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.

November's Activities

The arrival of December marks the end of my 5th month in Mali. Cold season is starting and although many of you might not call it cold directly the 90 degree days somehow have a different feeling to them. The wind picks up and it's really dry. Peanut farming has ended much to the delight of my blistered hands and I'm headed back into Bamako for 2 weeks of training in water sanitation stuff. Not too much has been going on outside of some Bambara studying and I can't help feeling like I'm at some distant summer camp. It didn't really strike me that I was in Africa...until recently.

I was sitting in my concession a couple days before Thanksgiving and I heard a lot of people talking excitedly about 100m from my huts. The procession of about 20 people (most of them kids) was walking in my direction and after they passed and moved to my neighbor's concession my counterpart came over and said "Come quick, there's a big snake!" Usually Malians tend to exaggerate the size of snakes and I expected maybe a 5 footer. I found this:A 12 foot African Rock Python. They quickly killed it and looked around proudly as the meat was filleted. I asked the guy who's holding the snake in the above picture, Bonjugu, if I could try it. He looked at me a little funny as if it were a crime that I had never eaten snake meat before and while patting my back with a huge smile said, "Ni Allah soona, I bena sa sogo dun sufe" "If God wills it, you will eat snake meat later tonight." Apparently Allah had other plans and he willed me a wicked giardia relapse before night's end but before that, I couldn't resist the photo op with this 50lb beast :It's hard describing perspective to Malians and you can't really see the magnitude of the snake in my hands. (also, yes, those are his guts on the right side)
After the stark realization that reptiles like this roam around my village I realized that I was indeed, in Africa. It still feels a little like summer camp though.

Thanksgiving came and went and I decided to stay in my village to get ready for the biggest Muslim holiday of the year Tabaski. It synchronized well with Thanksgiving and I was able to feast with my villagers on goat and lamb meat. During Tabaski, everyone gets new clothes and decides to debut them, so I got a lot of family portraits of the 15 families in my village. Also, there was lots of music and dancing -an all around fun time.The village dancing with drummers in the middleMy host family in their new clothes

Mamadou looking innocent in his new complet (keyword: looking)

Some other interesting things that have happened that have furthered my realization that I'm no longer in the states:

One of the older guys in my village pointed at a line in the dirt in front of my house and said that it was a snake path. I asked him where the snake had gone and he said he didn't know, but probably over there and nodded his head in the direction of my house while making a clicking noise with his tongue. We searched around inside my hut and couldn't find it, so we went back out to re-examine the path which we both decided was conclusive evidence that it's most definitely in the hut somewhere. During my second look I started moving some things around while wielding a long bamboo staff, my movements being followed by a group of onlookers peeping their heads through the screen door to see what the commotion was about. I pulled back my trunk and heard a really loud hiss and knew I found him. The hiss and coloring was indicative of a certain species of viper that is known to inhabit this area called the Puff Adder. It was small and not very intimidating, but the sound it made and the defensive position it took made me realize he meant business. I'm not one for killing everything and ideally I would have liked to do a catch and release sort of thing, but with the group of Malians behind me, my reputation as a man in the village on the line, along with my knowledge of this specific snake and what it could do to the kids in my village if I released it somewhere and it came back, I decided it was best to use the Malian philosophy: Kill All Snakes. So, I smashed his face with the bamboo staff and walked out of my house to the approval of the crowd of villagers assembled outside my door. Check it out:

Okay, so it's an adolescent snake which hasn't quite grown into it's coloring. There are markings on its back resembling what an adult puff adder should look like, but I'm not 100% sure my assumption was correct. Definitely some sort of viper because I looked at his fangs during what I'll call a "field autopsy." (Sidenote: Mom, don't do any research on this snake, just trust that I'm taking necessary precautions to avoid them)

Also, I found what I think is some sort of whip scorpion under my pillow in the stage house. Not really sure though. It looked like this:

So, if these things haven't gotten you excited to come out and visit me I don't know what else to do. I'm enjoying the wildlife a lot and finally all of those hours I thought I wasted watching Discovery Channel snake specials are paying off.

Another cool thing I saw was a hippo territorial dispute. It was pretty intense, as this one lone bull approached the family that normally sits in front of the stage house in Manantali. There's something pretty crazy about seeing animals that are the size of mini-vans with 12 inch tusks and mouths that can fit full grown humans inside battling it out, good times. My friend Jason took these pictures below...we were at a safe distance without a good zoom on the camera and I've compressed the pictures to fit them on here so that's why the image is slightly blurry.
Here's some other pictures that I took that I can post because the internet is good right now:

Sunrise as viewed from the gate of my concession.

The Manantali Stage house (there's two huts side by side), in case you were wondering what I was referring to when I mentioned it. The river is right behind where I took the picture from. This is where I spend my time if I'm not at site, there's an actual toilette (not just a hole in the ground), power, a shower, and a kitchen.


The neighbors kid with the monitor lizard he caught and later cooked. Once again, I didn't partake in eating it or taking the picture, Jason did, and he said the meat was surprisingly good and tasted like chicken (in case you were wondering).

That's all for now. I'll be within email range for the next couple weeks, so if you'd like a moderately prompt response, from now until the January would be a good time.

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.

Here are some of the pictures from the previous weeks of home-stay. They are basically in chronological order beginning with me eating breakfast inside my hut sitting on my small bed with the mosquito net.


A picture of the outside of my hut with the Peace Corps blue surrounding the windows and door frame. The paint has done nothing to slow the constant onslaught of crickets invading my personal space, so I've begun capturing geckos and letting them run amok in my room. So far the crickets are winning.


This is a picture of my host dad (N'tji Otis Diara). This is shortly after eating lunch one afternoon. Also, he's not unhappy, it's just really hard to get Malians to smile in pictures.

Next is a picture of some of the locals outside of the corner store watching a soccer game.

A picture of some of the family. There's a ton of kids running around in my concession so I'm not sure which are direct brothers and cousins, but I do know that on the left is my host mom and she's been taking care of me quite well.

My sisters making shea butter.

Some other trainees and I at a wedding in Baguineda Camp (3km from my village)
Panoramic shot of Soudougouba and surrounding area. (the sun was setting on the left side, so that's why it looks bleached.)

Sunset shortly after the panorama was taken.


Boats out on the Niger river pulling up sand for brick making.

Now for some animal life:
A cool looking grasshopper with one leg missing.
A gecko trying to escape into a crevice.

An owl. It's way bigger than the picture makes it look.


I'm still doing well in Soundougouba. We're currently about to head to our sites for the first time in 4 days. I found out this afternoon that I will be spending the next 2 years in Ganfan in the Kayes region (in the south west of the country towards Senegal). I'm really excited and will have more pictures from there to show you when I get back in a little under 3 weeks.

Also, my address is:

Corps de la Paix
BP 85
Bamako, Mali

Feel free to send stuff.