A Year in Review

As of July 10th I have been in Mali for an entire year. The new group of volunteers is here. They are all done with training, have been sworn in, and are hopefully settling into their sites. It makes me think back to last year when I moved to my site. This would be better if I was a movie director. I’m imagining a nice montage set to music. I’ll see if I can describe some of the stand out moments, and those everyday moments that are my life here.
Picture me sweating and dusty, with a few zits, that is standard. Put me on a dirt streets lined with mud brick houses. Add people in front of most of those houses. Sometimes there are groups of men making tea or women braiding each others hair, but there is also a lot of sitting chatting with neighbors, watching the world go by. It is causal, relaxed and keeps everyone involved in each others lives. I like it. Now fill those streets with kids playing hopscotch, marbles, rolling an old bike tire with a stick, or just running around being kids.
0in;">When the sweaty white girl walks by there is pandemonium among the children (and even some of the adults). Some kids jump with excitement, some run away in terror, some freeze in wide eyed wonder of the pale freak. The boys will try to play it cool and swagger up and say hello, like this happens all the time. Junior high aged girls will look me up and down out of the corner of their eye, whispering and giggling to each other, maybe trying to casually get close enough to touch my hair, hopefully without me noticing.

I will be called tubob, either to my face or as they talk to each other. I will be ask to give them money or a present. Some times the younger ones don’t get the French right and ask how my candy is, instead of how are you, can I have some candy? After another year of this it is going to really strange to go back to Ameri-key, as it is called here, where no one gets excited that I am walking down the street. These are my five minutes of fame. I just pretend that these are my groupies and that my stage name is ‘Tubob’.

Now for the emotion highs and lows, listed in a way that mimic the emotional roller coaster of life. The terror of first being left with my home stay family knowing I can’t talk to anyone and thinking I’m going to do something wrong, just how bad with it be; the incredible frustration of trying to learn a language, and non-US teaching methods; the euphoria of actually being able to talk to people in another language, or maybe even 2 different languages (The look of surprise on peoples’ faces when I speak to them in Bambaran, or use the limited Puehl or Dogon I know never gets old.); the torturous heat, boredom and general discomfort of long bus rides; the comic relief of all the random livestock, but especially donkeys; the stress of never being anonyms; the surprise when the people that use to annoy me on the street stick up for me, or turn into a friend that I look forward to seeing; the guilt that comes from being surrounded by people that are more kind and generous than I will ever be and have much less to share but are much more willing to do so; the profound understanding that comes from being on the receiving end of prejudice; the confusion of experiencing all these emotions plus all the ones I can’t even begin to describe happening in quick succession. I will stop this montage before you become the rapid cycling bi-polar freak I am. But don’t be worried I’m the happy kind of crazy, and pretty mellow for someone who spends most of the time on the manic side of being manic-depressive.

With all the amazing and insane moments I’ve had in the last year there are two that really stand out and are worth trying to tell the story. So here goes......

Mariam My Peanut Lady
On my daily walk between work, my host family and my house I pass by a lot of people selling things on the street. Mariam is only out in the afternoon with her little table of peanuts, and for some reason I like her. She is nice, patient with my horrible language, and treats me like a person. We actually share a laugh instead of her just laughing at me when she teaches me new words.

One day with our usually mix of limited vocabulary, funny faces and strange charades I explain to her that I have a cold. When she finally figures out what I am trying to say, she tells me to take over selling peanuts while she runs across the street to her house. It is really more of a straw shanty, but that’s not really important. The important thing is that she says she has ‘things’ that will make my cold go away. While she is gone the white girl at the peanut table gets a lot of strange looks and questions.

Mariam returns with three things. One is a green seed pod, the second is a piece of black plastic with shea butter on it and before I can figure out the third she has dipped her finger in the shea butter and stuck it up my nose. Yes, my nose, not her’s to show me how I should do this. No, her finger is up my nose! Out of self defense I quickly put shea butter up my other nostril, before she can get to it. She continues on like it’s no big deal to put your finger up someone else’s nose. So I decide, in a way that will soon become habit, that if this Malian is not upset why should I be?

Mariam proceeds to explain that I should chew the seed pod, but not eat it. Of course this involves more funny faces and exaggerated spitting on both our parts. The shea butter at this point is self explanatory. The third thing was a little piece of resin incense that I was suppose to burn and inhale the smoke from inside a tent made from my head wrap (which of course I don’t wear). The guys on my street agreed that if I followed her advice I would sleep well and be up running around in the morning.

Because I follow the advice of the Peace Corps medical staff to a T, I bleached the random seed pod before I chewed it. It was a giant fuzzy green bean that was worse than chewing on an aspirin. My lack of head wrap and incense burner kept me from inhaling strange smoke. And maybe it was the shock of having someone else put shea butter up my nose, not the shea butter itself that got rid of my cold. Like having someone scare away your hiccups, whatever it was it worked.

Taxi!
Transportation here is almost beyond explanation. It is such a bizarre experience in so many ways. The vehicles are in such bad condition it is hard to believe they are still on the road, and they have more people crammed than should be physically possible. The passengers always seem a little surprised and annoyed when they are asked to pay, and of course the driver never has change. The exchanges and interactions that go on when you pack people in and dose them with a little too much exhaust is what is really fascinating.

Malians are pretty easy going people in general. There maybe shouting and arm waving but it is just good natured theatrics as they try and get there way. Or there will be blatant ignoring of directions or questions that don’t serve a purpose for that person. But normally they are very easy going happy people.

One morning I took a nine place station wagon, which in other places would only have 7 people in it. But in Mali they pack in 9 passengers plus a driver. There was not the long wait for the car to fill. It wasn’t the usual crowd of women with babies. These were mostly men on their way to work, two of them even had on ties. I chatted with the man next to me about his children who were living in France, and the difference in the weather between Mali and France.

We stopped to let a man out before the usually spot. (These station wagons travel the 12 km on the 1 road connecting where I live and the next closest town.) The man that got out asked for his change, first the driver pretended not to hear, and then there was some shouting. All pretty standard so far. But then things took a bizarre route.

The man demanding his change went and stood in front of the car and challenged that the driver would have to run him over to leave. The driver accepted the challenge and started to drive forward. The man in front of the car had time to hop on the hood. We didn’t get very far with this man clinging to the hood, before the shock of the situation wore off and the stunned silence of all the rest of us in the car quickly turned to shouting. The driver stopped, and the man on the hood then stood up and started stomping his feet, continuing to demand for his change.

At this point the man next to me was the first offers the man on the hood the 100 FCFA that he is owed (less than a quarter). We all start offering money, and the driver finally decided to give in. With a little shoving and a few more shouts (kept to a minimum by the crowd that has gathered between them) the situation is resolved. The driver got back in the car and we drove the last few hundred feet to our destination.