Aw ni che, Aw ni sogoma! Hello and Good day from Mali! My name is Emily Albert and Mr. Coghlan was my English teacher when I was in seventh and eighth grade, about 9 years ago. To begin, I will explain what this letter is- this is the first correspondence letter that I have written as a part of the World Wise Schools Program. This is a program designed for Peace Corps volunteers to get in touch with classrooms and teachers back in America to exchange letters, art, and other interesting things that fit into a ‘show and tell’ type category. I am a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, West Africa. Mali is a landlocked, predominantly Muslim country about twice the size of Texas that was a French colony until fifty years ago. It is also the third poorest country in the world where about one in three kids under the age of five die and only about 30% of the population can read. I have been here for seven months now and have about a year and a half to go until I finish my service. A brief description of my life these days is that I speak the West African dialect of Bambara which has no written form, live in a mud hut with no water or electricity in a village has about 1,500 people, and I work at the maternity clinic. But before I get lost in all the differences between here and Ponte Vedra Beach, let me start from the beginning.
The Peace Corps is a United States government agency which has been in existence since1961. It is a 27 month (3 months training and 24 month service) program for people who want to volunteer and work abroad. 95% of volunteers have college degrees but it is not necessary, and anyone from a 22 year old opera singer to a 65 year old chemical engineer can apply. There are five sectors and each volunteer is assigned to one during the application based on previously held skills. The sectors are health education, water sanitation, small enterprise development, education, and environment. My assignment is health education. As a result, I live in a little town with more witch doctors than regular ones and I am supposed to work to introduce modern health practices and combine them with the herbal medicine traditions. One can do this by building a maternity center, training doctors, or just teaching people about why it is important for people to wash their hands. For example, in Mali, many people don’t believe in germs and never wash their hands. This is even more alarming when taking into account that we eat with our hands. But Peace Corps is really what you make it to be, and I am incorporating this World Wise Schools program into my service because I think it is a fun way to connect my classroom here with yours even though sometimes I feel like I am on another planet.
There is so much that I want to say that it is hard to start with such a broad letter. A huge amount of the population here is children, as each woman has about 8 living children and each man has up to four wives. So if you lived in my village instead of in Ponte Vedra, you would be living a much different life. Your day would begin with the sun, at which time you would pound rice, fetch water from the well, and take care of your siblings. Then you would eat rice for breakfast with some sugar on it and run to school at 8:00. There you would be in a class room with mud wells and a tin roof with about sixty to one hundred other children. Since you are in seventh or eighth grade, it would be mostly boys. At this point, girls stay home to help their moms and are getting ready to be married off and they will move to the house of the man who pays the largest dowry. But for those lucky enough to stay in school, you would be learning French, math, geography, and English. But the Malian education system is one that simply enforces rote memorization because the French left a system full of standardized testing and corruption, and then the following twenty five years of dictatorship didn’t do much to improve the system. Then you would go home for lunch and do dishes, wash clothes, or sweep the yard and huts. Then you would go back to school for a little in the afternoon, but it is very hot out so class is shorter. Then you go home after and help your mom clean fish, cook rice, and if you are a girl you would wash your little siblings. If you are a boy, you would go play soccer or wait for your friends who were herding cattle to come home to play too. Then you would all gather around a communal bowl, rinse your hands in a communal cup of water, and eat with your right hand only. Then it is dark so there is nothing left to do but the dishes, fetch water, bathe, and pound more millet, rice, and corn, for the next day’s meals. If you have home work, you would do it by the fire and maybe practice your multiplication tables in the dirt with friends.
The school structure is very authoritarian as a result of colonization and the following dictatorship so teachers must stick to a very regimented teaching plan. Even if you do pass your standardized tests year after year, after ninth grade when the time comes to go to lycee, you will see almost no women and many students have bought their way in with family connections. You will also have to move to a bigger town which is simply not possible for those who don’t have family there. And then few jobs are available other than working in the government and you can only get a job there if you know the right people. So you may ask yourself, what is the point of going to school if you live in a village when you could be working? And what is the point of going to school when the only job option is working and living in the village? There are plenty of statistics boasting that extended education reduces the number of children women have, makes them more open to modern medicine and birth control, and that an educated woman is a more empowered woman who as a result has healthier children and a healthier marriage. But when it comes down to it, the motivation is often not there for parents to send their kids to school. Fortunately, my town has a school and teachers who are paid. A non-profit takes care of that. And my teachers are all great, despite the fact that many did not choose this profession. Until recently the Malian government chose your profession for you based on your exam scores at the end of ninth grade. Can you imagine if president Obama looked at your SAT scores after ninth grade and told you what your only option was? Overall, we should be thankful that our teachers in America don’t beat us or go on strike, as is the norm around here.
But that is enough on the unfortunate lasting impact of colonization. There are plenty more in the health care system but I don’t want to bore you. As for my personal projects while here, so far I do baby weighing to screen for malnutrition and I give information sessions on different health care topics such as the importance of birth control, hand washing, and certain aspects of child nutrition like making rice with peanuts to add protein.
Please write down questions or thoughts that you would like me to elaborate on. I can send Mr. Coghlan a slide show of pictures of my village and things for him to show you with a projector if you want. After being here for what seems like such a long time, things actually seem normal so writing this letter has made me reevaluate all the strange habits and customs of life in Mali. In Peace Corps the days are years and the years are days. The best part though is simply forming personal relationships with people in my village so in the next letter I will give you an introduction to some of my closest friends and work partners. Ill also talk about the animals and food that I eat. Unfortunately all the lions and wild animals have been killed for the most part… but there are still some weird ones. In a few days I am going to Dakar with most of the other Peace Corps Mali volunteers by bus( which takes approximately 25 to 40 hours) for the West African Invitational Softball Tournament which is organized by Peace Corps volunteers in Senegal to get everyone together, so that will be my first real vacation. It’s embarrassing though because most people in my town can’t even afford the five dollar ticket to get to Bamako, and here I am going to Senegal for a week.
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