Monday, March 21, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
World Wise School Correspondance 2
Hello again! I hope all is well in Florida and I look forward to receiving your letters that Mr. Coghlan mailed to me. Once I get those then we can really get this conversation going. But for now, as I said in my last letter, I will give you an introduction to three of my closest friends in village and describe the food and animals for you. Also included are some pictures of the weird animals that we eat and pictures of my daily life.
My closest friend and work partner at site is Fode Keita. He is a forty something year old man and a prominent figure in town. He has one wife and I still, after almost eight months at site, am not sure how many kids he has. Or what kids are his. Somewhere around 8 I believe. And the miraculous part is that his wife uses birth control, so eight (or more, we will see) was their desired number by this age. That is one difference of Malian culture and American culture- we use birth control to not have children when we don’t want them. They use to leave about a year or two between each pregnancy, but rarely to actively prevent pregnancy for extended periods of time. But anyways, Fodes religion is not Islam but what he calls ‘totems’. I don’t even know what the translation of this into English would be exactly but it is a religion based upon ancient family tradition and nature. For example, he doesn’t eat hippos because they apparently once saved his family by carrying them across the river in a war. So now they are sacred. So he is one of the few men who dont go to pray at the mosque every time the call to prayer is sang. He is a fisherman and gets other incomes from his garden and seasonal crops. He also works for a nonprofit documenting children and getting western families to sponsor them to go to school. He is very different from other Malians, in that he has big well articulated dreams of going to England one day, learning English and finding people ‘like him’. He says that there is no one like him in this town, and he is right. He is motivated to keep up with health initiatives, such as animal and children vaccination schedules. When I want to talk about deeper issues like abortion, politics, or teen pregnancy in village, he is the only one I feel comfortable talking with. He really is one of a kind and I am really lucky to be working with him. He provides the local language skill and village support that are so hard to navigate alone.
My next closest friend lives in my market town. Her name is Suzanne, but she goes by Bartoma because it is hard for people to remember a Christian name. She is a little over fifty and has three kids. Already, I am sure you can tell she is not the average small town Malian. I go to eat lunch her on the days that I ride my bike to market four kilometers away to gather food for the week, but I stop by on other days too just because her food is so good. She is wealthy enough to buy meat sometimes, something I never see in my village. She is interesting because she is a working woman. And unfortunately, like many of the working mothers that I have met, she lives about 125 kilometers from her husband who lives in Bamako, the capital of Mali where he is a university teacher. All three of her children are in school, including her two daughters. Her son is 23 and studying at university to become a lawyer. She also has a 19 year old daughter who I have never met who also goes to university. They both live with their father. The youngest is about 16 and in school in the town where her mother lives. Suzanne always brags that her kids are first in their class, and I believe it. She is a truly nice lady and she is another person that I can talk to about project plans and ideas, or problems that I am having in village. She was born and raised in Bamako and one can tell by watching her. She was once a tailor, then a doctor, and now she works for a nonprofit doing small village outreach educating them on child and maternal health. She is a great role model for young girls and I plan on having her talk to my girls group in the future.
Lastly I will introduce you to my friend Nantene. She lives next door to me and is one of the two women in my little circle of houses who I feel the closest too. She is 19 and has a two year old girl with her husband. I think she has another daughter who is about 7 but I'm not sure, that doesn’t seem possible but I don’t know who else this little girl’s mother would be, and she lives with them. Last year a twelve year old got pregnant in village with a boy from the neighboring town though so it wouldn’t be the first time. Whenever I cook or prepare food I always sit with her and her little daughter and give them some. She is really captivating and I wonder what her life would be like if she lived in a society where she was given more opportunity. Her husband beats her publicly and often, which is really hard to see. Whenever it happens in the yard, all her friends hit him and yell at him until it stops but it has been pretty bad before. Fode says that he is a bad man, and that it was a forced marriage which she did not want. He says that her husband’s mother has an equally cold heart and everyone in village knows that he is a strange man. It is equally as sad when she turns some of her range to her daughter after these beatings. But she is pregnant again, for better or for worse, and it seems there is no other option but to keep going. She is a cookie cutter example of a Malian woman from a small village. Limited opportunity, forced marriage, no way out.
Food in my village is rice. Rice rice rice. That’s all we ever eat. I am used to the lack of variety now, and I cook my own breakfast and lunch to give myself some freedom. So I make rice oatmeal with crushed peanuts in it for breakfast. This is a meal that most Malians don’t get to eat because they can’t afford to not sell all their harvested peanuts, even though they are an important source of protein for kids and adults alike. For breakfast Malians have left over dinner or rice oatmeal. Then for lunch I make peanut butter honey sandwiches, Malians think it’s hilarious. But they keep coming back and asking me to share. Most Malians eat rice and green leaf sauce, onion sauce, or ‘naji’, which literally translates as ‘sauce water’. For dinner, I eat with Fode. We usually eat rice oatmeal, corn oatmeal, or if we are lucky, rice and one of the assorted sauces with fish. I buy him a sack of rice everyone in a while and bring sugar each night as a payment.
