Desert Sunrise

Where the wild things are
Dad- this is for you- Fode: "Do yewwwww knowwww Pheeeeeel Cooooleeeens?" hahahaahha

Excuse the confusion but I have decided to begin this post with the end- because last night was too priceless and I am worried that the rest of the post is too boring and the people may just miss out on this gem. So last night was Friday and it was the last day of this seliba party. Little did I know, seliba was not only Wednesday but more of a party that lasted an entire week. With all the old friends, students, and family that came in from Bamako, they had soccer tournaments and dance parties and all kinds of events every day. I missed the soccer championship which I am bummed about… there definitely would have been some good pictures too. Though I did not take any pictures last night at the dance party… they would have been awesome. But so I get to Fodes house at dinner time wearing pants and a boring shirt because I had been working around my house and yard all day. His daughters were like ‘we are going dancing tonight! You’re wearing that?! We can’t take you anywhere!’ or at least this is what I imagine they said, so I went home and changed into a full Malian outfit, the one I had made for the swear in ceremony. When I left my hut all my neighbor friends gathered around to see, who knew I could go from so masculine to so feminine in 30 seconds. They all laughed at me but I could tell my host sister is now coveting my outfit. So then I went back over to Fodes house which took forever because everyone had something to say about my new outfit and the fact that I am now a Malian woman. What I have always wanted to be! But then we eat dinner, moseyed around, my friends change into western clothes so now I am the only one in full Malian wear… and then at around 8 one of my friends with a baby tied to her back says that we are going dancing, right now. So I left dinner and she and I went to the ‘donke yoro’, which literally means dancing place, and we joined this giant circle of girls aged 7 to 25, half of which had babies strapped on like back packs. I tried to make my friend give me her baby but she wouldn’t… I think she was laughing too hard at everything else going on. So we are dancing, I look up and everyone else on this dancing stage is doing some sort of synchronized dance except for me… so I tried to join in, and then I look at the DJ and he is laughing at me, and breaks into the music on his microphone “OUAIS!! COMME CA!! It’s like that!! YOU CAN DO IT!!” I almost died. I was already laughing hysterically to myself just because the whole thing was so funny, and I think I may have scared the posse of 5 year olds gathered around taking turns touching me and then running away, but it was a sight to be seen, let me tell you. So then the little girls dancing around me seemed to be getting annoyed at always stepping on my heals and vice versa as I tried desperately to not stand out too much, and my friend and I left the circle and danced on the edge of the stage for a little while, much to the amusement of my other friends standing around chatting… “Dear god, pretend we don’t know her!” that’s what I imagine they were thinking… it was kind of like being a celebrity. Then my friend and I went back to Fodes house to kill some time before the real party started. Apparently, I found out a few hours later, that was only some sort of pre party that formed while they were testing the speakers and setting up. So then around 9 Fode and I went back to sell tickets- I was really confused until I saw that it was exactly like a middle school dance but way more intense. Everyone in the town and from the surrounding towns between 5 and 30 was there waiting to buy tickets. Motos were showing up left and right and people dressed to the nines in both western clothes and Malian clothes were there. It was like ‘the fast and the furious’ and the whole place smelled like Moto exhaust, like when you’re sitting in the water behind a ski boat waiting to get pulled up. All the guys had to show off their motos. And all the girls had to dance and drown you in their perfume as they walked by. You can really tell who is from Bamako… its odd. So then they start hanging up all these dead animals by their feet and apparently you can buy snacks, they had sodas, and little seating areas were popping up as people passed chairs and tables over the walls. Then some guy comes over with a cup of pastis and asks repetitively, “you drink? You drink?” I turned down that option, drinking pastis of all things with a bunch of guys I don’t know… could have been fun but it’s not like I can understand the conversation anyways. It was kind of like being in a club, there’s that same sense of excitement when you spot one of your friends. So then I sat with Fode and helped him sell tickets to the swarms of little kids, it was about 20 cents for kids and 55 cents for adults. About 9 zillion girls were dancing on the stage by this point and all the guys were gathered around in the chairs or just dancing for their friends. Some skanky girls were sitting on random guys laps, I wonder if they were prostitutes. Who knows. I went home at 10 30 but I am pretty sure that things were still only getting started and the music kept going till one… quite the party.

