Into the village

It’s been one month at site. After swear-in and the ensuing late nights in Bamako (absorbing as much electricity, pastries, and cold beer as my body could handle), I hop on a sauna that also serves as a bus and clatter my way 7 hours South and East to Sikasso. I spend about four days in the bustling city, meandering through market and buying stuff to move into my new house. I begin to hone my bargaining skills; joking with the sellers and telling them that they eat beans when the prices are inflated due to my white skin.

On Sept 27 a Peace Corps vehicle takes me to my site, drops off my stuff, and bids me good luck! And there I am, sitting in my hammock, surrounded by my neighbors and villagers, wondering where to begin. The village decides for me: we start with music and dancing – a wild blur of feet and smiling toothless old women, shuffling in between the drums and the balafon, a big xylophone. A few men show off their footwork and the women shake their butts, their babies strapped on their backs barely moving. But the sun is rising and the fields are calling, so we wrap it up and everyone heads to the fields. It's barely even noon.

For the first week or so, I eat all my meals with my host family, Jakalia Bengaly and his three wives and ten kids. Jakalia runs a little butiki on the roadside and fixes motorcycles and bicycles. I arrive in the middle of Ramadan, the Islamic fasting month, where Muslims fast from dawn until dusk. My village is mostly animist, practicing fetishes and sacrifices, but a good portion of them are also Muslim. So every evening at dusk Jakalia and I break fast (his fast, not mine), drinking sweetened millet porridge with big ladles out of the bowl, then eating fried sweet potatoes and papaya and of course, the obligatory bowl of corn toh, the mushy staple of the Malian diet, dipped in an okra sauce that is the consistency of snot. It’s growing on me. I'd better hope so, because it's what I will eat for dinner every single night in village for the next 2 years.

The end of Ramadan is a big celebration - called the big feast - and the morning after the new moon the praying types come to the mosque to perform some sort of ceremony... the imam (prayer leader) stands with his back to the sun with a multicolored umbrella to shade his shoulders, while the villagers, all dressed in their finest outfits, splay themselves on the ground, rising and bowing in prayer. The women are all positioned behind the men so that the mens' pious thoughts won't stray. When the ceremony wraps up, a column of men (trailed by the inconspicious white girl) snakes its way through the village to a feast at the imam's house. We wash our hands and eat rice with sauce. Then Jakalia and I return to his house and find another big bowl of rice and sauce and his wives offer me to eat. I say, "but I just ate!" and she laughs - this is the big feast day - you can't ever be full. So I discover, as I wandered through town greeting and eating, greeting and eating. I devise the strategy of taking small handfuls, chewing really slowly, and then saying "I'm full" as soon as I had made a little dent in my corner of the bowl.
The whole village stops for two days - the women cook, the men make tea, the children run around saying blessings and getting candy (the Malian form of trick or treating I suppose). For once I can see women and men just sitting around, talking, lounging in hammocks, resting. With dusk the music starts, and all the food consumed during the day fuels the energy release of the night. The children start dancing first, running about practicing the moves that they see the adults doing. The women gather in small groups, leaning forward slightly to protrude their bums, shuffling their sandled feet. As the night progresses, the adolescent boys start gathering, all of them wearing white plastic shoes that reflect the weak blue light of the single fluorescent tube hanging above the balafon player. The shoes make their feet glow as they whisk around at impossible speeds, weaving impossibly intricate patterns. Then the men too join in and the butts start gyrating (yes, even the men) and it becomes one big booty shaking, foot flying, baby bouncing, sweat soaked frenzy. Two nights of this. Phew. Then it's back to the fields.

