Double Life

So one thing that is not really touched upon in many Peace Corps blogs or other writings is the double life we lead as PCVs. There’s your village life, which is the one everybody talks about because it’s so profound and life-changing. And then there’s your expat life, when you spend time with other Americans/expats. Which isn’t very profound at all, but lets you blow off some steam and get your feet clean.

An easy way to distinguish between one’s village life and one’s expat life is a simple evaluation of wardrobe. In my village, I’ve got nobody to impress. So I wear my Macabi skirts or pagnes or my crappy, oversized ripped up dirty jeans (which as I have mentioned before elicits lots of “heeeeeeeeeey!”s from my village). On top, tank tops, stretched from the washboard, occasionally bleach-spotted or oil-stained. And occasionally, if I’ve got one on hand, a complet made of African fabric.

On the other side of my double life, I’ve got my expat clothes. My bedazzled, more fitting jeans (which I plan to de-dazzle tomorrow), cute tops, strapless bras, dresses. All of which I have left at Raven’s house in Bamako because I will never have occasion to wear them in my village so why haul them around?

Another telling sign: prevalence of hair on legs. I always shave my pits but NEVER my legs in my village. But once I’m in expat territory? I bust out the razor. Deodorant, too. I have taken to not wearing it in my village but can’t live without it otherwise. Hair conditioner. Even in those rare moments I wash my hair at site, there’s no way I’m going to use conditioner. Another item I have left at Raven’s.

Entertainment. Site: books, iPod, kids, animals. Expat world: laptops, televisions, internet, movies, iPod on speakers, dancing.

Food. Site: millet. Expat world: pizza and fried chicken burgers with bacon…and a strawberry milkshake.

In Guinea my experience in the expat world was extremely limited. I lived a two day hike away from Conakry (unless I happened to be able to catch the twice-weekly direct car which took 12 hours or so). In Conakry the only luxuries available were Chinese food, so-so ice cream, shawarma and beach bar pizza (accompanied by cold Guiluxe or Skol – well, sometimes cold). I never once went dancing. Nor did I ever go over to the Marine house. Half the time our VCR or DVD player in the house would be broken. But there WAS air conditioning. And hot showers.

Here in Mali, Bamako has a lot more to offer. Not only are there a slew of Chinese places, but there’s the Broadway Café which serves amazing strawberry milkshakes and pretty much whatever diner food your local mom-n-pop serves. There’s Appaloosa, a sub-par but better-than-nothing Tex-Mex restaurant. The Thai place (like heaven on a plate). Daguido’s Italian (quite good). Tons of real bars with beer on tap. Dance clubs. Internet cafes in spitting distance of wherever you’re standing. I’ve never been to the transit house but I bet there’s air conditioning and hot showers. I assume most of these things have sprung up and been successful here due to the sizable expat community. I mean, it’s no Dakar (Senegal), but it ain’t Conakry either.

I think the disparity between these two lives we lead is one reason some people end up ETing (early-terminating). In one sense, you do need it to blow off steam and get away from your village and be an American for a minute, but on the other hand I think some people get too caught up in it if they’re immersed in it too long and they are afraid to go back to their villages or they remember how fun and easy life was in America and just go back. Which is why Conakry was kind of the perfect balance. It had those elements of relaxation and indulgence you need every now and then but not so much that you wanted to stay there forever. When I came back after almost a month in Dakar on med hold, I was afraid to go back to my village, I remember. I was afraid I didn’t know how to live there anymore and that it would be like starting over and that all the tastes of Western delectability I’d been bubbling in for the last month had cooked me to a different consistency, but of course this turned out not to be true. I also thought this the other day as I was coming back from 3 weeks in Bamako. Which also turned out not to be true. You forget how easy it is to slip back and forth between these two lives.

So just remember that, future volunteers: just go back to your site. You won’t regret it.

On another note, Drissa told me today that the first project our chef du village wants us to work on is pisciculture, or fish farming. I was like awesome, that’s the one session I didn’t pay attention to because I was like yeah right. There’s no water. How are we gonna raise fish? Turns out there is some sort of river 5k away that in the rainy season has lots of fish that just pass us by and the dugutigi wants to harness this resource. So. When I get back from New Years and Tiken Jah, on va commencer.

Back at Site...briefly

Is it weird to say I missed toh? I was out of my site for three weeks – two weeks for in-service training (my third, awesome) and nearly a week to celebrate Christmas with the other Guinea transfers in Bamako. In that time, there was rice and sauce to be had for lunch at IST (though not particularly delectable versions of said delicacy), but no toh. Even more, I missed basi. Which has yet to make an appearance since my re-emergence in my village.

Yesterday I arrived back at my village in a good, old-fashioned bush taxi. I find bush taxis much more comfortable than the “bashi” mini-buses, since you get to sit facing forward with windows open and can see what is going on in the world outside.

I had kind of been dreading returning to my village (a feeling I never had in Guinea but attribute to my desire to always get back to my dog ASAP – god I miss my dog!!). I hadn’t had a lot of quiet time in the last three weeks, being constantly surrounded by Americans, dinners, running water and a flat screen television. I knew I wouldn’t get any quiet time when I got back, either. And I haven’t. True to form my family has wanted me to be out and around all the time and all I really want to do is catch up on my sleep.

Though I am ITCHING to start a project so when I get back from celebrating New Years I am going to get Drissa on a concerted search for a project the community wants to do. My clock is ticking, I’ve only got a year (and a month) left. Let’s get this show on the road.

So while I was gone there appears to have been a host of birthing activity. There are at least three new cows. Either they were purchased, or they were birthed over the last three weeks. The sheep that was born shortly after I got here is HUGE (at least twice as big as he was when I left for IST). There is also a puppy. And two kittens (my cat apparently died…who knows the circumstances? I reserve the right to use the name Macguyver for a different animal). There are a ton of new chicken chicks. But the one goatlet whose mom was sick right before I was leaving looks kind of sickly (I’m pretty sure the mom died cause I haven’t seen her) and the other goatlet doesn’t hang out with him anymore. Way to shun an orphan, geez! Oh AND there is a baby donkey!!!! Cutest thing ever. I want to touch it. But he’s skittish.

Also, the family dog healed just fine. I was worried her nasty wounds were going to get infected and go septic and kill her because she insisted on laying in the ashy dust of the kitchen hut, pressing the open wounds right into the ground, leg all swollen, but she’s got fresh skin over all the wounds and her leg is a normal size again. So that’s good.

I have two huge mice who think my house is their house. Today I was laying on my bed reading in broad daylight and there they were just frolicking and chasing each other all around the house. I almost threw my book at them.

The family wants me to take one of the new kittens (where did they get them??), but they seem just as feral as the old one was so I don’t know how well it will work out.

So my mom sent me three People magazines from incredibly different periods of time (how did you manage that?) and those were a bit of a hit with everyone, including the kids who insisted on fighting over them which seems dumb because they have all the time in the world to peruse them one at a time if they each want to get a really good look at every single picture. The spread that was the biggest hit was three of those Dancing with the Stars chicks in their underwear talking about how they stay fit. Racy shots. Shocking for the villageois.

So for anybody who was wondering, I spent my Christmas Eve at Raven’s in Bamako, enjoying chicken “Caesar” salad and baked potato bar with a bunch of Guinea transfers. Christmas Day was spent at an Expat house in Bamako, which meant electricity, TV, air conditioning, a real kitchen, etc... It was actually a pretty good Christmas. I’d venture to say the food was better than last Christmas and the not having to avoid falling bullets made it slightly calmer. Slightly.

So I’m headed back to Bamako on Thursday to go to the bank and celebrate the New Year. Then I am going to stay for the Tiken Jah concert on the 2nd (gonna be AWESOME!) and Paul coming into town on the 3rd since he was not around for Christmas. Then I’ll be back again for a month before the Segou Music Festival, WAIST (in Senegal!) and Amy’s wedding! My second bridesmaid-ship (dad’s wedding was first). And I get TWO outfits out of it because African weddings involve costume changes.

4 months until I’m 26. Scary. I’m thinking about celebrating by jet skiing on the Niger River. And making nachos. Or burritos. And margaritas…ok now the wheels are turning.

Cougar for Breakfast aka Happy Anniversary

Today is my one year anniversary of living in Africa. One year ago, I arrived at the Conakry airport (having just vomited in the airplane bathroom) and made my way with the rest of my 29-person stage to the Conakry bureau compound, bursting with anticipation, excitement and queasiness. I remember being struck by the filthiness of Conakry – all the trash and dirt and ramshackleness of the whole place. And I remember arriving there a few months later after my MedEvac to Dakar and as I wove through the Conakry night, thinking the word, “home”.

A year later, I now have a whole new home to adjust to.

Today I arrived in Bamako. I went to the Chinese place by her house for lunch and perhaps due to my presence they put on a France 24 in English and among other (sometimes enraging) stories, I found out that Dadis Camara (Guinea’s de facto president and leader of the CNDD) was shot yesterday by the head of his presidential guard (who is accused of being responsible for the Sept. 28 attack in the stadium that left at least 157 dead). Other sources said he was taken to Morocco for medical care by a Burkinabe airplane dispatched from Senegal. Some are convinced he is dead. After all, Conte was dead for about a week before his actual death was announced. Some wonder if Dadis (even if he is alive) will be allowed to fly back into Guinea.

France 24 made it sound like “a flesh wound!” but I don’t know. The problem is that the only information journalists get out of Guinea comes from the filter of the CNDD so no one really knows what’s going on there other than maybe observant, semi-connected Guineans living in the capital.

I don’t know what will happen to Guinea. It depresses me.

Today when I arrived at Madina Marche I was overwhelmed and trying to find a taxi to where I was going and at some point in the mix a Malian police officer waved me over to him. In Guinea, I would have pretended not to see him and hastily walked the other way. But here, I went over to him and he gave me directions to where I was going. Very nice guy. I also ended up eating my Chinese food next to two Malian police officers, one of whom was originally from Guinea, who were very nice. It’s amazing what an effective governing body can do.

So if you were wondering, “cougar for breakfast” refers to Raven’s boyfriend Ousmane’s inability to pronounce “Quaker” (as in oatmeal), so in the morning he will ask “Are we having Cougar for breakfast?” And Raven responds, “only if you go catch it!”

