"Did you sleep well last night?" Just another day

Before I head out, I'll talk a little bit about how mundane things are done, for example, a shopping day. You forget how much is involved in a culture until you begin to think about the process by which everything gets done.

We get at least one day in our regional city (in my case the capital) to get things we can't get once we're at site (various western food items, furniture, clothes, etc). Even though the volunteer I'm replacing left me about five skirts, I started my morning set on getting my own skirt made.

First, I went to the market (sugu). A big market (suguba) like in Bamako has everything a Malian needs for daily use: produce, eggs, meat (yes I've seen animals killed/plucked/hacked to pieces before my very eyes), bowls, shoes, clothes, hardware, and yes, fabric. Buying anything requires greeting (Hello, how are you? how's your family? did you sleep well?) before actually proceeding to the purpose of the transaction. I asked the fabric lady the price, which she stated, and since I went through the proper channels (greeting, speaking in Bambara) she didn't try to rip me off. Later in the afternoon I did have to bargain much harder for a chair.

With fabric in hand, I asked her where the tailor was. She pointed about 4 stalls down and over where I found two men each sitting at those old metal sewing machines. Again, I went through the proper greetings, then to make things easy, I pulled out another voluteer's skirt with a cut I liked and asked for the same thing. I was unsure of my Bambara at the end of my sentence, so I inadvertantly switched to the French phrase for "same thing." He asked if I knew French, and we chatted briefly about how yes, I knew some French but, little by little, I was trying to improve my Bambara and not use French.

At this point I asked a price. Pricing at first is a little bit of a nightmare: the smallest CFA coin is 5 CFA. Therefore, in Bambara, 5 CFA is referred to by the word for 'one.' Yes, this means that the word for 100 CFA is 'twenty', and 500 CFA is 'one hundred', etc. Malians think it is absurd that we stand there quickly multilpying or dividing by five: they don't realize they're not saying the number on the coin, so to them it's just like counting and not mental arithmetic. To make it more complicated, everything is bargained, so nothing has a 'formal' price: you can't pull a "look at the price tag because I don't know what you're saying" in Mali. Now, I've memorized most benchmark amounts or at least know about how much something should cost so I can guess--I can tell what cab ride distance is keme fila (1000 CFA) and most produce/food items are around mugan (100 CFA). But for large purchases or things where I don't have a price I'm aiming for, it still gets hairy. The tailor first stated the price for me in Bambara, broke it down into my memorized units when I looked puzzled, then stated it in French so I was certain of the price. After we agreed on the price, he told me to come back in three hours.

One folded piece of fabric will make a skirt called a tafe. Nearly every women in Mali wears this kind of skirt which is simply a huge rectangle of fabric tied around you and tucked in the waist like a bath towel. For a little more, you get fabric sewn on the ends in order to actually tie the thing around your waist. Two pieces of fabric, and you can get a complet made, or a matching top and bottom. I inherited a complet in this great teal fabric--















And then my family made me a complet from the independence day fabric for this year...














...which was just yesterday. I love the grassroots-ness of the independence day fabric, or the day to end violence against women fabric. I picked out the above blue and orange this morning since it reminded me of UVA.

Three hours later, I returned and he was just finishing up. Again, I greeted, and as I praised his work, he asked me and my friend's name. She stated first that she was a Traoure, at which point he said "did you eat your beans this morning?" I chimed in that she also drank her toilet water, confirming that, like him, I was a Diarra, Traoure's joking cousin. Even later in the day when I walked past him, he shouted "Diarra!" at me, and the women he was helping shouted "she's good!", affirming that she was a Diarra too. Such was my morning of buying from start to finish a skirt.

At site, I will work at my village's clinic or CSCOM: to start with, I'll go in for about 4 hours three times a week to observe, ask questions, chat with people that come in, etc. In afternoons on opposite days, I'll work with my language tutor to improve my Bambara.

Now I know you're sitting there saying, "ok, what about the rest of the time?"

