October 2010

Life out in Africa has been treating me pretty well. I recently got to take a 10 day vacation out to Ghana where I spent the entire time on the beach and arrived home to meet Drew and Rudy at the airport for another 10 days of showing them around Mali. Their visit was highlighted by Malinke dance parties, ridiculous sunsets and overall fantastic good times.

I'll start with the stories from Ghana: We flew out to Ghana on the 25th of September for a 10 day trip centered around a Marathon that some of our friends were running. I don't quite have the build for marathons so I thought it best that I sit out and watch to make sure I was right about it -which I was. We stayed in Accra for a couple days after the Marathon to let the runners recover and from there went to Cape Coast which housed a big slave fort back in the days of the slave trade. The size of the fort was incredible and attempting to imagine the terrible conditions of those inside it was impossible, as I was sweating profusely with our small tour group. The fort stood right above enormous breaking waves on a rock jutting into the southern facing, western Atlantic coast and was surrounded by enormous cannons and high walls. The area the fort was located on was one of the most scenic shorelines I had ever seen. Unfortunately, every city we went to was burdened with the same reminder of the exploitation of Africa and the underlying knowledge of Ghana being a huge hub for the slave trade was present everywhere.

Two pictures of the slave fort at Cape Coast

After Cape Coast, we went off to a different hotel on the beach in the middle of nowhere and enjoyed the incredible seafood. We purchased five fresh lobsters and three large tuna and had them cooked for under twenty dollars total. It was an awesome end to a perfect day and made me forget about the sunburn until I got back to the room and looked in a mirror. The next day we left the beach for Accra and Mali the following morning.

The last morning in Accra was interesting. Throughout the trip we had been making references to this woman we met on the street selling pineapples from a plate balanced on the top of her head. Each time a person passed her she would open her eyes to maximum capacity, nod her head towards the oncoming person, and say in an overly exaggerated low voice "Sweeeet!" We initially assumed that was the only word of English she knew, and since she had provided us with so much entertainment throughout the trip we agreed to buy a couple dollars worth of Sweeeet. We ran around Accra in the morning before our 10am flight and finally found her outside of a gas station. From across the road she recognized us and immediately posed a more questioning version of her catch phrase: "Sweeeeet?" To this we replied with something along the lines of 'most definitely' and assumed we'd have to work in hand signals to figure out what she would say afterwards, as none of us had any idea where to begin with the local language of Ga. Ms Sweet, as we now lovingly refer to her, was the most eloquent English speaker we met in all of Ghana. She not only explained the price differences in the pineapples, but the taste difference in those sizes and how she knew that they were ripe and of course Sweeeeet. We walked away from her with six pineapples, one of which she gave to us for free as a token of appreciation for buying so many. I wish I had a picture of us with Ms Sweet, but my camera ran out of batteries before the end of the trip.

Next up was meeting Drew and Rudy in the airport shortly after my flight arrived in Bamako. On the flight I sat next to the trainers of the Liberian national soccer team who were on their way to play Mali in Bamako the following Saturday. I was offered free tickets to the game, but unfortunately had to decline because I had planned on being in my site for the weekend with Rudy and Drew. Also, I couldn't have been on the Liberian side after living in Mali so long. Mali ended up winning 2-1 and I was able to watch the guys I sat next to on the plane from a bar in Manantali.

I spent a day in Manantali with Drew and Rudy because we missed the transport out to my site the morning after we arrived. We walked up a ridge line and bushwhacked through some thick overgrowth. Right before we reached the summit of one of the cliffs we heard voices and saw that there were two men up on top of the ridge with guns. It turns out they were guardians of the upper region surrounding the dam and they helped us up the last rock and offered us a grilled ear of corn. From the top we found out that there is a service road that leads up there and that if we went up that instead of bushwhacking we would have saved at least an hour and prevented ourselves from getting torn up by razor grass and thorns. It didn't really matter though because the second we got to the top we were astounded by the view. I had no idea the reservoir was as big as it was. It was a perfect clear day and I have never seen water look so blue. We got a fantastic picture with our new friend who was very proud to show off his gun that was held together by plastic bands.

