Watermelon Holidays

Aw San bee San bee!!! Seasons greetings from the Tabaski festival in M'Pedougou. I find it a wonderful change from the consumer feeding frenzy in the U.S., the endless Christmas sales, the loops of warbling carols following you down the blue fluorescent aisles of Target on Christmas Eve as you desperately grab stuff to use as stocking stuffers.

No, none of that here. The season here revolves around the Muslim holiday of Tabaski, or the festival of sheep, which falls exactly two moon cycles and ten days after the end of Ramadan. I was in Bamako for the preparations (the tailors working around the clock while flocks of sheep clogging the roads), and after my whirlwind week of meeting filmmakers, I was in a rush to get back to village before the festivities began.

Getting from the Peace Corps office in Bamako to the bus station is a 4 dollar cab ride across Bamako or a succession of 10 cent bush taxis that are crowded, slow, indirect, but a whole lot more adventure for the money. I've figured out how to navigate the system enough to take 2 hours to cross a distance that takes a taxi 15 minutes, in what I call the scenic tour of Bamako. At the grand marche I have to get off and switch cars, and the market swallows me whole, only consenting to spit me out after an hour of churning through its intestines. By the time I get to the main bus station I'm thoroughly digested. I buy some bananas, a bus ticket, and collapse on a bench to wait.

As I drift off into visions of sugar plums, a voice interupts, "Hey, you're a Sikasso Peace Corps volunteer, aren't you?" (in Bambara of course). "Yes,... do I know you?" It's a guy who lives in Sikasso and has seen me around before. He plops down on the bench and we start chatting in mixed French and Bambara. Pretty soon a crowd of young 20-somethings going home for Tabaski begins to gather; when they hear the white girl speaking Bambara, the cat's out of the bag. Three hours later we finally line up for the bus, and I realize that I forgot to buy a gift for my host family. I see a bulging cart of watermelons and buy a nice fat one to give as a treat to the kids. As we're getting on the bus one of my new friends, Sunkalo, asks me "So, we're going to eat the watermelon on the bus?" I laugh, "No, it's for my host family." The bus is crowded, the air crackling with the energy of kids going home for the holidays. I wedge myself into a seat between my bag, my melon, and my bags of fruit, and I comment "This watermelon has become a bit of a problem." Sunkalo retorts, " I know how to solve it!" But we find a place for it on a luggage shelf tucked behind a pile of bags.

Normally I attempt to read an entire book on the 8 hour bus ride from Bamako to Sikasso, but this ride is different. My seat partners are unparalleled. Relishing the chance to use my French, we launch into discussions of religion and the existence of God, the problem of the soul in light of evolution (do monkeys have souls, and if not, when did the soul arise?), polygamy and how women 'share' their husbands. A few hours into the ride Sunkalo, who is seated farther up in the bus, stands up and makes a mock speech to parliament, (fellow countrymen,...), making a motion that the watermelon be 'broken' and eaten. The entire front half of the bus cheers and starts chanting "Zeray, zeray, zeray" (Bambara: watermelon), stomping and building in volume. I laugh and ask if they have a knife. Sunkalo says no, he's just playing. I can save the watermelon for my host family. A little later the chanting erupts again, the zeray having become a bus-wide joke.

By this time it is dark and people are beginning to get off the bus as we pass their villages. And with them go their bags... In all the chaos and conversation I'm not paying attention to the little shelf holding the prized possession. We stop in a big village and quite a few people get off. The bus lurches forward into the thick, dusty darkness, and I hear (as if in slow motion) a rolling, then a distinct, squelching thump. The odor, sweet and fresh, hits us just before the bus driver flips the lights on to reveal the exposed red flesh of the sacred zeray. Both sides are up (we must have passed through a Murphy-free zone), broken in two clean halves. There is a brief moment of concern, a second glance my way to gauge my reaction, before I yell "Someone get a knife!" and soon wet, shining slices of zeray are floating around the bus, seeds and rinds flying out the windows and into our laps, the juice streaming down our dusty faces. As I bite into my own oversized slice (like the birthday girl who gets the big piece of cake) the bus erupts into a new cheer: "Sita! Sita! Sita!" (my Malian name). Best piece of watermelon I've ever had.

