Furusuri, a Malian wedding, mom's visit, 8 Mars

I experienced my first Malian wedding a few months ago. My older host sister, Salimata was married to a man from the Ivory Coast. It was an interesting process. Two days before the wedding I spent an afternoon with her lying around, drinking tea, having jabi (like henna) put on our hands and feet. I couldn't believe how long I had to sit there, and then mine still wasn't as dark as it should be.
Her jabi was very intricate and beautiful. I think it was a specific design because she was getting married. The next day (before the day of the wedding) she had to spend the whole day inside her mother's house. All the women in our extended family came and as they informed me we had to give her fabric and a piece of dishware. Then she sat inside while the rest of us talked, ate and danced outside. We could go inside and sit with her though.
In the afternoon they brought her outside and covered her face. An older woman started braiding her hair while women around her sang songs. After her hair was done being braided, she went into the negen (bathroom) with one of her grandmothers and she washed her. I didn't see that part. After that she came out and her mothers and other respected older women in the family washed her arms and legs, and last her feet. (Her face was still covered the whole time.) When her feet were clean they put new sandals on her and carried her, like she was a baby on the back of a younger woman and carried her back into the house, where she then put on white clothes and was allowed to have her face uncovered.
The next day, which was the actual day of the wedding, seemed to be not as big of a deal as the day before. She stayed inside all day, until at some point she went to the mayor's office to make it official. I didn't see her fiancee at all during this time. Once it was official she went to his family's house and had to stay inside for a week there except for going to the bathroom. Apparently all her mothers and aunts went and spent the first night with her there. They asked me to spend the night but I assumed they were joking. Almost every night I went with my host sisters and drank tea and talked with Sali inside her husbands family's house.
She seemed a little bit scared. I don't know if it was about being married again (she was divorced and has a child from a previous marriage). She had never been to the Cote d'Ivoire before and she knew she wouldn't see her family again for years. She also had to leave her five year old son with our family, because in Mali children are considered to belong to the man and his family. Although he lives with our family now, her ex-husbands family lives nearby and in a few years he will most likely go to live with them. It was hard for me to understand having to leave your child, but I know she had no other option.
I am hoping that if I make it to the Cote D'Ivoire I can go and visit her.
My mom came for ten days or so and we had a very nice visit. We didn't really do any traveling, we just stayed in Bamako and went out to my site for a couple days. But it was really nice to see her and I am very glad she got to see what my life is like here. She was a bit shocked. When she saw my hut she started to cry. However, she was moved by the kindness of everyone in my town and it was exciting for her to see me speaking Bambara and interacting with my friends.
The hot season was really in full swing (it is now over a hundred every day). I felt like I really needed to start getting more work done, and beginning projects. I talked with Jege and some people at the CSCOM, and we came up with the idea for me to start a severe malnutrition program every Wednesday. My site is surrounded by a lot of broussey, smaller villages, many of which are not along a main road, are much more poor and have much less access to clean water and a variety of foods, as a result of these circumstances there is much more malnutrition. The idea behind the nutrition program, at least for now, is that on Wednesday's mothers of severely malnourished children will come into the CSCOM, I will weigh their babies, talk with their mothers, bring them to the doctor, and if the doctor agrees they are severely malnourished he will write them a prescription for free Plumpy Nut (an ameliorated packaged peanut butter product to help malnourished babies and kids put on weight). As the weeks have gone on more and more mothers have started coming. There are still a lot of kinks to work out with the program and eventually I'd like to start going out to some of the villages myself, maybe doing animations and a HEARTH (usually a two week program where mothers and their babies agree to come every day, make ameliorated porridge, they see their babies gaining weight and therefore the benefits of the porridge, and every day you give a different animation on a good health practice). I didn't really know where to begin, so for now this is a starting point.
