Excerpts

...from my favorite friend that listens but doesn't talk, my journal. by the way, i go by the name "Djeneba Coulibaly" in village

9/27/07

Things that should still amaze me but don't: there is a proper way to eat with your hands from the communal bowl..sick kids walk around uncared for..babies sit naked in the dirt..the full moon shines so brightly it casts shadows. I feel far far away tonight-in a good way. There are ways of being in touch but I guess if I can't be there I can't mourn not being there. Besides, life is a struggle (according to my language teacher), and the fact that I know I'm challenging myself to my fullest capacity keeps me here and kind of amazes me. For once I am doing, and not dreaming. It's a good feeling to be in control of my own life for once, and not having it dictated to me (read: college).

Job Aspiration of the day: guy who sings prayers to the village over the mosque loudspeaker.

Question of the Day: hungry, or nauseous?

9/29

If you think wells are creepy, try going to the well behind your secluded concession on a pitch black night, with lightning flashing in the distance. Oh yeah, and that patch of grass you walked over to get there? It just rustled. More than once.

On a lighter note, the sky was creamsicle orange and pastel purple while the sun was setting today. The sun sets on a mud-brick town...

10/3

Did I really just eat with a FORK from a PLATE that was on a TABLE? While watching color TV with a DVD player underneath? Granted, we were watching channel one aka the one channel that the tv gets, and it was connected to a battery. Also, we were sitting in the dirt yard and I was swatting flies and mosquitos the entire time, but still. That was amazing. Maybe living next to the elementary school won't be so annoying, because that means my neighbors are teachers, and this is apparently reverse world where teachers are rich and have solar panels and batteries and TVs and drive motos. sweet.

10/4

I'm feeling a lack of direction at the moment. I don't like this wandering aimlessly and making my own work thing. The villagers aren't giving me much guidance, either, even though I want them to. But they've got lives to live and mouths to feed and whatnot. I don't want to stop loving mornings...but I like to have tasks and feel good about waking up and doing something, no matter how small it is. Maybe I'll go for a bike ride or something. Before the sun gets mean.

later....I've learned to not be afraid of things people hand to me to taste. Usually I'm hungry enough to eat whatever it is, and if I'm really lucky it might be a piece of meat, which is savored no matter what part of the animal it is. But usually it's just some root or fruit that a kid has brought back from the bush, or homemade peanut butter or some other creation. After I eat it, though, I immediately think about how many hands I've shaken since the last time I washed my own hands, and I feel a little dysentery coming on. Yummy!

10/5

Culture shock has worn off a little but moments still amaze me. You probably shouldn't argue cardinal directions with a geography major, but it's ok if we're interrupted by a group of women marching through village, clapping chanting singing for rain, and later on you tell me about the marabouts and griots living in our village. I'm kind of amazed that I'm living and breathing and holding my own in this most primitive of cultures. Even poor by African standards. Not the most primitive or isolated of Malian villages, but maybe close to it. I can't believe I can survive at this level.

10/8

I like that I bought a secondhand shirt at market today, out of a wheelbarrow full of shirts, for 30 cents. I like that when I asked a spice seller if she had garlic powder, she started laughing and said, you can pound some dried garlic... I keep having these moments where it's like, what if in the past you could see yourself now...shirtless, sweating, eating a raw tomato in your mud hut while kids run around screaming outside. I wouldn't have even believed the part about the tomato.

10/10

I like my newfound ability to make babies just scream at the site of a white person. Maybe they think I'm gonna adopt them or something.Thoughts: I think my hands/fingerprints are suffering permanent damage from eating scorching hot food out of the bowl, without utensils. Or maybe I'm just on my way to integrating!!

10/11

I like that I walked into the village square today just in time to see 10 men holding down a live cow, and a few seconds later getting its neck slit with a machete. haha, that was disgusting. Oh, Africa...women washing clothes by the well, men slaughtering a cow in the dirt, all behind the mosque made of mud. Also, watching kids make and sell henna powder (for decorating feet), from plant to leaf to mortar to sifter to powder, is pretty damn cool.

