On being a woman

The hitchhikers are barely visible in the dim glow of a rising moon, but we pull over to pick them up. I hop off my bike seat and re-roll my pant leg so it stops catching on my broken pump handle that sticks out. The hitchhikers are two preteen girls, just old enough that their tee-shirts aren’t flat but no older than 12 or 13. They aren’t old enough or lucky enough to be bike owners though, so tonight they decided to walk and hope they could catch a lift on the back rack of some guy’s bicycle. I am with M’Pedougou’s 20-year-old-boy posse, a rowdy pack of testosterone and hormones, all dressed up in their decorated bleached European-style jeans and tight t-shirts. It’s “soiree season” – the time of year when the young men of each village put on a big night of dancing and invite all the surrounding villagers.

The M’Pe posse convinced me to come along, so when we finished our round of tea at my host family’s around 10, a group of 15 or so saddled up and we peddled off into the darkness. I held my flashlight awkwardly gripped on my handlebar, veering around potholes in the dirt path. I noticed that most of the boys were riding blindly, and some of them didn’t even have brakes – they just put their foot on the back wheel to slow down. When we reach the first hitchhikers, the girls hop on side-saddle onto the back rack and then appear impervious to the rattling and bouncing that is making my flashlight look more like a strobe light.

After about 5 miles we reach the water. Under the fresh light of the low full moon, I see currents rippling and the whole posse dismounting to roll up their pant legs. “Sita, roll them up pretty high.” Ok, I think, this time’s as good as any to get schistosomiasis (the water-borne illness because of which we are told to never wade or swim in fresh water). I roll up my pant legs and we forge our way across, picking slowly over the unseen and rocky bottom. One guy tries to show off and ride across, until he hits a rock and falls off and everyone laughs.

We show up at the soiree with wet feet but well warmed up. I ogle a bit at the production. A beat-up old taxi had brought a generator, lights, speakers, and they walled off the schoolyard with whatever burlap sacks or tarps they could find. The lights are surprisingly bright after our quiet ride under the stars, and the speakers bump out fast Cote d’Ivoirian dance anthems. A crowd teems at the entrance, and the M’Pe posse globs on to the amoeba. There are two bouncers at the door taking money and giving tickets – it is CFA 500 to enter, about $1.25, and that includes a soft drink. In one of the few instances where I like sticking out because of my whiteness, they pull me up to the front and usher me through for free (I don’t want a soft drink). Inside, the school desks and tables are arranged in the schoolyard and groups of people are hanging out talking and flirting. It reminds me of a high school dance. When the M’Pe posse finally filters through, we go into the school house to dance. The main room is an inferno, a boiling, dripping, sweaty sauna of a dance party. I get the expected curious looks and stares (what is a white girl doing out here?) but a good share of greetings and waves from the people I know. The Sikasso DJ is a giant of a man (I know immediately he isn’t from a village – no one can get that fat eating corn toh!), and he sidles my way and tries to pull me into a circle and dance with me. Just as quickly, the M’Pe boys circle around and close him out. I smile and think, ah, it’s good to go dancing with 15 brothers who look out for you.

As the night wears on – we move inside and outside as the sweat drenches us and then evaporates in the brisk night air – I notice that there are very few women at the party. It is at least two thirds men, from the age of 12 to 40, with a heavy concentration of 20 year olds. But the girls, that is important, girls, not women, are few, and they are mostly of our hitchhikers’ demographic – preteens and early teens. I think about what I’ve read and heard, that women are married off as early as 12 and not much later than 16, and I stop to wonder if all this really is the equivalent of a high school dance, with the men all looking at these girls as prospective hook-ups or wives or second wives. They even play the requisite slow song now and then and everyone but a few couples rushes outside to cool off (isn’t that familiar?).

I also can’t help but reflect on my own place at this soiree. Ha. I’m the only white person. The only woman. The only college educated person. I’m just an anomaly – a pale, unmarried, childless 24 year-old woman who likes to go dancing. I would expect to feel “out of place” in the situation, but I have come to realize in my Peace Corps service that I am just different here, that I do not have a ‘peer group’ or a social place in this culture. All the women my age are married with three kids and never went to school, so the closest peers I have are the 20-year old guys who make good buddies for drinking tea and forging rivers at 5 in the morning. By the time I crawl into bed the moon had crossed the sky to pass the baton back over to the sun.