Anyway. Happy Anniversary to me (as melancholy as it may be).

Once Again A Fowl Owner

So my family left me alone today. I don’t know if they sensed my hyperventilation yesterday or what. But Setu knocked on the window to give me my bath water at 6:15ish and I went out and got it. I didn’t sleep very well because I kept hearing dogs fighting in the night, the loser yelping for mercy and it not sounding like they were getting it, and I was just imagining that it was our dog who was being ripped apart, already in her weakened state. A couple of times I almost got out of bed and went outside to make sure she was ok. In the morning she was in the same state as last night so at least she didn’t get in any further fights (although today somebody told me it was a person who hurt her yesterday, not a dog; I’m going to investigate this further).

So after my bath they brought me breakfast which was the millet rice type thing with tomato sauce. Then I spent time in my house reading a new book (finished Obama’s book and am now on an inherited book called Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates by Tom Robbins). Drissa came a little after nine to go over to the village chief’s house. He made me change out of my pants into my Obama wrap skirt. This still annoys me but I go with it.

So we went over to the chief’s house and basically spent four hours sitting around staring at one another. Luckily there was a puppy. So I spent most of my time with the puppy sleeping on my lap or playing with him, or with a small baby in my arms. We had toh for lunch, and I actually had what I believe to be a corn-based toh, first time for that. I gotta say, I kinda think all toh is the same, having had three different kinds. But the sauce was good because it was spicy. Now THERE’S a lady who’s not afraid of piment!!

So after countless shots of tea and lunch and everyone asking why I am not married and will I marry someone from the village (to which I reply if I can have 4 husbands sure, I could waste one on a villager – they find this hilarious), we decide to take our leave. I am gifted two chickens. One white one from the chief and one black one from his younger brother. They are both cocks but I guessed wrong at first and everyone laughed because I couldn’t tell the difference. So the black one is named Chester and the white one is named Philip. My family thinks it is weird that I named them but they are used to my affection for animals now so they weren’t really surprised. My dad tied purple strips around their legs so everyone will know they are my chickens. Luckily this time they don’t have to live in my house!!

So when I got home my family said my phone had been ringing and I had 6 missed calls from 3 different numbers: my dad, a private number and some number I did not recognize. Soon after I got back the private number rang again and guess who it was: Ousmane II! The connection REALLY sucked so I did not get to talk to him at all really other than to say “ca va???” I really wanted to ask how Yogi was but in the three times he tried to call I couldn’t really understand him at all. Nor did I get a number for him so I couldn’t call back. Maybe he will try again another day and I can get a number for him.

But anyway that means two things. First, that Daffe has been to my site and gotten my stuff and delivered my letters (which is how Ousmane II would have gotten my number). This means I might get my stuff at IST! Yay! Second, it means the envelope I gave to the Mali driver who said he would give it to the Guinea driver the night before the last Guinea staff went back to Conakry did so and they gave it to Yama as I had indicated so some of my last requests and the notes for Ousmane II and Balde got out to them (with pictures!) plus the rubber bone I sent for Yogi that I had received in a package from my grandma that was delivered to me here in Mali after evacuation.

So Ousmane II is now the proud owner of whatever stuff he got out of my house, and I hope he listened to what I said in the letter and gave some stuff to Ousmane and Aissatu Bah but who will ever know.

I really want to go back to Guinea, even just to say a real goodbye and bring people pictures and buy some fabric I never got around to (forestier fabric and leppi, the fabric of the Fouta) and one of those little pestle and mortars you can get outside of Mamou. So if it doesn’t reopen before the end of my service, I might go down there after I COS since Peace Corps can’t tell me what to do after I COS :P.

I still go back and forth on whether or not I want to retake possession of Yogi. I just don’t know if it would work if I brought him back to the States, but if I did everyone would say how beautiful he was and ask what kind of dog was he and think it was really cool that he is from Africa!! In my fantasy they would, anyway. So I don’t know. I guess I will do the research to figure out if I’d be able to take him back to the States with me, anyway, and then cross that bridge when it comes time that I can go back down there. If he is still alive.

So I think I am going to try to go to Bamako on Friday or Saturday to spend some time with Raven and Amy to talk some stuff out and have an opportunity to eat some Chinese food and sour cream (not at the same time) before I have to report to IST.

We’ll see how it goes.

Awful Day

Tabaski is like Chanukah: it goes on forever and I don’t get any presents.

Tabaski started on Friday when the sun went down. People stayed up all night. It then went on to Saturday, which was when I thought Tabaski was and thought the whole fete would go down. I mean, that’s when they killed Mr. Sheep. But no. It went on today, too. And I am informed we will continue through tomorrow and that there will be no market in Nossombougou so my plans to buy piment, have keke for lunch with a frozen baggie of bissap juice and spend the afternoon reading over a glass of red wine at the Auberge, flirting with the possibility of the English-speaking Bible Study folks showing up again has been thwarted. This was the first bad news of the day.

So I made a valiant effort today. I got up at 6:30ish, took my bath, and went out into the courtyard with the last 50 pages of Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope” unread under my arm. I proceeded to sit out there with the family, do the mass breakfast thing at about 8 with everybody (rice with peanut sauce – SCORE – turns out that was the best part of my day) and stay out there hanging out with the grandmas and stuff until like 1pm. Then mom #1 Seli tells me we are gonna go hang out with the ladies. And I’m like ok fine. It can’t be for that long because lunch is at like 2 (during Tabaski. Normally it is at 12). So we go hang out. I have to take off a little before 2 because I have to go to the bathroom and when I’m done it’s time to eat. But it is disappointing because it is this giant, football sized tuber that is absolutely tasteless all cut up and cooked with stuff (I dunno what) so I don’t eat very much and think longingly of peanut sauce. Or even toh. So then I decide to do some work in my house. I was like, I’ve put in my time today! And I know there’s something going on later because I have a complet for it.

So I go to do dishes and clean up my house and try to get my cat to come down and eat (he does not so I throw pieces of gross meat/fat up to him so he doesn’t frigging starve to death). So just as I’m finishing this mom #2 Abi comes over and tells me I have to come out, NOW. So I’m like ok.

I go out and there are a bunch of ladies sitting around in Moussa’s part of the compound. I was kind of confused at first. They all got up and shook my hand. And they gave me half a rice sack of something (turned out to be peanuts). Turns out they were the ladies delegation sent over from the village chief’s house to saluer me and gove me peanuts. Cause the chief evidently does not make house calls, especially not to see a woman. Seli makes me go put on my complet. Everybody tells me how “a kanji” (pretty) it is and scolds me for not being able to wear the headwrap which is the same freaking size as the skirt. This annoys me. As do the kids trying to get me to pay attention to them by telling me I am ugly (a game that got obnoxious about 5 minutes after it was originally initiated). Yusuf makes some comment about how NOW I am a woman, because women wear skirts, not pants and wearing pants is “a manji” (bad/ugly) which gets on my nerves because I am of the belief that anyone should be able to wear whatever they want whenever they want if it makes them comfortable. In Guinea everyone thought my jeans were “jolie”. I miss that.

The ladies make an appointment for me to go over to the chief’s house and hang out with him tomorrow. Luckily Drissa is going with me for that.

So then I have to walk them out like halfway to the road because that’s polite and this is when Drissa drives up on his dad’s moto and tells me there is no marche tomorrow, which I had REALLY been looking forward to. So I’m all like DAMN! And on the way back to the compound I’m thinking I am going to go relax in my house a little bit and get over the no market thing. But no. There is a new group of ladies waiting to saluer me. This time it is my language tutor Khalifa’s mom and her groupement. And I desperately want to be polite and interesting but I am getting SO SICK of not understanding Bambara and my clothes being pulled left and right and assessed by everyone and their mother (literally) and the kids still calling me ugly and men poking and pulling on me and saying that I am now a woman and I should never wear pants. And I am biting back tears as hard as I can. I have a smile completely frozen on my face. A pained smile. Just trying to get through it.

Bless these ladies they don’t hang around too long either so I walk them out and have to go through saying all the goodbye greeting thingies Seli and Abi are feeding me to say and I am so annoyed with it at this point but I have to say it or I’ll be rude and everyone will be mad. So then I have to go back because two OTHER ladies have come to saluer me.

It was the afternoon of the saluer. Seriously.

So this is Drissa’s mom and another lady (I think). Seli, bless her heart, always says stuff really slow and clear to me to try and help me understand Bambara but sometimes she repeats it even after I understand it and I’m like yes, I get it. Also, if someone calls my name, I can’t just look at them to show them they have my attention. They will repeat my name until I give a verbal indication of my attention. I hate this. And I still want to cry. And there are moments where I almost do, or I get that feeling in my chest like I just want to RUN to my house and slam my door. So they don’t stay very long either and I have to walk them out and THEN there is another party going on with the groupement and Seli makes me go and I want to punch somebody and the only thing that saved me was I said I had to get my water so I had about 2 minutes alone inside my house to do some measured breathing to calm down enough to not cry in front of everybody.

So I go to this next thing. Everyone is all dressed up. Kids everywhere. Tea being made. I try to cheer myself up by making faces at kids.

I don’t generally feel like this unless I am PMSing. And according to my pill pack, I am not. I attribute it to stress.

So eventually I decide I want to go back to our compound for just a few minutes to kind of decompress or see what other people are doing or whatever. So I go back and I sit with the grandmas for five minutes, check out the soccer game a bunch of the younger men are watching on tv, then I go over to pet the dog, because the dog is my friend. As I walk up to her she is laying on the ground panting. I didn’t think this was too strange until I see she is covered in blood. And I’m like WHAT HAPPENED TO MY DOG.

Turns out she got in a fight with some other dog and I hope the other dog looks worse!! A lot of her wounds are minor but she has a couple of really nasty chunks taken out of her and she can’t use one of her legs and I am so sad and angry and I just walk back to my house and get a bucket of water, a bandanna and some soap and go back over to her and try to start cleaning her up. The men laugh at me. I ignore them. She decides she doesn’t want to be cleaned up right this second so she doesn’t let me get much done before she hobbles away on three legs.

