au marché

at the market~ Nothing-not stories of past travels or all of the documentaries and books in the world- can prepare you to go to the market in Bamako.  People say that it will be a sensory overload, that you should be well-rested before you go, but after the mind-blowing experience of actually being there...several times now...I cannot help but return to one of my favorite travel quotes: 
"the use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality and instead of thinking of how things may be, to see them as they are." ~Samuel Johnson
At the market, you will see a lot of food (I recommend against going to the meat section-lots of live, unhappy chickens and fly-covered chunks of beef), juice and water sold in bags, handmade fabric and jewelry, and many plastic "teapots," which are used for hand washing as well as other kinds of washing (i.e., they help out the left hand with its duties).  However, you will also find MANY signs of "neo-colonialism" and/or globalization: cheap European-looking clothes, flip-flops, sunglasses, sugary sodas, and some Obama posters here and there.  The packaging of many of these products lines the unpaved pathway that serves as such for not only shoppers and vendors but also motorcycles and cars.  If you are in a group of one or more white people, especially white women, you will immediately find yourself surrounded by "helpers" who want to show you around the market and thus earn a sum of the money you pay whatever vendor you eventually choose.  Cries of "toubabou" (white person) come from every direction and every age of person, and don't be surprised when people literally grab your arm and try to pull you in every direction.  I do not normally have too big of a personal space "bubble," but the Malians may finally have found it.
     However, the market it also the center of some people's lives; it is the only source of revenue for a woman who is not well supported by her husband.  She somehow finds a way to feed a family by selling small bags of popcorn or plastic sunglasses to her counterparts or the random westerner who decides to brave the market.  No wonder they are excited to see us-our light skin tone means money, and it is not as if we don't have it.
     After our time at the market, I left with my three white friends and a ridiculous sense of accomplishment in one of the green sotramas (buses-with set lines and stops that everyone apparently just knows without any maps or signs marking stops), new fabric in hand.  It was the International Women's Day-March 8, 2011-print.  I thought that 10 U.S. dollars for 2 meters was a pretty good deal, until I later realized I could have found the same amount at the wholesale store for 2 U.S. dollars.  We definitely have yet to master the art of bargaining...and that of knowing where to go.
     The sotrama filled up to what we would call its capacity of about 15...which  quickly became 30, but we still succesfully made it back to our families, feeling like we had run about 10 miles and wondering how the adventure of dinner would go.  Every day certainly does hold something new and exciting!
 Kan ben

