The other advantage of rainy season that I negelcted to mention in my last blog is that once your field is sufficiently weeded and planted, there's not much else to do with everyone else out in the field, so you can take off with some fellow PCVs and ship out to Dogon Country. See the unique, goofy-looking houses! The villages carved out of the side of the cliffs! Walk the grueling hikes up and down mountains, through sorghum fields, and in and out of towns where even your obscure Malian language or basic French skills will get you next to nowhere! Sleep on top of mud houses under the stars, until the stars become obscured by clouds and the rain pelts you from every possible angle! Travel two hours through the midday heat only to find that the water pump at the end of the road is broken! Enjoy hiking rocky terrain and jagged cliff edges that would never be legal in the US without a telephone book-sized liability form!
Or just check out the pictures of me doing it...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/29040473@N02/
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
The Rainy Season Rundown, a.k.a., Samaya Sera Sa!
One of the most popular games to Malians and Americans love to play together is what I call The "What Do We Have That You Don't?" Game (catchier name pending). It is played by a "Toubab" sitting boredly and awkwardly with a bunch of Malians who want to entertain each other, despite having far-too-limited language skills to say anything of interest. The conversation eventually turns into a series of exchanges that are essentially along the lines of "Do you have XYZ in America?" "Why yes, but ours are better and built with machines. Do you have ABC here?" "No, we are poor." Lately, with the start of the Rainy Season, or Samaya Waati for those of you who want to impress coworkers with your Bamabara vocabulary, the conversations have taken on a more percipitous quality (pun sooo intended). Through endless conversations, killing afternoons and nights over Malian tea, I am now confident that within months, the denizens of Niantanso will be more knowledgable of American weather patterns than they ever wanted to be. And now, so will you be, faithful readers, as I give you a Rainy Season Rundown.
The most basic thing to know about Samaya Waati in Mali is that it is one of the two or three seasons, depending if you distinguish the Cold Season from the Hot or not. The Mango Rains begin around late March, if they come at all, and are good indicators for whether we will have tons and tons of the best mangos in the world, or simply just a helluva lot. Then, there is a hiatus in which time people figure out whether they need to repair their grass roofs at the last minute or not, before the rains come in earnest, starting in June and petering out in October. Some of the rain is your standard issue drizzle-to-pouring fare, giving your crops a good moistening, lasting a half an hour, and leaving as quickly as it came. Of course, that kind is boring compared to much more dramatic, awe-inspiring, apocalyptic monsoons that come every so often. These begin with a deep heavy gray filling the horizon in the distance, much like the scene at the top of this very page (if you are reading this post on the original blog site jakeinmali.blogspot.com), picking up to gale-force winds that feel and sound as if they will rip the bamboo and grass right off the roof of your house, which would be very unfortunate if your roof, like mine, is made only out of bamboo and grass. Then the rain starts, inundates everything in site for an hour or so, destroys mud-made latrines, scares animals, ruins farmwork, and then bashfully slinks off, leaving the sun shining in its wake, like an awkward child who accidentally destroys his mother's china collection, and quietly exists the scene hoping nobody will notice.
Left in the wake of the rain are puddles, and from puddles come some of the most fearsome, malicious blights the average African will ever encounter. The days are swarmed with flies, the nights invaded by mosquitoes; the former landing on all manner of fecal matter and organic waste before alighting on a victim's food or open wounds, spreading disease and infection; the latter, the vicious harbinger on of the world's most merciless killers - Malaria. While I have been managing to keep myself fairly healthy (thank you, Joe Taxpayer and the inventors of Mephloquine), I have been victimized in my own way be the illness brought on by the rain. The only thing more painful than seeing neighbors and friends afflicted by the disease of the day is having them come up to you asking for help. Of course, I am all too happy to dispense my knowledge of cheap, all-natural home remedies made from various friuts, leaves, and other ingredients which can be bought, if not in the local market, then in the Manantali market, where they would be going to buy medicine anyway if the local pharmacist (and by default, doctor) is dry.
"But why can't you just give us your medicine? We have no money!" they explain.
"Because I'm not a doctor," I reply, with a fully-aware sense of futility.
"But you have medicine. You get sick and you treat yourself with pills here! Why can't you give us those?"
"Because the medicine you want to use to treat what you might have, not even I am allowed to take until I send a vial of my own preserved feces to a medical lab in Bamako for testing, so there is no monkey-frumping way I'm giving it to you to give to your 4-year-old!"
The kinds of illnesses they think they have and the medicines they want are generally not necessarily coupled together. For example, "Sumaya" literally means Malaria, but practially, it means anything with all or some of the same symptoms. This means that a Malaria treatment, which is quinine-based, will be used to treat anything from the flu to dysentary to an assortment of possible parasites, which are not killed by quinine. Similarly, some illnesses defy definition, and are just characterized by the location of discomfort, like "furudimi," which is a pain in the "furu," wherever that may be. (Although one Fulani shepheard with a surprising array of English phrases under his turban once translated it as "Pancreatic Cancer." He did not, however, know what Cancer was.)