__________________________________

My host mom Alimatu and I are out collecting shea nuts one afternoon when I ask about her uterus. In the fall she had sharp pains in her reproductive system and she had gone to several doctors. She says that she and Jakalia (my host dad) had been told that her uterus was spent, just worn out from bearing four very large boys. She says that the doctor told her she shouldn’t have any more children. She stops, and it is just the breeze and the sounds of our nuts plunking into our buckets. So, I ask her, what do you plan to do about it? Are you going to take birth control? She says that she doesn’t want any more kids, that she is tired, and she doesn’t want to risk another pregnancy. But birth control, that is Jakalia’s decision, and he hasn’t said anything to her. I pause. Alimatu, have you talked to him about this? I think if you point out that he doesn’t want you to die, that he wants you to be there to raise your four boys, he might agree to put you on birth control… And we continue collecting nuts, plunk, plunk, and I speculate that rain might come later.

____________________________________

I've heard and read a lot about women's rights... but until now I have never understood how important the 'right' part is, that aspect of freedom, the aspect of choice. The differences between me and Alimatu are many but at the core is that I have choices in my life. I can decide to take birth control if I want to, without consulting anyone. I will decide when and to whom I marry, and if and when I have children. I ride my own bicycle to the soiree because I have economic rights and I can buy my own bike.

But... it isn't a simple picture. I don't know how I feel about this yet, but I know it is anything but simple.

One Year

Kama, one of my host family 'little brothers' and a beacon of sunshine. He told his dad that he wanted to drop out of school, so he became a cow herder for three months during the dry season and now he farms.

One full year. The days go by slowly, but the weeks and months have flown by, and now here I am in Bamako welcoming a new group of trainees, telling them stories and assuring them they will survive. It is a fresh dose of perspective to be reminded that only a year ago, I too was struggling to say the most basic phrases, that I thought the food in my homestay was terrible (I look back on it now and say, hey, that was pretty good!), that I was truly a child in terms of my ability to function in this society.

And now... here I am, having passed through the growing pains of adolescence and arrived at adulthood (well, pretty close). I don't have to ask questions about how to say such and such, what's appropriate, how things are done, or what organism is living in my gut. These things feel like second nature to me now (and my amoebas are like well-loved house pets... I feed them well).

The past two months have been the best yet. After months of sweating and waiting for the rains, the sky finally darkened and the village shifted from under the shade of the mango trees to back-breaking labor in the fields. Every morning the women wake up at 4am and trek out in the pitch black to collect the shea nuts that have fallen in the night. By daybreak they have returned, heated water, cooked, and they head out to the fields again, with hoes slung across their shoulders and bowls of food on their heads. Some are lucky enough to have cows, and the men till the fields with cow plows before seeding, but others just hack at the dry crusted earth with their sculpted, weathered muscles, and little by little they plant hectare after hectare of peanuts, rice, sorghum, millet, and corn. Once the seed is in the ground, the first field is already weed-infested, and the frenzy of weeding begins. It is truly back-breaking labor, and I marvel at how they tackle such a seemingly hopeless task(eleven hectares of corn stretches for a loooong way).
Last week my host dad 'hired' the women's group of my family (the Bengali women) to come weed his field for a day - 40 women for an entire day for about 10 US dollars. Wow. The old women came with their 'chichira' shaker gourds and sang, and women would rise to dance and sing as they hoed, drenched in dirt and sweat. Abdouleye told me that when he was a kid it was always like that, that when people went to plant, the drums came too, and their was dancing and singing in order to urge people along in their work. But, he says, the cow plow came and it is hard to play drums, and that the tradition has mostly disapeared. I can't help but question what constitutes progress Yes, the cow plow is good, I won't deny that, but it saddens me to see how quickly their society is being overtaken by new technology - at such a speed that they don't have time to adjust their cultural practices... they just get lost.

