Happy Thanksgiving Everybody! After a couple days of travel and (not) sleeping outside the train station, I just made the trip out to Kayes City, the hottest city in Africa, since it was built on top of a giant underground iron reserve. More optimistically, we also have internet here! Which means that in between spending the holiday with about a dozen other Peace Corps ex-pats like myself and having a full-fledged homemade Thanksgiving dinner with everything from pumpkin pie to chicken and stuffing to cranberry sauce and more, I also get to spend a little while updating my life and getting back to all you folks at home and thanking you for birthday well-wishes and other positivity.
As of now, I am in the beginning of my third month as an African villager and my life continues to get more interesting. I am developing more of a feel of how things work out here and almost as amazing as how different things are here is how similar they are as well. Every person is different and cultures around the world nurture certain qualities in those who are members. But when it comes down to it, I am seeing that even people in a place as remote from Philadelphia as Niantanso have the same qualities as anyone else: friendship and enmity, joking and sadness, pride and ego, selflessness and community, laziness and responsibility. As many times as I cannot relate to what people believe or how they act, I am equally amazed at other things that seem so familiar. For every time I am frustrated at Malians for acting with me in ways I find unacceptable or impolite, I realize they have as little idea how to relate to me as I do them in many circumstances. While at first I would get frustrated with how quickly many people grew tired of trying to converse with me and my inadequate language skill, I now begin to realize just how they feel as I speak English with the high school students who don’t understand simple phrases I say because of my accent, and I find it almost funny when they mumble something incomprehensible and get upset that I don’t understand their English.
A major part of my growth here is seeing things from angles I never previously had access to. Back in America, I never really experienced racism or discrimination in any meaningful way. Here, it’s almost constant. People go sometimes well out of their way to treat the local white boy differently. Of course as a white American, I don’t know the first thing about farming, so when I go into the peanut or millet fields with them to help harvest, they are so amazed that I would even attempt this hard work, they almost don’t even accept that I can do it. Every few minutes, someone new will come up to me to show me the proper way to work, identical to the way I had been working, or else tell me I’m tired and I should rest, seemingly as much to help me as to make themselves feel superior. It may be paranoia, but I get the sense that they patronize me and treat me overly hospitably as if to rub in my face the fact that all my American wealth and prestige aren’t worth a bag of rice in Mali if I can’t do the same backbreaking labor that they have mastered already. The first day I spent harvesting rice was one of the most exciting days I’ve had in village so far because despite the villagers’ skepticism, I grew reasonably good at it and proved without a doubt, in front of a field full of dozens of farmers, that I am not altogether as worthless as they many times make me out to be, despite being slow and cutting my fingers up pretty badly with the sickle. In my head, as I farmed, I drew parallels to the Civil Rights victories that took place in almost the exact opposite context in America — I was a white man in Africa proving he was as good, or as determined, a farmer as the skeptical workers around him and not a weak and pampered Westerner who got money for free. Not only that, but I am now probably the best millet/peanut/rice farmer ever to hail from Lower Merion, PA.
Equally valuable in my integration as a useful member of my community is the fact that I have actually begun to do my own PC work in the community. I have been doing baseline surveys with families all over the community to find information on water and sanitation-based behavior, like who uses treated drinking water, where they store food, which diseases are most common, etc. This has been an advantageous project for a number of reasons. First, it gives me an idea of what practices are common here so I can get an idea of what projects are most important to undertake in the future. Second, it gets me out of the house and into the village, talking to people and meeting families in concessions I otherwise would have little meaningful contact with. Third, it is a way of showing the community that I am in fact working and giving them a chance to tell me what areas of work they want me to help in, be it improving the wells by their concessions, teaching how to treat water, or just listening to them complain about life and hearing me promise I will do everything I can to help. I have also started trying to get a soak pit project started, but nobody has bothered getting supplies yet, so more on that later when I have something interesting to say about it.