Now that I am talking about animals, I will also talk about the lucky opportunity that we get to eat one. Fode often travels out into the bush with his gun and machete, and sometimes comes back with a surprise. When this happens, a little face pops up at my door and one of Fodes many children calls me over, giddy with excitement, to take a picture. It is normally a giant 3 foot lizard, fish with teeth that live on land in the dry season and swim in the rainy season, electric eels that he has caught in his fish trap, rabbits, bush rats, or other surprises which I haven’t seen yet. All the lions and real animals were hunted to extinction in this area in the last fifty years, but I have to say I am kind of relieved about that. My bike rides would be terrifying if I had to worry about lions along with all the other scary things I worry about.
One of the most recent pressing issues in my life is the weather. Normally a conversation fall back, the weather here is impossible to ignore. It is over one hundred degrees until well after dark. It is unbelievable how hot it can stay until well after the sun goes down. Hot season started over night. One day it was fine, and the next day never cooled off that evening and I couldn’t even sleep. People have started sleeping outside and I am thinking about it but I like the privacy and security of my own home, and ability to sleep in if I want. So never again complain about Mr. Coghlans AC habits… I remember we used to complain it was too hot or two cold alternating with the season, despite the fact that he protested that he kept the room at a steady 68 degrees. A solid 40 degrees colder than it is in my hut right now. Soak up that AC and send it to the 200 Peace Corps volunteers in Mali. No one ever stops sweating, even right after bucket baths in outdoor bathrooms. My parents and sister are coming in May, and everyone said that it was just plain mean to take your family to village during hot season but I figured, how miserable can it be? At least it is the beginning of mango season. There always has to be a silver lining.
The other most recent pressing issue is safety and security. Right now, more than ever, I am really concerned about the threat that Al Queada in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is posing to my safety. I don’t know if this reaches news in America, but the threat has slowly been encroaching on Peace Corps Mali and yesterday it made its debut. They are responsible for the kidnapping and murder of French volunteers all over West Africa, and they are the reason that we are not allowed to go in over two thirds of Mali. They are the reason behind Peace Corps Niger’s recent evacuation and I believe also the reason behind Mauritania’s. Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, and Guinea were all also recently evacuated but for different reasons. Mali, it seems, is the last man standing. But now in the past week peace corps has issued warning on two more of the cities that we are working in, and then yesterday, peace corps sent out a security text message about a planned attack and kidnapping at the American embassy and the American school, both in Bamako. This is really alarming and scary to me because they used to say that the threat was only to the French, which wasn’t very soothing but was good enough. But now it seems they can no longer use that excuse, and I am, for the first time, hoping for an evacuation. My banking town is Bamako, and it is about 125 kilometers west of my village. AQIM was never supposed to be this far south, into our ‘safe zone’. There was a bombing of the French embassy a few weeks ago, but that was ‘only targeting the French’. So I hope that none of you are too attached to Mali, because in my dream world, I want to get evacuated and then when they give us country change options for those of us who aren’t going to quit, I want to go to Benin, Togo, or Senegal. Hopefully I can learn more French. The timing couldn’t be worse but then again, there is probably no good time for a spontaneous evacuation. I am really not happy about this though. So keep your eyes on the news and we will see how the next week unfolds. Check the New York Times website in the world news, Africa section if you’re interested; that is my go to news source. Maybe even the Peace Corps website of the US state department if you really want to read the controversial stuff. I am writing this from my hut on March 11th, so maybe by Monday there will be more news. I am supposed to be going into Bamako on Monday to change my malaria prevention medicine and I hope I can still go.
Alright, I hope this reaches you all in good health and hopefully things will work out here as well. I don’t know what this means, ‘to work out’, as I say, but regardless, something must happen. I look forward to getting your letters and again, keep your eyes on the news and follow what is going on. I never would have known about this if I had lived in America so consider me your front line news source. Thanks again for participating in this program with me, I am enjoying it very much and I hope that you are as well. K’an ben kofe, Allah ka tile here caya!
The letter was written while I was at my site, but this closing paragraph I am writing from Bamako. Last week I received another text from Peace Corps saying “following the most recent warden message, Bamako is currently off limits to all peace corps volunteers. Please don’t come to Bamako without approval and please leave ASAP if you are here.” This was really concerning. I am not however in Bamako, as they have now opened it back up to volunteers and have deemed the threat not credible. So, this doesn’t calm my nerves completely but it is good enough. Situation resolved I guess.