I am also trying to get a girls' group organized with sixth grade girls. The teachers have been striking a lot lately and now they are on vacation for Easter (I assume the vacations being set around Christian holidays is a remnant of the colonial system). But the teacher and the girls seemed excited about it. I said we can make tea and chat. One girl said, "we're going to pound millet" I said no, no pounding millet. Another said, "we're going to fart". I said no, there will be no farting. Chatting! We will chat.
I am hoping to get to know the girls, maybe encourage them to study together, eventually try to tackle the insanely high rate of teenage pregnancy in my town through talking about abstinence and birth control. Everyone feels strongly it is a major problem at my site.
During my training at IST some traditional African healers came and gave a session. The main point of their presentation was to have volunteers encourage healers at their site to form associations. I had previously gone to a meeting with my homologue of traditional healers, so I asked what the next step was. They said it would be encouraging them to form a medicinal garden. Currently, most healers have to walk around in brousse, looking for plants. But if they have a garden, growing the plants themselves, they can better guarantee the quality and of course their availability, hopefully leading to better medicine for the community and an increase in their incomes.
I went and talked with the head of the association who is a very elderly adorable man who looks very wise. He started teaching me some medicines and we were having communication difficulties, but my friend Sungalo (his nephew) then came and explained and he was very enthusiastic. They called all the healers together and had a meeting about a week later, at which point the idea was addressed to the entire group and everyone was very enthusiastic. They said they didn't have a garden now because they would need a well. Currently they pay monthly dues so they would have money to contribute. They said they could find a piece of land, and otherwise they would need a well, fencing, and would like to buy seeds for some plants that couldn't be found in our area.
They said me coming to them and offering help was very important and had never happened before. They said now our hands are together. I am excited about this project because they are into it, they are organized, they have money available, and I think it will be very sustainable. I questioned myself a little bit, like is it ethical to be aiding traditional medicine when I obviously think biomedicine is so superior? But when push comes to shove African medicine is an integral part of the culture, and it is often the first option most Malians have when someone is sick. They usually try African medicine first and if they still don't get better they will then go to the CSCOM. Most people can simply not afford to run to the doctor for everything. And of course there is still a strong belief in the healing power. And there probably is something to a lot of the medicines. It has been around a lot longer than Western medicine. But of course if someone has malaria there is nothing else quite like quinine.
Well we're on the topic of malaria . . . . I was horrified a couple weeks ago when one of my best friends, Sofiatou (she braids my hair) came to the CSCOM and was clearly very, very sick. She couldn't really look me in the eyes or talk at all. She clearly had a very high fever and seemed to be almost to the point of convulsions. No one would give me a straight answer on what was wrong with her, but it seemed ovbious to me it was probably very advanced malaria, the cerebral kind. Finally my homologue said, its hypertension. She is a one hundred pound twenty- three year old. To see my doctor giving her a shot of Norvalgene and not quinine, to hear that her husband had not given her money the day before to come to the CSCOM, saying she wasn't sick. . . . and then when she had somehow come the doctor had sent her home with Cipro and Metro. I was really upset. Its not my place to diagnose medical problems or be involved at all with treatment, but of course under these circumstances . . . . when someone appears to be on the verge of death and you're in a malaria endemic area . . . . it seems obvious to give quinine. So many other times I see it being dished out like candy and have to really wonder if the people (who seem fully functioning) really have malaria.
I realized later everyone, my homologues, the other matrones, her family that flooded the CSCOM and couldn't help but cry when they saw her (neither could I) basically knew it was not hypertension and malaria. But it was a classic case of no one being able to stand up to the doctor. Having to respect the hierarchy. An ambulance came and took her to the hospital. I along with everyone else was really upset. I really didn't know if she was going to make it or if she was going to have permanent mental effects. The thing that got to me was knowing how unnecessary it was. The system had failed her in so many ways.
