My swim project, Malian wedding

Everyone likes pictures of cute kids!

And cute foals!

This is the drive shaft of a bache I was riding into town one day. Something's out of place...

On the brighter side, getting stuck on the side of the road for 4 hours (since you can't drive anywhere without a drive shaft) gives you plenty of opportunity to stop and appreciate the little things! Like these tiny grass flowers

And some mushrooms

And some more mushrooms

A spider in the morning, having set up camp on my veranda during the night

Okay before we get to the journal part, I want to say a little about a project I’m doing here! I don't often talk about the work I'm doing here, it’s probably time I let y’all know what I'm actually doing here in country apart from dodging scorpions. Okay so right now I’ve got a big project I’m working on with a couple other volunteers. It’s an extension and expansion of a project done last year in miniature, and the impetus for the project came from an accident that happened last year (before I arrived in country), so I’ll start with that. There were once three much-loved members of the Peace Corps community that wanted to see Mali from the river Niger. It’s a big country, but most of the population is focused around the river, which meanders through Bamako, up past Mopti and Dogon Country, through the desert sands and past Tambouctou (Timbuktu) and Gao city before crossing the border into the country Niger. Traveling on the river is therefore a great way to see the country, and these three volunteers built themselves a boat (and a rather impressive one at that) and set sail from Bamako on what promised to be a great adventure. Unfortunately there was an accident on the river, and their trip – and two of their lives – were cut tragically short. Though the third volunteer involved survived, he sustained serious injuries and had to be sent to America for treatment. To illustrate what kind of guys these three were, that third volunteer later flew himself back to Mali with his own money and before he was fully healed in order to complete a project that he had been working on in his village. In the aftermath and analysis of what had happened that day, a glaring deficiency in the Malian emergency worker service was made evident: despite the fact that most of the population is on or near the river, most of the population does not know how to swim, including the majority of the rescue worker service (equivalents of Fire Department and Police, etc).

The unfortunate truth is that swimming remains a skill practiced almost exclusively by the white ex-patriot community, while most Malians (who of course make up the vast majority of the emergency worker service) cannot swim, and may even be petrified of entering any water deeper than their thighs (understandable if you can’t swim). The only Malian exception is the ethnic Bozo community, who are the traditional fishermen and river-boaters of Mali. Since they make up only a tiny proportion of the population, they aren’t well-represented among the emergency worker population. Consequently when there is an accident and someone ends up in the river, it’s a near certainty that they don’t know how to swim. When rescue workers are called, they arrive on scene but cannot go in the water since they’d just become another victim. The rescue workers must therefore search for any fisherman that may happen to be both nearby and close enough to the shore to be hailed and get them to abandon their nets to come and do the rescue/extraction. Clearly this wastes a lot of valuable time, and many lives are lost that could otherwise have been saved with a more efficient response effort.

The project I and a few of my co-volunteers are doing addresses this need. We will train a group of emergency workers from both Mali’s Protection Civile, and the Brigade Fluviale branch of the Gendarmes. Over an eight-week program, we will introduce them to the water, teach them to swim, and teach them to perform basic water rescues, with the project culminating in staged practice-rescues on the actual Niger River. We hope to involve not only rescue workers from Bamako (where the program will take place) but also from other cities such as Koulikoro and Mopti. A smaller version of the project was done last year with 24 workers, and was by all accounts a rousing success. The trainees that attended were generally very enthusiastic about learning water safety skills, and were excited to be able to put their new skills to work in real-life situations.

This year we hope to involve 48 members of the Protection Civile and 24 from the Brigade Fluviale. Apart from the actual water safety skill training, we will also show them how to make water-rescue materials using locally available resources. Among the things being provided by the Malian government for the project are the costs of displacement of the trainees from other parts of Mali, room and board for trainees, and transportation to and from the training site for the duration of the project.

We hope to start the training in mid March 2009, progressing for eight weeks through early May. Unfortunately we need to complete funding of the project before September 12th - that is, less than a month. This is because the project proposal was submitted early this year by one of the volunteers that did the project earlier this year, but now he's reached the end of his service and is headed back to America. Peace Corps Washington wants to take down the project from the Peace Corps website, as it has sat there for a good many months without completing funding. They've agreed with us on a deadline for September 12th, at which time they will remove the project from the website and we will have to scale back the project plan in order to be able to do it with the funds that have been raised. So please! If you're interested in donating to the project, or know someone who is, go to https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=688-231 or log onto http://www.peacecorps.gov/, click on "Donate Now"; then on "Donate to Volunteer Projects"; select the region of search as "Africa" and the country as "Mali" and type "water safety" in the "keywords" section. You should find project number 688-231, with "Taylor E." listed as the "volunteer coordinator." A short description of the project follows (which states that the project will train 96 members of the emergency service - we've already had to scale this back a bit).