Other than that, village life is slow, relaxing, and generally enjoyable. I am making friends, getting better at chatting (as long as people are speaking slowly, simply, and directly to me), and finding it easier to believe that I will be spending the next two years of my life going to sleep under a thatched roof and only eating foods that can be farmed in village or bought at the local market (Wal*Mart? We don’t need no stinkin’ Wal*Mart!) I also have plenty of time to sit around and think at length about important matters like the meaning of our life on Earth (hint: read chapter 2 of part 2 of book 2 of “War and Peace”) or the meaning of the boulder falling into the swimming pool at the beginning of the film “Sexy Beast.” And of course, as it is that time of year, I’ve been thinking that the standards of what I am thankful for this year have been lowered immensely. Thanks for my house not collapsing yet. Thanks for two months of a healthy gastrointestinal system. Thanks for being able to bike only 3 hours to the nearest electrical outlet to recharge my batteries (literally and figuratively) and for being able to buy (terrible) beer and Mars bars and take showers once I get there. And of course, thanks for what potentially could easily have been a terrible living situation (and what has been for some many) turning out relatively splendidly for me. That said, think about all the things you have in your life that you can take for granted, the things that other people don’t have, and the fact that with all the wealth and luxury America gives us, what are the things in the world that really make us happy? Is it a new Television or a newly engaged couple? Is it the Phillies’ first World Series victory in 25 years or the first Democratic president in 8 years? Is it the sense of pride you get when you accomplish what you wondered whether or not you could accomplish, or simply being able to win little victories here and there? Depends on where you are, I guess. Happy Turkey Day.
Friday, November 28, 2008
One Month In the Bush
I thought I would be able to get internet access a month ago when I came into town. It turns out I was overly optimistic about the internet situation in Manantali. It’s a long story, but suffice it to say, this entry is a month old and is getting posted now because I already wrote it and it’s easier to do a short update for the past month in addition.
I have been installed in my site for a month now, and I can honestly say that, not surprisingly, this is one of the most surreal experiences I have ever put myself through. So many different elements of my life at site are completely different than anything I’ve lived through, including my first few months in-country. I am constantly reminded of one remark I found when preparing for service and reading some Peace Corps-provided literature that when you move to a place like a poor Malian farming village from a place like suburban America, everything that you once took for granted as a routine becomes a chore. If I want water, I fill up my gasoline jugs at the pump down the street. If I want to drink it, I have to wait until it goes through the filter and, for precaution’s sake, wait until the chlorine kills anything dangerous, all of which means a glass of safe drinking water might be a half hour in the making if I haven’t planned ahead.
More examples of routines becoming anything but are the greetings, which I mentioned in an earlier entry. Being accustomed to Americans’ general anonymity and not feeling the need to greet people on the street unless you know and like them, it’s tiring walking around a village where the expectation is to exchange greetings with everyone you walk past, even from a distance. All the more difficult if you know the people you are greeting, where the simple “Hi-how-are-you?” gets upgraded to an exhaustive run-down of every possible way of asking how the person and everyone they know are doing, plus a handshake. (This last part might be my least favorite as Malian hygienic practices in the bush leave much to be desired. Every time I shake someone’s’ hand, my mind automatically rolls through the list of all the germs and illnesses I am allowing to take up residence in my body simply for politeness’ sake.)
Chores and manners aside, there are a number of more significant things I have had to adapt to as part of my normal life. One of the most notable is the amount of time that I now go without having a decent conversation. Of course, there are no English speakers, and Bambara, the language I have been learning to this point, is spoken and understood sort of the way Spanish is in America. Niantanso is in traditionally a Malinke area, which means they speak a dialect that is similar enough to Bambara that I could communicate if I spoke Bamabara fluently, which of course I am not even close to being able to do. In the meantime, until I got into town here in the “electricity-ville” of Manantali, I have gone as much as 3 weeks where, aside from a few “normal” dialogues with the new English teacher who just moved into town, the only conversations I was having were in a language I scored “intermediate-mid” in when tested. What makes this harder is that when I do converse, even if I think I’m doing a decent job, Malians don’t have the same multi-cultural exposure we Americans do and aren’t used to understanding accents or improper sentence phrasing. It never occurred to me before how strange it would be to not be able to talk to people about what I was thinking, or recount something that happened, or even just tell a joke based on the situation, without having to resort to “Spot Goes to School” level dialogue.
