Burkina shea workshop, some talk of God, thief-wrestling, and the utility of Nigerian prostitutes

1. shea nuts!
2. me doing Bogolon, or traditional mud cloth
3. Ceci une pipe. Marcel Duchamp would be proud
4. more videos by request: child happy about eating ameliorated porridge
5. some local girls sousou-ing millet to make tho

6. the Dogon crew

7. view from the village on the mountainside

8-9. view of the village on the mountainside from the village in the sahel

10. short video of the same

Oh, and I've added a few new things to my PC glossary at right ---> that should be useful for this entry, such as "homologue"; "brousse"; "formation"; etc.


3/31


Okay so a lot has happened! First off the Burkina shea field trip - we (that is, myself and Fatou, the local Malian I brought on the trip) got picked up here on the afternoon of Monday the 17th. The group, about 10 volunteers, their counterparts, a few PC head honchos and the driver, arrived in Bobo in the evening after having to backtrack about an hour to get the required border paperwork for our car. Why the car should need paperwork after everyone inside it was already set with their own paperwork I'm not sure, but by now Government inefficiency does not surprise me, especially in Burkina. In the car our boss handed me 56,000 CFA, my per-diem for the trip, and a pleasant surprise. The same amount went to Fatou, which she refused to take at first - it made her obviously nervous, and I had to get a better Bambara speaker to explain to her what it was for, that it was really hers, and that she would not be expected to return it at the end of the trip, before she would take it. Still she was obviously uncomfortable with it, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that that's the most money she's held in her hand at any one time in her whole life, at the very least that belonged to her. To put it in perspective, a beginning Malian doctor with a family to support makes 100,000 CFA per month, with which he supports not only his own immediate family, but likely helps support a few siblings, their families, and his parents. Here we were telling Fatou that we expected her to spend over half that just herself on just food and in 5 days time. When the boss attempted to give her an additional 9,000 CFA for the return bus trip to site once the trip was over, she insisted that I hold on to it for her.


Another awkward moment came mere seconds later when we asked Fatou to sign a sheet of paper indicating that she had received the money, for the records. It quickly became clear that she can neither read nor write in any language. I tried to explain that this didn't matter since a signature doesn't have to look like anything in particular, never mind be legible, as long as it's some kind of mark that she herself made (I couldn't help thinking of the (possibly Hollywood) image of American Indians signing treaties with an X in place of their name). Still she refused to touch pen to paper, and I ended up signing for her; a somewhat dishonest feat that would be repeated many times over the next few days (ironically now that I think about it, the way I signed for her was the only way she couldn't possibly have signed for herself, with her name written out neatly).


Another thing that made it clear that our trip was planned by toubabs and that the Malians were just along for the ride reared its head at our hotel in Bobo. The hotel itself was rather nice by West African standards, with a toilet, bidet, shower, sink, TV, and even a mini-fridge and a/c. Actually it was a palace by West African standards - there was even a seat on the toilet, toilet paper provided, and no salidaga (a watering-can like device used in the lou in lieu of toilet paper). Us Americans were delighted. If you're wondering, yes I use the salidaga at site, as toilet paper is not sold in town and would fill up my nyegen (pit latrine) with unnecessary garbage anyway. Actually I have toilet paper, but just use it for tissues, which get burned with the rest of my garbage. Yes I always wash my hands well with soap.


The nice hotel room, however, was not nearly as remarkable from our point of view as it was for some of the particularly broussey homologues we brought. Sitting at home in the US, you might think it was remarkable for them in the "wow! we're staying in a palace, this is wonderful!" sense, and you'd be mistaken. Keep in mind that these women are used to hauling all of their water out of a well, doing their business in a nyegen (which you squat over rather than sit on), and consider using toilet paper instead of a salidaga dirty in the same way we westerners might think the opposite (how can you get clean without washing with water?!?). Apart from what they're used to, some of them may never even have seen a toilet, a sink, a shower, or indeed any kind of plumbing, indoor or outdoor. Imagine yourself, then, in the place of one of these women - having sat on a bus for hours you walk into your hotel room. What looks most like a familiar nyegen to you? Is it the toilet? You haven't sat down to do your business since you were nyegen-trained as a toddler (nor have you wanted to). The bidet? Heck, I've experienced both first and third-world ideas of a bathroom, and I still don't know quite how they're supposed to work. The sink? Obviously too high. How about the shower, with its slightly lowered water-catchment area (no shower curtains) and a small drain in the middle? Well, you've heard of small nyegen holes before but this is ridiculous - still it's by far the closest thing to a nyegen you see. It's the obvious choice and after all you have to go.




