The Rulons Take Over Mali!

It's a coup! Ha, just kidding, although in my opinion we would make great leaders. ;)

A couple weeks ago my dad, mom, and sister Kathryn all came to visit me here in Mali! After a two-day long journey from Chicago to Bamako, they got in at 11pm and we went straight to the hotel. Kathryn's first impression: why all the dust and smoke? Answer: it's dusty and burning garbage. The next day we spend hanging around Bamako, went to the art musuem and botanical gardens, and then out to dinner with a bunch of my Peace Corps friends.

On Day 2 we went up to Sevare, which is the 'city' that is ten kilometers from my village. The trip up took 10 hours, so we just ate dinner at the hotel we were at...and then the next day we were off to my village!! My village was SO nice to my family, I almost cried a bunch of times. They were so kind, gave them so many gifts, and just generally made sure that they were taken care of. Incredible. My host mom, Coumbare, kept telling my mom how much she loves me and takes care of me like I am her own daughter, and what a good and strong person I am. It meant so much to hear my people in village say such nice things about me. They were all named after people in my village. My Dad is Hamadoun Sidibe, my mom is Coumo Mugaroo, and Kathryn is Coumbare Dico. The man who Dad is named after came by, and they dressed Dad up in his Fulfulde outfit and started doing a Fulfulde dance together. Such a great time.

Kathryn stayed with me for two nights at site...she is a survivor! She and I went to a dance party held in my family's honor on her first night there, we pulled out all kinds of crazy moves....like the lawn mower, grocery shopping, doing the q-tip....it was absolutely hilarious, and my village LOVED it. In general, it was so crazy to see my parents and sister do things that are normal to me now, but are so foreign to them....like eating rice and sauce with their hands, having to greet every single person we pass, drinking tea out of a shot glass. They saw my garden project, and helped the women pull water from the well. I'm so glad that they could share in my Mali experience like this.

After the three days in village, we spent a day in Mopti ('The Venice of Mali') and a day in Djenne, which has the world's largest mud mosque - it's a world heritage site. (Sidenote: here is an interesting article about Djenne that was recently in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/world/africa/09mali.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=mali&st=cse) Overall, the Mali part of the trip was great!

Back to Bamako, we then went to the resort in Senegal, about an hour south of Dakar (the capital of Senegal). It was SO NICE. Crazy nice. I did nothing but sit by the beach and eat food for days. The last day we went on a safari, which was really cool because we don't have wildlife in Mali. We saw a whole herd of giraffes gallop right in front of us! All in all, it was a great trip, and I am so grateful that my family was able to come and see my life here. Thanks family! :)

The Tale of the Carrot Thief

I got back to village a couple days ago after my family's wonderful visit to Mali and an absolutely glorious vacation in Senegal with my family! (blog with stories coming soon) About five minutes after I get home, as I'm sweeping out the two inches of dust and sand that has accumulated on my floor in my two-week absence, Coumbare comes dashing into my compound. "Aissata!' she shouted, 'We have a carrot thief!

It took about everything I had to not burst out laughing - I mean really, a carrot thief? But she was quite serious. While I was gone, someone began to break into the garden at night. Curiously enough, this thief does not take all the carrots - he or she digs up a bunch, takes a few, and then leaves the rest on the ground. The carrots the thief steals are not fully ripe either. Even curiouser, this thief only takes carrots. Ignoring all the cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and hibiscus, the thief goes straight for the carrots.

Seeing as Bugs Bunny isn't around, I asked Coumbare who she thought the thief should be. She shook her head and said ominously, 'It could be anyone!' I should explain a bit about the security system around our community garden: it's nonexistent. There is a lock on the garden gate that Coumbare is in charge of unlocking each morning and locking each night - which she does religiously. But anyone could easily jump the fence, or even roll under it in some parts. It is impossible for animals to get into though. Or rather, if they did it would be quite obvious, what with a section of the fence being pushed to the ground and hoof marks. So this thief must be a person. It's not even hungry season right now, so the thief couldn't be stealing because he/she is starving. People just harvested their crops, so food is abundant.

Coumbare is insistent that once word spreads around village about the thief, the stealing will stop. In Malian culture, calling someone a thief is the worst thing you can do. Stealing is the most shameful act in which one can be caught. Until it stops though, I'm going to continue advocating my theory that it was Professor Plum in the library with the lead pipe...or perhaps, to go Clue Mali-style, Amadou in the women's garden with a diallo (hoe). I'll keep you updated...

Turkeys, guacamole, and pizza, oh my!

As you can tell by the title, for the past two weeks I have been living it up on a mini-vacation in a magical place in southern Mali called Sikasso. Sikasso is magical because it has fruit and vegetables! Oranges! Bananas! Pineapple! Apples! Cucumbers! Green beans! And...(drumroll please) avocados year-round!!