First day back at site for another 3 week stint till thanksgiving… I am going to try to only go to my market town and other than that, not leave at all. Since it is the first day back I am still really excited about it. Going into Bamako for Halloween and things was really fun, stayed at my friend Fletchers house in Bamako with my friends. I love being in Bamako because you see other volunteers, and I always have a good time when I go out with people from the stage group ahead of us. They always have good stories and are real fun to be with. I can’t wait till the February stage comes in. Such a fun visit though, I miss my friends already and cannot wait until thanksgiving. Plus I am officially going to the party at the ambassador’s house. There will be 30 Peace Corps volunteers and then an assortment of USAID employees and I am sure a few other groups present as well. And I hear that she flies in all her food from America, turkey and whipped cream for the pies that she is known for included. I have met the ambassador a few times, she is so nice and cried at our swear in ceremony.

Trying to get back to site was as usual, an adventure. I tried to get out one day but transport still hadn’t left after waiting at the bus stop for 7 hours and I didn’t want to travel in the dark, given their track record so far. So I went back to stage house, which turned out to be awesome because I got to go out with a group of people from the Dogon country who were in for medical exams and stuff. But it was a fun night and even though I was ready to go back to site, I definitely can not complain about a free night at the stage house with fun people. That’s one of the perks of having Bamako as my stage house, while it sucks that we have to share it with everyone else who comes to Bamako for this and that reason, we get to meet a lot more people that the other regional capital stage houses. But so day 2, I got to the bus station at 7 because they said we were leaving at 8, and we finally got out around one. Typical. But it was fun because I knew I was going to get out before dark, so I just made friends with the people I had met the day before. Now I have a nice group of friends to hang around and wait with. By friends I mean the banana lady and an assortment of child laborers selling bread and things. It was also cool to be there so early and see everything getting set up for the day. I used to love airports and I guess I have started to love this bus station. I see people I know and there is always an interesting conversation to be had. While a schedule and bathroom would be nice, it’s ok. It was incredible though because I met 2 Liberian refugees. There are a few in my town but they are older and scary. But these 2 guys, as soon as I saw them, I knew they weren’t Malian for some reason. But they came up to me and asked if I spoke English and then we ended up talking for over an hour. They had endured the 14 year civil war in Liberia but were desperately trying to get out, so when their paperwork went on hold for asylum in America, they had to flee because they couldn’t be in country any more. So they went to Sierra Leone, but by the time they returned, the paperwork was lost and their family and cousins had already got to America. So then they took land transport via different traffickers around to Benin, then up through the deserts of Niger, Mali, Algeria, and morocco. It was as horrible as you have read in the news papers, people died and the traffickers took advantage of their vulnerability and there was not food. But they finally made it onto a boat in morocco and set sail for Spain. Unfortunately, they got caught by immigration officials in the water and were sent back to Algeria. As he said “Arabs don’t like us very much”, so there time in the desert and in hiding was difficult. Somehow they ended up on Red Cross transport through kidal and goa (both cities in northern Mali where we aren’t allowed to go because of al queada) and now they are in Bamako. After three days at the Red Cross center sleeping on mats and getting some clothes, the Red Cross was done with them and could not help them anymore. And that how they ended up stranded in Bamako, trying to get back to the country they were forced to flee, to try to start again and try to get to America. He didn’t ask for anything except help in immigration, which I certainly can’t help with. But I gave him phone credit and water and exchanged emails. So sad and so crazy to meet face to face. In Denmark it was one thing, when I was working at the Red Cross asylum center, but this was unreal. Maybe I’ll get masters in immigration issues… complicated but so interesting to me. I just wish there was more I could have done for him.

