Kaieteur, Unchained

[You can follow this story with pictures on my photo album, just like those picture books you used to read...and hopefully sometimes still do.]

Imagine Niagara Falls, only 3 times taller, virtually no tourists, surrounded by South American rainforest, and you have to hike until your toes have blood blisters to get there but you get to swim at the precipice of it when you do.  In short, forget Niagara Falls - I'm a Kaieteur Man!

Yeah, I'll bet you had no idea that one of the great wonders of the natural world is located right here in the heart of Guyana.  Kaieteur holds the dubious-but-legitimate title of largest (not tallest, but largest) single-drop waterfall on the planet.  Victoria Falls, far taller, doesn't count because it's got an extra little drop at the top, and we measure not just height, but volume too.  But who cares?  This place is fantastic!  Nobody knows about it, so it gets maybe a couple hundred visitors a year.  It's greatest claim to fame in the Western world?  Heart-throb movie star Channing Tatum visited this past year.  We checked the log book in the guest house, but he hadn't signed it.

The trip started off in Georgetown, Guyana's capital, where five of us PCVs and a Bulgarian woman also working in the country met our guide, an Amerindian originally from the Kaieteur region who has actually been to Washington D.C. to campaign on behalf of Amerindian rights.  Together, we loaded up our backpacks and foodstuffs into a bus and took a long, bumpy, miserable ride into the jungle.  The road was unpaved, dusty, lumpy, downright dangerous, and looked just like my usual route to site back in my Mali days (so of course I was feeling nostalgic and happy as a clam).  The difference between here and Mali is that while in Mali, you'll see a farming village every few miles, this road took us through a dense rainforest with only the occasional Amerindian outpost or gold mining camp to break up the monotony.  Even these rare glimpses of civilization were each limited to three or four houses, two or three bars, and at least one pool table.  I have no idea how they got a pool table that far on that road.

But if the pool tables could all make it, so could we.  We got to the town of Madhia, a large mining outpost-turned-city and met our motorboat captains.  Onto the boats we climbed and after an hour of winding down the jungle river, the sun began to set and no sooner did we pull our cameras out to fire away at the gorgeous landscape than the brilliant glowing golden sunset clouds opened up into glowing golden rain torrents and that was the end of our photo-taking.  It was also the last time any of us saw dry clothes for the next two days.  Apparently, the least waterproof part of my backpack was the bottom, where I'd packed all my underwear and socks – which is how I ended up with the aforementioned blood blisters.

That night, we parked on Amatok Island, yet another small gold-miners' compound.  We slept in our hammocks and mosquito tents, and woke up in time for some sunrise river-bathing.  At first anxious about the reportedly piranha-infested waters, we were assured that the rivers were so full of piranha food that there was no way they would be interested in eating us – that is, I thought, unless we came upon the one piranha who hadn't had breakfast yet.  Happily, the only things that were interested in eating us were tiny fish who took harmless little nips at our toes like the ones in those Japanese feet-cleaning parlors.

After breakfast was another couple hours of boating down the river, and just when I was getting antsy, we parked our boats, had a quick lunch of peanut butter crackers and watermelons, and began to hike.  We had begun our ascent on the far side of the mountain from where Kaieteur Falls falls from, so we had to climb over to the other side of the mountain to get to the Falls.  It was one of those great moments that I experience every time I do something awesome while travelling, when I could shout to one of the other PCVs I was hiking with, "Check it out: we're hiking up a mountain in the South American rainforest!"  It was even more satisfying when I could shout, "Check it out: I'm taking a leak in the South American rainforest!"

Three hours of climbing, tripping, sweating, getting eaten by mosquitoes, and imitating spider monkey mating calls ended when we finally got to the top of the mountain, followed the trail out of the woods, walked into a break in the brush, and found ourselves at the edge of the cliff.  Cerulean evening sky was painted behind brilliant green broccoli-covered mountains that rose over the river valley in front of us.  While in one direction, the valley stretched for as far as the eye could see as the river flowed between the  the steep mountainsides, the other way hit a wall only a few hundred feet from where we were standing at our lookout point.  That wall rose up 741 feet into the air over the river, and gushed water like Mother Nature's storm gutter.  It was the legendary Kaieteur Falls.

Kaieteur gets its name from a bastardization of the Amerindian word which means "old man," and was named when a local tribesman launched himself over the edge of the waterfall in a sacrifice to the gods to protect his tribe from their enemies.  So far, the sacrifice seems to be working.  The Kaieteur National Park borders only covered about four square miles until the last few decades when the government realized what a vital asset the region could be and closed it off to further development, as well as mining and logging, creating a pristine park that covered hundreds of acres of protected land inside a region which is mostly undeveloped anyway.

That is the real treat of Kaieteur Falls – the remoteness.  Like I said, Niagara this ain't.  We had a minimally maintained guest house which is run off of solar panels and whose fresh water supply comes from a rainwater catchment tank.  The last people to fill out the guest book were the last PCVs who visited the house, two weeks earlier.  We spent two nights, a day and a half, at the Falls and only 3 times did we see other travelers.  They came in by bush plane, landed at the airstrip a 20-minute hike away, and cautiously approached the Fall's edge before jumping back squealing with a mix of terror and delight at this unbridled exposure to real Nature.  They then retreated to a safer and more photogenic distance to figure out how to shoot their exemplary trip photos while trying their hardest to exclude the annoying group of PCVs whom they were probably assured would not be there, and certainly would not be lazily lounging in the river in the middle of their shot because we were too haughty and comfortable to move.  After 20 minutes, they were on their way, and we just kept swimming, exploring, and soaking it all in.

Of all the majesty and beauty of the place, the most memorable part of the trip for me was watching the swifts.  A little before sunset, a few dozen swifts began to congregate in the sky over the falls, sailing through the air in slow arcs, sometimes following each others' arcs, sometimes bisecting them, and all the while growing in number until a few dozen turned into hundreds, perhaps even thousands – too many to count anyway.  As I sat there staring at them, I began to see a geometry in their flight movements, and the slow lines of birds curving through the air became hexagonal paths where the lines would cross each other, like a giant airborne imitation of the seams on a soccer ball.  Sometimes the flock would divide like celular mitosis into two smaller clusters, only to slowly merge back together again.  They danced their ballet through the air, a seamless mix of biology and art, until the sun went blow the horizon and, three or five or ten at a time, they would suddenly break off from the flock and drop straight down with a heavy whoosh of air audible even over the rush of the waterfall, and then dive between the waterfall and the cliff face where they would set up their nightly roost.

The last morning began with an early-morning yoga-photo-shoot.  One of my fellow travelers and I went to the falls at 7am, while the entire area between the mountains is thickly enveloped in fog, and I took shots of her posed silhouette in the mist.  We were soon joined by the rest of the group and took one last swim in the river, before resigning ourselves to going back to civilization, work, and leaving the serene adventure behind.  At the airstrip, we got on our plane, which reminded me of the plane Baloo flew in Disney's Tailspin cartoon show, an early staple of my Sunday morning routine.  (I half expected the pilot to be a giant talking bear in a flight suit, but alas...)  We flew back to Georgetown, caught busses home, and I began my last month in Guyana...

Vote.

Vote.

I don't care who you vote for.  I don't care if you vote Red, Blue, or Green.  I don't care if you vote Libertarian or Liberace.  Whig or Tory.  Communist, Socialist, or Stalinist.

I don't care if you've carefully weighed every issue on the table and averaged out your opinions accordingly, or if you've decided that repealing women's suffrage is your main issue and you're using your next-door neighbor as a write-in.

I don't care if you base your decision on whether Barack Obama or Paul Ryan is cuter. (Let's face it, neither Romney nor Biden are even competitors in that category.  Besides, Michelle is my number one gal.)

I don't care if you subscribe to Congressman Akin's gynecological "shut down in case of rape" theory, or the continuing implementation of 80-year-old New Deal-ish highway repainting ideas.

What I do care about is that the U.S. has a pretty low voter turnout.  The 2008 Presidential Elections, that cultural landmark year which showed a 58% turnout, had the highest percentage since Nixon won in 1968.  So that's basically a little more than half.  A little more than half of the country is willing to go out of their way during their lunch hour or on their way to or from work to help, in principle if not in actuality, decide who will be the next leader of our country.

I find that figure peculiar, since a lot more than half of the people I know have one thing or another to complain about if you bring up American politics in the right way.  Well, almost all of them.  Now this may be narrow-minded of me, and please tell me if you think I'm wrong here, but it's kind of like a carpenter volunteering to help his buddies build a house, refusing to do any work, and then complaining about the poor quality of work done without him.  Or like being invited to a party and asked to bring some beverages, only bringing a 6-pack of Zima, and then complaining that there's nothing good to drink.  In other words, if you don't care enough to help make a difference, how can you justify complaining?

Now I appreciate that there are plenty of issues out there that nobody in politics is addressing.  We have two main parties that win almost all of the votes, and if they don't care about your cause, nobody important will, so why bother voting at all?  And let's face it, politicians are competitors, not unlike athletes or poker players or the popular kids in high school.  They will break their promises, they will switch their loyalties, and they will win you over in the end, if not by doing what you want them to do, then by not totally disappointing you.  And let's not forget the futility of the landslide Red or Blue states.  So really, what's the point?

The point is that in this age of rapid-fire information barrages and spontaneous idea slipstreams, the odds are greater than ever before that your ideas will be heard.  If one person uploads a photo on Instagram or a video on Youtube, users, media outlets, and friends of friends of friends all over the world can catch the virus and see your work.  Information gets out.  Nothing happens in a bubble anymore.

Which means that your vote matters.  Your opinion will be heard.  The tipping point could be anywhere.  One lesbian somewhere could decide that her girlfriend looks like Justin Bieber, or one cat-owner could decide that his cat looks like Adolf Hitler.  That's how you get websites like lesbianswholooklikejustinbieber.tumblr.com or www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com which attract weirdly huge numbers of people every day.  It's just that easy.