Abdouleye (my work partner) and I have pushed full steam ahead with field experiments. Several farmers are trying out new sorghum varieties in controlled plots, some are putting urine on corn (a free source of nitrogen), and one farmer just planted an alley cropping trial (nitrogen fixing trees in a crop field). I have also taught my womens group about Moringa, a tree whose leaves are rich in vitamins, iron, and calcium, and they have planted them throughout the village. So, slowly, slowly, I feel like I am starting to be useful.

Yaya and Abdouleye, my two best friends in M'Pedougou. Yaya measures the rain every day for logging in our sorghum trial notebook. This is in the middle of his peanut field.

Abdouleye with a jug of watered down pee, getting ready to go "water" our corn test plot. Hmmm, nitrogen.

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On Language

Speaking a foreign language means learning to see the world in a new way. If it is true that “I think, therefore I am,” than thinking lays the very foundation of ‘being.’ Our patterns of thinking are, in turn, deeply trained by the linguistic tools that we use to organize our perceptions of the world around us. As my Bambara progresses, I realize how my mental habits are shifting as well. Significantly, there is no word for “late.”

Some fun ones -
I forgot – A bora n kono – It was inside me, it left
End of the month – kalo ka sa = death of the moon
Fruit – yiriden = tree children
Airport – pankurunjiginyoro = jumping boat landing place
To do physical activity/sports – farikolo nyenaje = bring body bones together for amusement
To spit – dajibo = to put out mouth water
N t’a don = I don’t know, I don’t enter, I don’t wear it, It’s mine
Yele - to smile, to laugh, to open, to go up, and light

And I realized just how mixed up the word order can get. Learning French was hard because of the masculine feminine nonsense, but at least the word order stays relatively similar – Not so in Bambara. The sentence ‘N be na mangora ja cogo kura jira dugo muso ma,’ translates word for word: I am coming mango dry way new show village women to.

On White Skin

I have yet to silence the complete pandemonium of emotions – anger, confusion, exasperation, and sadness – that arises every time the glowing apparition of my skin falls under the gaze of Malian children. It is the soundtrack to my existence: a high-pitched chipmunk warble of a broken record spinning the same three syllables into eternity, “Tubabu! Tubabu! Tubabu!” Occasionally the record progresses into loud nasal “Ca vaaa? Ca vaaa? Bon soooir,” as they say good evening at 10 o’clock in the morning.
Some days I eke out a smile and a soft greeting, “Aw ni che.”Some days I grit my teeth, avert eye contact, and hope that if I ignore them maybe they’ll go away. This only makes it grow louder.
Some days I burst a seam and I call back “My name is not Tubabu!” in Bambara.

The word Tubab comes from the Arabic word for doctor – tubib. So. I guess I’m a doctor. I come bearing news of washing-hands-with-soap and beans-beans-the-magical-fruit. Amazing how these two things could in fact produce a significant impact on their well-being. The Tubab-shouting children are only one group, the excited, eager, swarming kind. The others are no less curious, but they stay silent behind shy, shell-shocked eyes as they gape unashamedly at the wonder of my skin. Some, in rural villages, take a quick appraisal of this ghost in the shape of a woman and run screaming in horror. I’ve even seen one trip and fall on his flight from my ghastly presence.

If white children had never before seen black people, would they behave in the same way? If so, why do children respond this way? Why do kids get so outrageously excited by me? Why do I get so annoyed? What role does the history of French colonization play in all of this? Do they have a persisting "pyschological colonization" that manifests as an inferiority complex?

I reflect on these thoughts and I try to understand the complexities of my reactions. I have a quote on my wall that reads:

Treat every person you meet

as if they have a sign around their neck that says

‘Make me feel important.’

So there I am on my bicycle riding home from Sikasso through packs of chanting children…. Sighing and trying to smile and remain relaxed and to practice unconditional love. I can’t change Malians, I can only change my reaction to them ("if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and then make the change”). Yet if I could change one thing, it would be to hide my skin. I guess I will work on that patience thing some more.

And MORE pictures are at

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2265565&l=68f84&id=3408340

Watering the Fetishes

We're on the cusp of rainy season. The heat builds up until we think we're going to suffocate, and then the Western sky boils black and comes riding in on sheets of wind. I run inside and watch eagerly as the rain pummels the parched, thirsty earth, giving life, giving food, giving green.


