Hello again, I want to apologize for taking so long to make a good solid dense post about what I’m doing and about Malian culture. I think it goes without saying that I cannot recount everything or give you a perfect picture of my life here, but I’ll try.

Last week I headed down to Dialafara to visit my two friends Nicole and Andrew Wallace. I had heard many things about their site, but most notably their horrible transport and the beautiful landscape surrounding their house (rather contradictory, I know). I had intended to go to Goumera for a few days to calculate the costs of a garden for which we are trying to find money, but my transport had been rather unreliable so I decided to try and go to Dialafara. Dialafara is about 165 km (100 miles) south of Kayes, dirt road the whole way. If you look on a map, which I encourage you to do; you’ll find this village partway between Kayes and Kenieba near the Senegal border. Kenieba is a large village largely populated by people who come from smaller villages to work in the gold mines. Yes, gold mines. There are four or five foreign companies who work around here, mostly along the road to Kenieba. There are also Malian companies as well as individuals who search for gold 49er style.

Before I left I went to the market to get food for the Wallace’s and for me while I was there. I had my backpack and a pink bucket so I looked more noticeable than usual. I filled the pink bucket with market supplies (potatoes, tomatoes, cabbage, eggplant, eggs, peanut butter, rice and other produce) and then paid a kid to carry it, as it was rather heavy by this time, to the bus gare (station). I had to walk across town to the station (earlier in the day I had to bike around town all morning to find this gare to buy my ticket because it would be ridiculous to keep ALL the buses and transport ticket areas in the same place? Obviously, much too practical.) I was told to be at the transport area at 3 because we would then leave at 4, but as it turns out we left at six after stacking what was the equivalent in people’s belongings to 12 small cars on top. THEN we filled the inside of the truck. The truck was a semi that had been gutted and filled with seats and windows cut out of it. It felt a little like I was on the back of a traveling circus car. Luckily, I had a window and I was happy to do the whole trip in the dark as hot season has arrived and night is the only time existence is bearable. The most frustrating thing about transport is Mali is not how awfully uncomfortable, unreliable and long it is, but the inevitable stops at Gendarmeries. Gendarmeries are military checkpoints, or really just times to collect money from people who don’t have ID. We’re not ten minutes outside of Kayes (really, I timed it) and we have to stop at the Gendarmerie and EVERYONE (that means about 70 people) have to present ID to ONE guy, you’d think they could at least get two guys to do it. The way it works is that if you don’t have an ID card (for Malians it looks like a thinner brown passport) you have to pay 1,000 FCFA (the Malian currency, pronounced safe-a, stands for Centrale Financiale Afrique Franc, with some le’s and de’s in there somewhere) to move on. The gendarmerie dude counts the amount of people while he’s going through who do not show ID then collects the money from the mobili-tigi (car-dude; in Bambara, if you put a noun in front of ‘tigi’ you are usually assuming that person is in charge of whatever the noun is, for example, pomme-tigi = apple seller, jamana-tigi = president or country leader, etc.). The mobili-tigis are some of my favorite people when I travel because they are always aware of me and they usually take good care of me. Depending on the size of the vehicle, there are usually about 3 mobili-tigis, who mostly sit on the roof on top of everyone’s stuff the whole way. It’s actually illegal for them to do this, as it’s obviously a bit of a safety hazard, but I’ll come back to that. For this particular vehicle, which was about 4 times the size of the normal bus people take, there were 7 or 8 mobili-tigis. Usually there is one who sits by each door and then a few on top and maybe one in the front cab. Anyway, they collected all the money to pay the Gendarmeries and we were finally off. It took us about 3 hours to reach the first big stop where we were able to get food from the duminikeyorow (food place, literally). This is also where I bought more eggs because two of mine had broken. At this point, I was actually lectured by the mobili-tigi about having not taken better care of my eggs (ie. keeping them all in one basket, haha) and he helped me find a place to buy new ones, then he filled up my water bottle with water that he, very proudly, stated came from a robinet (faucet) in Kayes. We started off again, by now it was about 10:00 pm, and finally reached Dialafara around 1:00. I met with Nicole and Andrew and we promptly went to bed.

Nicole and I spent most of the 6 days I was there knitting, chatting, napping or cooking. Andrew, who is the busiest Peace Corps Volunteer that ever there was, spent the week running around the commune mapping things with an organization called GRDR. GRDR also works in my commune but they are much further along with the program than in Dialafara. So, a brief description of the political breakdown of Mali: first there is the President who lives in Bamako in a big white house (maison blanche), then there are regions (Kayes, Sikasso, Koulikoro, Segou, Mopti, Timbuktu, Gao, Kidal and Bamako), for each region there is a Governor who lives in the regional capital of each. In each region the areas are broken down into Cercles and then into Communes within each Cercle. Each Commune has a Mayor. My Commune is rather odd because it ONLY represents the village of Goumera, which has a large population and few nearby villages. The Dialafara Commune, however, is a larger commune with many villages (not one paved road) and is just beginning the process of working with GRDR (this is a French acronym meaning something very fabulous I’m sure, but I can’t recall what it is right now). Andrew was helping the GRDR representatives map the Commune using GPS. They identify different attributes about the Commune, like whether or not they have pumps and where are the pumps, where are the health centers and schools, markets and natural water sources, etc, in order to identify what kind of needs with which GRDR can help. GRDR is a French non-governmental organization where the Commune is set up with a sister city, who helps fund a project or projects over a 5 year period. In my village, GRDR facilitated payment for a pre-school (I think this is rather ridiculous because they could have used another pump or some kind of drainage system for dirty water during the rainy season, or a new CSCOM, but instead they built a pre-school, whatever the case, it’s a very very nice facility and will be around for a long time). Any questions?