The number of votes your candidate gets could be the difference between him or her trying harder next year or throwing in the towel and saying "Screw it all!"  You could be overheard saying something in the voting line or on the bus ride to the voting line, or simply be seen in the voting line wearing a particularly provocative pair of shoes, and that could change one person's mind, and he could change another's, and on and on.  The right person might hear you make a really cutting zinger about tax plans and all of a sudden, your private joke is a Huffington Post headline.

I think I've made my point.  In case it didn't come through clearly enough...

Vote.

The New Pirates of the Caribbean...and Pictures!

First order of business...Pictures!  I posted a few from Guyana, then broke my hard drive so I lost a few dozen that I'd taken since then (and thousands of others...sigh), and then went out and took a few more pictures and posted them, so now you can view them all on Facebook right HERE!

Also, here's the latest of what we've been working on at the Imam Bacchus Library - a video I directed with some of our library regulars, right HERE!

But don't forget to come back to read the rest of this blog when you're done.  I promise, it's really interesting!

***

About a month ago, the world celebrated a holiday that I still can't believe exists, let alone is fairly widely known: International Talk Like a Pirate Day.  When I first heard of ITLaPD, it was in college, and I figured it was just some silly Internet meme thing.  I thought the idea was totally dumb, so in equally dumb protest, I decided that since I was a sort of pirate myself – an avid ignorer of online copyright infringement laws, who downloaded movies, music, and software faster than a clipper on the high seas – I would try to get as many of my friends as possible on board with an alternative International Talk Like Jake Day.  As a result, quite a few of them spent the day saying "dude" a lot, while mumbling their speech in as deep a voice as they could muster, and some even went as far as adopting the bouncy gait that apparently everyone but me knew I had.  It was, in my own humble and probably wrong opinion, the greatest celebration of Pirate culture I'd ever borne witness to.

Until now.

Enter Guyana, a nation that boasts not only friendly neighborhood piracy, but even federally-funded acts of intellectual property theft that have become one of the most controversial matters of state policy in quite some time.

In the first instance, we have a sort of Robin Hood-esque piracy, where folks steal from the rich/government, and giving to the poor, ie,, themselves.  Guyana is a country that has distinct rainy and dry seasons.  In the rainy season, it's a good idea to carry an umbrella around with you if you plan to be outside and there's more than one cloud in the sky – a rainstorm could come in hard and fast from off the coast in a matter of minutes, drench you through the knickers and down to the soul, and sail off before you even knew what hit you.  But in the dry season, well, it's dry.  The dirt cracks, the heat heats up, and the water runs out.

And when the water runs out, according to my landlord, the water company refuses to pump water out to their customers, so houses don't get any.  Perhaps the locals would be more sympathetic if there were really no water and the whole system truly had to shut down; but the water company, while only sending a sub-minimal amount of water each day to houses, if they send any at all, continues to charge each house the same rate as usual.  (It could also simply be a matter of too little pressure, but charging for water than nobody is getting is certainly grounds for anger.)

So what do the angry, thirsty locals do?  An independent water-piracy scheme that could easily be the basis for a less-interesting, low-budget sequel to "Chinatown."  Using household electrical pumps, they suck water right from the source and into their house.  When he told me about this, I was both mildly outraged and pretty amused too.  Where does the water company get off not sending us water?  Don't they know how bad people smell if they can't get a shower in this weather?  And if they really don't have water, then how are we still getting any?  And what will happen to them if all the local water-piracy starts to take its toll?  All I know for sure is that when I hear my landlord flip on the motor, I dash into the bathroom to fill my 30 gallon bucket and take a shower, just in case it's another 2 days before I can actually get a decent water supply.

My landlord warned me that this is illegal, and while virtually everyone here on the coast does it, I shouldn't tell anyone lest the wrong people hear.  Except if the government wants to crack down on local piracy, they have to first deal with their own state-sponsored-piracy hullabaloo.  In a scandal that was all over the local papers recently, the Guyanese government had been shopping around for the best deal on school textbooks.  They wanted the cheapest way to get the most students the best education.  After apparently very little research, half-hearted negotiation, and total disregard for federal law, Caribbean law, and the International Berne Convention, they decided that photocopied, pirated textbooks produced and sold by independant vendors around Georgetown, Guyana's capital, was the way to go.

Now, as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I'm not really supposed to publish or publicly demonstrate my opinion regarding government matters or local politics, so I can only say what I've heard from others and read in the papers.  One common response seems to be, "Well there's a big !#%ing surprise!"  The government here has earned itself a solid reputation for being totally untrustworthy and irreversibly corrupt, although it seems to me that shady, under-the-table negotiations and public declarations of piracy are two different things.  I mean, let me be clear here, there have been recorded public statements and press conferences where state officials, like Cabinet Secretary Roger Luncheon for one, have said outright that their main priorities are giving their children a good education while saving money, international law be damned.  There have been claims from government spokesmen that the photocopied textbooks cost 1/10 the price of the originals, although allegedly that figure is based on little more than what the committee responsible for this whole affair gleaned by asking a couple local shops how much they charge.

Naturally, there was a lot of backlash when this story broke a few weeks ago.  Various publishing companies threatened lawsuits and boycotts, other countries wrote harsh indictments, and newspapers wrote editorials that basically amounted to, "I can't believe we seriously have to scold you for this.  What are you, Government, an idiot?"  Well, they might have a point.  Based on what I've read and people I've talked to, it seems that virtually the only people in support of this policy (yes, it was actually declared a "policy") are the ones behind it.  Even one local man whose opinion I asked said that it wasn't so much the actual piracy he minded – education is always a priority – but that the committee behind the decision didn't really do anything to negotiate with the publishers or distributors for a cheaper wholesale or at-cost contract.  They just assumed that buying pirated books for schools would be cheaper, so they went ahead with it.

One of the biggest criticisms against this policy, which to be fair has since been overturned by the Federal Court's coup decision to actually uphold the law against the politicians, is the example it sets.  Do the ends justify the means?  Should the government brashly declare that it will happily break the law for the good of its people?  And the irony at heart of the issue: what will the children learn from this?  There is already such a wide acceptance of copyright piracy in this country because of how few laws exist to prevent it, even legitimate general stores only offer bootleg CDs and DVDs.  In fact, many of the stores that sold bootleg textbooks have stopped doing so at the insistence of various publishers, but happily continue to offer the latest in black-market music and movie releases.

In a recent local newspaper article about a new multiplex movie theater that will be built in Georgetown, the focus was not so much about the theater itself, but how it would affect the local black-market DVD business.  Most of those interviewed were optimistic: bootlegs are cheaper, and a lot of people prefer to watch movies in the comfort of their own home, and aren't interested in braving the crowds and noise of a public theater.  The very fact that this article was written the way it was, placing bootleggers as the victims the way American independent stores are seen as victims of Wal*Mart and the like, implies that the outrage over the textbook piracy issue is hypocritical.  If the locals can do it and nobody hassles them, why can't the State?  And yet, despite rampant corruption and unreliability in the government, the Guyanese people still seem to hold their leaders to a higher moral standard.  At least they haven't given up hope.

The Best of Chef Ablaye's Makeshift Fusion Cuisine

I think they say that necessity is the mother of invention.  I tend to misquote things like that pretty often, so I could be wrong, but since you're reading my blog, I assume that you're more interested in what I say than what they say.  In any case, necessity has always proven to be a powerful force in my creative process, and nowhere is this more evident than my cooking.  I began my education on the subject in college, using the best in canned and defrost-able goods to give myself cheap and tasty sustenance, but my true prowess over makeshift-cooking was forged in the Peace Corps, where limited ingredients and lack of certain nutrients forced me to stretch the limits of my palate's comfort zone to provide myself with a diet that wouldn't leave me bored, gagging, or malnourished.  I'm sure that my opinion of many of my "successes" have been tainted by limited variety and lowered standards, but I think that there are a few gems among my repertoire which some of you folks might appreciate too.  These recipes have simple ingredients, are pretty easy to make, and were mostly all made up as I was going along (so don't expect any kind of exact measurements, short of what I was able to eyeball at the time of cooking).  So for the first time in print, and just in time for the Jewish holiday season, I bring you "The Best of Chef Ablaye's Makeshift Fusion Cuisine."

PanJakes

The idea of an alternative pancake named after myself came about one day while I was in my village in Mali.  I wanted pancakes, but I didn't have any milk or sugar, and the clouds were gushing water like God's bidet, so going shopping wasn't an enticing prospect.  I could either make the blandest pancakes ever with flour, water, oil, and the one egg I had left, or I could break out my Mad Scientist Chef's Cap and improvise.  I took a look in my dry goods chest, and sitting right on top was one of the most versatile ingredients in the improv-chef's collection: dry-packaged vegetable soup mix, courtesy of Mom and her care packages.  Now, I am not a fan of brothy soups – I like to feel like I'm eating food, not drinking it.  These little 10 gram packets of soup powder with tiny nibs of dried carrot, green bean, tomato, and corn did not a meal make.

But lo and behold, I was able to find a few good uses for the stock after all.  One of them is to toss it into a pot with rice and water and make some vegetable soup-flavored rice, which is quite good.  Even more surprisingly tasty was my idea on that soggy and hungry day: make it into a PanJake!  I won't bother with the specifics of the recipe here, because if you don't know how to make a pancake, there are half a million folks on Google who will gladly explain it, and my recipe, at least the first time I made it, is precisely the same as any of them, only instead of sugar and milk, you toss in the soup mix and water.  No other spices or salt are needed, since the mix takes care of that.  If your soup mix doesn't come with tiny dried chunks of veggie, you should dice up some yourself to add flavor, and a few nutrients.

