Tuesday, December 23, 2008
an ending
hi. i noticed people are still looking at my blog. thank you for reading it, although i am sorry nothing has been written in a long, long time. on my map which shows the places from which my blog has been checked, the biggest spot comes from kansas. thank you to the kansas people (most likely one person) who still checks on it; i am glad someone in kansas still cares enough to be curious about me. i think it is probably scott's mom. i am not going to write anymore because i came home last month, in the beginning of november. i miss mali a lot. i wish everyone i know could have come to visit me out there. i know and love many beautiful people there. i hope to return there soon, maybe as soon as may, insallah. and maybe if so, i will write on my blog again but until then adios. love, brooke
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Happy 4th of July!
My 4th of July is not exactly patriotic. I find myself in my office writing up reports on the projects I have done the past 3 months. I realize too, that I need to update all of you on my projects too.
My school is built. Thank you to all of those who donated and/or helped me spread the word about it. I have been avoiding putting up blogs though because I have had some problems with my school and I feel ashamed about writing about them here, where many of you have donated to the school. But, you all deserve to know what is going on. My project spent over a year on the website waiting to be funded and during that time the value of the dollar dropped significantly and the prices of materials rose. In fact, the price of cement rose by 50% since the time I submitted my project. Unfortunately once the budget is written it cannot be changed. So, there was no opportunity to keep the project posted until it raised the money it needed to build the 3 classrooms my counterparts in village and I had planned on. Instead we had to revise the project upon receiving the money. It was decided that instead of building 3 classrooms which could not be completed fully we would build 2 classrooms.
The 2 classrooms have been built. They have doors, large windows with shutters, they are made from cement, they have a sturdy tin roof, and cement floors BUT there is not any money left over to cover the seal the walls with cement (as we do with plaster), paint the school a pretty color, and, most importantly, furnish the classrooms. So, basically, what we have now is 2 empty cinderblock rooms that are very close to functioning. I look at the classrooms and feel bad. I feel like I failed in some ways. We are so close to having a nice school. I feel like I failed my village and I also feel like I failed all of you who donated to my project. With this feeling sinking inside me, I have to think of alternative plans so that students and teachers can use these classrooms soon. Normally, my village would be able to come up with some money to help but this year CMDT, the national organization that buys cotton from farmers, has not yet been able to pay the farmers in my village for last year’s cotton. It is doubtful that they will get paid at all. Many farmers aren’t planting cotton this year because of this. But cotton money is the men’s only real source of income. Without it, men cannot buy the things their families need like school and doctors’ fee, clothing, salt, tools, tea, etc. They also cannot contribute to community funded projects, such as sealing the school with cement, or, more importantly, fixing the pump that just broke so that they have access to clean drinking water. So, that leaves me looking for money again. So, I was thinking that soon, in a village near me, a new Peace Corps volunteer is going to move in to replace my sweet neighbor Michele Lehman, I hope this new volunteer can submit a project for me to complete the school after I am gone. Since I too will soon be leaving Mali, I cannot submit any more projects that need money. So my only option is to hope that this person will be willing to work on this with my village. Anyway, I am sorry, very sorry, things did not turn out as I said they would. But, I think soon the school will be finished. And, it was because of the help of all of you that made it possible for Sokouroni to get such nice classrooms to learn in.
Another project I completed this last quarter was, in many ways, my most personally rewarding project that I have done so far in Sokouroni. I gathered all the mothers of malnourished babies in Sokouroni and met with them every morning for 2 weeks to teach them about mother and infant nutrition, family planning methods, prevention of malaria, AIDS, and diarrheal diseases, etc. Every morning I would teach the women a new recipe for a nutritious porridge that they could feed to their malnourished babies. We would make the porridge together and each women would leave the meeting with enough porridge to feed her baby for the day. The babies were weighed in the beginning of 2 weeks and then at the end so that the weights could be compared. All the babies gained weight within 2 weeks. But, the best story to come out of this was that there was one baby with Kwashikor, a type of malnourishment where instead of getting really skinny babies get really swollen in their hands and feet and faces, so they look kind of chubby. This baby had Kwashikor so bad that his skin had turned dark black and was peeling off in large patches, he had been taken to numerous doctors in the area and they had given different skin medicines but none of them recognized this type of malnourishment; it is kind of rare. Anyway, so I saw him and told his mother to come to our porridge meetings and she came with him every morning. After 2 weeks, it was just amazing the difference! His skin was back on, it had healed almost completely; he was energetic and not swollen. Simply adding protein in the form of peanuts, beans, and soy made him so much better so quickly. That was really exciting for me.
