THREE WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL
April 20
There is something magical about waking up to drumming. It happens quite regularly, as I go to bed early and the drums wake up late.
On this occasion it was the night after my friend Issa’s wedding. There were actually three marriages that happened on the same day, and I went with Abdouleye to the dowry ceremony. This entails a gathering of old men in a hut, chewing on bitter kola nuts while they exchange the dowry and give gifts. Next to the wrinkly men I noticed the sacrifice block, with fresh streaks of blood. The “dugu son” season is beginning, the season of offering sacrifices to the ancestors and the genies in order to get good rain this year. Outside the dowry hut, villagers were gathered at the newlyweds’ concession to chat, play cards, drink tea, and eat. It had started the night before and would go for several more days, with dancing at night. M’Pedougou is not a Muslim village, so the customs are rather informal compared to a lot of Mali.
Soon a child came and asked to speak to Abdouleye. He went out and came back, “Sita, let’s go home.” I looked at him curiously, wondering why he wanted to go, and of all things, home. We started walking and he said, “My mother, she’s passed away.” I nodded and as we walked I quietly gave him my blessings (Bambara fills that gap we have in English – that awkward sticky feeling of oh gosh, I want to console you, but I don’t know what to say… Um, I’m sorry? In Bambara there is a string of ‘death blessings’ that smooth over that gap. May Allah return her to the Earth. May he cool her resting place. May her children live out the life that she gave them) At his mom’s hut, the family was beginning to gather, trickling in from marriage festivities, their gaiety muffled. Abdouleye’s brother was sitting on a carved wood stool sobbing, tears making dark lines on his dusty cheeks. Their older brother, my language tutor Adama, drunk on millet beer from the marriage festivities, was preaching to no one in particular about the naturalness of death. The women began to gather and the singing began that afternoon.
By the next night, I’m flat worn out from the day-in-day-out festivities, the dancing circles of women, the cha-chas, the calabash drumming, the rice eating, and the all night balafon dancing. All, of course, taking place under a burning sun and even at night the moon seems to give off heat. I’ve gone home to tuck myself into my mosquito net and sweat myself to sleep.
I’m tugged back into consciousness by a deep resonant drumming, a sound I’ve not yet heard in village. Its deep voice is soon joined by the playful rising notes of the balafon. My mosquito net flaps against me in a thick wind, urging me, go, go, go to the music. I slip on my new tafe (fabric that wraps as a skirt) and, like many other nights, forage out into the dark. I pick my way through a dried out cotton field, letting the wind lift up my tafe and brush the silky fabric against my legs. I savor the cool air and the dark, turbulent sky. The balafon players are circled under a mango tree next to Abdouleye’s mom’s hut, illuminated by a pair of fluorescent tube lights. Above them swollen mangoes swing like violent pendulums in the wind. Dancers circle around, their feet flying in impossibly fast, impossibly intricate egg-beater patterns. A sheet of sand whisks through the air, and some of the pendulums fly free, their thuds drowned by the drumming. My friend Jeneba comes up behind me and smiles a great, yellow fleshy smile and hands me a mango. I pile a few into my shirt just as fat drops of water start spitting from the black boiling mass above.
Flip flops flapping, tafe whipping, rain drops splatting, I sprint through the cotton field to get home to move my bed inside. Just in time. Rain hammers down on my tin roof. Gusts of wet air burst in through my windows and I happily let the cool spray splatter across my floor. Outside the parched soil cries hallelujah and drinks long, deep gulps of sky water. I peel mangoes and I smile, savoring each bite of this sweet existence.
MOTIVATION
Monday, April 28
My women’s group meets most Monday mornings at 9am. The women trickle in, usually in spurts, and most weeks we are lucky to start by 9:30 with about 15 of the 20 women. We’ve talked about how to reduce women’s workload, child spacing and birth control options, starting a garden, and we did a formation on mud stoves about a month ago (mud stoves are an improvement over the tradition three-rock stove because it holds heat in and thus burns less firewood, reducing the time spent collecting wood and helping slow deforestation). I set the group up with 2 women represented from each large family within M’Pedougou, hoping that they could act as ‘representatives’ for their women, spreading what they learn within the village.