10/12

So, my attempt to talk to the village chief (dugutiki) by myself didn't go over so well yesterday, but I can't even believe I had enough guts to go and do that. Maybe I should actually try to plan what I'm going to ask him next time. I'm really having an up week. And today was a reward-the end of Ramadan, a certified holiday, and it was good-cloudy and cool in the morning, 2 different kinds of MEAT and rice and potatoes for lunch, (divine), not having to do anything except say amen to blessings all day...rain! in the afternoon. To remember today: kids in their new outfits and brand new plastic shoes, running around town spouting off blessings to adults to earn a few coins apiece from them.

10/14

Wow..this is how ingrained greetings have become in me...I saw some movement in the corner of my eye..and almost just said good afternoon to some passing cows.

10/16

Today-trying to explain the Georgia drought to some Malians. "In my village we get water from a big lake, and the lake is almost dried up because it's not raining." I can just see them imagining people walking back and forth from Lake Lanier with buckets of water. In other news, I'm constantly encouraged by the niceness of Malians. "You don't understand? you will. you don't know it? you will." I can't believe what a second and third and fourth chance you can get with people here.

10/19

Even the insects go hungry here...they're so desperate they're eating my malaria pills. ha! (author's note: I'm not taking malaria pills because I have malaria. I have to take them every day just to keep from getting malaria..but it's still possible to get malaria while taking the pills.)

Friday October something 2007; I don't know what you're doing tonight, but I'm rolling out bread loaves on a rickety almost busted table under the light of a dying flashlight. My host family are the town bread makers...I work for my share!

10/22

do horses bleed white? Not a metaphor but an actual question, and I don't have Wikipedia here to answer it. Spur of the moment trip to San today by horse cart. The ride back from market was a little hotter and bumpier and slower, seeing as one horse was pulling a cart, 10 sacks of rice, 3 Malians and a toubab. Everyone and every thing works hard here. We've got a machine for that in America.

10/28

Good advice: it's probably a good idea to at least strain the visible worms out of your bucket of well water before you bathe with it. Finally got my own well bag! Now I can draw worm-infested water any time I want, without having to walk the extra 200 feet to the water pump.

10/30/07, 5:40 am; can't sleep...someone across town has been pounding millet since the prayer call.

11/6/07

Is it funny or sad when my little brother is proudly showing off his bed to me? ...a plastic sack half full of dried baobab leaves. And here's my blanket, Djeneba...another sack. Slept under my refugee blanket for the first time last night. The coldness progressed quickly in a month...first I was sweating sleeping outside; then sleeping with a sheet; 2 sheets; socks and pants...think it's time to start actually sleeping in the house when 2 sheets and a thick wool blanket isn't enough. Of course, I was sleeping on the roof. I might have been a little more exposed to the elements. But you can see all the stars! today's highlight: listening to my little brother repeat his English lesson over and over to remember it- hate hate hate hate hate hate...nine, ten. haha.

11/9/07

I totally had (another) Peace Corps moment today...after a month of feeling left out, because I'm not like these people at all- I'm not married, I don't have 3 babies at 23, I can't even really cook- and lazy, having been accused of not doing any work, which is true, but only because I don't know how to yet...I found myself sitting in a sorghum field, watching women walk back and forth carrying grain to load onto the horse cart. I started thinking about how I'll never be like a real Malian, and hence I'll never really fit in here. A girl my age had left her baby beside me and told me, since I wasn't going to work, to watch the baby and pick it up if it cried. I sat on a turned over aluminum bucket feeling more and more inadedequate, especially when the baby started crying and I didn't know what to do. Luckily she stopped crying a moment later...and the women came over, the mom scooping up her baby and telling me we were going to the other side of the road now. Someone picked up my bucket for me and moved it to my new sitting place, and the young mom sat beside me, on the ground, and nursed her baby. I sat for a moment watching the women work on their new pile. Feeling lazy and frustrated with myself, I finally worked up the courage to get up and flip over my seat. No one said anything as I walked to the pile and started laying the stacked sorghum tassels in my bucket. Another woman smiled at me and helped me lift the bucket onto my head, confident in my ability to carry it to the horse cart. Amazingly, none of the other women laughed that hard at the site of me doing actual work. I made my delivery and walked back to the pile. The silence was finally broken when, after a few round trips, I was told that if I was tired I could sit down. I said I understood, and loaded another bucketfull.