It's so obvious, in fact, that it only really becomes awkward when your PCV walks in to find you squatting in the shower. I can't imagine the thoughts that would be going through both of your heads (I wasn't either party), as the PCV tries to explain why you should sit on the toilet, shows you how to use toilet paper, and how to work all the faucets and knobs - this way for hot, this for cold; up for on, down for off. Then the shower, with its own set of knobs that do the same thing as the sink ones but for some reason are designed completely differently. It's only now that I think about it that the whole thing seems to be designed not to be first-time user-friendly.




Actually I think I have an idea of what this is like - I can remember trying to take a shower at a girlfriend's house in New York where I could get the water coming out of the spigot at the right temperature and reasonable pressure, but could not for the life of me find a knob to make the flow switch to the shower head. There simply were no more knobs to turn, or plungers to pull, buttons to press, levers to switch, nothing. After puzzling over it, naked with the water running for 5 minutes or so, I finally had to turn the water off, put my clothes back on, go out and ask - ask! - how to do it. The embarrasment at being outsmarted by a shower during my senior year of college! As it turned out you had to pull a ring on the spigot right where the water comes out. Simple once you've seen it done, but not at all obvious, even to someone who's been using showers and baths for over two decades. But how about to someone who's never seen running water before? Really, how many faucet designs do we need?




The following day was spent on the road to Ouagadougou, the capitol, with a brief stop at a shea butter production association along the way. More on the actual formation later. Arrived in Ouaga in the evening, and most of the Malians were tired and decided to go strait to bed. Us Americans of course went out to a restaurant for a nice dinner - pizza and beer was the most popular choice, with ice cream for dessert (a nice break from the tho with leaf sauce that makes up most of our diets). Anyway we were walking back to the hotel and had gotten split into two groups, my group walking about 50 feet behind the first. We were in the middle of a conversation when someone in the street walked up and said something. As I was talking myself and have developed a habit of ignoring strange street people who look like they're about to: a) ask for money, b)try to sell me something, c) call me "hey whitey" (in local language or French) just to see how I'll respond, or d) ask to marry one of the women walking with me (marriage if they're of the more polite sort), I didn't really hear what he was saying. This habit of assuming that everyone outside my site fits into one of these four categories may sound harsh, but I assure you it's both hard-won and usually accurate, except in this case. As I was saying I didn't really hear him, until my brain registered the word "voleur" - thief. He was pointing toward the first group of us up ahead. At first I thought he was calling one of them a thief (insults are a less common, but not uncommon enough reaction to seeing white people in cities), but thought that was a bit harsh. Usually to be insulted you have to lose your temper and be less than polite with a too-persistent street-vendor, and even then "thief" seemed an odd insult to use. I only had to ponder for a half-second or so, however, before a girl in the front group screamed and the warning became clear for what it was.




Actually she'd screamed because the unknown man behind her was walking far too close. It wasn't until she started to apologise that he grabbed her purse. She managed to hold on to it long enough for John, the only other guy on the trip and a former high school wrestler, to put the guy on the ground. Another girl snatched the purse back, which is about when my group arrived on the scene. The would-be thief, who I'm pretty sure was drugged up, stood up slowly and for a few seconds looked like he might like to make another grab for something, despite John, myself, and Gretchen, who managed to look more threatening brandishing a large rolled-up Shakira poster she'd just bought than us guys looked (hey, it was a huge poster!). It wasn't until our boss started asking the crowd of Burkinabes that had quickly assembled for the number of the police that the thief finally decided he'd better leave. Me and a few others followed him until he turned down a dark alley into an abandoned construction site, where we thought better of following him farther. The crowd of Burkinabes failed to either stop the thief or give us the number of the police. In Bamako, Malians would have grabbed him and given him a good lesson in mob justice while waiting for the police to arrive - did I mention that Malians HATE thieves?




