I'm aware I haven't been the best at updating this - with the infrequent internet access I do have, there is rarely time to write out an entire blog entry. In the past couple months, I led my first formation with some other PCVs and also received funding for my first project!
The formation I did with my friends Katie, Emily, and Ali came about through the Gender and Development (GAD) committee of Peace Corps Mali (on which I am my region's representative). One volunteer had the great idea of staging a 3-day long Take Our Daughters to Work Day retreat for girls in her region. The girls shadowed professional women for a day, did some fun educational games, learned skills to help them in the future, and were paired with a professional woman as a mentor. GAD helped to spread the idea to other volunteers in Mali, and soon a couple of us up in Mopti wanted to give it a try. There was one problem: we are farther out from Bamako, and thus don't have the same resources the volunteers down there have. We decided to switch it up a bit, and called it Bring Work to Our Daughters Day. Girls from Fatoma/Sassolo (my and Ali's villages), Sevare (Katie's village), and Konna (Em's village) all came to Konna for a one-day formation. We brought in professional working women from Konna and Fatoma as well. In the morning, we played some ice-breaker games and the women led a panel discussion about the importance of education and women in development. We then had lunch, followed by an afternoon of really productive group work. We put the girls and women into groups, and gave them questions to discuss, among them: What are the educational problems in Mali? How are girls treated differently from boys in school? How can we fix these gender disparities in our communities? What sustainable strategies can we start to work on? The girls gave some great answers and were really motivated to start working on educational issues in their communities -- and hopefully will continue on to high school next fall!
As for my community garden project, I finally succeeded in buying all the materials needed with the help of my neighbor, Samba, and host mom, Kumbari. Whew! It was quite the exhausting process, what with all the bargaining in three different languages at the same time (French, Fulfulde, and Bambara). Unfortunately I had to leave for the States the day before the fence was going to start being built. I really hope that my village went ahead and started - I had to leave the key to my house with them so they could have access to the materials (yes, I currently have one hectare of fencing, 10 sacks of cement, a wheelbarrow, some shovels, and 50 iron fenceposts in my house. My village decided my house was the best place for storage because I have room and I won't steal the materials. There's not a lot of breathing room). They were also going to start digging the well the day after I left. I'm incredibly nervous that it's not happening - if the well does not get built before the rains come in June/July, then it can't be build until next February because the water table will rise during rainy season. Of course my village realizes this too, it's just that they are working on many other projects right now, chief among them home repair, and my role is to kind of gently prod them along into working on this one. I'm sure it will all work out in the end though!
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