Snapshots

During a visit from my mom, I was chastised multiple times for not keeping up with this blog. Apologies.  Catch-up -- August was spent drawing and painting world maps, see below for more on that. September somehow passed by without a lot happening. In October, I spent the first week in Bamako, working on changes to the health volunteer manual. The rest of the month passed in a blur, waiting for the end of the month when I met my mom in Morocco (!!!). Vacation was wonderful, I had fresh orange juice daily and, of course, got to spend some quality time with my momma. After a week in Morocco, mostly in the beach town Essaouira, we flew into Mali and spent a week here. We were in my village for Seliba (also known as Tabaski), the big fête. All in all, we had a wonderful time together. I then spent Thanksgiving in Sikasso with a lot of other volunteers, catching up and eating good food.

And that brings us to now. I will be helping with a research project in Koutiala during part of December, and then heading to Dogon country for Christmas before coming back to village to focus on my big project of the year, a well at my maternity. Today marks 17 months in Mali, I can't believe it's come this fast and I'm already doing my second set of holidays in Mali. Promise to try to keep up with this more regularly!


(12/1)
My arms itch from the sorghum particles floating in the air. Nearby are the whistles and thumps of sticks whacking a huge pile of the harvest. Even the 6 year old joins in - if you want to eat, you have to work. I am the exception, of course, their token white person. A few good whomps with a stick and it's taken away from me, too strenuous. I can't say that I really mind. The fluid rhythms passing through the group are mimicked in my legs, bouncing the 4-month-old my family is taking care of.

Making faces and cooing to calm the hungry child, (actions, I might note, that once made me painfully self-conscious) I contemplate my afternoon. There are small preparations for vague, future projects, but I know after this many months that little of those will happen today. Self-motivation is a slippery creature when you lack deadlines and expectations. More likely, I'll visit with friends- the list of people I need to go drink tea with grows despite how social I think I'm being. I list and categorize things that need to be done, many of which would not make sense right now and are just further put off. In this way, days slip into weeks, floating complacently by me.




Kindling (11/18)
"Kolomousso," Sali started as she calculated the numbers for the meningitis vaccination campaign, "is the cleanest of all the villages we serve." We sat on her porch in the late afternoon, her making tea while I enjoyed the break from heat as the sun went down

"Why?" I asked, my attention was momentarily distracted from the doves fighting on the wall.

She mumbled numbers before answering simply, "The women clean it every week." I smiled. So obvious. Kolomousso is a couple of miles 'into the bush,' as they say. There are a couple huge, beautiful baobob trees, but besides that it is an average Malian dustbowl. The village closest to it, N'Tarla, is lush by comparison, with gardens and a lot of vegetation, but many of the children there are sick and/or malnourished. They run around with rotting teeth, reddish, brittle hair, inflated bellies, and sticks for arms and legs - all signs of malnutrition. The children in Kolomousso, on the other hand, are all healthy and happy.

"Sali! The babies there are all so healthy and fat, that has to be why!" She glanced up at me, amused at my realization on a topic I'd been going on about for months. I was having a slow day. Thoughts swirled and wheels turned as I considered the neighboring villages, how they could help each other. I conjured up plans of formations, womens groups, sanitation practices. "Sali," I said hesitantly, "if we could get the Kolomousso women to talk to the women in N'Tarla, and maybe the other villages, they could explain how they organize the village cleaning, and the other villages could use them for an example, and then start their own organizations, and then..." I stopped myself from rambling too much.

She set her pen down, considering me for a minute before softly saying, "sometimes different groups or villages don't get along, and this prevents them from helping each other..." The nice way of saying, "no." I nodded, focusing on the doves that were once again in battle. I grumbled about people's interest extending as far as their front door and stopping there. She made empathetic noises. It was nice, I mused, that Sali would answer me honestly, rather than just encourage whatever hair-brained schemes I come up with. This, I decide, could be very useful in a question I've been trying to answer by myself the last few months.

"Sali... When I give animations to people, nothing changes. For example, if I talk to a group of women about what nutritional needs their kids have, they don't cook anything differently, or if I explain why soap is necessary, they don't really -" I stopped, a lump forming in my throat. Where the hell is that coming from? I screwed up my eyebrows, forcing it to go down. "So my question for you," I continued, "is if I should even continue doing animations at all?"

I know how this sounds. Not at all like your average cheerful, optimistic Peace Corps volunteer who perseveres through all of the trials of the developing world and comes out the other end having impacted the lives of villagers in countless ways. I realized, at some point, that it is not that simple. I've spent the last few months sifting through a lot of existential crisis (in relation to Peace Corps) questions with myself, and yet find myself with few answers to those questions. Motivation packed its bags and slammed the door for a while, despite efforts to reclaim it by painting maps. To coax it to come back, I've acknowledged to myself that the people I work with in my village will work for and bother me about building a well at the maternity, but leave me be besides that. With this I acknowledged that almost any other projects, any other work, is going to have come from self-motivation with the understanding that things might not change. Because people don't always want to change, it turns out. I taped a quote to my wall, "It is possible, even desirable, to give 100 percent effort to an activity without having any stake in the results." (The quote, I believe, came from The Geography of Bliss, by Eric Weiner.) Motivation poked it's head in the door, it is listening at least. That's a step in the right direction.

Sali blinked at me for a minute, confused by what I was asking. Finally, she blurted out, "Yes! Mariam [that's me], sometimes people don't have the money to change right away, or they listen but then go home and are too distracted by taking care of their families to remember to do anything differently. Or you talk to children, and they can't change anything in their parents' home, but they will remember and change how things are when they are in charge. Mariam, people are listening when you talk to them. You have to keep talking to them, to repeat yourself until they can't forget."