So I stand up, get my bucket together, and go back to my house. Where I promptly shut the door and lock it. About 30 seconds later I hear Seli outside calling my name. I hide. She walks toward the court, probably to ask where I am.

When I am satisfied she is gone, I sit on my bed. That’s when the tears come. Not the loud sobbing I was expecting to experience or felt like experiencing today but just some slow pained tears. I get my volunteer handbook to see if it has the number for the whereabouts phone in it because I decide I am going to try and go to Bamako and see Raven tomorrow so she can talk me down. I find the number but just as I do Hawa comes to my window and tells me to come eat. I just grunt at her. She goes away. I pull myself together. Send Raven the text asking if I can spend the night there tomorrow night. Go back over to where the ladies are now sitting around big plastic bowls of spaghetti, the tuber thing and meat. I share a little stool with one of my grandmas. Somebody hands me a baggie of fresh ginger juice with a sprig of mint in it. Somebody hands me a bucket of water and I wash my hand, then we start eating. Seli sees me and comes over. She says that she had gotten together a bowl of food to send over to my house. She looks really understanding, like she saw the dog and knew I would be upset. I just said it was ok and I would eat here, which I did. And after enjoying my ginger juice, silently got up and went back home.

Where I took out all my braids, which had been itching my scalp for days. As I was coming back from a brief tourney of the compound as I was taking out my braids, I see the slow fat mouse. I get really pissed at him and grab the broom. And as he is right by the door I take a swat at him, never expecting to hit him, expecting him to wiggle out under the door. But I DO hit him. So I scream. Mostly from the horror of actually hitting him and seeing a wet spot on the ground and him squirming and twisting on the ground. So I didn’t really want to kill him but kneejerk reaction, I hit him again. Because a quick death is better than a slow one and I would hate to have fatally injured him but then have him die a slow painful death. On the second blow he gets up and skitters away. At my scream the boys outside had come running to the door. They see it is a mouse, and he is hiding between my stove’s gas tank and the wall. I don’t want to hit him again. One of the guys (it might have been Oumarri) comes in with a block of wood and we try to find the mouse, who has now hidden under the gas tank. When I tip the gas tank up he runs out and into my bedroom where Oumarri lunges after him and I hear the crack of the wood on the floor. But when I wheel around and look in, he has missed and the mouse has disappeared down that dang hole where they are getting in and out. Mouse survives. At least for now. Who knows, when I hit him I might have given him a brain hemhorrage or something. He at least “had his bell rung real good” as my dad would say. Maybe he will decide it’s not worth it to keep coming into my house. Maybe his brain is tiny and he’s going to forget all about it before the night is through.

Eventually I had the blessing of a bath with a hair washing. Then I had a laugh. Because when I got back from my bath, the cat was laying on the edge of the plastic so I put a pile of clothes under it and flipped his butt out of the ceiling! VICTORY! I laugh because he looks so shocked every time it happens. He hasn’t climbed back up yet. My bet is he will hang out down here until the sun starts coming up. Which is good, because he’ll scare any mice that come in, and I can rest assured he has had an opportunity to drink water and eat.

So all things considered, I feel better now that I’m going to bed. And I don’t know if I will end up heading to Bamako tomorrow or not. It would be after my hang out session with the chief. I guess we’ll see how I feel after that.

Tabaski 2009

Well I just saw my first sheep slaughter. It is actually almost surprising that I have avoided seeing anything larger than a chicken killed since being here. I almost missed it because the kids called me over to see two dogs having sex. But then when I walked back I saw my host dad and his oldest son holding the sheep down, having just slit his throat. So I missed the slitting part, which is often the worst part because that’s when you see the animal fighting for his life, not wanting to die. Which to me is the most awful part of death: seeing something or someone struggle for life in the midst of dying. So they slit his throat pretty thoroughly and he was bleeding on the ground. There was no fanfare, I was the only one even watching. I thought he must be dead but then he started to kick and his body shook and his torso still moved up and down as though he were breathing or some great wave were going through him. His head hung limp and lifeless but his body still fought. It took a couple of minutes like that for him to actually die. Then they strung him up by his back legs to drain out the rest of his blood. I thought I was fine but then I felt sick to my stomach and almost like I might vomit so I went back to my house. Where I was promptly interrupted with the daily invitation to go have tea from Yusuf. I’ll go over there later.

So I don’t even want to see a cow slaughter. I can’t even imagine. There are volunteers who want to actually kill a cow themselves. I’m not going to name names but you know who you are! I don’t have that in me. I mean, in the States I am a freaking vegetarian. I don’t think I could even stand to watch a fish flip around on the deck of a boat, struggling to get back in the water. When I find mice struggling for their lives in a bucket of water, I have an uncontrollable urge to scoop them out and save them, even though I hate them thoroughly when they treat my house as their own all night. I am sometimes even sympathetic to ants or spiders who run for their lives when I start killing their friends.

So basically, I don’t know how much of our Tabaski sheep I will be able to stomach eating. That’s another thing I have fleetingly thought in the past: if you couldn’t kill it yourself, you shouldn’t eat it. It’s almost like cowardice in a way. I don’t know. I never had to deal with these moral dilemmas in the States because I didn’t so much as eat gelatin or lard (no marshmallows – imagine life without marshmallows! I have lived it…and still am, there are no marshmallows in Mali).

Anyway. Last night they stayed up pretty much all night. Yesterday evening as I was sitting by the cook fire reading my Water and Sanitation training manual (no, seriously, I was reading it – I am sooooo the model volunteer), I started to feel a little bit of a sore throat. I was like GREAT. And then remembered I don’t have so much as a vitamin C supplement, let alone Echinacea, Emergen-C or Elderberry (the things I rely on to keep me from getting sick when I start getting the first signs). That’s all in Guinea. There aren’t even oranges here. So I went to bed at 9ish or so but then got up at midnight to see what was going on, which wasn’t much – it was just people watching TV, listening to cassette tapes, sitting around fires, and cooking. The kids were all sleeping. So I hung out for like 45 minutes and went back to bed. And was then woken at 4:30 in the morning by a flashlight through my bedroom window and someone yelling at me to come eat. I am not very receptive to being jarred awake, A. B. I hate it when people look in my windows or try to talk to me through my window. C. I am sick (sore throat just kept getting progressively worse all night). D. I am tired because even the sleeping I HAVE done hasn’t been good because of all the radios and chatter. So I put my sheet over my head and told them to go away in English. Which they eventually did, after discerning that I was “full” and not going to come eat. Then a couple of minutes later I dragged myself out of bed because I told myself I should at least go see what was going on, even though there’s no way I could have eaten that early anyway. So I got dressed and went outside and it was completely deserted. I have no idea where everybody was, doing this eating. So a little annoyed, I just went back to bed and got up at my usual 6:30am when my bath water arrived.

It was a sort of riz gras for breakfast with a big chunk of meat (I think beef), a piece of bread and a cup of ginjam (ginger juice, which I am not a huge fan of but hot it was nice on my throat). A lot of people were bringing bowls of food over and putting them in one of the grandmas’ rooms. Soon after that, the most part of the women’s group came over and everybody ate again. I was full, so I didn’t eat, though I would have if there had been some basi or peanut sauce to be had, but it was all the riz gras-like thing I had just eaten so I abstained.

So then I just hung out while people were pounding millet and cooking and whatnot and that’s when they killed the aforementioned sheep. Then I went to my house for a little while but one of my moms came and got me and said we were going somewhere ELSE to pound millet. I’m not entirely sure what this was about, but the whole groupement went to this person’s house and pounded millet and pulled water. And it wasn’t even like it was a poor family, or a family that didn’t have enough women, it was just some family.

Of course right when we walk in I see their dead sheep hanging from it’s feet from their shade hangar. A man and a teenage boy are cutting its skin off. GROSS. Then they cut its head off. Then they start gutting it. And of course the chair they have sat me in is facing this whole display. Then they decide that I am sitting in the sun and need to go sit under the hangar so now I have the distinct privilege of sitting right next to the being-chopped-up sheep. Poor guy.

So after this we all go put on our first complets so we are dressed for lunch and after lunch we go hang out with the groupement and make tea and whatnot.

I don’t know, it actually wasn’t that eventful of a day. But I suppose it’s how they might see our Thanksgiving or Easter: you get a new outfit and go to Church on Easter (well, some people), you hang out with your friends and family all day and don’t work, and you eat a ridiculous amount of food ensemble. Kind of the same thing. Without the football. Actually, come to think of it, there WAS some soccer watching going on!! So holidays are basically the same thing everywhere.

Happy Thanksgiving

I hope yours was more eventful than mine. I spent the day all on my own prerogative, reading Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope”, learning to make basi with Sita (they call it “cous-cous” but I call it millet sawdust with a delicious bean sauce made of water, beans, peanut butter, Maggi cube and salt – could definitely be made more nutritious with some tomatoes and onions but hey, it’s got protein!), eating basi (after the sheep spilled all my sauce while I was washing my hands and getting a piment), napping, cleaning my house, cutting my toenails, picking up my Tabaski clothes from the tailor (I am SHOCKED he got everybody’s clothes done, he is the only tailor in town and pretty much EVERYBODY wants at least one new outfit) and the coup de grace: enjoying a packet of Easy Mac and a tootsie roll pop.

I didn’t do anything I didn’t want to do today, like have to entertain people or study Bambara. So in that sense it was a holiday. But I did not end up making a holiday meal and I am going to bed with a stomachache. Christmas better be more exciting.

Yesterday my cat decided to shimmy up one of the big tree trunk poles holding my roof up and camp out in the black plastic ceiling. You can tell where he is because it makes the plastic dip down. But he makes me angry because he scratches holes into the plastic and can’t get down so he meowed all night last night, yet wouldn’t let me help him down. This morning he was sleeping on the edge of the plastic above where I hang my purse, so I opened the purse and let it hang open and then flipped him out of the plastic and he just happened to land in the purse, looking very confused, then rocketed onto the bed where he got stuck in the mosquito netting. All of which was very amusing for me. When I got him loose, he hid and ate and then I watched him climb back up into the plastic! Where he currently still is. If he starts complaining that he can’t get down tonight I am going to poke him with the broom. Also the mice he is supposed to be scaring off are NOT scared off and one particularly fat one has been spotted for the last couple of days. Cat not doing his job. I think he will probably disappear when I am at IST anyway. So I am not going to name him unless he is still around when I get back (why waste a good pet name?).

