Six Months

I've reached a milestone... Six months in Mali! Some highlights:

Favorite Bambara word:
Pankurunjiginyoro. Literally: Jumping boat landing place. English: Airport.

Skill I've picked up:
Listening and clicking in my throat to show I'm listening, then nodding and saying "akanyi" to indicate I've understood when really I didn't.

Skill I still haven't mastered:
Pouring Malian tea - they pour back and forth for about 15 minutes between two shot glasses to make the tea foamy. When I do it I miss the glasses and before I make foam I've spilled all the tea.

How I've changed the most:
I eat meat. I crave candy bars and chocolate and cookies - all the foods I once dismissed as "environmentally damaging and nutritionally empty." The politics of meat is different in Mali - there are no factory farms, antibiotics, cleared rainforests, or complex energy-consuming supply chains involved - just free-range, organic, pasture-fed animals. As for the candy bars and cookies, after weeks of corn mush, ... they don't seem so nutritionally empty.

Number of marriage proposals: Close to 50

Most interesting package: A box of dried leaves from the banks of the Seine River in Paris.

What do I miss the most?
Coffee, broccoli, breakfast cereal, road biking, people being (and things happening) on time. Easy access to Wikipedia to answer pressing questions like "is MSG (the main ingredient in Maggi, the staple spice in most Malian cooking) really that bad for me?"

What do I not miss?
Traffic jams, being in a rush, never having enough time, fixed prices.

Possible projects: (i.e. What is Jessie actually doing in Mali?)

1. Doing a research trial (called a Farmer Field School) on alley cropping: Planting trees INSIDE crop fields to fix nitrogen in the soil and create mulch with the leaf litter. The idea is that it increases crop yields.

2. Doing another research trial to test out new higher yielding sorghum varieties, some of which are bred (not genetically modified) to be resistant to a weed that plagues the fields in my area.

3. Introducing free sources of fertilizer: Teaching them how to build composting "toilets" that you plant trees on after six months of use. We call them ArborLoos. And that's not all! Collecting pee - !!! - diluting it with water and using it on nitrogen-needy crops as fertilizer. Whoever said there was no such thing as a free lunch?

4. Working with the women to teach them how to make improved shea butter, to form an organization, and help them learn how to find external buyers who pay a higher price.

5. Drying mangoes!! (Vitamin A defiency in kids being a major health concern, and tasty food deficiency being a major mental health concern)

And my personal goals for 2008:

Start a chicken coop.
Learn how to pour tea.
Read 52 books.
To be kind, generous, curious, and cheerful.