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.

--------------------------------

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.

Race, Death, and Patience

RACE
Feb.4
Yesterday my host dad Jakalia asked me a question that I can't answer. We were sitting in front of the electric glow of his butiki, waiting for the tea, and I looked at my watch for awhile. He asked "What is it?" I paused and replied, "It's really amazing how something so small can be so complicated. This little watch that I bought for a few dollars... it required metal mines and plastic factories and trucks and the whole history of thought that lead to time-keeping, and the complex machinery of a WATCH. And yet we rarely think twice about it." He nodded, and started looking around, his heavy eyes lingering on shiny objects with square edges: "Look at all of this, the tea pot, motorcycles, bicycles, cell phones, lanterns, flashlights, batteries, TV, radio, cold sodas... ALL OF IT, it came from white people. What have black people ever made?" I just looked at him. Then he said slowly "Our minds our not as good."

There are few things in life that annoy me, and in Mali I can deal with heat, giardia, and 62-hour bus rides ... but it is certain small things that start grating on me. First, the chanting of "Tubabu" (white person) by little children, wherever I go. I want to yell back "I'm not WHITE! I'm tan! And you're not BLACK! You're brown!" It is such a human tendency to dichotomize, to exaggerate difference, when in reality everything runs on a spectrum. Some Caucasians are ivory, some medium beige, while Africans too run from deep ebony to the honey or caramel of the light-skinned Peuls or the Touaregs.

My second pet peeve is the pump. Any time I go to get water, there are invariably a small gaggle of girls and maybe some women, and they take my jug and pump my water for me. Yes, I’m a guest, and their culture always treats guests with utmost hospitality, but…it just seems ridiculous that when I try to take the pump from them, they shove me away, … no, the Tubabu woman must not work. She can’t work. It is the same when I go to the fields. If I start breaking a sweat, I am immediately told to go sit in the shade and rest. I have come to terms with this cultural kindness of theirs, but I wonder all the time – Where does it come from? Where do their ideas of what white people can or can’t do come from? If we can build airplanes and cell phones, why is it so hard to believe that I can beat shea paste into shea butter?

The final thing that drives me nuts is the “We have no money. America is rich. Take me to America.” I always argue, I tell them, No!! You don’t want to go to America! We are sad, stressed out, lonely people who do not get to sit under mango trees drinking tea all afternoon. Why do you think you are poor? You have enough to eat. You have a roof over your head. You think you are poor only in relation to the mass consumption of Americans, which you think makes us happier.

I start to target television – the only window my villagers have into the world of white people. Every night they watch the Brazilian soap opera with rich white people who never work and argue about money while they cheat each other. Desperate Housewives is on tomorrow at 2, interspliced with some advertisements for LandCruisers and CocaCola. Little brown faces gaze at the flickering images, to grow up one day to say to a white person, “Your skin is beautiful. Mine is not. Your mind is good. Mine is not.” And I cry inside and wish I could throw the television off a cliff.

DEATH
Feb. 6
A new sound wakes me in the night. I lay in the dark, listening. Yes, human voices, women’s voices, calling and responding in high pitched wails. Beneath it I hear a steady deep patter of hands on taut leather.
I grope around for my flashlight, slip on my flip flops, and push open my screen door to investigate. I have heard that there are fetish rituals that women are forbidden to see, but the voices sound feminine, and I think this is something different. The air is crisp, the stars hang thick across night’s black ceiling, like glow worms offering their light to a giant cavern – each one insignificant, but combined their efforts allow me to walk towards the music without using my invasive metallic light.
The sound rises from my friend Yaya’s compound – Yaya, one of my best friends in village, with whom I pass many afternoons and whose smile never fails to brighten my day. As I near the entrance two older women come out and I ask them what is happening.
“Yaya’s mom died.”
…. the sweet, frail, toothless woman who always made an effort to greet me in slow Bambara (one of the few women who can), who showed me how to turn raw cotton into thread in the shade of her mango tree… I nod and enter.
Framed by the glow of three small campfires, a circle of women turns in measured steps, their voices lilting upwards with the smoke from the fires. Their song is not sad, their eyes are not moist. No! The women are celebrating, they have spread the message through the village, risen from their beds, donned their finest clothes, and come together in the darkness to embrace the life of this woman.
They greet me and usher me into the circle. Jakalia’s mom, my “host grandma” is in the center of the circle with three other elder women with gourds, pounding out the beat, dancing, lifting their arms, exalting in song. Another group of dancers gyrates nearby to a deafening staccato rhythm, and after I tire of the one circle I make my way to the other. As I near it, I realize it is next to the room with the corpse.
The rancid stench of urine clings to my nostrils, but the women gathered in the room do not seem to notice or to mind. They sit in a circle around the body, which is covered in a pale pink shroud. Their faces are lit by lamplight and they chat, they laugh, they sit in silence.
It finally dawns on me that there are only women. Old women sitting, middle aged women with their powerful voices, young women with babies strapped to their backs or nursing next to the fires. Of course. Those who bring life into the world are those who usher it out.
One group of dancers snakes across the courtyard through a doorway. Curious, I follow. On the other side, next to the road, sit the men. They are silent, circled around two low fires, many asleep, others just staring into the flames. The womens’ voices break their torpor, as they move slowly to stand around the men, holding them in the warmth of their voices, as a mother embraces a child, protecting him in her powerful, soothing grace. In the orange glow of fire light, I see a strange green speck. A cell phone! I edge closer. Some guy is playing tetris on his cellphone! Moments like this, of stark juxtaposition between tradition and modernity, never cease to amaze me. Just as I was reveling in the beauty, power of this tradition, here is a guy who could care less. He’d prefer the beauty and power of Western gadgets. I sigh and return to the women gathering close around the fires for warmth in the cool morning air.
Just sitting, listening, I feel how rich these people are. We may have more plastic and doohickeys, and yeah, better health and more opportunities, but I realize how impoverished we have become in spirit, in community, in our disconnect with the cycle of life and with each other. I think of an old woman dying alone on a white sterile hospital bed with no one around but a man in an ironed labcoat and the sound of a beeping heart monitor, and I shiver.
What better way to say goodbye to a loved member of the family, who has lived her life fully, than with song and dance and food, with the clank of shells hitting gourds, the plump breast of a nursing mother, an embrace of her life and the lives she left behind.