Anyway, that’s work. But, I have also been doing a lot of other things lately. I went to Cabo Verde with my friend Isabelle. We took a bus from Bamako to Dakar. It was the absolute bus from hell. I thought I had already endured the worst that transport in the world could give me. I have been stuck standing, nose-to-nose, on a cigarette-smoke filled, lugi-drowned train during the Chinese New Year going from Chonquing to some other place 14 hours away. I have been smooshed every which way into many steel boxes of death racing through people-infested streets in numerous cities but this bus ride tested my endurance in ways it never had been before. We got to the bus stop, as requested, by 7 am. We got there to find that the bus they said we were going to take was not even coming. Instead they were going to put us on this old city bus from some German city that had been rotting there on the street for years. So, anyway, that was to be expected – that they would lie to us about what kind of bus we were going to take, bus since we had bought the tickets the day before we had no way to get out of it and go and get a nice bus from another company. Anyway, so we sat and waited and waited. Finally, 11 am comes and they are ready to start loading the bus. So, we got on. We thought the bus was full and it was going to leave. But, wait here pulls up another full bus, and the people on this bus are going to get on too! Oh boy! So, the bus owner starts putting teeny wooden stools side-by-side in the aisle of this bus! On these teeny stools, in this tiny aisle, 2 grown men are expected to sit side-by-side, with their knees in one another’s backs. This is bad. Really. I can’t explain it well, but these big, grown men were literally sitting on top of one another and expected to sit this way to Dakar! Dakar! At this point in our trip we are expecting Dakar to be 2 days away…(oh! How optimistic we were!) At this point in the day it is past noon, in the middle of hot season, and everyone, the bus is 95% men, starts taking off their shirts. Now I begin to realize the other passengers are foreigners (Malians would never strip like that unless they were in the fields, and even then very few do); these people are even more foreign to Mali then myself. The men turned out to be Nigerians going to the Gambia, and not being passive Malian people who believe everything that happens is Allah’s will, they were pissed. Being foreigners they don’t speak Bambara, they speak horrible French ( Isabelle and I, become the sole interpreters for the Nigerians) but they have no qualms about starting fights. So fights break out between the passengers and the bus people. People are yelling, standing up, pushing. It was crazy. But, like us, they had to realize the futility of the fight because they too had paid the equivalent of $65 to get a ticket on this bus, and the money is not easy to find. When everyone gets seated (with half-naked African men sitting as squished as they were, sweating, and rightfully angry I couldn’t help but be reminded of slave ships – the way these Malians were treating these men was just disgusting!) we take off, now it is like 2 pm, we quickly realize the bus is tilted significantly in one direction. Here the Nigerians start talking again about how they will die and the talk quickly turns into demands of pulling over and letting them out. Me too, I was yelling too. In Bambara. Anyway, thankfully Malian cops pull our bus over. We all pour out of the bus like water breaking through a dam, a mass movement that will become very common on this trip. The bus people admit the bus is too heavy and tell the cops they will get us another bus. They tell me they will divide up the passengers on to 2 buses now. So, we wait. I talk to the bus people, try to get them to give us our money back, tell them at this point we won’t get to Dakar in time to catch our plane to Cabo Verde – a lie. One of the bus people was so mean he brought up slavery, in my 2 years here in Africa the only other time I felt any hostility about slavery coming from someone it came from a black American visiting the Cape Coast slave castle in Ghana. Malians normally joke about slavery but this was man was mean and angry. Other Malians step in, they joke, call me a bean-eater, act their cordial Malian selves but tell me to talk to the boss about money, who will be coming later. After an hour or so, the other bus comes. A more heavy-duty greyhound type of bus. The boss comes. He laughs at me and tells me there is no way to get my money back. I was so angry!!! But, what can I do? We all get in. What about dividing up passengers? A lie. Completely. We’re all going on this one. Some people had to sit under the seats!!! I couldn’t believe it. They treated them like animals.
Anyway, I’ll post more on this later, but I need to go home and make dinner.
Also, can Kay Zienta-Smith email me her address? My email is brookemassa@gmail.com Thanks!
My school is built. Thank you to all of those who donated and/or helped me spread the word about it. I have been avoiding putting up blogs though because I have had some problems with my school and I feel ashamed about writing about them here, where many of you have donated to the school. But, you all deserve to know what is going on. My project spent over a year on the website waiting to be funded and during that time the value of the dollar dropped significantly and the prices of materials rose. In fact, the price of cement rose by 50% since the time I submitted my project. Unfortunately once the budget is written it cannot be changed. So, there was no opportunity to keep the project posted until it raised the money it needed to build the 3 classrooms my counterparts in village and I had planned on. Instead we had to revise the project upon receiving the money. It was decided that instead of building 3 classrooms which could not be completed fully we would build 2 classrooms.
The 2 classrooms have been built. They have doors, large windows with shutters, they are made from cement, they have a sturdy tin roof, and cement floors BUT there is not any money left over to cover the seal the walls with cement (as we do with plaster), paint the school a pretty color, and, most importantly, furnish the classrooms. So, basically, what we have now is 2 empty cinderblock rooms that are very close to functioning. I look at the classrooms and feel bad. I feel like I failed in some ways. We are so close to having a nice school. I feel like I failed my village and I also feel like I failed all of you who donated to my project. With this feeling sinking inside me, I have to think of alternative plans so that students and teachers can use these classrooms soon. Normally, my village would be able to come up with some money to help but this year CMDT, the national organization that buys cotton from farmers, has not yet been able to pay the farmers in my village for last year’s cotton. It is doubtful that they will get paid at all. Many farmers aren’t planting cotton this year because of this. But cotton money is the men’s only real source of income. Without it, men cannot buy the things their families need like school and doctors’ fee, clothing, salt, tools, tea, etc. They also cannot contribute to community funded projects, such as sealing the school with cement, or, more importantly, fixing the pump that just broke so that they have access to clean drinking water. So, that leaves me looking for money again. So, I was thinking that soon, in a village near me, a new Peace Corps volunteer is going to move in to replace my sweet neighbor Michele Lehman, I hope this new volunteer can submit a project for me to complete the school after I am gone. Since I too will soon be leaving Mali, I cannot submit any more projects that need money. So my only option is to hope that this person will be willing to work on this with my village. Anyway, I am sorry, very sorry, things did not turn out as I said they would. But, I think soon the school will be finished. And, it was because of the help of all of you that made it possible for Sokouroni to get such nice classrooms to learn in.