I hope to hell my attempt at gaining some respect worked, because I worked with the women until the sun was nearly down and the last tassel loaded onto the cart. If nothing else it was a good feeling to do actual work for the first time in 3 something months...but I think we got something out of it. Me-sore arms. The women-hopefully the sentiment that I'm actually capable of doing work, and will do so for them. Baby steps, right? I've got 2 years to figure this job out.

11/10/07

There's something peculiar about dysentery that leaves you nauseous and yet craving a tomato and mayonnaise sandwich at the same time. I'm getting to know my body well here. Sickness is coming every 2 or 3 weeks, but I guess it doesn't help that I dine on a table made of sand, aka the ground, with goats and sheep tied up a few feet away, their dander dancing in the wind. I think I'm adjusting little by little, though. Maybe one day I'll be immune.

and now a reward for making it through all that...some pictures for your viewing pleasure:

this is what sorghum looks like...and a shea tree for good measure

this is what millet looks like! yum

this is what a well looks like...this is in my homologue, aka village co-worker's, garden

multiple generations of my host family working in their fields...dad (Sekou) on the far left

what kids do during the day...herd animals in the bush. or maybe go to school if they feel like it.

the things kids do for fun!! the stick and hoop game, just like old times! yes!!!

view from inside a baobab tree. i think maybe goblins live inside at night.

my favorite picture of all time at the moment. Ali on balofon, Arimatu, unknown kid, Kadja & Rokia on...looking at me

Djelica, eatin' on some hot boilt p-nuts

taking a break by the hibiscus harvest

my brothers/cousins!! some of the many hundreds of them. coulibaly 4 life!

halloween in San...carving watermelons

view out of a window at the mayor's office in my village

kids' bikes lined up near the middle school....lunch is in those little pails

aforementioned baby sleeping in a sorghum field

Swear-in

It's official...I'm a volunteer now! I'm moving to no email-land tomorrow, but actually it's a 4-day process involving protocol in the regional capital (Segou) followed by houseware/furniture shopping. Fun! Especially since I have to buy everything I need, from outdoor vendors, in 95 degree heat. Yay mini hot season! Anywho, this might be my last update for a while. Here are some pictures:

the women of San...my teammates

Natural Resource Management crew, a.k.a. the tree huggers

Everybody..I'm hidden in the middle somewhere

3 hours in the life of a PCT

September 13, 2007
Ramadan started today, so to celebrate, after class we went to the bar. Actually, we go to the bar most days, but I usually only drink Fanta because I get dehydrated sitting in the hot African sun all day. Also, I'm usually fighting off some kind of sickness, including my current killer cold from hell, which was passed around my village and I, unfortunately, caught.The bar is about a 20-minute bike ride away, in a bigger village on the paved road. Some other volunteers are also living there for training. Around 5:30 I am enjoying my second Fanta and we are playfully arguing with out Malian bar friends (whom we see most every day) about whether they can really call us Toubabs. The word has become rather insulting, especially when adults use it to address you ("Toubabu...ca va?"). Kids screaming it over and over as you ride your bike by is almost cute, but it still gets old. We settle on a deal: they can call us "white skin" if we can call them "black skin." The Bambara word for African, farafin, literally means "black skin."