Feb. 7
As if that wasn’t enough, the celebrations continue for three more days. The day after her death, hundreds of people come from surrounding villages, the hunters dressed in their traditional attire, the women wearing their best matching fabric complets. Yaya’s compound transforms into a giant festival – people from all over the village bringing firewood to keep the fires going, food to cook and feed the throngs, and non-stop song and dance, telling the story of her life.

The men lift the body onto a wooden stretcher and carry it to a fetish house, then out into a field where they fire off guns, and then they RUN the body to the grave. On the way I pass a cow and a goat being sacrificed, but I keep running in the chaos, the dust, the yelling, trying to not get trampled.

We arrive sweating at the hole that the men had dug during the day, tucked back in the sacred woods, next to Yaya’s father’s grave. The women sing, and for the first time I see tears flow, and they place the body into the grave on a bed of song and gentle voices. Then sweaty, shirtless men frantically cover the grave in stones and branches. From dust to dust.

Yaya and his brother.

I think, I want to die like this. To have my spirit swept into the earth by exalting voices, pounding feet, clapping hands, smiles, and laughter. To have school stop for two days and no one goes to work, to have everyone whose life I have touched come to tell stories and cook feasts.

If I die and any of you are around to witness it, I want song and dance, food and drink, stories and celebration. There will be no black at my funeral.

Photos: http://usc.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2209082&l=b01cf&id=3408340

PATIENCE

Feb. 26

My reserves of patience have been pushed to new extremes. Friday morning we left our tranquil beach house in Senegal at 9am to head back to Mali... and I got into Bamako last night at midnight, 63 hours later. We rode two separate public transit cars to get back to Dakar, battered old buses with people stuffed in tighter than sardines, then got on our bus in Dakar to head for Mali that afternoon. The road between Dakar and the Mali border has to be the worst road I have ever experienced (worse than Kangaroo Island Australia, worse than the road to Kenicott Mines in Alaska). For hundreds of kilometers, our bus crawled along at pace I could have out-run, bobbing up and down in potholes big enough to eat a man. We "slept," while the "air stewards" sprawled out on the dirty aisle floor to catch up on sleep before their driving shift. There was a Nigerian sitting behind me who, every time the bus hit a REALLY bad pot hole (one that made us all fly out of our seats), would yell a stream of English swear words. It made me laugh that we EVER think flying is difficult, with their constant beverages, reclining chairs, seat back pockets, LAVATORIES, air conditioning, and ... well... they're usually only 10, maybe 15 hours, not 62.

My stomach wasn't feeling well, and by morning I was in desperate need of a hole in the ground. We stopped in a little village for the Muslims to pray at dawn, and I got out started asking around if anyone spoke Bambara. No, no. I made it clear I needed to "use the facilities," and a woman handed me a pot of water and sent me behind the huts, where I found a patch of dirt enclosed with straw where people can pee, and a field of peeing men who had just gotten off the bus. Shit. (quite literally). I saw another woman and told her in Bambara, "I need to poop." She understood and I made it just in time. Diarrhea and African public transport are not a good match.

The border crossing to Mali took us all day, with bus-searches, customs, bribes, gendarme stops, and a half bus-load full of people who didn't have proper passports or visas. Apparently there were sewing machines strapped to the roof that weren't Claimed... Another two hours of my life. We got into Kayes, Mali at 9pm and the bus owner decided to stop for the night. We were glad, because we all had grossly swollen ankles from sitting for 30 hours, and we have a Peace Corps house in Kayes with showers and beds. We walked there, glad for the exercise, and slept for a few hours, then walked back at 4am to get back on the bus.

We found no one. Gradually passengers started gathering, but no bus people. The hours ticked by, and we sat. The owner had told us (very forcefully, in a heated argument the night before) that we would leave no later than 5. He showed up, then disapeared. At 9am, there was a crowd of angry people, a woman who had a job to start, but there is no recourse in Africa. No "I demand my money back." We just had to wait. At 10 my friend Jacq sat in the driver seat and started honking the horn. She took one of his cigarettes and smoked it (even though she doesn't smoke). At 11:30 we finally left, ... and 12 hours later got into Bamako. Sweaty, dirty, exhausted, frustrated, with swollen cankles just to rub it in.

And today I get on my 7 hour bus to Sikasso.

Senegal photos: http://usc.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2209082&l=b01cf&id=3408340

a few photos

The market in Segou, around New Years.

Watching the Africa Cup of Nations! The TV is powered by a solar panel on the roof.

On our way to go rock climbing near Bamako. Avoiding goat pee is a skill to be perfected.

Six Months

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

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

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

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

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

Number of marriage proposals: Close to 50

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And my personal goals for 2008:

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

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