emily in the mango rains

Precursor- I am writing this from a flooded stranded land cruiser sitting in the middle of a river that was once a road. I am on my way to site, to be installed and essentially start being a peace corps volunteer, but the car got stuck and I have been sitting here since 1 30… its almost 7 now. The road is littered with dead cars, busses, burning starter engines and batteries, and people walking. Apparently there was a lot of rain yesterday. This was supposed to be a 4 to 8 hour drive but as usual, we are now pushing 12 hours and the weird part is that there is no end in site, so that is why I am using this time to type of my blog from this incredible week. Doesn’t help that today was one of the two days since being in Africa that I have had to pound Imodium… oh well, this is Peace Corps and I love the unpredictability. But it’s fun because I am sitting in the car with this APCD who is really cool and I’m getting his life story out of him. Our driver decided to walk to a nearby town through the floods but I don’t want to get infections from the water… so I’m hanging out in the flooded land rover watching the fish swim by my door. The day got funnier. After many attempts at trying to push the car out of the water, the engine finally died and then so did the battery. Apparently it is a bad sign when the engines died. Lots of motorcycle engines were dead and same with cars, all you could hear was the starter engine going and going. Then they wanted to plug in the electrical cord into the car that was in waist deep water to pull out the tow cable… fortunately we convinced them not to do that. They kept making fun of me, saying I looked scared, and I wanted to be like yeah obviously because you guys are trying to jump a car battery in standing water. So after all the many varying efforts, we were still stuck there and we decided to wait for a Peace Corps car to come from Bamako. So we waited, it got dark, our driver decided he wanted to walk to a town. I didn’t want to walk. Going to the bathroom was a fun experience, it’s inevitable if you sit in a car all day, and the water was basically up to my hips so I definitely broke some codes of Malian decency as I stood there with my skirt around my waist. I hope I didn’t get schisto. The driver returned a few hours later with a giant truck that he paid to pull us out, backwards, from the sink pit we were in. Once we were out, the water was only thigh deep, so the car could drain out and that was good. Then we waited some more and then the Peace Corps car came to rescue us!
I spent this past week at tubaniso, finishing up things before we are inducted into Peace Corps as volunteers and leave for our 2 years at site. This week was so so so much fun; I don’t even know where to begin. Saturday we had our final language test at our home stay villages and we all had to get intermediate mid in Bambara in order to be sworn in at the embassy. Fortunately we all did, though I don’t really feel confident in my language skills yet, time will tell. I’m not worried, it will come. Then Saturday we hung around the home stay village and went to the bar/restaurant for a little to get some food, celebrate, and get things at the tailors to wear at swear in so that we look integrated. People from a neighboring village rode their bikes to the bar too. Typical Africa story- some of the guys wanted to get hair cuts before swear in so they asked the bar tender where the barber shop was. He said it was down the street so they said ok, let’s go after we eat. Then ten minutes later this guy on a moped shows up with a bag full of hair cutting gear. With the lack of electricity, I had to wonder how he was going to buzz cut a tubab. He pulls out a pack of razor blades and a fine tooth comb, and manages to give an awesome buzz cut, complete with neck and forehead trimming, the skin of which he poured bleach on afterwards. Saturday night was sad; I hung out with my host brother for a while and tried to absorb the people as much as possible. I also think I encountered my first drunk Malian. My host brother and I were sitting outside his hut on benches chatting and his friend comes over. He is wobbly and his pants are unzipped, and his is fumbling with the zipper trying to zip them during this whole story about ‘gerens’ and weird giggles, and weird touchy feeling actions towards my brother. Gerens are kind of scandalous places where men hang out in secret with mistresses or friends, but they do this never with their wives and never near other family members. For example, my teacher has his own geren but his brother has a different one. I told my host brother that I understood what they were talking about and he starting laughing and asked me how I knew about those.
But Sunday! Finally. The day of reunion with all my friends. Sure I had seen them recently, but this was the week that I had been looking forward to for so long. A week of care free time with all 80 of us, looking forward to swear in and excited/really scared for the day when we all go to site. I got back and went to my hut to unpack and things, after the hectic morning of leaving homestay, which was really sad. I can’t imagine leaving after 2 years.