My Village

The surrounding area around my village is awesome and I'm sure that I'll spend a lot of time hiking around it and getting to know the lay of the land. I have no or very little cell phone service in my community and it'll be rough getting to the town that has reception because it's far. I'll do my best to make it out there every three weeks or so, so Mom, I'll call...just more infrequently (yes that's possible).

As for the rest of the details of Ganfa, I'll start with some personal description. The players:

The Bandis (from the French word for Bandit, bearing the same meaning)

The Bandis are a group of 5 to 10 year old boys that runs around my village constantly getting into trouble. They are a gang of about 8 sling shot toting trouble makers that are constantly in some sort of scuffle. The lead is actually one of the youngest and doesn't yet go to school. Malinkes have a way of pronouncing F's as H's, and this kid's name is Fambaga, pronounced Hambaga, so I call him Hamburger -and he's quite the ham. His close associate is his cousin who is about a year or two older. His father runs a boutique that sells tea, soap, rice and sugar. The way the sugar is sold is in small plastic bags and after they are used on pots of tea or mone, the bags are set aside to blow away in the wind. This young Bandi has realized this and has grown a taste for the sugar lined plastic and often times when I see him running around town he's got one of them in his mouth, so I call him Sweet Tooth. Hamburger and Sweet Tooth's other associates vary from day to day but often involve the same group of 5 or 6 which I have yet to learn all of their names. I attempted to recruit them, in my rudimentary Bambara, to help me protect the flowers in my concession that my homologue planted from the sheep that burst through my gate and decide to eat them. The first meeting for my Department of Concessional Defense was yesterday and during the middle of it, Hamburger saw it fit to walk outside the wood fence that lines my concession and pee. I didn't see this because I was reading a book at the time, but was notified of it by the other members shortly thereafter at which point the group decided that I should grab a branch from the tree, strip it of its leaves and teach Hamburger a lesson. I declined the offer and decided discretion would be best as it is our first meeting and if I lose the kingpin, I would surely lose the rest of the Bandis as well. Another thing about the Bandis and what gives them their name is that they really can't be trusted with much. They're always wanting to play cards with me, though none of them know how to play correctly, but whenever I indulge in playing or try to teach them they find ways of cheating and removing any aspect of competition from the game as they quickly gang up and claim victory. Cards with them for now is a lost cause.

Hamburger manning the slingshot with sweet tooth on the right.

The Musow (The Women)

They work incredibly hard and spend most of their day cooking and taking care of the kids. All of them are incredibly friendly, but our conversations don't extend much past standard greetings as they only speak Malinke for the most part. I'm quite positive that every girl above the age of 12 could easily beat me up. They throw around 20 liter water jugs like it's nothing, pound millet for hours with these over sized mortar and pestles and from this have incredibly muscular arms. With that in mind I've done my best to stay on their good sides and oblige to help them whenever asked with corn harvest or peanut shelling.

Cew (The Men)

Most of the men work in the fields all day doing back breaking labor with small tools that cause you to stoop over and put a lot of stress on your back. Most are very good natured and happy to help me learn Bambara while drinking tea and discussing local politics. Two of the notable cew in the village are my homologue Nwugoun and my friend which just left for Bamako for 3 months today Niouma. They have both been very helpful in getting me adjusted to the village life. Nwugoun is a very soft spoken good guy who is the first Malian I've noted in my village to enjoy the look of flowers. He planted some in my concession, but they were quickly eaten by sheep. My favorite time with him was when I was just getting into Bambara and my knowledge of it was really poor. He came over after dinner and we sat and watched the toads that lined up around the light to eat the bugs. He started throwing little pieces of charcoal at this one who when pelted with the little pieces would lash his tongue out and gobble down the charcoal. Bambara makes you sound like Yoda from Star Wars if translated word for word and at the time I was still listening to sentences and doing that and Nwugoun turned to me and said "Look, great hunger has this one" as he threw more charcoal at him which the toad continued to eat. I laughed pretty hard when I heard that and realized that Nwugoun and I had a lot in common as we both found it hilarious that this stupid toad would keep eating charcoal.

Nwugoun with his flowers

Niouma is a bit different from Nwugoun. He's a little bit taller than me and with roughly the same build. He's a bit more a ladies man than the average Ganfan man and shows it with crisp, clean jeans and a button up t-shirt (always with the collar up -I haven't figured out how to talk fashion with him yet, but hopefully I can convince him to change that). Niouma is one of the guys I go to the market in Dioukeli (Joe-kelly : a village about 11km away) with every Thursday. He takes a lot of offense to people that try to rip me off because I'm white and he ends up doing a lot of my bargaining for me in the market.

Cewkoroba (old men)

Most of the old men speak Malinke so I don't spend too much time with them. The majority of them spend their days making baskets out of palm fronds and drinking tea. One of the nicest guys in the village is Mamadou Diaby and he has taken it upon himself to make sure that everything is taken care of for me. He does a lot of work with pump maintenance and is one of a select few people who can actually read. Unfortunately, his sight is going and with that is his ability to read. He's currently blind in one eye and has depth perception troubles, so I help him by lighting his cigarettes for him. He has this uncanny skill of holding on to his cigarettes without ashing them and building this 3 inch long ash trail all the while making vigorous hand gestures (as pantomiming things is one of the best ways for me to communicate right now). He has a ton of knowledge about water sanitation and pump maintainance and is very excited that I'm in his village.