Thursday, August 7
Well I went to my first Malian wedding, at long last! How I’ve failed to go to one for a whole year I don’t know – perhaps being a guy I don’t get invited when a female volunteer would. Also my host family at site is significantly smaller than most Malian families. But mostly it’s been my fault I suppose, as I’ve been too shy to crash one of the many wedding parties around town I’ve heard going on (these are not quiet affairs). This is another one of my leftover Western sensibilities – in Mali such things are village affairs: If you didn’t get invited it’s probably because your brother’s friend’s sister got invited and it was assumed that they’d bring you. This attitude can make it hard to plan meetings, since you have to plan for many more people showing up than you invited, but works wonderfully for keeping a sense of community in social gatherings and everyday life.

Actually, planning meetings is hard for a variety of reasons, most having to do with Malians’ relaxed sense of time. Many Malians carry no watch, phone, or anything else that could tell them the exact hour if they wanted to know it, and most of the rest think of hours as suggestions rather than obligations. Thus if you arrive for a meeting set to start at 9am at 9am, you’ll likely be the only person there. Depending on the formality of the meeting, probably about half of those invited will have shown up when it finally starts at 11am, and most of the rest will come in the middle or at the end of the meeting. This can be exasperating when you’re trying to get things done, but once you get used to the flexible pace and accept it, it also relieves you of a lot of stress (after all, Malians usually don’t expect you to keep hours that they themselves don’t keep). Unfortunately, some people never get used to it.

If the meeting is more informal, a fair fraction of the people who said they’d come won’t show up at all – not because they can’t tell time, but because they never intended to come in the first place. In Mali it’s considered more polite to agree to do something and then not follow through then it is to refuse, which is seen as combative. For me personally it may also just mean that they didn’t understand what I was asking in the first place – while learning Bambara I was amazed to find even myself simply nodding and saying “yes” quite a lot when I didn’t understand someone, since constantly asking for repetition and rephrasing of questions gets tiring.

Before I got side-tracked though, I was talking about a wedding. My host-sister from my host-family during training was finally getting married. She and Adama were the two most helpful, understanding people in the family for me, and an integral part of helping me get through training. M’bamagan is her name (another volunteer, who inherited this name from her, translates it from the Bambara as “squishy mama,” though this description doesn’t really fit either of them), and she was particularly old for a Malian girl to be married – around 22 or 23 perhaps. The wedding was also somewhat remarkable because she not only knew the guy beforehand, but wanted to marry him before the arrangements were made. The first thing (her age) likely had a lot to do with the second (choosing her husband), and both of them probably had a lot to do with the fact that she has two children already, out of wedlock and to two different fathers as I understand it, neither of whom is her new husband or is even present. Contraception isn’t widely practiced in any form in Mali, even if the man has multiple wives and children already – the larger your family, the more respect you’re given. The attitude is very much “the more the merrier.” This of course leads to all kinds of problems: apart from the many mouths to feed, the woman’s uterus gets tired after many births, which greatly increases the risk of complications during pregnancy and birthing.

Of course it’s not all bad – large, very close-knit families, most of whom share a concession, mean that any member of the family who falls on hard times (like having two kids out of wedlock) has a big support network. Indeed this is why it’s so hard to convince them of the good of contraception in the first place – it’s a problem that provides its own solution, of sorts, but only as long as everyone’s (not) practicing it equally.

Actually in this particular situation I can’t help but think that having two kids out of wedlock worked out rather well for M’ba – since this would have made her slightly less desirable as a prospective wife to older men, it is likely a major reason she escaped the fate of most Malian girls – to be married off in their mid-teens to a man they don’t know who’s likely at least 10 years older than them. Indeed my current host-brother plans exactly that – to work until he’s in his late 20s and has finally saved up enough for a bride price, and then to get himself a nice 15 or 16 year old wife. Because M’ba escaped this, and because she found a man with somewhat more modern ideas, she was able to wait until her mid-20s and marry someone of her own choosing.