When I am able to have something resembling a normal conversation, I find further difficulty adjusting to the way Malians converse. I keep thinking of one scholar who wrote that people tend to speak in “scripts” for every situation. There are established idioms, responses, and phrases used in all situations, so that even if what we are saying is an original thought, often it is the standard scripted response for that occasion. For example, if one man tells a friend he is sick, the friend will respond either with “Feel better” or continue in a standard line of questioning to learn more about the situation: “What’s wrong? Are you taking anything?” One would have to be very clever or original, or insane, to deviate much from the established scripts of communication. In Mali, all of these scripts are different. People are simply used to saying things differently, with their own idioms and expressions. They state the obvious often: “Hello Ablaye, noon has arrived,” or “You are looking fatter than usual today.” I find myself not knowing how to talk to people, not only because I don’t understand what they are saying, but because I have no idea why they are saying it or how to respond. I regularly get asked questions like “Does America have the same sun as Africa? Does it shine like it does here?” Another favorite is when at least once a day, someone who had not met me yet would point to a chicken or a sheep and ask “Ablaye, what’s this thing’s name?” Eventually I stopped answering “it’s called a saga,” and started sarcastically responding “It’s name is Mustafa, like you.”
Learning curves aside, I have been having plenty of fun little adventures as I get acclimated to my new home. I still regularly have very young children start crying or screaming as soon as they see me, which is hilarious and only encourages their mothers to shove them right in my terrifying white-boy face. My greatest accomplishment in this area was one time when a mother put down her two toddlers in front of me. The kids stared at me until I said good morning, at which point they started bawling with terror in their eyes, spun around, and ran as fast as their little legs could carry them down the street and around the corner out of sight.
Another exciting moment was my first experience with a goat slaughtering. The day before, my homologue and I had hiked up a hill outside the town and found a family of goats stranded on the top. We brought them down and gave them to the head goat-herder, and the next day, our town’s market day when everyone comes to sell food and wares, one of the goats was taken out to be slaughtered and portioned out for sale, with a portion going to my homologue and I as thanks. All I can say about witnessing the slaughter is that I now have a newfound appreciation for Kosher meat. Rather than a razor-sharp blade painlessly stuck through the neck as Judaism requires, the throat was sawed open with an old dull knife. With blood spurting all over the little kids holding the goat down, and the goat still jerking from nervous reflex, they skinned and gutted it, emptied the full intestines into the bushes nearby, chopped it up – meat, bones and organs – and divided them into neat little piles for sale. I know already that I have a weak stomach for gore and these kinds of “anatomy lessons,” so the knowledge that this anatomy was going to be prepared as peoples’ dinner, and with the prayer that the cooks have at least some sense of suitable meat preparation practice, definitely gave my nerves a workout that day.
Other adventures I’ve had involved clearing the weeds out of my field only to be told I was doing it wrong by everyone who walked by and eventually giving up and letting them do it for me rather than listen to them make fun of me all day, trying to build a table with exactly the same results, or my bike ride to the nearest cell phone service which I thought would be an easy 15 km bike ride on a road, and which turned out to be a grueling ride through the rarely-trodden bush-path just to get a cellular signal that barely worked. However, most of my time has been spent sitting around, reading, eating, listening to other people chatting and understanding very little, studying language, hiking or biking around, and trying my best to socialize with the locals and the kids who have taken a liking to the weird new “Toubabu” (ie. whitey). I have been doing a little bit in the way of trying to assess the community’s needs in terms of my eventual work, but for the most part, I’m just waiting for when I can finally make myself useful.
As of now, I’m taking a break from the bush in the lovely seaside resort just outside bustling downtown Manantali (no, of course not!! It’s a PC-owned house but it is right on the river and near the market area, and run-amok with hippos and monkeys galore). This is where I come when I feel like getting computer access and watching movies, playing the resident PCV Dave’s “Zombies” board game, getting good grub at the restaurants or street-food vendors and tossing back a few beverages I can’t publicly get away with in my Muslim village. And of course speaking English regularly. In other words, this is Club Med – Kayes region. It’s a 40 km bike ride from village, recently made a lot easier by the acquisition of my new PC-issued mountain bike, colored candy-cane red and white like “Speed Racer” and making me stick out more than ever as the rich American.
