where i have been and what i've been doing

Ok so it’s been a while, I’m sorry to all of my faithful fans. Life in Mali has been going… Let’s see the last time I updated was after Thanksgiving, since then village life has had it ups and down. My homologue’s wife and probably my best female friend in village, Alima, gave birth to their first child. With the exception of one or two woman people have finally stopped saying it’s my baby, apparently Alima can be pregnant for nine months and endure a morning of labor and because I’m always with Abdoulaye, the baby is mine… also the babies are born very white here so they were like, look she’s white just like you! Anyway I was in Bamako when it happened, so I was kind of disappointed because I wanted to go with her to the clinic when she was in labor but they called me up after in happened. It was funny because before I left Alima said they she would have the baby before I got back and I was like no way, you’re only like 7 months pregnant, she told my calculations were off but by the size of her I didn’t believe it. Sure enough, it happened and the baby, named Masha, was really small, she’s still on the small size but definitely getting bigger, she drinks a lot of breast milk so I think she will be alright. She was born on December 4th.

After that we had seliba, or tabaski, the biggest Muslim fete. It was a lot of fun, three days of non-stop tea drinking, macaroni and meat eating, radio listening, chatting with friends, while in your best duds, fun. I missed out on going to the praying place with all my villagers, apparently the white girl’s absence was noted, when I came around to greet later in the day the really old village chief said he didn’t see me there and had thought I was traveling. No, we were just up till three drinking tea the night before…

Myself and nine other volunteers spent Christmas at a volunteer’s village in the Segou region. Her host family and a lot of the village is Christian, so we ate pig, went to church and us the volunteers had a gift exchange. Big props to Christy for putting up with all of us at site, it’s hard to have so many visitors in village.

New Years I made my first trip to Segou-ville where I visited the lovely riverside home of a fellow volunteer. Lots of fun drinking and dancing, it’s good to get a break from Malian life sometimes. I don’t think I liked Segou too much. People were really rude and the kids were horrible. I guess they get a lot of tourists and are used to harassing tourists. But down here in Sikasso, there are hardly ever any tourists and the people are mainly nice or just apathetic. But I was glad to see another Malian city. I’ve been here over a year and hadn’t seen anything besides Sikasso and Bamako. But that’s all about to change…

Emily is coming to visit in less than 48 hours as we speak. I’m really excited to have a visitor, especially a really cool one like Emily. She’s going to be here for a while so I’m going to introduce here to Malian village life, and finally do a bit of traveling in Mali (dogon country and Gao?), and possibly a trip to Senegal.

So what the heck are you actually working on in Mali, you may be asking yourself right now? Well after many set backs the first part of my sanitation project is finished. We built 45 soak pits in my village. I may have explained it before but basically a soak pit is a big hole filled with rocks that catches all of the dirty run-off water from latrines. It is then covered with plastic and dirt so that the waste cannot be seen. There is also a piece of pvc piping that leads into the pit from the latrine area so the water is completely contained, thus stopping the problem of yucky stagnate sewage water in our streets and behind our houses. What was formerly an eyesore, mosquito breeding ground and health hazard is no longer seen. Next up is building three wash areas. Basically cement slabs with a tiny wall, and a connecting soak pit. These will be located near the pumps so that when women wash their clothes they will have a clean area to do it and a proper sanitary way to dispose of the water. We bought 12 bags of cement and got lots of rocks, sand, and gravel and luckily Emily will get to be here, so she will be able to see how projects work in Mali!!!

I just yesterday got the money to send a woman from our village to school to become a trained matron. This is really exciting for the villagers and Jene herself, who will be spending a year in Sikasso in order to be a certified health aid/matron. She’s been studying since the beginning of the month and seems to be doing well. It’s a big sacrifice on her part, she being the only wife in her concession, has a lot of responsibilities at home, but the village picked her to become our matron and her husband agreed, so she will be here for a year studying. As for the construction of the actual maternity, still no word back, although the word is they committee doesn’t meet till the end of this month. I submitted the project proposal to the US Embassy’s Self-Help project fund. Let’s hope for the best…

I’m still teaching at the school once a week, this has probably been the most rewarding and challenging project, the kids can be really difficult but sometimes they are so bright and beautiful. Still playing soccer with the girls, they love it but they can be a big pain sometimes with the constant bickering. It’s also been kind of difficult explaining techniques and skills to a sport, especially in Bambara.

I’m also trying to get the third pump in our village fixed. The villagers have approached me with their desire for a whole new water system with a water tour and taps. After some research I have decided that it is really not what the village needs, it’s incredibly expensive around 100,000 USD and the village is just not big enough. They can still meet all of their needs with pumps, so I told the chief what we really need to work on is fixing pumps and maintaining them, and maybe adding another pump to the village down the road.

As part of my sanitation project I really wanted to clean up the standing pump run-off water, but there were many things we didn’t think about before we wrote p the project asking for money. Because the area around the pump is all dirt the run off water is a lot of mud, so building a soak pit will not be efficient because it will get clogged up with mud. What we really needed to do was get enough cement to build a wall and floor around the pump to ensure a higher quality of sanitation around the pump itself so that the run off water would be for the most part clean and easily seeps into the ground. I may seek out some extra funs to see if we can get this done before I leave.

I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about the actual school in my village, I’m going to take some pics to show you, it’s really sad and dilapidated, it’s one of those typical schools you see when they show pictures of poor African schools. Three of the buildings are in ruins so a few years back they made a mud brick class room and the first graders meet there. The second graders also meet in a mud brick room, of which I have no clue of its initial purpose. In the existing cement building the third and fourth graders meet in the same classroom and the fifth and sixth graders each meet in their own classrooms. The point of this is that the government has been promising to build a new school for them for several years now. Right before the presidential elections last year ATT(Mali's prez) said the school would be built in 18 months, it's almost been a year now and nothing....

I’m still trying to find a financer to buy books for the school. We wrote up a PC project proposal but my village couldn’t meet the percentage of community contribution required, so let me know if you have any ideas, or know of any project that want to spend about 3,000 USD on school books. It’s really sad at this point, because there are only a few old copies of books and the kids can’t take them home or actually even use them at all, the teachers write the whole text on the board so the kids can copy it into their cahiers (notebooks).

Ok let’s leave this blog entry on a high note. As you may or may have not heard, the African Cup of Nations is well underway. What does his mean you ask? It means that everyday between the hours of 5-9 none of the young men in village are seen in town; they are all located in front of the few black and white (horrible quality) small televisions in town. Tonight will be the decisive match between Mali and Cote d’Ivoire, and will be sure to provide much excitement into Malian village life. Allez les Aigles!!!