I will add that the second time I made my veggie-soup PanJakes, I tried something a bit different.  I used the same recipe, only with more flour, less water, more baking powder, and less heat under the frying pan.  This allowed me to make a thicker, fluffier PanJake, which could be cut in half and used as a flavorful sandwich bun - it goes great with tuna or cold cuts.  I've also since expanded on the idea of the PanJake to make it not just different sizes and consistencies, but different flavors too, based on whatever soup mix or other ingredients I have available: Cream of Mushroom PanJakes, Fried Tortilla-Style Curry PanJakes, Squash and Beef PanJakes (make sure to grate the squash very fine and either grind and cook or slow/pressure-cook the beef first so you can mince really tiny bits), and the other possibilities are only limited to your ingredients and daring.

Pumpkin Latkes

Well, these are basically the same as any other kind of latke, or potato pancake to you non Yiddish/German speakers.  What you're going to need first is a pumpkin.  I used a 1kg slice of pumpkin – about 1/6 of a whole large one – and that was plenty for a big lunch for me.  So if you want it to be a main course for the family, get one that's about 3-4 kg, or 6-8 lbs.  For the 1kg recipe, you also want a medium onion, some flour – I really couldn't tell you how much, but it might be around 1 cup  –  2 eggs, some oil, some garlic if you want (I didn't use any when I made this, but that's only because I didn't have any), salt, and of course, some sweet-yet-savory pumpkin-friendly spices, such as nutmeg, turmeric, coriander, peppercorn, and basil.

Grate the pumpkins, dice the onions, crack the eggs, drop in a few tablespoons of oil, toss in the spices, and mix the whole thing together.  Then, add flour until you get a consistency that's thin enough to glop into a pan, but thick enough that the liquid won't run around after you drop it in and turn into a PanJake.  There are two ways you can cook them now.  You can either do what I did and add oil to the mix and fry it on a dry teflon/non-stick pan, or you can keep the oil out of the mix and heat it up in the pan to fry the latkes in.  The problem with the latter method is that while it tastes a bit better, pumpkins seem to soak up oil more than other vegetables, so you're going to go through a lot of it, and my love-handles are showing a little too much love for that.  Either way, get the pan medium-high so that they have time to cook before they burn up, drop in blobs of the mix and flatten them out with a spoon or they will be much softer on the inside than the crust.  Fry 'er at will!

Cookup Rice, Jake-Style

This is my own version of a Guyanese dish which itself doesn't have any specific instructions, other than throw rice into a pot with a whole bunch of local ingredients like veggies, beans, fish, and some spices, and cook it up, all together.  It's simple even when locals make it, and mine is basically one variant based on my own years of culinary experience.  First, take rice and water and throw it in a pot, preparing to cook it the way you would always cook rice.  But before you put it on the fire, throw in small chunks of fish, curry powder (or similar spices that are used to make curry – I like coriander, turmeric, salt, plus some basil and rosemary) and coconut milk.  Coconut milk is actually one of the non-negotiable ingredients; it isn't proper Cookup without coconut milk.  If you don't have any fresh or canned, the powder works too but you have to wait until the water is hot before adding it.  If you want a bit more authenticity, soak some beans overnight and toss them in too, but I don't usually remember to do that.

While you're cooking the rice, chop up and sauté some other complimentary veggies like garlic, onions, eggplant, bell pepper, carrot, etc.  You want to cook them separately, because if there's one thing I learned while pulling kitchen-duty at Flo's house in Ireland (see my posts from May-July, 2011) it's that vegetables taste better when you roast them, grill them, sauté them, or do any damn thing at all to them besides boiling them.  You need to let them burn, just a teensy tiny bit so they can caramelize and release the sugars and richer flavors.  When the veggies are done, and just before the rice is finished, toss them into the pot so they can impart some of their flavor onto the rest of the rice, and wait for them to finish cooking.  Break out a glass of white rum and water, gather up some mosquitoes, put on the Hindi dance beats, and enjoy, Guyanese style!

Chef Ablaye's Chowder Philosophy

I said before that I don't like soup, but give me a good chowder, stew, cholent, or anything thick and murky, and I'm a happy man.  If I had to pick, I'd probably take a good cholent first to satisfy my Ashkenazic Jewish appetite, but the problem is that a proper cholent uses a lot of meat and barely, both of which can be scarce for Peace Corps Volunteers, and if you don't want to leave it cooking for the requisite 24 hours and use up all your gas, you might as well have a stew.  A stew is good too, but it strikes me as a cold weather food and I tend to do Peace Corps in very hot places.  Also, as I said, meat is rarely an option for me, and a stew without meat might as well just be soup, as far as I'm concerned.

That leaves my favorite fish and potato chowder recipe.  Chowder is perfect: quick to cook, cheap ingredients, and it uses one of my other favorite improv-cooking ingredients besides soup mix: milk powder!  That's right, milk that will never go bad, no matter how many miles there are between you and the nearest refrigerator!  (Just seal the bag or can, or the ants will have a nice picnic inside it.)  This is probably one of the easiest recipes I use: chop up the fish (remove the bones if there are any), chop up the veggies (which can be anything you want, but I like potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, maybe a tomato or two, and celery if I can find it), and put them in a pot.  Add water, but only enough to just cover the ingredients.  Add spices, like rosemary, basil, pepper, salt, and tarragon.  Boil until the potatoes are soft.  If the potatoes are done, you know the fish is done too, unless you cut giant chunks of fish and tiny bits of tater.  This is when you toss in the milk, or the milk powder, which I prefer to use since it's also a decent thickener.  You don't want to overcook the stuff in the pot or it will all fall apart and you won't know a chunk of fish from a carrot, so if everything's cooked and it's still too watery (as I said, I like it THICK), toss in some corn meal or flour and mix it really well.  And presto chango, you're a chowderhead!


Well, that's the best of what will most likely appeal to those of you who have ordinary folks who've never started a club with your PCV buddy called The Culinary Adventurers Club.  If you end up trying any of these recipes, let me know how they came out!  And if you have any good ones of your own that meet my criteria – cheap, stovetop-friendly, and yummy – send them to me as well.  Until then, as they say in Mali, na duminike!

How to Sell Education

It's September; which means it's Autumn; which means that as the season changes, the foliage transforms from verdant softness to technicolor crunch whose dry and crisp flavor matches the air, which chills the body, raising the goosebumps on flesh and the zippers on jackets.

Unless you're in Guyana, less than 500 miles from the Equator, where the only change in season is that it goes from hot to less hot (and a bit cool between 3 and 5 am), buggy to less buggy, and rainy to just humid.  But if there's one September constant between my native homeland of the U.S.A. and my current equatorial residence, it's that September is when all the little kiddies go back to school.

With school back in session, it's time to kick my work here at the Imam Bacchus Library into overdrive, and start doing some heavy-duty outreach work, convince students that reading will make you cool, and parents that reading will keep your kids smart and out of trouble.  Since my last posting here, I've begun the arduous task of learning how to become a movie director, and then teaching the head librarian here everything I've learned in the last month.  Taking a page from PBS's classic show "Reading Rainbow," we're basically recording our weekly Story Hour, where the library's director, Imam, picks a theme for the week, and then reads a few books, tells a few stories, and organizes some fun artistic activity for the Nursery-Primary School-age children who come in.  Meanwhile, the librarian and I film the stories, make cute little music videos out of the activities, and then try to wrangle the bucking bronco of video editing software, Adobe Premiere Pro, to make a short movie out of it.

Premiere Pro is a dense, hard to wield, and unfriendly program, and figuring out how to use it is the PC equivalent to navigating the great Labyrinth and battling the Minotaur, armed with nothing but some dental floss and a q-tip.  But once we've managed to wrestle some good production value out of it, the two-phase plan is to a) upload the videos to Youtube for the world to see what amazing stuff we're doing, and b) to start broadcasting them on the local television station, to help advertise the library, while sending out our message of the value of literacy.

Now that school is back in session, the summer regulars no longer have time to show up to the library anymore, so we're also going to start bringing the library to them.  On Monday and Tuesday, for example, we'll pack a truck full of books, head out to the primary school down the road a couple miles, and set up a sort of display fair, where we can show students firsthand what we have to offer, when many of them might not have come out on their own.  We have a whole list of other projects which we will try to begin to implement over the next few months before my contract here expires, but I'll save talking about those until we've started getting to work on them.

In the meantime, I'm going to take some time now to tell you about some interesting things going on in one of my other homes-away-from-home, Mali.  The news there is remaining steadily ominous.  We've got a fog ('cause it's the rainy season there now, get it?) of political uncertainty in the south involving interim governments and conditionally-rejected offers of international military support, profoundly disturbing reports of Islamist extremists sending the northern part of the country on a fast-track to becoming "the next Afghanistan," as the media is often fond of putting it, and no end in sight to a long-standing drought and regional food crisis.  While I've been reading the headlines often enough, and I'm probably equally informed about current events in Mali as I am about those in American, which is actually saying fairly little, I've definitely lost my inside grasp on what's been going on there since the Coup.

So I'm not interested now in rehashing what a 5-minute Google News search could tell you.  No, I'd rather let you know about some of the positive influences that are continuing over in Mali, despite these times of uncertainty which try even the noblest hearts.  There are dozens of great organizations, and I'm sure most of them deserve at least your awareness, if not your support, but today, I'm picking just one particularly cool project for this post because, well I have friends who work there.

