Leaving

Leaving

I remember the posters for Peace Corps recruitment in the US. Written in white print above a photo of a child in a worn t-shirt with a giant smile: The Toughest Job You’ll Ever Love. Trite, of course. But now, ten hours before I board a plane to leave Mali, it rings true. Joining the Peace Corps was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

On Sunday M’Pedougou held my going-away party. After a morning of soft drizzle, they hauled the balafons and speaker system out and set up in the center of village. People trickled out and gathered, kids, women, men, old people, everyone in the village and even the neighboring villages was there. A car arrived, and I was surprised to see men in suits step out! The mayor had showed up with some bigwig politicians from Sikasso, and they quickly made use of the sound system. There were long greetings and many thanks. One man said, "Do you know what she had to give up in order to come here? She left her family, her friends, her culture, her food... " A man from a nearby village that I had worked in gave me a massive rooster, a gift from the women's group. Finally, my close friend Yaya gave the mayor a package, and they presented me with a giant mud cloth depicting the history of Sikasso. It was a gift from my village so that I would remember them. As if I could forget. Finally I got up and gave an impromptu speech:

“ I left my house two years ago with no idea what was waiting for me in Africa. But I found you. We’ve now spent two years farming together, making tea together, eating together, cooking together. We dance together and take care of each other when we’re sick. You have become the largest family I’ve ever had, and I will never ever forget you and the warmth with which you welcomed me. …” and so on. It was cheesy but it was also true.

I choked up a bit as I looked out at the sea of faces that smiled back at me. I knew everyone. Every face I paused on brought a fresh memory and I had the overwhelming sensation that I will never experience anything like this again. I won’t know the names of all my neighbor’s kids and go help them grow their food. I won’t run from rainstorms through wet corn fields. I won’t sit under ripe mango trees listening to soft keys of balafon on the radio and greeting everyone who passes.

I finished my speech and the sorrow of the moment was soon overtaken by the sheer joy and energy of dancing. The women who I had been working with for two years gathered in circles and pulled me to the middle. The balafon notes rang clear and fast, and dust rose from the ground as our feet scurried to keep pace. My host mom Fatimata held my hands and we locked eyes, smiling, just beholding each other in that moment. Friends circled in and out, and we were all soon drenched in sweat, which was then powdered in light dust. It was beautiful. The old men (who were already drunk off millet beer) joined in the chaos and strutted their moves. I danced until I thought my heart would break.

These memories will rest with me forever.

So now for some more fun: A self-interview

How has Peace Corps changed me?
-I’m infinitely more patient, and I walk slower.

-I can do nothing all day and not feel guilty about it
-I value family and friends and spending time with these people much more highly. It is so easy in the States to get caught up in seeking. I was a very achievement oriented person before Peace Corps – getting good grades, pole vaulting, whatever it was, it was always my most important priority. I think living with a small village has opened my eyes to the importance of putting people first and valuing relationships.
-My intestines will forever be scarred…

Best parts of Peace Corps?
-The time span. It is so special to be able to spend two years with people, to see people change and to gain their trust. My friend Alimatu got pregnant, gave birth, and now her little baby is starting to walk. I also loved planting the fields, weeding, then harvesting, and then eating that same food. Seeing the entire life cycle is a huge benefit to the two year time span of Peace Corps.
-Being able to speak Bambara fluently.
-Balafon music and dancing under the stars

Worst parts of Peace Corps?
-The illnesses…. From intestinal amoebas to malaria, and I even once had a giant swollen lip that looked like a horror story: “Collagen Gone Wrong!”
-Boredom.
-Getting harassed by little children constantly chanting “Tubabu! Tubabu! Tubabu!” (white person).
-Transportation - 60 hour bus rides, Goat pee dripping down from the roof into the window, 10 hours delays, breakdowns, crazy busdrivers, sleeping in bus stations...

I guess the "worst" parts do make the best stories.

_________________________________

I have a heart bursting with love for this country and the people I grew to know, but I am ready to come home and spend time with my own people. It’s been an adventure of a lifetime. Truly the toughest job I’ll ever love.

Waiting for Rain

I’ve often enjoyed awkward pauses in conversation, laughing inside at the clumsy silence hanging between two people. This evening, however, the pause lingering in the air presses against me like a growing balloon, and there’s no inner smile to break its taut skin.

“I ni su Yaya. K’u jooni? Pi-ar-denni?” I’ve crossed paths with my close friend Yaya in the faint blue afterglow of twilight, and his white smile glows at me in the darkness. We exchange greetings, which flow naturally between us, overlapping, advancing and retreating like waves. When the tide ebbs, I complain about the topic that no one can avoid,

“I was sure rain was going to come this afternoon. The wind kicked up, the sky darkened, and then it vanished.”

“I thought it was going to come too.  I really did.”

“How many millimeters have you measured this month?”

“Not even twenty. Last year we had more than 200 by this time. I’ve never seen anything like this. No one has.”

            His words drop into the night air and leave only a hole, a gaping silence that I don’t know how to fill. I look up at the emerging stars, that lovely sight that has become ominous in its unabashed verification of a clear and cloudless sky. It’s been twelve days since the last rain fell in M’Pedougou, and everything and everyone watches the sky in angst. The corn plants, poking their puerile heads out of the ground, complain amongst each other in soft parched murmurs about the drought and the noisome clouds of dust.

            The silent balloon pressed against my flesh starts to hurt, but I don’t know what to say to Yaya. He rescues me with a gentle, “A be na nogoya,” It’ll get better. We’ll get out of this. I nod and affirm his blessings, and we continue on our paths. The silence, though broken, still clings to me and I can’t shake off its sticky tendrils.

            What if it doesn’t nogoya? What if this is a symptom of global warming, and Mali (and the world) is in store for more and more extreme weather events that will disrupt our ways of life and of living? I look up at the sky again, trying to locate the shreds of guilty silence still weighing on me in the darkness. The sticky part of the silence is the part gnawing its way into my conscience: the awareness of my own contributions to that unseen but present layer of greenhouse gases. The stars wink down at me through these layers, and I remember with greater guilt that I’m going home soon. Back to the land of gas-guzzling cars, heaters, air conditioners and TVs and rampant, blind, blithely rapacious energy use that we use to entertain ourselves and to make our lives “comfortable” and “easy.”