On top of the ridge overlooking the reservoir with Fode.

I think the high point was the dance party that my village threw for a wedding that coincided with the boys' visit. The basic format for Malian dance parties is to have five or more people in the middle of a circle doing a modified version of the running man while waving around head wraps that the women hand off to you and alternating high and low clapping. We quickly became professionals and literally danced up a dust storm -or maybe that was just Rudy.

Fatim and Bugari doing the girl-style African jump dance with Drew and Rudy in the background. (Luckily there's no real photo evidence of us dancing, but trust that if there was a rug, it would have been cut to shreds)

A picture of Rudy, Drew and me in Manantali at sunset

Shortly after the Manantali stay, I showed the boys what real African travel was like and put them on a truck-bus to Bamako which overall wasn't bad until a five liter jug of milk spilled out and curdled on the floor next to us an hour away from Bamako. It was gross, but added to the overall pleasantness of the other days. We finished the trip with a couple relaxed days in Dakar before the boys flew out for the states. I'm off to site tomorrow for some much needed village time before the same thing happens again with the parents.

The Last Couple Months

Sorry for the long delay in between entries, but It's been tough being able to get a hold of the internet and for long enough to go through all the pictures I have and get that all sorted out. I'm not used to having power, so my main focus has been enjoying the air conditioning.

Recently there's been a lot going on with the new group of volunteers swearing in on the 3rd and I came in early to help do some training with them. It was for two days, one of which was ridiculously hot, the other it rained heavily the whole time. I'm not sure which I liked better being wet from rain or sweat.

So, the new trainees have all sworn in and now and we have to go through the arduous process of installing them into their sites. Luckily we've only got 2 in Manantali, however, it's no longer MAN-antali because one happens to be a girl. However, now there's four volunteers in Manantali and it should make things a little more interesting with more people to talk to.

I went back to my homestay family's site in Soundougouba last month and visited with N'tji and his family. It was a great time, although I could only stay for a short time. I met the new kid that was staying with him and he loved his homestay as much as I did. N'tji really takes care of his family.

Djeneba, N'tji and I after lunch

Additionally there was a wedding in my community which involved a lot of singing, dancing and gift giving. I've got some videos of the women in my community dancing, but I'm unsure if I can upload them because the files are quite large and the internet here is dreadfully slow.

Also, rainy season just started which has caused some intense difficulty in transport out of my village and a rise the mosquito population. Currently my village is slightly under water and a side project that I've started is planting a tree nursery to help soak up some of the puddles...or swamps rather.

The bride's family before making the procession over to her new home.

Here is a picture of the wedding procession through the middle of my community, normally it's not quite so flooded, but we got over a foot of rain the day before the wedding, thus the necessity for the tree nursery

A Muslim blessing of the goat to be slaughtered for the marriage. The man in white in the middle is the husband and the only woman in the picture is the soon to be wife, you can kind of see it in the background of the next picture hanging upside down.

My host mom and the other ladies preparing food for the wedding.

The bridal party, the bride to be is the one in the middle with the soccer jersey and white head cover on.

A dance around the new husband's house. Lots of jumping and drumming.

Some more local wildlife.

A picture of my Homologue's family.

I was unable to upload any of the videos, but I'll try to get them up at some point in time because it's pretty entertaining. That's all for now, but I'll try to be better about posting more stuff.

May

The end of hot season marks the beginning of rainy season and before coming to Kita we got about a foot of rain in Manantali. I hadn't seen real rain in months and it was nice to just stand outside in it and feel cold for once. It was a pretty fantastic storm and ended with standing water in the house due to the holes in the sheet metal roof. I'm curious to see what it's done to my termite ridden thatch roof in my village.