The organization is called myAgro, and while it's only just a baby, at 8 months old, they've been making some really great headway, and influencing a lot of small-scale Malian farmers.  They do this through giving loans and establishing savings programs with local farmer who sign up for the program.  According to one of their recent performance reports, they have already signed up hundreds of farmers for their program, earned thousands of dollars in savings for farmers in their program (in a country where, for millions of people, earning just one dollar in a day can make the difference between eating today or not), and continue to run a weekly program to publicize the programs and educate and interview farmers and program members around the country.  As those of you who know me might imagine, this some-time farmer, radio DJ, and cheapskate finds a lot to like about myAgro!  And of course, the founder, Anushka Ratnayake, is an awesome person who I met a few times during my last stint in Mali.  And to quote my good friend and fellow Mali RPCV, Audra, who currently volunteers for myAgro while living in Chicago, "What is really interesting with myAgro is that in the midst of all of the Malian politically instability, their programs are offering solutions for farmers to create sustainable food security for themselves."  See, we're not talking about a charity here, we're talking about a capacity-building venture, a program that doesn't give away fish, but creates fishermen.

If you want to learn more about myAgro, peruse their website at www.myagro.org, or alternatively, you could just take my word for it and head straight to their Donate Now page.  Trust me, a few bucks on your end can go a long way towards some relief in a country that needs it, and setting good examples for sustainable agricultural methods which, if spread widely enough, will encourage positive and lasting change where it's needed.  That's right, for the price of one trenta-sized double-macchiato triple-mochaccino latte caffeine jug, you could help improve farming capabilities in the most fantastic country most of you have never been to!

Well, that's it for now, folks, but keep your eyes on the blog for the continuing adventures of Lower Merion, PA's favorite globetrotting blogger...

Just Take a Look, It's in a Book...

Nothing makes me feel more like a Peace Corps Volunteer than being the lone caucasian walking through a racially disparate neighborhood with a cadre of half a dozen loud, boistrous, and totally incomprehensible dark-skinned youngsters in tow.

That's about where I was earlier today, being led by these kids from house to house along the Guyana's Essequibo Coast, visiting families to ask them about how well and how often they read.  The kids were there to show me which houses they knew were inhabited by families worth interviewing, and not just stodgy old bachelors or toothsome guard dogs.  They also gave a sense of legitimacy to my presence; a lone, out-of-place-looking stranger from a strange land asking a mother of 3 if she reads newspapers looks less peculiar when six or seven of the mother's son's friends are vouching for him.

But don't worry, there's a purpose to my intellectual lurking habits – it actually is a legitimate part of my job here.  I've been assigned the task of helping the Imam Bacchus Library, a new and growing public library in the middle of this stretch of coastline promote itself and expand its programs.  The goal is to get more people to use the library, which would in turn promote literacy throughout the community, something that seems to be lacking.  Before getting to any of that though, the last three weeks were spent observing, interviewing, and fact-finding throughout the library's greater zone of influence.  My first week here had me feeling like Billy Madison as I spent my days in nursery and primary school classrooms, enjoying story-times, reading classes, sing-alongs, art projects.  A highlight: one nursery school graduation rehearsal where the kids practiced their performance of Vitamin C's "Graduation Song," which I'm amazed actually enjoys the same role in Guyana as it does in the U.S. as the unofficial day school graduation anthem.

During this initial period, I observed what seemed to be strong foundations from the schools' end concerning reading education, but since I was only able to get a superficial glance at the end of the school year, there was no doubt that I was missing a lot.  As I began my observations of the secondary schools the next week, I began to see the outcome of the early years of education.  As one would find anywhere, there was a wide range of ability in the students, despite all coming from basically the same education background – with universal school curriculums designed by the national Ministry of Education.  There were plenty of kids who were bright, literate, and enthusiastic learners, but there were a surprising number of kids who literally could not read.  Remember my last post where I quoted that writing sample from one of the star students in the seventh grade remedial class?  That was one of the better examples from that class.  The weakest of the weak students wrote literally gibberish.  Words resembling "iggitbidf" or "luberkrad" were typical and the authors could not remember what they had actually written, and certainly couldn't read it.

My next step was to take a stab at figuring out why this could be the case, so I started asking the different constituent groups what they thought.  The results were about as uselessly varied as I'd been expecting.  Students blamed the teachers.  Teachers blamed the parents.  Parents blamed their kids.  Chickens blamed their eggs.  And I realized that this whole question probably doesn't matter all that much to me.  I'm only here for six months, I have a undergraduate degree, and I have neither the time, expertise, or interest in trying to tackle a vast issue like the illiteracy culture of this country, certainly not compared to much more qualified folks who are working on that very issue already.  Peace Corps is all about doing grassroots empowerment, not large-scale cultural overhauls.

Besides, it's not as if the system is hopeless.  As I said, there are plenty of successful students graduating schools and getting quality educations, by Guyanese standards at least, and there aren't so few of them that they would be considered outliers.  The good students share the system with the weaker ones, at least in the early years.  It's only when they enter secondary school that their grades begin to determine their placement in classes and the quality of the education they are given, since school budgets are also higher at the more selective schools.

So what am I going to do?  What I was asked to: make this library awesome!  Attacking the problem one symptom at a time seems the right way to go about my job, and since the library hired me to help encourage literacy, I'll use the library to do it.  The theory is this: Make the library more fun and give more people reasons to go there --> More people using the library most likely results in more people reading, learning, and associating positively with those things -->  More kids get into the habit of reading and self-educating, and more parents start to see this as an activity for their kids which is easy to encourage, rather than an unnecessary alternative to watching TV and playing cricket --> Attitudes towards literacy improves.

Which leads to my posse and me running around town to knock on doors and find out who does and doesn't already use the library, why they do or don't, and what we can do to change that.  My supervisor – the library's founder and head – and I have been brainstorming possible activities and allures, such as contests and "read-a-thons" like I had back in elementary school, filming the story-time hours and puppet shows we already run and have them broadcast on the public access TV station, holding literacy and computer training classes for all ages, but especially for those out of school, and creating our own homemade version of one of my favorite childhood shows, Reading Rainbow.

We'll see how far we get, but I'm hopeful that we can make the library one of the major cultural institutions of the Essequibo Coast, and transform how the people here view literacy and education.  Who knows how much potential innovation can be tapped from people who don't even know how creative they can be until they're given a chance and a reason to try?

Speaking Guyanese

Calling Guyana an English-speaking country is a bit like calling Jean-Claude Van Damme an actor.  Sure, J.C.V.D. has had a lion's share of feature films to his name and royalty checks to back them up, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't find a number of them pretty Van Damme entertaning, but as for him being an actor...

So with that point snidely made, I will acknowledge that Guyana is officially an anglophone country, and pretty much everyone I have run into so far can understand most of what I say, and speaks…well, that's the tricky part.  It's English.  It's also Creolese.  It's also got a bit of Hindi, depending on where they live.  And no matter what language it actually is, who I'm speaking to will make all the difference as to whether I understand any of it or not.

My pre-arrival impressions of Guyanese accents were based on one person I knew, and another I'd heard of.  The former was Mali's Peace Corps Medical Officer, who has a peculiar but delightful mix of influences in her accent.  It has the bright, musical quality of a British accent, with some delicate calypso exoticism, and is as clearly-toned as a tuning fork.  The latter example, I've only heard of through a married couple of family friends from back home, who were speaking of a Guyanese housekeeper they once employed.  When the wife mentioned that she had a hard time understanding her sometimes because of her unique way with English, her husband replied with smiling skepticism, "That was English?"

So far, my experience listening to people here has run the gamut from our dear doctor's charming lilt to an impregnable warble which plays by its own rules – or the few it has.  The difference is in whether or not they are speaking Standard English, the kind which is taught in schools, used in official business, and spoken on the TV and radio.  Standard English mostly sounds like a mild-to-heavy accent on a slightly goofy version of what you're reading right now.  There are some Guyanese who have spent time in U.S. or have at least watched a lot of our TV shows, and have American English pretty much nailed down.

To flavor the language, there are those who use the words which technically exist, but have been collecting cobwebs in the dusty corners of "my" language's attic.  I've never heard the word "shucks!" used so many times in anything written after the 1950's than I have hanging out with locals here.  And the other day, I was asked by a bus passenger crammed in next to me if his bag was "humbugging" me, which is not only incorrect, but bewilderingly so.  (This is on par with a dear friend of mine who speaks English fairly well as a second language, and who recently praised me as "an exorbitant writer," which she insisted made sense as a complement when literally translated back into her native German.)

It's when I hear Creolese thrown into the English, as is often done here, that I get stuck and wish I was back in Mali, where I can at least understand Bambara and some of its dialects better than I can the children and drunken fishermen I've encountered here – though my dad reminded me that incomprehensibility is a common trait amongst drunken fishermen the world over.

The problem with Creolese is two-fold.  First is the warped pronunciation of their vowels, which actually shares some occasional traits with the Irish accent (Cork in particular, it sounds to me), plus whatever other ethnic influence is local to the area, be it Indian, Caribbean, or British.  "Dog" sounds like "daeg," "Thursday" morphs into "Taarsdey," "hat" is worn as a "hyat," and I can't even figure out how to spell the other sounds they use.  The other hinderance is the language itself, which has English rules tossed into a blender, along with some Hindi vocabulary in the areas with East Indian immigrant populations, and comes out sounding like the lost verses of "Day-O."

Unlike Haiti, which has standardized their version of Creole and made it their official language alongside French, Guyana still maintains English as it's only formal language, and unfortunately, not everyone knows the difference.  In preparation for my library and literacy outreach program I'll be working on while I'm here, I've been observing and interviewing a lot of teachers from Nursery school through high school, and one of the common themes that comes up is that not all the students learn to distinguish between the Creolese they speak and the English they're supposed to be restricted to in school.  In some cases, even the teachers blur or cross the line, in conversation and in lessons.

As a result, here is some of what I saw in middle-school age Remedial English writing exams.  From a more literate student in the class, there was, in immaculate handwriting, "I will like to inviting you to go fishing with us. My Father buy a new fishing boat we will go at the backdam to fishing.  A nice cook wite fish and went we finshend cook we will eat and rast a little and went we finshend we will go back fishing."  This actually sounds, to my untrained mind, like something I might hear a child say verbatim if they were to narrate this imaginary letter to me, so it's no surprise that this is how a student with poor understanding of the difference between proper and colloquial language would write.