The following day we went to another Shea association and had a very productive visit. For those of you at home, shea is a tree that grows along a small beltway stretching from West Africa to East Africa, the nuts of which are processed by the village women into an oil that they use for everything from cooking to medicine to soap making. It is just lately being discovered by the West as a high quality Cocoa-butter substitute for use in cosmetics, soaps, but especially in chocolate production. The cocoa bean industry is a multi-billion dollar industry - the trouble is, cocoa beans are expensive. Shea nuts/butter can form a cheap but quality substitute. Also, since shea butter has a higher melting-point than cocoa butter it's good to put in chocolate because it raises the melting-curve of the chocolate - resulting in less mess in your hands. The trouble is organizing small African villages to turn out quality nuts/butter in quantities that fit onto a container ship. Since shea production is traditionally a female industry, when you can get organized you can put money directly into the hands of poor women who have little other means of getting it in an intensely male-dominated society. Burkina is about 10 years ahead of Mali in their organization. This trip did a great job of showing our (mostly female) homologues what shea work can do for them, and where we can be 10 years down the road. It got them all really excited and motivated to get the word out in their villages, which is vitally important given that it may take a couple years of work before they start seeing profits.




Still, we hadn't seen the last of those awkward cross-cultural moments. For the following day the boss arranged for the Association we were meeting to make us a rice-and-sauce meal for lunch, for 3,000 CFA a head. She made the mistake of paying up front and notifying the rest of us of the arrangement after the fact. Figuring that she'd given everyone 10,000 CFA per day for food and that the Malians were all spending much less than that, they shouldn't complain about spending 3,000 for one meal - that's what the money was for, after all. The volunteers weren't thrilled - I don't mind shelling out 5,000 CFA for a pizza once in a while, but I can get a decent rice-and-sauce meal in Sikasso for 200 CFA, and a good one (with a bit of meat!) for 300. 3,000 then was a little steep, but since it wasn't our money we couldn't complain too loudly. The Malian, however, were downright mutinous. Kris was a bit taken aback by this - we'd just handed them all this money for this very purpose! - until we pointed out that though this was true, they could likely feed their whole family for a few days on 3,000 CFA home. Eventually we reached a compromise by subsidizing the meal with money from the trip's emergency funds.







Wednesday, 4/2


During our baby weighing yesterday I weighed a particularly malnourished one. We have growth charts, comparing the baby's weight to its age in months so that any given child falls into ether the "green," healthy zone; "yellow," caution/danger zone; or "red," dire-straits zone. I could tell immediately by looking at how thin the child was that it was in the red. Its skin hung limply from its arm and leg bones, and its face, which had been made up with eye-liner, painted-on eyebrows, and even a little rouge on its lips (mothers often make up their infants in this manner here, especially when the baby i going to be seen - as when going to the maternity for a weighing), was sunken, forming a grotesque mask. Worse, whereas normally a baby should be eyes-wide, squirming around or groping for its mother's breast, this one lay still, eyes half-closed and mouth hanging slightly open, uninterested in the outside world - a sign of advanced malnutrition. Such children are oblivious to their surroundings, as if passively resigned to their fate. When a needle was inserted into its arm for its first vaccination, it barely whimpered. I found my mind screaming "why bother?!? it doesn't need a polio vaccination, it needs some breast milk! Save the vaccination for the next kid, that might live long enough to need it!" As I said I could see that he was in the red zone, but wanted to know how deeply. Intending to ask his age, my Bambara came out as "how many months is it?" to which the mother replied with a smile that said "clearly you don't know much about how big babies should be" or perhaps just "clearly you've never given birth before" and said "11 days." I was at once furious both with her and with myself - I could clearly see by its size that it was a recent birth (although this can be deceiving since badly malnourished kids can often be twice as old as they look like they should be), and my mis-phrased question had diminished my credibility in this woman's eyes. Still I was furious with her - at 1.8 kg (just under 4 lbs) this baby would have been deep in the red zone even if it were only 11 seconds old.



I wanted to yell at her for wasting her time dressing up her child before coming in when she should have been feeding him. Why, in fact, had she come in at all? I, who have only been around babies for the past couple months, didn't need a scale and a growth chart to tell me that this child was in big trouble. This woman didn't seem overly concerned - the fact is that babies born sickly here have it particularly hard. With a fertility rate of 6.6 children per mother, the attitude of a lot of Malians is that if a child's already in trouble when it's born, clearly it's God's will that the child not make it, and who are we to defy God's will? One of every 5 Malian children won't live to see its 5th birthday, that's a fact. This means that on average every single mother will lose a child during her lifetime, and every fourth or fifth will lose two. For every family I see that hasn't lost one, that means that someone else has lost three or four. Given that, is it such a stretch to believe that God has selected some from birth? If so, why prolong the inevitable, when those resources could well go into an older, healthier child (according to Richard Dawson, the older child has a higher genetic value since it has already proved that it can survive for as long as it has, whereas the newborn has not yet)? As angry as I was at the mother's seeming indifference, there's a cruel but nonetheless powerful logic to it. Perhaps, then, that's precisely why she came - perhaps she does know the child will die, but by coming to the Maternity, by getting those vaccines, she is "doing all she can," placing the outcome as squarely as she can in God's hands. Perhaps, then, she comes precisely because does care - if she didn't, it would be easy enough to let the child die quietly at home. By coming she proves that she does care, and then it's easier to take mentally when God takes the child anyway. But then again, maybe she should try feeding it.