I'm about to start a big project in the village to put a 2m diameter well in a field so the women's association can start a community garden and improve the latrines in all of the concessions in my village. We're going to be putting concrete slabs over the latrine pits to encourage the kids to use them because right now there's no specified area for kids to use the bathroom and they're afraid to use the latrines because they think they might fall in the hole. It's rough trying to change the ways of the town. I did a formation with a Malian who works with Peace Corps using visual methods to teach villages how to improve their sanitation methods. He spoke a lot about keeping your living space clean and the villagers did a lot of cleaning up afterwords. I was really impressed by the amount of people that showed up and their dedication to meeting the goals we set.

Things are going great and temperatures are starting to drop. Everything's looking up. Here's some pictures:

The community map we made during the formation at my village in the only shady spot in town.

Me and Mohatmadi the day before his naming ceremony (yeah, I need a haircut)
Pigeon meat

The donkey cart relay for getting gravel from the gravel pit over to the area surrounding the pump. We made it fun and turned it into a donkey cart race between the pump and the pit. It was pretty fun.
The spider that's been tormenting my hut. It's tough to gage the size of it, but the piece of wood that is behind it (the one it's not standing on) is about as big as my thigh. That's the best picture I could get because it was moving pretty quick and the flash bleached it out a little.

March and April

Once again it's been quite some time since my last update and as you can imagine, tons of things happened. However, my photo documentation of these events will be lacking slightly because I forgot to bring my memory card from the camera I most often use, but fear not, I'll get those up soon because I have to be back in Kita (the internet town) soon for work stuff.

I've been trying to spend a lot of time at site to get the villagers excited to start projects, but it's been tough. The average daily temperature is somewhere around 115 or more and there's no escaping it. I thought things were going well in early April when I wasn't too bothered by the heat because there was a fairly constant breeze blowing through the town to cool you, or dry you off enough so you didn't know how much you were actually sweating, and then that stopped. Now frequently the temperature breaches the 120 mark and there's no wind, and when it does come, it feels like you've opened the door to an oven that's coated with a fine layer of dust and it's funneled straight into your eyes. Not only does the heat sting your eyes, but the dust gets in there and irritates everything. It's not all bad though. Hot season so far has consisted of a lot of sitting in the shade because you physically can't do anything else. Finding shade is a little harder than it was during other parts of the year because all of the leaves on the big shade trees have fallen off and died due to the lack of water. I spend most of my time hiding under my gua (bamboo trellis) and shifting my position with the steadily changing angle of the sun. Little by little the shade from my gua is diminishing and I finally figured out why. I woke up in the middle of the night a couple weeks back to the sound of termites chomping on the wood supporting the roof and the roof itself. Not sure what I can do to fix that.

Peanut season is long gone and most families are selling off their reserve stocks to have money for the rest of hot season before the rains come in June. This means that my protein intake has taken a hit, but I've got an ace up my sleave -or rather a sling shot in my back pocket. One of my new favorite pre-dinner activities is going through the brush on the cattle trails with a loaded sling shot looking for pretty much anything that moves. At around 5PM most evenings I make my way into the land surrounding the town and do my best to track pheasants, doves and squirrels. I have yet to get a pheasant, because they're pretty flighty, but squirrels and doves are really dumb and love to watch you as you pull back on the rubber sling (last thing they ever see -imagine a sun burned Dennis the Menace, but bearded, 6 foot 4 and 210 lbs). On occasion, I'll grab some of the other guys around my age and a pack of dogs and we'll walk a couple miles down towards the power cables from the dam leading to Senegal where the larger (and tastier) ground squirrels tend to live. We chase them into their holes and dig them out with the help of the dogs. Ground squirrels are pretty good eating, but I have to say pigeon is my favorite. The villagers keep pigeons as pets and they are surprisingly meaty. Chickens are really expensive, but for the low price of 50 cents you can get yourself a fresh plump pigeon -delivered. However, the delivery is usually from a kid looking to make money to buy bon bons and the bird is always alive so you've got to do the dirty work. I've got a system worked out with my host brother, so when he brings me a pigeon, I give it the old chop and he de-feathers it. I usually give him a wing or a leg for his troubles and he's glad to partake in the feast. Pigeon, as one could imagine, tastes exactly like chicken and it makes me pretty nostalgic for my dad's grilled chicken. On another note, it's quite a resilient bird that doesn't like giving up when you're administering the aforementioned 'chop.' It puts up about 45 seconds of struggle after head removal so I always hold it down. I'm really curious to see if it still possesses the ability to fly sans head. Anyway, I'm sure the pheasant is much better and meatier than the pidgeon, but for not having to do any work to get it, the pidgeon might prove to be a better bird.