One of the most unusual afflictions I've seen happened to a good friend of mine, and was honestly one of the most unsettling things I've ever witnessed, so of course it deserves its own paragraph. I arrived home one day only to discover that "a certain somebody's" adorable, friendly, pet Patas monkey, Perry Dansira, was looking rather melancholy and listless. On close inspection, she was covered in cuts and welts, and I assumed she'd had a run in with a dog. On much closer inspection, the kind of closeness only brought on by my own creepy sense of curiosity, I realized that these wounds were still wide open, and some tissue was protruding slightly, only to retract when touched by the twig I prodded it with. Following the hunch brought on by the most morbid parts of my imagination, I prodded the tissue with tweezers, squeezed the swollen area, and with Perry in full, clearly understanding cooperation, I removed a small, fat, white grub. In all honesty, I might have shrieked like a girl, and I might have thrown the worm and the tweezers far into the yard, panic-stricken after having an instant flashback to a traumatic leech attack I suffered ten years ago. When my hand stopped shaking and my heart stopped racing, I retrieved the tweezers, placed the specimen in a plastic bag and went off to my host-family for assistance. They, of course, laughed at my consternation and still shaking fingers and told me I had nothing to worry about. This was a "Tumbo," a fly larva burrowed into the flesh of all animals, and occasionally people, during the rainy season. They told me I could leave them be, and the monkey would most likely die, which was fine since she was too small to eat anyway, or I could search her whole body and pluck them out one by one. Grudgingly, I followed my ASPCA-inspired sensibilities and began "a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in that area" (with respect to The Fugitive) to find these worms, much like my obsessive hunts for wood-mites in my house a few weeks earlier when I realized what the munching sounds coming from my roof after every rain were. (Un)luckily, Perry decided to aid in the exraction of the worms, and in one of the most physically and emotionally nauseating scenes I've ever witnessed, she would pull away the limb that I had partly uprooted a worm from, and attack with her mouth, pulling it out the rest of the way, taking a few good chews, and gulping down the little monster which had just been doing the same to her own subdermal layers.
No description of Samaya Waati would be complete without mentioning the most important aspect of the season - farming. In the interest of cross-cultural integration, I decided to become a corn farmer. Limiting myself to just the area in my concession, which is about a quarter of a hectare (half the size of a real farmer's smallest field), I got my hands on some seeds, bought the proper equipment, a large hand-hough and a smaller one used as a trowel, gathered some of my friends to show me how it's done, and went to work. In a departure from the norm, rather than telling me to take a break and go slowly since I'm just a lowly American, not a real tough Malian farmer, everyone stared in amazement as they realized I do in fact know how to farm, and then insisted that my "field" was too small and I should at least quadruple it, and then pay others to farm it. Incidentally, working my own field has given me incrediple appreciation and sympathy to those who have to do much more work than I do to live. It's been hard enough doing my own micro-field as a hobby, and doing enormously more work every just so I can have enough to feed my family sounds like torture. My fellow volunteers and I are often talking about the absurdity of the Malian work ethic, or lack thereof, which causes so much stagnation in the development of this country. Even in village, much of the dry season is spent simply lounging around and drinking tea, but when the rain hits and there is farming to be done, almost every one of my neighbors, from the young children sent to the fields to boil tea for the workers, to the elderly women whose family have all left town and work their fields alone mobilize and turn into labor machines. It's partly out of necessity, and partly out of enjoyment of the work itself. It is what makes the Malians proud, defining their identity of people who may have very little, but work for every ounce of it.
The most basic thing to know about Samaya Waati in Mali is that it is one of the two or three seasons, depending if you distinguish the Cold Season from the Hot or not. The Mango Rains begin around late March, if they come at all, and are good indicators for whether we will have tons and tons of the best mangos in the world, or simply just a helluva lot. Then, there is a hiatus in which time people figure out whether they need to repair their grass roofs at the last minute or not, before the rains come in earnest, starting in June and petering out in October. Some of the rain is your standard issue drizzle-to-pouring fare, giving your crops a good moistening, lasting a half an hour, and leaving as quickly as it came. Of course, that kind is boring compared to much more dramatic, awe-inspiring, apocalyptic monsoons that come every so often. These begin with a deep heavy gray filling the horizon in the distance, much like the scene at the top of this very page (if you are reading this post on the original blog site jakeinmali.blogspot.com), picking up to gale-force winds that feel and sound as if they will rip the bamboo and grass right off the roof of your house, which would be very unfortunate if your roof, like mine, is made only out of bamboo and grass. Then the rain starts, inundates everything in site for an hour or so, destroys mud-made latrines, scares animals, ruins farmwork, and then bashfully slinks off, leaving the sun shining in its wake, like an awkward child who accidentally destroys his mother's china collection, and quietly exists the scene hoping nobody will notice.