The good news is they gave her quinine when she got to the hospital and seems to be doing okay now. The other thing that was strange is that people wouldn't let other people get upset. They would say its nothing, its nothing. Let your mind sit. And then when the other people weren't around the health workers were saying amongst themselves, its bad. I guess it is just not really culturally approriate to cry and show how upset you are in front of other people.
On a happier note, I celebrated 8 Mars, or the Eighth of March, International Women's Day with my community. Except we actually celebrated it on the 17th. Yes, this was very strange to me. Jege and a lot of other women had been planning every day for a week before the 8th for a skit they were performing, and then the special 8 Mars fabric that all the women wear on the day could not be found, so they delayed the celebrations for a week.
There was so much drama surrounding the fabric it was unbelievable. I had been told how important fabric was to the culture, but this experience really drove it home for me. Apparently not enough had been made this year. I just finally scored some for myself. It is purple and said equality for women and stopping SIDA (HIV/AIDS).
The celebrations were awesome. The skit that Jege and the other women had been performing was really great. A lot of the women dressed up as men. One was a chief of the town, and another was a swaggrering mumbling drunk (chimmycaman). Jege and a stagiere (matrone in training) gave an animation on stopping female circumscion and SIDA. I thought that was really great but I was a bit confounded because, as I said to my homologue, don't you DO excisions? To which she denied doing it but I have been told by enough other people that she does, so I believe she does. I know she just knows that it is something that is so culturally difficult for me to fathom that she thinks I won't be able to get past knowing she performs them. (And she's right, it is pretty hard for me to understand.) But as another one of my friends pointed out, she may be obliged to do it. I try to reason that at least maybe she is using sterile equipment, doing it more partially . . . but when push comes to shove I really don't know.
The women also did a dance of alcoholics. Young girls did a beautiful traditional African dance that was very moving. Some other young people performed choreographed dances. People sang and lip synched. And then people ate amazing zame. The celebrations lasted all day. It was one of those days where I was filled with love and pride in Jege and in my community.
I just spent my longest stretch at site ever, and it was really good. I learned a lot more about my site. I finally talked with the doctor at my CSCOM about SIDA (HIV/AIDS). On my demand for a volunteer form, they had asked that I help increase awareness regarding SIDA, but since I had come there whenever I asked people about it they acted like it just wasn't a real problem. The awareness had all been done. But after talking more with the doctor (who is more aware of the extent of the problems of any of the other CSCOM employees because of the confidentiality factor) I feel convinced I need to take a very active role in trying to increase awareness. I hadn't wanted to beat a dead horse or focus on it when it seems there are much more immediate needs (malnutrition, lack of clean water, etc.) and it isn't anywhere near an epidemic in Mali at this point. Their levels are comparable to US levels. However, I have now faced that this is the time when it needs to be addressed.
The doctor told me there are four positive people in my town, and seven people in the surrounding brousse. He gave me the name of a SIDA anamatrice who works for ADERA (an NGO), Mata. It is her job to give animations and increase SIDA awareness in our area. He said when they go to brousse together, afterwards everyone agrees to be tested. But the problem in our town is no one will get tested. There are four positive people and only something like five people who had been tested. He said their had been one HIV/AIDS death in our community. Mata said there had been four. It is always really difficult to get definitive answers, and especially on things as sensitive as cause of death, SIDA especially.
Mata is really cool and interested in working together. We're now trying to brainstorm ways to increase awareness regarding prevention and encourage people to get tested. But naturally many people are scared of the stigma. Also, as my good friend Adama told me, there are some people who categorically refuse to believe SIDA exists. They do not believe there are some diseases for which there is no medicinal cure. At this point I am just trying to initiate conversations about SIDA. Even just telling people it exists in our community is a big starter.
I learned a lot in my last month at site. I always say there are surprises every day, and I know there probably will be until the day I leave. Its a process. It keeps things interesting, that's for sure. Tonight I am off with Jege and the other volunteers in my region for a couple more days of training, and then back to site. My parents booked my ticket, so I will be home from June 22-July 13. Can't wait to see everyone! Please send me letters!