Pigeon on the left side of a roof at sunset, hungry?

Due to the heat, I've been sleeping outside, which has been pretty incredible. It still doesn't normally get cold enough to warrant puting on any type of blanket, or shirt for that matter, but there's something pretty nice about falling asleep under the stars every night. The clouds are pretty rare and don't really stick around through the night so you get a good view of the major constellations characteristic of this lattitude (which is great for those nights it's too hot to sleep). One thing that's been making sleeping outside a little frightening is this huge desert spider. There's one living in or around my hut and it comes out every night. It's enormous, about the size of my hand and I've got decent sized mits. It makes noise when it walks around because it has these two really long feelers at the front and they click as it passes over rocks. It's also lightning fast which is the really scary part (a 7" spider that's faster than you). Unfortunately I think it had babies because I saw a miniature version of it in my hut. Time will tell. (I have a picture of it, which is on my other camera...to be posted at a later date)

The animals of Ganfa have been quite a burden recently (aside from the pigeon). The cows dug up my soak pit and tore holes into the plastic sheeting intended to keep rain water out. Since it's dry season right now I wasn't all that worried about fixing it quickly, but then legions of toads started coming out of the pipe leading into it from my negen. I was forced to uncover the plastic, remove all of the rocks, take out the toads, throw the rocks back in and cover it up again. I took out somewhere around 10kg of toads. I had to get a picture of it because its the highest concentration of toads I've ever seen in my life. In addition to the cows and toads, the roosters are still waking me up at 330 in the morning in anticipation of the sunrise. I see absolutely no purpose for chickens because no one eats them, as they're too expensive, and roosters have no concept of time to be of any use as an alarm clock. Just another reason the pigeon is superior. Additionally, cats start their fighting sporadically throughout the night and the dog pack decides to join them creating a symphony of horrific screeches followed by the pre-dawn cattle rush behind my hut. TIA. I'll have more soon, in about two weeks.

The Toad Invasion (that bag got completely filled)

Mohatmadi trying to trade his jellies for my shoes (no deal)

Hot season is also roof replacement season. It's incredible how sturdy the bamboo roofs are. The rope is all palm fronds tied together and everything used to make it is grown locally. My job is to make the rope and lift it in place. Then they put everything together and cover it with a layer of dried grass. It's an incredible process that creates a leak-proof shelter to put on top of mud walls.

Old pictures I meant to post a while back from my trip to Senegal and The Gambia:

A picture from a ferry in The Gambia at the port of Banjul.

8 hours after getting on the ferry we ended up on a deserted beach with no one for miles in either direction.

January

This is a long overdue update of my recent wheelings and dealings in Mali:

I'm still enjoying myself pretty well. I spend my days farming peanuts and finding ways to avoid direct exposure to the sun as my Malian friends find it imperative to point out that I'm white and the sun is hot which is a bad combination. I've made some home improvements to make my hut more comfortable, but for the most part it's still a mud cylinder with crickets, spiders, termites and other assorted friends. I keep telling myself that it's cold season and there's no way the digital thermometer in my room can reach 100 degrees...and in order to assure myself of that I've switched it to Celsius. So now at mid-day when I get that urge to check the temperature in an attempt to humor myself at this so called "cold" season I'm reminded that it is -especially when it's a balmy 38 degrees outside. The trick is losing it's novelty as I can quickly do the conversion in my head now, but for a couple days I was sufficiently fooled. Overall though, I'm growing accustomed to the heat and it's not bad at all right now.

