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

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

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

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

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

Disney Meets Mali

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

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

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

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

As you know, my language tutor (ie moral/cultural compass) is the director of our school, and I’ve quickly become friends with him and his family, which means that I end up spending a lot of time at their house. I hadn’t observed a class until recently, but because of a first three month “needs assessment” that I’m required to do by the Peace Corps, I found myself in a classroom recently observing the afternoon’s lesson. The lesson started off really well, and I was encouraged by the structure and the pace, but it all disintegrated when the students couldn’t tell their teacher which mathematical operation they had used to solve their simple math problem. After asking several times, and not getting a response (probably because the kids had no idea), he brought out his rubber whip and began to beat the kids.
Now let’s back up a step-- I don’t agree with beating kids (or anyone for that matter), however I would have found it easier to stomach if they’d been misbehaving or acting inappropriately in any way. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
The kids were given a simple math problem: if there are 234 boys and 456 girls in the class, how many total students are in the class, and then divided into groups with their hand-held chalk boards to solve the problem. I thought it was rather forward-thinking and interactive that my teacher was dividing them into groups and asking them to work together to solve a problem, which some groups did successfully. They got the right numerical answer, but when asked which operation they’d used to get their answer, they couldn’t say “addition”. And instead of stopping to go back and explain the different operations, the teacher resorted to pacing the room re-asking the same question over and over and over again. And then he got so frustrated and said to me “Pardon me, please” before he went around to the groups and asked the SAME question again, and when they couldn’t answer correctly, he beat them. Hard. This was no simple love tap, but a thwack that made them writhe and wince. It’s a sign of weakness in this culture to scream or cry, so the room was silent while he went around hitting the kids. It was awful.
I watched briefly, unsure of what to do, before finally deciding that leaving the room was best. I left the room shaking and on the verge of tears to get some water outside. I composed myself and went to a different classroom where the students were diligently copying a lesson in French about transportation methods of Mali, most of which they’d probably never heard of or seen. Maybe there’s something to be said for the tried-and-true copy and regurgitate schooling system that the French colonialists introduced to this country years ago. The kids may not understand what they’re learning, but at least they’re ignorant and welt-less, instead of the other, more painful option.

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



I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas…
The high today in Mali is 96*, and they tell us it’s cold season. One of us did not have a white Christmas, but it nevertheless was a really good one anyway.
A friend of mine who I studied abroad with in Madagascar came to visit on the 13th. I came into Bamako to pick her up that Saturday night, and we spent Sunday here in the capital. Bright and early Monday morning, we got a ride to Sikasso, and spent the night there. Early Tuesday morning, we took off for my site and spent Tuesday-Saturday morning hanging out in village and meeting people. On Saturday, we started our trek back to Sikasso, back to Bamako and onwards, 6 hours west until we got to a small town called Manantali. I’m inclined to think it was a town in the middle of nowhere that nobody had ever been to before someone got the idea to dam the river and make a HUGE hydroelectric power plant there. Someone said that, at full capacity, this dam could power all of Mali and perhaps have some energy leftover for surrounding countries. That’s massive. If you google image search “Manantali”, you’ll find some photos of it.
We met some other Peace Corps friends in Bamako on Sunday and headed west early Monday morning. Our final destination was a Peace Corps stage house in town where we’d planned to meet more PCV’s to celebrate Christmas. What we didn’t realize when we’d first decided to head out there was how beautiful the place really was – the house is right on the river! Supposedly there are hippos there, but we never saw them, which is probably a good thing, because they can be extremely dangerous. We did have monkeys come right up to the porch where we were sitting one morning (sorry Elizabeth, I have no idea what kind they were). We spent the week relaxing, swimming and hiking, and thanks to all the Whole Foods deliciousness that my friend had brought, we had some pretty great meals. Our Christmas dinner had the works: guinea fowl, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, pumpkin mush (to substitute for the lack of sweet potatoes), and pumpkin bread (which I made without an oven! Gotta love double boilers). This may sound all hum-drum to you, but everything tasted SO much better with the addition of things from America. The stuffing had dried cranberries in it, the mashed potatoes had butter and spices, and there’s no cranberry sauce to be had anywhere in this country. It all tasted so good!

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

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