ANTS!

So I have an ant problem at my house. They are always all over my stove, even when my stove is clean (which I now have to be very meticulous about and do several times a day to keep the ants to a minimum). They are also just generally all over the place, but I don’t care if they are on the walls or the floor, I only care when they get into my stuff.

Like my water filter. Tonight as I was filling my water bottle I noticed little black things coming out of the filter along with the water. I held the bottle up. Sure enough, a couple dozen dead ants were swirling around my bottle. I opened the filter. Dozens of dead ants floating around in what would have been my nice clean water. So sometime between last night and tonight they all found their way in there. The only way to get into the clean part of the filter is through this little tiny hole near the top that is there to relieve the pressure as water exits the bucket. It is evidently large enough for an ant to get in. Or several dozen. Who then plunge to their watery deaths. In my clean water.

So I am pissed because I was all ready to brush my teeth and settle down under my mosquito net with Cormac McCarthy’s “Suttree” and instead I have to clean out my water filter, wait for it to dry (which I did not really do, I just dried it with a towel and told myself I would bleach in the bottle for a little while), put it back together and refill it. And for some reason, this filter takes FOREVER to filter the water. Which is weird because the candles are brand new. In Guinea, with new candles, my filter (same brand) would finish a whole top bucket in like 15 minutes. This one takes like an hour. Or more. I don’t even know because I never stick around to see how long it takes because it takes so frigging long. And I can’t brush my teeth and get all settled because I don’t have any clean water to do it with, it is currently being filtered at a snail’s pace.

DAMN YOU ANTS!!!

So next time I am in Bamako I am going to see if one of the ex-pat stores carries ant traps. Ants aren’t cute. So I don’t mind murdering them like I do mice.

Who don’t come into my house anymore thanks to my loud, mean but very cute cat. Who I still have not named. Right now his name is kitty.

Three Lunches

So today I received three different lunches. My family’s toh and baobab leaf sauce (a portion big enough for two in their opinion, 4 in my opinion), Yusuf’s family’s toh and baobob sauce (a portion big enough for 1 in their opnion and 2 in mine), and Binta’s family’s beans (a huge bowl suitable for at least 4 people if that is all they were eating). I was like, holy shit. Luckily Yagari, my language trainer, agreed to eat with me so we got through most of Yusuf’s family’s toh. I gave some of my family’s toh to my cat and to the dog because if I didn’t make ANY of it disappear they would be offended. And then I ate like three bites of beans but I was STUFFED so I just gave the bowl to Hawa and it didn’t look like I’d made a dent in it at all so hopefully the family will eat some before sending it back over to Binta.

I mean, I do appreciate all the food gifts people send me but it is a truly delicate balance figuring out what to eat and how much so as not to offend people and I don’t want to just take some and throw it away (or give it to the dog) because, as you probably know, there are children starving in Africa!! However you wouldn’t know it here because whenever I try to get a child to help me eat some of these things they tell me they are full.

I wish I knew a hungry family that lived close by to me but the only really visibly hungry family I have seen so far is all the way across the village and I don’t know if I’d even be able to figure out which compound was theirs again, anyway. The kids looked like all the kids: skinny arms and legs, old man faces and big bloated bellies, but the way I knew they were hungry was that the mom and dad were SO skinny. I mean, nothing but muscle and bone. The mom’s ankles were like sticks. Also, the guy only had one wife which here means one of three things: you are very young, you are Christian, or you are poor. He was not very young, I very highly doubt he was Christian, and I’m pretty sure this is one of the families who do not even have a latrine so have to do their business out in the field. So my money is on category #3.

Anyway. I wish they lived closer because then I’d give them my leftovers.

It’s just more of a shame because I HAVE food. I have 3 US Postal Service Flat Rate boxes stuffed with food, plus a bunch of cans, packages and other things in my kitchen hutch, plus more than half a pallet of eggs. And a kilo of flour, 2 kilos of potatoes, and tomatoes and onions. And cucumbers! I mean, I HAVE FOOD. It’s like our celebrity culture in the States. When you can afford to buy a Dior dress, you get it for free. And people who can’t afford it go without. Kind of a messed up system. But as I am proving, it seems more universal than cultural.

Bambara Training

So there was a day earlier this week (like, Tuesday – it’s Thursday), where I was frustrated at not being able to talk to anyone and pissed off at Peace Corps for putting me into a village where a total of 2 people I have met speak French (no, wait, three, the lady principal of the school does, too) after only 5 days of Bambara lessons. I was like, I am never going to be able to communicate here in Bambara, my homologue is always going to have to translate for me, I will never be able to talk to people (or by the time I am able to it will be time to COS), and why did they do this to me?

So I texted my APCD Haoua and I was like, look, I need language help. My tutor does his best but he doesn’t know how to teach so it’s basically just me asking him what words in my Bambara manual mean. It’s really frustrating. She texted back that they would send a language trainer to my site for a week. You can’t say Peace Corps Mali doesn’t support their volunteers, that’s for sure.

The next day (yesterday), Bocar (the language supervisor) called me and said he had a trainer who was willing to come. She got here this afternoon. Talk about efficient. I get 30 hours of training over a 5 or 6-day period which works out to about 6 hours a day. We start at 8am tomorrow. So if you were keeping track, I asked for help on Tuesday and will start receiving it on Friday. PC Mali doesn’t mess around. In Guinea, it would have taken until Friday just for a formateur to GET to my site (2 days from Conakry woot woot!) and it probably would have taken them several days to lock down a trainer. Actually I don’t think PC Guinea even offered at-site training, though I have heard lots of other posts do. But in their defense, tons of people in my village spoke French there so it wasn’t absolutely necessary to speak the local language like it is here.

So hopefully at the end of a week I will feel more confident in Bambara, or at least able to say and understand more stuff. Then I think we might get some language training during IST in December, but if we don’t, since I’ll be in Bamako, I will just ask for tutoring while I am there (can have 30 hours a month) and get a formateur to come out to the training site for a few hours a week to help me.

Also, Drissa and I have only about 15 more families to interview (we have already done something like 45). So that’s exciting. It will be a load off once that is done, which should be Saturday night.

Oh, yesterday we interviewed the village chief. There are FIFTY ONE people living in his compound. Like 30 of them are kids under 16, but STILL. Insanity. Dri says there is another big family we are going to interview tomorrow. I wonder how it will compare.

Also, during our interviews the other day we came across a family with two kittens and after they and the dog chased them down, they gave me a long haired gray kitten who was very angry. I zipped him in my purse and he went to sleep, but BOY has he been a pain in the butt. He uses the litter box I made for him without a problem – this is great! But he does not eat the food I give him (which is the food the family gives me, plus milk). So I end up having to give him some egg or tuna (luckily it is tuna I can buy in Mali, but still, that stuff is expensive!) and put it on the millet and sauce so hopefully he will eat something. Cats are supposed to love milk, why doesn’t he drink it??? So whatever he doesn’t eat I give to the dog, who gratefully and quickly gulps it all up. Also, this cat screams all night long. I’m not sure why. If he’s scared, or calling for his mother, or just hates me. But he cries ALL NIGHT LONG. So I don’t get a very good sleep. I’ve been sleeping with earplugs in. I can still hear him, but it’s not as sharp and loud. I hope he gets over that soon. Also, he is always hiding. If you see him out in the open, it is a rare and freak occurrence. And he hates it when I try to touch or pick him up (so no, I have not bathed him). I mean, dude is practically feral.

But at least there are no more mice?

Laundry...and Cat As Delicacy

Yesterday morning I took my bucket of clothes out to the well to do some washing. I mean, I don’t really have a problem washing my own clothes, but it takes me a long time and everybody laughs at me. Because I don’t do it right. Long story short, a maybe 13-year-old girl named Setu came out there with me and hauled up my water (still have not hauled water myself) and then we both started to wash stuff and after I had washed a couple of things, this woman who was at the well was just like, “stop. She will wash it for you.” Because I apparently can’t do it. So Setu washed all my stuff and then washed it all a SECOND time, which I found kind of confusing. Then she rinsed everything twice and helped me hang it up on my line. She did a LOT of work. I intended to pay her, but when I followed her to the piler (immediately after finishing helping me hang up the stuff, she walked straight over to the pestle and mortar and started pounding millet…girl knows the meaning of hard work without complaints), I held out 500 FCFA (like a dollar) and one of my precious few pink and white Guinean lollipops (though if my food trunk gets here I will have like 200 of them). Setu stared down at my hands and actually looked AFRAID. The woman at the piler objected (same woman from the well) and the grandma got up from her chair to discuss this, as well. Turns out the woman who said Setu would do my laundry was her mother, and your mother can command you and lend out your labor. She said, “I am Setu’s mother, and I told her to do your laundry for you. You must not pay her.” She took the lollipop from my hand and said I could give her that, but that was all. This was all in Bambara which I barely understand but that was the gist of it. So I gave her my precious lollipop but felt bad about her not being able to take the coin, but she seemed happy enough with the lollipop. When I saw her later that evening I gave her a Propel flavored powder packet and told her to put it in her water so she probably had a tasty drink AND recovered some electrolytes (go me!)

Drissa and I have started to do the “baseline survery”, which is a list of about 30 questions Peace Corps gave me and said to ask everyone in the village (if I can get around to every concession) to get an idea of the water and sanitation needs here. For one thing, they need a malaria sensibilization. I was informed that you can get malaria from eating eggs and drinking milk. I was like, NO, you can’t, you can only get it from mosquitoes. They had equally ridiculous ideas of where the palu comes from in Guinea (like from eating tomato seeds or fresh mangoes), but in Guinea, while they would say that, they would still eat tomatoes (seeds squeezed out) and mangoes (right off the tree). Here they have such a deficiency of protein (since they don’t do the dried fish thing) that it’s a crying shame they are afraid to eat two of their only reliable and relatively accessible protein sources.

