I gotten a lot of requests to translate that last line, so here's the story that goes with it: I came into Segou for new years eve, and took a boat ride on the river to watch the sun set with some friends. While we were on the boat we saw some fireworks (Malians celebrate new years, too!). I tried to ask the word for fireworks in bambara: A be fo cogodi ni tasuma be sanfe? (translation: How is it called when fire is in the sky?). And the answer I got was "Tasuma be sanfe" (fire in the sky). This might be a 'had to be there' moment, but it says something about the literalness of the language that continually cracks me up.
Anyway, I'm back in Segou having finished another round of training. I'm really looking foreward to getting back to my village, as I now have several exciting project ideas that I need to go over with them. I've been talking to Engineers Without Boarders (another volunteer service organization) about collaborating on the construction of a real school building in my village (made out of more than sticks and leaves) that incorporates large scale rainwater harvesting for irrigation in the garden. Nothing is certain yet, but the project would take care of several of my village's biggest needs - education, access to water, and small scale income generation (i.e. selling the produce from the garden), so I'm working hard to make it happen.
I don't know when I got so busy! I'll be back in Bamako in a little over a week to attend a conference on Earthen Architecture, then I'm off to Senegal for the West African International Softball Tournament (WAIST). Lots of fun ahead.
Please keep me posted on how all of YOU are doing!
Friday, January 25, 2008
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Tasuma be Sanfe de!
Sorry for the short christmas post, but, as promised, I can write more often now that I'm in Bamako for a few weeks, with all the luxuries of the modern world. We tried to watch the OSU game last night, huddled together under discarded refugee blankets at 1 in the morning, but it wouldn't stream fast enough from the internet, so we gave up. I heard they lost anyway. Tonight we're taking advantage of the CNN access here to watch the New Hampshire primaries. We'll take what we can get.
What brings me to Bamako, other than internet and CNN, is the second phase of technical training. In between football games and catching up with all the other volunteers, we're learning methods for digging wells, irrigating gardens, composting, etc., and also how to find funding for such projects.
I mentioned refugee blankets - yes, it's freezing here! I didn't take them seriously when they said that cold season was coming, but it's true! I'm wearing sweaters and sitting around fires to keep warm.
A be fo cogodi ni tasuma be sanfe?
What brings me to Bamako, other than internet and CNN, is the second phase of technical training. In between football games and catching up with all the other volunteers, we're learning methods for digging wells, irrigating gardens, composting, etc., and also how to find funding for such projects.
I mentioned refugee blankets - yes, it's freezing here! I didn't take them seriously when they said that cold season was coming, but it's true! I'm wearing sweaters and sitting around fires to keep warm.
A be fo cogodi ni tasuma be sanfe?
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
All I got for Christmas was giardia
After Tabaski, I headed down to Bamako to spend Christmas with some friends. Warm weather and the pace of the big city snuffed out much of the holiday feel, but we celebrated christmas eve toasting wine and cheese cozily at our hotel. Even though Bamako offers 'real food' such as hamburgers and ice cream, we ate our Christmas dinner at an egg shack, and headed out to watch some live music. That's when it hit me. I spent the rest of christmas in the bathroom, humming carols.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Tabaski Sauce
(disclaimer - this post is not for the weak stomached!)
I survived my first Tabaski and am back in the city having JUST finished a 50K bike ride. (The internet cafe is air conditioned, so it's a good place to cool off!)
Tabaski started out much like Ramadan: everyone wore their best clothes and prayed together in a field (see previous picture), but after the prayer everyone rushed to the village center for a mass slaughtering of sheep. Since every family is required to kill a sheep (in memory of the sheep Abraham killed instead of his son), we're talking somewhere around 30 sheep, necks slit, in a pile, twitching on the ground. I'll spare you all the pictures. The rest of the day was spent cooking and eating. Everyone in the village also felt compelled to give me a pile of their meat, and by the end of the day I had amassed over 10 kilo's, piled into a bucket. Keep in mind that when I say meat I mean every part that once belonged to the animal: bones, stomaches, intestines, everything. Now some of these are actually quite good; the liver's tasty, as are the kidneys. But the stomach I just can't stomach. I ended up giving a lot of my loot away to other families. The meat fest was followed by a lot of dancing and drinking of tea, late into the night.
Now I'm getting ready for christmas in the city with other volunteers and, hopefully, with a little less meat.
I survived my first Tabaski and am back in the city having JUST finished a 50K bike ride. (The internet cafe is air conditioned, so it's a good place to cool off!)
Tabaski started out much like Ramadan: everyone wore their best clothes and prayed together in a field (see previous picture), but after the prayer everyone rushed to the village center for a mass slaughtering of sheep. Since every family is required to kill a sheep (in memory of the sheep Abraham killed instead of his son), we're talking somewhere around 30 sheep, necks slit, in a pile, twitching on the ground. I'll spare you all the pictures. The rest of the day was spent cooking and eating. Everyone in the village also felt compelled to give me a pile of their meat, and by the end of the day I had amassed over 10 kilo's, piled into a bucket. Keep in mind that when I say meat I mean every part that once belonged to the animal: bones, stomaches, intestines, everything. Now some of these are actually quite good; the liver's tasty, as are the kidneys. But the stomach I just can't stomach. I ended up giving a lot of my loot away to other families. The meat fest was followed by a lot of dancing and drinking of tea, late into the night.
Now I'm getting ready for christmas in the city with other volunteers and, hopefully, with a little less meat.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
"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...
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...
Friday, November 2, 2007
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.
Monday, October 22, 2007
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??
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??
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