Tooro TE

Pas de problème~Hier, je pensais que je détestais le weekend; je deviendrais folle si je devais passer une heure de plus devant la télé sans personne que parle une langue que j'arrive à comprendre....entre les Maliens, c'est presque toujours le bambara, même s'ils peuvent parler le français.  Je suis là pour apprendre et pour aider les gens, pas pour m'asseoir, seule, pendant toute la journée.  Or, les choses me semblait d'être impossibles à organiser ici.  Je voulais faire un bénévolat à soit une clinique soit une centre de santé communautaire (CSCOM), mais évidemment, ils n'ont pas beaucoup de clients le weekend, le seul temps pendant lequel je pourrais y travailler.  Par contre, je ne comprends pas du tout pourquoi il n'y a pas beaucoup de clients, surtout au CSCOM, le weekend, car la santé de gens en général au Mali n'est certainement pas la meilleure du monde, et ce fait pose beaucoup de problèmes à la vie quotidienne.  C'est une question à traiter- On verra.         
     Avec tout cet énergie nerveux de mes pensées, je ne savais pas quoi faire.  Je ne voulais que courir...faire la cuisine...courir...faire la cuisine, les deux activités que généralement m'aident à réfléchir à mes problèmes.  Mais "faire la cuisine" n'a pas la même signification ici qu'aux Etats-Unis, et je suis nulle.  En plus, ma famille d'accueil ne me donnera jamais des tâches domestiques à faire.  De l'autre côté, les filles/femmes ne font pas souvent "du jogging" au Mali.  Le basket est considéré comme sport féminin, mais comme règle général, ce sont les hommes qui s'entrainent aux sports.  Est-ce que j'étais assez courageuse de casser cette barrière?  Je pensais pas, mais après un dîner au restaurant avec des amies américaines de mon programme, je m'ai décidée-je courirais le lendemain.  Je m'en moquais.
     Alors, ce matin, je me suis levée assez tôt, et habillé en t-shirt et des "culottes" (un short qui couvre les genoux) prêtés de ma sœur d'accueil, j'ai quitté la maison.  Quelle surprise!  Les gens n'ont pas trop crié à moi, sauf l'homme qui dirait parfois, "courage!"  Petit à petit, je me suis détendue, et comme toujours quand on court, j'ai commencé à voir mon quartier d'un point de vue différent.  Voici une école, voilà des petits enfants, des femmes de ménage jetant de l'eau par terre; voici la maison d'une amie, voilà un cyber-café; c'est un vrai monde, pas une idée qui vit à mon imagination, un monde tellement différent que le mien que j'y avais pensé comme à un rêve, même en étant là.  J'y ai réfléchis jusqu'à la fin de la rue...les champs pleins de déchets devant l'aéroport.  Puis, le retour-j'adore toujours le retour, car cela me donne l'occasion de remuer mes pensées de l'aller.  En plus, augmentant la vitesse, c'est l'occasion pour l'on d'utiliser tout l'énergie qui lui reste.  Après m'avoir douchée, j'ai salué ma maman d'accueil.  "I ka kEnE?" (comment va la santé?), elle ma demandé. "Tooro TE," (pas de problème) j'ai répondu avec plus de vérité que jamais.  Hier, rien n'était possible, mais aujourd'hui, tout l'est!!!

Frapper

To hit~ Sardined into our white van with the windows open and the dust blowing in, we were making our way to Koulikoro, a village about 60 km outside of Bamako on the Niger River.  I had carefully placed myself next to Lamine, the amazing "student activities coordinator" who pretty much does anything and everything to help us make the most of our experience.  He also happens to be my "joking cousin," (as he is a blacksmith and I, because I live with the family, Bah, am a cowherder) part of an ethnic group that historically shares a unique bond with my own, allowing us to joke with each other, saying things like "you are my grandson/granddaughter" or "you eat beans."  From him, we learn how to joke, speak, and generally interact in the Malian way.  Therefore, I am ALWAYS asking him questions.  That day, I began with, "is it normal here for older family members to hit younger ones as punishment?" because that in particular had been making me uncomfortable in my host family lately.  Apparently, "beating is part of informal education here," but not to the point that the other person is seriously hurt.  However, if it really bothers me, I may be able to say, "yes, he was wrong to do that, but you should stop hitting him," always agreeing with the older person, and he or she will usually listen. 
     Feeling empowered, I went on to ask an all-the-more nagging question: "what about violence between young children of the same age?"  I had not been able to stop mentally replaying the moment from the day before when my host brother (8 years old) started yelling at all of the girls his age who were painting their nails in my room...and then hitting them.  One of the girls was almost in tears, and another looked at me, laughing, and said "he is going to be just like his father."  My gut reaction was too much, and feeling like I had real power, being 12 years older than everyone else in the room, I fixed him with an angry stare and grabbed his hand...my strength against his...keeping him from moving away from the room or toward the girls.  "Why are you hitting them?!!!" I yelled, in French.  He pointed to a bottle of nail polish that the girl he just was hitting had knocked over on the ground, and I said "no, she knocked that over because you were hitting her, not before." He looked at me in disbelief.  Who was I to stop him?...me, the random white person who cannot even speak his first language and who never keeps the rest of the family from hitting him? But he stopped...and left the room.
     After hearing my story, Lamine looked at me with approval: "you did the right thing; I am proud of you," he said.  Apparently because I am older than my host brother, I as the adult am always supposed to break up fights between him and his friends.  But I was strangely unappeased by this explanation.  It still feels unfair to me that I can stop one person from hitting others but no one from hitting him.  However, Lamine brought me back to Earth...and that particular piece of it called Mali... by asking about what parents usually do to discipline their children in the U.S.  Apparently time-out would be considered abuse here, but beating is not...