I convince my second host mom, Alimatu, to take me to the fields with her finally. She keeps repeating, “I be se?” (“Are you able to?”) and I insist that yes, I can make it all the way out to the fields, I won’t die. So she straps on her baby and loads the enormous bowl of toh on her head and we set off. We get there after an hour walk, to find the rest of the family harvesting cotton and peanuts. I force them to give me a hoe and we start hacking our way into the field. The peanuts are interplanted with sorghum, which is at this point over 8 feet tall, and the leaves scratch my sweaty arms as we dig through the soil searching for treasure. At the peak of the day we eat under a tree. The 10 kids, not in school because it's Sunday, are already beginning to eat when I come thrashing out of the sorghum jungle. The image of their noses dripping with snot, white ringworm circles decorating their shaved heads, and bloated bellies and skinny legs recedes behind their warm smiles and our communal desire to eat. The bowl of toh jiggles with their grasping paws. I wash my own and scoop it into the mush, then dunk it, hand and all, into my mouth.

The next day I join the cotton harvest. There is an association of young men in my village named "Five O'Clock" - so called because that's when they stop working. They offer their labor on Tuesdays in exchange for about $30 (for about thirty people, for all day), and people in the town hire them to harvest fields or do whatever they need done. Five O'Clock then puts their earnings into a fund to do community improvements, feasts and dancing being included under that category. I head out to the fields with my work partner, Abdouleye, to the surprise of the men already hard at work. I strap a rice sack on with a strip of old tire and start pulling the cotton balls from their little cups. We are all drenched, completely dripping in sweat, but no one seems to mind … I guess there is no choice really. The men’s voices ping back and forth in constant banter and laughter, while now and again a whooping erupts and echoes across the field. We go back to the cart and dump our sacks into a giant pile of fluffy cotton. They ask me if I want to go home and rest. I give them a mocking disdain: “What, do you think I'm a salabagato?" ( a lazy person - the ultimate insult) That brings a round of laughter and we go back to work. But soon enough the Western sky decides to send us home anyway. Wet gusts of wind whip across the fields and we all run, scraping ourselves on the sharp cotton branches, racing across the field to reach our houses before the torrent hits. The donkeys struggle with the loaded cart- cotton balls flying, whips lashing. I start laughing, but I realize that it might only be funny to me. For my villagers, wet cotton is a very real threat to their primary source of income. I get back to my hut drenched, to find my muddy laundry strewn across the lawn (the second time that’s happened!) and my drying beans are wet again. Sigh.


A few days later I join the rice harvest - I'm an ag volunteer - my definition of "going to work" is to meander around and head to the fields. I ride my bike this time, and park it under a tree with all the other mens' bikes, take my sandals off, and start in on some real work. The harvest is done, today is rice thrashing. They ask me if we do that in the US, .. I say no, I think machines do it. When I tell them that machines also pick crops, plant crops, and yes, even make our coffee, they wonder ... well, what exactly do you do then? Um, we sit in offices and shuffle papers around and watch the clock? Here though, we watch the sun, because as they say here "the sun is mean." The men have piled the rice in huge piles in a circle, with big metal barrels in the middle on top of some old holey tarps. I grab some rice

stalks and start thrashing - the rice falls off onto the tarps and a lot of dust and the rest of the plant flies up in the air and sticks to my sweat-drenched arms and neck. They force me to rest, but I want to see the afternoon through, so we thrash away under the hot sun. Finally we're done; dirty, sweaty, physically exhausted. The women now move in to sweep the rice into bowls, pouring it to get rid of debris, and load it into sacks to put in the donkey cart. We eat big bowls of rice and peanut sauce in the shade of a mango tree. I sleep harder that night than I have in a long time, and the next day my shoulders and back feel like I'd started pole vaulting again.

Slowly, I have started making friends, mostly with my neighbors. To one side is Namongo and his quick laughter, his gifts of oranges and jokes. On another is sweet Mariam and her three daughters, who stop by my house when they go to the pump. My favorite is Yaya, who owns the millet grinder and has a smile that beams from a mile away. We hang out a lot in his hammocks chatting and discussing Mali's situation in development in comparison to other African countries (a lot of Malians are very opinionated about the difference between French and British colonies, the former being inferior in their eyes), and we talk about agriculture and the needs of the community. Other times we just watch the big trucks go by on the main road and the goats munching on their mango branches while we drink tea. And time slows down.

Enjoying life in a mud hut -