I fear I'll have little opportunity to make headway into he local dialects here.  I'm only here for six months, and most of the people I hang out with actually do speak English fairly well, though there probably a good reason I don't spend much time with the folks I can't understand.  As for adopting my own language to fit theirs, well…no.  In Mali, I was more than happy to go around speaking Bambara, because I had no real choice if I wanted to communicate.  Just imagining myself trying to adapt my language to fit in here makes me giggle at the thought.  It's one thing to watch a Hasidic New Yorker doing a musical imitation of Burning Spear, but for me to incorporate that into everyday speech is just too much of an anatopism for my own dignity to handle.  Sorry folks, but I'm proud of my own Phluphia mumble, and I intend to keep it!

Introducing, Guyana!

Just about every person over the age of 30 to whom I informed of my impending trip to Guyana mentioned the one thing they knew about the country: Kool-Aid suicide cults.  Now granted, that was more than I knew about the place before I was accepted to work there in my latest Peace Corps Response gig.  In fact, like most of my other under-30 friends, I was barely familiar with what continent it was on.  The first thing I learned about Guyana, other than its location, was that it's distinguishing landmark was the inspiration for "Paradise Falls" in Disney's Up.  I love that movie, and I think the first 15 minute segment is one of the greatest love stories ever filmed, which is why it seemed rather unfair for the second thing I learned about Guyana to be the 1978 Jonestown Massacre, in which over 900 people died of suicide poisoning at the hands of Jim Jones and his People's Temple cult.

However, the first things I saw firsthand in Guyana happened as the captain woke the passengers up at 5:00am to inform the us that we were beginning our descent, and the sky above the clouds was a brilliant psychedelic rainbow horizon, unlike anything I've ever seen.  A band of ROYGBIV stretched in a thick line across the sky, darkening down into a flat plain of tarnished-silver colored clouds.  As we descended into the clouds and the sun rose higher above the horizon, we flew through an iridescent golden-gray nebula of wisps and puffs, broke through the bottom, and saw an endless deciduous-green shag carpet, like something from the Disco era.  I've never seen, at least from that height, such thick jungle, such an impenetrable canopy of treetops which were only occasionally sliced open by the dull glitter of murky rivers.  The captain announced that we were about to land, and thanked us for our patronage, and with about four seconds and 100 feet of altitude to spare, the jungle broke and the runway began not an inch too soon.

We were picked up at the airport by Flavio, the PCR supervisor, who drove us through the capital, Georgetown, to our hotel, and then to the PC Bureau.  It was my first glimpse of anything in the Western Hemisphere south of Florida, and looked as new to me as Mali did my first time there.  Most of the houses have a similar look; squat and wide, with almost flat, barely triangular roofs, and virtually no buildings exceeding five stories, except for St Georges' Anglican Cathedral, which was once the tallest wooden building in the world.  They also drive on the "wrong" side of the road (as opposed to the right side), which was a tough transition to make in terms of not completely freaking out when I would see a car barreling straight towards us on our right side.

The next few days flew by in a tizzy of orientations and introductions to just about everyone on PC Guyana staff.  Elizabeth, the other Response volunteer who arrived with me (and also happens to come from a Philadelphia suburb near mine), and I were given the skinny on the rules and administrative issues, most of which were familiar, if slightly different from our previous PC posts.  For example, the idea of having weekends off from work and not counting towards vacation days as we travel is different from Mali where we are considered to be officially always on duty, though not necessarily always working.  We also were warned of the new social protocols we would have to get used to, such as how inviting a girl into my house is just a hop, skip, and a jump away from inviting them into bed, regardless of how innocent my intentions might be (and I am nothing if not a man of innocent intentions!).

After three days of orientation, plus a "safety and security" tour of Georgetown, I was ready to be sent off to my site.  We took a taxi to the Essequibo River, which we were then obliged to cross the water by way of a half-hour speedboat ride weaving through islands and bouncing on the waves.  We landed in a town called Supenaam, which I am disappointed to admit was not actually called Superman, and then drove off to the town of Affiance.

Affiance is located right on the coast, but sadly, the beaches are mostly just grassy mud and shallow water.  However, the whole area is absolutely gorgeous, with the strip of towns along the coast, of which Affiance is one, being just a long row of houses and businesses along a single main road, and nothing beyond that road but the sea on one side and rice fields on the other.  The palm trees are plentiful, the livestock are ubiquitous, the heavy gray rainy season clouds loom dramatically, and walking down the street, I keep getting a strong but anonymous scent of something that smells just like Mali, but with a slightly curried flavor to it, which I assume is on account of the predominantly East Indian population here.

It's been less than a week but I already have a million thoughts of this new home of mine and plenty that I want to write.  In consideration to your attention span, I think I will just leave off here, and update you all next week after I've begun my work at the Imam Bacchus Library.

But before you go, I have some great news!  If you thought something like a military coup d'etat and temporary evacuation of the executive staff meant the end of Mali Health Organizing Project, think again!  The local staff are still on the ground in Sikoroni, Bamako, carrying out their normal routines and continuing to implement their programs.  They have a weekly radio program dealing with health issues that gets heard by potentially millions of listeners.  Their Community Health Workers are still diligently making weekly visits to families to check up on the health of the Action For Health program members and training them in early intervention for illness control.  And my pet project in the short time I worked for them, the Three-Legged Stool of Nutrition, was used during a recent nutrition fair which you can see at their blog.  In order for MHOP to keep maximizing their great work, they need funding, and this month, they are running a special fundraising campaign, which you can see all the details about on their newly redesigned website, malihealth.org.  I don't like to plug things needlessly on this blog, be cause let's face it, it's mostly about shameless self-promotion, but MHOP is really a great organization with some creative and capable people running it, and they're not just working to improve the health situation in one part of Bamako, but to create a template for other similar NGOs to learn from.  So donate, already!

Going, Going, Guyana!...Soon?

Well, I must apologize: I had planned to have some new and interesting updates for you all by now, but it seems my life is too glamourous and exciting for my own good.

You may recall in my last posting here that I was given a reassignment to work on a children's' literacy outreach program in Guyana.  Now, while I have gotten some details about the position, I really don't like counting my chickens before they hatch by telling you all exactly what I'm going to be doing there before I've even arrived, since as recent events in my life can attest, sometimes instead of chickens, you get omelettes.  What I do know about the position is that I will be working in a community on the Essequibo Coast of Guyana, on the northern coast of South America (which includes some nice river-side real estate!).  I will initially be doing some local research about mentalities towards education and try to find out as much as I can about why illiteracy rates are as high as they are, even in students – the ones who hypothetically should be learning how to read every day.  Once I have compiled a sufficient amount of research, I will begin to develop a campaign of sorts to encourage reading and set up a program in a local library to that same end.  Basically, my job is to teach youngsters that reading is cool and knowledge is power!  So far, the best idea preliminary brainstorming has gotten me is to dig up old videos on Ebay of Reading Rainbow, one of my all-time favorite PBS shows, and I'm sure yours too!  I mean seriously, if the guy from Star Trek with the funny space-glasses can't encourage them to read, what chance do I have?

Much to my vexation though, there's been a small hiccup in this little plan of mine.  See, I'm writing this blog right now on Monday evening, May 21.  I was supposed to be settling into my new life in Guyana right now, but it doesn't look like I'll be there for another three weeks because, as I said, I'm just too awesome for my own good!  I've been using a special Peace Corps-issued passport for all my Peace Corps-related travel, which actually really just means going to and from Mali, taking various vacations, and of course, being evacuated.  On this passport, I've visited ten different countries, and crossed the borders of those countries multiple times, as many as six times for Togo back in '09.  Well, after all that flipping and flopping all over Creation, it seems that I've run out of pages for visa stamps, so before I could get my Guyana Visa, I needed to get more pages.

America baby, as much as I love you, sometimes I just wish you'd stop wasting your time on those useless extravagances like Brangelina's Baby or the Senate and take care of little ol' Humble Jake!  (No, folks, I don't mind if you start calling me that.)  All I needed were a few pages to staple into the back of my passport and now that it's taken too long to get them, I didn't get my visa yet, which means another 3 weeks or so until I get to leave.  It's not the end of the world, but it is annoying and until my date is confirmed, I'm starting to feel like those guys in the heist movies where they are told to stay in their apartment for days but be ready to move on a moment's notice when it's time for "the job" to go down (thinking specifically of Reservoir Dogs).

In the meantime, I've gotten to meet my niece, Maia "Bean" Kupchan, a 10-week-old bundle of giggles, goofy faces, and earsplitting "I'm hungry/thirsty/tired/scared/bored/confused/lonely" wails.  I've also happened upon some of my "bucket list" concerts which just happened to be in town in the same month which I wasn't even supposed to be home for (Rammstein and Mark Lanegan).  I've helped my sister Aviva out at her urban gardening program, flexing my weeding and sewing muscles, and with my extra time on my hands, I might as well go back.

I have also, with almost masochistic concern, been keeping tabs on the situation in Mali.  It breaks my heart on a pretty regular basis to see the progression of events there in the aftermath of the coup.  Human rights atrocities have become all too common in the northern half of the country as about half a dozen Tuareg Separatist rebels and Islamist Extremist groups have been fighting over towns in the Azawad region, trying to take over land and either resist or impose Sharia Law.  This is all as a result of the power vacuum left by the military withdrawal from the region when the coup started, and so far it hasn't paid off in the least.  Cpt. Sanogo and his cronies have officially stepped down and appointed a member of the old president's staff to act as interim president, but even that is tentative.