[I’ve been reading a truly life-changing book called “The Gift of Good Land,” by Wendell Berry, and in it Berry notes our tendency in the US to look too narrowly at a problem, and thus invent solutions that either do not solve the problem, make more problems, or make it worse. Case in point: air conditioners. Because of increased global warming, on hot summer days (let’s be honest here, not hot compared to Mali), people want to be comfortable, so they turn on their air conditioners. This consumes electricity, which is made in many areas of the country by burning coal. The burning coal adds more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and we’re back to square one. ]

            Standing here in the dark on a well-worn footpath in this small African village, I have felt no greater shame. It will be Yaya, the man with the warmest smile I’ve ever known, who will have to sell some cows this year to help his family get by. It will be Alimatu, my host mom who tells stories late into the night, who will have to scrape at the dry earth with her short-handled hoe to re-plant crops when the first planting has died of thirst. It is these people, who have worked outside under a blistering sun their whole lives, who have never known the luxuries of light switches, running water, refrigerators, or cars in which to zip down to the 7-11 for a slurpee and a bag of chips, who will suffer (first) through the consequences of our behavior.

The true irony lies in their desire to be like us. They are people who traditionally lived only off the interest of their “natural bank account,” leaving the principal alone so their kids would have something to live of off. Then they see and hear of America, which is eating away directly at its principal and proclaiming itself “wealthy,” and they are envious of our wealth. It’s normal, it’s only human, but it’s also tragic. 

How can I go home and go back to the American life, after seeing and knowing what I do now? Now that I know that when I hop into a car or buy food shipped from across the country, doused with fertilizers, and processed in a fume-emitting factory… that in merely participating in the American lifestyle, I’m (in an indirect way, but as part of the larger problem) making the soil just a little bit dryer for my dear friends Yaya and Alimatu. They won’t blame me. When I leave they’ll thank me profusely with heaps of peanuts and chickens for coming to “help” them, and I’ll smile guiltily and glance up at their dry skies. That will be an awkward pause that sticks with me for awhile. 

On TV!

The second shea butter movie was just aired on ORTM, Mali's national TV station, last week! The first movie (Shea Butter) has been appearing at least weekly for over a month now, and the now the "prequel" - Shea Nuts - is in rotation too. It's pretty exciting for people in my village to see themselves on TV, and I've heard from other Peace Corps volunteers throughout the country that they've seen the videos. They're movie stars!

Back home

This is the first e-mail I’ve ever written IN village! I’m in my hut in M’Pedougou with my laptop. I brought it to village just this once to show my movie stars the video that is the talk of Bamako! They really enjoyed it - I had to play it three times.

We’re on the cusp of rainy season, but it’s been a fitful start. Everyone’s seed is in the ground, waiting desperately for the next rain to come. This morning is market day. Sellers carefully stack their wares (okra, mangoes, bike parts) into the smallest sellable unit (5 or 10 cents a pile) and people drift about socializing and drinking rounds of tea. I suffer through the endless cycles of “Sita! You were lost! Now you’ve been found!” (the Bambara way to say you’ve been gone for a long time) I say, “Yes, I was indeed lost. I won’t get lost again!” But they’re glad I’m back, and I’m glad to be back. I know so many faces, so many names. We’ve hoed fields of corn together, we’ve danced into sweaty starry nights together. It feels like home.

After a week and a half without rain, the air clings around us like viscous soup. Sometimes I wish we humans had more conscious control over our unconscious bodily functions; I’m awed by our bodies, don’t get me wrong, but… when it’s 100 degrees outside and 95% humidity with no chance of evaporation, maybe sweating profusely (It’s like my body’s sprung a serious leak) isn’t the best strategy.

So when the Western sky “speaks and splits” as they say in Bambara, I’m overjoyed. Swirling black clouds bully in a fuming dust storm that whips over piles of mangoes and sends us all scurrying for home. But, as luck would have it, the clouds leap frog right over us. I stand bemused in my yard, surveying my parched tomato beds and my tree nursery, contemplating the broken pumps and the difficulty of getting water (strapping an old 20 liter plastic jug on my bike and riding across village). In three directions I see gray sheets of rain, but above me shines a patch of blue sky. It is difficult, even after two years, to imagine what life is really like for my neighbors. My garden is for the joy of it, not to feed a family. If the rains don’t come… well, I don’t really want to think about it. I can’t fathom it. We are so conditioned in the West to having control over just about everything in our lives. We believe that if you just work hard and apply yourself, you’ll be okay. But here, there’s a lot more simply left to the swirling clouds of Chance.

(and, of course, whether the chickens you sacrificed in April fell on their stomachs or their backs. J )

 

Shea video on You Tube

My shea video is on YouTube now - with English subtitles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7ktkxQuCjI

Success!

Today was why I joined the Peace Corps. Today was why I went to film school. Today was why I spent months struggling to learn Bambara.

I came into Sikasso yesterday to finish up editing the shea butter training video that I shot in my village last month. I stayed up late into the night last night (taking advantage of the temperature falling below 100), sitting with the glow of my computer screen on our porch under a soft moon. Out of habit, I still woke up at 5:45 with the roosters this morning, and the buzz of the city (the motorcycles, the goats, the jabbering radios) pulled me up. 

Like every Tuesday, I went to Radio Kenedougou - the radio station where I have my weekly radio show - "Aux bords de l'amitié"  (on the banks of friendship). With my ever-improving language skills, the show has really come into its own. This month we've talked about tree planting, global warming, and we did a really great show exploring the question: "What is development?" One of my friends in village came up to me last week and said "I loved that point you made on your show about how Africa may be physically decolonized, but we can't advance until we decolonize our minds and allow ourselves to develop as Africans, not imitations of the West." Indeed. This morning's show was on individuality vs. communalism, and we compared American and Malian attitudes (from how we eat to how we treat old people).