M'Pedougou is not a Muslim village. They call themselves "josonnaw," which translates to "fetish waterers." It is what Westerners loosely lump into the category of animism. What I've gathered is that they give sacrifices to the genies and the ancestors, and each year they kick off rainy season with a giant village festival to give offerings and to dance until they ancestors too must get tired from watching. It is called a "dugu son," which might mean "watering the village," and people come from villages near and far to take part in the fun.

DAY 1

We've finished hauling buckets and buckets of water (carefully perched upon our heads as we weave through the maze of pathways connecting pump and hut), and the rice and sauce have been cooked in the light of a hazy orange sunset. My host mom Alimatu thrusts a bowl of rice at me and says "Wu si!", lets go! My host moms, host sister Nawa and I each take a bowl and scuttle down the road that winds past the mango groves and towards the great sacred tree where the genies live. They gracefully balance their bowls atop their heads, hips swaying, heads perfectly motionless, while I must hold on to mine with a hand. Other groups of women and children join us, and as we reach the mango groves, more women come running towards us, their bare feet flapping on the dusty earth, their mouths carved open into giant grins. They grab handfuls of rice out of our bowls and eat some, then throw some into the air. We pick up the pace and snake our way along the edge of the old cotton field towards the tree.

The tree is a giant, its roots curling up out of the ground and its pale skin stretching skyward before slender arms emerge and twist and tangle into each other. At its base, we approach one by one and throw our few remaining handfuls of rice (most of it having been eaten on the way there) upon its smooth, exposed roots. We say our prayers to the ancestors and to the genies, "May we have a good rainy season," "May all of our children be fed," then turn and work our way upstream through the incoming swarms of women, grabbing handfuls of rice out of their bowls and sharing smiles and moments of laughter.

Back in our compound, we fill more bowls of rice and take them to the Bengaly family meeting house, placing them in the midst of a circle of people. Dusk has swept the harsh African sun past the horizon, but a few men hold up flashlights, so I can make out some old men sitting around with a crate of chickens beside them. One man starts uttering blessings in Senoufo and another slits a chicken's throat over a calabash of fetishes and other mysterious, secret-society things. Once the blood has drained, he tosses the limp creature into the middle of the circle, where the crowd watches in anticipation. The scrawny bird lays still for a moment, then its body leaps off the ground, flailing and flopping. There is no "running around" of the proverbial chicken with its head cut off, as these chickens are too weak to run in the post-life. The best they can do is flap their wings and make a few desperate hops. After watching about a dozen chickens die, some of whom manage to flop their way into the bowls of rice, the crowd lets out a roar and the women start shaking their chichara gourds, and a few burst into song. I turn to my host mom, "Mun kera?" what happened?. She responds, "It landed on its back. If it lands on its back it is a good sign, it means it has pleased the ancestors." ah. of course.

DAY 2

I get up late, exhausted by the night-after-night of balafon dancing. My legs hurt, I've got ghiardia again, and a cold. But eh, that's life here, so I haul water from the pump, water my tree nursery, take a bucket bath, and head over to my host family's house. Today is the 'big day.' All the women in my extended family bought matching fabric, so today we gather and don our outfits for the first time. In the distance we can hear the deep echo of the "bum-ba" drum, literally 'big boom,' a fitting name I think. Two black masked creatures appear - hunched over like old men, leaning on canes, dancing a slow knee-lifting side step. Wiry 'hair' flows down from the masks over their backs, and someone sticks corn cobs into the extended carved mouths. One of them apparently has bad vision; he's got funky black glasses perched on his pointed nose. They chase the swarms of children, who run screaming in terror and delight.

A balafon mysteriously appears and soon the drums are wailing. After a song or so they pick up, the instruments float up onto the tops of womens' heads, and the whole crowd is moving along towards the sacred trees. Behind us more people are gathering at the Boom-ba.

Once we reach the sacred grove, tucked into the lush greenery by a stream, the musicians set up post and start pounding out rhythms, and groups of women tap-shuffle their flip-flopped feet, kicking up clouds of dust that we cough on and laugh at.

