the Home of Doves

I am delighted to say that I have 80 new friends. I left Oregon last Monday for 3 days of training in Philadelphia, where I met my new friends and coworkers. These people are going to be lifelong friends. My last meal in the states was grilled tofu (on a rooftop in Philly), and my last memory is of a morning cup of coffee. It was hard to just say "goodbye" and know how long I would be gone and to think of everything and everyone I would be leaving behind.

The 80 of us flew together to Paris and then Bamako, arriving at 9:00pm to a gentle humid heat and a team of Peace Corps staff to escort us out to the Peace Corps training center outside of the city. The site is named "Tubaniso," meaning "the home of doves." Fitting.

Upon arriving at Tubaniso, the first order of business was learning how to go to the bathroom. The toilets, called the "nyegen," are drop pits with a small hole in the concrete floor. When walking up to the toilet, one is supposed to clap or cough loudly to announce their prescence, and if a person is inside that person coughs in response. Furthermore, one must always remember to bring the "salidaga," a teapot of water that serves as toilet paper.

I woke up early my first morning and stepped out of my round hut to see a giant one-eyed hunching tortoise munching on bunch grass.

My first attempt at doing laundry was laughable. I bought a block of hard soap and took my clothes out with my bucket and filled the bucket with water. I broke off some soap. I sloshed some water around. ... The soap didn't dissolve. I kneaded and rubbed my clothes for awhile, decided that I was clueless, and then rinsed them one by one and hung them out carefully on the line.
That night, sheetless, blanketless, lying on my back in my underwear and sweating, I woke up to a crack of thunder that seemed to explode the walls of our hut. The white mosquito nets on our beds rippled in the gusts of wind blowing through the door and windows, and blinked like huge fireflies as sheets of lightning flashed from all directions. I lay there, smiling because I love thunderstorms, and pulled the sheet up around me. OH shit! My laundry!! Leaping out of bed, stumbling into my shoes, I ran outside to find an empty line. One shirt was in a tree, others on the ground, and one sock... well, it just did what all socks do when they go through the laundry: it ran away.

Yesterday we ate our first real Malian meal. On a mat on the floor, five or six people sit around a bowl of rice or to (a gooey stuff made from millet), and the sauce of meat and cabbage is ladled into the center of the bowl. You eat with your right hand only, scooping up some food and pressing it into a ball in your palm, then using your thumb to push it up to the front. Then you shove the whole thing (fingers and all) into your mouth, and if you have anything left on your hand after that it is perfectly acceptable to lick the hand in a large sweeping motion. I was ecstatic. I love eating with my hands. Or should I say, hand.

After four days here at Tubaniso, we leave tomorrow morning to go to our homestay villages. I am going with four other volunteers to a small village 40km south of Bamako, where I will live with a family and start intensive Bambara language training. Every two weeks we will come back to Tubaniso and work on our technical training (agriculture skills), then go back out to the village. We do this for 9 weeks, and then we will be sworn in as official Peace Corps Volunteers and go out to our sites. So tomorrow I leave the home of doves and enter the real MALI. !!