le monde est petit

It's a small world~ (this information is slightly old again...I actually wrote it four days ago but couldn't post it until now) Yes, people were right when they said that it would be very different being in Africa, that it would be hard to adjust, that I would get sick.  I am currently finishing up my malaria medications (the doctor found it early enough that I didn't experience anything strongly resembling malaria, but I was a bit sick nonetheless) and feel like I am starting over again, trying not to feel nauseous every time I eat dinner filled with shared saliva, trying not to overreact when I actually want private time, but a few members of my host family run into the room yelling at each other or when they call the maid to turn off the light instead of doing it themselves.  At least, that is how I felt this morning.  But then everything changed... those of you who were keeping up with my blog last semester may remember a certain incident from my stay in France:
   "And [the concert at the sainte chapelle] was all the better not only because of the fantastic student discount but also because I enjoyed it with new friends—a couple from Australia and their cousin, who is French!  The two Australians have been to Mali, and as I am going to study the healthcare system there (among other things) next semester, I was extremely intrigued when they began an in-depth discussion of just that.  Apparently Mr. Awesome Australian man came down with a mild autoimmune (but easily treatable) disease that develops from the flu while he was there, and the doctors were entirely clueless.  When he went to London, the first doctor he saw, along with a colleague, made the correct diagnosis on the first try.  However, Mali apparently offers some of the best treatments for Malaria."
    What I failed to mention in this account was the fact that the Australian couple also had a contact in Mali, the man who helped them get to London when things started to go wrong.  The night of the concert, we exchanged email addresses, and they sent me his contact information within the week.  So today, feeling better and ready again for adventure, I decided to visit this Mr. Youchau Traoré.  An interesting and roundabout taxi ride later during which neither I nor the driver knew the directions to our destination, I arrived at the "ecole youchau traoré."  He welcomed me warmly despite my being 30 minutes late and handed me lunch...complete with a fork and bottled water.  Then, we started talking, and I sat in awe as he discussed his life.  He grew up in a village and eventually moved to the city to study.  He then worked for various international organizations as a translator and language teacher including the Peace Corps and...believe it or not...SIT study abroad (my program).  He then decided that given his success in life, it was time to give back to the community, so he built his school in one of the poorer areas of Bamako, trained his teachers himself, and paid for the majority of his students' tuition for the first several years.  His relationships with westerners continued to multiply, given his continued work as a translator, and with the help of an American student, he set up a sponsorship program between her city in the US and his students, through which people can pay for one year of a child's education at a time.  He also personally financed a Community Healthcare Center in his community, allowing it to be one of the only ones in Mali that is not financially dependent on the government (which would not be good because the government doesn't really allocate funds for healthcare, especially at the community level).  He told me he could sign me up for a one month internship there and that I can use the computer lab at his school whenever I want.  He proceeded to answer all of the hard questions that no one seemed to want to answer before today...like why will my host family never give me less food even though I can never eat all of it?  How do the Sotramas (the "bus" system of sorts) actually work?  And the most pressing question of all: why does it seem that the Malian people never actually answer my questions?  He said that it is language based:  the language of Bambara is very general, so people do not know how to be direct in answering a question.  He said that to receive an answer I should keep asking...and asking... and asking...until the answer becomes something resembling the directness I am looking for.
     Time with Youchau was well spent, and I hope to visit him again soon.  I can't believe that I found a contact so rich in knowledge and a friend so rich in hospitality through a chance encounter in Paris.  Indeed, it's a small world.

le moustiquaire

the mosquito net~ I never thought that the mosquito net would be a source of worry for me here.  And it is only indirectly that it has been, but my strange ocd tendancies are definitely showing their true colors....