Then I finally got back to site, stopped at Andersons to get my bike and chat with people in his town and surrounding towns, and continued on. Getting back was nice though, things finally felt really familiar and I have a lot to do before thanksgiving and December.

So lately I have been looking for other 22 year olds to hang out with, as opposed to the posse of 14 year old girls that I have joined. But today i finally figured out that there are no 22 year olds in Mali, theoretically. Or anywhere with a culture like this. you are either 14 and single (maybe) or 22 with 3 dependant kids, 2 of whom are breastfeeding and are always tied to your back and hanging on your legs as you pound rice or corn. So this is why I feel like I don’t have friends at village. But now that I have realized this, I have embraced my club of 14 year old girls and so now things are great. Even more concerning is the issue of my sex Ed class prospective students. I was imagining rounding up all the 15 and 16 year olds maybe, but now I see that I need to get the 12 year olds… do I need to have them get parental consent forms signed? Or verbally in this case since most adults can’t read or write? Or maybe that just an American thing. But the other day I was talking to my 14 year old new best friend and I was asking her some of the questions in my baseline survey, which I had done with her parents a few weeks before. When I got to the part about STDs and family planning, I felt weird being alone with her even though I wanted her opinion without her moms influence… but I called her mom over because I didn’t want my question to come out wrong and then have her think I said something weird about sex. But before I got her mom over, I asked her what STDs she knew of and she said “Malaria!” …no…. not really. And then her mom corrected her and Fatim obviously had no idea she was even wrong. Hello sex Ed class inspiration! Malaria does seem to be a catch all around here… if you have anything out of the ordinary, then you have malaria and you have to eat papaya leaves. That’s all. O wonder they thing that papaya leaves work… because half the time it’s just a cold, and then when the person actually has malaria and dies because they didn’t get treatment, well that’s just the normal margin of error. Obviously. Malian logic wins again.

I started my baseline survey though and things have been really interesting. Even though they lie about washing their hands and stuff, just my asking again and then being around forces them to make their kids start washing their hands, so that’s good. Like the other day I saw my teachers kids eating fish and their mom actually made them wash their hands, and this is the first time I have ever seen this, so that was good. And apparently my teacher sells condoms from his house so that is good. If it seems to be relevant, maybe I will tell the kids in my sex Ed class that I will sell them too… but this is controversial so I will have to think about it. But I want them to come to me so I can tell them the facts straight instead of typical Malian fashion, which is dancing around the bush and never telling the cold hard truth. And these kids certainly wouldn’t go to my teacher to buy condoms anyways; they just aren’t using them because they can’t buy them without the whole region knowing. I think the girl before me may have sold them, but I think I will regardless. But they won’t get away without a big long talk first.

Things have been great lately because I told Fode that I wanted more time to spend with families other than his, especially my host family, and he understood so that was good. So since then I have been cooking lunch in my hut and giving some to my host family and neighbor sometimes, and I have had more time to wander the village and stop in with new people. Fode is a life saver but I swear, I was never alone and he always knew where I was. I felt like a puppy and totally not in control… I am glad I have that back now. And now I can actually eat lots. The last few days I have been making huge quantities of food, intending to give food to my friends but instead I ate it all each time… but that’s good. Gotta gain back some weight. Though I think I am back to normal so that’s good. That’s got me thinking about thanksgiving again… not an hour goes by where I don’t get excited about it.