Other things I’ve learned are that everyone goes to the hospital in the bigger town to have babies and get vaccinations (who then give out free mosquito nets which the people actually USE) and nearly nobody bleaches their water or washes their hands with soap. Some people don’t even rinse their hands after using the bathroom. This fact is made especially digusting by the fact that their left hand is their toilet paper. Also, they don’t get drinking water from the pumps. Because 200m is “far”. I’m like – in Guinea I had to go almost a kilo down a mountain just to get WORK water and drinking water was farther. 200m for potable water? Not far. Plus everybody has donkey carts, they wouldn’t even have to carry it. Hey maybe that is a good small business idea: one person who delivers bidons of water to people in a donkey cart for 100 Francs apiece or something. I should start asking this question to people (do you think the water from the pump is cleaner/better to drink? Would you pay 100F a bidon to have it delivered to your house?).

Today I was sitting out with some girls and they told me to go inside and get my “baby who doesn’t eat”. I had no idea what they were talking about but eventually decided the only thing they could mean is the large Big Bird stuffed animal with the tape deck in his butt that I inherited from Corinna. I brought it out and there was much wonder and laughter but since the batteries were dead, we couldn’t make it talk. If it didn’t have a tape deck in it, they would have been more confused (like, WTF is this for??? – but since it’s a cassette player, it makes complete sense, it’s just a funny looking cassette deck).

Also, tonight when Drissa and I got back from our afternoon’s interviews (we go from like 4-7), the kids outside my house were chopping up a charred CAT. Yes, like a house cat. People eat cat here. Which must account for the lack of available kittens to come eat my mice. At first I was grossed out, then I was kinda annoyed because they knew I NEEDED a cat but in their defense it was a big cat and I think they are looking for a kitten for me. I texted this to Corinna who happened to be with Raven and Ousmane (Raven’s Guinean boyfriend who has come up to Mali to be with her). Ousmane said he would NEVER eat a cat, as did Corinna, but Raven said she’d try it. I admit I was curious, but they did not offer me a piece so I dodged that moral dilemma.

I wonder if I’ll get to try pigeon…

One Mouse Down...

So this evening before dinner I was out playing cards with Drissa and I started to hear a mouse inside and I was like, “there! You hear it! I’m not lying! There are mice!” And he heard it and we continued to play. Then we heard a splash and some more splashing. And I was like HOLY SHIT, the mouse fell into the water bucket. So I took the lantern inside and sure enough, there was a little mouse swimming around in the water bucket. I brought the bucket outside and I said, “Oh no! What do I do now?!” Because mice are cute. Obnoxious. But cute. And I could never kill one with my own hands. Though I’d have no problem sic-ing a cat on them. So there were some kids. And they gathered around the bucket and one of them dipped his hand in to fish out the mouse. As I was about say, “what will we do with him now?”, the kid took one step back, raised his hand over his head and slammed the mouse onto the ground as hard as he could. Liquid of some kind ricocheted into my face. I was stunned for a second. Then I ventured to look at the mouse, who had flown to my feet. I couldn’t have taken it if the mouse had still been alive – fatally injured, but alive. Thank God he wasn’t. He was as still as Melvin was after I found him drowned in a bucket in Guinea. A kid picked him up and did God-knows-what with him (I think threw him into the field). I said, “I prefer it when a cat kills the mice.” And wiped the drops from my face. Some kid said he’d go find me a cat. I think maybe they didn’t believe me about the mice before, but now they do. So now they are actually going to find me a cat.

Anyway. Today I also tried to explain to Drissa about “me time”. They have NO concept of “me time” in Africa. I mean, why WOULDN’T you spend every waking moment constantly surrounded by people? That’s normal! I had to explain because a. he thinks whenever I am alone in my house, I am sleeping (which is almost never the case) and b. he asked if I spend my nights out chatting with the family, which I don’t, ‘cause that is me time. Plus I go to sleep really early (like 8pm…hey man if I have to get up at 6 I gotta get my beauty sleep). So I had to explain to him that I am an American, and as an American, I need time by myself. I read, I write, I think, I just be alone, and that is something I need EVERY DAY. At first he was like WTF. But I just said, you’ve seen all the books in my house and all the paper, when I am alone in my house, I am reading those books and writing on that paper (really I am writing on this AlphaSmart but I am SO not about to try to explain this thing). I think in the end he understood. Probably not WHY I need it, but what I am doing during it, and that it’s one of those weird things white people do.

He brought me a bag full of beef today. I was like, “oh”. That shouldn’t be surprising at all but right when I saw it in my head I went, “gross” and ALMOST said, “eeww” out loud but then checked myself. As a bag of raw, bloody (and I mean bloody…it dripped on my floor) meat is quite a gift in Africa. I gave it to Setu, who was on cooking duty today. She and the momuso (grandma) who were there seemed really happy about it. It showed up in that evening’s peanut sauce (three cheers for peanut sauce!!). Also Yousufu sent over a big bowl of the grits-like thing and peanut sauce (I prefer my family’s peanut sauce though). And Drissa was like, “you have to eat it.” And this is after we are already full of my family’s dinner. And I’m like, “dude, this is how big my stomach is” and make a circle with my hands. “How am I gonna fit that into it, too?” He said if you don’t eat some of what people send to you, they will think you don’t like them. Even if you get six bowls of food, you have to eat some of each or you will offend people. I was like, “I sure as shit am never going to go hungry here.” I have to give all my potatoes to my family tomorrow, before they go bad. I don’t anticipate making French fries anytime soon.

Also,today I introduced cards into my relationship with Drissa. First I asked him if he played cards and he said yes but then his eyes got big when he saw the deck and he was like, “that’s a lot of cards!!” So clearly he had never played with a regular deck of cards before. I taught him to play “Go Fish”. To make it educational for me, we did it in Bambara. Dude, you can learn your numbers QUICK playing Go Fish in another language. “Segin b’I kun wa?” – Do you have an eight? You can also learn how to say, “do you have…?” which will be helpful especially when trying to buy things. We named the king “ce” (CHE) which means man or husband and the queen “muso” which means woman or wife and the jack “den” which means kid. I contemplated naming the ace “Allah” but stopped short at that. We played like 30 rounds before dinner got to us.

He also told me that it is weird that I eat alone and not in the same bowl with the family. I told him they bring me my own bowl 3x a day and do not invite me to eat with them, so that’s how we do it. He is probably going to tell them to start inviting me to eat with them and then I will lose even MORE “me time”.

I think I had a spoiling surplus of “me time” in Guinea (like, 90% of my day) and here switching it 180 so I only have 10% “me time” is almost more shocking than it would have been coming from the States.

At any rate. Maybe they won’t think I am just sleeping all afternoon.

I Want Tabaski Clothes, Too!

So tonight I was out staring at the stars. It’s amazing how many you can see when there are no lights around for miles. It’s beautiful, and humbling, and existential.

Some women walked by and invited me to go chat in another compound (after them saying it slowly several times I understood it). I told them thank you but I am going to stay here. Then I decided to venture over to the circle of people around a little light over by my host father’s corner of the compound. I went over and lots of people offered me their chairs but I ended up just sitting on this REALLY low bench-like contraption. It was all women and some children. There was a metal plate in the middle and some coins on it. I asked what the money was for and discerned that it was for clothes for Tabaski. Which might be next week. I don’t really know. So I was like, “Well *I* want clothes for Tabaski! How much is it?” So we spent a long time trying to discern how much money it was (because in Bambara, like lots of west African languages, you have to multiply the figure they give you by five in order to figure out how many Francs it actually costs and since I have a hard enough time figuring out what it was the first figure they gave me, it was a bit of work). So they finally just put the amount of money I would need to give onto the plate: 3 mille 750 francs, which is what I had finally worked it out to be in my head and I went back to my house to retrieve the funds. So, inshallah, I will be getting a Tabaski outfit. Which is great because I don’t have very many clothes (and NO African clothes – all should be on their way from Guinea – inshallah). Plus I’d hate to be wearing a western outfit during the biggest holiday of the year. Which, this year, happens to be a day or two after Thanksgiving (if I knew when Thanksgiving actually was I could pinpoint when Tabaski is but without my calendar I can’t remember if it is supposed to be the third Thursday in November or what. If that’s the case, then Thanksgiving is a week from Thursday and Tabaski is…Saturday maybe. Life is hard without a calendar.

In Guinea, for 3,750 francs, which is like 37,500 Guinean Francs, you could get a HELLA nice complet. So I am excited to see what I will get. If somebody doesn’t take my measurements soon, I might not end up with one. But we shall see.

The other highlight of this conversation was that Abi, who I believe to be the first wife (turns out she is the second wife) of my host dad, Moussa, who has three wives (exactly which three women who live here I still have to discern) said they are going to help me find a cat “sisan”, which means “right away” or “early”. I thanked her and pantomimed my problems with the mice by pretending to sleep, then knocking on the bench with my fingertips to mimic their noise during the night, then plugging my ears and letting out an “auuuuugggghhhhh”, which elicted peals of laughter. Not sure exactly how they figured out I needed a cat, probably Khalifa told them (he’s my language tutor). But maybe I will get one soon! That would be sweet. Although I have not noticed the mice getting into my foodstuffs yet, my experience has shown they WILL. And they are robbing me of good sleep.

Plus I read in my Water and Sanitation manual that fleas they carry and their poo can spread disease. So KILL ‘EM, I say!! Or at least run them out of my house.

When I came back inside, the cockroach problem I thought had subsided has NOT and I spent the next 10-15 minutes killing every cockroach I could get my flip flop on (maybe 15 or so). Some got away. I feel like even if I did spray this place, it wouldn’t get them because a. they are cockroaches and can survive a nuclear holocaust and b. there’s plastic covering the ceiling (except around the edges) so it wouldn’t really get to them in there, which is where they dwell.

As I write there is something crawling around on the plastic, evidently confused. I am assuming it is a mouse. Even after prodding the plastic with my broom handle several times, it is still wandering around aimlessly.

Basically, I am religious about my mosquito net for MANY more reasons than just malaria. Seriously.

My Neighbor's the Witch Doctor!

Ok so I don’t know that he is actually a witch doctor, but he is a dispenser of some sort.