And now for some random entries taken from my daily journal I keep at site:
- After watching a Kung Fu movie off a generator at the village, I had to defend myself by saying in earnest “No, no, no, in real life, Americans aren’t mean and they don’t go around killing each other with karate.”
- Today, I ate an entire cucumber that measured 9.5 inches long by 5.5 inches wide. And that’s smallish.
- People here are always complaining about how miserable they are because of work, poverty, illness, etc. I try to tell them that “Money can’t buy happiness” but I wonder now if that is an expression one can only say when they have a cushion of luxury around them already. Here, money really is the only thing that can cure many of their problems.
- Clever idea for a Mother’s Day lunch special at restaurants: Eggs Over-Easy. Get it?
And now, stay tuned for the Thanksgiving Day Jake In Mali Special, coming up next!
I have been installed in my site for a month now, and I can honestly say that, not surprisingly, this is one of the most surreal experiences I have ever put myself through. So many different elements of my life at site are completely different than anything I’ve lived through, including my first few months in-country. I am constantly reminded of one remark I found when preparing for service and reading some Peace Corps-provided literature that when you move to a place like a poor Malian farming village from a place like suburban America, everything that you once took for granted as a routine becomes a chore. If I want water, I fill up my gasoline jugs at the pump down the street. If I want to drink it, I have to wait until it goes through the filter and, for precaution’s sake, wait until the chlorine kills anything dangerous, all of which means a glass of safe drinking water might be a half hour in the making if I haven’t planned ahead.
More examples of routines becoming anything but are the greetings, which I mentioned in an earlier entry. Being accustomed to Americans’ general anonymity and not feeling the need to greet people on the street unless you know and like them, it’s tiring walking around a village where the expectation is to exchange greetings with everyone you walk past, even from a distance. All the more difficult if you know the people you are greeting, where the simple “Hi-how-are-you?” gets upgraded to an exhaustive run-down of every possible way of asking how the person and everyone they know are doing, plus a handshake. (This last part might be my least favorite as Malian hygienic practices in the bush leave much to be desired. Every time I shake someone’s’ hand, my mind automatically rolls through the list of all the germs and illnesses I am allowing to take up residence in my body simply for politeness’ sake.)
Chores and manners aside, there are a number of more significant things I have had to adapt to as part of my normal life. One of the most notable is the amount of time that I now go without having a decent conversation. Of course, there are no English speakers, and Bambara, the language I have been learning to this point, is spoken and understood sort of the way Spanish is in America. Niantanso is in traditionally a Malinke area, which means they speak a dialect that is similar enough to Bambara that I could communicate if I spoke Bamabara fluently, which of course I am not even close to being able to do. In the meantime, until I got into town here in the “electricity-ville” of Manantali, I have gone as much as 3 weeks where, aside from a few “normal” dialogues with the new English teacher who just moved into town, the only conversations I was having were in a language I scored “intermediate-mid” in when tested. What makes this harder is that when I do converse, even if I think I’m doing a decent job, Malians don’t have the same multi-cultural exposure we Americans do and aren’t used to understanding accents or improper sentence phrasing. It never occurred to me before how strange it would be to not be able to talk to people about what I was thinking, or recount something that happened, or even just tell a joke based on the situation, without having to resort to “Spot Goes to School” level dialogue.
When I am able to have something resembling a normal conversation, I find further difficulty adjusting to the way Malians converse. I keep thinking of one scholar who wrote that people tend to speak in “scripts” for every situation. There are established idioms, responses, and phrases used in all situations, so that even if what we are saying is an original thought, often it is the standard scripted response for that occasion. For example, if one man tells a friend he is sick, the friend will respond either with “Feel better” or continue in a standard line of questioning to learn more about the situation: “What’s wrong? Are you taking anything?” One would have to be very clever or original, or insane, to deviate much from the established scripts of communication. In Mali, all of these scripts are different. People are simply used to saying things differently, with their own idioms and expressions. They state the obvious often: “Hello Ablaye, noon has arrived,” or “You are looking fatter than usual today.” I find myself not knowing how to talk to people, not only because I don’t understand what they are saying, but because I have no idea why they are saying it or how to respond. I regularly get asked questions like “Does America have the same sun as Africa? Does it shine like it does here?” Another favorite is when at least once a day, someone who had not met me yet would point to a chicken or a sheep and ask “Ablaye, what’s this thing’s name?” Eventually I stopped answering “it’s called a saga,” and started sarcastically responding “It’s name is Mustafa, like you.”