Tomorrow is market day and it will be crazy since the Seliba festival is next Wednesday (supposedly). I am excited about that though and I have a new outfit being made at the tailors, matching with my host family… ill take lots of pictures don’t worry. They will probably make me wear a head scarf too so get excited about those pics when I put them up on face book at thanksgiving. I need to buy a bunch of stuff for my kitchen though, now that I am cooking, so that will be fun too. I also need to avoid the women on town who keep asking me to buy their kids new outfits for seliba…

I helped to pre natal consultations again at the CSCOM and again wondered if ‘avortement’ really meant abortion in English. I had asked the matron and she had explained but maybe I just couldn’t believe that it was such a common question, at every prenatal conversation, and that the answer was so often ‘yes, I have had this many’ while looking at the floor. The majority of women it seems have had at least one or two. And a girl of 14 who lied and said she was 16 until we pressured her to tell the truth came in pregnant too. The thing is that these girls always seem older, and in a way they are. They are usually married with kids by 17 so there is no such thing as the 22 year old that I am used to hanging out with in America. So yesterday I asked my teacher what the deal with abortion was around here and what the little pregnant girl was going to do. It turns out that it is the typical story of a developing country with strict religious beliefs incorporated into their laws and culture- abortion is completely illegal and doctors and patients will go to jail if caught. (Enter bribes) but as is custom in these situations, doctors or nurses or midwifes will sometimes do them if offered enough money to offset the almost invisible risk. There are no legal limits like in the states, where abortions cannot be preformed after the first trimester or so unless in certain cases, for many reasons including the fact that the risk is higher for the mother. So I would imagine that in a country without reliable pregnancy tests ( peace corps tells us never to use the French tests sold here in the pharmacy because of often false positive results) and high rates of anemia, that It would be hard to really know if you’re pregnant before 2 or 3 months go by. By this time, it is too late for the abortion method of taking a series of 2 pills, at least by US standards, and the other method, involving a vacuum and such, would be used. But in a land where both the medical facilities in my region have unreliable or no electricity, this means that both abortion methods approved as safe in the US are not possible here. So what results are untrained people doing abortion with substandard dangerous methods. My teacher was very animated when talking about his and cited cases where the women bleed to death, get infections which cause infertility or death, complications that also cause infertility or death, and the chance that all following pregnancies will fail early in the term. So if so many women at the CSCOM have had abortions, what percent of the women are infertile or dead? And where do they get the abortions? I know you can go to Bamako and get a relatively safer abortion but only the wealthy can afford this. Fode said that it is done in the woman’s home often times but that the doctors in this area are too scared. I don’t believe that they are too scared; I bet I could find a doctor who did them. I know one of my friends, she worked at a CSCOM and her homologue was the matron, and she performed abortions. Enter my sex Ed class. But how do you convince a boy of 15 of these issues and have him feel the same sense of frustration and push for action that a 20 year old does when faced with family planning methods? It almost seems like abortion is a form of birth control here. A very expensive, the most expensive actually and the most dangerous for sure. But when a 19 year old is pregnant, has kids at home, a husband thank god, and has already had 2 abortions- it is definitely a form of birth control. And if it is so common, it starts to feel not so bad, and easier to rationalize. So then Fode and I were talking about whether or not I should give out condoms in my little reproductive health class. We decided that this would in a way give the kids permission, but I decided that I will keep a bunch in my house and tell the kids that they can come get them from me for free. But how do you make that seem appealing to a kid… but kids here can’t buy them, there are no secrets, so we do what we can. And now for that poor unmarried 14 year old who looks 25, she cannot go to school anymore if she even was before and now boys see her as someone they can sleep with and not have to marry, if they didn’t see her as that before… especially when the father may be just as young, they are too young to legally marry even in Mali.

There is one girl here who is a curious case. I won’t identify who she is just in case somehow someone gains access to this blog. (its happened before… someone’s host mom stopped talking to her after she posted pictures on her blog, one of which had the 3 year old naked She is 17 and has the attitude of a 25 year old super model. I have tried and tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, invited her to lunch, given her nail polish, but she is impossible. So yesterday I was talking to my friend and told him that I failed again at making friends with her. And he said that it’s fine, that everyone around here knows that she is impossible, and that is exactly why no one around here is going to want to marry her. He said, at the risk of sounding harsh, that boys were going to see her as someone they can sleep with and then ignore, and he said that she will soon be 40 and still living at home with 3 kids from 3 different dads. His speech was humorous but he is right… and that is sad.