My work partner Abdouleye came in to Sikasso around lunchtime and we got a ride with my friend Alou out to another volunteer's village 10km from Sikasso. We showed up an hour late and had to wait another hour for everyone to show up. Nothing unusual. Abdouleye and I just hung out under a mango tree, cooled by a gusty Western wind. We made observations about little differences we noticed in the village. Once the crowd had grown to more than fifty women, I opened the meeting to an enthusiastic murmuring of "Eh! Ala. She speaks Bambara fluently!" The women were wide-eyed and attentive. As seasoned shea butter trainers, Abdouleye and I stepped right into our element, asking the women about their current shea practices and then using our visual aids to go step-by-step through the improved process. When we finished I thanked the women for their attention span and then asked them, "If you can still sit still, I've made a little movie about shea butter production." We moved into a dark spot behind a building, and I pulled out my shiny, sleek MacBook, and propped it on a hand-carved wooden stool. The crowd huddled around and shhed each other into silence. I pressed play.

For twelve minutes, they were glued to the screen. They let out gasps of surprise and clicks of agreement, and when the credits finally rolled they erupted in applause. Success! I'm using my skills for something good in the world. Thy gave me a giant bag of mangoes and the women exhorted me to come back again. 

Next up? Trying to get the movie broadcast on national television!

I have also finally uploaded a little video clip to YouTube. It is a balafon party in my village in December. Just rough footage, but you can see just what incredible dancers they are!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5JjDOJD4P0

Dancing in the heat

These photos are taken in Kandiandugu, a neighboring village where a friend of mine works. We went to dance under the giant village tree, escaping the brutal sun but not the heat.

Shea Butter movie

Abdouleye, the multi-tasker, hard at work with my home-made bounce board (it bounces light into the faces and illuminates dark skin).

The finished butter, ready to cool into the hardened form.



I finished filming the first installation of my shea butter movie, and I've started editing. It was a riot to try and get my "actors" to understand why I needed to do multiple takes, why we had to get the kids out of the scene, why they shouldn't look at the camera, etc, etc. It was a lot of fun all the same, and I'm looking forward to showing the finished product.

Thanks again to all of you who helped me get this project rolling!

What is development?

They showed up in a shining white SUV. We had been waiting for almost two hours, dressed in our matching outfits from last season's village festival, sweat beads rolling down our backs and dripping onto the red dust. When the glimmering vehicle finally rolled up the road, we ran forward, clapping our hands and stomping our feet to the patter of drummers lining the path. The doors opened and three ghostly creatures emerged, two women and a man. Their clothes were crisp khaki (with nifty zip-off legs) and they wore boots and wide-brimmed hats. They were whisked away to the school, and I rode the wave inside a crowd of women, all dressed from head to toe in matching fabric. It was my turn to be in the other end of a village greeting.

When the hubbub had died, the dust had settled, and the figures were finally left alone, I approached, slightly unsure of what to say, of where to begin. They gave a start to see me, a white girl, emerging from the fray of color and sweat and dust. I introduced myself and noted their crisp French accents and pale winter skin. They were astonished to learn that I lived here, that I spoke fluently the local language, that I was going to spend an entire two years in a mud hut. I was astonished that they expected to hop off an airplane from Paris, plop down in a small village, and be able to contribute.

I learned that they had indeed, just gotten off the airplane. This was their first time in Africa, and they were going to spend a week in M'Pedougou in what development workers call "needs assessment." This is where the aid worker ostensibly takes a comprehensive survey of the community and identifies areas of need. Peace Corps volunteers spend more than three months learning about the local customs and values before even beginning to attempt a "needs assessment." But, they were on a limited time frame. They were working for an NGO called Electricians Without Borders and their goal was to see about bringing electricity to M'Pedougou. 

The women asked me if I could help organize a meeting with village women, and serve as a translator. I said of course, and two days later we all met under the main thatched shade hut. The meeting progressed through a series of Yes or No questions. "If you were to have electricity, would it help you to study at night?" ...um, Yes. "If you were to have electricity, would it help your children study at night?" ...um, Yes. "If you were to have electricity, would it help you access the outside world through television and radio?" ...um, Yes. One of the women kept nodding and saying "Very good." At this point I suggested maybe they stray from a Yes or No format. She agreed and asked what they did during the day. The women just looked blankly at me, implying, what are these women asking us? I told the French women, "They have no frame of reference. Their daily activities are the norm for them, and they have no idea what you want to know. That they get water at 5am? That they pound millet for hours? That they collect firewood? What do you want and why?" I suggested that she keep it related to electricity, so the women would understand what we were getting at. One of the French women suggested "What if you got a communal television and placed it in the middle of the village, and people could gather in the evenings and watch it together, learning about the outside world?"

I could feel my insides knotting up. Occasionally I have a sensation of floating outside my body and seeing myself from above, and it happened at this moment. I could see my white skin and the white skin of the two French ladies. I could see our crisp manufactured clothing (manufactured by sweatshop labor in some other 3rd world country), my fancy Lexan water bottle, all glittering of money, modernity, and technology in front of this group of rural women. I could see the earnest expressions of good will on our faces, and I thought of the tragic title of a book I read a while back: "Despite Good Intentions." We mean well, but we might actually be doing more harm than good.

(And my knotted up gut spills into my head: A television? First of all, there are already several in the village. For access to the outside world? Have they ever watched television in Mali? If they had, they would know that it consists of nothing but Brazilian soap operas that paint life as a constant drama of sex, infidelity, murder, and money. Intercut with commercials for cars, MSG-laden cooking spices, and cell phones. I thought, wow, they came all this way from France to a village they've never even seen, to bring electricity. Why? Why do we need electricity? How will that help us? They study by lamplight. And watching more television just makes them want things they can't have and don't need.)

The next question was "What do you need?" Ok, this is a bit more open-ended. The answer is "a machine that makes shea butter." Ok. After the meeting one of the French women says to me, "We should look into this shea butter machine. That would be really great to get them one." I just shut my mouth and nod. I'm in no state to speak. 

There is, first of all, no way for a small village like M'Pe to create a manufacturing plant, and the machine is expensive, difficult to maintain, and is only profitable at very high volumes. In all of Mali, there are only two. I've been working with the women of M'Pedougou for a year and a half to improve their local production methods in a sustainable manner, and then two French women can hop off a plane and everyone runs for the lure of low-hanging fruit. 