My closest friend and work partner at site is Fode Keita. He is a forty something year old man and a prominent figure in town. He has one wife and I still, after almost eight months at site, am not sure how many kids he has. Or what kids are his. Somewhere around 8 I believe. And the miraculous part is that his wife uses birth control, so eight (or more, we will see) was their desired number by this age. That is one difference of Malian culture and American culture- we use birth control to not have children when we don’t want them. They use to leave about a year or two between each pregnancy, but rarely to actively prevent pregnancy for extended periods of time. But anyways, Fodes religion is not Islam but what he calls ‘totems’. I don’t even know what the translation of this into English would be exactly but it is a religion based upon ancient family tradition and nature. For example, he doesn’t eat hippos because they apparently once saved his family by carrying them across the river in a war. So now they are sacred. So he is one of the few men who dont go to pray at the mosque every time the call to prayer is sang. He is a fisherman and gets other incomes from his garden and seasonal crops. He also works for a nonprofit documenting children and getting western families to sponsor them to go to school. He is very different from other Malians, in that he has big well articulated dreams of going to England one day, learning English and finding people ‘like him’. He says that there is no one like him in this town, and he is right. He is motivated to keep up with health initiatives, such as animal and children vaccination schedules. When I want to talk about deeper issues like abortion, politics, or teen pregnancy in village, he is the only one I feel comfortable talking with. He really is one of a kind and I am really lucky to be working with him. He provides the local language skill and village support that are so hard to navigate alone.
My next closest friend lives in my market town. Her name is Suzanne, but she goes by Bartoma because it is hard for people to remember a Christian name. She is a little over fifty and has three kids. Already, I am sure you can tell she is not the average small town Malian. I go to eat lunch her on the days that I ride my bike to market four kilometers away to gather food for the week, but I stop by on other days too just because her food is so good. She is wealthy enough to buy meat sometimes, something I never see in my village. She is interesting because she is a working woman. And unfortunately, like many of the working mothers that I have met, she lives about 125 kilometers from her husband who lives in Bamako, the capital of Mali where he is a university teacher. All three of her children are in school, including her two daughters. Her son is 23 and studying at university to become a lawyer. She also has a 19 year old daughter who I have never met who also goes to university. They both live with their father. The youngest is about 16 and in school in the town where her mother lives. Suzanne always brags that her kids are first in their class, and I believe it. She is a truly nice lady and she is another person that I can talk to about project plans and ideas, or problems that I am having in village. She was born and raised in Bamako and one can tell by watching her. She was once a tailor, then a doctor, and now she works for a nonprofit doing small village outreach educating them on child and maternal health. She is a great role model for young girls and I plan on having her talk to my girls group in the future.
Lastly I will introduce you to my friend Nantene. She lives next door to me and is one of the two women in my little circle of houses who I feel the closest too. She is 19 and has a two year old girl with her husband. I think she has another daughter who is about 7 but I'm not sure, that doesn’t seem possible but I don’t know who else this little girl’s mother would be, and she lives with them. Last year a twelve year old got pregnant in village with a boy from the neighboring town though so it wouldn’t be the first time. Whenever I cook or prepare food I always sit with her and her little daughter and give them some. She is really captivating and I wonder what her life would be like if she lived in a society where she was given more opportunity. Her husband beats her publicly and often, which is really hard to see. Whenever it happens in the yard, all her friends hit him and yell at him until it stops but it has been pretty bad before. Fode says that he is a bad man, and that it was a forced marriage which she did not want. He says that her husband’s mother has an equally cold heart and everyone in village knows that he is a strange man. It is equally as sad when she turns some of her range to her daughter after these beatings. But she is pregnant again, for better or for worse, and it seems there is no other option but to keep going. She is a cookie cutter example of a Malian woman from a small village. Limited opportunity, forced marriage, no way out.
Food in my village is rice. Rice rice rice. That’s all we ever eat. I am used to the lack of variety now, and I cook my own breakfast and lunch to give myself some freedom. So I make rice oatmeal with crushed peanuts in it for breakfast. This is a meal that most Malians don’t get to eat because they can’t afford to not sell all their harvested peanuts, even though they are an important source of protein for kids and adults alike. For breakfast Malians have left over dinner or rice oatmeal. Then for lunch I make peanut butter honey sandwiches, Malians think it’s hilarious. But they keep coming back and asking me to share. Most Malians eat rice and green leaf sauce, onion sauce, or ‘naji’, which literally translates as ‘sauce water’. For dinner, I eat with Fode. We usually eat rice oatmeal, corn oatmeal, or if we are lucky, rice and one of the assorted sauces with fish. I buy him a sack of rice everyone in a while and bring sugar each night as a payment.
