…Or something like that. Either way I don’t have much time left in Mali. Our Close Of Service Conference is coming up at the end of June, at which we find out the exact date that we leave Mali- mine should be sometime in September. The last few months have been really busy, which makes the time feel like it’s going that much faster. In December my family came to visit, and in February my friend and fellow PCV Grace came, too. Since December my women’s literacy class has ended and the cereal grinder project has technically been finished. I also went to a training on tree grafting and shea tree management and put together a training for the Sikasso region on high quality shea butter production.
My family coming to visit was something I’d been looking forward to for a long time. My mom, dad, sister and Carrie all arrived in Bamako one night, and you could tell they had had a long trip. (I’m not gonna lie- I’m cracking up right now just thinking about the looks on their faces!) We then proceeded to go on a whirlwind tour or Mali: relaxing at a dam south of Bamako; seeing Sikasso and the waterfalls near my site; spending the Muslim holiday of Tabaski in Madoubougou; taking a boat trip on the Niger River; visiting Dogon Country; and shopping and relaxing in Segou and Bamako. For me it all really was a blast. Being able to show 4 of the most important people in my life where I’ve been living and what I’ve been doing was truly amazing. Even with the language barrier, it was pretty cool for me to be able to introduce my Malian community and my family to each other. Everyone in Madoubougou still talks about it practically everyday.
Our ride on the Niger and trip to Dogon County was the first time I’d done either. My family probably wished that I’d known better what I was getting us into, but we survived :) The boat on the Niger was not exactly what any of us had expected, and I think Carrie in particular was ready to kill me when we stopped to spend the night on the shore (some might say “rock”) a few hundred meters downwind from drying fish (some might say “rotting”). There’s really no other way to see that part of Mali, though, and it really was pretty cool. Most of the trip was on what is called the Niger Inland Delta, and we spent the night at Lake Debo. It’s a gorgeous river valley with little fishing villages scattered along the way, a couple of which had beautiful mosques to add to the scenery.
Dogon Country lived up to its hype from the tourist guide books, too. Some of us (eh-hem… that’s a subtle throat clearing noise, p.s.) weren’t in quite as good of shape as hiking through Dogon (and really getting to see all of it) requires, but we were able to get the gist of it in the 2 days we spent there. The terrain is picturesque, and the culture is interestingly unique. But after 1 day of walking down the cliff and through a couple of villages, we were ready to move on and spend their last few days in Mali relaxing a bit and making sure they all had some souvenirs to bring home. All in all my family did really good dealing with all the tiring little annoyances Mali can throw at a person, and I can’t blame them for being ready to get back to America by the end of their trip!
A month later I got another visitor, my friend Grace. As some of you know, she is a Peace Corps Volunteer in Bulgaria, and it was fun for us to compare the 2 countries as well as our experiences in them. Of course there are many obvious differences between Mali and Bulgaria. Grace left freezing winter weather to come enjoy the beautiful February sun of Mali. She lives in a cement block apartment with internet; I live in a mud hut with a hole in the ground outside for a toilet. Bulgarians generally love to drink booze; Malians for the most part are strict enough Muslims to stay away from it. And she can dye her hair dark and dress in the right clothes to blend in as a Bulgarian pretty well; I stick out like a sore thumb no matter what. However, we spent a lot of time talking about the role of Peace Corps in our respective countries, the difficulties and joys of the languages, the ups and downs of dealing with a foreign culture, the things we miss about the States, and so on.
So anyways, Grace got into Bamako a few days before the music festival in Segou started, and we had some time to kill. Unfortunately the day she flew in I came down with the Triple Crown of stomach illnesses- giardia, amoebas, and bacterial dysentery. Not fun. I’ve gotten used to being sick here, but I felt bad for Grace that her first 3 days in Mali were spent mostly in our hotel room, the PC bureau, and the PC med. office. Luckily I was feeling better by the first night of the Festival sur le Niger, which turned out to be excellent. My favorite living Malian artist, Habib Koité, played that first night and only fell in the river once… yup, he fell in the river. But he kept right on playing afterwards like it was no big deal- it really wasn’t- and put on a good show. The other big name there was Salif Keita, and he was pretty good. Watching him reminded me of seeing Bob Dylan in concert, though, in that he’s way past his prime and too old for live shows, really, but still fun to listen to. The rest of the artists at the Festival put on some good shows.