As for the home improvements, I recently put up what is known as a "gua" [pronounced like Guatemalal] in Bambara which provides a little extra shade between my two huts. It's made hanging out in my concession much easier but it was a little tough to find the wood to build it. The average Malian gua is about a foot too short for me and I wanted to make sure that I didn't have to duck upon entering my concession, so we cut down some bigger trees to make it and now I've got the tallest gua in town. In addition to the gua, I just finished my first project that was meant as an educational tool to let people know how to get rid of muddy puddles behind their negens from their shower water. I built a soak pit which was a little more difficult than I had expected. I dug the hole, a 1x1m square with a depth of 1.5m with a small hand tool which wasn't all that bad, but in order to fill it I needed a certain type of sandy rock that's found in large numbers in my village. The only problem is that the rocks they have are the size of houses and burried under the topsoil, so I had to dig out and break all of them to get them into a usable size. Once again my hands are covered in blisters but it was all worth it because the project is so far a success and I think the majority of the villagers who watched the building process agree that it's a necessity in some areas.

A picture of my huts with the gua in between them

A picture of the soak pit I built with some community members

I spent a week talking to everyone in town and analyzing the village needs to better understand their ideas of desired projects which they'd like to see completed during my service and it looks like I'll be quite busy for the next couple years. I'm excited to get started and everyone still seems very ambitious and eager to get things going, so keeps me inspired. I scheduled a meeting with all of the older men in my community to discuss potential projects and their feasibility as well as get an overall consensus of commitment from the heads of the household. Overall the meeting went pretty well and I was satisfied that the majority of what I said in Bambara was understood. I suggested a couple things to improve the town that they hadn't thought of like soak pits and other quick and easy sanitation based projects. However, since it's gardening season right now I suggested that they use urine fertilizer (it's not as bad as it sounds) and they had a good laugh. I listed the benefits and other advantages but I think it was mostly lost among their laughs. After I had accumulated a list of ideas I decided it was time to get a different opinion and I sat in on a meeting with the village women's group which was much more organized. This was a bit more tricky because the women only speak Malinke, so everything I said had to be translated. With this there are some inherent problems and I expected that. However, there are some words in Bambara that are universally known throughout the Malinke speaking community and most of those are slang or bad words. One such slang word is wulu, which means dog, and wuluwulu is soak pit. Wulu can be misconstrued if used in the wrong context and not followed by the appropriate post-position or implying direct possession. In these instances it refers to male genetalia. I thought by saying wuluwulu dinge, implying that it was a soak pit hole (dinge means hole) that I could avoid any misunderstandings. However, given that my presentation was in Bambara, the only part they understood was wulu and my intent to build a hole for it as I believe dinge also means hole in Malinke. They erupted into laughter which continued after Nouwnkoun translated it. I didn't even attempt to suggest urine fertilizer for their gardens. All in all, it wasn't a complete loss and I walked away from the meeting with some valuable information, two pockets full of roasted peanuts and an embarassed look on my face.

Mango season is also coming quickly and I'm really excited. Everyone's gardens are in full bloom and most people are dreading the arrival of hot season which starts in March. The wells in my town dry up around late April so there won't be any work to do in the gardens then. I'm pretty worried about hot season and the prospects of not seeing rain for another 5 months so I spoke with the oldest man in my village about getting through the heat and he told me about his method by proudly showing me his field of tobacco. His plan is to sit in the shade, drink tea and chew tobacco...I don't know if that will be my method for getting through it but a hammock and shade are definitely in order. Here's a picture of his field:

Also, I learned how to build mud huts with my Nouwnkoun. He and his father built a circular hut because his old one was completely eaten by termites. They took dirt, water and dried grass and mixed it all together and formed 2 foot long mud cylinders, then they smoothed them out in the shape of a circle adding about 8 inches of mud to it per day. Here's how that looked:
I also took a vacation recently to Dakar for the West African International Softball Tournament but I have yet to get all the pictures from friends. I'll try to get that posted in the next couple days while I'm still in the reaches of internet.