Meanwhile, the horizon in the east has turned a very menacing shade of gray, and the darkness is moving very quickly in our direction. The other people I'm with think they have time for one more round, but I panic and quickly bid farewell, saying sanji be na sisan! (rain is coming now!) to the Malians, who are well aware of this fact.Malian rainstorms don't play. Two minutes after I leave the bar, a cold wind starts blowing fiercely, and I can hardly pedal by bike. My skirt is flying up but no one notices because they are all rushing around like mad, packing up the fruits and vegetables they are selling, and others are trying to get their donkey carts under cover. I turn onto the dirt road leading to my village; the wind is blowing the dirt into the air violently, and I can hardly see and am choking on dust. When the rain comes here it really comes, and with the first drops I feel I start to get nervous. Some other trainees, Amanda and Davin, live a little ways down this road, and I make it to their house just as the rain starts falling harder. I wait it out in their room for a little while, but as soon as the rain lightens I leave. I'm nervous because it's getting late- 6:30, and when the sun sets, at 7, it really sets. There aren't any lights on my road, and I don't have a flashlight. I'm also nervous that I won't even be able to get home at all, because the bridge (see picture below) tends to become flooded during rainstoms, and if it's flooded now I'll be stranded on the wrong side.

The sky is illuminated every few seconds by awesome huge lightning bolts that light the entire landscape. It's still raining a bit. Luckily, when I come to the bridge the water is low enough to pass, though not without covering me with mud in the process. The sun is rapidly setting and I'm riding through every mud puddle in an effort to get home quickly. I ride into my village covered with mud, straining to pedal, as dirt roads turn to mud when you add water.

My host mom is cooking dinner at my house, and attending to a screaming baby, as I arrive. I get matches from her to light my lamp, and fill my bucket with warm bathwater from the pot in the cooking hut. I'm finally feeling calm, having arrived in one piece, but when I go into my nyegen (bathroom) to bathe, I find one wall has a hole in it in a bad place. An entire wall of my nyegen crumbled completely a few weeks ago in a huge storm, along with many of the walls around town and half of my family's cooking hut. The wall was rebuilt with sticks, branches and a black plastic tarp, a temporary solution at best. Today half of it has been blown away, exposing the bathroom to anyone in the field or road behind it. I'm scurrying to find a place for myself and my lamp in the nyegen where I can see but not be seen. The rain is still falling as I reposition myself, my bucket, my lamp once, twice, 3 times. Finally I give up and take the fastest bucket bath in the chilliest rain I've felt in Mali, laughing at the craziness of the last 2 hours. I hurry into my room, trying not to get recovered in mud. My dinner tonight-chicken meat! No bones, no fat, maybe the third time I've eaten chicken here, and the first time with my family. I guess dinners during Ramadan are special occasions. I enjoy my dinner, sitting on my mat warming up next to my oil lamp. Yeah, this is totally what I signed up for.

homestay pictures

walking to town to sell some stuff...
if i've ever mentioned the finger and hand fabric here it is, on the right. she has a hand right across her butt! also, i really love the multicolored hanger fabric. there must have been a sale on it in the market, really, because every woman in my village seems to have an outfit made out of it.

kids galore...they like to do karate poses. that blue thing is a pot lid/ our frisbee.

boys club at my house, every afternoon. my room is on the right, my bathroom on the far right.

girls fashion club...this kid has no idea how pimp he is right now. that's my little brother, Sulumani, in the corner.

my favorite little sister/soulmate, Kadjatu. she is so freaking awesome and adorable. plus she carries my stuff to school for me.

with some kids en brousse aka in the bush. sort of.

You're allowed to be a bad ass when you pound grain 4 hours a day. Malian women are my heroes. Even the little girls are stronger than me.

her eyes are freaking freaky man! also, action shot of millet being pounded.

Tamalakow (people of Tamala). Our language teacher Abdoulaye is the one next to me, hidden in the shadow.

come back, white people, and give us candy!!

...leaving town. Abdoulaye's house in the background. We have class under the tree.

i wish i could get these pictures to format right. one day...

don't worry guys,

i'm eating! lots of potatoes and fish and rice and eggs and various millet-based meals with peanut or baobab leaf or fish sauce. sometimes it's hard to eat when you're constantly fighting off the many stomach ailments Africa wants to throw at you.
one more week of homestay! I gotta give my siblings the stickers and candy they've been begging me for. They know I'm holding.

at least my ride wasn't that bad

actual overheard conversation:
girl 1: "how long was your ride to site?"
girl 2: "21 hours on the way there...24 on the way back, but that was only because of the bandits."

site visit

goats have to ride the bus too.



