According to a Reuters report, "Hundreds of protesters entered Mali's presidential palace unopposed on Monday and said they would remain there until interim civilian president Dioncounda Traore resigned. . . The protesters tore up images of Traore and called for him to be replaced by Captain Amadou Sanogo, the officer who led the March 22 military coup. . . Soldiers positioned at the palace stood by as the civilians entered the buildings."  Within a few hours, the president himself was attacked by the mob and hospitalized.  What this means is that the most vocal citizens of Bamako are in favor of having the coup leaders maintain their globally-unpopular and so far disastrous control of the country rather than let it fall into the hands of those who were in power during the stable, yet corrupt, office of the deposed president Touré, or ATT.  I don't think that the population of Bamako is at all representative of most Malians, but I also can't think of a single nice thing I've ever heard a Malian say about ATT or the government at large.  It may be that however convoluted his methods are, Sanogo might have a bit of a point with regards to just restarting the government from scratch and giving the people something to believe in again.  It is getting harder for me to be able to tell whether I should support what my own sense of logic dictates – that the country is worse off than it has been in decades, with manipulative and hypocritical dictators running the show – or try to understand and reconcile my views with what appears to be the vocal majority.

This is a deceptively complicated issue, which has had dozens of articles written on it, so I won't waste space here just to be redundant, and instead I will just direct you to the News and to one of the best commentaries I've been reading.

Finally, I've posted the best of my photos from my latest gig in Mali, plus my Evacuation Vacation in Ghana onto my Facebook, which you can access here, even if you've never stepped foot on Facebook in your life!

Post-Coup and Post-Corps

The palm trees do nothing to shield the view or muffle the sound of the rhythmic flush of the waves, and the sand infiltrates every pore of my toes as I dig my feet into the tan beach under the diffused light of the cloudy early morning sky, and I have a hard time believing that I am here, and now is now, and the tidal wave of events of the last few weeks is, well, over.

Things were moving quickly for a few days, about two weeks into the coup, and nobody had any idea what direction the situation would take.  First, Cpt. Sanogo said he would step down, but then never said when.  Then ECOWAS agreed to hold off on putting sanctions on Mali, cutting off fuel, food, and money to the landlocked country, but then decided to call Sanogo's bluff and impose them after all.  Depending on who you ask, some say that Mali became something just short of a disaster zone, with endless lines of people at gas stations stocking up on fuel, which was calculated to run out within a few weeks if the sanctions stayed.  Power was cut off for 12 hours a day in Bamako, due to low hydroelectric pressure from the hot season and the desire to save fuel.  Water access in my neighborhood was made difficult because the taps can't pressure the water up the hill to where I lived and it had to be trucked in with tankers, so in an effort to conserve fuel, people stopped getting water.

But on the other hand, if you asked the normal folks out on the street how they felt, they still hated ATT, they still thought Sanogo's putsch was a heroic move, and they really didn't see things as being that bad.  After a time, though, Sanogo was making no earnest moves to step aside, the entire northern half of the country, the Azawad region, was taken over by various warring radical factions of various religious and political stripes, and Peace Corps had no choice but to cash in their chips and evacuate all non-essential staff from Mali, for the first time since our program's inception in 1971.

You can read all about our Exodus-themed Passover Seder on the front page of the April 11 Jewish Exponent, or online here.  But as emotionally gratifying as that night was, two days later, 200 volunteers and staff got on busses to the airport (one of which, in true Malian fashion, broke down along the way before we had even left he city) and boarded our chartered flight to Ghana.

The next day, we began our combination Transition Conference/Close of Service/mad rush to figure out what we were going to do next, and which of our friends we were going to be competing for jobs with.  Peace Corps staff showed all of us just how unbelievably on top of their game they are by managing to proofread and approve all of our Description of Service Reports, signing off on our medical evaluations, and helping us find places to either start anew in another country for two years, find jobs in connected sectors, or move on to Peace Corps Response, the post I had in Mali until everything went sour.

It was about as stressful and nerve-wracking a week as I've had in a long time, since everything was going in hyper-speed.  We all wanted to make as much use of the connections to PC staff as we could while we still had them in shouting distance.  With so many possible options and so little time, being careful or deliberate was a bit of a luxury.  That said, I find it remarkable that within four days of stating a possible interest in another PCR post in another country, I was accepted to a six month position in Guyana, spearheading a children's literacy campaign, which is set to begin in just a few weeks.  For now, I have accepted the post, which will give me a chance to do what I had planned to do during the latter half of my Mali PCR stint – continue working and developing my skills while applying for other jobs so that I can hope to have something solid by the time I finish my service at the end of 2012.

As I write, I am sitting under a gazebo by the beach at the bungalow lodge Hideout, in Ghana, still trying to accept that everything is different now, that my life plans have taken as unexpected and drastic a change as they've ever undergone, and that I now deal with one of the  most obvious yet hardest challenges one can experience in life – the Universe is bigger than me, and when preparation fails, I can only adapt.  I take this oceanside vacation with some friends, swimming, hiking, drinking, playing.  I let the ocean waves drench me, washing out the stress and unhappiness of the last three weeks so I can wring myself dry and clean.  I prepare to close the latest book of my story, to open another.

I've Been Published!

Well, we've been evacuated.  All of Peace Corps Mali has been picked up and taken out of the country.  While I'm not sure if I am allowed to publicly post too many details as to where we are, what we are doing, or when we'll be done, I for one plan to be back in the U.S. of A. in about a week.  Until then, read this article I was asked to write for the Jewish Exponent, which got published right on the front page!  Later on, you'll get some more current and useful details out of me, but this should tide you over for now and let you know all about my third and most significant Passover in Mali - the story of how the Evacuation from Egypt and the Exodus from Mali came together.

A Modern Passover Exodus

Coup-ed Up: One Week After Mali's Mutiny

It depends on who you are talking to, whether it was a "mutiny" or a proper "coup d'etat."  The latter seems to have a more official ring to it, though the Dictionary on my laptop calls it "violent, and illegal," while the former is a more derogatorily used term, adopted by those who would prefer to undermine the legitimacy of the military takeover.  They both sound bad to me, but I suppose "coup d'etat" has that sophisticated Francophone authority to it, whereas "mutiny" (which by the way is also a French word in origin) brings to mind 18th century pirate novels and Humphrey Bogart being miscast as a Naval Captain in "Mutiny on the Bounty."  In Peace Corp's recent text message to all of us volunteers, we were warned to stay out of the center of Bamako because of protests "supporting mutineers."  And hours before he was deposed, Malian president Amadou Toumani Toure, ATT as he's universally known here, Tweeted that there was no "coup" going on, simply a mutiny, as if the difference between the terms was enough to quell our worries.  ATT only got off one final Tweet before he wasn't heard from again for an entire week, so it seems to me that whatever you want to call what happened, it was certainly effective in its goal – ousting the president, dissolving the constitution, and handing control of the entire country over to Captain Amadou Sanogo.

These are some of the thoughts I've been ruminating on since Thursday morning, at around 7:45 am, an hour before I usually show up at Mali Health Organizing Project for work.  It was at that time, lying in bed reading, that I got a phone call from Anna, our current and soon-to-be former Executive Director, and Kris, our currently soon-to-be Executive Director.

"Hey, Jake, have you been listening to the news?  No?  Okay, well, the military apparently took over the presidential palace and dissolved the constitution, so we're all just kind of hanging out at the office on the internet, waiting to see what happens."

"Um, okay…I guess I'll be over in a little bit…" I replied, shocked almost to silence and not having the slightest clue what to do with the information I had just gotten.  Presently enough, Peace Corps brought it all home for me with a phone call saying that we were officially on Standfast, which means that you don't leave home for any reason, unless you're like me and your office with internet is around the corner, and the neighborhood is totally quiet.  So I headed over to work, and Anna, Kris, my supervisor Devon, and I began our weekend-long vigil, confined mostly to the office, glued to our computers, and turbulently plowing through every emotion we knew of while trying to make sense of the insanity.  Anna half-joked that we have been going through the seven stages of frief, from shock and denial (not our little Mali!?) to anger (stupid Sanogo!).

After a week, things have calmed down, in a manner of speaking, but they don't make any more sense.  Even since the last time I was in Mali in 2010, Malians have not been fond of ATT, and are perfectly happy to have someone kick him out of office.  The fact that he was just over a month away from being voted out legally and democratically is not all that important to many people.  They were happy to see someone like Sanogo stand up for their opinions.  And to the disbelief of us Americans, while around 1000 people marched into Bamako to protest the unconstitutional takeover, several times that number held a rally the next day in support of Sanogo and his junta, and decrying the opinions of the rest of the world's governments who are appear universally opposed to the coup.  Mali has been disenfranchised and sanctioned by the likes of the African Union, the EU, US, and ECOWAS, who was planning to send a delegation of presidents from neighboring countries over to talk to Sanogo, but protestors crowded the runway at Bamako's airport and all the planes turned tail and flew home, and now they are planning sanctions and border closings if the junta is still in power come Monday.  The public seems to largely see this as their country's business, and has no interest in seeing anyone else get involved.  Whether they see the long-term repercussions of alienating the countries upon whose aid, Mali so heavily depends, is unclear to me, but that particular issue has not really come up.  "I want the international community to shut up. This is our revolution," were the words heard by one young protestor at the pro-junta rally on Wednesday. 