I joke with one of my close Malian friends here about our "money trees," because white people are synonymous with money here. It is frustrating, tiring, and depressing all at once. What matters in life are things that our money and technology can not buy. Malians have just about everything that truly matters in life: friendship, family, spare time, food to eat. They lack a few things that we consider pretty important, from the 21st century perspective of the West: clean water, sanitation (every single person lives with amoebas and giardia), dental and health care, and other things like that. What they think they lack, but in fact do not need (in my opinion) are things like motorcycles, pollution, fancy buildings, cars, depression, suicide, homicide, gated communities, and Blackberries. But they see us, they see our TV shows, and they think we're better off, so they want it too.

But we can't all have it. The world is finite, and with almost 7 billion people, I have no idea how we expect to "develop" the "undeveloped" world and continue to maintain our current so-called high standards of living. The average environmental footprint of an American, that is - the resources consumed by an average citizen - if expanded to every citizen of Planet Earth... would require at least 5 or more planets to support the human population.  (see redefiningprogress.org)

So there I am, watching the drama unfold in M'Pedougou. Let's help the poor people and bring them machines and electricity and advertisements for consumer goods. That's what we call progress. That's what we call development. I go home and lay in bed that night, wondering if perhaps maybe we've got it all wrong. I've thought this for a long time, but it really starts hitting home when it gets off an SUV and walks right up to my doorstep. We need to be changing the US, not Mali. I guess when I get done with my work here it will be time to go home and get to work on a more monumental task than teaching people about germs and eating beans. I need to teach Americans about riding bicycles, recycling, buying less junk and appreciating friendship over a pot of tea. That would be development.

A few days later the white SUV rolls out of town. They're wonderful people, don't get me wrong. I just wonder if we really know what we're doing.

FESPACO 2009

FESPACO, the Pan-African Film Festival takes place in Ouagadougou, BurkinaFaso, every two years. I've been looking forward to it ever since I arrived in West Africa.

INSPIRATION

Films are a bit like the stars: old light shining through darkness. Just as one stares up with wonder at the night sky, dreaming of far-off places and catching a brief glimpse of our (small) place in the cosmos, so too do we sit in a movie theater gazing at flickering photographs, twenty four images of old light per second, telling us stories that help us glimpse our place in society.

Like seeing the stars on a clear moonless night (far from citylights), a good film ignites awe and inspiration and reminds us of life’s ultimate paradox: that nothing matters and that everything matters. We are tiny particles of dust, and yet particles that have significance.

So there I was last week, sitting in dark movie theaters in Ouagadougou, a particle of dust perched on a chair, peering forward at projected images of old light. One evening the patterns of light and sound waves coalesced to represent the story of another particle ofdust: Wangari Maathai. As the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in environmental activism in Kenya, she is a human being who understands the meaning of our short existence, and who shares it with the rest of us. I spent an hour and a half getting to know her in the darkness, and I left the theater filled with awe and excitement. Since Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in the1980s, Kenyans have planted more the 35 million trees on their (once deforested) soil. But I already knew all this; I’ve written papers about her and read her books in college. What left me suffused with inspiration was the moving, living, breathing being: the twinkle in her eyes that reminded me of starlight. A light that said to me, yes, this life is worth living. So go out and make it meaningful.

PERSPIRATION

On my way home from Ouagadougou I was mooshed into a battered bush taxi, literally kneaded into a sliver of space over the engine, and then topped off with a three layers of voluptuous African women filling every last crevasse with their giant hips and flowing meters of fabric. I cracked the window and let my hand escape into the wind. I closed my eyes and tried to drift off in the blackness to another place.

I dreamt that I was a little dough ball and a woman (towering before me) was opening a giant oven that was spitting out flames, and she said to me, “In you go, three months in the furnace for you,” and my little dough ball lips stuck together as they tried to burble out,“No! No!” and she shoved me into the oven. So here I rest, a cooking dough ball, waiting for the rains to come along and open the door to let me out.

The Slingshot Effect

There have been several films recently about the rippling effects of our actions: The Butterfly Effect, and several years back there was Pay it Forward. I have another tale of repercussions to tell.

STICKS
It’s a quiet evening at the roadside. Like every evening in M’Pedougou, I’m sitting on a bench outside Jakalia’s little “butiki,” leaning against the solid post of his thatched shade structure. In the doorway to his shop, a single fluorescent bulb glares out at the black night, casting a bluish glow on the objects in its path. My host brother Amadou appears under it, carrying the evening bowl of corn toh. I slide out a piece of wood to sit on and pour water into the hand-washing bowl. As I’m looking for the wandering bar of soap, a pair of dogs passes near us, barking and carousing as dogs are wont to do on a full moon.

Before I can register it, Amadou grabs a stick and hurls it with full force at the dogs. And it’s followed not by a high-pitched canine yelp but by an equally shrill howl of pain, coming from behind us. Our heads whip to the sound, and there is Bakari, Amadou’s younger brother. Bakari’s hands tightly clasp his forehead as he emits a relentless piercing scream. My eyes pop out of my head, and Jakalia runs towards him. Unprying Bakari’s small hands, a squirt of blood waters the dusty ground, and Jakalia lets them spring shut. He takes a t-shirt and wraps it around the boy’s head. Amadou fires up the motorcycle and before the toh has even cooled enough to eat, the two brothers are two glowing red taillights in the night, riding to the doctor in the next village.

The dog-intended stick had ricocheted off my leaning post. The dogs, meanwhile, went on about their business. Months later, Bakari still has a scar on his otherwise smooth chocolate forehead.

STONES
There are certain risks to owning a pet, especially in Mali. First of all, there is no Alley Cat to pour into my cat’s bowl, just a steady supply of mice and, if she’s lucky, my neighbor Yaya’s fresh cow milk. Just keeping her fed is a challenge; then there is TB and rabies and worms and Ala knows what else. These challenges, however, are small compared to what lurks in wait beyond the safe walls of my compound: children.

Cats are not typically pets in Mali. If someone has a mouse problem, yeah, they’ll get a cat. But they won’t name it. They laugh when they ask me, “How is Mawa doing?” and I respond “She greets you.” (the standard greeting in Mali is a long exchange inquiring about family members; it is now a joke because my only family member is Mawa, my skinny calico cat). Malians put cats very low on the pecking order.