I was talking to my local language tutor, Doumbia, about this today. He’d remarked that, comparatively, a lot of female volunteers end up finding a Malian husband, while male volunteers nearly never do. That’s of course because the vast majority of Malian men close in age to your average volunteer is single and has been saving up for a bride price, while the vast majority of Malian women who are anywhere near our age are married and/or have multiple children already. Doumbia also told me how he’d gone to the authorities just yesterday with a friend’s grievance against the father of his chosen bride. As part of the bride price they’d agreed on, the friend would work in the girl’s father’s fields for four rainy seasons, as well as provide the father with a gift of 25kg of fish and 10,000 CFA each of those four years, before he could finally marry the girl. Well this rainy season was the fourth and the girl, who apparently wants to marry another man and had no say in the original arrangement, ran off to another village to be with her chosen man. The father then failed to go after her and get her to accept the first suitor, who by now has spent four years and considerable expense to obtain her. Well they’ve gotten the village chief involved now, though I’ve not yet heard the outcome.

I’ve gotten side-tracked again, so now back to the wedding itself. I arrived at the concession in the morning, having traveled in to Bamako a few days earlier, and was immediately struck by how under-dressed I was. I was wearing a Malian outfit made of lower-quality “wax” fabric (all fabrics with prints on them are “wax” fabric. Lower quality means the fabric is thinner, which I prefer since it makes it breathable, quite good for the heat). This would probably have been fine at a wedding out in brousse, but I’d forgotten how much Malians, especially those close to Bamako, like to dress up for special occasions. Everyone else was wearing intricately embroidered outfits of basan (a higher-quality fabric than “wax,” it’s monotone and unprinted but woven in such a way that it has a pattern nonetheless, and is generally smooth and has a nice sheen. It’s also really hot). Well there was nothing I could do at that point but hope my being a dumb toubab afforded me some forgiveness for the oversight, and indeed nobody said anything about it.



Friday, August 8
As I was saying, I arrived to find the concession full of people, all dressed in fancy new outfits they’d had made for the occasion. I didn’t arrive alone, as M’bamagan #2, the volunteer who’d stayed with the family for her training the year before I arrived, was with me (she was properly dressed in a finely pressed basan outfit, though to be fair she’d borrowed it from a Malian friend). The new class of trainees recently arrived and we’d hoped to meet up with them but they had left earlier that morning to go back to the training center, thereby missing the party. After going through greetings with the family we were issued into M’ba’s room, where there sat the bride.

Or was it? We both hesitated – sure enough she was in a wedding gown with her hair all done up, way too much makeup, and a silvery-grey chalky stuff covering her exposed arms and face. I’d heard that sometimes Malian women put something on their skin to make it whiter because they think that whiter skin is more beautiful than darker (I disagree), and I assume this was it. It looked awful, but I have more sense than to say that to the bride on her wedding day. The trouble was this girl didn’t look anything like the M’ba we both knew, but then we’d never seen M’ba with her hair and makeup all done up or with her skin all… chalked up; and after all this was M’ba’s wedding and this was clearly the bride. So the other volunteer and I figured it had to be her, recognizable or not. It was only slightly awkward when we greeted her and she responded with “M’ba.”

As it turned out she was some (friend?) of M’ba, and was also getting married that day. The real M’ba was off somewhere else. She arrived shortly thereafter, and I was relieved to see that she’d opted not to have herself chalked for the occasion. She looked radiant – where I felt the first girl’s hair and makeup were a bit too done up, M’ba’s looked gorgeous. She entered the concession with a train of people following her, not the least remarkable of whom was a griot with a bullhorn.

“What the heck is a griot, and why does one need a bullhorn?” Glad you asked. A griot is a fixture in Malian society, a hereditary caste of people whose job it is to talk. When a young (or old) man sees a nice (young) girl he wants to marry, the first thing he does is hire a griot. The griot’s first task is to go to the girl’s father and talk up the suitor and make his intentions known. Eventually, if the father is receptive, it’s the griot’s job to negotiate the bride price with the father. They discuss the relative merits of both the individuals concerned, as well as the extended families of said individuals. The final price is thus dependant on the honor and village standing of the individuals and families involved, as well as the skill of the griot him or herself. When the celebration day finally comes, it’s the griot’s job to walk around talking and singing about everyone involved and everything that happens. For example, at a wedding involving a Traoré such as this, the griot might spend a lot of time singing about the history of the Traorés back to pre-colonial times, as well as about famous Traorés of more modern times. All the while they’re singing they are also collecting money from the crowd, and can get quite testy when money is not forthcoming (this is their livelihood after all). There was actually quite a scene later on, as apparently the one griot with the bullhorn was drowning out the others and getting all the money, which various parties were none too happy about. Still, for most Malians having an engagement and marriage without a griot would be unthinkable.