holidays, Katlyn's visit

Hello,
Sorry its been so long since I've written. I know I really haven't been very good at staying on top of the blog. I will try to summarize the past four months. I have just finished three weeks of IST (in-service training), at Tubaniso the Peace Corps training camp. Training was good and it was fun to see all of the other volunteers again, but I am very ready to get back to my site.
Before IST, Katlyn was here for six weeks! We had a wonderful visit and we both volunteered here with the Global Smile Foundation, an NGO based in Boston that performs cleft lip surgeries on people in the developing world. They came for a week and did fifty-one surgeries. I was impressed by how much people's lives were changed within a few hours. Volunteering with them was very meaningful and it was great to have tons of other Americans to talk to who were interested in what I am doing here! They're coming back next October, and I can't wait to see everyone again! In the meantime I am starting to help them with recruiting by talking to other volunteers and their homologues (work partners), explaining the process and asking them to tell anyone they know about the organization. People are already starting to show up at my CSCOM (the doctor's office and maternity where I work)! And when Katlyn was still at my site with me, a baby with a cleft lip had just been born that day. It was really nice to be able to tell the parents, who were so upset, about the possibility of having a corrective surgery next October.
Katlyn and I had a lot of fun together, of course. We tried to go to Ghana, but only made it to Burkina because when we were in Burkina we found out that a safety and security warning had been issued by the Peace Corps, because of concerns about the results of the runoff election. We still learned a lot from our trip and had a lot of shared inside jokes/philosophies. One of mine was, if I have to be bored, (we spent 21 hours on a bus on the way there) I might as well be full. Every time the buses stopped we ran off and bought things that people were selling along the road. Both of our Fanta consumptions reached ridiculous levels. Once Katlyn was extremely excited because she thought she was buying sugarcane but it turned out to be yams, which led to our quote, "when you think life is giving you sucarcane, it may just be yams . . . but yams are still pretty great". Basically that was the metaphor for the trip: we missed out on Ghana but we still got Burkina.
We stayed with two different Burkinabe families, one in Ouaga and one in Bobo. They both took us in and treated us like family. After Burkina we joined a Peace Corps volunteer organized trip for Christmas in Dogon Country. We did an intense four day hike with a lot of other volunteers. This hike involved literally hiking up and down cliffs from 7 am until 6 pm or so with an hour and a half off for lunch. I had to do this hike in Birkenstock's and jeans because I was still packed for Ghana. There were many points along the trip where I felt it was quite possible that I could meet my death on those cliffs. Had I had any idea how physically intensive it was, I never would have agreed to do it. However, now that it is over I am really glad I did it and proud of myself. I am considering doing another Dogon hike during raining season . . . this time sans jeans and Birkenstock's, and maybe with some hiking boots.
Katlyn and I spent New Year's in Bamako, and then returned to my site for another week. We had a really great week together at site. She had been there for a couple days before, and by the second time around she had picked up more Bambara and French, she had gotten the hang of the negen and the bucket bath, and the food and even eating with her hand! She was trying to learn how to play the jembe (West African drum) so we were on a search for a teacher for her which led us down some interesting paths. We both watched a baby being born together for the first time from start to finish (it only took about fifteen minutes) and although we both had to crouch on the ground, felt nauseous and faint and cover our eyes some of the time, we both wholeheartedly agreed it was less disturbing than watching the Miracle of Birth movie in health class.
While she was there I also finally got up the nerve to talk with a woman about her child's low weight. I had been told by my homologue that the baby was malnourished, but I had had no idea the extent of it. When I realized the baby was seven months old (i had thought it was a newborn), I was horrified. When the mother took off the babies clothes to weigh him, we saw he was literally just skin and bones. His head looked abnormally large in proportion to the rest of his body. When we weighed him we saw he was under five kilos. His mother told me he is sick all the time.