Of course, we here at MHOP have nothing good to say about the revolt.  For one thing, I've been prohibited by PC from leaving my neighborhood or going further than the distance to get food at the market down the road.  It's in the interest of safety, and I'm fortunate to be able to split my time between home and the office, and I've been making use of the time by being more glued to the Media than I have perhaps since 9/11.  On a side not, it wasn't until this week that I realized the advantages of Twitter.  I had always just ridiculed it as the latest superfluous web-based outlet for mankind's sense of narcissism, a tool for those who truly feel that each trivial thought of theirs needs to be communicated to the masses in real time.  However, I've spent most of the week with at least three web-browser windows opened at a time to various live feeds of Mali news headlines, as it was literally the fastest way to get the latest headlines, and to those of you egotists who really think that what you have to report is so important, you've just been vindicated, so well done!  Of course, half the information out there is rumor and heresay, so a lot of the "information" we've been getting has been second guessing itself and put together, it would read like the script of a bad thriller/soap-opera: The president is dead!...no wait, he's alive but in custody...no, he's still free and under guard but he's launching a counter-offensive...except he's not, and ECOWAS has closed all the banks and frozen money...but actually, they haven't!...and Mali's national television is out of military control...well, no it's not, but they're just showing videos of dancing villagers anyway...

The grimmer news is that the MHOP Board of Directors has decided that with the situation as unpredictable as it is, all American staff are ordered out of the country until things calm down, some unknowable time in the future.  Luckily for me, I ultimately answer to Peace Corps, so I can keep working as long as we haven't evacuated, but with our EDs leaving early and the office manager Devon leaving this place which has become her home, and the rest of the organization's operations continuing to run at almost regular capacity, things are going to get heated up around here.  We've spent days making arrangements for who is to take over which roles and which programs will run at what level.  We're also pulling 12-hour work days preparing for an impact evaluation study we are planning for this summer with Brown University.  

Between these last minute preparations for their departure and seeing the news of the situation evolve in ways that make it increasingly clear that an easy and speedy resolution are unlikely, not to mention being quarantined to my immediate neighborhood, things have been stressful.  Peace Corps sent a list of clever suggestions for killing time while on Standfast, which I'm sure is a much different situation for volunteers in other parts of the country where dozens of them are sequestered in their regional houses together (22 in Kita, my old region, which if I recall has maybe room to fit half that many people comfortably).  These included making Zombie movies, holding Poker tournaments, and a Nation-wide Volunteer World Map mural contest.  We've been mostly watching movies (but still no 2008 Phillies vs. Devil Rays), cooking lavish dinners, working, I made a Standfast playlist on my iTunes featuring songs about being bored, trapped, and how "Politics Are Bad" by Malian duo Amadou and Mariam.

Thankfully, things are still safe here, and in my neighborhood things have barely changed at all, except at first when gas stations closed to avoid looting and our water-delivery tanker was delayed a couple days.  Overall, looting in town has subsided, and all the soldiers who stole property from the homes of the deposed politicians were ordered to return everything.  Evacuation, as of last night, is still considered an unlikely and unnecessary scenario.  But we're still on Standfast through Monday at the earliest, and this whole situation feels like a countdown to the inevitable, as it doesn't seem likely that Sanogo will give up his power anytime soon.  For now, it's just more waiting and wondering.  

For those of you who haven't done enough reading here, I recommend this blog, this interview, which shows a side of Mali's problems I haven't even addressed here but which are no less pressing, and my new friend Twitter for a conglomeration of pretty much all Mali-news, as it comes.

The Situation in Mali

It's a similar feeling, I imagine, to what one feels when you've been diagnosed with a terrible disease.  There's a feeling of denial that makes you have to ask yourself, "How could this happen to me?  I'm healthy!"  Similarly, Mali has for a long time had a reputation of being one of the sanctuaries of peace and Democracy in West Africa, and really the continent as a whole.  They have had a strong Democratic government for years, and relative stability, one of the freest medias in Africa, and while desperately poor as a country, and certainly not without its strifes, it just feels like a safe and happy place.  So it's amazing to me that things have gotten as out of hand as they have.

If you haven't been following the situation as it's been unravelling, over the last several months, there has been a resurgence of rebel activity in the northern part of the country from militants of the nomadic Tuareg ethnic group, MNLA, who want their own independent country in the north.  This fight has been going on for decades, but has been fairly quiet and civil, up until a couple years ago, when I was in Mali the first time.  With the combination of MNLA rebels and a rapidly increasing presence of AQIM terrorists using that desert part of the country as a safe haven, stability began to decrease.  In the last several months, MNLA has become much more determined and agressive in it's demands, and has begun advancing south into more populated areas of the country, seizing towns, killing locals, and and successfully resisting Malian troops almost the entire way.  The Malian government has been sending forces up to combat, but their lack of success at stopping the MNLA advance has angered civillians all over the country.  Combined with the long-lasting drought that has been going on, there have been nearly 200,000 refugees from Mali, either to other neighboring countries or to more central parts of the country, near Bamako.  And in Bamako, there have been demonstrations, riots, and occasional violence as people are getting fed up with watching their soldiers and countrymen killed only because of what they consider to be the weak handling of the situation by President Amadou Toumani Touré, ATT, whose already weak popularity had become total disdain by many Malians.  And that was the state of things, until Wednesday.

Despite the democratic elections being held next month, the military faction, CNRDR (National Committee for the Return of Democracy and the Restoration of the State), declared a coup d'etat yesterday to oust the "incompetent and disavowed" President.  They took over the national TV station and Presidential Palace in Bamako to make this speech, and have begun arresting cabinet members.  ATT disappeared, and is reportedly hiding in a base outside the city, protected by his special guards and paratroopers.  According the Red Cross, there have been 40 injuries and one death.  A full-time nation-wide curfew has been declared, and in the meantime, NMLA has decided to take the opportunity caused by the confusion in the capital and preoccupied state of the military to "take advantage of the chaos to gain more ground" and "make new advances in their campaign to carve out a northern homeland." (http://af.reuters.com/article/maliNews/idAFL6E8EMAAJ20120322)

As for me, I've had some contact with Peace Corps officials who called me to tell me that we are on Standfast, meaning stay inside and don't try anything funny.  All day, I've been at my office, around the corner from my house, with the other 3 American staff and a couple of our Malian coworkers as well.  We've been soaking up the news, staying in contact with friends, and waiting to see what happens next.  Our plan is to head over to my house if anything heats up around here, which is not likely, but my house has lots of locking doors and is well fortified, with food and water if the worst were to happen.  We just ventured out to my house to get my external hard drive full of movies, some TV shows, and the 2008 World Series (which nobody else seems interested in watching), and some whiskey I had stowed for special occasions, such as violent military uprisings.  Nobody in the streets seem the slightest bit concerned over anything that's going on.  A truck full of armed soldiers passed by the road earlier, but it hasn't caused a bit of a stir, and people say they were probably just filling up on gas, or perhaps arresting some political figure who might live in the next town over.  We're going to start making dinner together soon, and we're keeping a good sense of humor as we wonder how this could have happened to our little Mali.  It's surreal, because by the looks of it, things seem more or less the same as they always do here in Sikoro, making the whole day seem more unbelievable.  And yet, here we are, waiting to know what the future holds.  I finally got to meet my adorable new niece over Skype, less than two weeks old, and to echo the words of her mother, my sister, I hope it will still be another year before I get to meet her in person.

Here's a nice long list of all the major Mali-related news headlines since the begining and earlier to get a better idea of what's been going on here: http://twitter.com/#!/mali

The Good, the Bad, and the Uncreative Title

There's a rustling, a shuffling, and scratching, and a squeaking, and I lift myself upright in my bed and look at the ground outside my window to find Ratt Murdoch happily feasting on my old fish bones.  Ratt Murdoch is a good neighbor, one whose company I've enjoyed through my screened bedroom window almost since the day I moved into my new apartment in Bamako.  He makes some noise, but it's enough to let me know he's there, and not too much to be a bother.  Unlike the lizards who frequent the walls outside my house, he's not as skittish and frightened off by sounds, so I can usually get a good long look at him, watching him scamper around digging for food or exploring my seven square feet of backyard, without him running away.  A few nights ago, I hosted a fish chowder dinner for some of my co-workers and there was enough leftover for me to give to one of my (Homo sapien) neighbors who often cooks for me.  Left with a pile of fish bones, I decided that those would be equally appreciated by one of my other (Rattus norvegicus) neighbors, who I named after the alter ego of the superhero Daredevil (The Man Without Fear!).  Now, some of you might know that for quite a while last year, in between coming home from the Peace Corps and going WWOOFing in Europe, I adopted a pair of rat brothers who were adorable, affectionate, intelligent, and playful little pals.  Aside from an avid propensity towards defecation wherever they chose, they were fantastic pets and proved themselves wholly unworthy of the stigma our society has so unfairly cast upon them.  So when I discovered the young little Mr. Murdoch outside my window, I developed an immediate sympathy and affection towards him, and while I have no intention of actually adopting a possibly feral rodent off the street, I have no problem encouraging him to stop by once in a while to say hi, and letting him eagerly dispose of some of my organic garbage too.  Besides, since I'm living in an urban environment this time, keeping a pet seems like more trouble than it's worth, and I already fulfilled one of my greatest life-long dreams of owning a pet monkey the last time I was in Mali living en brousse, so I'm happy to just have a frequent visitor who isn't too dependent on me this time around.

Yes, things are certainly different from the way they were the last time I was doing PC Mali.  I've moved from the country to the city; I've got utilities, regular contact other Americans/Westerners, and a 9-5, five-days-a-week job (for the first time since 2007!).  It's good, it's bad, and it's looney.  For the benefit of those of you who have not read my old PC Mali articles or just don't remember everything I've written about over the last three and a half years (I don't even remember some of my Niantanso friends' names, so don't feel too bad), here's a little point-by-point comparison of the old life to the new.