Thus, every time I go on a trip I say goodbye to Mawa and just cross my fingers that some kids won’t have eaten her when I get back.

When I get back from Bamako after January training, I’m home for a day before Mawa comes bounding in. They didn’t eat her. They just took a slingshot and launched a rock into her eye. The whole side of her face is swollen and oozing blood and puss. When Abdouleye, my work partner, stops by I erupt into a long tirade…. “Why would they do this? What was the point?... If they were going to eat it, that’s one thing… at least it was for a reason, but this?... There’s enough pain and suffering in the world, why do we have to go around creating MORE? All living things feel pain.”

Abdouleye just sighs and apologizes for the kids, saying essentially “kids will be kids.” I retort, “No, kids will be what they are taught it’s acceptable to be. If men beat women and treat women like their slaves, and older kids pick on younger kids, it leaves little kids to pick on the only thing they can: animals. And none of this chain of abuse helps anyone. I once saw a kid tie up the fourth leg of a donkey and then ride it for fun. That’s not okay. Violence for violence’s sake is not okay.” Then the strain of saying this in Bambara wears me out, and I give way to silence.

Now I have a cat who is blind in one eye.

MAY BREAK MY BONES
Kids will be kids. And some kids will start investigating what happens when you try to peck in the wrong direction. Yousouf is my favorite little trouble making 2-year old, just discovering the power of his own voice and of his actions. He still wears a string of bells around his plump belly, which now serve as an alarm system for all those within hearing: first you hear the jingling, then you look around for unfolding mischief.

One night his mom Alimatu and I are sitting and talking next to a low-burning fire in the cooking hut, when we hear mischief erupt. From the next hut over a hot jet of little-boy Senoufo voices shoots into the crisp night air. Alimatu giggles. What are they saying? She listens a bit more, then chuckles, “Yousouf went in and peed on his older brothers.” What?? Yes, he just walked in and peed on them. Pissing in the face of the pecking order. I shake my head. Then another shriek erupts and this time Alimatu’s smile fades. Hamadou comes barreling into the cooking hut, blood spewing from his mouth. He curls down his bottom lip to reveal a bloody hole in his teethline. Sambara, he wails. “A shoe.” Yousouf had defended himself by throwing a shoe at his brothers, taking out two of Hamadou's precious teeth. There is no dental care for Malian villagers. Once a tooth’s out, it’s out.

********

The moral of this story: don’t throw things. Be it sticks, be it shoes, be it words. Don’t go hurling things into open space with a vague destination. We have enough pain in this world.

Three New Moons in Mali

When I see them through the glass at the airport, it really hits me. Eighteen months is a long time. My first glimpse is of my dad’s halo of white hair floating above a see of dark skin in the baggage claim. The halo shimmers like a ghost, prickling my skin with the awareness of passing time. I let my eyes pull focus to my own reflection in the glass, and I study the transparent image fixed in the foreground. My hair is streaked with blond, my arms are less muscular, but I can’t detect any signs of time. Then the halo passes behind my own image, my focus racks back, and I pull in a sharp breath of air. Time passes whether we see it or not, and we are, each of us, just impermanent wisps of life that breathe and live and love and then blow out. 

So when the halo comes bursting out of the airport doors I leap from my reverie and go clasp my arms around the very real, the very physical wisp of life in front of me. I hold my dad, my mom, my brother. I look at their faces, and for the first time in 18 months I see a reflection. My brother smiles and I see my own dimples.  I think seriously for the first time about what it means to share the same blood. It means a lot. 

                          ******

The Lunas stayed for one moon. It was an adventure, a reunion, a recharging, a time of laughter and great learning for all. I remember the first day in Bamako, my dad said, “I just couldn’t imagine it. No matter how many pictures or letters you sent, I just had no idea it was like this.” Yeah. It’s probably dirtier, more polluted, more hectic than I could describe. Alongside women with giant loads of bananas stacked on their heads, herds of goats and cattle weave through the dusty chaos of motorcycles and donkey carts and battered taxis. It’s a hard scene to imagine.

Our welcome in M’Pedougou, my village, was nothing short of spectacular. I called ahead of time to warn of our arrival, and when we pulled up on the road, it was to the sight of 200 people crowded on the roadside. They drummed and sang and did their best to utterly overwhelm the new arrivals. Soon enough the drummers let us unpack and promised that sini, tomorrow, there would be more. Sini, we gathered in the center of village, next to the old mango tree, to dance for hours to balafon music. My mom and dad, who are old-time cloggers, showed off some fancy moves to the delight of the villagers. Each family member was presented with a beautiful bogolan mudcloth, and we received three chickens. The next day my women’s group members came by with a mountain of peanuts. I was taken back with their generosity – their willingness to give the small amount that they have in a gesture of thanks to me and to my family.

The next day, while my brother suffered through a painful (first) bout of giardia, my neighbor Yaya invited us over to weigh his sorghum trial results. Here it was, the final result of the project I’d been working on all year. We had started in March, holding meetings to discuss the scientific research process and to figure out who was doing what, where, and how. I acquired four new varieties of sorghum seed in Bamako at a research station and divvied them up between five farmers. Each farmer was to plant five small plots, one of each new variety and then the local variety as a control. From five farmers, four planted. From four planted, three sprouted (one got eaten by termites). From three sprouted, two survived to maturity (one got eaten by cows). From two mature stands, one got measured (one got damaged by birds). And this was Yaya’s. Yaya, my shining light in M’Pedougou. Yaya only finished fourth grade, but his intelligence, creativity, work ethic, and beaming smile have brought him far in life. Needless to say, I was nervous as we collected the dried up bundles of sorghum and Yaya’s wives started beating the seed off the stalks. I know research is supposed to be “impartial,” but I couldn’t help but hope that all this work might amount to some small opportunity for improvement. The scales gave me an early Christmas gift. The local variety weighed in at 3kg, and one of the new varieties at 5kg, a substantial increase. It was exciting to see positive results, and even better that my dad (himself an agricultural researcher) could be there to see it. 

