Song Playing: You and I by Ingrid Michaelson
I'm in the city (Koutiala) for a week for language classes, which basically means a week of English, electricity, good food, and internet. It seems somewhat strange that they take us out of sites where we are forced to speak and understand Bambara to learn it, but I'm not complaining. Last night I helped one of the other volunteers make Spanish omlettes, fried plantains, and bruchetta (on lightly toasted bread), all using a little charcoal grill and a fan. And when I say charcoal, I mean pieces from a tree that was charred the next town over, not nice little brickettes that you light with lighter fluid. Normally, we would have a stove (and oven. I miss ovens.) here, but they've been out of propane in Koutiala for a few weeks. Rumor has it they're out of propane in all of Mali... neat, huh? The food was delicious, none-the-less. AND we had hobo sangria. Lovely.
So bracelets. You can buy a handful of basic seed-bead bracelets for about 20 cents in any market you go to here. A lot of female volunteers in Mali wear monthly bracelets - every month you're here, you add another. Right now I have excess bracelets jangling on my left arm and three little bracelets on my right. Looking at them surprises me - sometimes it feels like a lot more than 3 months, sometimes it feels like a lot less. There are (many) days at site where I feel like I'm not doing enough, or not really doing anything. Seeing those bracelets reminds me that I've still got a lot of time to go and that I should stop stressing about it.
Because of the distinct lack of internet & electricity in my life, I'll be writing entries for this thing in a journal and then just unloading multiple posts at once. So under this, the bottom entry is the first one; the closest is the latest. Hope you enjoy, I'll be around all week.
Peace & Love
Elyse
Little Critters (9/30)
Like most children, I used to love books that personified animals. The Berenstain Bears and the Little Critter series were some of my favorites. The real things were just as fascinating. Lines of ants marching through the kitchen were intriguing, not pests. I would catch fireflies and tadpoles in the summer, studied frogs regularly, and once tried to 'incubate' an abandoned robin's egg under my desk lamp. Most of this can be attributed to my sister. As I got older, critters became less amusing and more annoying. In my more ‘adult’-like years, I either killed all insects that dared enter my home or completely ignored them. Here, both ignorance and exterminating all insects are not possibilities.
Out in my yard, I religiously pull up stray weeds that could house anything I don't like. Toads appear outside at night and on my porch in the rain. Flies are constantly on the attack – I have recently launched counter-attacks with a homemade fly swatter. Besides being annoying, flies here can carry sicknesses that I'd rather not name. There's a colony of ants that lives in the mudbricks under the cement on my porch - we watch each other warily. They allow me to exist because I bring out delicious treats, like dead flies and moths, but I did spend a few days trying to drown them out. I allow them to exist because of the sadistic pleasure of watching them carry away said dead flies, but they bite HARD and I am constantly worried that they will invade my house and am on the lookout for trains of them inside. Inside, I brush off termite lines on the walls almost daily and am trying to oust them from my window sills. The spiders and I are in a truce - as long as they don't come down to my level, I ignore them. Everything in my kitchen that might be of interest to anything is contained. About a week ago, I'd forgotten to clean off the knife I used to make my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. That night, bigger ants (the ones that don't bite and are not carnivorous), had swarmed it.
Last night, I heard a rustling in the corner when I opened my front door. My makeshift trashcan (cardboard box) sits there - I've been debating what to do with the trash for the last few weeks. Most people here burn it all and dump it in this big pile on the side of the village road. There is no garbage disposal system here, no landfills, just piles of trash. I am averse to burning plastic (need I explain?), and have been considering dumping it down my nyegen, but wasn't sure if that was the best option.
So anyways, I shined my flashlight in the direction of the trashcan and saw something trying to jump out of it. Figuring it was a toad and wondering how the hell and WHY it was there, I stepped closer - to find a very large mouse. By Malian standards, this mouse was small. The body was only 3.5-4 inches long. Tiny, really. But I'm not Malian. I cursed out a storm and hopped from foot to foot as the mouse continuously tried to jump out of my trashcan. More than anything, I was worried it would find my kitchen.
I locked the mouse in and ran over to my host family's house. Not knowing the word for mouse, I told my host parents there was a "thing" in my house. They stared at me, confused. I remembered that the previous day, some creature was found in the corner of their porch that they tried to kill. Assuming it was a mouse, I pointed to the corner and said, "like that thing yesterday!" They both exclaimed, my host father grabbed a big stick, and started racing to my house. As we got closer, my host father gallantly held out his arm and told me to stay back. This seemed a little odd – I mean, I don’t like mice, but I wasn’t scared that it would eat me or anything. Stick at the ready, I opened the door for him and he entered cautiously. I pointed vigorously at the corner, but hung back in case the mouse HAD jumped out and was actually rabid and was about to attack. After cautiously looking around the room, he peered in the trashcan and chuckled. He said something to my host mother and soon they were both laughing quite hard. My host mom explained that they were worried because the thing that was in their yard was a snake (many of which are dangerous here) and that a mouse was nothing to worry about. I smiled, but repeated that mice are bad and I wanted it OUT. Still laughing, my host father tapped it with the stick and picked it up by the tail. He waived it in my face, teasing, which sent them both into a second bout of laughing when I backed up from him and said something like, “no no no no, very bad. bad bad bad.” He threw the dead mouse over my wall and they both bade me a good night, still chuckling. The next day, I threw my trash in the nyegen.
