Taxes and Plastic Bags

I want to meet the moron who told Africans that all Americans have a lot of money and then find an affordable way to smite him. I think it’s imperative that Malians come to grips with the idea that America isn’t paradise, in fact, what Americans consider paradise looks an awful lot like Africa. It’s no like you get off the plane, walk through customs and then suddenly you are endowed with a mansion and servants and several cars that no normal human being would want let alone afford. It’s impossible to dissuade Malians of any of this. They are utterly confused when you try to tell them that just because my dad has 3 cars it does not mean that he’s rich. This is because he has three cars. All his money was spent on buying the cars, maintaining them, insuring them and licensing them. So if he actually drives them he’ll be ruined. I should tell Malians that Americans live in their cars, but I’m certain my dad has contemplated the notion from time to time. In Mali, you don’t have to have a mortgage or flood insurance because your house is made of mud and it’s guaranteed that every year after rainy season you’ll need to rebuild part of it and you don’t have to follow any rules about building, no inspections or taxes, no mortgages. I think in most cases you have to ask the village chief to use land if it is not already yours, but I’m not entirely clear on land-owning rules here. I’m fairly certain Malians and particularly their village chiefs are not clear on the rules either.

Mali has somehow managed survive on a premise of no accountability. This can be frustrating unless you go about dealing with people in a Malian way. That means publicly humiliating them in order to pressure them to maintain some kind of order. A volunteer near me decided to simply take matters into his own hands after someone’s sheep wandered into his yard and ate his garden. He caught a baby sheep and cut off its ear. I think it took everything he had and his wife to prevent him from putting the ear on a necklace and running around in a loin-cloth shouting about the injustice and his way of dealing with the matter. Unfortunately nothing came of it and now the sheep just has one ear. Apparently there is an actual way of dealing with this particular issue using the Malian justice system but it takes months and the people who manage these issues might actually have to do their job. The Malian way of dealing with bad behavior or less than average behavior is to present the person in front of the village and lambaste them with shameful remarks until things change. In the same village as the lamb with one ear, the school director presented each student with their report card AND listed off the student’s grades. If the student had poor grades the villagers would yell things like “that’s bad” and boo the student as they walked to the front of the group. If that’s not motivation to do better I don’t know what is. I think another factor contributing to their inability to feel accountable for things is that the entire system that supposedly governs them takes advantage of people when they try to do the right thing. So, if my friend who cut of the ear of the lamb had tried to go through the system properly, I imagine at some point if not many times throughout the process he would have to pay a man extra to do their job. This is not a legitimate cost for their work, technically they’re paid by the state and it’s no secret that they would not be likely to help someone unless they were being paid under the table to do it. Malians seem to accept this and, worse yet, perpetuate it, so it doesn’t ever change.

Malians have kind of a sad notion of what it means to pay taxes, as well; they’re much like a great deal of Americans. If you didn’t pay taxes you wouldn’t have roads or schools or really any order institution that maintains order at all and likely half the population of America would be out of a job. Raising taxes actually makes your quality of life better. Do you even notice what they take out of your paycheck anyway? In Mali I don’t know how people pay taxes here but for some reason the big fat man/animal from Disney’s Robin Hood always pops into my head, taking money from the poor to give to the rich. I don’t think the extra kicks go to the rich I think the collector keeps it for himself. Sometimes I try to shame people with religion for saying things like that are okay and perfectly normal and good, but they don’t really buy it. One thing that’s difficult too is that hardly anyone has a regular job where they actually get a paycheck. People put up their little grass stand and sell mangos or corn and no one is the wiser. It is illegal for people to come with their buckets of goods to the market and sit in the middle of the road until you trip over them and are forced to buy their smelly fish. I once saw a police-officer very diplomatically pick up someone’s bucket and throw all their products (fish) into the road, subsequently run over by passing bikes, mopeds and cars. Why not just write a ticket? That would be too easy. This also happens about once a month, so obviously if the rules aren’t enforced women are going to keep selling their fish with the risk that their fish will end up as road kill. (That is an interesting notion, fish, as road kill. Only in Mali.)

One of the greatest things about Malians is that they insist on having a bag for everything and selling every thing there is in little plastic bags. Ice, peanuts, mangoes, milk, eggs, oil, juice all come neatly in quarter, half and liter bags depending on how much you want. In fact, if you try to exist without the use of bags you’re probably nuts. There are even young boys who only sell bags. Usually these kids attend the Madrassas and are forced to work by Maribous. The kids go out and beg for money and food or sell plastic bags and give the money and food to the Maribous. It is child slavery, and awfully sad, and some Malians still send their children to Madrassas because they do not have the money to care for their children. They usually send their kids to the cities to beg so they live far away from their families at a very young age. The youngest I’ve seen is five year olds begging. They whisper words from the Quar’an to guilt you into giving them stuff. It’s strange and uncomfortable because some of those kids have great puppy-dog eyes, but you know they will not benefit from the donation you give them. Sometimes I give them food and won’t let them leave until they eat it.

Okay so extension from the Malaria post from before:

In our Peace Corps publication they published an article about malaria here in Mali.

“Health experts say the majority of cases in Mali are misdiagnosed, which causes resistance to malaria drugs and leaves other illnesses untreated. ‘When people are sick in Mali, the doctor will usually tell them they have malaria whether or not they test for it,’ said Fatou Faye, an infectious disease researcher and trainer at a privately funded medical laboratory, the Charles Merieux Centre in Bamako. ‘The patients then buy anti-malarial in the street and build up a resistance to treatment.’”

One more way to help prevent problems associated with Malaria NOT what big organizations are working to help.