Through the course of our trip, I got to watch my family go through a mini version of the journey I’ve been on for eighteen months. It starts with shock: complete sensory overload. As the shock wears off, it transitions into wonder and excitement, maybe romanticism. As I experienced it, there follows a period of enthusiasm and new ideas, and then as the ideas are suggested and tried and don’t work, or tried and abandoned, or simply not tried, a layer of dust settles on the preliminary enthusiasm. My dad started out full of ideas – like why don’t they have longer handle hoes instead of these short ones that hurt their backs? Answer: they just don’t do it that way. I too started out chock full of ideas, and over time I haven’t lost these ideas, but I have a better idea of why, in fact, things are done the way they are. Tradition. Inertia. Cultural differences. And many reasons that we can’t see at all.

As Americans we are programmed to experiment, to innovate, to improve, to distinguish ourselves. Individuality is prized. Here, people are programmed to do things the way their community has been doing them for a long time. They are taught the values of family cohesion and community. Tasks are accomplished by working together and working hard, and few people stop to think, hey if I did this differently, I could make this task more efficient and potentially reap a greater benefit. Take, for example, the Malian belief that when someone has more than someone else, they should share it. To a Westerner, it means people have no incentive to innovate or do better or work harder because they will just have to give their profit to their family or friends. It sounds like bad capitalism. In Mali, it means that in even one of the poorest countries in the world, very few people are left to fall through the cracks.

As I have gradually become aware of these differences, I haven’t lost “hope,” but I have a greatly altered perspective on development, in particular the pace at which it can and should happen. In my dad’s one month in Mali I saw him jerk through this process of paradigm shifting, wondering why change was so difficult. It would be easy to fall into simple criticism or cynicism or both, but I think the bridge across those two dangerous pits lies in opening the mind beyond culturally programmed beliefs about the way society should work.  Recognizing how complicated this puzzle is, I have started letting go of my attempts to “change” people or things. I am not here to force anything on anybody. I’m here to exchange ideas, to give people opportunities if they are interested in them, and to be an American ambassador of peace and friendship. 

The Niger River and Dogon Country

Marathons of feet and mind

PHOTOS at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2303541&l=2c663&id=3408340

the ACCRA INTERNATIONAL MARATHON

When my alarm wrenches me from sleep, I lay for a moment relishing the pleasures of a soft bed. What the -- am I doing? On the nightstand is a white square of sheeny paper (like money, it doesn’t tear) with the number 546 on it. I get up, and I’m already dressed: in the one pair of (knee-length-for-modesty) running shorts I came to Africa with, and the pale orange wicking t-shirt that, by the looks of it, won’t be wicking for much longer. I sit in the dark and pull on my grubby running shoes, who also look like relics from war. Why, I ask myself, do human beings, or some of them anyway, choose to engage in activities that they know will be difficult, painful, in fact, down right dreadful? I’m about to run the Accra International Marathon in the capital city of Ghana (south-east of Mali), sandwiched by the Ivory Coast and Togo, and I have to ask myself again what it’s all about.

When I was “training” in Mali, battling bouts of intestinal amoebas (which seem to be a permanent fixture for me), fevers, and herds of cows, I thought about it too. I run in the late afternoon, when the worst of the heat has abated, and people are beginning to come home from the fields. I run out into the ‘bush’ as they call it in French, past fields of corn and sorghum glowing gold, through herds of cows and goats in search of pasture, and … of course, past the people. The women appear as bright splashes of color, their heads loaded with giant baskets or bowls overflowing with the day’s harvest and carefully tied bundles of firewood. From their bright plastic flip flops, to the striped fabric wrapped as for skirts and the equally brilliantly patterned shirts that invariably slip off one shoulder, their bodies glide forward, the necks moving slightly in barely perceptible weaves, left, right, left, right, as they effortlessly balance their loads and chatter and bob their way home. Our paths cross. Their steps are those of exhaustion after a day’s labor, and mine are those of an American in my fancy running shoes, my knees showing, my sunglasses glinting in the sun. We greet and inquire about families, bless the remainder of the day, and continue on. I can’t help but feel a ball of guilt lodge in my throat. Here I am, with such excess energy that I not only can, but I choose, to go running for some ungodly reason. In a place where never-ending back-breaking labor is the norm, the word for happiness or well-being is one and the same as “rest.” Lafine. They don’t need to supplement their lives with extra labor, and they can’t understand why I would choose to do so if I didn’t have to.

So at 3am my friend Bess and I load into a shuttle that will take us to the starting line, 42k, 26.2 miles outside of Accra. There are at least a dozen Peace Corps Volunteers from around West Africa, and we swap stories of training for a marathon in the climactic and nutritional conditions of the Sub-Sahara. We spend at least an hour in the shuttle trying to find the starting place, and when we unload we are alone, until 4:30 when another group arrives. Just as the sky is starting to turn a dark gray purple, someone comes and tells us to walk down the road to the starting line. So the group strings along down the road, everyone muttering about where the start line is, and we walk for what seems like a mile, maybe longer, everyone counting every step as one extra they shouldn’t have had to take in addition to 26.2 miles. Finally a big bus passes us in the opposite direction, filled with neon-green-shirt-wearing runners, and it halts, people get out, and call us back, so we turn around, again, begrudging every step that we walk back, and sit down to wait for the start. An hour and a half later, after more buses full of Ghanians (pronounced Gha- NAY-un) arrive, and the sky has heated up into a milky white soup, the race starts.

Bess and I, both severely undertrained due to illness, allow ourselves a slow start and plod along. The road is a paved country road heading through several smaller towns before passing through the outskirts of Accra and into the city itself. As there are only about 400 runners, the route has not been closed to traffic, so we run in the shoulder. Every so often the race coordinators have put out kilometer markers and they have people in lime green t-shirts handing us bags of water. The sun starts peeking its head out from the clouds, glaring down on us, who are trapped between its angry rays and the smoldering black pavement. Yuck.

At the halfway point I am exhausted, just boiling hot and my knees are telling me that my running shoes are what they look like: junk. I pass “21 km” and my heart plummets. There is no way I can do this. And, as if by magic, the sun’s anger ebbs and it agrees to slink back into the clouds. I grab a bag of water, break it onto my head, and just then the road turns a corner and the Atlantic Ocean spills out in front of me, deep blue with little white diamonds dancing across its surface. Ok. I’ll just go slowly.

