Beatrice Goes to Africa: Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing, Baby...

First things first: Thank you, thank you, thank you for all your comments! Here are some quick responses:
Judy: I’ve never heard of a “swamp” contest. I’ll keep my ears open!
Bruno: no, sheep don’t have names. And thankfully, they’re not one other nameless animal that keeps me up at night. And as for alternative energy, there are some solar panels floating around, but I haven’t seen any wind turbines.
Matthew: You should probably come visit. You need to make up for lost time, right (I mean that in the best way possible!).

It occurred to me recently that you might want to know about my daily schedule. So here goes:
Every morning at about 6:30/7am, I wake up, emerge from my mosquito net and get ready to face the day. I wash my face (because it’s culturally inappropriate to speak to and greet people before you’ve washed) before going to my host families’ house to buy bread from them. They get their bread delivered daily from a town about 20k away, which means that there’s always a finite supply of bread. If I get there too late, I’m stuck eating fried dough, which I don’t really like. How’s that for motivation to get out of bed? I typically eat bread with peanut butter, honey and bananas (if I have any) and drink tea for breakfast. I’m fortunate to have a gas stove with three burners, which is really nice because the Malians cook on charcoal or wood stoves, which are slow and completely foreign to me. Anywhere between 1 and about 10 kids typically show up at some point during this process.
At around 8, my troubles start. I have done everything I “need” to do for the morning, and am faced with the decision to either sit around in my compound by myself with a book, or go wander around town to find people to sit around with. I typically choose the latter. I go walk around to either my host families’ house or my homologues’ house to greet them and see what they’re doing. Typically, we pretend to talk to the fullest extent possible. It’s really great when there are kids running around because then I can make faces at them and play with them, because neither of those involve language skills. I have one kid trained so that whenever he sees me, his eyes get really big, and he purses his mouth to mimic a facial expression I made the first time I went into his compound. It is absolutely adorable.
Note: Mondays and Wednesdays are days to look forward to because there are markets in neighboring villages. I go to them, walk around for a while, sit with people from my village, and sometimes buy things.
Then 11/noon rolls around, and if I have food in my trunk in my kitchen, I head home and attempt to cook something palatable. If not, I head to my host families house and hope, hope, hope that they’re eating rice and sauce. But if not, we eat corn toh and sauce. Toh is gelatinous, and the sauce is snotty. Delicious. In all seriousness, toh is a dish made from pounded corn kernels, akin to congealed Cream of Wheat. The sauce at this time of year is made from dried, crushed fish and pounded ocra (sp?) powder. It does, indeed, have a very snotty consistency – there’s no other way to put it to make it sound good while accurately describing it. I force myself to eat it 1. because it’s typically my only option, but 2. because I know I’m probably getting more vitamins from the sauce than I am from most other things I’m eating. I’ve rediscovered what being “full” means. If I’m actually hungry, I will eat a substantial amount of toh and sauce, but the minute it stops tasting good is the minute I no longer know that I’m hungry. I immediately stop eating when this happens.
After eating, I usually go home from about 12/1-2/3:00. I figure it’s siesta time in the rest of the country (and parts of Europe), so I probably shouldn’t go against cultural norms by actually doing anything at this time of day.
And then at around 2/3:00, I resume doing nothing. I’ll either walk around my village some more and see what people are doing or read a book. I’ve played a few rounds of UNO with folks, sat around and “chatted” some more, or just stared aimlessly into space.
Finally, 5:00 rolls around and I go to the pump that’s about 500m from my house (that’s close), and get water for my bucket bath. It’s really nice to have a pump this close because it means I can be slightly more sure about the cleanliness of my water. Most families in Mali have wells, and because they’re tapping into water that’s closer to the surface, it’s more susceptible to contamination in the form of dirty bathroom runoff or animal feces. As Peace Corps volunteers, we’re required to both filter and bleach well water, and even then we can’t always be entirely sure that it doesn’t contain contaminants. But pumps are dug a lot deeper and tap into water that’s (at least as I understand it) less contaminated. I filter my water with the large scale filter PC gives us, but worry less about bleaching it. So I get my water, and then put it on the stove to heat up so I can take a warm bath. If you’re going to have to take a bucket bath, you can at least make it a warm one, right? And then I go take my bath in my concrete bathroom with no roof. And actually, one of the mud walls fell down in a hard rain storm we had before I got to site, so my wash stall really only has two permanent walls and a door right now. The other wall is a thatch wall that’s propped up from the back by sticks. My village promises they’ll fix it when the rainy season is over. And I didn’t have a door until recently, when I told my village carpenter that everyone on the street can look in and see me bathing if they didn’t install another door for me. So now there’s a much appreciated tin door shielding me from the road.