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.

Yummy in the tummy!

It is official: the garden is up and running!

A couple weeks ago, my host family and I ate our first meal from the garden: salad with lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions. There is something so wonderful about eating food straight from the garden that you grew. All the kids were so excited about it - they only get vegetables once in a blue moon, so it is a real treat for them. They all fought over the last bits of lettuce in the communal bowl. I couldn't help but compare them to American kids, who I highly doubt would ever fight over who got the most tomatoes or cucumber slices. But these vegetables are better to them than candy! The watermelons are ready to harvest now too, so last night for dinner I had salad and a huge slice of watermelon for dessert! It honestly amazes me that the soil in our garden - very sandy - can produce gigantic juicy watermelons! Score one for food security!

In addition, a couple weeks ago we had a very important group of visitors: a NGO by a French couple that is building a garden for an association of Malians out in Bankass - Dogon Country. Before they began work on their new community garden, they were showing the Malians around to other gardens and allowing Malians to teach Malians good gardening techniques. They heard of our garden, and chose it as one of the teaching sites. Moussa came out with his entourage to show them around. He led a mini-session on tree planting, and each person in the group planted a mango tree! Then, completely unplanned, Coumbare took some of the group aside and told them about her work in the vegetable nursery. She basically taught them everything she had learned through my lessons and her experience! I was so proud of her! For a woman to speak in public in front of strangers, especially strange men, is a huge deal here. When I first came, she would not even ask questions if a man was leading a meeting. That day, she spoke confidently in public! Again, so proud.

Last week was the Muslim holiday of Tabaski, and we celebrated by killing a sheep and snacking on it all day long (woohoo!). The Tabaski sheep is like the Thanksgiving turkey - every family who can afford to kills a sheep. If you cannot afford a sheep, you get a cheaper animal, like goat, chicken, or even pigeon. Tabaski celebrates when Abraham was told to sacrifice his son Ishmael by Allah. At the last minute, Allah saved Ishmael and replaced him with a sheep (hence the eating of the sheep). Sound like the Christian story of Abraham and Isaac? Yup. It is the biggest holiday of the year - everyone is dressed in their fanciest outfits and goes around greeting all day and eating meat with their family and neighbors. I unfortunately had to eat bits of stomach, kidney, and liver (very gross, but it would be very rude to refuse). All in all, a good holiday!

History Time!

I recently finished a book on the history of Timbuktu, and in it was an interesting description of the Fulani people - the majority ethnic group in my village. This pertains to them before the Islamic conquest and their conversion to Islam, so says little about their culture today, but it is still fascinating history. The excerpt below is from Timbuktu: The Sahara's Fabled City of Gold by Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle (Walker Publishing Co: New York, 2007), p. 47-49.

"The Fulani, or Fulbe, or Peul, are an interesting people who have spread throughout the African savanna, and late in Timbuktu's life had a more or less disastrous effect on its politics. Their origins are in Senegal-Gambia, the product of admixture between native Wolof and incoming Berbers, yielding a modern people who are dark of skin with Arab or European features; indeed, newborn Fulani are often white, though they quickly turn dark. Throughout history the prickly Fulani were notorious for their fanatical views on their own racial purity and their insistence on their own beauty, even to the extent that an ordinary-looking Fulani man would encourage his wife to give birth to sons of better-looking men so as to improve the race. This fanaticism was later transferred to religion, and when the Fulani adopted Islam in later centuries their zeal gave rise to waves of jihadist warfare that roiled Timbuktu and its region for generations. About seven million Fulani are now spread out across a dozen countries.

"On the Niger, they settled somewhere around 1400 in Masina, west of Timbuktu; the Tarikh of al-Sa'adi often referred to the Masinakoi, or sultans of Masina. For reasons unknown they drew the unyielding hatred of the Songhai tyrant Sonni Ali and later, in 1498, became the unwilling subjects of the Songhai, when Askia Mohamed defeated them in battle, but they resisted to the last and maintained their own unrelenting hostility to their conquerors until after the Moroccan invasions of 1590.

"The pre-Islamic Fulani had a complicated cosmology. Most African societies, though animist, believed in some sort of supreme being, but the Fulani were more explicit than most; making them fairly easy converts when Muslim proselytizers came through in the centuries after Muhammad. They also had a creation myth that speaks eloquently, if rather cynically, of resurrection and redemption.