After Segou Grace and I went down to Sikasso, spent a day at the waterfalls, and visited Madoubougou. Before we knew it, it was time to head back up to Bamako for some last minute souvenir shopping and a couple of nights out on the town. Grace even got to experience the real joys of Malian public transportation on the final leg of the trip. The bus from Sikasso to Bamako can take as little as 5 and a half hours, but for us it took the just-as-likely 11 hours. I knew we were in trouble from the start when we got on a mostly empty bus. They generally won’t leave town until they’ve filled every seat and have people sitting in the aisles. So we sat on the edge of town waiting for another bus for our bus to pass us off to for I don’t even know how long. Then of course the bus had to stop in every single one of the 40 villages between Sikasso and Bamako to drop off and pick up passengers, but not before getting a flat tire or some other such problem that took an hour and a half to fix. And they didn’t even really fix whatever it was all that well because we were going even slower than usual for the rest of the trip. It was so bad that even some of the Malians were complaining to the driver, which almost never happens. Hopefully I won’t have to deal with anything like that when I head up to Bulgaria to visit Grace in June. :)
The last time I wrote, I mentioned the start of the Women’s literacy class, and it ended in January. With the cereal grinder project, the idea was for the women’s association to manage it themselves. And since that requires keeping some form of records we had to start with teaching them to read and write. The nationwide literacy rate is something like 20 percent, but it’s virtually 0 for rural women. Some of the women in Madoubougou had a limited education coming in, but many could not even write or recognize the numbers 0-9. So 20 women started the class, and 18 ended up finishing. They spent 4 hours a day, 6 days a week for 8 weeks, learning first to read and write the Bambara alphabet (which is basically the Latin alphabet plus and minus a few letters) and the written numbers (which are the exact same). They learned to string the letters together to sound-out words and the concept of a one followed by two zeros symbolizing one hundred. It’s kind of hard to relate to at first, breaking down things like this that come so naturally after years of daily use. But it was really cool to see the women actually learning it. Of course two months wasn’t enough for those starting from the very beginning to reach the point of total literacy, but it laid a good foundation to build on. And the women who’d had some experience with letters and numbers before this class are now that much better at it. So I think it went well.
The cereal grinder project has also been finished, technically. In January we received all the funding, and I’d like to thank everyone who contributed. (For anyone who would still like to contribute to a similar project, there are a variety of projects on the Peace Corps website all the time.) Once the money actually arrived in Sikasso, Fousseynou and I went around buying all the parts and organizing a truck to come down to Madoubougou with it all. The village men built a house for the grinder, and it was all installed and ready to go within a month.
There is a 10hp diesel motor to run everything and two mills: one is a “rice mill” that shells rice and grinds corn and millet kernels down into smaller bits but not all the way to flour (I just realized I don’t know the proper terms for any of this stuff in English, so bear with me on the explanation if you do…); the other mill grinds corn and millet to flour and will also grind peanuts and shea nuts into paste. The third piece run by the motor is an alternator (i.e. electricity generator. This runs lighting, allowing the grinder to operate after sundown, as well as a battery charger. Many people use motorcycle- or car-sized batteries as a source of electricity at home, powering lights, radios, and even TVs if they have one. Now they are able to charge them right in Madoubougou. All of this is being managed by the women’s association as a business, just as any other grinder in Mali runs, and that covers all operating costs.
Along with the literacy class, there was a grinder operation and maintenance training for the women. That training ended up being shortened to 10 days from 20, and the village decided to have 3 young men from the community attend it as well. The idea was that these men could pick up the information better and faster and then help the women after the trainer left. But attendance at this training wasn’t very good, and there have been little problems here and there with the mills since the end of the training. Luckily a guy in village was able to convince a nephew of his who has 15 years of experience with grinders to come to Madoubougou for the next 2 months to help. He started on Saturday and got all the tweaking of everything done. Now the idea is that he’ll work with the 3 men and a group of women over the 2 months to teach them more about operating the grinder. Hopefully by then there will be at least 1 man capable of taking on the daily operation of the grinder along with a group of 6-14 women rotating in pairs to help out. The management of the money is still the women’s responsibility, and they’ll pay the chosen man (or men) as an employee. So I guess the point is that it hasn’t quite worked out the way we’d initially planned (what really ever does?), but it looks like it should be o.k. anyways.
I was going to tell you all about the shea training we just had in Sikasso and what we’re doing with shea down in my village, but this has just gotten too long… so I’m going to have to save it for next time, in’sha allah (god willing), and say goodbye ‘til then.