When I get off the bus I say my goodbyes, exchange phone numbers, fend off marriage proposals, and promise to call my friends when I return to the big cities. I heft my backpack and walk to my hut by moonlight, my face glowing.

Big City Lights

It's a shock to the system. Wedged in a sputtering green bush taxi between voluptious women, gangly kids, subdued chickens and a film of sweat and grime, I crank my neck sideways to avoid the unfortunate . The crowds of people part just enough for the motorcycles, taxis, foot carts and the endless stream of green boxes to inch forward, then they close in again like an amoeba, a great pulsing, crackling mass of motion and life. Platters of pineapple and plastic shoes bob up and down over a sea of goats with fat bellies who are unaware of their impending glory as the main dish for the Muslim Tabaski feasts. The scene floods my senses, a hurricane-force storm after a long draught from civilization.

Last week I was riding my bike into Farakala to attend a training session for an upcoming health campaign to vaccinate children, when my phone rang. Startling, since coverage is spotty, and who calls me anyway? It was the Peace Corps headquarters - they wanted to know if I wanted to come in to Bamako to go to a function with the US Ambassador and Martin Scorsese. Um, well, I hesitated, I am pretty busy with the sorghum harvest, but I suppose I could carve the time out of my schedule to make it.

Huh?

On Wednesday I go to a screening of The Departed at the huge movie theater in Bamako, Martin Scorsese introduces it and talks about why he is in Mali - to work on world film preservation with his friend Souleymane Cisse, the great Malian film director.

Thursday evening (after a day wandering around market, stunning the Malians with the fact that a white person speaks Bambara!) I head to the Ambassador's house with the Peace Corps Admin Officer, adjusting my skirt and wondering if I will be hopelessly underdressed. Oh well, nothing to do about it now. The party is a swank cocktail social on the Ambassador's patio with an open bar and decadent hors d'oeuvres floating around on silver platters. My first conversation is with the US director of the President's Malaria Initiative, a $1.2 billion, five-year drive to fight malaria in developing countries. Next I meet the French ambassador, and then a few French filmmakers who are working with Souleymane Cisse and Martin Scorsese. Then Martin enters the scene and after a brief toast, the milling continues and I make my way to him, introduce myself, and we talk briefly about film school. I chat with Souleymane Cisse, he gives me his phone number.

Soon I become aware of musical accompaniment: Salif Keita, Habib Koite, Oumou Sangare, the heavy weights of Malian music are ten feet away singing and laughing, an informal tribute to Martin and Souleymane. Where am I? A few days ago I was in my mud hut chasing mice out of my extra mattress.

Life can be surreal and full of surprises. I don't know where this adventure is going, I don't know how my filmmaking aspirations will find their place in this sejour in the tropics, but everything seems to be connecting, concentric spirals of synchronicity and coincidence that appear to be going somewhere, sometimes I lead and I sometimes I follow. I think today I will go to the Peace Corps office and take my movie camera out of storage. It's time.

Waterfalls and village

And a new album: http://usc.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2191768&l=94fb0&id=3408340

Time to think

"How is it that in Ameriki it is morning, while it is afternoon here?" says my neighbor Musa, stretched out in a hammock, shaded from the scorching sun by a hangar of dried straw.
"Well..." I stumble, trying to buy time as I grasp for words like "orbit, time zone, and rotatation" in my limited Bambara vocabulary
"Yeah," adds his friend Nanturu, "And why does Ameriki have more than one time?"
I glance over at a pile of squash and pick up the roundest one I can find.
"This is the Earth." I point to the stem, "and this is Mali," then I slowly rotate it and point to the other side, "here is Ameriki."

I've been thinking a lot in the past few months; take away all my distractions (like a job, a road bike) and plunk me into an animist farming village, and that's likely to happen. I read a lot, I write a lot, and I have developed the ability to pass several hours at a time staring off into space thinking about things while I sit with a group of Malians speaking Senufo to each other. My thinking sessions are sometimes spiced up with conversation, and nearly always punctuated with the three rounds of tea, boiled in little blue pots on charcoal stoves, served in shot glasses with lots of foam.

