teach the local women in our village about treating their mosquito nets, the benefits of oral rehydration salts and how to make them, and how to treat their well water so they don't get sick from drinking it. The local head of the women in our village got a lot of women to come, so we had a pretty realistic turnout for our first practice run. About 20 women came with their babies and toddlers to listen to us talk - it was really great because they sat and listened to our awful Bambara and then asked great questions, only about half of which we understood. Thankfully, our Language and Cultural Facilitators** (see below for the scoop on our LCF's), were there to clean up around the edges.
Our next task was to conduct a baby weighing morning in our village. Baby weighings are popular and important health tools in Mali because they provide a relatively easy and reliable way for both care givers and mothers to know if babies under the age for 2/3 are getting adequate amounts of nutrition. In short, they're basically the first line of defense at the community health level against malnutrition. Here's how it works: at regular intervals depending on the health center, mothers come to have their babies weighed. They stick them in what looks like a pair of shorts and hook them up to a hanging scale. They then ask the age of the baby and match up the babies weight and age on a color-coded malnutrition chart. Green means go and keep up what you're doing. Yellow means "Yikes, we need to talk about what you're feeding your kid". And red means "ohmy! It's time to step up your child's nutrition". We have a relatively wealthy village, so out of about 30-40 kids weighed, we only came up with a handful in the yellow zone and 0 in the red. It turns out that weighing babies can be a traumatic experience. The minute you take them from their mom, they start whimpering, and then when they get shoved into the plastic shorts and suspended from a hook in the air, the whimpers turn into full out screams of rage and humiliation. You'd cry too if you got put in plastic shorts and hung from a tree branch. The shame! Here's a photo I found to illustrate my point. I'll have photos of actual people I know up soon, but my camera's still being futsy:
Our next activity was to make ameliorated porridge for women and talk about nutrition. We made a breakfast type porridge similar to Cream of Wheat in the US. It's made of corn flour, millet flour and peanut flour, as well as a TON of sugar to sweeten it. This day wasn't especially interesting, so I won't talk much more about it.
One day, the Peace Corps took us to a malnutrition rehabilitation center in Bamako (I should probably say that Bko's the capital of Mali, and is about an hour away from both our homestay villages and the PC training center). The MRCenter is actually just a wing of a hospital that focuses on severely malnourished babies. There were only 9 kids there when we went, which seemed to be a pretty low number for one of Africa's poorest countries. And the funny thing was that they didn't look at all like those pathetic kids you see in the "Save the Children" or "UNICEF" ads on TV or in magazines in the US. I have yet to see anyone as pathetic looking as those ones, which could lead to an interesting discussion about the accuracy of those ads, but since I've only just arrived here, I probably should refrain from making sweeping generalizations. The long story short is that the kids at the center stay there and get huge amounts of calories in liquid form every 4 hours until they're better. The center's staff also talks to the mothers about how to feed their kids so that they won't get sick again when they leave. We learned that malnutrition can have many causes which range from the inability of the mother's body to produce nutritious breast milk, thus depriving the baby of the vital nutrients most little ones get, to the inability to rebound back to a normal weight after a bout of sickness such as malaria or severe diarrhea. I expected the center to be extremely sad and depressing, but it wasn't what we expected. We talked to the workers about the babies' progress (medical confidentiality in this country is a topic worth discussing later) since they arrived at the center, and the kids actually seemed to be doing pretty well.
I'm going to try to do my best in the future to balance my talk of the differences between the US and Mali with a sprinkling of the similarities. I think lots of people in the US view Africa as extremely foreign, and somewhere they'd never want to visit for fear of getting sick. And while parts of it are really foreign and bizarre to us as Americans, I'm finding daily that there are more similarities than you might think. Mali's not the place to come if you're looking for a leisurely stroll down Champs Elysees (but then again, whose ever heard of a leisurely stroll down one of Europe's busiest boulevards?) or a relaxing beach vacation, but I do think it has lots to offer the adventurous traveler. Yes, you will get sick and yes, you will be uncomfortable for parts of your stay, but the people you meet and the things you see make up for any discomfort you might encounter. And plus, don't you want to see the land of so many legends for yourself? Timbuktu really does exist, and it turns out that there's a lot of fascinating history hidden there. And it's right here in our backyard!
I'm still healthy and happy thus far. For those of you who think we're eating poorly, let me dissuade all fears of that. I've had several Mexican nights recently, as well as coleslaw, hamburgers, sloppy joes, ice cream and more. I actually started off my day with a 7am Snickers bar from a friend this morning. And we get driven around in plush, air-conditioned SUV's. We're about to watch the new Batman movie in the dining room of the training center now, and we're all talking about the upcoming presidential election in the US. A few weeks ago, Peace Corps bussed us to a pool in Bamako, and when we officially swear in as volunteers on Friday, we're going to swim again and dance the night away at a club. We wrestled a lot with the question wealth inequality during my time in Madagascar, and I actually haven't heard anyone here in Mali question it, which surprises me. We go to the plush grocery store here often (at least once a week), and are driven to the bakery almost as often. It's nice to the extent that these are the only places we can find familiar shampoo, toothpaste and soap. And well, it's nice to pay extra to eat ice cream every once in a while. We're still adjusting to life in Mali and this provides a slice of normalcy for us, but I've begun to wonder recently when enough is enough. It's worth remembering that we'll never be Malians, and so we shouldn't strive to eat, breathe, sleep, and live as Malians (and as a matter of fact, our Peace Corps country director made a point to say that he worries when people come off the plane on day one dressed as natives), but there's something about the American-ness that's been transported to Africa that still gets me. As supposed development workers in one of the poorest countries of the world, it seems like we should be doing something else. And I think my ideal something else starts this Saturday, when we'll all ship out to our local villages to spend the next three months living like most of the country. I'm not going to go on too long about this topic, as it's something I think I'll be dealing with for the next two years, and will have a lot more insight into in the future.
Take care and check back later in the week for an update on my host family.
** LCF = a Malian hired and trained by Peace Corps to live in village with us and serve as not only our Bambara teachers, but our insiders into the Malian culture and society. We had two women who spoke Bambara, French and English. We got off to a rough start with them, as their English was shaky and our Bambara non-existent, but by the end, we were spending most of the day joking around with them. They accurately picked up on my, should we say "strong" personality and hounded me relentlessly about it. I make sure to come back with appropriate responses, and now my comebacks are even in Bambara. They ended up being our saviors in village, as they got along really well with our host families, provided the insight into social ceremonies like the wedding we attended, and could translate anything and everything our families said to us that we didn't understand. We'll be sad to leave them, but they've been living in a small village away from their families for the last two months, so it's time for them to head back to Bamako and resume normal life.
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