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 membersI 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.