I told her we were going to make ameliorated porridge together and I asked her if she was breastfeeding him. She lifted up her shirt, and pushed on her breasts (side note: breasts are not sexualized here, which as a Westerner was of course a hard idea to get used to, especially when your knees must always be covered . . . more on this later) and said she had no milk, but milk did come out . . . I encouraged her to breastfeed him and we made the porridge together. The ameliorated porridge basically just consists of adding a pounded protein that is readily available in the community (in this case peanuts) to the porridge everyone normally eats, and if available milk, sugar and lemon, to preserve it. I read to her an animation on ameliorated porridge from my PC health manual, and she understood. When the porridge was ready, Katlyn and I were both captivated by how eagerly the baby ate it . . . I was worried he would throw it up he ate it so fast. I told her to keep giving it to him, and the next day she said she had as well. It might have been my imagination, but I thought he was already starting to look a little more alert. The day after that I had to leave to go into Bamako for IST, and the morning I left I talked with her and she told me she had made more porridge that morning and that she was going to keep making it every day, and that when I came back he was going to be billybillyba (fat). Of course this made me really happy. The whole experience was very meaningful to me. I had this kind of aha feeling, like okay, this can be my role. This is a starting point. But I also know, that when I return I have to prepare myself for the possibility that this did not happen and that the baby is no bigger or worse than he was before.
Making ameliorated porridge with this woman, getting to know her and trying to understand why this baby was so severely malnourished, was the first time I did work in more of a formal sense. The Peace Corps strongly encourages that in your first three months at site you focus on integrating into your site and working on language. You are supposed to conduct various needs assessment exercises, and just sort of figure out how things work in your community, what the problems are, what the needs are, what is working really well that you can build on. You are not really allowed to begin any funded projects.
Basically from Sept.-Dec. I went to the CSCOM every day and I went to the school a lot of mornings and sat in on English classes. I tried to get closer with my homologue, Jege's family, my supervisor the president of the organization that runs of the CSCOM, Sungalo's family and my own host family. I worked on language constantly, and luckily Jege and her family were EXTREMELY patient with me. I basically existed in an almost constant state of confusion for the first few months. Of course that is extremely frustrating and requires an insane amount of patience, but its surprising how used to not knowing what is going on one can become.
Around early November all of a sudden people started understanding me, and not just the people that I dealt with all the time, but people along the street! People had been constantly saying, you don't speak Bambara, you don't understand Bambara, Bambara is easy, etc. etc., and suddenly people were saying, you speak lots of Bambara! Words don't express how happy this made me. Finally I feel like my brain is a sponge for new Bambara words and expressions, although it still takes a lot of repetition and a lot of trial and error. (As in I just mumble what I think it is supposed to sound like a couple of times and gesture, and fumble out a few French words until people get it more.)
Things are finally better with my host family/host moms. Now that my Bambara is better, things are going better. I gave Katlyn the same Malian name as my host mother which was a big honor. The third wife just had a baby, Rokia Traore, and Katlyn and I were there for her naming ceremony. We danced and ate and I gave three pagnes of fabric to Koja (the mother) as a present. Three pagnes is enough material to have a complet made.
I need to continue trying to work on my relationship with my host family, its getting better, but its slow. Little things have helped. I think as time goes on we just get more used to each other. I have to acknowledge that it is impossible to comprehend how bizarre it must have been to them when all of a sudden a toubab, unmarried, relatively wealthy twenty-three year old woman, fumbling out bad Bambara moved into their compound. I think I wrote before how we had some issues because they felt I was not working. It was and will continue to be difficult for them to understand that what I do in town is work for me. I am just not a woman in any of the senses they're accustomed to: I don't have children, I barely even know how to hold a baby and get it to stop crying (although I am getting better), I can't pound millet, I can't carry water on my head, I'm not married and I don't intent to be anytime soon . . . . But they're getting more used to me, and I think having Katlyn at my site kind of humanized me more.