Malian wedding ceremonies generally come in three flavors. The first is the religious one – either Muslim at the mosque or Christian at the church. The second is the official wedding, held at the mayor’s office, where all the necessary papers are signed. This is officially required by the state, to ensure the inheritance and custody rights and responsibilities of all involved. However since both the religious ceremony and the official ceremony require a monetary donation to the imam/priest and mayor, respectively (more if she’s the man’s first wife, practically nothing if she’s not), some Malians can’t afford both ceremonies, and when forced to choose it’s always the official one that gets the axe, whatever legal problems this may cause down the road (legal problems may be hell figuratively, but they’re much better than actual hell). Depending on the inclinations of the families involved, there may also be the third kind of ceremony, the traditional, which may involve the sacrifice of chickens or livestock.

At about 10am, the concession being full since the arrival of the husband’s troupe, everyone piled into cars, bachés, motos, and donkey carts, and we went in a grand (and very noisy) procession to the Mayor’s office for the official wedding. We crammed as many people as would fit into the building, with the two couples to be married sitting at a fold-out table opposite the mayor’s office staff. Unfortunately the ceremony attracted a bit more attention than they might have liked, and a great group of neighborhood kids gathered outside the (glassless) windows. There was also a group standing in the back that wouldn’t be quiet, so the proceedings were punctuated occasionally by various important people at the front of the crowd yelling “shut up!” at those in the back. There was also the occasional outburst from the griot with the bullhorn, who probably needn’t have used it since we were inside.

The ceremony was remarkable for me in to ways. Firstly, nobody was smiling – least of all the husbands and brides, who looked profoundly miserable. This was strange since I’d been told that M’ba and her man wanted to marry each other (I’ve heard stories from other volunteers wherein at this point the bride is sobbing hysterically, terrified to be leaving the family she’s grown up in to be married off to a man she doesn’t know (the bride traditionally leaves her family to go live with her husband’s family, however far away that may be), while the older members of her family berate her for dishonoring the family with the scene she’s making, which of course doesn’t help). Still, the lack of smiles (comical to me in this case) wasn’t altogether unexpected. Whereas Americans tend to burst into fake over-smile whenever they see a camera pointed at them (as someone who loves photography this is frustrating, since fake over-smiles tend to make people look a little crazy, when a candid shot or half-grin would be much more flattering), Malians don’t suffer from this urge. Indeed, whip out a camera and a Malian laughing and smiling from ear to ear (who may well have just asked you to get the camera) immediately goes into awkward tense-expressionless or frowny-face mode. With the innumerable cameras and video cameras out documenting the occasion, I suppose the bridal parties could hardly have failed to look anything but miserable.

The second thing remarkable to me was the vows. The mayor would read each vow in both Bambara and French, and the pairs would then mumble their agreement. Unfortunately, with the noise in the back, attendant shouts of “shut up, damnit!” and the bullhorn ringing in my ears, I missed most of the vows. I only clearly heard two of the vows given in Bambara. Or perhaps those are just the only two I remember hearing since they were so remarkable to me. The first was “Cé yé so tigi yé!” Literally, “the man/husband (both are cé in Bambara) is the master of the house!” The second, immediately following, was “muso té so tigi yé dé!” which translates as “the woman/wife id not the master of the house!” The “dé” doesn’t mean anything, but adds emphasis to the phrase so that perhaps a better translation would be “the woman/bride is not the master of the house, seriously guys I’m totally not kidding!”

Now it’s no secret that Malian women did not enjoy the same liberation achieved by westerners in the 60s, to say the least. Still I thought that this attitude was prevalent enough in Malian society that it went without saying. At the most this is something I expected to hear at the religious ceremony since the brand of Islam practiced in Mali tacitly or explicitly accepts male domination as the status quo. I did not, however, expect to hear it at the official ceremony, written in black and white on a contract that must not only be agreed to verbally, but undersigned by all parties involved, bride included. I was a bit taken aback, and can't help wondering what cabinet minister was so afraid of his wives that he felt it necessary to write his superiority down in contract form. Then rephrased and written again, for good measure.