Another project I completed this last quarter was, in many ways, my most personally rewarding project that I have done so far in Sokouroni. I gathered all the mothers of malnourished babies in Sokouroni and met with them every morning for 2 weeks to teach them about mother and infant nutrition, family planning methods, prevention of malaria, AIDS, and diarrheal diseases, etc. Every morning I would teach the women a new recipe for a nutritious porridge that they could feed to their malnourished babies. We would make the porridge together and each women would leave the meeting with enough porridge to feed her baby for the day. The babies were weighed in the beginning of 2 weeks and then at the end so that the weights could be compared. All the babies gained weight within 2 weeks. But, the best story to come out of this was that there was one baby with Kwashikor, a type of malnourishment where instead of getting really skinny babies get really swollen in their hands and feet and faces, so they look kind of chubby. This baby had Kwashikor so bad that his skin had turned dark black and was peeling off in large patches, he had been taken to numerous doctors in the area and they had given different skin medicines but none of them recognized this type of malnourishment; it is kind of rare. Anyway, so I saw him and told his mother to come to our porridge meetings and she came with him every morning. After 2 weeks, it was just amazing the difference! His skin was back on, it had healed almost completely; he was energetic and not swollen. Simply adding protein in the form of peanuts, beans, and soy made him so much better so quickly. That was really exciting for me.
Anyway, that’s work. But, I have also been doing a lot of other things lately. I went to Cabo Verde with my friend Isabelle. We took a bus from Bamako to Dakar. It was the absolute bus from hell. I thought I had already endured the worst that transport in the world could give me. I have been stuck standing, nose-to-nose, on a cigarette-smoke filled, lugi-drowned train during the Chinese New Year going from Chonquing to some other place 14 hours away. I have been smooshed every which way into many steel boxes of death racing through people-infested streets in numerous cities but this bus ride tested my endurance in ways it never had been before. We got to the bus stop, as requested, by 7 am. We got there to find that the bus they said we were going to take was not even coming. Instead they were going to put us on this old city bus from some German city that had been rotting there on the street for years. So, anyway, that was to be expected – that they would lie to us about what kind of bus we were going to take, bus since we had bought the tickets the day before we had no way to get out of it and go and get a nice bus from another company. Anyway, so we sat and waited and waited. Finally, 11 am comes and they are ready to start loading the bus. So, we got on. We thought the bus was full and it was going to leave. But, wait here pulls up another full bus, and the people on this bus are going to get on too! Oh boy! So, the bus owner starts putting teeny wooden stools side-by-side in the aisle of this bus! On these teeny stools, in this tiny aisle, 2 grown men are expected to sit side-by-side, with their knees in one another’s backs. This is bad. Really. I can’t explain it well, but these big, grown men were literally sitting on top of one another and expected to sit this way to Dakar! Dakar! At this point in our trip we are expecting Dakar to be 2 days away…(oh! How optimistic we were!) At this point in the day it is past noon, in the middle of hot season, and everyone, the bus is 95% men, starts taking off their shirts. Now I begin to realize the other passengers are foreigners (Malians would never strip like that unless they were in the fields, and even then very few do); these people are even more foreign to Mali then myself. The men turned out to be Nigerians going to the Gambia, and not being passive Malian people who believe everything that happens is Allah’s will, they were pissed. Being foreigners they don’t speak Bambara, they speak horrible French ( Isabelle and I, become the sole interpreters for the Nigerians) but they have no qualms about starting fights. So fights break out between the passengers and the bus people. People are yelling, standing up, pushing. It was crazy. But, like us, they had to realize the futility of the fight because they too had paid the equivalent of $65 to get a ticket on this bus, and the money is not easy to find. When everyone gets seated (with half-naked African men sitting as squished as they were, sweating, and rightfully angry I couldn’t help but be reminded of slave ships – the way these Malians were treating these men was just disgusting!) we take off, now it is like 2 pm, we quickly realize the bus is tilted significantly in one direction. Here the Nigerians start talking again about how they will die and the talk quickly turns into demands of pulling over and letting them out. Me too, I was yelling too. In Bambara. Anyway, thankfully Malian cops pull our bus over. We all pour out of the bus like water breaking through a dam, a mass movement that will become very common on this trip. The bus people admit the bus is too heavy and tell the cops they will get us another bus. They tell me they will divide up the passengers on to 2 buses now. So, we wait. I talk to the bus people, try to get them to give us our money back, tell them at this point we won’t get to Dakar in time to catch our plane to Cabo Verde – a lie. One of the bus people was so mean he brought up slavery, in my 2 years here in Africa the only other time I felt any hostility about slavery coming from someone it came from a black American visiting the Cape Coast slave castle in Ghana. Malians normally joke about slavery but this was man was mean and angry. Other Malians step in, they joke, call me a bean-eater, act their cordial Malian selves but tell me to talk to the boss about money, who will be coming later. After an hour or so, the other bus comes. A more heavy-duty greyhound type of bus. The boss comes. He laughs at me and tells me there is no way to get my money back. I was so angry!!! But, what can I do? We all get in. What about dividing up passengers? A lie. Completely. We’re all going on this one. Some people had to sit under the seats!!! I couldn’t believe it. They treated them like animals.
