I was in Sikassoville (the city) for our Peace Corps Thanksgiving celebration. And it was an epic celebration to say the least! My friend Sarah planned the majority of it, including a dinner of turkey, mashed potatoes, green beans, salad, fruit salad, stuffing, apple pie, and pumpkin pie! We all ate so much - it was delicious! The next day we had a donkey race, which I did not participate in but took many photos instead (most of them feature people falling off donkeys, ha). My region unfortunately did not win - Sikasso beat us - but Sarah won for Sikasso, so that was fun. The next day was a trip to the waterfalls, where we camped out overnight. They were absolutely beautiful! It was about a 3 hour car ride out to the village by the waterfalls. This car ride was pretty much hilarious - definitely my worst Malian transit experience. The car broke down at least three times because the gasoline kept leaking out in mysterious places. We made it though! After the car ride was a 20 minute hike, which featured crossing a bridge with no handrails - basically just a log! It was a fun experience for all of us ('Don't die!'). The waterfalls are gorgeous though - there are three levels, and we hiked to all of them. We spent the night at the falls, hanging out around our campfire and eating guacamole and tortillas for dinner. The next morning we hiked back out, then got back into the car...which proceeded to break down yet again! For the last twenty minutes of the ride there were at least eleven people crammed into a car that should fit seven. Hilarious.
Later that day, my friends Ali, Sarah, and I headed out to Sarah's site for a week. I had such a great time at her site - we made pizza, of all things, en brousse! To do so, we created what we call a brousse oven. A brousse oven is essentially one pot inside a much larger pot with rocks and water at the bottom. When you put a lid on this contraption, it acts as an oven. The pizza was so good, even better because we were eating it in a small village in rural Mali. Sarah's host family and friends were really nice. They call her 'Crazy lady' as a joke, and of course included us in that immediately (white people do a lot of 'crazy' things here, like dancing all over the place, or flossing teeth, or painting their front doors). There were several differences between our villages - I live in a Peul village, and she lives in a Senufo/Bambara village. The most noticeable difference is that people down here greet a LOT. And they greet everyone. For a long time. Peuls usually greet people they know, and even then they just ask a couple questions (how are you? how is your family? over). Down here in Bambara country, they greet absolutely everyone, even strangers, with a million and one questions. The Bambara are definitely a lot friendlier!
We had one interesting conversation with an English teacher at the school. He came over to talk with us to improve his English. We were talking about gender roles here in Mali - how men claim to do all the hard work, yet in reality sit around for probably half the day drinking tea while women do all the cooking, cleaning, and sometimes farming. We asked him if he was going to ask his wife to do all the work for him when he gets married. His response (and I'm quoting): 'I am not sure. Here in Mali, it is different. I pay my wife's family to marry her. After that, she is like my slave.'
Now, I would hope that he was just mistranslating in his head - English is his third language, after all. Even if he was mistranslating though, it is still incredibly shocking to hear something like that spoken in English. We questioned him after that, but he kept on saying that people would make fun of him if he washed dishes or did laundry. After that, I said, 'Change starts with one person! That person could be you!' (Yes, incredibly trite, but that's life.) That made him think for a little bit. At the end of the day, I'm sure that when he gets married he will teach English and his wife will do all the endless housework and some fieldwork on top of that....but I hope that he remembers our conversation from time to time and thinks about what he could do to help his wife.
Gender roles here are so hard to deal with: I see women work all day long, breaking their backs drawing water from the well, working in the fields, chopping firewood with a baby strapped to their back, carrying two buckets of water when nine months pregnant. My job is largely cross-culture: to explain American culture to Malians and explain Malian culture to Americans. I spend a lot of my time having conversations with Malians in Fulfulde about how in America, men and women are equal. That they share the work. Women work outside the home, and that's normal. But it is hard to do that sometimes, when even after long conversations where I prove my point quite succinctly with a very educated Malian man in English, he says that change won't start with him.