I was washing some dishes and (who I assume is) his daughter comes by to invite me over for tea (that sounds really British, doesn’t it?). I can understand this in Bambara: I be gaa taa dute min (you come and drink tea). I can also understand “you come and eat” – I be gaa taa dumunike. They do tea differently here. It’s not nearly as strong nor does it take NEARLY as long to make. In fact, I don’t even think they use the gunpowder tea like they do in Guinea. I think they use teabags! Weird!

Anyway so I follow her over to the neighboring compound and she leads me to one of the rooms where Yusufu is with some lady (who seems kind of well-to-do: she had a giant red leathery purse – high class). Plus she spoke French, which means she went to school and definitely past the required 6th grade (even the 6th graders can’t speak any French, though). He is sitting on the floor and she is sitting on a bench. At first glance the room looks like a junk room. There are bottles of who-knows-what all over the place (there was even an empty bottle of Jack Daniels Whiskey in there – where did he get that??), little packets of something wrapped in paper, all kinds of bundles of leaves and herbs and then the weird stuff. Like animal horns and skins, dried snake skins and some weird, small, dried, skinned animal hanging from a hook in the ceiling. And bones. I don’t know what he is saying to the lady but she is paying him (maybe, like, 500 francs or about a dollar) and he is loading her up with paper packets, bundles of leaves, powders, etc… I notice a little paper packet hanging above the door from a string. It kind of reminded me of a mezuzah (the thing Jews put on every door that has some scripture inside it).

I recall that Drissa once told me he doesn’t go to pray (but I could swear he said he was Muslim), but he does something with Yusufu. Maybe he’s an animist. I don’t know.

Yusufu seems kind of young to be the village witch doctor though. He is maybe in his early 30s. But he has a very well-organized compound, lots of animals AND he has a moto (which means he has some money). I don’t know how many wives or kids he has, I’ll have to ask him sometime.

But anyway. Maybe he can make me some funky African charm to keep away the sorcerers. That would be awesome.

A Word on Toh - and other Malian culinary excursions

So I think I once described toh as a giant gnocchi, lacking any other sufficient comparison. But gnocchi is more firm and not grainy enough and in my toh-some adventures here in Mali so far I have come up with a MUCH better comparison: it’s like cream of wheat with far too little water so it’s all congealed together rather than soupy. That is exactly what toh is like.

Personally, I like toh. I have had two kinds of toh: manioc toh and millet toh. Manioc toh is yellowish white and millet toh is purplish. Manioc is what we had in Guinea (as everyone there grew manioc all the time and I don’t think I ever saw one millet plant). In my village in Mali, it’s ALL about the millet. I can’t say I prefer one strain to the other (though can’t wait to look up whether millet has a higher nutritional value than the nearly completely void manioc). But I do prefer peanut sauce with my toh. Mainly because I prefer peanut sauce nearly all the time (since there’s no more manioc leaf sauce for me). The sauce they usually give with the toh, however, is baobob leaf sauce, which as I have before stated, many volunteers refer to as “snot sauce”. This is a fair comparison. It is slimy and long slimy strings stretch from your spoon (or hand) to the bowl once you’ve dipped your toh. Plus it’s green. And fairly salty. So “snot” might actually end up being a fair comparison.

At any rate, I think we eat toh for one meal every two days or so. They also have come up with a surprising number of other iterations of millet. There is the keke-like thing, which is like millet sawdust but I don’t like it as much as the manioc keke. Then there is a coarse grits-like thing, but like the toh, it is like a congealed mass of grits rather than soupy. Then there is a cous-cous which I think I have only had once. And, of course, the porridge for breakfast (I stand by my statement it would be greatly improved with a little powdered milk, cinnamon and sugar, which I am going to try out next time I can get my hands on those three things). For sauces there’s the baobob leaf sauce, peanut sauce, a bean sauce and tomato sauce. I wasn’t super fond of the tomato sauce. Once I got the grits-like thing covered in a very thin oil sauce (kinda like a vinaigrette). It was tasty but I am betting nutritionally void. They do not appear to make any other leaf sauces, which is a disappointment (leaves have vitamins!). Also, they don’t really do the piment thing. Which I thought was weird (have to bring my own piment). Also, they don’t put mashed up dried fish in everything, which I often despised in Guinea but now realize was WAY better for your health since you’re at least getting some protein that way (here I can go all three meals without a speck of protein – the kids’ distended bellies are huge). At least they make bean sauces. And there’s lots of peanut eating going on (this might be partly because they just harvested all their peanuts – not sure how long the peanuts end up lasting throughout the year).

And the other thing is: they have SO MANY animals. In my compound alone, there are about 6 cows, 15 goats, 20 sheep, 20 pigeons (which as I mentioned, are food here), and maybe 30 chickens. I don’t think we personally have any ducks. So basically what I’m saying is, there’s no lack of eggs or milk or even meat, but I have never (in my whole week here…) seen it getting eaten (although there was sour milk in the porridge yesterday so that’s something!). So I’ve decided that whenever I leave to go to Bamako or wherever, when I come back I will always bring some form of protein (like a rooster or some fresh fish) and some form of vitamins (like a watermelon). Plus I am going to ask Haoua (my APCD) ASAP where I can get my hands on some moringa seeds. And then work on perfecting a moringa leaf-peanut butter sauce.

EDIT: tonight was tomato sauce again with the grits-clump. Not like I remember it the first night, that’s for sure. I think the first night I was still coming off my high of pizza and carbonara sauce I’d been enjoying for three weeks and the thrust back into African cuisine was a bit of a bump. But now? It’s just like any other sauce. And it’s got some vitamins in it!

Life in the Diarra Compound

So the day starts off like this. The women are up by, like, 5:30am…at the latest. I’m not sure exactly what they do that early other than heat my bath water, but it probably consists of heating other people’s bath water and starting to pound the millet. At 6:15am sharp, every day (except, weirdly, Friday when it didn’t happen until like 6:45), I hear the handle of a bucket bounce down onto the rim and then three taps on my metal door. My bath water has arrived. I groan a response so they know I am getting up and loudly put on my flip flops, sitting by the side of my bed, find my (really dirty – need to wash it) pagne and wrap it around myself so I don’t answer the door bare-kneed even though it is always a woman bringing me hot water. She’ll pour a little bit in my bath bucket and then I swirl it around and cleanse it with my hand to clean it out, expertly (ha!) throw the discarded water out into the dust and hold it down as she pours the rest of the heated water inside. Then I usually stumble to my latrine (which now stinks of rotten meat thanks to the spoiled Spam Lite I threw down it on, like, Day 3). I deposit the bucket and my basket of bath things and usually stumble back to lay down for another 15 minutes before dragging myself out of bed, grabbing my (stinky, need to wash it) REI towel and trudging back to the latrine to bathe (sort of unnecessarily since I bathed before going to bed). I wouldn’t do it if the water wasn’t warm.

After that sometimes I am motivated and I get dressed and go out into the compound to study my Bambara right away, where I am served “seri”, which is a millet porridge similar to oatmeal that could greatly benefit from some powdered milk, sugar and cinnamon. Other times I am still tired so I lay down again, other times I am anti-social so I read a little, and in both of these cases the seri is brought to my door within 30 minutes. Oh, clearly during the 5:30-6:15 period they also start making the seri…seri-ously (ha ha).

After this I always go sit out in the compound with my Bambara stuff, even if I don’t feel like studying at all. I’ll sit there and make faces at kids and do my flash cards and page through the Bambara learning manual Peace Corps gave me but a lot of the time I just start pulling peanuts off the dried plant with the grandmas (and the kids who I think help only so they can come sit with me – you’re welcome, grandmas!) and listen to them talk. And saluer the women who come by to go to the well to get water and the men who cruise through the compound for no reason other than to saluer.

Speaking of men, the men tend to be gone early in the day. Like, after the seri. Twice a week (Monday and Friday), my host dad Moussa puts stuff on the back of his bike and goes to the markets (11k and 7k away, respectively). Still have to figure out what’s in that bag. One time he came back with sweet potatoes, which were well-received. So far I think there are two other grown men in our compound. One says “bonjour” to me every day and the other one speaks some French but they are usually gone during the day, in the fields or maybe just hanging out at someone else’s house.

It’s the kids that take care of the animals. Or, herd them, I should say. This morning while I was pulling peanuts with the grandmas all the kids ran over to the “sheep corner” and after some excitement came out holding a stiff, dead baby sheep by the tail. They passed the carcass among themselves until finally a little boy walked away out of sight (not very far, though) to dispose of the body. I thought, “that’s where I should have put that damn Spam”. Anyway, when I say they herd the animals, I mean they are the ones to untie or ungate them, chase them with sticks, chase them when they come back into the compound (loose) and tie/gate them back up in the evening (one of the most amusing things is to see a tiny 4 year old boy with a stick bossing around a full-grown male cow about 50x his size). We have cows, sheep, goats and donkeys that require this attention (actually I don’t know where the donkeys spend the night – when they are not working they always seem to be hanging out in the fields). We also have chickens, ducks and pigeons which from what I can tell pen themselves up just fine when it starts to get dark (but in the ducks’ case spend all day hanging out at the well, pooping on the concrete platform, just to contaminate the water, I’m sure). Also, apparently we eat pigeons, I found out today. I remember hearing them referred to as “rats with wings” (probably from a New Yorker) in the States, but here they are food.

I try to hang out until lunch (which today was the millet keke-like thing with bean sauce). Waiting for lunch today, I separated kolo nuts from their shells with ba Abi, which they use to make oil. She also made a hot bissap tea out of hibiscus flowers and sugar which was, in a word, TASTY. After all this, I usually repose and read and study Bambara and sometimes sleep and rarely emerge until my bath water is again delivered to me, followed by my dinner (today a millet grits-like thing with the “snot sauce” [baobab] usually reserved for toh). Then I bring back the remainder of my dinner (I usually leave at least half, not only because I stop as soon as the hunger pangs go away but also because I am afraid that my leftovers are supplementing the kids’ diet [not to mention my friend, the dog’s]). Then I usually write or read or listen to music and can still hear the kids running around, squealing, and sometimes the TV. Have I mentioned this? They have a TV which is run off a car battery, which I think they charge from the neighbors’ solar panel device. I only saw them watching it once (though I know it happens several times a week), but everyone gathers around the TV, which has a grainy green picture of what looks like a soap opera playing and I am certain is only in French (which nearly none of them speak or understand). I have opted out of joining in on this. Once I get my DVDs back from Guinea I should figure out how to hook my laptop up to it and play Pirates of the Caribbean for them in French. Although my laptop screen itself might actually be bigger.

