Dogon with the fam, work trouble at site

Dad in Dogon at the bottom of the cliffsClimbing up into the cliffs of Dogon. Those are Baobab treesMonkey skull up in the dwellings on the cliffsBack down at the bottom, a mud mosqueThere's that freakin kid with his turban againThe fam climbing along the top of the cliffsOur second Dogon guide, Oumar, hanging out on the edge of the cliffs

A very colorful traffic jam climbing between villages on the cliff-top

A rickety wooden ladder spanning a chasm and a drop of a couple hundred feet on the climb down
Did anyone order Tabaski sheep in a bag?Or perhaps some sheep on the roof?Danger, Dao, and I at Tabaski morning prayersShe affectionately calls me Tubabu, so I affectionatly call her Old Woman. She's one of my favorite people in villageDifferent old woman, no relationMy new host mother Salimata in her Tabaski best


First off I must apologize for being so long in posting a new entry - I hope I still have someone to apologize to! A lot has been going on - Thanksgiving, my family came to visit for two weeks, Christmas and the new year, Tabaski, etc. so I've been spending most of my time running around rather than sitting and reflecting. Really though, I just haven't been inspired to write since I've been experiencing what I hope has been the nadir of all the ups and downs of my service. More on that later.

Secondly, and this is also long overdue, I want to say thank you to all that donated to my swim project - we reached our funding goal in full and have received the money, and are in the planning/preparing/purchasing stage of the project; which we intend to run from March 16th to May 9th. During this time I will be living in Bamako and shall have regular access to the internet, so I'll be able to update here as the project goes along.

Warning: there's nothing about Africa in this paragraph, so if you want to skip my ramblings feel free to - you won't miss anything particularly insightful. I've been under a lot of stress lately about life after Peace Corps - after all, my "months remaining until home" countdown has finally hit the single digits, yet I don't feel much closer to figuring out what I want to do, how to go about doing it, where I want to be, or how to pay for any of the above than I was when I flew out of Philadelphia some 18 months ago. I've crossed a number of things off the list (like med school) but added just as many if not more, and none of them will be easy - they pretty much all involve some time in grad school, and all in programs for which I don't have the necessary pre-requisites - never mind funds. If I find any fault with my choice of NYU for undergrad, it's that perhaps a smaller school would have provided me with more individual counseling as to what I want to do and how to get there rather than letting me blunder into a History major despite the fact that I have no interest in the study of history (or little more than average, anyway). It is now one of my great regrets in life that I just coasted along in undergrad, doing only what was required to get a degree (any degree!) without much thought for life after college. That's fine if you're not planning on a further degree, but failing to develop relationships with professors who could then write recommendations and failing to take the most basic pre-requisite courses (say, ANY science, math, statistics, or economics courses at all) can make grad-school application difficult to say the least.

But back to Africa. When joining the Peace Corps you are often told that many volunteers say after their service that they got more out of it than their village did. Without further analysis you are left thinking "wow, surely their village got a lot of out of it so they must have had a really incredible experience!" While I don't deny that I have in fact had an incredible experience and have learned and grown much, the statement would be true even if I hadn't. That is to say, I'm not at all sure my village has gotten anything from my experience beyond cultural exchange. Fortunately two of the three goals of Peace Corps are cultural (to have other cultures learn about Americans and to have Americans learn about other cultures) while only one actually has to do with getting work done. Fortunately I feel I've at least made progress culturally, and we all know what Meatloaf said about "two out of three"... If I'm a meatloaf fan when I return to the states someone shoot me. I blame the Lebanese owners of our favorite bar in Bamako, who have an inexplicable penchant for playing bad American '80s music. Speaking of cultural exchange.

Actually I'm not even sure how much progress I've made on the cultural front either - most of my villagers still seem to think that all American white males are somewhere between Kiefer Sutherland as Agent Jack Bauer in "24" and Chuck Norris as seen in "Delta Force" (are my pop-culture references out of date?).

My work in village seems to have reached somewhat of an impasse - the matrones have realized that I'm not going to give them large amounts (or small for that matter) of money to do things they should be doing anyway, and I've realized that they're not going to do anything I don't give them large amounts of money to do. This might eventually have resulted in a compromise - them doing things beyond the bare-minimum required to keep their jobs and me doing things I knew they'd discontinue as soon as I left, but the South Korean chapter of Save The Children has stepped in and is building us a new maternity building, so they've found someone else to pin their hopes of buying out of the village's problems on. This statement may seem a bit harsh, but when speaking with my homologue a little while ago about how discouraged I was with work she replied that the matrones were also discouraged. We were talking about the strange fact that the matrones don't do animations (10-minute health talks on topics such as nutrition, clean drinking water, and the importance of pre-natal consultations) despite the fact that A) they know the info; B) being native Bambara speakers they would have no trouble conveying the info; C) unquestionably have the time (most of their time is spent knitting and chatting); D) most animations cost nothing at all to do; and E) the information is very much needed by the community. I asked her why the matrones were discouraged, and she replied "because the toubab (that is, me) didn't come with lots of money."

If I sound discouraged I am, but don't let my individual experience color your picture of third-world development too much. Many people are very hard working and dedicated, it just so happens that my particular matrones are either not or are victims of systemic issues like the lack of proper incentives and such - I won't go into that, but if you're interested please read "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good" by William Easterly, which is a brilliant counterpoint to the Jeffrey Sachs' infuriating "The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time."