On a lighter note once again, although perhaps a bit bittersweet, I'd like to share a joke with you. I first heard it from a fellow volunteer, written in the Mali Rag, PC Mali's internal newspaper. It goes something like this:
A villager falls into a hole he can't climb out of. Later, a missionary walks by. The villager explains his plight, and the missionary throws down a bible. "If you follow Jesus, he will show you the way."
An NGO worker walks by. The villager explains, and the NGO worker throws down a wad of money and walks away.
A PC volunteer walks by. The villager explains, and the PCV runs off. After a while, the volunteer returns with a bag and jumps into the hole. "Did you bring something to climb out with?" asks the villager. "No," says the volunteer, "I'm coming to live with you!"





Sunday, 4/20


Well I'm getting... accustomed? desensitized? to Mali more and more. I realized it twice recently, the first time when writing an email to a friend and complaining about the toilet situation here. I was remarking that the worst kind of toilet here is a toilet with no seat - far worse than a nyegen because at least a nyegen is easy to squat over. Anyway in my describing the inconveniences of the Malian bathroom I completely forgot to list the lack of toilet paper. Using a salidaga has become quite usual for me, something I would not have predicted before leaving the states. Secondly, just yesterday it was quite hot. It's quite hot everyday, hitting around 108 - 110 degrees on my thermometer (which is in the shade) every day for the past 4 to 6 weeks or longer. Anyway I was sweating quite a lot and thought maybe it had finally hit the 111 mark, but when I checked I was indignant to find that the temperature only read 106. "106!" I said to myself, "surely it can't be only 106, it feels hotter than that!" It's only recently that I've been able to consider a temperature of 106 to be "not that hot" - only a few months ago I would have thought that was quite hot enough. Before coming to Mali the hottest temp I'd ever seen on a thermometer was (Marble?) Canyon in (Arizona?), on the road just before reaching the Grand Canyon. That was on my family's Out West trip just before my 6th grade year, and stepping out of the van into the 108 degree heat I remember thinking that surely nobody could live in such a place - and I suspect the van's thermometer was in the sun, or at least superficially high because of the hot road.





Tuesday, 4/22

So after April IST, or rather on the last evening of it, Laura and I were in Bamako at the bureau, about to get on a PC bus back to Tubaniso, the training site. At that moment Mary Virginia ran up to us and said that her Aunt, who'd just been in Ghana for 2 months doing outreach work of some kind, was passing through on her way home and that they were renting a car and heading out to Dogon Country for 2 days before her plane was to depart. Dogon Country, for those at home, is the touristy thing to do in Mali. Merv's aunt had met the US Ambassador to (Burkina?) who had told her if she did one thing before leaving West Africa, she should see Dogon. Anyway they had two extra seats in the car, and wanted to know if we'd like to come. It only took a couple minutes deliberation to decide that Heck yes we did! An air-conditioned, personal transport to Dogon Country was too good to pass up, even if it meant putting off my intended visit to my first host family yet again. So bright and early the next morning (6am) we hopped into the car in Bamako, having packed and returned to Bamako that evening. As it turned out, the a/c was broken despite the patrone's earlier assurances, but hey - TIA. A personal car without a/c is still far better than a public bus or bache without a/c.

Arriving in Sevare, we went to the Farafina Tigne (African Reality/Truth) store to meet Peace Corps Baba, a very (perhaps a bit overly) friendly Malian who's been working with Peace Corps for many years and consequently speaks the best English I've heard from a Malian outside PC staff. He runs the store, as well as a smal museum on the store's loft. He's been to African cultural festivals in Chicago and Paris (he won't go to Chicago this year as the weak US dollar makes it impossible to turn a profit). Artifacts from varous Malian cultures and time are on display in the museum, from ancient, crudely fashioned amber Fulani wedding necklaces to bronze Touareg camel saddle-bag locks. The museum also has a small bookshelf stocked mostly with coffee-table books about Mali and African culture, though I was highly amused when Laura pointed out one that seemed to be trying to hide among the others, entitled "The Sights of Kansas City" - clearly a present to Baba from a past volunteer that he can't resist showing off.