We don't spend long before the instruments are hoisted up again. There are still hordes of new musicians and dancers arriving, but we're the first wave, so we move out through the forest, traipsing across dried out crop fields, picking over millet and sorghum stalks. We pass by the giant tree, give it our blessings, and move into the fields to dance.

Like transient worshippers, we soon pick up and wind single-file back towards M'Pedougou, skirting around the mango groves towards the dugutigi's house (the village chief). We all remove our head wraps and bow before the chief, who is blind and mostly deaf, but still a smiley old man who showers us with blessings and chews on bitter kola nuts. We dance for him and then dance outside as new groups move in, dancing until our feet hurt and we're thirsty and tired. Women start slipping away, to get water, to wash, to cook the evening meal of rice and sauce. The sounds of pestles pounding sprinkles the air, already thick with shaking gourds, hands thumping leather, and agile drum sticks dancing on the resonant planks of the balafon.

DAY 3

In the morning, again exhausted, I come to greet my host moms. We sit down to eat rice and sauce, and Fatimata seems tired. She has been pregnant for months, and I wonder at how she got through all the festivities. We don't talk much, and then when we have finished eating she says "A be so kono," it (or he or she) is in the house." I look at her blankly. She nods at the house. I look at her stomach, and a wave of comprehension slides over me. "FATIMATA!" I shriek, "You gave birth!" She nods, and smiles towards her hut. I leap up, then slow down and cautiously enter the dark hut, pushing back the curtain in her door. I look on her bed, seeing only piles of clothes, pieces of fabric. I make out a bundle, then a tiny face, its eyes closed, its face scrunching up as it stretches. I sit down softly. The doorway darkens and Fatimata enters. I look at her tired slender body and the miniscule human being, and she picks him up and places him in my lap. She shrugs, profers a wan smile, and I wonder what she's thinking. What does this kid mean to her? Her eldest son is 18, a grown man, and here she is with a newborn, its fingernails barely visible, getting ready to nurse it into toddlerhood and strap it on her back as she heads out to the fields.

Soon it will be time to plant. To watch the skys and hope for rain, to sow the seeds for next year's food by the force of muscle and a hoe. To hope that this year will be better than the last.

MORE PHOTOS
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2239022&l=2b1df&id=3408340

Hail and Dust storms

Harvesting "nere" seed to make into a sauce. This is my host sister Nawa.
One of the many mud stoves that the women have built to save firewood.
A village elder making traditional cotton fabric on his loom.

Yesterday afternoon I rode into the bush to get my friend Calita and ride into Sikasso. We got roped into drinking a round of tea and finally managed to get on the road at 4:15, a bit late, and with dark clouds building up in the Eastern sky that we were riding towards. The air was hot, heavy, humid, ready to burst.

Packs of schoolkids raced past us on their one speed bicycles, and when we reached the big mango groves 5 miles out of M'Pedougou, the wind blasted down the road upon us and within minutes the sky started pelting pebble-sized-hail, raining down in sheets and bouncing across the road. I was laughing so hard I could barely hold my bike up in the wind. I ran off the road to find shelter under a mango tree, but the hail started knocking down mangos, so I stood out in the open and was thankful for my bike helmet.

When the hail passed we started riding again in a gentle rain, laughing and savoring the novel sensation of goose bumps. An hour later, as we crested a hill we were met by another blast of wind and a wall of brown fog. I said, 'Is this a duststorm?' Calita responded, 'I don't know but let's get out of it, whatever it is.' We pushed our bikes DOWNhill into the wind, dust flying towards us and sticking to our wet skin, swirling into our eyes and teeth and ears. We turned off the road towards a little village that we were passing, pushing our bikes between some huts and looking for signs of life. A man came out and said, 'Come, get inside. We'll wait out the storm.' We ducked into his hut just in time. Chunks of dirt and sand and rock pummeled the tin roof, and at one point the wind lifted the corner and I thought for sure it was going to fly off, but it didn't. We huddled for 20 minutes, until it had subsided and we had to get going to make it to Sikasso before dark. What an afternoon.

