A squared plus B squared (or How does your garden grow?)

Village life is still surprisingly busy. The women really want to start a vegetable garden, so we're diving right in, head first, while it's still a good season to start planting. I found 30 women to form a committee, and put them in charge of deciding what to grow and where to buy the seeds, and I arranged with the chief to give us the plot of land. I felt just like a real architect as I went out to measure the site and sketch a plan of where all the plots will go. But there's no tape measure, so I had to do it Malian style by measuring out one meter (the length of my feet to my bottom rib) and then tying knots in a rope at 1 meter intervals. But I couldn't figure out how to make a perfect right angle until just this morning when I woke up dreaming about finding the hypotenuse of a right triangle, and realized that was the answer I was looking for. And luck would have it that the dimensions just happen to be 30 by 40! Thank you Pythagoras. So we're starting construction of the fence tomorrow when I get back. I'm in the city now, catching up on the stories from other volunteers' villages and eating 'real' food. Which brings me to the subject of food. I'm learning to cook all over again as my ingredients are limited to millet, rice, onions, salt, various leaves, and the occasional tomato. I'm getting pretty creative, but the only other alternative is the afore-mentioned playdoh and snot sauce, which I want to aviod if possible.
We did have meat for Fitr, at the end of ramadan. I watched as they killed two cows, skinned them, and divided up all (and I do mean All) the pieces. We had a big fiest at sunset, and the next morning the entire village gathered in a field at sunrise to pray; men in the front, boys in the back, and women off to the side (and me, standing with the young girls, looking on). Then we drank coffee, ate candy, and had a dance party for the rest of the day. It was quite a good time. The next day I was snapped back into reality as another child died, the 4th in the village since I've been there, and I had to go make the proper blessings to the family. When you hear statistics like "6,000,000 children under the age of 5 die each year from malnutrition" (or, like, 16,000 a day, if I did the math right), it's hard to fathom until you see the reality of it. If you add the next 2 leading causes of death, waterborn diseases and AIDS, the number goes up to around 40,000 a day. From preventable causes. (...stay with me, I'll get off the soap box soon...) I'm excited about the work in Jeffrey Sachs' Millennium Villages, one of which is only a few kilometers from my site. The basic idea is that if you pump enough money into an area to bring up everything at the same time (i.e. education, health, agriculture) that it has a much better chance at sustaining itself than a village receiving aid in only one sector. It's an experiment (a very very well funded experiment) and I'm excited to see how it works over the next 2 years.
I could write for another hour, but my internet time is up. Thank you to everyone who's sent me emails, snail mails, and packages! They are so appreciated; keep them coming! Blog comments are also appreciated. How else do I know if anyone is reading this thing??

New Address

oh, where to start? I moved into my village, set up house. A bed, a floor mat, and some pots and pans are about my only furnishings so far, but I put that interior design degree to use, made some curtains, and decorated the termite infested walls a little. Its about as cozy as a mud hut could be. Ive been super busy the last two weeks getting to know everyone in the village, and settling in. Ive also done an incredible amount of manual labor. I didnt know the bambara word for architect (because there is no word) so I told my village I was a house builder, and theyve been putting me to work! I built a soak pit for my waste water, helped build a small addition to the school (out of sticks and rope, like robinson crusoe), and built a porch off my house so I can sit outside in the shade.
Ive also been doing some baseline surveys to figure out what the village needs (and figure out what I should be doing for the next two years). Aside from sanitation needs like soak pits, access to potable water, and trash management, the women are really interested in starting a collective vegetable garden, which I think will be a fun side project. On a much larger scale, from what Ive seen, there is also the need to develop the infrastructure for the village to host a market once a week, as they have to travel several hours to the closest market town. The chief is really excited by the idea of a market, as am I, so Im doing some work to figure out the economics of how it would work, etc. In short, Ive got a lot to keep me busy!
My new address is:

Mary Althoff
Corps de la Paix
B.P. 117
Segou, Mali
West Africa

I love to get mail and packages! Send junk food, candy, spices, seeds (veggies and flowers), and pictures of ya'll. And can somebody send me a potato peeler? Just one please, though, so pick a delegate.