Nicole also purchased a solar oven. Solar ovens, in theory, would be really good for Mali, BUT they are not. I’ll get to that in a moment, first of all, Nicole made brownies, peanut butter cookies, banana bread, shish kabobs, and rice in hers (not all at the same time, of course). It’s great for Americans because we only make a limited amount of food AND we have the money and supplies to bake things, whereas Malians pretty much make two things a day and would need at least 4 solar ovens to make enough food for the whole family. One solar oven costs about the equivalent of $80, and is only useful for making lunch because Malians usually make dinner too late to use the solar oven. While the benefits to the environment are huge (ie. they are not cutting down trees for firewood; Malians don’t really see things in the form of an investment, particularly in the environment because they wouldn’t be using firewood to heat their pots) the change would take years to happen, if at all. Nevertheless, I got to eat some good food while I was there. On Saturday morning Nicole, Andrew, their language tutor, Lamini (who speaks relatively good English), and I went on a short morning hike up to the edge of the plateau that rises just outside of the village. There weren’t really any trails most of the way to the top and we didn’t even make it to the top because it was rather inaccessible (and all I had were chacos), but we did see some beautiful rocks and nice dry riverbeds where waterfalls careen down through the valley during the rainy season.

Sunday was Easter, we died eggs and ate wild boar (ham, which Lamini had paid to have killed for us all-he’s a Christian, thus, allowed to eat pork) and mashed potatoes and played scrabble. The following morning I packed up and headed back to Kayes. I flagged down a small bus in the market area of Dialafara. The bus was a gutted out maintenance van with benches that frame the perimeter of the inside. I was in the back corner by the back door. We arrived at the food place after 2 quick hours, ate lunch, and headed back to Kayes. As we were leaving Sadiola (food place), we met a policeman who stopped us because our mobili-tigis were on the roof of the bus, so we had to spend a good 15 minutes in a hot box of death (bus) waiting for the issue to be sorted out. At first it looked like the policeman was going to arrest the dudes, but that didn’t end up being the case. We arrived in Kayes after about 5 hours (2 shorter than the trip down) and I had to walk back across town to my house (I’m too cheap to take a taxi) covered in red dirt. I took a rinse shower and subsequently filled the tub with brown water, then I took another scrub and soap shower and again filled the tub with brown water.

The next morning I packed again and headed out to Goumera to start writing out the costs for the garden at the pre-school for which we would like to find funding (the pre-school for which GRDR paid). I arrived and went to meet my supervisor and set up a meeting at 9 the next morning to talk about plans for the garden and costs with the headmaster of the primary school and the mayor and then I went to greet my host-family. On the way, I ran into the dude (another mobili-tigi), who owns the bus I arrived on, and I told him I left my plastic bag full of tea (gifts for my host-family) on the bus so we went and found it and then I went to meet my host-family. The funny thing about my Malians is that if I stay in my village for weeks, they get really bored with me, so when I’m gone for long periods of time and in village for short periods of time they actually like me more. I greeted all the women and kids and gave tea to the dugu-tigi (village leader/chief) and then hung out and drank tea with the women (I like woman tea better than man tea). I told my host-sister, who I had given trees to plant before I left last time that I had brought her new trees because, as I had suspected, hers had died. THEN the big news came, Dialla, my host-niece, the oldest of the girls who was not married, was now married. This came as quite a shock because Dialla is 12 or 13 years old (this is actually illegal in Mali and I had run into her dad in Kayes several times and he had never mentioned that he had sold his daughters soul to the devil). I also missed an enormous party which was also sad, but obviously not as sad as a child getting married. In most cases, when I’ve heard about this it hasn’t affected me as much, but I almost broke down into tears right there (I’m not a big crier, so this is a big deal). Dialla is one of my favorite people too because she has this very independent personality and the very thought of her staying in Goumera to cook and raise children for the rest of her life is heartbreaking. That’s exactly what she’ll do too. I arranged to go see her the next day at her new house and went home to see HALIMETOU!

Halimetou is my best friend, she lives across the street. She was married when she was 14 and is now pregnant at 15, she’s getting rather large (she’s due at the end of May). She’s really excited and so am I. We talk about how big her belly is all the time. I told her I was going to buy her a baby mosquito net. The baby mosquito nets look like the cover for fancy food. So, the baby is the food and the mosquito net is the cover. She said she is going to name the baby Mariam (after me) which I think is weird because almost every baby I meet is named Mariam. I told her we should name it Emily, but no one can pronounce that so we vetoed it. I told her to call me if she starts to have any stomach pains and I would tell her what to do and come out to the village immediately.

The next morning, I met with my supervisor and the mayor. We spent 3 hours coming up with all of the things we’d need to build a garden, including a well, and calling all the people who know what things cost and we actually finished it all right there in the same day. I had expected the process to take the whole three days I was there, if not, longer, but we got it all done. So, I decided to leave the following morning. That afternoon I helped my host-sister plant the trees I brought her and then helped my homologue plant trees that I had brought for her, and then spent the evening weeding my garden and preparing to leave again.

All in all, it’s been a rather productive couple of weeks. I’m headed to Bamako next weekend for a week-long training then back to my site for 2 months of some serious work. I have some exciting plans, but I’ll save that for the next blog!

Hiking in Dialafara

My Kitten

More Kitten

Dying Easter Eggs

Dying Easter Eggs

The village of Dialafara

Rocks!

Jakuma ani Wulu te se ka tulonke nogonfe.

(Cat and dog cannot play together)

Filling the compost hole

Kitty

My new house!

FILI!

A Shea Tree

Andrew and bamboo

Tree inside the rock.

More Rocks!

Planting Moringa at the Orphanage

My ride home.

More planting Moringa