This morning we did our radio show - we discussed global warming: What is it? What causes it? What can we do to lessen it? What can we do to mitigate its effects? We gave a big shout out to all the women in M'Pedougou who had built mudstoves. It was a fun show; I'm getting into the groove now and I like the chance to share ideas with a lot of people all at once.

Until next week; this is Sita Bengaly.

Three Weddings and a Funeral

THREE WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL

April 20

There is something magical about waking up to drumming. It happens quite regularly, as I go to bed early and the drums wake up late.

On this occasion it was the night after my friend Issa’s wedding. There were actually three marriages that happened on the same day, and I went with Abdouleye to the dowry ceremony. This entails a gathering of old men in a hut, chewing on bitter kola nuts while they exchange the dowry and give gifts. Next to the wrinkly men I noticed the sacrifice block, with fresh streaks of blood. The “dugu son” season is beginning, the season of offering sacrifices to the ancestors and the genies in order to get good rain this year. Outside the dowry hut, villagers were gathered at the newlyweds’ concession to chat, play cards, drink tea, and eat. It had started the night before and would go for several more days, with dancing at night. M’Pedougou is not a Muslim village, so the customs are rather informal compared to a lot of Mali.

Soon a child came and asked to speak to Abdouleye. He went out and came back, “Sita, let’s go home.” I looked at him curiously, wondering why he wanted to go, and of all things, home. We started walking and he said, “My mother, she’s passed away.” I nodded and as we walked I quietly gave him my blessings (Bambara fills that gap we have in English – that awkward sticky feeling of oh gosh, I want to console you, but I don’t know what to say… Um, I’m sorry? In Bambara there is a string of ‘death blessings’ that smooth over that gap. May Allah return her to the Earth. May he cool her resting place. May her children live out the life that she gave them) At his mom’s hut, the family was beginning to gather, trickling in from marriage festivities, their gaiety muffled. Abdouleye’s brother was sitting on a carved wood stool sobbing, tears making dark lines on his dusty cheeks. Their older brother, my language tutor Adama, drunk on millet beer from the marriage festivities, was preaching to no one in particular about the naturalness of death. The women began to gather and the singing began that afternoon.

By the next night, I’m flat worn out from the day-in-day-out festivities, the dancing circles of women, the cha-chas, the calabash drumming, the rice eating, and the all night balafon dancing. All, of course, taking place under a burning sun and even at night the moon seems to give off heat. I’ve gone home to tuck myself into my mosquito net and sweat myself to sleep.

I’m tugged back into consciousness by a deep resonant drumming, a sound I’ve not yet heard in village. Its deep voice is soon joined by the playful rising notes of the balafon. My mosquito net flaps against me in a thick wind, urging me, go, go, go to the music. I slip on my new tafe (fabric that wraps as a skirt) and, like many other nights, forage out into the dark. I pick my way through a dried out cotton field, letting the wind lift up my tafe and brush the silky fabric against my legs. I savor the cool air and the dark, turbulent sky. The balafon players are circled under a mango tree next to Abdouleye’s mom’s hut, illuminated by a pair of fluorescent tube lights. Above them swollen mangoes swing like violent pendulums in the wind. Dancers circle around, their feet flying in impossibly fast, impossibly intricate egg-beater patterns. A sheet of sand whisks through the air, and some of the pendulums fly free, their thuds drowned by the drumming. My friend Jeneba comes up behind me and smiles a great, yellow fleshy smile and hands me a mango. I pile a few into my shirt just as fat drops of water start spitting from the black boiling mass above.

Flip flops flapping, tafe whipping, rain drops splatting, I sprint through the cotton field to get home to move my bed inside. Just in time. Rain hammers down on my tin roof. Gusts of wet air burst in through my windows and I happily let the cool spray splatter across my floor. Outside the parched soil cries hallelujah and drinks long, deep gulps of sky water. I peel mangoes and I smile, savoring each bite of this sweet existence.