Left in the wake of the rain are puddles, and from puddles come some of the most fearsome, malicious blights the average African will ever encounter. The days are swarmed with flies, the nights invaded by mosquitoes; the former landing on all manner of fecal matter and organic waste before alighting on a victim's food or open wounds, spreading disease and infection; the latter, the vicious harbinger on of the world's most merciless killers - Malaria. While I have been managing to keep myself fairly healthy (thank you, Joe Taxpayer and the inventors of Mephloquine), I have been victimized in my own way be the illness brought on by the rain. The only thing more painful than seeing neighbors and friends afflicted by the disease of the day is having them come up to you asking for help. Of course, I am all too happy to dispense my knowledge of cheap, all-natural home remedies made from various friuts, leaves, and other ingredients which can be bought, if not in the local market, then in the Manantali market, where they would be going to buy medicine anyway if the local pharmacist (and by default, doctor) is dry.
"But why can't you just give us your medicine? We have no money!" they explain.
"Because I'm not a doctor," I reply, with a fully-aware sense of futility.
"But you have medicine. You get sick and you treat yourself with pills here! Why can't you give us those?"
"Because the medicine you want to use to treat what you might have, not even I am allowed to take until I send a vial of my own preserved feces to a medical lab in Bamako for testing, so there is no monkey-frumping way I'm giving it to you to give to your 4-year-old!"
The kinds of illnesses they think they have and the medicines they want are generally not necessarily coupled together. For example, "Sumaya" literally means Malaria, but practially, it means anything with all or some of the same symptoms. This means that a Malaria treatment, which is quinine-based, will be used to treat anything from the flu to dysentary to an assortment of possible parasites, which are not killed by quinine. Similarly, some illnesses defy definition, and are just characterized by the location of discomfort, like "furudimi," which is a pain in the "furu," wherever that may be. (Although one Fulani shepheard with a surprising array of English phrases under his turban once translated it as "Pancreatic Cancer." He did not, however, know what Cancer was.)
One of the most unusual afflictions I've seen happened to a good friend of mine, and was honestly one of the most unsettling things I've ever witnessed, so of course it deserves its own paragraph. I arrived home one day only to discover that "a certain somebody's" adorable, friendly, pet Patas monkey, Perry Dansira, was looking rather melancholy and listless. On close inspection, she was covered in cuts and welts, and I assumed she'd had a run in with a dog. On much closer inspection, the kind of closeness only brought on by my own creepy sense of curiosity, I realized that these wounds were still wide open, and some tissue was protruding slightly, only to retract when touched by the twig I prodded it with. Following the hunch brought on by the most morbid parts of my imagination, I prodded the tissue with tweezers, squeezed the swollen area, and with Perry in full, clearly understanding cooperation, I removed a small, fat, white grub. In all honesty, I might have shrieked like a girl, and I might have thrown the worm and the tweezers far into the yard, panic-stricken after having an instant flashback to a traumatic leech attack I suffered ten years ago. When my hand stopped shaking and my heart stopped racing, I retrieved the tweezers, placed the specimen in a plastic bag and went off to my host-family for assistance. They, of course, laughed at my consternation and still shaking fingers and told me I had nothing to worry about. This was a "Tumbo," a fly larva burrowed into the flesh of all animals, and occasionally people, during the rainy season. They told me I could leave them be, and the monkey would most likely die, which was fine since she was too small to eat anyway, or I could search her whole body and pluck them out one by one. Grudgingly, I followed my ASPCA-inspired sensibilities and began "a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in that area" (with respect to The Fugitive) to find these worms, much like my obsessive hunts for wood-mites in my house a few weeks earlier when I realized what the munching sounds coming from my roof after every rain were. (Un)luckily, Perry decided to aid in the exraction of the worms, and in one of the most physically and emotionally nauseating scenes I've ever witnessed, she would pull away the limb that I had partly uprooted a worm from, and attack with her mouth, pulling it out the rest of the way, taking a few good chews, and gulping down the little monster which had just been doing the same to her own subdermal layers.
No description of Samaya Waati would be complete without mentioning the most important aspect of the season - farming. In the interest of cross-cultural integration, I decided to become a corn farmer. Limiting myself to just the area in my concession, which is about a quarter of a hectare (half the size of a real farmer's smallest field), I got my hands on some seeds, bought the proper equipment, a large hand-hough and a smaller one used as a trowel, gathered some of my friends to show me how it's done, and went to work. In a departure from the norm, rather than telling me to take a break and go slowly since I'm just a lowly American, not a real tough Malian farmer, everyone stared in amazement as they realized I do in fact know how to farm, and then insisted that my "field" was too small and I should at least quadruple it, and then pay others to farm it. Incidentally, working my own field has given me incrediple appreciation and sympathy to those who have to do much more work than I do to live. It's been hard enough doing my own micro-field as a hobby, and doing enormously more work every just so I can have enough to feed my family sounds like torture. My fellow volunteers and I are often talking about the absurdity of the Malian work ethic, or lack thereof, which causes so much stagnation in the development of this country. Even in village, much of the dry season is spent simply lounging around and drinking tea, but when the rain hits and there is farming to be done, almost every one of my neighbors, from the young children sent to the fields to boil tea for the workers, to the elderly women whose family have all left town and work their fields alone mobilize and turn into labor machines. It's partly out of necessity, and partly out of enjoyment of the work itself. It is what makes the Malians proud, defining their identity of people who may have very little, but work for every ounce of it.
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