Another bummer is that I just found out that one of my favorite girls from my little posse of preteen girls is going to cote d’ivoire next week to live her aunt and her aunts daughters and go to school there… and that she will be staying there until she is doe with school, which will be a long long time, well after I leave Mali. So that is really sad. Her dad says it is because he didn’t get the education that he wanted but he wants his daughters to have it. So one I already in Bamako but luckily she is coming home Monday for the Seliba party and to say good bye to her sister… he says there will be lots of crying. He also said that if she stays here, that she will never got the chance to leave, that she will end up gallivanting around at night with the other kids who aren’t educated and couldn’t get out for whatever reason, and that she will end up pregnant. I am starting to see this town as the sort of place that the educated want to flee, not just the educated but the ones who want more than what their parents had… it’s sad.

Just another typical day in Mali… spent the morning pounding shea nuts and now my hands have blisters all over them… I hate how that keeps happening. Makes the other women think that I have fragile hands. But another event of the day was when the 10 year old daughter of my host family was crying. I don’t know why but she was really upset. She was in and out of the hut and we were all sitting out front under the cover. She was really upset but I guess she decided that sitting outside would make her feel better. But as I have heard is custom around here, her 2 host moms and older sister just alternated laughing at her and making fun of her and asking me to take pictures of her because she was crying. It was just ridiculous, she is the one child in the family who really works and certainly deserves respect from her older lazy sister especially. Now there are plenty of reasons that she could be crying about, one being that she is a Malian girl or maybe that she has like 5 siblings under the age of 5 who are always crying simultaneously… but there isn’t a way in Bambara to say, why are you upset? So I saw this as a wonderful opportunity to make her my friend and show her family a lesson. I got up and told her to come with me to my house and sat her down in my comfy chair, let her pick a crystal light packet, and gave her a stack of gossip magazines. I just did my dishes and such but she calmed down a lot and then once she was totally composed, left. But I hope that she will see my house as a little island away from Mali sometimes… I want her to come over more. And this will make her older sister jealous, that she got special treatment, so it served 2 purposes because now her older sister will maybe be nicer to me to try to get to come to my little island of freedom.

Yesterday was Seliba. A Muslim holiday of some sort, I don’t know what it is about or even what its name in English is. But it was kind of like the African bush version of thanksgiving… if you can picture that. Tons of family members came to my town on Tuesday and most will leave on Saturday or Sunday. Everyone gets their hair done, feet and hands hennaed, eye brows waxed off and new gigantic Aladdin Barbie-esque ones drawn one. We all got new clothes too and people here love to be matching with their friends or family… so needless to say my host mom and neighbors got me in on their outfits… there are some very attractive pictures on my face book. They are priceless. So that morning I woke up feeling like a little kid on Christmas morning for some reason, and actually took the time to do my hair and wear mascara, only to have my host mom tie this giant scarf on my head and attempt to put charcoal on my eyes. Then I went to Fodes house because we they were killing a goat at 10. As we were killing the goat, Fode casually mentioned that a baby was being born and that my homologue had been at the maternity all night because one was born late last night too, so I raced over there to see what was happening in time to see the comatose woman walk out and the little baby being carried to the resting room next door. So I hung out with the matrons and my homologue while they collected all the body parts to be buried in the yard for good luck and while they cleaned the place. And to think, they even used soap and one woman was wearing gloves! Turns out that the new mom, who I have met at pre natal consultations before, is from Cote D’Ivoire originally but when her husband died, she took the option of marrying her husband’s younger brother, to ensure that someone would pay for her kids schooling and such. Apparently she could have stayed single and remarried on her own if she wanted, but in this culture, that isn’t really an option. This is one of the main arguments for why AIDS spreads faster in Muslim countries… exhibit A.