The runners are, at this point, spread out, and Bess and I have separated. There is no one around, so it is just me and the ocean. When the road finally turns back inland, I thank the waves for their moral support and steel myself for the final legs. The last 15k run through the outlying areas of Accra, and for one long, interminable stretch of road, I dodge public transport buses, taxis, push carts, women with heads stacked high, dogs, and bicycles. The shoulder devolves into a slanting patch of dirt. I’m getting thirsty, it’s been a long time since I have seen a race vehicle. I look as far as I can behind me and ahead of me, and I see no bright lime green. Oh no, what if I missed a turn and I’m just running off into some market of the sprawling mass of Accra? I stop and ask someone if they have seen runners go by. They say yes, and I heave a sigh of relief. Twenty six miles is long enough, I don’t need to get lost.

It was as much suffering as I could have hoped for, and I felt glad when it was all over. I don’t know what I learned or gained from the experience. That I can make myself suffer? One aspect that always intrigues me is the mental side: the power that your mind has to determine your perspective. My body may be suffering, but I can choose to look at the waves crashing on the beach and just recognize the pain, be with it, and not do what humans always try to do: get rid of it. When we can be with suffering, understand it, not run away from it, then perhaps it loses its power over us. I remember at one point passing a runner and commenting on a funny billboard in front of us, and he gave me a sigh, (how can you be thinking about a funny billboard when we are suffering like this??). It’s all relative.

---------------
Speaking of relativity, our trip to Ghana was eye-opening. We traveled overland the thousand+ miles, going through Burkina Faso and moving gradually from the dry sahel to the lush sub tropics. We also noticed a gradual shift, from Islam to Christian, from Bambara to French and Mossi, to Twi and English. The first time we got out of a bus in Ghana, at a legitimate “bus stop,” our jaws dropped. Pavement, everywhere. Trash cans. Ice cream sellers. General cleanliness and orderliness the likes of we haven’t seen for awhile. I wondered what my impression of Ghana would have been had I come directly from the States or Europe. My relative perspective was that Ghana was the promised land. When we left Ghana we were flat broke, scrounging our last coins and made the journey up to Burkina with just enough money to pay for the use of public drop latrines and the occasional bag of filtered water. We spent a night on benches at the Ghana/Burkina border before it opened the next morning, and then we gradually transitioned back into the Africa we are used to: inconsistent transport, swelteringly hot, and no ice cream on carts. We spent the last night of our trip wrapped in a mosquito net in Bobo-Dioulasso, waiting for the bus that never left (they said 10pm, we left at 5am). My friend Sarah asked me, “Jessie, when will it no longer be ok to be sleeping on the ground in dirty bus stations with overflowing latrines?” I couldn’t answer. I don’t know. For now it’s an adventure.

HOSPITALITY
It’s becoming almost a ritual for us now- every Monday morning Abdouleye and I pack up our materials and head out to a neighboring village to do our shea nut trainings. This past Monday we went to a village for a second training session.

I show up at Abdouleye’s hut on the roadside around 8, and he isn’t there. I sit down under the big mango tree, already seeking shade from the brutal sun, and watch donkey carts bumping past on their way to the fields. Abdouleye comes up the road, and we greet. Then he says “Sita, my bike is broken. The frame itself has snapped,” and he shows me his bicycle, a patchwork of teal and light blue and rusted metal. Indeed, the frame is broken. “I’ll get one to borrow,” and he disappears again, then comes back after a bit with another bike. We load up and set off.

The path to Zhiworodougou winds its way back from the road for some 10k. We pass through fields of towering sorghum, sweet potatos, people picking peanuts, thrashing rice. We dip through mango groves and weave through small gatherings of huts that are invisible until the very moment you reach them because of the sorghum. By the time we reach Zhiworodougou we are both drenched in sweat. We dismount and pull our bikes into the shade. A woman in blue and white fabric greets us and comes towards me, dipping down to her knees. How are you? How is M’Pedougou? How is your family? How are your work partners? Did you arrive safely? Welcome. I awkwardly respond. I’m fine with the Senoufo, it’s the kneeling thing I’m still not comfortable with. Women don’t kneel to other women, they only kneel to men. I’m an honorary man here, but it makes me feel uneasy to be in such an unbalance of power.

I hear the ringing from a distance – they have struck the metal gong that serves as an effective telephone tree “Meeting! Meeting!” and Abdouleye and I are guided through the village, past the chief’s house to greet, where he gives us a bag of peanuts and blesses us for several minutes. It is fully 11am by the time we sit down in the meeting hut. The sun is melting my skin off and the respite of shade is diminished by the oppression of 70 bodies crammed into a small mud building. Our host, Adama, puts two chairs out, and no sooner have we sat down then another man walks in with more chairs and insists that I move into the more comfortable chair. Fine. Anything to make sure the white girl is as comfortable as possible. Adama sits by the door and before I can blink he begins tending to a small stove and pours loose-leaf black tea into a teapot.

The meeting starts and I greet, bless, then turn it all over to Abdouleye. We have a picture series depicting the steps of shea nut and butter production, and he goes through them one by one, explaining, answering questions and quelling debates. There are at least 60 women, and behind us sit about 10 older men, seated around on a low mud bench. Beside me, Adama is pouring tea back and forth from the teapot to a shot glass, from shot glass to tea pot, and then he adds another shot glass worth of sugar. He interrupts loudly, “Sita,” to give me the first shot of tea, and I take it with my right hand (supporting it with my left to show deference) and I drink the tea somewhat guiltily, seated in front of a crowd of women (women rarely get to drink tea), and hand the glass back.

I flash back to my very first day of homestay, only a week after arriving in Mali, when the village greeted us with a ceremony and gave each volunteer a cold Coke in a glass bottle. Coke wasn’t sold in that village. Someone had had to go on a motorcycle to buy the drinks and bring them specially for us. I remember sitting guiltily in front of the villagers, drinking a cold soda that I didn’t even want.

