Everything You Wanted To Know About Mali

I'm going to try a little harder this time to make a good blog. Please forgive me for being vague in previous blog entries.



The most startling thing for me in Mali how different Malian and West African culture differs from the other countries I've visited. To begin with, the French role in Africa is less prominent than the white people of southern Africa. Malians don't seem to be as aware of their disposition as the 2nd poorest country in Africa as Malawians were of their lot. The differences in Malian culture are everywhere. Basically everything her evolves around family unity. They do everything together and outside. This outsideness is kind of frustrating because it prevents privacy for people like me who like privacy. The only things that happen inside are 'special' things. They even take naps outside. Malians can sleep anywhere, although, i'm fairly certain that the only time i see them sleeping (usually in chairs) is the only time they ever sleep. At meal times all the men eat together and all the women eat together. The kids kind of filter in here and there, at lunch they all eat together. They're dirty so it's probably better that only they have to eat their dirt. My host family eats To and Slime for every meal except breakfast. Breakfast is this corn porridge doused in sugar, not really good either. Anyway, the whole idea of eating together is to maintain family unity. When they wash before they eat the oldest person washes first and then the youngest last and they all use the same water. Very sanitary. This is one of the things we work on.



My host-dad (jatigi) has two brothers who lives with their wives in my concession. I've realized that I have absolutely no idea who most of the women belong to and I haven't even begun to try and remember all of their names. There are at least two women per man and then there are some extras who I can't figure out who they are. One of the extras looks like she's 20 and has a baby and a bun in the oven, she actually really irritates me but she just showed up this last week, i never remember seeing her before. She keeps asking me for things and it's getting a little out of hand. I might end up having to tell her to stop coming around me. Only one more week of homestay left! So, my host-dad has 14 kids between the 2 wives and i think one of his wives is pregnant again. Aish! All these people eat just about every meal together. I usually eat out of my own bowl, because they know I don't like To, they still find it funny to tell me that that's what i'm eating for dinner, i just look at them at try to keep from vomiting. Anyway, holidays in Mali like Christmas and Thanksgiving don't really translate because they're always with their entire extended family. Women usually leave their home villages when they get married but they usually visit often enough. Also, there is no word for cousin in Bambara so all your cousins, all your half-siblings, are your siblings, so figuring out who everyone belongs to is just plain impossible. People don't really use the word for uncle or aunt they just call everyone mom or dad if they are old enough to be their mom or dad.



Another thing that all Malians do is drink tea. Sounds simple enough, but it's by far the most complicated process of making anything so simple ever and I'm fairly certain I'll never do it all the way. Initially, my language teacher persuaded me to make one round but when i found out that I had to make two more I quit. Malians love their tea. It's also really horrible tasting tea too, tons of sugar and also really hot. You basically take a shot of really hot bad tasting liquid and hope you don't die. They drink tea all day long too, in America we do not have time for this whole process it's just takes too long.



Some Malian parenting tactics that I've picked up are really going to help me not have to take care of my children when I'm older. First of all, having a million children allows for numerous babysitters. It's kind of funny because on the one hand Malian children are more mature than American children, like they do many tasks that American parents wouldn't let their kids do like carry babies on their backs, and do all kinds of difficult household chores, however, they are incredibly immature when it comes to sharing and being polite. My little sisters think it's funny to try and grab and/or suck on my boobs. I eventually had to tell them that this is rude and in America people do NOT do this. Some things probably could change, like putting babies down on the ground in dirt next to a pile of chicken poop and several, if not hundreds, of things that they can swallow or choke on.

The men in my family are usually out at the fields all day. Like I said before, I went to the fields and did some weeding for an hour or so before I decided I had been overworked. I don't know how many fields my family has or how any of that land ownership stuff works, but they have a lot of them. They farm rice, corn, millet and shea. The shea process is really cool actually. They make the shea butter in my host-village. First they pick the shea nuts off the ground after they've fallen from the tree and then they peal the outside off and eat it. Then they leave them out in the sun to dry the nuts to make sure they're completely dry. Then the women store the nuts. After that they are supposed to boil them to get the shells off but they usually heat them in the oven which is causing the butter to be carcinagenic (this is a Peace Corps project), after this they crack the shells off of them and pile the nuts in the big mortars to pound them into a powder. After the nuts are pounded they mix hot water in the shea flour and kneed the mixture until the shae oils come to the top then they pull out the oils that they want and continue doing this until they have it. Then they package the head-sized mound of shea butter in leaves and take it to market on their heads. The women are mostly responsible for the shea stuff and just about everything else, but the men always say that they build houses and women don't, so kudos to them.

There are five sectors in Peace Corps Mali; Natural Resource Management (NRM), Health Education, Agriculture, Water and Sanitation (Water San), and Small Enterprise Development (SED). I'm health, if you didn't know and I can now kind of give you a better understanding what I hope to do in my village as a volunteer. First of all, my homologue (counterpart) is a Matrone at the local CSCOM (this is a french acronym for something that means health center). The CSCOM staffs two matrones, one doctor and one pharmacist. The doctor is paid by the Belgian government or something and I don't know how everyone else gets paid. They all speak French, Sonike and Bambara (I only kind of speak Bambara, so we'll see how quickly I change things). One of my goals right now is to find a group in America to sponsor the CSCOM in my village and fund the maintenance on it forever since right now it's totally independently funded and in need of some major adjustments. I think I'm going to be working with a lot of water sanitation things. For example, during the rainy season, everyone in my village drinks runoff water from their roofs. They don't even filter it. It's visibly dirty and an easy fix would be to filter the water through fabric, so, anyway, that's one thing I've noticed.

My house is pretty cool, or I should say houses are pretty cool. I have two round mud huts with thatched roofs and a nyegen. I'm having them build a fence and a wall around my concession so I have some privacy and I'm getting a dog (she already exists, but she's not really mine until I get there). Her name is Fili, which means garbage in Bambara. People name their kids this if they've had any of their children die at a young age, they believe that if they name their children 'garbage' then God won't take them from them. If you know any traditional birth control methods for dogs, please inform me.

I hope this is a better blog entry even if it is a little disjointed, I'm going to try harder to be more detailed or at least more long-winded (if that's possible). I love you all!