There are a lot of things about Peace Corps that sometimes I would rather not write about and just forget about. Malians seem to be pros at beating their kids with one half of the brain while greeting you, all smiles, in the same instance, with the other half. Or in this instance, watching your friend get beat by her husband in the courtyard as she screams ‘you’re a killer!’ and he pushes her down and stomps on her back with a host of ladies yelling at him and pushing him. And then ten minutes later be back to work, all smiles. Then he goes to wash his hands and feet off only to go back for round two, to once again humiliate and abuse every aspect of his wife, all the while avoiding eye contact and never showing any emotion. To such a degree, that in the beginning when I heard her screaming from my hut and went outside and saw him, I thought he was just joking around. it’s nice to know that the ladies have each other’s backs to a certain extent, like right now the woman who was beaten (age 19, beautiful and so nice, one of the ladies who I had matching outfits with) is hiding in one of their houses with her cute little three year old daughter who spent the event crying on the side lines. All the ladies were yelling at him, something about children, and everyone seems to be angry at him but that is all. It will happen again and again. Just goes to show, yet again, that even the nicest, shyest seeming man can turn around and beat the hell out of his young wife whom he has children with. I was planning to spend the afternoon in my hut and now I definitely feel justified in doing so. There are some things that I really hate about Mali and their acceptance of domestic, child, and animal abuse is up there. And it’s safe to say that their dispute was cut short by the crowd of angry women and for all I know, it will continue behind closed doors this evening, where it is even more socially acceptable. That is how our teacher once explained it- domestic abuse is fine behind closed doors, in the privacy of one’s home, but rude when done in public. How considerate. Needless to say, yet another Malian mind has lost my respect. Sure someone is probably reading this right now saying that it’s a circle of violence, that he was raised in that manner and that it’s the only way he knows, that really it’s not his fault, its Malian society’s fault for allowing it to continue. Well it will continue forever unless some man sees it as the dehumanizing act that it is, sooner or later. If everyone in Mali believes that it is justified, when will the belief change? I talked to Fode about it that night at dinner. He said that she was forced to marry her husband by her parents but that she didn’t want to. She’s 19 and has a 3 year old so she couldn’t have been more than 16… it’s so sad, she is completely stuck.

But tomorrow I am baby weighing and handing out vitamins to kids… and then Wednesday I will go to Bamako for thanksgiving!! I cannot wait.

BAMAKO TOMRROW THANK THE LORD. 3 straight weeks at site… haven’t spoken English except on the phone… won’t even say how many times I washed (or should I say didn’t wash) my hair… if Bamako if now the land of the free then that makes America… heaven? Just talked to my dad, he’s on a plane going to America to meet up with my mom and sister at my aunt’s house in Greensboro, so jealous!! But it’s crazy to picture an airplane right now; I bet Fode is the only person in my village who has ever seen a plane, none the less been on one. And he was in a stripped cargo plane flying from north Mali to Bamako. That’s all. My dad’s eight hour flight across an entire ocean is how long it takes me to drive the 125 k to Bamako in a bush taxi sometimes… there is no doubt that this is a parallel universe. This can’t be the same planet.

Things like ‘relative poverty vs. extreme poverty’ that we talked about in class in college don’t even touch this world that I am in right now. 33% of kids under 5 die. Blame it on the colonial legacy, the culture, the religion, whatever you want. On a side note, in the book I am reading right now, The End of Faith by Sam Harris, explains this a little. It also says that (is Mali an Arab country? I guess not… but similar) the GDP of all Arab countries combined is less than that of Spain and Spain has translated more books into Spanish this year than the Arab world has since the 9th century. And on that note, according to a survey done by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, when Malians were asked if suicide bombing and terrorist attacks in defense on Islam are justifiable, 54% of Malians said a flat out yes, not even including the ‘probably’ and ‘don’t know/maybe’ groups. I highly recommend this book; it is the best book in the subject that I have read. Some books on this issue frustrate me and I can’t finish them, like the God Delusion, for example. But this one, I have nothing but good things to say.