MOTIVATION

Monday, April 28

My women’s group meets most Monday mornings at 9am. The women trickle in, usually in spurts, and most weeks we are lucky to start by 9:30 with about 15 of the 20 women. We’ve talked about how to reduce women’s workload, child spacing and birth control options, starting a garden, and we did a formation on mud stoves about a month ago (mud stoves are an improvement over the tradition three-rock stove because it holds heat in and thus burns less firewood, reducing the time spent collecting wood and helping slow deforestation). I set the group up with 2 women represented from each large family within M’Pedougou, hoping that they could act as ‘representatives’ for their women, spreading what they learn within the village.
So when I taught them how to build mud stoves, the idea was that the 2 women would then go build their own mud stoves and teach their family’s women how to build them, and knowledge transfer would multiply in an almost exponential manner.

This Monday I was still eating breakfast (a bowl of sorghum and peanut porridge) at 8:30 when I heard “ko-ko” from outside (roughly meaning…hello, I’m here, can I enter?). I came out to find five women with chairs and stools on their heads. I gawked and said, well, you’re half an hour early, no one else is going to be here for awhile. They sat down anyway. I went back inside to collect more stools and I heard it again: “ko-ko.” Huh? I went back out, to find another group of women. Within ten minutes my concession was packed with women. Afu, a boisterous joking women with eyes that crinkle as if she’s got an inside joke, turned on her radio and stretched herself out in my hammock. I sat down and counted… 19 women. It was only 8:40. What was going on? Was my watch off an hour? This kind of … timeliness, EARLINESS in fact, is just about unheard of in village life in most of Africa. At 8:50 Abdouleye showed up, his jaw dropping at the gate. The last woman came and we started the meeting at 8:55.

We talked about Moringa trees, a tree that is sometimes called “the miracle tree.” The leaves provide vitamins, protein, and fiber that most village Malians severely lack, and it incorporates easily into their cooking. I have three of them in my yard and I have started a tree nursery, with 50 little saplings so far.
Near the end of the meeting Adama arrived - my language tutor who had helped me with the mud stove formation. Abdouleye and I were planning on making a tour of the village to ‘inspect’ the mud stoves. Adama (his eyes puffy and, as he is most mornings, still a bit tipsy from the previous night’s millet beer) said he’d come just to “add some words.”
He moved into what I call his motivational speaker mode, switching between Bambara and Senufo, using dramatic pauses for emphasis.
“ If you don’t build your mud stove, WHO will? If M’Pedougou’s children (Bambara’s expression for citizens) don’t work for their own advancement, WHO will? Each of us has our own skills to add, our own contribution to make, and if we don’t do it, WHO will?”
The women were nodding and murmuring, adding punctuations of “Amiina.” It was a clichéd Peace Corps moment that I think few volunteers are actually luck enough to experience – as few villages understand that development isn’t about charity, gifts, or white skin.

When Adama had finished I said “I too want to add some words.”
I paused, and spoke in slow crisp Bambara, “Long ago, the first people of America, those who were there before the white-skinned people came, they had a saying.” Pause. “They said, in everything we do, we must take into account the lives of future generations.” Pause.
The older women nodded in knowing, and the younger women with baby’s sucking on their breasts added their tongue-clicks that signal agreement. “If we cut down our trees today, what will our children do?”

And with that Abdouleye and I started our village tour. I had low expectations. As we reached each larger family’s area of village, one of the group’s representative women joined us and gave us a tour of her area. In and out of huts and yards, mud stove after mud stove after mud stove. Some had complex systems four up to four pots to sit on the same stove, some had smooth gray mud walls, some were dark, some had closed doors, some were open, but hut after hut, I started to get overwhelmed.
I said, “Abdouleye! The whole village has built mud stoves!”
He said, “Yes, what did you expect?”
“Well, I guess I just didn’t expect people to do it.”
“M’Pedougou is moving forward, and we’re doing it ourselves.”
I agreed.

And pictures are at

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2233178&l=97e0e&id=3408340

How to make toh

I got a letter from someone requesting a step-by-step guide to making toh. Toh is the staple food of many Malians, and in M'Pedougou they eat it for lunch, dinner, and sometimes even breakfast for 350 days a year.
I've posted a picture tutorial, as well as a few other photos:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2221088&l=1e0f2&id=3408340

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.