Learning curves aside, I have been having plenty of fun little adventures as I get acclimated to my new home. I still regularly have very young children start crying or screaming as soon as they see me, which is hilarious and only encourages their mothers to shove them right in my terrifying white-boy face. My greatest accomplishment in this area was one time when a mother put down her two toddlers in front of me. The kids stared at me until I said good morning, at which point they started bawling with terror in their eyes, spun around, and ran as fast as their little legs could carry them down the street and around the corner out of sight.
Another exciting moment was my first experience with a goat slaughtering. The day before, my homologue and I had hiked up a hill outside the town and found a family of goats stranded on the top. We brought them down and gave them to the head goat-herder, and the next day, our town’s market day when everyone comes to sell food and wares, one of the goats was taken out to be slaughtered and portioned out for sale, with a portion going to my homologue and I as thanks. All I can say about witnessing the slaughter is that I now have a newfound appreciation for Kosher meat. Rather than a razor-sharp blade painlessly stuck through the neck as Judaism requires, the throat was sawed open with an old dull knife. With blood spurting all over the little kids holding the goat down, and the goat still jerking from nervous reflex, they skinned and gutted it, emptied the full intestines into the bushes nearby, chopped it up – meat, bones and organs – and divided them into neat little piles for sale. I know already that I have a weak stomach for gore and these kinds of “anatomy lessons,” so the knowledge that this anatomy was going to be prepared as peoples’ dinner, and with the prayer that the cooks have at least some sense of suitable meat preparation practice, definitely gave my nerves a workout that day.
Other adventures I’ve had involved clearing the weeds out of my field only to be told I was doing it wrong by everyone who walked by and eventually giving up and letting them do it for me rather than listen to them make fun of me all day, trying to build a table with exactly the same results, or my bike ride to the nearest cell phone service which I thought would be an easy 15 km bike ride on a road, and which turned out to be a grueling ride through the rarely-trodden bush-path just to get a cellular signal that barely worked. However, most of my time has been spent sitting around, reading, eating, listening to other people chatting and understanding very little, studying language, hiking or biking around, and trying my best to socialize with the locals and the kids who have taken a liking to the weird new “Toubabu” (ie. whitey). I have been doing a little bit in the way of trying to assess the community’s needs in terms of my eventual work, but for the most part, I’m just waiting for when I can finally make myself useful.
As of now, I’m taking a break from the bush in the lovely seaside resort just outside bustling downtown Manantali (no, of course not!! It’s a PC-owned house but it is right on the river and near the market area, and run-amok with hippos and monkeys galore). This is where I come when I feel like getting computer access and watching movies, playing the resident PCV Dave’s “Zombies” board game, getting good grub at the restaurants or street-food vendors and tossing back a few beverages I can’t publicly get away with in my Muslim village. And of course speaking English regularly. In other words, this is Club Med – Kayes region. It’s a 40 km bike ride from village, recently made a lot easier by the acquisition of my new PC-issued mountain bike, colored candy-cane red and white like “Speed Racer” and making me stick out more than ever as the rich American.
And now for some random entries taken from my daily journal I keep at site:
- After watching a Kung Fu movie off a generator at the village, I had to defend myself by saying in earnest “No, no, no, in real life, Americans aren’t mean and they don’t go around killing each other with karate.”
- Today, I ate an entire cucumber that measured 9.5 inches long by 5.5 inches wide. And that’s smallish.
- People here are always complaining about how miserable they are because of work, poverty, illness, etc. I try to tell them that “Money can’t buy happiness” but I wonder now if that is an expression one can only say when they have a cushion of luxury around them already. Here, money really is the only thing that can cure many of their problems.
- Clever idea for a Mother’s Day lunch special at restaurants: Eggs Over-Easy. Get it?
And now, stay tuned for the Thanksgiving Day Jake In Mali Special, coming up next!
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