Anyway, I’ll post more on this later, but I need to go home and make dinner.
Also, can Kay Zienta-Smith email me her address? My email is brookemassa@gmail.com Thanks!
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Post from Mid-March
I just read this book called The Unheard by Josh Swiller. It was a really interesting memoir about some deaf guy’s crazy, intense Peace Corps experience in Zambia – he had a very interesting story to tell and I recommend it –it’s a fast read, but one of the things it got me to thinking about is deafness and Scott. Scott, my ex-boyfriend, is half-deaf. He used to always ask me, very patiently, to speak louder and would explain, again, that he was hard of hearing. He would explain how frustrating and tiring it was for him to always have to ask people to repeat themselves or to try to infer what people were saying by context. Sometimes he felt like people thought he was stupid because he didn’t understand what they were saying. Scott is the smartest person I have ever met, truly. A very smart man. It was hard for Scott, being kind of deaf. And, anyway, I was just realizing that despite living with him for almost 9 years I almost never really believed him about his deafness. I mean, I knew that one of his ears couldn’t hear (what was the rhyme he taught me the first day I met him? Right ear, good ear; left ear, bad ear… or was it the other way around…?) but I thought, in some way, he could hear if he wanted to. Maybe there was a part of me that thought he was just lazy. And, me with my little, sweet voice; I had such a hard time, I often refused to raise my voice for him. Speaking loudly just flooded me with bad feelings - like anger and a general sense of uncomfortableness. Logically, I wasn’t angry but physiologically I was. I could never get over the emotional baggage that accompanied the physiological trigger. If I spoke loudly, I couldn’t help but exude anger. And, of course, poor Scott would have to wonder “why is she angry at me for being half deaf?” And, I couldn’t explain that I wasn’t angry because I was. Now, I feel ashamed, guilty for not being more accommodating to him. I was the lazy one. Even with the help of Scott’s brilliant rhyme I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head which ear was bad. I would have to figure out on which hand are the spaces between my fingers stretched out. It is on this side that Scott walked with me while holding my hand. From this is can deduct that it must have been his left ear which was bad. My right hand is still stretched out from 9 years of holding hands everywhere we went. I feel bad that knowing which ear was bad was something I never really thought important enough to try to memorize. I have memorized a million things with of no importance but the thing that in some ways shaped my love’s life I never figured out. I’m sorry Scott.
I have also been thinking about him because I saw that the Jayhawks were a no. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. I miss knowing about them.
But. In general, I feel happy. I think about Scott often but I don’t feel sad. I can say I still love him but I know I can love other people too. Maybe we’ll work things out - that would be ideal for me because we have shared so much already. But if it doesn’t work out then I guess one of these days I will be able to look back on my past with him as I now look at my childhood (as Scott himself told me) – with a happy nostalgia.
I have also been thinking about him because I saw that the Jayhawks were a no. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. I miss knowing about them.
But. In general, I feel happy. I think about Scott often but I don’t feel sad. I can say I still love him but I know I can love other people too. Maybe we’ll work things out - that would be ideal for me because we have shared so much already. But if it doesn’t work out then I guess one of these days I will be able to look back on my past with him as I now look at my childhood (as Scott himself told me) – with a happy nostalgia.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
hot season has arrived. seems early. not long ago I was wearing wool socks to bed now I've begin kicking off my blankets at night and, in the morning when it is cool again, picking them off of the dirt and wrapping myself in them again. But by 10 am it's hot and pour gold bond powder on like it's a cool dip in the pool (thanks jamar!!!) the heat slows down my mind. i feel like an old old tortoise - slow and heavy and too unmotivated to even look for a blade of grass to eat. serriously, in village i am eating less and less every day cause it's too much work to cook.
school construction is going, dooni dooni, as they say here, little by little. it is expected to be done by may 5th. we'll see about that.