Now that I am talking about animals, I will also talk about the lucky opportunity that we get to eat one. Fode often travels out into the bush with his gun and machete, and sometimes comes back with a surprise. When this happens, a little face pops up at my door and one of Fodes many children calls me over, giddy with excitement, to take a picture. It is normally a giant 3 foot lizard, fish with teeth that live on land in the dry season and swim in the rainy season, electric eels that he has caught in his fish trap, rabbits, bush rats, or other surprises which I haven’t seen yet. All the lions and real animals were hunted to extinction in this area in the last fifty years, but I have to say I am kind of relieved about that. My bike rides would be terrifying if I had to worry about lions along with all the other scary things I worry about.
One of the most recent pressing issues in my life is the weather. Normally a conversation fall back, the weather here is impossible to ignore. It is over one hundred degrees until well after dark. It is unbelievable how hot it can stay until well after the sun goes down. Hot season started over night. One day it was fine, and the next day never cooled off that evening and I couldn’t even sleep. People have started sleeping outside and I am thinking about it but I like the privacy and security of my own home, and ability to sleep in if I want. So never again complain about Mr. Coghlans AC habits… I remember we used to complain it was too hot or two cold alternating with the season, despite the fact that he protested that he kept the room at a steady 68 degrees. A solid 40 degrees colder than it is in my hut right now. Soak up that AC and send it to the 200 Peace Corps volunteers in Mali. No one ever stops sweating, even right after bucket baths in outdoor bathrooms. My parents and sister are coming in May, and everyone said that it was just plain mean to take your family to village during hot season but I figured, how miserable can it be? At least it is the beginning of mango season. There always has to be a silver lining.
The other most recent pressing issue is safety and security. Right now, more than ever, I am really concerned about the threat that Al Queada in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is posing to my safety. I don’t know if this reaches news in America, but the threat has slowly been encroaching on Peace Corps Mali and yesterday it made its debut. They are responsible for the kidnapping and murder of French volunteers all over West Africa, and they are the reason that we are not allowed to go in over two thirds of Mali. They are the reason behind Peace Corps Niger’s recent evacuation and I believe also the reason behind Mauritania’s. Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, and Guinea were all also recently evacuated but for different reasons. Mali, it seems, is the last man standing. But now in the past week peace corps has issued warning on two more of the cities that we are working in, and then yesterday, peace corps sent out a security text message about a planned attack and kidnapping at the American embassy and the American school, both in Bamako. This is really alarming and scary to me because they used to say that the threat was only to the French, which wasn’t very soothing but was good enough. But now it seems they can no longer use that excuse, and I am, for the first time, hoping for an evacuation. My banking town is Bamako, and it is about 125 kilometers west of my village. AQIM was never supposed to be this far south, into our ‘safe zone’. There was a bombing of the French embassy a few weeks ago, but that was ‘only targeting the French’. So I hope that none of you are too attached to Mali, because in my dream world, I want to get evacuated and then when they give us country change options for those of us who aren’t going to quit, I want to go to Benin, Togo, or Senegal. Hopefully I can learn more French. The timing couldn’t be worse but then again, there is probably no good time for a spontaneous evacuation. I am really not happy about this though. So keep your eyes on the news and we will see how the next week unfolds. Check the New York Times website in the world news, Africa section if you’re interested; that is my go to news source. Maybe even the Peace Corps website of the US state department if you really want to read the controversial stuff. I am writing this from my hut on March 11th, so maybe by Monday there will be more news. I am supposed to be going into Bamako on Monday to change my malaria prevention medicine and I hope I can still go.
Alright, I hope this reaches you all in good health and hopefully things will work out here as well. I don’t know what this means, ‘to work out’, as I say, but regardless, something must happen. I look forward to getting your letters and again, keep your eyes on the news and follow what is going on. I never would have known about this if I had lived in America so consider me your front line news source. Thanks again for participating in this program with me, I am enjoying it very much and I hope that you are as well. K’an ben kofe, Allah ka tile here caya!
The letter was written while I was at my site, but this closing paragraph I am writing from Bamako. Last week I received another text from Peace Corps saying “following the most recent warden message, Bamako is currently off limits to all peace corps volunteers. Please don’t come to Bamako without approval and please leave ASAP if you are here.” This was really concerning. I am not however in Bamako, as they have now opened it back up to volunteers and have deemed the threat not credible. So, this doesn’t calm my nerves completely but it is good enough. Situation resolved I guess.
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