the book review one

Daily life for a Peace Corps volunteer is far from demanding. There is no daily grind here. I spend a lot of my free time reading books because I failed to bring any knitting with me. The books I’ve read lately have given me some perspective on my experience here in Mali and I’m going to use them to give you a description of my experience here.

Dancing Skeletons by Katherine Dettwyler is sort of a jumbled story of her time conducting research for her Fulbright fellowship in Mali. I have many criticisms, not only for her general and opinionated descriptions of Malian culture, but also for her role as a medical anthropologist doing research. She is a Physical Anthropologist and was doing research that was following up that of her dissertation on nutrition in children affecting their health in later life. She did her dissertation on a village in the suburbs of Bamako which is a far cry from what rural Mali is like. Poor nutrition certainly exists here and she gives a good description of it, however, I’m in Mali and I think if I weren’t her anecdotes wouldn’t make much sense. One of the things I’ve noticed is that there are few, if any, starving children in the villages. They eat quite a lot, in fact, they have very high calorie diets. The problem is that the eat rice or millet in some form for every meal which is nutritious but these carbs are not supplemented with anything like protein or vitamins. Kwashiorkor is a protein deficiency often seen in Mali and many poor countries which causes children to have distended (fat) bellies and thin arms. There is also a cultural discrepancy related to eating meat and other fatty and protein rich foods. When there is meat available usually it is given to the adults because it is understood that they do more work thus they need more of the nutrients from the meat, in addition there is a stigma related to eating beans here (much like in the US) because they cause gas. One of the big joking cousin jokes is “you eat beans!” Anyway, what this book made me reconsider was doing research that for my own career. I doubt Dettwyler has spent more for a few months in Mali since she did her research and teaching in a classroom in America doesn’t, to me, seem like an effective way of dealing with a crisis that you claim to care a great deal about. She also made this absurd comments about breasts being a sexual symbol in America and how horrible that is while in Africa they’re seen more as a functional device (in truth I’m certain my village wouldn’t freak out if I walked around with my shirt off, and I know that many Peace Corps Volunteers have done it before), but if you are upset that breasts are a sexual symbol then where do you draw the line? If you make every part of a woman’s body into a functional device then you remove the human being altogether.

I’ve actually talked to this woman before and I think she’s very intelligent. She did a phone lecture with one of my medical anthropology classes in college. She did research on the positive aspects of mothers sleeping with their babies for the first year in order to prevent SIDS.

There is No Me Without You is by Melissa Faye Green about a woman in Ethiopia that haphazardly starts an orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for orphans of parents who died of HIV/AIDS. It was cool to hear a story told about a place where I’ve been before that gave me a better understanding of the culture as well as the reason for Ethiopia’s disparaging poverty. Also very cool is that my thesis advisor co-wrote a book that is cited several times throughout the book. Right before I started this book one of my male friends in my village mentioned to me that he doesn’t “believe in AIDS and at any rate he practices fidelity [bullshit] so he doesn’t need to use condoms.” This shows that he has little or no concern for the well-being or safety of any of the women in his family because we were encouraging him to use birth spacing to help his children have better nutrition and his wives a better chance of surviving and having more healthy children and he thought we were insinuating that he needed condoms because he sleeps around. GREAT!

This book gives a great history of AIDS and information about much of the epidemic that I was completely unaware. AIDS in West Africa is a different kind of epidemic and the muslim culture here creates a different aspect of dealing with epidemic, like telling people that it really does exist. It's kind of motivated me to focus some of my work on sexual health and really working with the kids to understand how STDs can affect you even if you are 'practicing fidelity.'