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!