Two dozen years

It's a hot birthday this year. I wake up before dawn, lathered in sweat, sticking to my sheet, and I look up at the stars, veiled by the white gauze of my mosquito net. 24 years. And here I am, sleeping on the red earth of Mali, thankful for chance to be alive, to think, to breathe, to interact with my fellow creatures.

By the time the sun blots out the stars, I'm up and about, going to the pump for morning greetings and a bucket of water. I mix up a bowl of basi (pounded millet) with thick milk that I got from some Peul women. It's my new breakfast staple for when I can't find eggs. At 9 am, women start showing up for my weekly women's group meeting. As each woman arrives (with stool on head), she claps at the entrance to my courtyard and says a loud "Ka ka," to announce her presence and ask for permission to enter. The greetings swirl around, all in Senufo: how are you, how are the children, the husband, the parents, the neighbors, and did the night pass in peace? Then the blessings come, may the day end in peace, may god help us, may we get along well, may we help each other. I nod and affirm the greetings: "Amiina, amiina, amiina." (Amen)

By 9:30 the women have all arrived and the greetings have been said, so we start the meeting with another round of greetings and blessings. My work partner Abdouleye translates everything into Senufo for me, and we talk about setting up a women's association to make improved shea butter for the export market. Shea butter making is a traditional women's activity in Mali, but primarily for personal use. Just recently the international market has started seeking out better quality butter for use in cosmetics, creams, and chocolate. For the women to sell to these buyers, however, they have to completely change their production practices. They currently store the nuts in holes in the ground for several months (where they mold and rot), then smoke them over a fire to dry them (turning them black and filling them with carcinogens). The new method means boiling and sun-drying the nuts instead. We discuss all this, and the women are interested in trying the new methods if it means a new source of income.

We end the meeting around 11, checking up on how many women have built mud stoves since we did a formation on them, and make plans to go around next week to look at people's stoves.

My friend Calita from a nearby village comes over, and we make banana bread in my solar stove and lounge in my hammock, watching her thermometer as the temperature soars to 109.

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.

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The last two months in M'Pedougou have been wonderful. After Yaya's mother's death, I decided that I can't live in this village for 2 years and not understand what people are saying. I just can't. So I have begun studying Senufo, an unwritten tonal language that challenges my patience every single day. I have invented four new letters to represent weird sounds, and I write little arrows to indicate up or down tonal inflections, with circles to represent nasal sounds. It's a riot. Really.

I have also started working. (!) After a great deal of reflection, (What is development? What is the role of a Peace Corps volunteer? How can I get around the "gift-giving" mentality that just cements the relationship of dependency between developed and developing nations? What can I possibly teach anyone about agriculture?), I decided to form a farmer's improvement group. My village is made up of 9 large extended families, so Abdouleye chose 1 man and 1 woman from each family, motivated individuals who can be leaders within their families, who want to learn, to experiment, and to share what they learn.

The group is set up with three goals:
1. To find new techniques, plant varieties, and information related to farming and natural
resource management.

2. To test these findings.

3. To share what is found with family members, friends, and neighboring communities.

I plan to act as a liason between my farmers and the NGOs and research organizations already here in Mali, and to teach several farmers how they can play this role when I leave. It is frustrating to go to Bamako and Sikasso and see all this incredible knowledge being accumulated, but with a weak or non-existent extension function, this knowledge just sits and collects dust, never reaching the people it is intended to help.

So this coming rainy season our work will begin: five farmers will be trying out new varieties of sorghum, five will be trying new varieties of rice, five will be alley-cropping (planting nitrogen-fixing trees in rows within their crop fields), and five will be collecting pee in jugs and using it as a nitrogen source for corn. We will take measurements, compare the old with the new, and determine what works and what doesn't. My goal is that next year the farmers themselves will seek out new information and we will try out whatever it is that they find. That is what I think Peace Corps Volunteers should do : help people discover their capabilities to develop without constant outside assistance. There are so many rhetorical catch-phrases (Capacity building! Self-help!) and yet I so rarely see it happening here in the development field. What I see is a lot of dependency-building and a lot of gift-giving. It is the difference between building a road and helping to build the political, social and economic infrastructure to maintain that road and to build new roads.

I am in Bamako for another training session right now (with Abdouleye! We can speak in code to each other in Senufo now, which is fun!). I am missing the mangos that have started dripping off the trees in Sikasso, the ONLY compensating and sanity-saving element of hot season.

Here is the 5-day forecast for Sikasso, just to give an idea:
102° F 77° F
102° F 80° F

109° F 84° F

105° F 89° F LOW !

104° F 84° F

I think I will freeze to death when I return to Ameriki.