"Cold Season"

Happy Thanksgiving! I just got back into town after spending Thanksgiving with some other volunteers. We actually managed to make a complete thanksgiving dinner, with turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, green beans, fruit salad, even pumpkin pie! It was amazing. We bought 2 turkeys (alive) cut their necks (facing mecca, of course), took out feathers and organs, and cooked 'em up. And to think that I was once a vegetarian!




But it's back to work tomorrow. It's "cold season" which means there's a lot of work going on. By cold I mean sometimes it gets down to the 70's, at night. Yet people in my village are starting to walk around in hats and puffy coats!
Now is the time of year when everyone is harvesting crops, and here that consists mostly of millet. I've gone out to the fields a few times to help, but mostly I've been constructing structures to store the grain (cereal banks, I guess), made out of mud. They have a really neat method of stacking interlocking wet mud bricks into circular forms with a single window. It's pretty fast, and with 3 people you can get one up in about two days.





I'm also getting chickens next week to raise for the eggs (and for a steady source of protien)! So between the garden, the (free range) chickens, the lack of electricity, and riding my bike everywhere, my carbon impact is probably the lowest it's ever been. (Minus the bit of petrol I use in my lantern.) All the farming here is done without machines, too; it's picked by hand, carried on heads, and then transported by donkey cart.






That's pretty much the update. I feel like I've just about settled in, although there are still plenty of random events (like having a picnic in the middle of a millet field, gathered around a single bowl scooping up handfulls of toh and snot sauce) to remind me that, oh yeah, I'm in Africa...

Goats and Watermelons

The end of Ramadan, the men praying together.


Dance party!


At exactly noon every day, all the goats in the village (that's, like, several thousand goats!) gather in front of my house on their way out to pasture. You have to see the video to really understand how crazy it is.


A bunch of volunteers met up to celebrate halloween in the city. There's no pumpkins in Mali, so we carved watermelons (which, surprisingly, ARE in Mali)!



And the garden is coming along quickly. We finished the fence in a day, with the help of half the men in the village who showed up to dig holes, cut branches, and tie sticks together. It looks great, and we're going to start planting as soon as I get back to site.

That's the update for now. Life goes along at a slow pace, yet my thoughts run as fast as ever.

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.

Beans, Beans, The Magical Fruit

Training is almost finished. We left Missalabugu yesterday with heavy hearts on both sides. It was delicate, also, to explain again to my host family that even though I've been living with them for 2 months and they've been helping me learn the language, cooking for me, and washing my clothes, that now I'm going to go do projects in ANOTHER village. I'm not giving anything to the village that has given me so much. I learned how to say the equivalent of 'it's not up to me' in Bambara, but I still feel a little remorse. I did get to do one little construction project just before we left: a wash area and soak pit next to one of the community wells.





A soak pit is basically a hole filled with rocks that water drains into and can then be absorbed back into the ground, rather than running all over the place. And the wash area is a small concrete pad where woman can come to wash clothes, rather than making a bunch of soapy mud in front of their houses. Even though we were pretty rushed, both came out pretty well and the village is really happy with them. We also did a sensitization session about hand washing and sanitation - a little taste of what I'll be doing a lot when I get to my village.
Then we threw a big farewell party! We bought 20 kg of beans (enough to feed the whole village) and cooked them up with tomato, onion, garlic, and lots of hot pepper. It was tasty, but the truth is that we really just wanted to get them to eat beans for the protein. See, Malians are a little bit like 3rd graders when it comes to beans... They insist that eating beans makes your fart, and farting is totally totally unthinkably rude, so they don't eat beans. They all like beans, and beans are the same price as rice, which they eat all the time, but they can't seem to get over the stigma of farting. So we told them it was "american food" and they ate it. Everybody seemed to like it, and even if they didn't, they ate it anyway and it was more much-needed protein than they normally get in a month. Ramadan started a few days ago and everyone is fasting from sunrise to sunset, so we ate the beans in the dark. And then we had a dance party to some malian music.



On a bit sadder note, my 3 year-old host-brother died last week, of malaria. It was the second infant death in the village during the 2 months we were there, the first being of malnutrition. The day of his death everyone in the village came to my house and gave blessings, men on one side women on the other. We all sat in silence for half an hour or an hour, while the elders in the village took the body to be buried. Then everyone kind-of went about the rest of their day as though nothing had happened, and it wasn't mentioned again. It was staggering. There are so many tragic realities here that could be easily avoided through education. We don't know how good we have it.


(On a happier note, yes, that IS a new yorker magazine!)