A short while later, standing outside the store, we met Hassimi - a huge linebacker-sized Dogon who would be our guide for our two-day excursion. Hassimi is a favorite guide of PC volunteers, and it's easy to see why. He's friendly, speaks very good English (perhaps even better than PC Baba's), knows his stuff, and has an infectious smile. His English was what surprised me the most about him - he would whip out various American colloquialisms at unexpected times, undoubtedly gleaned from hanging out with us volunteers too much. The Malian education system emphacises rote memorization, so that many students can rattle off a whole sentence or even a scripted conversation, but haven't a clue what they're saying. My host brother frequently asks me "how does the work?" but when asked what he's trying to say so I can correct him, can only shrug. Repeat ad infinitum. A common conversation between myself and the English teachers at site goes like this:

Teacher: "Hello! How are you?"

Me: "I'm fine, how are you?"

Teacher: "I'm good, how are you?"

Me: "..."

We got the chance to ask Hassimi where he'd learned English, and he allowed as how it was from... Nigerian prostitutes. He was a Malian army-brat, and one day decided he really wanted to learn English. The only people around who spoke English were the Nigerian prostitutes, and so he spent many a night in local bars, where he'd buy a girl a drink and sit and talk in English with a notebook to write down any new words or phrases. Looking back now I wish I'd asked him exactly how long it takes to learn English in this manner, but oh well - what's important is that he learned it, and it serves him very well now.

Thursday, 4/24

I'm happier at since April IST than I have been before. For one thing, I've got a number of little projects going - I've made a pepignere (bagged, single-serving tree nursery) and planted moringa in it, just yesterday I completed the frame for a solar fruit drier, and I've bought paint for making a giant-sized baby growth-monitoring chart. Next week I think I'll ask Danger to help me make a compost pit so I can make some better pepigneres and plant lots of moringa trees (the moringa tree, an import from India, has leaves that are high in iron, vitamin A, and protein - 3 things Malians don't get enough of). I also just today finally talked to the mayor about shea production in my village. Unfortunately it turns out the whole thing has gotten highly politicized and messy due to some less than awesome interactions between the government here and the government in Bamako, but PC has taken notice and will hopefully be able to work things out before they place a volunteer here in September to do shea work (yep, I'll be getting a teammate at site with me, inch'Allah). In the mean time I can jump in on the bottom level of development, a good place to start anyway, without offending anyone.

Speaking of vitamin A, and this is a down note, it's necessary for life. A deficiency of it leads among other things to night blindness, the effects of which should be obvious. Here in Sikasso we get plenty of it during mango and carrot seasons, but virtually none the rest of the year. Consequently it's given in supplement form to children of a certain age every six months, along with their vaccinations. However, like anything, too much of it can be bad. The supplements are so concentrated that they need to be spread out, and for children two supplements should be separated by at least a few weeks, ideally. Too much at once can lead to vitamin A poisoning, which can be fatal. This normally isn't a problem - the amounts found in food are such that you couldn't give yourself vitamin A poisoning if you tried, and those children that get the supplements with their vaccinations get documented to avoid overdose. However this did become a problem back in December during the multiple-vaccination campaign, when vitamin A and mosquito nets were both being given out. Now although we were marking all the children with a "permanent" marker to avoid a mother bringing a child back multiple times, never underestimate the ingenuity of a poor mother when giving out something that could save her child's life (since children over 5 were not included in the campaign, they could not get nets). As any 19 year old that's gone to an 18+ concert where underage kids were marked so they couldn't go to the bar can tell you, permanent marker is hardly permanent. Although I don't know that it happened here (the lines were so awful that I would think it would have discouraged even the most determined mothers), elsewhere in Mali some mothers came back multiple times with the same child to get nets for his brothers and sisters. Unfortunately this resulted in a few (I've no idea at all how many) child deaths from vitamin A poisoning. Sadly, I also wonder how many of those extra nets are actually being used. A common fate of such nets after other campaigns has been resale in market (we were theoretically preventing that by opening the package of each and every net, significantly reducing their market value), fishing nets, wedding gowns, you name it. This has been exactly the argument against giving such things away for free - something acquired for nothing is worth nothing to its recipient. Here in my concessoin, Dao (at 4, the only one in the family able to get a net) doesn't use his, which has sat at the bottom of a trunk since December despite his origional elation at having received one. This just goes to prove the old adage: you can bring a horse a mosquito net, but you can't make him sleep under it. Especially in the hot season when there's no place to tie it up outside.