The session takes a few hours, and when Abdouleye finishes I’m as drenched in sweat as when I arrived in Zhiworodougou. I think we’re done. But oh, there’s more talking. Abdouleye says something (this is all in Senoufo, I only catch pieces) to Adama, and then I notice that Adama turns to the man next to him and says, Sedu, did you hear what Abdouleye said? And he repeats what he heard. And then Sedu turns and repeats what he heard, around like that. I ogle. That’s why our meeting had been taking so long. Then a woman comes forward with two large bowls. “Sita, you came here once before and told us about these new shea butter techniques. We heard what you said and we did what you told us. Here.” She opens the bowls to reveal one bowl containing a yellow ball that looked like soft margarine, the other filled with a hard off white substance with a soft sheen. The women gather excitedly behind her, “Ok, now which one was dried in the sun and which one was smoked over a fire?” I laugh and clap my hands for the women, and I point to the clean white bowl and say “sun –dried.” The women erupt in clapping and that’s that.

We are presented with a giant bag of sweet potatoes, more bags of peanuts and a chicken, and we are ushered out to lounge in the shade and enjoy another round of tea while we wait for the heat to fizzle out a bit. Around 4, we strap our gifts on the backs of our bicycles. The chicken’s legs are tied and she dangles awkwardly upside down from Abdouleye’s handlebars. He pulls on his 2008 brand sunglasses (the zeroes are little soccer balls), and we are escorted to the edge of the village. I thank them for their gifts, and for their work, and as they hold my bicycle and take turns shaking my hand, wishing me a safe return, I feel the true meaning of hospitality.

An opportunity for women in Mali

To my friends,

For one year now I have lived in M’Pedougou, a subsistence farming village in the fifth poorest country in the world. I wake up in my mud hut at dawn to fetch water, I hike to the fields with my host family and help them hack the dry Sahelian earth with short-handled hoes, and I try as best I can to help them improve their lot in life. As an ‘Environment’ Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, West Africa, my job is to help people manage their natural resources in both an ecologically and economically sustainable manner.

Mali suffers from several unique distinctions: in addition to being ranked 173rd of 177 countries on the United Nations’ Human Development Index, it also ranks among the worst for gender inequality. Women carry the heaviest load in the struggle to survive in the harsh climate of the Sahel. They wake up before the roosters to collect firewood, heat water for bathing, pound millet and corn into flour in order to cook three meals a day over smoking fires, and when the rains have come they go to the fields to eke out an existence on depleted soils. All of these duties are performed with infants strapped to their backs and several more children in tow.

The United Nations recognizes that in order for rural, agricultural, illiterate societies to develop, women must be given an opportunity to lighten their burden. In villages like M’Pedougou, women are responsible for feeding their families and caring for their children with little access to an independent income. All field crops, such as peanuts or cotton, are sold by the men. All garden produce, such as bananas or tomatoes, are sold by the men. In rural Mali, the sole domain that remains for women is the shea tree.

The shea tree produces a small fruit with an oil-rich nut that women collect, dry, and process to extract butter for cooking, medicinal purposes, and for selling. This income from shea butter pays for children’s clothing and school fees, vegetables and sauce ingredients that provide valuable nutrients, salt, soap, household supplies, and medicine for the women and children.

In recent years, the international market for shea products has expanded, from use as a cocoa butter substitute to pharmaceuticals, leaving Mali (which has the second largest population of shea trees in the world) trailing behind other shea producing countries in West Africa. Malian women traditionally dry the shea nuts by roasting them over a fire, which introduces smoke and carcinogenic compounds which are forbidden by international regulation. According to the NGO ProKarite, ”A lack of product quality standards and technical proficiency of producers has greatly constrained market opportunities for rural producers of shea, particularly in Mali which has long suffered from a reputation as a source of poor-quality shea kernel and shea butter.”

Last year when I was living in Paris I bought a small pot of shea butter in an upscale boutique for 15 Euros. The same quantity sells for 15 cents in M’Pedougou. In order to give at least a fraction of that higher share back to the women who deserve it, many groups and NGOs are working across West Africa. In Mali, USAID (the US Agency for International Development), several local organizations, and the US Peace Corps are working together to provide women with the training and the organizational skills they need to improve Mali’s reputation as a shea producer and to give rural women higher prices for their shea products.

The first step in this process is teaching women how to improve their shea processing techniques, to shift from smoking their nuts to sun-drying them. In my past year as a volunteer, I have participated in several educational meetings and trained my Malian “counterpart” (a farmer in M’Pedougou) how to lead more trainings on improved shea butter production. Together, we have travelled to several local villages and we are poised to organize an area-wide group that will sell improved butter (at higher prices!) next year.

Finally, I was in discussion with my director at the Peace Corps over the difficulty of training illiterate women on something that can’t be demonstrated. At trainings, we must discuss the process in the abstract – as there is no way to collect nuts, wash them, dry them, store them, pound them, and make them into butter in a one-hour meeting with a women’s group. We alighted on the idea of making a training video that could visually demonstrate the process, from start to finish, and enumerate the steps clearly in Bambara (the language I have learned, spoken throughout Mali). Once finished, the video could be used by USAID staff, Peace Corps volunteers, and several NGOs in their regional training efforts. It could be played on laptops, DVD players (frequently found even in small villages!) and projected on screens in larger towns and cities. Finally, the video could be shown on the Malian TV station, ORTM.

As a graduate of the film production program at the University of Southern California, the possibility to use my skills during my Peace Corps service excites me greatly. I have with me in Mali a high-definition video camera, but I lack the means of turning my raw footage into a movie. All I need is a computer and editing software in order to turn my mud hut into a miniature MGM, M’pedouGou Movies (ok, I don’t have electricity, but Sikasso is close).

My own salary as a Peace Corps Volunteer doesn’t include an allowance for new laptops or editing software, so I am asking for donations to help me in this project. My parents are coming to visit me in December. They have offered to deposit checks in my account and to order the computer and bring it to me when they come.

My goal is to raise $3500 to cover the costs. Please donate what you feel you can afford. You can mail checks (payable to Jessica Luna) to:
John Luna
24663 Ervin Rd
Philomath, OR 97370.

In love and light, saying goodbye to the rains and hello to the cool Harmattan winds,
Wishing you peace
Jessie

Making shea butter.
My women's group, who are ready to form a shea butter association.