So when I taught them how to build mud stoves, the idea was that the 2 women would then go build their own mud stoves and teach their family’s women how to build them, and knowledge transfer would multiply in an almost exponential manner.
This Monday I was still eating breakfast (a bowl of sorghum and peanut porridge) at 8:30 when I heard “ko-ko” from outside (roughly meaning…hello, I’m here, can I enter?). I came out to find five women with chairs and stools on their heads. I gawked and said, well, you’re half an hour early, no one else is going to be here for awhile. They sat down anyway. I went back inside to collect more stools and I heard it again: “ko-ko.” Huh? I went back out, to find another group of women. Within ten minutes my concession was packed with women. Afu, a boisterous joking women with eyes that crinkle as if she’s got an inside joke, turned on her radio and stretched herself out in my hammock. I sat down and counted… 19 women. It was only 8:40. What was going on? Was my watch off an hour? This kind of … timeliness, EARLINESS in fact, is just about unheard of in village life in most of Africa. At 8:50 Abdouleye showed up, his jaw dropping at the gate. The last woman came and we started the meeting at 8:55.
We talked about Moringa trees, a tree that is sometimes called “the miracle tree.” The leaves provide vitamins, protein, and fiber that most village Malians severely lack, and it incorporates easily into their cooking. I have three of them in my yard and I have started a tree nursery, with 50 little saplings so far.
Near the end of the meeting Adama arrived - my language tutor who had helped me with the mud stove formation. Abdouleye and I were planning on making a tour of the village to ‘inspect’ the mud stoves. Adama (his eyes puffy and, as he is most mornings, still a bit tipsy from the previous night’s millet beer) said he’d come just to “add some words.”
He moved into what I call his motivational speaker mode, switching between Bambara and Senufo, using dramatic pauses for emphasis.
“ If you don’t build your mud stove, WHO will? If M’Pedougou’s children (Bambara’s expression for citizens) don’t work for their own advancement, WHO will? Each of us has our own skills to add, our own contribution to make, and if we don’t do it, WHO will?”
The women were nodding and murmuring, adding punctuations of “Amiina.” It was a clichéd Peace Corps moment that I think few volunteers are actually luck enough to experience – as few villages understand that development isn’t about charity, gifts, or white skin.
When Adama had finished I said “I too want to add some words.”
I paused, and spoke in slow crisp Bambara, “Long ago, the first people of America, those who were there before the white-skinned people came, they had a saying.” Pause. “They said, in everything we do, we must take into account the lives of future generations.” Pause.
The older women nodded in knowing, and the younger women with baby’s sucking on their breasts added their tongue-clicks that signal agreement. “If we cut down our trees today, what will our children do?”
And with that Abdouleye and I started our village tour. I had low expectations. As we reached each larger family’s area of village, one of the group’s representative women joined us and gave us a tour of her area. In and out of huts and yards, mud stove after mud stove after mud stove. Some had complex systems four up to four pots to sit on the same stove, some had smooth gray mud walls, some were dark, some had closed doors, some were open, but hut after hut, I started to get overwhelmed.
I said, “Abdouleye! The whole village has built mud stoves!”
He said, “Yes, what did you expect?”
“Well, I guess I just didn’t expect people to do it.”
“M’Pedougou is moving forward, and we’re doing it ourselves.”
I agreed.
And pictures are at
After a nice birthday dinner of toh and okra sauce, I head home, and hang up a lantern from my straw-covered hangar. Abdouleye, Yaya, Daouda and Baba come over and we make tea and chat until our eyelids droop and the milky way has crept up from the Southern horizon. I climb into the safe womb of my mosquito net and try not to think about the sweat already trickling onto my sheet.
