I came to Kita, a small city east of my village, with grand plans of spending lots of time in the internet cafe, uploading photos, updating my blog, and sending messages out to all my friends. Instead, I spent the last weekend enjoying a big Halloween party, enjoying my time with Americans, and waiting out a citywide blackout that cut off internet for a day. Oops. That just means that instead of my normal witty insight and informative social observation which I know you all relish and enjoy, you're instead just stuck with a short and hasty "I'm still alive" letter to tide you over until my next trip out of town for Thanksgiving, which will happen a week early here so that w can have time to also celebrate Tabaski, the Muslim "Thanksgiving/Yom Kippur" holiday, with our host families in our villages.
In the meantime, as just a brief update before my bus leaves, the last few weeks have seen the end of the rainy season, and the start of harvesting. People spend the days gathering all their friends together to break off the corn, dig up the peanuts, and cut the rice and millet for harvest. This is another example of how Malians turn hard labor into a fun day in the field by making it a social event, egging each other to work harder and race each other, joking and jeering all the while. I myself hosted one such event, though rather than getting 30 men to come in and harvest two or three hectares of corn, I gave a bunch of little kids candy to come and work my quarter-hectare crop and husk all the corn. After leaving it on top of my porch roof to dry, and then putting all the cobs in a sck and beating them with a heavy log to break off the kernals, I ended up with about 100 kgs of corn, plenty to feed myself and my pet monkey for a good long time.
In the midst of all this activity, the funding came through for my first big funded project, a major step up from the smaller-scale, though equally important work I've been doing so far like teaching people how to chemically treat their wells to clean the drinking water or engaging in endless futile conversations about the importance of washing hands with soap before eating and after using their bare hands to wipe themselves on the toilet. This project involves hooking up a battery to the electric millet-pounding machine so that electricity can be efficiently stored and bought by people in the town, serving as an income-generator for the credit and loan association in the town which owns the machine, as well as a way for locals to do everything from welding broken farming equipment to storing food in refridgerators to watching the latest Jay-Z videos on their DVD players. I figure that the fact that I am not doing a strictly water/sanitation project as my work focus normally is, is made up for by the fact that I will get oodles of good street cred from the locals, who to this day often still see me as a fun little white boy to point at.
As of now, I am hanging out in Kita, waiting to get a bus home, following the wild and raucus Peace Corps Halloween party held here. In case you're wondering, I cut out cardboard boxes and dressed up as The Whereabox, the figurative message box PCVs send SMS or emails to when they travel alerting staff as to their whereabouts. In other words, you have to be a PCV to get the joke. Photos will come later.
Meanwhile, it's time I headed out, so until Thanksgiving, Peace!
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