I finish up my technical training this week and then move to my site. But I've got internet all this week, and don't really know what else ya'll want to hear about... so flood the comments with questions! In the meantime, here are some nice photos I've taken:

No Troubles

Where to start?? The last week feels like several years worth of experiences. I visited the village where I'll be living for the next two years. It totally fits every expectation (good and bad) that I'd imagined. It's a really small village, about 400 or possibly 500 people. It's "in the bush" meaning far far from civilization. Needless to say there's no running water or electricity. The morning routine of taking a shower (which is repeated again before dinner) involves waking up with the sun to the sounds of roosters and donkeys (and if you've never heard a donkey, consider it a blessing), then I walk to the well with my bucket, hitch it to the rope, and drop it down. I'm going to have arms of iron soon, because, man, that bucket is HEAVY to pull back up, even with a pulley. Then I carry it on my head back to my house, and take a bucket bath. All of this is done in total silence, as you're not allowed to greet anyone until after you've washed your face. Once clean, I come back out of my house and greet everyone. This is not just a simple 'hello,' but rather an extended interview process with every person encountered. The dialogue is totally scripted and, loosely translated, goes something like this:

A: you and morning
B: N-say, you and morning
A: peace in the night?
B: only peace
A: are you in good health?
B: no troubles
A: is your father in good health?
B: no troubles
A: is your mother in good health?
B: no troubles
A: is your family in good health?
B: no troubles.
A: N-say
B: N-say
A: N-say
B: peace in the night?
A: only peace
B: are you in good health
A: no troubles
etc....

Then you move on to the next person and start over again. There is no variation. Even if your father is dying of malaria, you have to say 'no troubles.' There's also really no translation for "N-say." If you're a guy you'd say "N-baa" instead, but it's really just like a "yeah, man."

I can see that I'll have no lack of water/sanitation projects over the next two years. There are so many obvious things to be done, and more that I'm sure I don't know about yet. There are several wells in the village, all of which I'm told go dry after the rainy season (which we're in now). Also, many of the houses have negens (poop holes) that drain right into the street, which is muddy and covered in green slime where mosquitos like to breed. The village has been waiting for a volunteer for a long time, and I can sense that they're incredibly motivated. The hard part might be finding times to work; the women (just like in Missalabugu) work in the fields and cook all day, as do many of the men. The older men tend to sit around most of the day drinking tea and taking naps.



The food is terrible. Everyone eats a dish called "toh" for breakfast lunch and dinner. It's basically a grey paste made of millet that has the texture of play-doh and tastes like feet. Then they put a green snot sauce on it and eat it together out of a huge bowl.




I enjoy the communal aspect of eating, but there's no way I can choke down toh for every meal. So the last morning I was there, I borrowed a little stove and pot and made an omelette. The people in the village were so fascinated they started bringing over eggs for me to cook for them, and soon I had a small omelette restaurant going. It was unbelievable.



My house is totally pimp. It's made of mud, but it feels like a mansion. I've got 4 rooms, a negen, and a big courtyard with a tree. I've already decorated and furnished it in my head, and I've got plans to start a garden in the courtyard to grow some vegetables.



It's also pretty easy to get to Segou (the closest big city) from my site. I have to bike for an hour and a half to get to the main road, and then catch a bus into town (which is about a 30 min ride). But Segou is really an amazing city. It's much cleaner and more compact than Bamako, making it nice to walk around. It's also right on the Niger river, so there's some boat traffic and some terrific sunsets.





I spent two nights there with the rest of the volunteers in the region, eating pizza and going out to the dance clubs - quite a contrast to the slow pace of life in the village. Then on the way back, the bus made a stop so that everyone could get out and pray by the side of the road.


(this is the mosque in my village)

I can’t help but compare everything here to India. It’s the same in so many ways, yet lacking in certain details, the most noticeable and ruffling I attribute to what I see as a diminished appreciation for beauty, in an abstract sense. In Indian villages, even though poverty and sanitation are just as bad, there was always time to draw a pattern or a mandala on the ground, and there was a certain pride in appearance, a respect for design. I don’t quite see that here. It might be that it’s there hiding in a form that I’m not able to discern, but I find myself more stricken by the poverty when it’s mixed with this acceptance or lack of ambition for something better. They have nothing. And even if they have potable water and a lower infant mortality rate after I’m gone, I’m wondering how to give them beauty that’s sustainable.

leaves and peanut butter

I'm back at Tubani So (with electricity and internet!) for the next few days. I finally found out where my permanent site will be in Mali: Tongo. It's a really small village south of Segou, which is a pretty big city. I'm going to visit on Monday to see my house and meet the chief. Then it's back to Tubani So for more technical training, then back to Missalabugu for another few weeks for more language training. I'm really amazed at the amount of Bambara I've learned in such a short time. I've gone from cave-man speak (I. Water. Get.) to actually being able to have pretty decent conversations with people. We had language testing yesterday, and my Bambara is now actually better than my French! It helps that there are no verb conjugations, and very simple grammar.
Other than constantly feeling like I've been hit by a train because of the heat, I've been surprisingly healthy so far. It's a challenge to find protein in the village, because all they eat is millet mush or rice for every meal. (Hence, it's no wonder that so many of them are malnourished with bloated bellies). So I've been eating a ton of peanuts (which my family farms), eggs, and the occasional fish, served whole. They also make this sauce from leaves and peanut butter which sounds gross, but is actually kind of like Indian saag if you use your imagination. I've been trying to help with the cooking as much as I can, both to learn myself and to encourage them to eat more veggies and protein. And when I'm really craving something other than mush, we fry potatoes in oil and have make-shift french fries. Totally yummy.
I'm amazed by the hard lives of the women in my village. They wake up with the sun, pound millet for an hour, cook breakfast, go to the field and farm all day planting peanuts one by one in the relentless sun, come home to pound more millet and cook dinner, wash clothes and dishes, go to bed and do it all over again. It makes my 10 hours a day of language training seem like leisure.