And I think I wrote about the rest of my day in my last post, but I’ll repeat parts of it… After my bath (that sounds so…Victorian? So proper! Almost like I should go eat tea and crumpets immediately afterwards), I go and sit with one of my neighbors who fries bean dough every everning. It’s an excuse to a. check my voicemail and b. be social and c. eat beans! Cell service in my village is extremely limited, and it just so happens that there’s a stick with a knob on it near the bean-frying lady that gets great service. So I go, turn on my phone, and hang it on the knob on the tree and wait for messages. I typically leave it on for a half hour or so, but no longer because I don’t want the battery to run out. There are ways to recharge it in village, but I’d have to pay for that, and I’m a cheap PC volunteer, so I try to make my charge last two weeks until I come into Sikasso, our regional capital, again and get electricity that someone else is paying for. I sit, and sometimes talk and joke with the folks that have come to buy beans and sit around, too. It’s typically a group of men, because the women are at home taking care of the kids and making dinner and, well, running the household.
But here’s really why it’s fun (and this is more complicated than I think even I understand, but I’ll try to do my best in summarizing): in Mali, your last name makes a big difference. A generations long tradition exists in which different family names joke with each other. At the most academic level, it serves as a social stabilizer, a way to ease tensions and draw people together. For us PCV’s, it serves as a repetitive joke that doesn’t require many language skills to participate in because it progresses in the exact same way each and every time. Here’s how it works: You’ll either be meeting someone or buying something from someone on the street and they’ll ask you your first and last name. At which point you tell them, and they react accordingly. I’m a Coulibaly, which means that almost everyone jokes with me. I’ve been told I’ve set myself up for a long two years of being made fun of, but I’m ok with that. It’s something to talk about. So…once people establish that I’m a Coulibaly, people always follow with the following…Coulibaly’s are bad, and they eat beans. At which point, I tell them that people with their last name are bad, and that they eat beans. Sometimes, you can tell them that they’re your slave, although as Americans, we’re a bit hesitant to make that joke. There’s a little too much historical baggage with that one. My village consists of folks with the same last name which is different than mine, and I joke with them all. They constantly tell me that my last name is bad, and that I should change it. As I walk through town, they call my name and tell me that I’m one of them (ie I have the same last name), to which I reply that the folks with my last name are great, and I’ll never be one of them.
And then, at around 7 or 7:30, I head to my host families’ house to eat toh and sauce and drink tea. Different people pop in and out of the house, and come to talk and drink tea. Drinking tea is really nice because it provides a finite thing to wait around for.
Let me explain: it is very uncomfortable for me, as an American, coming from our busy-busy culture, to just sit around and do nothing. But, as a handy-dandy Peace Corps manual I read recently said, sitting around is perfectly normal in lots of cultures. And here’s the crazy thing: you don’t even necessarily have to talk while sitting around. It’s nuts! But I never quite know when enough sitting around and talking is enough. So tea provides the perfect out. We brew three rounds of tea from one box of loose leaves, and then it’s over, and I have a reason to leave. I can’t leave ‘till we’ve had three rounds (the glass is about the size of a shot glass, so we’re not drinking three 8 oz. glasses of tea), so I either find something to talk about because when they talk to me, they have to speak in Bambara (more on that later) and I can pick the topic of conversation, which means we’ll most likely be using a set of vocab I can understand. Or when the conversation fails, we eat or stare at the stars. Oranges are coming into season, so we’ve been drinking lots of OJ. They cut off the top of the orange, cut out a wedge at the top and then peel off the outside of the skin, leaving a layer of roughage on the outside so the juice can’t squeeze out. Then they squish the orange slightly, and drink the juice from the top wedge they cut out. It’s great! A friend of mine also fries fish every afternoon to sell and brings me some every evening. I never even really liked fish in the US, let alone fried fish, but they’re not bad here. I still don’t eat the head, but I’ve started to really enjoy fried fins. My host dad takes care of the heads in one bite for me.

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

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