The first couple of nights I was here, I knew that I would eventually share a bed, but the sister I usually would sleep with was gone, so it didn't hit me how interesting this experience could be.  I proceeded to throw up profusely the second night of my stay and became totally paranoid that I would get stuck inside the mosquito net when I needed to run to the bathroom...the first internal sign that this might not work.  The first external sign that something wasn't right was a single dress cast off onto my bed.  I thought that was strange but figured that someone accidently left it there while changing, since the communal chest of drawers is in my room.  But then my sister came back, and I realized that it is common practice in my family to throw dirty clothes...undergarments included... onto this bed, to lay on it during the day (sweating a lot in the process), and even to eat on it sometimes.  I told myself that it would be o.k...I have american ideas about cleanliness, etc., but then, I slept with my sister who moves around a lot in her sleep, often closer to me rather than farther away, which is not good, especially when I am already pouring sweat because of being inside the mosquito net.  Two almost sleepless nights later, I decided to ask my family to let me put up the mosquito net tent that I brought from the US outside the house because it would be cooler.  They proceeded to start taking the dirty mattress off the bed to put it outside...for me to sleep on it with my sister.  I quickly assured them that I did not mean to make my sister sleep outside as well...so they proceeded to take the mattress off of another sister's bed and put it outside for me with her mosquito net.  She then slept in the dirty bed with my other sister.  The next day, I finally convinced them to let me put up my tent, so now i am much cooler at night and not stealing anyone's bed...but that was definitely a cultural experience...  Somehow being low maintenance in American culture becomes high maintenance here in no time.  It is all very interesting... Hopefully I will write soon with something a bit more profound, but I find that especially at the start of one's stay here, the practical parts of life feel so immediate and important that there is not much time for anything else!

So/I ka so

chez moi/ à ma maison~ Tout d'abord, à mes amis francophones, excusez-moi pour mes fautes!...              Je ne me suis jamais sentie tellement bienvenue et quand même tellement seule chez des étrangers que je me sens chez ma famille d'accueil.  Ils parlent parfaitement le français, mais comme ce n'est pas leur langue maternelle, le "lingua franca" appelé "frambara" (français + bambara) constitue la plupart de la conversation, et je trouve que c'est une réussite si je comprends même un mot ou deux.  Pourtant, ils décident souvent de me dire des petites choses en français comme, "le petit garçon qui habite à côté a dit que tu es gentille-car tu l'as salué.  Une des anciennes étudiantes n'aurait jamais salué les gens, et quand les enfants l'ont touché, elle regarderait ses mains pour voir s'il y avait quelque chose de dégoutant là."  Au moins je peux mieux réagir qu'elle!  Les enfants sont super mignons et même plus accueillants que leurs parents (de qui le chaleur est plus fort même que le temps ici!)  Je les adore.

     Par ailleurs, chez ma famille d'accueil, on mange avec les mains (une pratique auquel j'avais une réaction beaucoup plus négative que je m'avais attendu...  je suis toujours en train de m'y habitué).  On mange le dîner dehors sur le sol...les femmes, au moins.  En plus, la télé est toujours allumée, et mon papa d'accueil a mis sur le mur des photos de son voyage à la Mec qui ont l'air touristique.  C'est vraiment un monde différent que celui de le semestre dernier.  D'ailleurs, si on tombe malade, les gens essaient de l'aider d'abord avec de la nourriture, une très mauvaise idée pour moi, qui déteste manger pendant toute la journée après avoir vomi.  En somme, j'adore déjà ce pays, mais je vois partout les signes de la pauvreté.  En bambara, "ma maison" est "n ka so," mais "chez moi" est "so."  C'est de n ka so que je vous écrit en ce moment, mais j'espère que je serai à so avant la fin du semestre... Parlant de chez moi, tout le monde en France, vous me manquez tellement que je ne peux pas attendre à vous revoir!