Anyway when all’s said and done I’m usually asleep by 9 or 10pm. Only to be tormented all night long by my (huge) mice. I really need to find a cat ASAP.

Adjustment

Mike put it best (with help from Nick, I think): it’s like your husband/wife just died and you’re being asked to sleep with somebody else…and they’re not even that hot!!

I haven’t properly mourned for Guinea. I don’t know that I can. And being shoved into this new relationship is in some ways even more trying than it was the first time. In other ways its not.

There are 11 of us who decided to transfer to Mali: me, Corinna, Mike, Marisa, Danielle, Paul, Erich, Mark, Scotty, Yik and Molly. Mark, Scotty, Yik and Molly are G18 and I didn’t even meet them until I arrived at Tubaniso after the evac (to be fair Yik was in my car between Kankan and Bamako, but he was wearing a crazy pink hair net and I couldn’t take him seriously).

Erich is a volunteer for a very finite amount of time from now (January, I believe) as he is G15 and deserves his COS. The other 6 of us are all from my stage, G17 (I am the sole AgFo to transfer here though I am proud to say ALL G17 AgFos did transfer – to places like Benin, Jamaica, Madagascar, Zambia and Senegal). G17 is hardcore. Out of the 4 stages in-country, I believe we were the one with the most transfers – we weren’t ready to give up, man. G15 understandably just COSed (their COS date was like Feb. 4). A lot of G16 (education) went home for 2 months and is going to start Liberia’s program in February (they get to keep their COS date which is a SWEET deal) – the others COSed. A surprisingly small number of G18ers opted to transfer (in their defense, they swore in like a week before we were evacuated). This includes the 4 who decided to stick it out with us in Mali. I believe most of the others are looking at re-enrollment, which basically means they go home, get placed again and start completely over.

So the last couple of days I have thought more and more about going back to get my dog. I know Mike and Marisa are thinking of going back for their dog and cat, too. I wouldn’t go get Yogi if I didn’t know for sure I could bring him back to the States, so I have to look that up. For the sole reason that I suspect he is probably happy in Santou and it is a vastly different world here and I don’t think I would want to leave him here.

Corinna warned me about how hard it would be to go back to Guinea but I want to and I think it would bring me some kind of closure so I would welcome it. If my mom or dad actually come through on their pledge to come visit me I would want to take them to Guinea, too. I spent nearly a year of my short (25 year) life there, and it is a place that will remain in my heart and memory until the day I die.

Missing Guinea

I feel priveledged to have been able to live in Guinea, one of the most beautiful places in the world. While I did not and don’t feel like I would have gotten a lot of actual projects done there, it was an amazing place with amazing people and I will miss it forever. Especially my effing dog.

But now I feel priveledged to serve in Mali. The people here are great and here I feel like I will actually get projects accomplished. So I got to have the best of both worlds.

Today Drissa and I went to the bigger town north of us where the gendarmerie, mayor and sous prefet are. I’m not exactly sure who I met but everyone seemed to be happy that I am here and unlike in Guinea do not make big non-sequitor speeches about it. I think I met the mayor, the second mayor and the sous prefet. I don’t know really. The Sous Prefet was very flirty and it’s still hard to get rid of that.

I was wrong in thinking it wouldn’t be easier this time around. It is, if only in the sense that I know I have to act like a freaking idiot and be unapologetic for my lack of language skills but show that I am trying.

I think my experience here will be a lot different than my experience in Guinea. Both will have their high and low points and both will be equally important and satisfying in my life.

But I seriously miss my dog and want to go get him if Guinea reopens anytime soon.

My family has been giving me hot bath water twice a day. Once in the evening when it gets dark and once at 6:15 in the morning. Which means I have to get up every day at 6:15am. So I take an afternoon nap every day after lunch.

I managed to get the house pretty much organized today (as much as I can without a table or shelves yet). I’ve been getting fed 3x a day every day so I don’t know when I will have occasion to bust open the four food boxes I have with me (inheritances from people who flew to their reassignment/back to America and two boxes from my grandparents) or the entire carton of eggs I bought. I have to figure out how to pay the family back for all the food. Whether I should just pay them or buy them stuff on market day remains to be seen.

Dooni, dooni as they say: little by little.

First Impressions of Mali

Well, I was installed at my site today. A few days ago we (as in those of us transferring to Mali) went to a village near the training center to practice our frankly non-existent Bambara. In that moment I had never missed Guinea more. It hit me that I was going to have to do it all over again. The awkward silence, not understanding anything people say to you, embarrassing yourself, offending people, setting your boundaries and limits, getting used to new food, feeling like an asshole – I HAVE TO DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN. And in that moment, sitting there surrounded by women and children with Corinna and Mark I was just like…I don’t want to go through this again. I was deluding myself into thinking it would be easier this time around. Yeah, it would be easier if I were going to a Pular-speaking village (never realized how much Pular I really knew until I couldn’t use it anymore). Or a village closer to Guinea’s borders who ate the same kinds of foods. But this village is TOTALLY different.

Let me preface by saying that I am happy to be here. And it is a little bit easier because I KNOW I have to make an ass out of myself and embrace that fact. I made a kid fall on the ground and cry today because I chased him with my broom. I was just kidding but he ended up really scared after he fell. In the States the mom would be like, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO MY KID???” But here, they laugh. Getting hurt is funny (it was like this in Guinea, too).

So the things about my new village that I like more than Santou:

1. My house is small, just two rooms. It is a real “mud bush house” as my APCD called it. And it is. It is made out of mud. The thatch roof is held up by good-sized tree trunks. There is black plastic hanging under the roof to prevent rain leaks and catch falling debris. It is, in a word, awesome.

2. I live with people. I live in a concession (sort of…it’s not really surrounded by a wall but it’s clear all these houses are “together”) with I don’t know how many other families. Maybe they are all part of the same extended family. I haven’t figured it out yet. But the point is, they are falling all over themselves to do stuff for me. They bring me water (the well is only like 30 yards away, I could do it…however the pump is kinda far and they brought me two big bidons of pump water so that’s a plus). They bring me food because I said I was too busy and tired to come out and eat ensemble tonight. THEY HEATED MY BATH WATER!! Which seems ridiculous. In fact I think I told them not to do it. I mean, it’s not cold. But I remember Jake saying his family in training heated his water because even though it was hot as hell in Forecariah, if you bathe in warm water, you feel cooler afterwards. It was a quality investment. I don’t want to put them out, though, so I hope they don’t do it every day. (UPDATE: they do it twice a day, every day. I am grateful because it is cold when I bathe at sunrise and after sunset.)

3. I am the first volunteer ever to live here. They have wanted a volunteer for a really long time and now that they have one they are really excited.

4. I sort of have reseau. If I put my phone on the little ledge above my window outside it gets a signal so can receive calls and text messages. If I want to talk on it I have to stand with my back against the wall on my tiptoes with my ear bent as far up as possible. If I stand flat-footed I lose the signal. I am considering finding some sort of box I can stand on.

5. My homologue is 18 and actually wants to be my homologue. He comes over every morning and hangs out pretty much all day. We eat together and he helps me with my Bambara. He also helps me get stuff like kerosene and putting together my stove.

6. Donkeys. ‘Nuff said.

7. Pretty much nobody speaks French. This means I HAVE to learn Bambara and be able to communicate in their language which means I can do a lot more communication with women, whose French skills also lacked in Guinea.

Things not as awesome as Guinea:

1. My dog isn’t here. Self-explanatory.

2. I have a cockroach problem. Only at night, but there are lots and they are big. Have to bomb my house.

3. Petites. There are SO MANY KIDS. I mean there were a lot of kids in Guinea but the kids here outnumber the adults at least 3-to-1. And because they’ve never had a white person here before they are VERY curious. Also noisy.

4. Nobody speaks French. I know I had this in my likes, too, but right now it’s also in my dislikes because it pretty much means I can’t communicate AT ALL. Keep in mind that Peace Corps Mali usually trains their volunteers in the local language of their village for the two-month PST period. I’ve taken Bambara for about 6 days.

5. I live with people. Also in the likes, but it means I don’t really have a lot of privacy and always have to be worried about being social and always have people walking up to my door and windows to say hello. Or other things I can’t understand.

6. Food. All they eat is millet. Every single meal. In the morning it’s like a millet porridge (would be improved with some sugar and cinnamon). The dinner I had the first night I really didn’t like. It was like un-molested millet with a tomato sauce. I really didn’t like it. But the other meals I’ve had have been good. I even like the “blob with snot sauce” as some volunteers refer to toh and baobab leaf sauce. In fact I had that for lunch. It was good. They make cous-cous out of millet, a keke-like thing, toh, and others. There are like 10 different bases they can make out of millet. It’s creative. Plus the peanut sauce is pretty good. But there’s no manioc leaf sauce. And I have yet to have a fresh leaf sauce (baobab leaf sauce is made from dried leaves). So we shall see.

All-in-all, there are lots of pluses and minuses but as usual, I’ll make the best of it.

Moving to Mali

Well I have been officially accepted as a transfer to the Mali Water & Sanitation program. I am still in denial that I am not going back to Guinea and probably will be until I am installed at my site next week and have a good, long, snotty, ugly cry in my house.

Without my dog.

This whole process has been stressful and awful but somehow we are all making it through in one way or another.

PacMan helps (thanks Dave).

So here's to making the most of Mali!!

Officially Suspended

So. It's over for us in Guinea. We are not going back. I don't really know what to say about it right now other than that we are all now looking at our other options. On va voir.

"Consolidation" Sucks

It's not so much that I mind being here in PC Mali's training compound with all my colleagues but it SUCKS to not be in Guinea anymore. It's like the old saying: "you don't know what you've got til it's gone." I miss my dog SO MUCH. I left him with Ousmane II and Kareem. My fellow volunteers joke that the people of my village are at this moment enjoying Yogi "brochettes" (basically, meat shish kebobs). Too soon.