My village is called Niasso and is near San, in the Segou region. Yes, we are all getting schooled in Malian geography now. It is a fun 7 hour bus ride to get to my site. (on a big bus, not the goat bus)



The tally:
population of Niasso: ~1500 people
closest Fanta: 18k away
closest internet: 3 hours by bus (as far as I know)
cell phone reception: 100% while i'm laying in bed. yes!!



luckily the town of San, my Fanta source, also has a Peace Corps house with electricity and running water and a refrigerator!!! and beds if I need to sleep there. oh yeah, and an oven to make brownies!!! which the current PCVs in the San region did f0r us when we arrived. A few days later we made tacos, and I think I fell in love. god bless a full stomach-it hasn't happened very much lately. It rarely happens for Malians, though, so sometimes I feel bad complaining. But I do love brownies.


Check my new house! I don't get to move in for a month, though. The little stairs on the side are so I can climb up and sleep on the roof during hot season. It's totally made of mud and sticks (!!) I don't have electricity or running water, but the pump is right across the road from me! I carried my bathwater bucket from the pump on my head the other day, and it is definitely the most efficient way to carry water, just so you know. And I think, in the long run, I will only have to have several back and neck surgeries! (just kidding)





















so...thanks soooo much for the letters and packages!! I'll be getting a new address soon and I'll post it up here. good things to send, in case you were wondering... food! mac & cheese, brownie mix, cheez its, skittles, trail mix, trashy magazines or whatever other general goodness you care to share. also, I have a cell phone, but I haven't used it that much yet. please call me, I'm lonely!!

I have about a month until swear-in, when I become a volunteer for real. eek! Time to learn Bambara!

Bien. Glace. Ici!

Good. Cold. Here. That's the sign in front of businesses that sell Coke. I use "business" loosely, because sometimes it's nothing more than a hut with a refrigerator out front.


So here's what I've been up to, because you probably have no idea from these sparse posts. The 80 something trainees in my group have been split into 10 or so groups for language training in homestay villages near Bamako. Mine is 35K from Bamako. There are 4 trainees and one Peace Corps teacher, and varying accounts of the population of the village-300 is the most I've heard. And it's about as authentic Africa as you can imagine.



The view from my classroom...





































My daily routine: get up at 6:30 for a bucket bath, eat breakfast (bread), walk to my teacher's house for 4 hours of Bambara class, go home for lunch (bread), go back to school for another 3 hours, free time-I usually rest or read or ride my bike 2K to the next town to drink a Fanta. Another bucket bath in the evening, then this:




















My family and a million random kids watch our favorite Brazilian French-dubbed soap opera, Au Coeur du Peche, on this TV powered by a car battery. I don't know how many of them actually understand it, but they don't complain. It still hasn't ceased to amaze me that this happens every night. I think they were unprepared for this picture, by the way-they don't look like zombies in real life.






After that I eat dinner (bread), go to bed and do it all over again the next day. We eat with our families 3 times a day, but I've taken to only eating the bread they give me, because I'm finding the food really hard to get used to. Twice, on market days, we have cooked our own dinners at our language teacher's house. Last week was 2 chickens, purchased live in the market for 1500CFA each ($3), slaughtered hilal style in front of us, and boiled...risotto cooked over a propane stove...and "bruschetta" consisting of french bread, tomato paste and olive oil, and laughing cow cheese. you take what you can get here. I'm never taking refrigeration for granted again. I miss real cheese!