First off, the most basic differences.  In Niantanso, my 2000 resident urban farming village, three hours from the nearest large town, people didn't have any qualms about a) naked children running around all over creation with their five-year-old siblings looking after them, b) publicly picking their nose or spitting indoors, c) coming by my house at all hours of the day or night if they had any suspicion at all that I might be around and incessantly knocking and calling my name so they could say hi or just get a good White Person sighting, until I would cave in and answer, whether I was sleeping or just ignoring them and trying to get some peace and quiet, d) asking me if I brought them presents every time I come in from town or telling me (not asking me, mind you) that I should give them my money/clothes/watch/food/etc. because I'm stinkin' rich and they have no money at all.  In Sikoroni, the peri-urban neighborhood that is one of the poorest areas in Bamako, just outside one of the most cosmopolitan, a) many more, but not quite all, the children wear clothes, b) it's probably not a whole lot more sanitary here, but you don't see kids using the outer wall of my house as a urinal, c) I live in an enclosed apartment compound so people don't really come in without a reason, and kids seem to have better things to do with their time than "visit" me, and d) people seem to be more used to folks like me around here, and don't have the same expectations of me.

In Niantanso, the nearest cellular service was a 15km bike ride on a forest trail which I took once a week, and the nearest electricity and running water were 40km, which I only saw maybe five days a month on average.  In Sikoroni, there is cell service, electricity, and while I have no running water, I do have an indoor latrine and I can just get the kid who goes up and down the street all day selling water for ¢10 per 20L jug to fill me up.  In Niantanso, my house was made of mud bricks, and had a thatched grass and bamboo roof, which meant that the insect-to-human ratio in my house outnumbered me several thousand to one.  In Sikoroni, I get cement walls, tile floors, and screen windows that close properly.

So have I moved up in the world?  Well, in Niantanso, I was friendly with at least half the town, partly because I was so novel and exciting, even late into my service, and partly because everyone knew everyone anyway, so of course I was part of that.  In Sikoroni, well, it's a lot more like living your city.  In Niantanso, the village was surrounded by literally endless trails that wound through forests and fields, over and around hills and cliffs, past other villages, and one of the most relaxing things to do on a slow day was just to get lost in the woods or on a hilltop, or gather wild fruit, or go bouldering.  In Sikoroni, it's all urban, you have to be constantly watching out for passing motor scooters in the road, and while there is a hill, there's nary a decent tree on it and nothing but slums of small cement houses as far as the eye can see.  In Niantanso, my 6am wakeup every morning was the gentle and rustic cockadoodledoo of the roosters, braying of donkeys, and rhythmic thumping of women pounding millet.  In Sikoroni, it's motorcycles, trucks, the main gate to my compound swinging and crashing open and shut, all reverberated and amplified by the walls of our courtyard so it's like trying to sleep through the motor pit at the Indy 500 Speedway.  In Niantanso, I was literally unable to spend more than a third of my $280/month stipend at site every month even if I tried since there's little more than food and the occasional new t-shirt or soap bar to buy, which meant that when I went into town or took vacation time, I had more than enough cash to throw around.  In Sikoroni, being a Bamako volunteer, I make slightly more money but have a lot more places and opportunities to spend it, and people to encourage me to spend it with them, and instead of being filthy rich, I'm finding myself having to budget my expenses just to keep my bank account in check.

I could go on, but another advantage of being in the city is that I can update my blog more often and not burden you with half an hour of reading material with every posting.  As far as conclusions for this one though, I honestly haven't made up my mind yet.  Bamako is easier, the bush is simpler.  I certainly had no desire to go back to living in the village for my second time out, though.  I may miss the magic, culture, and freedom of the Wild West, but it's the same Mali.  I still get to speak Bambara, I still get my favorite local cuisine – though they make it better out in Malinke country – and I'm still getting to do some feel-good local aid work, which I'll get into next time.  For now, I hear some more rustling outside my window…it looks like Ratt Murdoch has a friend!  Well hello there, Ratisyahu, Hassidic Rodent Superstar…

Old-New Photos: Better Late Than Never

For those of you who have been complimenting me so complimentarily on how much you love my descriptions of my travels and how much they make you feel like you are really there, I'm going to do you one better!  Follow the link below to get to my Facebook album full of all the best pictures I took of my Israel trip.  Lots of prettiness and plenty of gratuitous sunset shots, but sadly, I lost my picture of the Big Yellow Dinosaur.
Enjoy!

Click Me! - Israel Photo Album

Return of the Nonnative: Jake Back in Mali

With apologies to those of you who have somehow been left out of the comings and goings of my life as of late, I assume most of you know that I've found my way back to Mali, my old country of residence from 2008 to 2010.  And for those of you who didn't know this, and are right now going through tremendous surprise and shock, well…whoops…I probably should have told you to sit down for this.  Not the kind of blast-in-the-brain you wanted to get while reading your iPad on a crowded subway on the way to work, is it?

But now that you've had a chance to recover, and for the rest of you who already knew about this, I should probably take this time to explain myself a bit.  As you may have gathered from knowing me personally, or reading my previous tactlessly-honest blog posts, I've been in a bit of a directionless state for a while.  I finished the Peace Corps in Mali in 2010, was home by October of that year, looking for jobs a few months later, with not the kind of success I had hoped for.  It was then that I was invited by an old and dear friend to come along on a WWOOFing adventure with another of his old and dear friends, who would soon become a new and dear friend of mine. (When I was much younger, people would talk about "dear friends" and I would somehow decide they meant Bambi, the only friendly deer I knew of – and now you know even more about me!)

Over the course of my hard-working, exciting, and emotionally profitable adventure, I began to realize that I needed to sit my brain down and have a talk with it.  You know, really figure out what it wanted from me, where it wanted me to go, in a way that would be productive for the safety, well-being, and longevity of the rest of me.  My Id, Ego, and Superego thought they needed a heart-to-heart with my gut feelings.  WWOOFing-buddy Matt noted at a later point that he had noticed that I was often talking about trying to figure out what's next in my life, with no satisfied answer, but that I often spoke with mirth and fondness of my time in Mali, and he had sort of assumed that at some point in the near future, I would make my way back there.  And I had planned to…at some point, though not necessarily knowing when.  But the more I began to look at the prospect of coming home from my trip and having to start from scratch with the job searches and whatnot, I realized that more than any other specific thing, I just wanted to get back into the world of international development and intrigue, and what better place than the place where it all started for me, the land I grew to love, Mali.

Of course, due credit goes to Karmen, my old site-mate, "travel-wife" (so shady characters would leave her alone on our frequent cross-country bus trips), and good friend.  She gave me the extra push of confidence I needed, not to mention advice, for how to go about applying to Peace Corps Response, a program for Returned Peace Corps Volunteers to go back into service to fill immediate and specific needs by host organizations.  I sent emails to our PC/Mali Country Director, applied online (PC headquarters never actually got my application, though, but with the strength of the CD's recommendation, they figured it didn't really matter anyway), and was accepted to work for what I lovingly call the Malian House of Pancakes (MHOP - they're actually called Mali Health Organizing Project).  Washington HQ was actually somewhat vague as to the nature of the work I would be doing there – mainly, I suspect, because of a previous negative experience with a PCV which didn't work out – and with rising Tuareg Rebel tensions in the Northern desert areas of the country, and a last-minute tonsillectomy, I actually began to worry that this plan might not materialize after all.  But my departure date came, and after 10 hours of waiting in airports, 15 hours sitting in airplanes, two sunsets, five in-flight movies (I recommend "50/50" and "The Ides of March," but was disappointed by "Horrible Bosses"), I arrived back into the fresh, balmy, night air of Bamako International Airport, just like I did three and a half years ago, and I felt mighty nice!

I guess the next question is "So Jake, what are you doing in Mali this time?"  The answer is: I don't really know enough to have anything worth telling you quite yet.  I only just met with the organization on Thursday, and I don't begin work until Monday.  If you want to know what MHOP does, you should go to malihealth.org and they will tell you all about what they do, and what I will be a part of.

As for where I'm doing it, well it's a far cry from the rural village I found myself in last time – though not quite as far as I pictured it might be.  I'm in Bamako, the capital city, but not quite in the city proper.  It's more like on the outskirts, or peri-urban neighborhood, as it's been described.  It's got the business, noise, and congestion of the city but without the amenities like nice houses, or electricity or running water in every home.  I'm actually fairly happy with where I'm set up, despite being way on the other side of town from the PC bureau, transit house, and most direct and easily accessible PC contact.  In fact, the taxi ride across town to PC territory costs about half as much as a bus from Kita, one of the nearby transit houses back when I was a normal volunteer, several hours outside the city.

But this time, my walls and roofs are cement, not mud and thatched bamboo, there's electricity, I have an indoor toilet/bathroom so I can use the commode in comfort, in any weather – but no indoor running water, so I'll still have to wait for the water delivery boy to come by every day (just like the Milk Man in the olden days!).  And let's not forget the lovely sunrise view outside my window.

I'm right near a large local market, and not too far from the Westerner-friendly supermarkets and restaurants, if I feel like splurging my meager PC stipend (or I could save up for a fridge…).  And while this neighborhood, Sikoroni (or Sikoron as the locals call it, the "ni" suffix being considered diminutive), is not the quaint, slow-paced, and relaxing village Niantanso was for me for two years, I've been told that the old village mentality this area had before it was developed into a Bamako suburb is still somewhat intact.  They still have unpaved roads, the neighbors are characteristically delightful and adorable, there's a few good climbing hills nearby for great vistas of the city, and best of all, they speak Bambara!  Not Niantanso's bee-stung-tounge dialect of Bambara, locally called Maningakhan, where every name sounds like something somebody belched (M'badjala, Djadjei) and even Malians from other parts of the country can't understand a word the old ladies say, but real, straightforward, simple Bambara, a language as easy to say and learn as its own names (Fanta, Mamadou).  And while most of the people I knew when I was still in Mali are gone, with a few fantastic exceptions, that just means there are that many more new people to meet.

So the lesson for the day is that while things are not quite as I thought they would be, that's part of the fun of living and working in Mali, and knowing that every day will be rife with strange and novel experiences, waiting to be enjoyed.  And for now, I feel like I'm on something resembling the right track.  Of course, work doesn't start until Monday...