So on this scorching afternoon, as I suck the last foam bubbles from my glass, I think about Galileo. He had this whole "earth going around the sun" thing figured out a really long time ago. Western civilization figured out a lot of things a long time ago - mathematics, calculus, physics, the whole concept of scientific inquiry, and a system of writing to write all this stuff down and share the knowledge acquired, literature, political systems and philosophy, theater, photography. My mind starts reeling and I blink a few times. A guy roars into the hangar on a Yamaha motorcycle. The faded, gangsta-rapper face of 50 Cent grins from his t-shirt, framed by the words "Get Rich or Die Trying." The layers of irony are almost too much for me to handle. How the world market brings in He greets in crisp Bambara, and I immediately peg him as a rich city slicker from Sikasso (yes, I stereotype non-villagers now). He adds a liter or two of crude oil to his tank and drives off. I think about African American poverty and how different it is from African poverty; I think about why people would (and do) die to get rich, I think about how the t-shirt was donated and shipped across the ocean to end up in the used clothes piles all over Africa. After my diversion, my thoughts return to Galileo. Why did the West develop all those things while African countries did not? Why? I've read Guns, Germs and Steel and I know that the answer is complicated; related to the unfair North-South continental axis that prevents the spread of innovation. I also know that without a food surplus created by efficient agriculture, people can't liberate labor to start doing other things (like sitting around thinking), which lead to what we call development and progress. With thoughts like this, I start to appreciate the value of my role as an agricultural extension agent.

I started holding meetings with my villagers to get to know their agricultural work; to know what they grow, how they grow it, and what problems they encounter. The soil is overworked and eroded, they have no equipment, no irrigation, no knowledge of pest management, and a fuelwood demand that leads the women out for hours in search of wood. To feed their families, they grow millet, sorghum and corn to fill round mud granaries. For "cash," they grow tiger nuts (a ground nut like peanuts, only sweet!) and cotton, neither of which actually bring them cash after they pay back the loans they take for fertilizer. And without equipment, without soil conservation practices, without cheap transport to markets that will buy their goods for a fair price, each year gets harder...and it is difficult to know where to begin.

To stimulate my thinking, I've been reading. Luckily, a series of incidents bestowed me with copious amounts of time to do this. Three weeks ago I started getting high afternoon fevers, and after a few days of that the med office thought I might have malaria, so I hopped a bus into Bamako. At the same time I got an infection on my lip and it started to swell. By the time I got to Bamako my cyclical fevers were gone (I had taken the emergency anti-malarial meds), but my lip was the size of a golf ball. I spent more than a week drugged up, reading books, and thinking about what it would be like to be deformed. I got to know what it feels like to be stared at, to having people ask me "What's wrong with your face?" I wondered what it would be like to have a permanent deformity. It finally pussed out of my lip and I returned to normal.

Only a week after getting back from Bamako I rode my bike into Sikasso to do some research on agriculture NGOs in my area. Walking through market, I got hit by a motorcycle - it knocked me over and then ran over my foot, taking a good chunk of my skin with it. I then spent a week with an infected foot, sitting in my hut boiling water to clean it and soak it.

I read Into the Wild, about a young man who leaves society to live on his own in the wilderness. It made me think about my own desire to see how humans can live with/in/against nature. In the West we have developed so much that we are starting to lose touch with our roots, so to speak. We don't know what it is like to grow our own food and wait for the rains to come. We don't kill our own animals, we don't wake up with the sun and go to bed with it. It's almost like we live outside nature - insulated by our walls and clothes and cars and electricity. There are a few of us who desire to get outside the insulation. We do it through backpacking, trips into wild places, and also through things like what I'm doing right now: living in a society that lives closer to nature. I get my water at the well, I write in my journal by lamplight, and I eat food that was grown less than a mile from my house. Funny thing is, the people here have an opposite desire. I can't tell you how many times I have heard "Ameriki is rich. Take me with you to Ameriki." I grope for words and mumble something about visas. I want to take off my watch and my sunglasses and hide my bicycle in a bush so they are not forced to see these signs of wealth that they don't have access to, and that perhaps they do not need.