We've been spending about 2 weeks in our villages with 3 or 4 day breaks here (at our training compound with good food and internet and FANS). So no..I don't have a wireless connection in my village. Next week we actually get to come out of the comfort bubble and visit our future sites. So far we've been shuttled in peace corps land cruisers every time we go somewhere, which makes me feel like a diplomat. Next week, though, we have to take public transport alone. My site is in the Segou region, near San, about 6 hours from BKO by bus. Public transport is how most everybody gets around, but is unreliable at best (so i've heard). Accidents, tire blowouts, breakdowns are common, and one of our training coordinators told us schedules run on "west african international time." (aka WAIT). So 8 am departure might not really mean 8 am. And 6 hours might really mean 12 (but let's hope not....) Wish me luck!

when the road floods,

you just have to wait...

as far as i can tell, Chaco and Nalgene and The Company that Makes Bandanas

...are making a killing off of us! we got spiffy new bikes and bike helmets today in preparation for our departure tomorrow. and they even cooked us pizza! and french toast! today. but i was assured i could expect to eat millet at most every meal with my host family. everyone's trying to use the computers now and they're going super slow. Gmail is taking a major hit from us.

more in a few weeks!
this post sponsored by gmail, chaco, nalgene, and bandanas inc.

pictures, as promised

I freaking love technology! we had our first practice eating with our hands out of the communal bowl at lunch today. it was only mildly humiliating. you can only eat with your right hand because the left hand is reserved for cleaning yourself in the bathroom (aka the nyegen), and is therefore the unclean hand. here's some pictures of my environs right now- the road in, some random trees, and the huts where we sleep. more later hopefully! i'm taking full advantage of this internet while I have it.

finally here!

after a million hours of traveling (or so it seemed), we have finally arrived at our training site. we got here late last night, found our respective huts and pretty much immediately went to bed. surprisingly, our training site (which is about an hour's drive from Bamako, the capital) has electricity, showers! and fast internet! also, my phone, which i turned on for fun not expecting anything to happen, gets almost full reception here. i'm probably not going to use it though. for all the luxuries we have, though, we still have to use the squatty potties. i think i'm getting pretty good already!

we start language classes tomorrow- "survival Bambara" is first up. exciting! i haven't gotten to practice my French too much but i'm pretty confident about it. there are 80 people in my training group and we run the gamut of French knowledge, from absolutely none to close to fluent. most people in Mali speak Bambara in addition to French, but the language I will learn will ultimately depend on where my final site is, because a bunch of other languages are spoken here too.

for the next few days we'll be going to classes on safety, health, cross cultural adaption and language and then on wednesday we leave for our home stays (i don't know where mine is yet). i have a feeling we won't have high speed internet at our home stays, but we'll travel back to the training site every week or so for more classes as a group.

more updates and hopefully PICTURES! in a few days!!

Last day in atlanta!! pack, unpack, repack, stuff some more stuff in, last minute runs to the store, trying not to cry...etc. The going away party yesterday was awesome, thanks if you came! Sorry if you had to witness the sobfest at the end. Also sorry if you had to sit through THE LONGEST GAME OF CLUE EVER. But I'm not complaining. I'm gonna miss y'all!!

I leave for Philly at about 6 am tomorrow (flight is at 8:45), then we leave for real on Thursday evening. I don't know how much internet access I'm going to have from here on out, seeing as I don't have a laptop, and I don't know the internet situation just yet. Just another part of the great unknown that is my immediate future. But email me please!!

I'm going to keep trying to figure out this website and get my mailing address posted up here. Till next time, love yall!

freak out!!!

4 days!!!! ahhhhh!!!!
saying goodbye to athens is getting harder by the minute. i had a good last day walking around taking more touristy pictures of town, drinking a soda outside the co-op, then later going to a bunch of bars that were more crowded than they should have been. today i'm busy burning cds and packing and trying not to freak out (as always).

another thing that's getting harder: fitting everything into my suitcase. i envy people who are moving to another house or city or state. i wish i could just carry boxes instead of trying to fit everything into a box made of fabric that's going to get thrown around. but at least it's expandable.

i'm still getting used to the idea of typing my everyday activities out for all the world to see, so bear with me. if I know people are reading this I might be more inspired to keep up with it (if I have time)

things left to do: everything

so, here it is. we'll see how well i can keep up with this.

thought of the day: whistling is totally contagious! i always want to whistle when someone else is whistling.