At the beginning there was a huge drop of milk,
Then Doondari came and created stone.
Then stone created iron;
And iron created fire;
And fire created water;
And water created air.
Then Doondari descended a second time.
And he took the five elements
And he shaped them into man.
But man was proud.
Then Doondari created blindness and blindness defeated man.
But when blindness became too proud,
Doondari created sleep and sleep defeated blindness;
But when sleep became too proud,
Doondari created worry and worry defeated sleep;
But when worry became too proud,
Doondari created death, and death defeated worry;
But when death became too proud,
Doondari descended for the third time
And he came as Gueno the eternal one,
And Gueno defeated death."

And the winner is...

Just kidding, there are no winners. Although I have been asked to share the top five books I've read this year (from July 2009 to July 2010). This proved to be a very difficult choice, as I've read quite a few (see list in side-bar), so I decided to split it into fiction and nonfiction. So in no particular order and without further ado:

Top 5 Nonfiction Books
- Amazing Grace by Jonathan Kozol. Fantastic and incredibly thought provoking. It makes you want to do something, right now, about urban poverty in America. Living in Mali, I live with very poor people (in money, not in spirit). Having volunteered with urban poverty organizations and studied poverty in cities in college, I know it's bad. I would rather live in Mali then be poor in any city in America. People here are poor, but they don't have daily shootouts and drug dealers down the streets. Something needs to be done, I'm not sure what but I'm a fan of people actually being aware of what their actions cause. And environmental justice and non-racist city planning. And social services that actually work.

- The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I'm a little late to reading Pollan's books, but they are so well-written and provide thoughtful analyses of our food system. Eat local.

- Madam Secretary by Madeline Albright. Perfect book for someone who gets geeked out by foreign policy and politics. Very long, but I could have read more.

- Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. Epic book. I've tried to read it four times, and finally succeeded in Mali.

- America's Women by Gail Collins. Such a fun book! I love the stories of the many different women she shares in this history of America.

Top 5 Fiction Books
- Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver. I love Kingsolver, and have read all of her books except for the newest one since I came to Mali. This is one of my favorites. Great story that weaves in the importance of the environment and ecology with the power of family.

- Persuasion by Jane Austen. Pride & Prejudice is actually my favorite Austen, but I felt the need to put up something I hadn't read before Mali. Love her.

- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. I didn't like Hemingway before I read this book. Now he is one of my favorites.

- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Laugh out loud funny. I was reading this in my compound and kept on getting weird glances from my neighbors because I kept on laughing.

- A Passage to India by E.M. Forster. Great book about colonialism in India.

I'm Back!

Well, after a wonderful and much too short break in America, I am back in Mali! First of all, thank you to the so many people who made my stay in America so fabulous. I loved being home with family and seeing the friends who made the time to visit. And of course, Sam and Nate's wedding was absolutely wonderful! It was great to catch up with friends and spend time with family. THANK YOU!

Now, to Mali: The first couple weeks back in country are always rough. It's really hot, there's no good food, massive caffeine headaches keep on happening, and family and friends are thousands of miles away. Ugh, you think. Why I am here? And then you wait. You sit and sweat through hot afternoons. You try to read War and Peace, and end up reading People instead. You venture out and fumble your way through remembering Fulfulde. And it's absolutely horrible for about a day. And then you see your peeps in village, and it all comes back. Drinking tea, shooting the breeze, shooing children away, speaking Fulfulde, and laughing a lot. Emphasis on a lot. You fall back into the routine, and everything seems to be okay. At least until that unlucky nth person of the day asks you for money. Then it's all over, everyone duck and cover. ;)

All the women in my village have been badgering me for a while now about doing another project: digging another well in the garden and getting a pump installed in both the new well and the well we already have. Another well in the garden is really important because having only one well makes it very difficult to water an entire hectare of vegetables. Children as young as five stay home from school in order to help pull the water and carry it across the garden in order to keep their family's plot alive. This can take up to four hours a day, two hours in the morning and two in the evening. The pumps would help alleviate this problem as well, as it would take a lot of the back-breaking labor out of watering the garden. This project is still in the early stages, but I hope it comes to fruition during my service.

I tried helping to water one evening, and they gave me a small child-size bucket. It was hard work! I was struggling carrying my one teensy-tiny bucket across the garden, while thirteen-year-old girls beside me were carrying buckets three times the size of mine on their heads. If nothing else, at least I provide comic relief.

I've established a new inside joke with my host family, which cracks me up every single time. Every night by five-year-old little host brother, Ngara, comes into the compound and pretends to be absolutely exhausted by falling onto our mat. I ask him a question about America, like, 'Is there millet in America?' And he says, 'Oh, I was there today. I did not see any millet.' I then ask him if he say my family, and he responds yes. He has named my mom Fatomata and my dad Hamadoun, after himself (Ngara is a nickname for Hamadoun). This charade continues on through the rest of dinner until I leave. I always tell him to greet my family the next day when he goes to America. We have quite a lot of fun with it, and he enjoys being the new 'America expert' in the family.