Diaby on the left, standing with neighbor and kids

Cool things I've seen:

Someone tried to sell me this monkey

This is how we cook corn on the cob

Red-billed Horn Bill

Hippos

I'm officially a sworn in Peace Corps Volunteer. Swear in was the 10th of September, so it's been some time since then. I meant to update this shortly thereafter, but it is hard to find a reliable source for internet. Anyhow, the swear in ceremony was similar to that of a small high school graduation -only with the main language being French and with Malian TV cameras there. Everyone met at the embassy, most in traditional Malian garb and my specific homestay group of guys in our own take on Malian attire. We chose some fabric from the local market and had the tailor throw it all together in what we still think to be a rather fashionable ensemble. You can be the judge for yourself though:

Soundougouba Homestay Crew (Colleen, Owen, Eric, Matt S, Me, Matt C, & Pilar)

Everyone: Risky Business

So we sat in the heat of the day listening to the speaches given by the Country Director, fellow volunteers who exhibited some of the different languages learned over the past two and a half months and finally the Embassador. After sweating through the speaches and congratulations we were invited to stand and take our vow to defend the constitution at which point the elation of the whole process struck us as we were now allowed to seek cooler shade the after party. I spent the night hanging out with my other 65 fellow volunteers in Bamako at various establishments allthewhile maintaining the most professional behavior and setting a spendid example of how a good American boy should behave. Seriously...

The next day we regrouped at the Tubaniso training center and prepared for the next following day which would take us to our sites for final installation and the upcoming two years of our lives. For the first three months we aren't allowed to leave our region which is kind of a bummer, but more so to make sure that we can hack it. However, in those three months we have relatively few objectives outside of getting as integrated as possible into your community. It sounds a lot easier than it is. My village, as I may have mentioned speaks Malinke, not Bambara which I learned in training. Granted, there are some similarities between the two but for the most part I have a lot of difficulty figuring it out. The problem is that they sound very much alike and since my Bambara was pretty poor upon arrival I assumed that I just wasn't understanding the Bambara, but it has become strikingly evident that their usage of Bambara is very limited. Unless I specifically preface a conversation with "please speak Bambara only," Malinke is the only spoken language. Even then, their conversations are peppered with Malinke words and different pronunciations of words than I'm not used to hearing and gaining full understanding of what's going on is quite a chore. The women, older men, and young children don't speak any Bambara. The men from about 12 to 50 speak Bambara. In a village of 400 people, that's about half. It's frustrating because I constantly get asked 'why I don't speak Malinke' and I respond with 'the same reason you don't speak English.' It's hard to maintain composure because I take a lot of flack from the kids that think it's easy to speak Malinke and since they don't hear me speak anything but garbled Bambara and horrid French and therefore assume that I'm retarded -then I just start speaking to them in English and get as angry at them as they do at me when I don't understand them. It's rough, but simple joys can be taken in the nicer families that find time to stop by my house with tea, peanuts and roasted ears of corn and more than make up for the troubles I encounter day to day with language. Overall, I love my village immensely, but there are some things that make living in it very difficult. The food is awesome. I usually eat alone and since they don't use utensils I use my hands. My diatigi's (jah tee gee : host) wives are excellent cooks and I'm supplied with tons of millet, corn or rice covered in tigadegena (peanut sauce) which is one of my new favorite things. I don't eat much meat, but since I've now witnessed an in-village slaughter of a goat, I'm not sure that I want to eat much. In between meals I spend my days eating peanuts and since we just harvested the corn, we've been eating a lot of ears of corn -at the peak I was eating upwards of 5 ears a day cooked on charcoal. I have absolutely no complaints about the food as the Malinke people are well known for having spectacular peanut dishes. My day to day routine goes as follows: I wake up at or shortly after 6 when one of my diatigi's wives brings water to bathe with. I take a bucket bath after about 30 minutes of light exercise. After that I read a little while and await the arrival of breakfast, usually in the form of mone (Moh-nee - millet porridge) or siri (rice or corn porridge). After that my supervisor usually stops by and informs me of his plan for the day at which point I agree to do whatever he's doing, decide to go work in the field with my homologue or diatigi or sit it out and study in my concession. There's no shade in my concession after about 10 AM and I'm forced to take refuge under the big tree in the middle of the village which is a common hang out for those who don't go off to the field during the heat of the day. Tea is made sporadically throughout the day (yes, I now own a tea set and am not afraid to admit it). The tea is half sugar and half tea and is served in the form of shots in small glasses. You have to be cautious about the timing of your tea drinking because if you drink it to late you'll be up all night...I've made that mistake several times. Also, cards are played as well. Usually a game called Cent Cinquante-et-Un (151) which is basically Malian Uno. Lunch is served around noon and dinner shortly after 7, after the sun has set. The problem with dinner is that sunset unleashes throngs of bugs from the grassy areas. If I wear my head lamp I will literally get rained on by bugs. Being that I'm too lazy to take my food inside and attempt to eat it under my bug net, I end up eating a lot of bugs. It's not a bad thing because most don't really have any taste, however, recently there's been this spawn of little flying beetles. They're about the size of an M&M and love flying right into my food. Initially I plucked them out, but with time I got complacent and lazy and haphazardly stuck my hand in the bowl and withdrew without looking beforehand. I immediately realized my mistake and came to the realization that these aren't normal beetles, but stink bugs. Since then I've been much more attentive to what I eat but there are so many of these bugs that it's impossible to avoid them all. I have yet to develop a taste for them, but the toads that come into my concession with the night who congregate in front of my area light like the ones that I throw out covered in tigadegena. Accompanying the thousands of flying beetles that come every night are hordes of toads to snack on the ones that stick around the light too long. After about an hour of aerial attacks by the beetles they stop coming and around 8 or 9 I can sit back and enjoy the full advantage of being in the middle of nowhere without power as the milky way stems from horizon to horizon and countless stars blur the constellations.

My Village

My Huts

Dinner: Tigadegena & To

The black things are the beetles and those are toads...the flash made it look light outside but it's pitch black

My hut with a rainbow

Me Chasing Hippos

I will update more tomorrow...I swear.