I'm in bamako, i've come to see the doctor. i am just so tired all of the time - is it really just the heat? are amoebas taking up residence in my tummy again? am i anemic? i just want to know if there is a magic pill to give me more energy. but, really, as it is, i feel like i take more than enough pills. is taking malarone every day for 2 years really safe? america's government says yes, but germany's doesn't. i haven't spent much time in germany but i feel like the pill people there, like the german equivalent of the fda, are maybe less corrupt. oh well.
anyways, i came here to bamako also to eat a slice of cake in honor of my last year of my 20s. and also, i had to get a new phone, my last one was stolen, my new number is 223-460-and something, i'll figure it out soon. i also took my self out so somewhere that has cheese on the menu. oh luxury! but tonight is back to street food, i don't have money for cheese. do you know i spent nearly $1000 applying to schools! isn't that crazy? application fees, gre report fees, transcript fees... crazy. but anyway, i also got into yale. so now i am waiting for duke and wisconsin. and then, of course, waiting for some school to offer me a free ride. i guess that doesn'y really jappen very often for a master's program though. so, anyway, i need money, can't spend $4 on a meal...
nothing else is new.
school construction is going, dooni dooni, as they say here, little by little. it is expected to be done by may 5th. we'll see about that.
I'm in bamako, i've come to see the doctor. i am just so tired all of the time - is it really just the heat? are amoebas taking up residence in my tummy again? am i anemic? i just want to know if there is a magic pill to give me more energy. but, really, as it is, i feel like i take more than enough pills. is taking malarone every day for 2 years really safe? america's government says yes, but germany's doesn't. i haven't spent much time in germany but i feel like the pill people there, like the german equivalent of the fda, are maybe less corrupt. oh well.
anyways, i came here to bamako also to eat a slice of cake in honor of my last year of my 20s. and also, i had to get a new phone, my last one was stolen, my new number is 223-460-and something, i'll figure it out soon. i also took my self out so somewhere that has cheese on the menu. oh luxury! but tonight is back to street food, i don't have money for cheese. do you know i spent nearly $1000 applying to schools! isn't that crazy? application fees, gre report fees, transcript fees... crazy. but anyway, i also got into yale. so now i am waiting for duke and wisconsin. and then, of course, waiting for some school to offer me a free ride. i guess that doesn'y really jappen very often for a master's program though. so, anyway, i need money, can't spend $4 on a meal...
nothing else is new.
Monday, March 3, 2008
There is a lot of news to tell everyone. First and foremost, my school was funded at the beginning of February. This is big news for me and my village and we are all very grateful for the money and efforts given by all those who helped raise the funds for the school.
THANK YOU ALL SOOOOOO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My village is now collecting tons of sand. This is not easy work. Men take donkey carts out to the river to dig sand out of the banks. The poor donkeys pull all this sand back to village, about 6 km away. The sand then has to be sifted of all other debris – we are sifting literally tons of sand. Soon though this part of the work will be done and we can start making cement bricks and then, construction can begin.
Secondly, the quadruplets and their mom are still living in the hospital. The government, at first, told them that they would help nourish the babies with formula. But, it has yet to come up with any money to help them. One small can of formula costs $8! So, the babies have been living off of donations from the people of Sikasso since they arrived at the hospital over a month ago. People in my village are grumpy because the president, ATT, has claimed to be the “friend of children,” but…. Well, we all know how politicians are…. Anyway, the hospital put the 4 babies and the mom on one small cot and one night one baby fell off the bed. So, now there are 3. The mom and her co-wife, who was sleeping on the floor of the hospital to help the mom feed the babies, were so sad and angry at the doctors who insisted that the babies sleep on the cot (even though the mother wanted them to sleep on the floor), that they claimed that the hospital killed their baby; it was not the work of Allah but the work of doctors. This is a big statement for a Malian to make; so much of what happens in the lives of Malians is attributed to the work of Allah. Despite this, the remaining babies and the mom still all sleep together are the same small cot. As the babies get bigger I can see that this may be more and more of an issue; today I am going to the hospital to see how they are doing and I want to talk to the doctors about this bed issue. It would be much better if they could just hang a mosquito net so that it reaches the floor and have the babies all sleeping on the floor, under the net. Unfortunately, a foreigner with white skin has more influence than a Malian woman, especially one that comes from a small village.
Thirdly, for those of you interested in scandal…especially interesting to those of you who have spent some time around Sokouroni… There is a man in my village named Nuhume Traore. He’s an older man, in his 60s at least, but healthy and apparently still quite a ladies’ man. He got 2 beautiful wives, one of whom cannot be over 30, and both have given the most gorgeous children in Sokouroni. I always liked going over to his house because he and his first wife are nice people and his children are sweet. But, I have found out that to Sokouroni this is a bad man. Last week, Nuhume and a young woman named Finay caused a huge scandal. Finay and Nuhume have liked each other but Nuhume couldn’t marry her because she is married to Balla. Balla lives outside of village with his first wife but comes in to village every once in a while to see Finay. One early morning Nuhume took Finay away on his moto. No one knew where they went and they were gone for a few days. When they got back, Finay and Nuhume were married. Nuhume had taken Finay to a village far away where there was a maribout, a man who teaches the Koran to people but is not an Imam. This maribout, like many maribouts, has special powers. He was able to dissolve the marriage between Finay and Balla and marry her to Nuhume. So, of course, Balla was very angry. Nuhume stole his wife! Finay, for some reason, hadn’t come up with a good plan on how to deal with Balla when she got back to village so she called up the gendarmes and claimed that Balla had beaten her. The gendarmes took Balla away. My djatiki, my host father- in other words, is renowned for talking. So, he was summoned by the village to find out why Balla was taken away by the gendarmes. He was successful in getting the full story of what happened and getting Balla back to Sokouroni. After hearing the story, the dugutiki of my village called all the heads of the households together to meet. The men decided to kick Nuhume and his family out of Sokouroni. So, with only a few months left before rainy season when farming starts, Nuhume and his family have to find a new place to live. Of course, because women are assumed to be passive players in the world, nothing was done to Finay. I am sure Finay had as much to do with betraying her husband as Nuhume did but she is allowed to live on in village as Balla’s wife. This is all the more ironic because Nuhume is one of the very few men in Sokouroni who practice a more strict interpretation of Islam which requires women to cover their heads all the time. If anyone should be about honoring a marriage you would think it would be someone like Nuhume.
