HIV/AIDS Awareness

We thought we had seen the worst by now. During a year and a half in our villages, living in mud huts and eating corn mush "toh" every night for dinner, we patted ourselves on the back for being "hardcore" for accepting to live and work in conditions few other Americans would tolerate. We flee to the big cities every few weeks under the pretense of "mental sanity" - we want to eat familiar foods, speak English with friends, check e-mail, and watch TV. We had gotten used to this new routine, come to accept it as normal. We thought we had seen it all, and were starting to think it wasn't so bad.

Returning to Mali in August from my trip home to America, a fellow PCV and I were approached by two Malian friends, students at the national University, and trained HIV/AIDS educators, about doing an HIV/AIDS awareness project in December in the mining zones near the Mali-Cote d'Ivoire border. We agreed to the project, not entirely too sure of what we were getting ourselves into, but figuring we could pull it off anyway.

The "AIDS boys", Lacina and Camara, one cold morning

We numbered five - two Malians, two PCV's and my brother who's visiting from America. The trip wasn't long distance wise -- 100k south from Sikasso to Zegoua, on the border, and then about 65k west into the bush. It would have been straightforward in America and taken only a few hours, but nothing is ever straightforward in Mali. After 10 hours in buses and cars of questionable quality on paths that no sane American would ever drive their car over, we arrived sore and tired in the mining town of Massiogo, our first stop on a tour that was include five villages.

We likened our surroundings to a refugee camp. None of us had ever actually seen one, but we agreed that this is probably what one would look like if we were to happen upon one. Not a permanent structure in site, just rows and rows of low-slung ramshackle houses and shops. They all looked exactly the same - a stick frame wrapped with some combination of black industrial plastic sheets and grass woven together in long strips. No windows, and very small doors made out of rice sacks. There were streets in this town, but no signs, no landmarks, no obvious way out. Where had we landed?

Home, Sweet Home for two nights, a typical miners house (the white is the front door).
It had three bedrooms and a living room, but had dirt floors and no electricity.
We slept on the floor on sleeping pads in our mosquito net tents.
Needless to say, we weren't looking to stick around much longer.

The "main road" through town (we only knew it was the main road because it was wider, lined with shops instead of houses, and we almost got hit by motos zooming by ever 5 seconds. The stores sold the same food and clothes and plastic household items one could expect to find in any big Malian city, suggesting a sense of permanence in a town where everything else reeked of transience. People were sticking around long enough to need new shirts, sandals, dishes and nutritious food, but not quite long enough to find the time to build themselves a mud hut. Or maybe it just wasn't worth their time. There's gold to be mined, after all, so who has time to waste building a house?

The main road through town

Even the doctor's office was a far cry from the one's found in the rest of Mali. This one was built entirely out of corrugated tin, including it's matching bathrooms. Because we were in town on a health mission, we went to the doctor first to introduce ourselves. To our surprise, the town had a rather evolved social structure and the doctor introduced us to the chief of the village, the head of the hunters association (a well respected group in Malian society) and the head barman, as they referred to him. We'd probably call him a pimp in America, as he was officially in charge of all the girls in town -- 160 officially registered sex workers of all nationalities.

They told us repeatedly that the mining towns "knew no borders", meaning that Malians, Ivoriens, Burkinabe, Ghanians and Nigerians were all here living together with the same goal: to make as much money as possible. Something was off. Ethnicity and nationality is everything in Mali; the idea that these notions didn't matter seemed almost as out of place as these squatter zones themselves. Ethnicity in Mali is where you come from, who you are, and what you will become. How could something this primal be dismissed so easily? What else would miners be willing to overlook in order to get rich?

The ubiquitous prostitute bars seemed to answer my question. Most Malians are devout Muslims, and it can be hard to find a bar in some Malian towns, but we had no trouble tracking them down here. Does knowing no borders also mean knowing no religion, no morals? Or were the Christians the only ones visiting the bars and the ladies? That didn't seem likely. The barman took us around to his bars and facilitated meetings between us and the women who worked there. We were told, however, that the officially registered sex workers was only the tip of the iceberg/ Young girls often come to town looking to help the miners with household tasks like cooking or washing clothes. We were told that these girls often get forced into less desirable after hours employment for these same men. Some of these youngsters will become part of what Malians call a "furu fitini", literally a small marriage, but really a marriage with an expiration date. Miners will take girls as young as 12 or 13 years old as their wives as long as they have money in their pocket, with the understanding that when the money's gone, the marriage is over, and the girl will be passed onto another man. Sitting at the doctor's office, we were handed a photo of a man and woman seated against a white backdrop. There was writing at their feet that read something like, "Curse the cheater who committed such adultery". There was only one living person in the photo. The man had cheated on his wife, she stabbed him repeatedly and then took his dead body to the photo studio. Morals were superfluous in this work, or so it seemed.

There exists a sort of desperation in these areas, if desperation is even the right word. Capitalism reigns and money is king. Water from the communal pump isn't free, and a trip to the pit latrine will cost you 10 cents, a bath in that same space about 50. Nobody has private bathrooms or wells, and the pump owner has a monopoly on the water supply. I've never had to pay for water in Mali before. The prices of goods in the stores on the main road are inflated, suggesting a certain level of income that may or may not exist. We were told not too take too many pictures the morning we went out to the mine pits -- you never know when you'll take teh wrong person's picture, they told us. The miners may have been working for weeks with no reward, and we didn't want them to come at us demanding money for their photos. Tensions must run high.

Working at the pits.
One man in the hole, filling up the bucket, one man above pulling it up.

The first site we visited had a school, but judging by the number of young children we saw around during the day, it didn't look like many were taking advantage of it. The boys were probably more valuable working in the fields, and girls in the house or kitchen.

Personal health seemed to be low on the list of priorities, as well. 50,000 people densely packed into one area sharing pit latrines without any sewage system or water treatment system. The lack of trash in the streets and the scarcity of mice was a pleasant surprise, however. A walk through the streets of a typical Malian village is a game of hopscotch as you try to avoid trash piles or latrine water runoff. These two eyesores were missing and we were led to the designated trash piles each time we needed to throw something away. Beyond environmental health hazards hid occupational ones. Men digging 50, 60 meters down in search of a gold seam to follow in either direction as long as it will go. Along with the photo of the slain man we saw, we were handed a photo of a corpse that'd been pulled from a collapsed mine shaft. We too thought it was a bit odd to be taking picture of dead people, but that wasn't the point. There are no safety measures in place to protect these workers. As long as there's someone to do the job, lives will be expendable.

Water running through town

The stress and pressure must get to people, as well. During a 9am visit to the pits, we ran across several workers so buzzed they couldn't form coherent sentences. And a 10am trip to the bars brought us in contact with the guys who didn't even make it to work that day. They weren't many, but it was clear they'd been there a while already.

So what makes it all worth it?

To be continued......