I threw a dance party at our house for Katlyn's arrival which was a great success. Katlyn said it may have been the best party she has ever attended. I hired a DJ for ten thousand CFA (which is approximately twenty American dollars). One of my best friends, Bakari, Jege's son, helped me get it organized, and Katlyn and I walked around hyping the party for a few days before it. Also, when there is music and dancing in Africa, people will just come. And come they did! There were a couple hundred people there. Bakari kept insisting that Katlyn and I begin the dance party with a dance, but we just felt too awkward. Although of course there was no way around us feeling awkward. Anyway, finally him and my host sister, Marium did this dance and then the rest of the dances began.
I had assumed that the dance party would be like they are in North America: music playing, everyone, or almost everyone dancing at the same time. No, no, no. There was crowd control at this party! People started throwing water down onto the dirt/sand and a few appointed people were walking around in the circle that had formed, hitting and yelling at people who tried to cross the imaginary line. Katlyn and I were both disturbed by the hitting, and I had to speak with Bakari and say, "c'est pas necessaire", but he kept insisting it was necessary and the crowd control continued, albeit possibly being slightly subdued. People were called by Bakari and the DJ to enter the middle of the circle and do group or individual dances. Suddenly my host sister Fatumata was telling me there were toubabs at the party. I had invited my team mate Westin to come, and some of his friends from his site, so I just assumed he had brought some other toubabs, but Fati led me over to four dirty hippie toubabs who turned out to be from Argentina. They spoke a little bit of English and had come to Mali to quote, "learn to play jembe and be with the people". They drove a caravan and had decided randomly to stop at my site for the night and had just happened to stumble upon our party.
I got on the mircrophone, greeted everyone, and welcomed Katlyn (a.k.a. Sokoney Billybillyba) and the four Sud Americains . . . then the DJ, Bakari and the crowd insisted all the toubabs should do a dance. I told their dreaded (literally) leader that Katlyn and I were scared, and of course in what seems cliched South American behavior, he said, "of what? dancing? why?". Katlyn resisted more than I did which is ironic because she is a borderline professional dancer (see the Mighty Mystic's latest video on youtube) while I on the other hand was born without rhythm. We danced and then afterwards Bakari wanted me to ask the South Americans if they could sing reggae, to which one responded, "no, but we circus" which turned out to be juggling, and they had the equipment! I feel the moment he said he could juggle may have been one of the greatest moments of my life. I felt like Katlyn and I had somehow willed these hippies to show up to amuse us. They did in fact juggle much to everyone's delight.
All the other dances were spectacular. Most notably was a group of young girls that Katlyn and I felt were dancing very inappropriately, but no one else seemed horrified. Somehow I was also able to convince Katlyn to do a number with by far the best dancer there, and they did a special rendition of Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie", much to the delight of my entire town. The dance party was a big success and I am planning on having a lot more in the future.
In summary, my first three to four months at site were challenging and required a lot of patience, but they were also a lot of fun and really interesting. Every day something new happened, I figured out something else. Everything still seems at the beginning, I still have lots of new friends to make, lots more to figure out about my town. I have a surplus of ideas for projects and I am finally beginning to feel mildly competent. I am the first volunteer so I have a totally clean slate as to what I want to do, how I want to do things, who I am friends with etc. I am really excited right now to get back to my site. I feel really lucky to be in the site that I am and with the homologue that I have.
Having had all the holidays pass did make me miss being home more, and I just miss America in general daily, but my parents are currently in the process of booking a flight home for me for the end of June! I am coming home for a three week visit! Having that to look forward to, and having my mother here in just two weeks or so, as well as just having Katlyn here, makes me still really feel connected to my life at home and rejuvenates me. As do all the kind letters, e-mails, care packages and telephone calls from everyone! Thank you so much! Hope all is well in Ameriki!