Lastly, my personal news. So far I have been accepted into the London School of Economics, Columbia, University of Michigan, University of Maryland, and Indiana University. At the moment the University of Maryland is the only school that is offering me some money to go. I haven’t been rejected from any schools yet either. So, the remaining schools to hear back from are Duke, Yale, and the University of Wisconsin. It is pretty exciting to think about where I might be living next year. Ideally, I would like to get into the University of Wisconsin CHANGE Fellowship program which pays for all of my tuition plus gives me a $30,000/year living stipend! But, I won’t count on that. I would also really like to go to LSE. The LSE program is on international environmental policy and it is only one year long. I would like to do that program and then also defer my admission to another program that is more focused on environmental management and scientific research. Both policy and management aspects of international environmental issues are interesting to me so I hope that no matter how it works out I get a solid education in both things without getting into too much debt. I also like the Columbia program but I had to accept or decline by yesterday and, since not all schools have gotten back to me, it is impossible for me to make a good decision. Plus, their program starts in May and I don’t think I could leave Mali so soon. Other than that, well, not much is new. I celebrated my birthday in village by making baba ghanoush and flour tortillas. No one in village understood the significance of the day; they all think I turned a year older on New Year’s Day. So, now I am 29.
THANK YOU ALL SOOOOOO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My village is now collecting tons of sand. This is not easy work. Men take donkey carts out to the river to dig sand out of the banks. The poor donkeys pull all this sand back to village, about 6 km away. The sand then has to be sifted of all other debris – we are sifting literally tons of sand. Soon though this part of the work will be done and we can start making cement bricks and then, construction can begin.
Secondly, the quadruplets and their mom are still living in the hospital. The government, at first, told them that they would help nourish the babies with formula. But, it has yet to come up with any money to help them. One small can of formula costs $8! So, the babies have been living off of donations from the people of Sikasso since they arrived at the hospital over a month ago. People in my village are grumpy because the president, ATT, has claimed to be the “friend of children,” but…. Well, we all know how politicians are…. Anyway, the hospital put the 4 babies and the mom on one small cot and one night one baby fell off the bed. So, now there are 3. The mom and her co-wife, who was sleeping on the floor of the hospital to help the mom feed the babies, were so sad and angry at the doctors who insisted that the babies sleep on the cot (even though the mother wanted them to sleep on the floor), that they claimed that the hospital killed their baby; it was not the work of Allah but the work of doctors. This is a big statement for a Malian to make; so much of what happens in the lives of Malians is attributed to the work of Allah. Despite this, the remaining babies and the mom still all sleep together are the same small cot. As the babies get bigger I can see that this may be more and more of an issue; today I am going to the hospital to see how they are doing and I want to talk to the doctors about this bed issue. It would be much better if they could just hang a mosquito net so that it reaches the floor and have the babies all sleeping on the floor, under the net. Unfortunately, a foreigner with white skin has more influence than a Malian woman, especially one that comes from a small village.
Thirdly, for those of you interested in scandal…especially interesting to those of you who have spent some time around Sokouroni… There is a man in my village named Nuhume Traore. He’s an older man, in his 60s at least, but healthy and apparently still quite a ladies’ man. He got 2 beautiful wives, one of whom cannot be over 30, and both have given the most gorgeous children in Sokouroni. I always liked going over to his house because he and his first wife are nice people and his children are sweet. But, I have found out that to Sokouroni this is a bad man. Last week, Nuhume and a young woman named Finay caused a huge scandal. Finay and Nuhume have liked each other but Nuhume couldn’t marry her because she is married to Balla. Balla lives outside of village with his first wife but comes in to village every once in a while to see Finay. One early morning Nuhume took Finay away on his moto. No one knew where they went and they were gone for a few days. When they got back, Finay and Nuhume were married. Nuhume had taken Finay to a village far away where there was a maribout, a man who teaches the Koran to people but is not an Imam. This maribout, like many maribouts, has special powers. He was able to dissolve the marriage between Finay and Balla and marry her to Nuhume. So, of course, Balla was very angry. Nuhume stole his wife! Finay, for some reason, hadn’t come up with a good plan on how to deal with Balla when she got back to village so she called up the gendarmes and claimed that Balla had beaten her. The gendarmes took Balla away. My djatiki, my host father- in other words, is renowned for talking. So, he was summoned by the village to find out why Balla was taken away by the gendarmes. He was successful in getting the full story of what happened and getting Balla back to Sokouroni. After hearing the story, the dugutiki of my village called all the heads of the households together to meet. The men decided to kick Nuhume and his family out of Sokouroni. So, with only a few months left before rainy season when farming starts, Nuhume and his family have to find a new place to live. Of course, because women are assumed to be passive players in the world, nothing was done to Finay. I am sure Finay had as much to do with betraying her husband as Nuhume did but she is allowed to live on in village as Balla’s wife. This is all the more ironic because Nuhume is one of the very few men in Sokouroni who practice a more strict interpretation of Islam which requires women to cover their heads all the time. If anyone should be about honoring a marriage you would think it would be someone like Nuhume.
