Dancing in the heat

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

Shea Butter movie

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

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



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

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

What is development?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FESPACO 2009

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

INSPIRATION

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

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

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

PERSPIRATION

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

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

The Slingshot Effect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

********

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

Three New Moons in Mali

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

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

                          ******

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Niger River and Dogon Country