Grief (9/28)
song playing: The Sound of Silence (Simon & Garfunkel)
Volunteers go through a somewhat defined rollercoaster of emotions. We’re given a chart pinpointing the stages and what to expect at each one. It’s one hell of a rollercoaster the first couple of months, let me tell you. Once past the worst of it – the daily plummets and sudden inclines as well as the longer slumps and hills – it seems pretty trivial and not necessarily something that I want to blog about unless I’m interested in sounding mentally unstable. But rollercoaster aside, there are experiences that affect my emotional self and form an important piece of this whole Peace Corps thing. I’ve been debating how personal this blog should be. It would be strange to write out my emotions when I don’t know who the recipients are and aren’t. Then again, this particular experience isn’t something I will forget and is probably something that will affect me for a very long time, so here it is. I’d like to note before I delve into whatever this is that I’m only writing out chunks of the picture – little personal bits I’ve sifted into words of something much bigger than me. ...
On the 13th of September, my Uncle Chuck (my dad’s older brother) died. I visited him a couple of weeks before I came here, and though I knew his death was a possibility, I didn’t really expect it within my service, let alone within the first few months. Put simply, the grief rocked me. To experience strong grief like that in a foreign environment is a little disconcerting. After sobbing to my mother for an hour, there was no way to contact or connect with family for a couple of days. I was the lone American in a tiny Malian village. Understand that Malians laugh a lot. They speak passionately, express a full range of emotions, and are very social, but they do not cry or hug. So after mumbled explanations to my host mother and homologue, I pushed away my grief – there’s nowhere for it to go here. Ignorance is bliss, I suppose.
About a week after, I was reading Around the Bloc by Stephanie Elizondo Griest, and this passage struck a chord in me.
“When I packed my bags for Moscow, I somehow thought I was simultaneously wrapping 21 years of personal relationships into a box, tying it neatly with a ribbon, and setting it off to the side so that nothing would change in my absence. …After all, we’re the ones venturing out into the big, crazy world, filling up our journals, growing like weeds. And we have the gall to think [our families] are just sitting at home, soaking in security and stability. It’s only when we reopen these wrapped & riboned boxes, upon our triumphant return home, that we discover nothing is the way we had left it before.” (Around the Bloc, pg. 36)
Reading that, I realized how much I wasn’t dealing with my uncle’s death. Being so far and so disconnected from home forced me into a sort of detachment. While my family was preparing to go to the visitation, I was bartering in the market. Since my mother’s phone call, considering my uncle’s death as reality would slam into me, turning me into a puddle. But once a puddle, there was no outlet – I could not bury myself in junk food & TV, could not leave just to get out, could not cry, and couldn’t really contact my family. So that day at the market, and in the time since then, I have either ignored the whole thing or considered it sideways – a secondary thought to be observed objectively with no personal relation. Writing this, I recognize that I am still not facing it straight on, because I can feel the tears and the pain waiting for me and still have no place for them to go, nor a way to come to terms with them once face to face with them. There’s a distinct lack of closure, an inability to attain that closure. So here I am, warily watching my pretty little box with it’s ribbon, knowing while not accepting that once I open it, I will find – among many other things – a deep, profound grief.
For the last 2 weeks now, my heart has been with my family. I love you all very, very much. Rest in peace, Unca Chuck.
Reality (9/5)
I am a Peace Corps volunteer. How the hell did that happen? I was dropped off at my village around 3 this afternoon. Just, “alright, here you go. we’ll try to get your luggage here tomorrow. You’ll be fine without it for a day, right?” though maybe not in those exact words. I swept and read until 5:30 when I decided I should sit with my host family (simply because that seemed like the thing you do on your first day). In the last 5 minutes, I have realized that this is actually my life and that I will live here for 2 years. Two. Years. There are tears somewhere behind my eyes, gathered from a conglomeration of good and not so good emotions, but they will have to wait.
My host mother is proud, her actions sure, precise, and practiced. Her mind is sharp, her toung ready. She is safety; a stronghold. My father looks feather light; a small face holds deep set, concerned eyes. He moves gracefully, slowly, after considerations have been made. He is a farmer and a mason – sinew-y muscles hidden but verified in his work. He learns American games, counts, reads, and does sudokus with me. He is an advice giver and a mediator, meditative thoughts creating deliberate opinions. My homologue is young. Her sile is ready, but her eyes flutter and her hands wring, nervous and unsure. Still, she holds her head high, befitting the position of a matrone, and issues birth papers in small, careful handwriting. She will be my friend and my case study. I will watch her, follow her, depend on her, talk to her, and laugh with her countless times in the next 2 years.
I sit here, gazing at stars appearing after the sunset and writing down the roots I need to grow in order to stay sane the next few hours, let alone months or even years. My mind whispers that I’m tired, that I should go curl up with a book in my private house, excape my fears of this sudden new life. Instead I sit with my family. My body is curled around my journal, my thoughts running around like the chickens pecking near my feet, but I am present. When I was younger, a book I was reading described the dream god as having one foot in reality and one in chaos – I suppose that’s what this feeling is. Deep breathing is necessary