Le Temps

Time~  It is unbelievably true that time is different here.  I almost decided not to publish my last blog entry because I felt the information was too old, and then I realised that I had written it YESTERDAY (i.e., the day before I wrote this post on paper...not actually yesterday now), not 3 days, a week, or even 2 weeks ago like it felt.  So here I am, in the village of Siby for two nights, stuttering Bambara (even though in this particular village, the people speak malinké, which is closely enough related that we should be able to understand each other...theoretically) and staying in a hotel made of huts right next to a women's cooperative that produces shea butter.  The women there are some of the strongest I have ever met.  The labor is VERY manual. They spend hours on each step- picking the shea nuts, sorting out the ones that are good from those that are underdeveloped or rotten, pounding them into paste; and then (here is where we began observing) adding water and beating the resulting liquid until the shea oil comes out.  We tried to help with this step, but seven american girls couldn't close to keep up with the two women working today.  They finish by boiling the oil, sifting out any impurities, and then packaging it as pure shea butter or nicely perfumed soap, shampoo, etc.  "La Maison de Karité" is their name- definitely a worthwhile stop if you will be in Siby anytime soon.

     Another Bambara lesson (more greetings and introductions) later, we ventured into the actual village to meet some sample "host families."  What an insane experience- to know an ensemble of about 20 words of a language being spoken all around you in a world so very different from your own.  Our method of communication became a mixture of French (with the woman who served as our guide) and handshakes/high fives/hugs with the many...many...children.  Will we ever feel like part of this world?  The language will make a difference, of course, but I wonder, how many barriers will continue to separate us from th villagers no matter what?  What can one really research/study/understand in 3 months?  How do the women who we "helped" make shea butter face one of their major roles in society-to be mothers-with the knowledge that they very well may die during childbirth, leaving their friends, their work, their other children, with one less "empowered" woman among them?  One of the answers is humour, which pervades much of the conversation here.  Another, it seems, is a certain strength that runs much deeper than that put into practice beating shea oil out of paste.  After all, the men here respond to the question: "I ka kEnE?" (How is your health?) with "nba" (my mother), while women respond, "nse" (my strength).  My teacher explained that the woman is the most important part of Malian society-the backbone, if you will.  But who are we, the white women with hair like straw?  We are "tubabu," the whites, a word originally from Arabic for doctor/first responder.  Maybe, then, I will eventually feel like part of this world, not as one of its women but instead as a much truer Tubabu among them than I am right now.

Je suis là!

I am here! (note..I wrote this my first day here; some information is old...e.g., lost luggage)~  I was going to begin this with a quote from an anthropologist who worked in Africa in the 60s.  But her book is in a backback somewhere between Chicago, Paris, and Bamako...and the adventure begins!  Thanks to the sage advice of my African friends, I had more than one outfit, my water purification kit, and other such essentials in a carry-on, but it will be interesting to see how long it takes my bag to come.  Maybe this will give me the chance to see that one can survive-quite comfortably-with less material support than one may think.  Anyways, I am in Bamako with 6 other American girls who are beyond interesting and purposeful in their lives in a way that many people our age are not.  Then there is Modibo, our program director, and his several assistants.  Their combined friendliness is overwhelming as is that of the Malian people in general. 
     So what have we done so far?  Day one was a whirlwind of our first bambara lesson (greetings), a short tour of our school and the neighborhood around it, one of the best lunches I have ever had (made at the school by our cook) and the "drop-off," an activity designed to immerse us immediately in the logistics of life here.  A conversatin with a phone company, two marriage proposals (plus a "call me when you NEED me") and the purchase of a beautiful straw hat later, I emerged overwhelmed from the "grand marchée" with my partner, Erin, ready to take a taxi back to our hotel.  We fumbled out the correct amount of CFA (west african francs) and went inside.
     So I am in Bamako and cannot believe it...still.  Bamako, the capital city that is neither as visible from an airplane nor as tall as any other capital I have ever seen.  Women pick through pieces of trash for items to wash and use later while men take other trash out of the city in donkey-drawn carts to dump in the fields by the airport.  I hate and love being American here.  I hate being served, asked to sit while others stand, given more food than I can eat when there are literally starving children down the street.  But I love the fact that children want to touch me, be held by me, and take pictures together...as well as the Obama fabric that many people wear as dresses and pant suits.  Once we make it out of the hotel and into the world, we shall see.