Lastly, my personal news. So far I have been accepted into the London School of Economics, Columbia, University of Michigan, University of Maryland, and Indiana University. At the moment the University of Maryland is the only school that is offering me some money to go. I haven’t been rejected from any schools yet either. So, the remaining schools to hear back from are Duke, Yale, and the University of Wisconsin. It is pretty exciting to think about where I might be living next year. Ideally, I would like to get into the University of Wisconsin CHANGE Fellowship program which pays for all of my tuition plus gives me a $30,000/year living stipend! But, I won’t count on that. I would also really like to go to LSE. The LSE program is on international environmental policy and it is only one year long. I would like to do that program and then also defer my admission to another program that is more focused on environmental management and scientific research. Both policy and management aspects of international environmental issues are interesting to me so I hope that no matter how it works out I get a solid education in both things without getting into too much debt. I also like the Columbia program but I had to accept or decline by yesterday and, since not all schools have gotten back to me, it is impossible for me to make a good decision. Plus, their program starts in May and I don’t think I could leave Mali so soon. Other than that, well, not much is new. I celebrated my birthday in village by making baba ghanoush and flour tortillas. No one in village understood the significance of the day; they all think I turned a year older on New Year’s Day. So, now I am 29.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Kabako! A miracle!
Here's some news for you! It's certainly big news in my village, and all the surrounding villages. My friend's second wife, Wasa, gave birth to 4 little bitty baby boys. 4! I knew she was big but I thought it was just that her Traore husband was forcing her to eat beans all the time. Bean-eating blacksmith that he is! Anyway, so she found 4, a surprise for everyone! They all came out tiny, but alive and healthy. They've made it past the first week and for being so strong, they were rewarded with names - Fosseini, Lassine, Aruna, and Musa. I know their names better than their parents!
The local government is helping Wasa feed the babies. She can't do it alone. So the hospital in Sikasso came to village to bring her to stay in Sikasso where they will supplement the babies' diet with formula. Ala ka den naani balo! Amiiiina! photos to come!
The local government is helping Wasa feed the babies. She can't do it alone. So the hospital in Sikasso came to village to bring her to stay in Sikasso where they will supplement the babies' diet with formula. Ala ka den naani balo! Amiiiina! photos to come!
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Bamako
Bamako has grown on me, like almost everything Malian - it has to grow on you. Nothing here instinctively reaches out to me and says, "wow! this is awesome!" It all worms its way into your being so subtly that one day you wake up and don't smell the raw sewage or see the trash everywhere. And, in fact, instead everything seems quite beautiful, fresh, and lovely. That's how Mali is feeling to me lately and it is hard to think about how someday, sooner than later, I will have to leave. I am scared to leave now. I think about how I could marry a beautiful Malian man and have a second mud hut here. I just want someone around me to speak Bambara to me and ask me a million times a day if my mom is healthy. I have come to Bamako to bring some of the people from my village (and Jamar - Gazini Bengali from Kacierela came too!) to learn how to graft trees. It was a really good training, not only because they really know how to graft now and can go back and teach everyone in my village how to graft, but because people in my village are now really excited to get working on tree projects with me. It was what we needed - a little rejuvenation. So, I can go back to village with a little more energy. Plus, my wonderful doctors cleared up my amoebic dysentary. Life is great!
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Did you know that cooked sheep intestines look just like elbow macaroni?
Anyway, on to other things…
While all of you are rosy-cheeked, stuffed into warm wool coats, sipping hot chocolate, and listening to the Nutcracker Suite, here in Mali we just dressed up in fine, colorful clothes and slaughtered a whole bunch of innocent lambs – maybe to commemorate Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son to Allah? I am not sure… anyway, Tabaski! Or, in Bambara, SeliBa – the big prayer. Skinned sheep carcasses decorated people’s homes like stockings in the USA.
Unfortunately, our fête in Sokouroni was dampened a bit by what else? Funerals! Oh funerals and Mali seem to go hand-in-hand. Fortunately, one of the funerals was for a very, very old man who had been sick for a long, long time. (For those of you who are ex-Sokouronians, the cekoroba was Bé. The blind man who lived near the mosque and was cared for by Madu. Remember him?) The second day of the fête Sidi Djabate’s lovely wife Amineta died. Unfortunately, she died too soon. Her husband, a man I usually like, did not take her to the doctor for an infected boil (even though he just bought himself a brand new motorcycle); her death could have been prevented easily. Ala ka hine u la. Ala ka ko ke here ye.
Enough talk of death.
After our 2 mornings of mourning, people celebrated in the afternoon by stuffing sheep meat down their throats. Instead, of meat, they gave me dégé – a porridge with soured milk – truly delicious! Being a vegetarian definitely has its benefits!
