End of the swim project

Wednesday, May 20^th

One of the Protection Civile groups

Well it's been a crazy couple weeks. I finally did get a new camera, and just about 3 days later my computer died. Blue screen of death, couldn't even boot to BIOS to wipe the hard drive! It's just as well I suppose – I got that computer in 2002 and among its many quirks the most amusing and infuriating was that it tended to overheat and shut down when taxed with such memory-intensive programs as gmail. This meant that I had to stick the whole computer in the freezer about every ten minutes to keep it from overheating. Seriously.

Westin and Dramane

Anyway we wrapped up the swim project a week and a half ago. All in all it went very well! We didn't have to miss any more weeks due to the pool being disgusting, though we were close a couple times. Basically it would get really gross, they'd pour a whole mess of chemicals in, and then it would be clear and blue again for a couple days before repeating the process.

Ami, the best of our female traineesChef Tall practices first aid

What to say? For the most part everyone learned to swim. The Protection Civile were particularly dedicated to class, coming even on Malian holidays (Malians love their holidays – you never realize quite how many there are until you try to schedule a training) and to all of our optional Friday practice sessions. The Brigade Fluvial took the project much less seriously. To be fair, I think they would have come to practice sessions but their commander wouldn't let them (he'd gotten it into his head that one day a week should be sufficient – the Protection Civile were getting three). This really showed by the end of class, as none of the Brigade Fluvial members that didn't already know how to swim (about 6 of the 12 were decent swimmers already) had improved much. The Protection Civile on the other hand had improved by leaps and bounds. Now I'm not saying it was a perfect success – of the 30 members of the Protection Civile we had probably only 20 of them were comfortable swimming without life-jackets, and I'd really only trust about eight of them to actually save my life without a lifejacket – but given the time constraints I'd say we did very well.

Our first day on the NigerFatoumata was a little panicked in the riverYumm, river scum by the shoreline

The last week of the project we spent doing mock-rescues in the Niger River in the middle of Bamako. This is probably really gross, and it's pretty likely we all contracted schistosomiasis. Peace Corps will test us for it in a couple months when we head back to America though, so we should be alright. The mock-rescues went very well. Most of the trainees took off their life-jackets for at least one attempt, which was very brave of them to do since we were in the middle of the very wide river (we motored out to the middle to try to avoid as much gross water as possible – though very wide, the river is not very deep – about 7 or 8 feet at the moment, though that's its low point during dry season, and still plenty to drown in).Here's Fatoumata trying to drown Holly...

To close out the project we had a ceremony at the Peace Corps office. All the trainees came, as well as their commanders, the Director of Peace Corps Mali, and we even had a representative from the American Embassy. There were rumors that ORTM, the lone Malian TV station, might show up, but it was not to be. We had Mike, our director, give a little speech about the beginnings of the project – Matt and Justin and the accident that took their lives. After that we had a slide show and gave out certificates. The trainees surprised us with gifts – we all got a wooden Ciwara, which is the Bambara symbol of hard work, and a very nice outfit made of mud-cloth. They were very grateful to us, and everyone not directly involved in the project (our director, the embassy rep, the commanders, etc.) were all very impressed.

Closing ceremony - Westin, Holly, Alkalifa, me, Mike, with pictures of Matt and Justin

One of our best swimmers, Yaya, came up to me after the ceremony and told me he'd already been recruited by his commander to go up to Koulikoro to watch over the swimming area there and teach a few colleagues how to perform rescues. I couldn't believe that they're already putting what they learned to use!With the project completed, pizza and beer were in order!

I want to say thank you again to everyone who donated to make this project happen. It was a great success and has made me feel like my time in Mali was at least a little productive. I should add that since we got the use of the pool for much cheaper than anticipated, we have a little money left over that will be going back into the Peace Corps general project fund to go towards other (smaller) projects. Your money will continue to do good in places and ways we will never know.

I'm heading back to site today. I haven't been there since the end of January, and I'm quite nervous about getting back, though also a little excited. Write about it soon.