This past week a gaggle of Peace Corps volunteers convened in Sikasso to celebrate Thanksgiving. We divided into teams- the turkey team (they made aprons), the stuffing team, the pie team, and cooked a feast beyond comparison. It was wonderful to be among friends, to be able to speak and express myself, to hear stories from my fellow volunteers. It takes time apart from something to truly appreciate it. Here's my thanksgiving toast: to friends.

Night Sounds

NEW PHOTOS are at: http://usc.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2180021&l=7f9cd&id=3408340

NIGHT SOUNDS

The night starts with the TOK TOK of wood hitting wood, some resonant, others flat, some women pounding in unison in a steady rhythm, others pounding alone at a slower cadence. Having returned from the fields, the women are hard at work cooking the evening meal, but they have to pound the corn and millet for the next day's meals. The thuds slowly ebb as the moon peaks up, and my neighbor's radio replaces the void. He turns it up so that it exceeds the capacity of the tinny speakers, and warbled West African dance tunes waft into the air, the bass lost entirely, the treble coming in and out of reception.

As the moon rises higher the sound of children laughing and yelling permeates the darkness. The heat of the sun has gone to bed, so if their work is done, the children can play. They run around dragging tuna cans on strings, with sand and pebbles that clatter around and make a racket against the metal. Some little boys cut circles out of dried gourds and make wheels out of them, mounting them on an axle and then attaching it to a stick to make a little wheeled stick (a name doesn't come to mind). In this way, equipped with slingshots for killing lizards, some kids pulling strings, others pushing sticks, they run around the village in groups, and the sound of their laughter lasts long after I've blown out my kerosene lamp and crawled under my mosquito net, carefully tucking the edges underneath my mattress to keep out the bugs of the night.

But the net doesn't keep out the sounds. I've barely drifted into that half-sleep coma when I hear a scratching, a rustling that has a hard edge to it. I sit up, and of course it stops. I sit silent and wait for it to come back, and I locate it as coming from the corner, inside a trunk. I flick my headlamp on, and there on the floor is a baby mouse, squirming around helplessly. I grab a cup and trap the little dude - he squeals for mom, but he isn't going anywhere. Next I inspect the trunk - the lid is ajar. I press it shut and lock it. Next I take the trunk outside and leave it there to deal with in the morning. I do the same with the baby mouse, and crawl back into bed.

Next I'm woken by a whirr, a squeaking and then my mosquito net is under attack by fluttering wings and a bat's radar system gone bonkers. I sit up again and turn on my light. Two bats are bickering, whizzing around and hitting the walls and occasionally my net. I sigh... what can I do? I debate my options, and eventually get out of bed, find another cup and a broom, and I start trying to whack the little devils out of the air. I manage to hit one, and when he cowers on the floor my cup slams down. Trapped, sucker. No more merry making for you. He joins the trunk and the mouse cup outside. I crawl back into bed, and the nearby donkeys lull me to sleep with their piercing brays.

At 4:30 the prayer call sounds. Long, muted calls in Arabic that come even before the stars have winked out. I roll over and wonder how many people actually go to morning prayer. Then I hear the roosters, maybe the prayer call woke them up too. Then I hear the TOK TOK thunking of wood on wood, the women have heard - and their call is to the mortar, to the day's work ahead of them. I search around and grope for my earplugs. This may be the start to their day, but it's not yet the start of mine.

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 -

Swearing in as a Peace Corps Volunteer

I swore in this morning as a Peace Corps Volunteer. There were 76 of us, outfitted to the nines in Malian attire at the United States Embassy. I was swimming in my own sweat in the 96 degree heat, but I still got goosebumps as I raised my right hand and swore to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic. It was a strange moment, 76 voices in unison, all wondering what exactly we were swearing to do, but understanding that the moment was symbolic and represented a pretty huge commitment. Two years of my life consecrated to serving a group of people and a country, to better their lives and hopefully, mine as well.