We range between laughing and crying pretty frequently and personally I am in a bit of denial that we won't be going back to Guinea because I REALLY want to go back.

But I don't think we are going back. And it SUCKS. It sucks worse than anything else: worse than leaving home for college, worse than transferring schools to different states, worse than summer camp coming to an end. Because the people we left behind became not only our friends but our FAMILY. And we did not get to say proper goodbyes or cry about it (because Guineans don't cry in public). And also because those people we love are now in danger. In an unstable African country in complete confusion. And the more we hear about violence and instability, the more pictures and videos we see, the harder it is to justify to ourselves just leaving them there as if "it isn't our fight."

And it SUCKS abandoning your dog. Who you got when he was the size of your palm. Who can't understand why you left him or what happened. Who stood by you during all the toughest times of your service in an unfamiliar country.

Anyway. The idea now is that if the Guinea program has to be suspended (we should know this early next week), the majority of us (who aren't close to COS) will try to transfer countries. The good news is that there are several countries saying they can take 10-15 of us apiece, so we will all probably be able to find a spot. The bad news is none of those spots will be Guinea. And that's the next part to come to peace with.

"Consolidation"

Well as I was brushing my teeth tonight I saw a bright flashlight coming hurriedly to my house. At first I thought it was just one of my friends, or acquiaintances because most of my friends know I don’t take visitors after dark, especially if my door is closed. But the flashlight was too bright. And moving too quickly for a Guinean. It was Ian.

I was like what’s up? It’s not uncommon for him to stop by my house if his car has stopped in my town and it didn’t occur to me at first that this couldn’t be a regular visit because he had just gone to John’s site yesterday (in fact my friend Ousmane II said he saw him coming through on a taxi at like 3am). Ian just hung his arms on my window with his face up to the screen and said, “I have some bad news.” And I was like what? And he was like, “You know what I’m going to say.” And I still didn’t. My brain was not working. Then I had a fleeting thought that we might be consolidating to John’s site and the words came out of his mouth: “We’re going to Mali.” He couldn’t stay, as the car had just briefly stopped for him to tell me this so I don’t have any info other than that he is coming with a car in the morning and we are going to go to John’s site and wait for Peace Corps to come pick us up.

I was alright when Ian left but then I got dressed and went to Ousmane II’s house and just started crying when I was telling him we are leaving tomorrow.

I couldn’t speak, really, so he told his mom and she started crying and then we went to the Carrefour and said goodbye to Safi with the keke and Nene Aissatu who I get evening rice from and then went to Caw Ousmane/Aissatu Bah’s house and I couldn’t speak there either so Ousmane II had to tell them. On the way there we saw Alessane and told him.

I’m sad that I won’t get to see Ousmane I before I go. I don’t have a picture of him. This makes me incredibly sad.

I haven’t allowed myself to think about leaving Yogi yet. Ousmane II and Kareem said they will take care of him. Hopefully he will be happy there.

I have a lot of packing to do even though I already did a preliminary pack last week when things started going downhill. Have to get all my food together to give away tomorrow. Everything perishable.

I’m going to cry myself to sleep, I just know it.

Information

So this morning a dude I didn’t know wearing trendy blue camoflauge pants came up to my house with a note from John. He had duct-taped all the edges so no one could peek at it (not that anyone here reads English, anyway) so I knew it had to be about our status.

I wasn’t really freaking out or anything but I was surprised at what a relief it was to get official news rather than guessing and assuming.

Apparently right now (well, as of yesterday when he wrote the note) our status is “Alert”, which is a step below “Standfast”. Apparently at some earlier time, we were on Standfast and John had sent notes but I did not receive it (don’t know about Ian, but if he sent me Ian’s, like he did this time, Ian didn’t get it either). So I’m sending Ian’s copy up to his site with his friend Conte today (hooray for market day!) so hopefully he will get it tonight.

So apparently Paul canceled his race, which is kind of a relief because I didn’t want him to think I was letting him down! It also means John is definitely at his site and can pass us news (when the bush note system works).

I decided not to go to John’s site today, but rather on Sunday which is market day and I could get a taxi there and back in the same day and not have to stay over (guarding the patience of my dog sitters carefully). Plus there might be some straggler avocadoes on the big market day so I’m looking forward to that.

So my friend Alysun just came over and was talking to me about the greve and he is quite riled up, indeed. He told me that yesterday Dadis said it wasn’t him who fired upon the people at the stadium but rather that the military has split into two factions (meaning this other faction is not under his control). Oh, that’s WAY better (can you taste the sarcasm?). Alysun actually did not seem to believe it and went off about something Dadis said about France (I think) and said, “once words come out of your mouth, it’s like a bucket of water. Once it spills on the ground you cannot put it back.”

I think I forgot to mention that while there are over 150 dead, there are something like 2500 people injured. Either beaten, raped or shot.

“Why am I Guinean?” Alysun laments. “The government doesn’t know what they’re doing. We will never be developed. If you know that the money you give for development is going to be boofed, you won’t give it, right?” I explained how President Obama said one of the most important factors in the ability of a country to develop is good governance. Guinea does not and has not had that since the French left over 50 years ago (or even before that – I have no idea how good a governor France was).

Oh would you look at that, just received John’s first note.

Alysun talks about education and how there are people who are 30 years old and can’t write their names. “How will your country become developed if there is no education?”

To me the answer is grassroots. Getting everyone together from the ground up to demand a real democracy. Unfortunately in a country like this, the only way to get a real democracy might be to take it by force.

Greve

So this morning I went to the health center with Aissatu Bah. She had cut her finger with a knife while cooking the other day and was going to have her dressings changed. Basically, something we as Americans do at home but here there’s no such thing as a basic household first aid kit so the simplest thing like putting some iodine on it and a band-aid (they don’t actually have band-aids here, they tape gauze onto the wound) requires a trip to the health center. They don’t have much there, but they do have iodine and gauze. However they don’t sterilize anything before using it nor do they wash their hands before dressing somebody’s wound and I’m just like – “you’d be better off if I did that for you at my house” but we are not allowed to do that, so…

While we were there she and the doctor told me that a greve started in Conakry yesterday. I think greve literally means “strike”, but it’s more like “people are demonstrating against the government and the government is killing them.” 87 dead since yesterday. The only thing I could get out of anyone is that it has to do with “the opposition”. Really have to try to get BBC News on my radio today. I am sure we are on standfast (first stage of readiness – it means stay at your site or wherever you currently happen to be) right now but I haven’t heard anything and if I still haven’t heard anything by Thursday morning I don’t know if I should go to Paul’s race or not. It’s nowhere near Conakry, it’s in the opposite direction, but if we’re on standfast we are not supposed to travel. I really wish I could make phone calls without going all the way to John’s site. But maybe he will send me a note today or tomorrow to let me know what’s going on. At any rate I am putting my “consolidation” pack in order in case we get the word to start preparing for possible evacuation. Plus a little suitcase of the stuff I’ll want sent to me if we do get evacuated (apparently they will send you a limited weight of stuff if you are evacuated). Mine is mostly fabric/African clothes, jewelry and other small souvenirs. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

So besides that, Aissatu’s family does not have good luck this week. Not only did Aissatu cut her finger cooking, but Caw Ousmane cut his thumb with his machete out in the fields. Grandma has been vomiting for 2 days. Billo has a HORRIBLE ear infection, I mean there is just crusty discolored gunk all over the outside of his ear. I asked if they had taken him to the health center and they said no. Kid definitely needs antibiotics. Then the other kid (shoot…Ibrahima?) has all these sores all over his shins oozing pus and blood and I was like Aissatu, use the soap I gave you the other day (good antibacterial one), wash that well 3-4 times a day and make the kid wear clean pants. SERIOUSLY. I don’t know if they will do it or not. But basically there are only 3 people in the family who are in good health: Caw Ousmane’s wife Aissatu, his baby Tidiane and Binta (teenager and Aissatu Bah’s sister).

Also my mice are not dead. I just saw one sprint across the living room floor. Yesterday I saw one walking all slow so I thought maybe he was in his death throes but then he saw me and shot off like a rocket. Can’t kill bugs with fumigation, can’t kill mice with rat poison (and they DID eat it), what’s with these African super-creatures? Maybe that’s why they call them “Africanized Bees” cause if they’re impossible to kill, they’re probably Afrca-like.

In other news, I got a really awesome loaf of French bread today. Crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, just the way I like it!! Wish I knew which baker baked it. YUM.

EDIT: Ok so my friend Bella just gave me the down-low on the greve, which, I looked it up, does mean strike. So apparently what’s going on is that all of the “opposition” candidates (everyone but Dadis – there are like 80) had planned during Ramadan that they wanted to have a demonstration protesting Dadis’ plans to be a candidate on the ballot, which he originally said he would not do. They knew they had to wait until Ramadan was over so they planned it for Sept. 28 which is Guinea’s independence day (when they kicked France out) in the Estade du the 28 de Septembre (Independence Stadium, basically). About a week ago Dadis made his candidacy official. Which fueled the demonstration even more. There were over 50,000 “jeunesse” (youth, though I suspect they weren’t all youths) there. The CNDD did not like this demonstration and told them to disperse. They said no. So the Presidential Guard (Red Berets) went in and made them leave, in the process killing 87 people (and evidently raping women with their guns – this is just what my friend told me). So in response, there is apparently a demonstration in Mamou today (“the intersection of Guinea” – gotta go through there to go almost anywhere) and he thinks they will spread to all the bigger cities, places where we have volunteers (well, I mean, we even have volunteers in Conakry but at least in Conakry they can go to the Bureau which is guarded).

So if this is true and there are going to be demonstrations like this in bigger cities, I am not going to Paul’s race, as I have to go through several big cities to get there. I just hope that John hasn’t left his site yet and that we are on standfast and he has to stay there because if me and Ian don’t have John there to send us messages, we are kind of SOL. Although I guess if it were a real emergency he could call the German couple who live in his city and they could send us a message (they speak English – and French, and German, and probably 2 or 3 other languages =).)

At any rate, I’m getting my “For America” suitcase all ready to go…just in case.