Beyond SeliBa, life goes on in village like always. Last year, I moved to Sokouroni. And, now reminds me a lot of what it was like when I first moved there. Women cut down trees for fuel wood and pound millet; men sit around and drink tea; young men congregate in front of the store to watch a black-and-white fuzzy screened TV; Awa roasts peanuts. Nothing changes and a day slips by without hardly being noticed. It’s a weird feeling to know a year has passed by like one day.
After SeliBa, I came to Sikasso to work on my graduate school essays, due in a week. So, here I have been. Life as a Sikasso volunteer is very different. I see other volunteers all the time. I live in Trinh Tran’s big house with running water, electricity, and privacy. In the morning, I walk downtown and get a steaming hot glass of sweetened condensed milk with a pinch of coffee; I sip it at a table on the side of the road and watch the Malians bustle by in their fancy-pants embroidered bazen bubus and orobus (richy-rich clothes). I get to buy fresh veggies at the market everyday and I use my new cookbook to make delicious food (thanks Jamar!!!!) I meet many different types of Malians, some of whom are very easy to relate to. In village everyone is a farmer and their thoughts, understandably, center around their work. Here, there are students, business people, farmers, vendors, doctors, etc. It’s nice to talk to someone about something other than the state of their onions. I also work everyday and am productive! It’s just a nice change. The only day I have taken off is Christmas. I spent my Christmas, once again, in Sikasso, instead of going somewhere fun and new like most Peace Corps volunteers. Only last year, I was sick, depressed and confused about Scott, and just watched Sex in the City episodes by myself and I thought how I would soon be a single 30-something year old woman whose main thoughts in life focused on finding a man (depressing!!). This year was a step-up. Not much happened. My friend Jacq and I, and a few of the new volunteers, hung-out, drank wine from a box, and wondered around a little tipsy. Better than last year.
Friday, November 23, 2007
The Big Project Blog
OK, it’s time for me to write another blog on how I need money to help Sokouroni expand its school. HELP! Only $3,000 is needed. So close – yet so far! My project has been online the longest out of all Mali Peace Corps Projects. It’s a good project, you can all be sure your money or fundraising efforts will be going to a good cause. Only a small amount of Sokouroni’s kids get to go to school – a big factor in this is simply that the present school is simply too small to accommodate students. An education is the most important thing you can give a Malian. Being able to read, do mathematics, to write are valuable tools for farmers. With basic skills they have access to more resources and information. Plus, most students will go on to higher education. Many former students have gone on to high school and university and now have salary-earning jobs. Supporting education is crucial to solving many issues facing Malians.
HELP!!!!!!!!
HELP!!!!!!!!
Why Toh?
Nov. 20 Today Yacouba, one of my supervisors from Peace Corps, came to visit me in my village. It was a fine, normal visit. Nothing interesting happened. But, he talked to me about the chimp NGO in the Bafing Reserve area in western Mali. Apparently, my boss at Peace Corps is still working on getting me a position there for a 3rd year project. It’s a dream job for me – working to preserve a small population of chimpanzees. I’d probably make a lot of great connections, learn a lot about conservation biology in practice, and I think, overall, I would have fun. It’s in a place that has never had a volunteer before, I would improve my French. There are a lot of benefits to staying for a 3rd year. I have been working on applications for grad school, and I will continue to do so – cause there’s a chance the village won’t be approved by the Peace Corps because it is so remote. Plus, I have this strong feeling of excitement when I think of returning to school. I love school. There’s this part of me that really doesn’t want to wait until I am 30 to go back. But that’s ultimately a stupid reason to pass up such a good opportunity. I also have this stupid thought that if I stay here any longer I will miss an opportunity to be with Scott again. It doesn’t make sense except that if I am living in the Malian bush instead of the USA, Scott might be less likely to stop by and visit. I am afraid of furthering isolating myself from him. It’s stupid I know. I shouldn’t make any decisions in my life based on my prospects of being with Scott again. I just feel sad about maybe never seeing him again. But anyway, I am almost afraid to apply to grad school now, what if some great school offers me a huge scholarship and the NGO thing goes through? Then I would be torn. A week ago I was thinking of leaving PC to work in Thailand again, now I am considering staying for an extra year? I am so confused, if I think about it too much I feel stressed – very unMalian of me. I won’t think about it. What happens happens. Sometimes I think joining PC was the only big regret I have had in my life so far. I think if I stayed maybe Scott and I would’ve worked things out; my marriage wouldn’t have died, as the Malians say. Sometimes I regret being ambitious and letting myself get wrapped up in the bigger world. Sometimes I don’t know where all this ambition to do good in the world comes from. It seems pretty hopeless. And, why do I care if animals go extinct? Why do I care if babies die of malnourishment? It seems the amount of people who care are so small compared to the people who just want to lead lives to satisfy their own needs. It’s hopeless. Maybe I should just live life to have fun – which would mean just dressing up pretty and going out, or backpacking and mountain climbing, or eating only good food – not toh. Is life too short to spend time eating toh? I get scared that it is. Toh is no fun. Why am I forcing myself to eat so much toh? That is the root question I should be asking myself…
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