Happy Turkey (or Guinea Hen?) Day!

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.