Her conviction, her belief in not only me but also what I was trying to do, surprised me. She had never before mentioned that she approved of and really cheered on the small things I did around the village. Then again, I never asked. I was left speechless, nodding. I expected a tentative "maybe this isn't helping," or a superficial "yay Peace Corps!" but I did not expect real fire. That fire seems to have been lit under where Motivation was sitting, bumming on my front door. It's come back inside, though the bags are still half packed. It's probably my job to unpack those bags.




Translations (11/7)
In a way, I'd forgotten what it was like, being thrown into a place where virtually no one spoke the same language as you. Watching my mom interact with my villagers for her few days in the strange place I now refer to as home, I recognized her smile as the same one that was glued to my face when I first walked down this dirt road last August.

We're blessed continuously (literally). Eventually, I don't have the energy to translate line-for-line to my mother's constant 'what are they saying?' 'They greet, they bless,' I respond. I can't begrudge her craving a translator: I've been there, I know the infuriation of not understanding anything and not having any basic connection to the words, as there are between romance languages. You're suspended in an alternate world, and your translator is almost your umbilical cord.

Sharing tea at my host family's, a younger man walks in and greets us. "This is my mother," I explain. He says something that I think references my mom's chest, so I ask him to repeat himself.

"Truly, you're drinking breast milk right now," he repeats.

"Ah," I respond, not knowing what else to say.

"Your mother is here, she always takes care of you so you are drinking breast milk again," he continues, "I too am visiting my mother."

"So we're both drinking breast milk!" I finish for him, understanding and unfazed. My mom asks what he said. I turn to her but stop myself, imagining her reaction. "He's just greeting, I'll explain later," I say. Mom smiles and nods at him.

Later I do tell her what he said, explaining that breasts are not sexualized here, that it's a Malian way of saying I don't have to worry and am being cared for. Mom nods, but she can't hide the shocked and slightly appalled look on her face. Really, I find this all pretty amusing.



World Map Project (10/12)
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this blog entry. Literally hours as I drew lines and squiggles, stared at a wall, and sniffed paint fumes, trying to come up with the right antic to draw you all into the story. Eventually, however, I gave up. Eventually, I didn't want to think about maps or painting for a long time. Still don't, really.

The first map I helped paint was in a friend's village. The homologues kept taking the paintbrushes from us, and then at the end a few men couldn't help themselves from critiquing our painting abilities.
"This is so messy! Look at all of these random dots!"

"Those are supposed to be there, those are islands," we explained, slightly piqued

"No, no. Those can't be real. What are they doing there?"

"Well, people live there."

At this they burst out laughing and slapped each others backs. One finally gasped out, "But where do they put their houses!?" This is what we refer to as a cultural exchange. or something.

Bethany and my world map project evolved slowly. In time, we decided that we would draw out the maps, local 6th graders would do the actual painting, and then we would come in to do any touch-ups in the end. The process worked well, all in all. I learned to let the little things go. And honestly, I was frustrated in August. All of it. Handing over paintbrushes to a group of kids who are not in the habit of coloring can have... exciting results. But when we handed over those brushes and told them we would put their handprints and their names on the wall, each one was so excited. Made me feel fortunate for all of the art classes throughout my life, the fact that my school list at one point included some sort of apron so I wouldn't dirty my clothes while painting and playing with clay.

Without a template to go by, the international fair portion of the project had a number of kinks that will eventually be worked out in reproductions (hopefully). Due to forces outside of our control, the fair was put on hold after the first day, which was enough to leave me exhausted in and of itself. I spent the morning cooking rice, beans, and corn in different forms with women from my village. They laughed when I wasn't sure how to cook rice. Exhasperated explanations (pleas, really) that I knew how to cook rice for myself and just didn't know how to cook 15 kilos of it at once over an open fire... this didn't help my cause.

But in the end we served up giant bowls of a rice and bean dish to represent Mexico and a corn and bean dish to represent Cameroon (both were slight alterations on the original recipes, but the idea was there). "I've been to Mexico, I've been to Cameroon!" the women crowed as they stirred and taste-tested the giant vats of food. We had to keep reminding them how to say both words as well as that the two places were different countries. Still, who knows - maybe they'll start altering some of their own beans-in-a-bowl-of-oil dinners now that we've showed them they could be adding other ingredients.

It was decided that a panel discussion would be much easier than a fair with booths, and keep us somewhat within time constraints, though we still took 2 hours as opposed to the 1 we were allotted. There were many confused faces among the children. We told them to let us know if they were ever confused - one little boy continuously repeated, "I don't understand." But the teachers were helpful and seemingly appreciative, and the kids devoured the food. We had noted how one would have to travel to get to each country we talked about during the panel; right before we left, a little boy came up and asked if we were going to get on our planes and go home now that we were done - he'd misunderstood and thought we'd each come in from the countries we talked about and would then fly away. Explaining the world and it's many cultures, it turns out, is not an easy feat.




(10/9)
I can hear Bethany shuffling behind me, echoing my snails pace as we walk to market. Only 10:00 AM and we are both already silently cursing the heat. Some girls giggle as they walk past, shouting "Tubabu! Waari di yan!" (White girl! Give me money!). I contemplate the amount of energy it would take to tell them off, then contrast it to the energy needed to shake them up a little. I immediately wince at my own thoughts - I would never hit a child, but Mali makes you think hard about it a little too often for comfort. I can imagine the empathetic expression of a volunteer at this versus the scandalized expression of people back home. Maybe it's the heat.

Returning to my mono-colored surroundings, punctuated only by vibrant fabrics, I decide the majority of the year should be called hot season. April-May should be called 'get the hell out of Mali' season. 'Hell,' for short. I sigh and plod along, knowing all will be well when I can find some cold ginger juice and used-clothing piles.

Peace & Love
Elyse