Time, outside of the 5 call to prayer times (dawn, noon, 2, 4, dusk), really isn't that important. Most places of work "start" at 8am. That means about 8:45. In an office, meeting, anything formal, there is ALWAYS a pause cafe (coffee break) from 10-10:30. Noon is lunch/prayer call/tea, at which point work doesn't resume until 2:30. That means about 3. Which means, yes, you only work until the next prayer call and so the day just kind of putters out.

By this description, it looks like there aren't too many working hours in a day...which is somewhat true. There's quite a bit of sitting around doing nothing time in Mali, and Malians don't see anything wrong with that. But this sentiment is only "somewhat" true since in Mali, when things "get done" they "get done" more often through informal connections then anything ever in an office-- especially with what my work will be. Case in point, my homestay mother exercised huge influence in my homestay community: she knew when every marriage, baptism, or funeral was because she rented out chairs and showed up at most social events. So when I asked her if she could have some people over for us Health Volunteers to practice our health presentations, I came home to a concession full of about 10 members of the Sonraii Women's Association. Since every member of that organization took her seriously, they took me seriously too and tried to be as helpful as possible with my stumbling Bambara.

Likewise, I was specifically assigned to this site to work the school kids aged between ages 9-12. My language tutor is a teacher at the school. His wife is the matrone at the CSCOM and my work counterpart.

In conclusion, what will I be "doing?" As far as "doing," I will be walking into familys' compounds one by one, sitting for a few hours, drinking lots of tea, and asking, "how things are going? Did you sleep well last night?"

Coming to you from Moribabougou...













Fata on the left and Alliou on the right, host brother and sister.
















This was everyone from my family I could round up at that moment. That's about half of the people who regularly live in/sleep in/ come in and out of our concession. The serious default is just an African thing: they all really do smile.













My host mother. That's me on the left.


My host mother, Fatimata, is president of a Moribabougou Women's Association and is generally important community member, if nothing else because she's incredibly old: few things outrank the respect you get from age in Mali, and nothing, not even a married man with four wives, can pull rank on you if you're older.

Briefly,

I've been busy working toward my language exam, but I thought I'd comment on the recent news stories about Mali--mostly, the severe flooding in West Africa.

Rainy season is nearly over, but for about two weeks, it thunderstormed every night, flooding my family's compound every now and again and sections of street. People here respond to rain a little bit how the US southeastern seaboard responds to snow: everyone stops everything and just sits at home, fearful of venturing out. My family looked at me like I was crazed when it was just letting up rain, and said "you're going to school in this??" And rightly so: two of our side streets where flooded out, and you don't want to walk through standing water for risk of some water borne parasite. Weakly built houses also have a tendency to collapse in on themselves (I checked my family's house after some houses fell in and was pleases to see they spent the extra money for secure metal beams and attachments over wooden beams and leather to tie boards together. If it rains particularly hard or for a long time, the electricity and/or phone grid is also cut, making venturing into flooded streets even more treacherous. In the southern regions of Mali (Kayes, Kouilkoro, and Sikasso), the soil or rivers can accomodate the influx of water. In the northern regions where there's only sand, entire roads are submerged under water because there's no place for the water to go. On site visit, most of our volunteers in the the northern regions had trips which involved sitting on top of the bus while the driver drove through standing water. Or actually getting out to help push the bus/car through water.

The other most relevant hazard of rainy season, other than property damage due to flooding, is that malaria will tend to be worse: more standing water equals more mosquitos. Just before I left my homestay, one of my younger sisters was sick. The word for malaria is the same thing for chills and fever, so you can never be sure if when they say "sumaya" it really is malaria. But her low-grade fever, general malaise, and the fact that I know she doesn't sleep under a mosquito net makes it pretty likely that she does have malaria. Nearly everone here has malaria to some extent. But malaria contributes to why the age five and under mortality rate here is the highest is the world: you're either strong enough to just live with the malaria, or you just don't make it. She's six. I'm terrified if when I go back and visit my homestay family in december if she'll still be there.

Fortunately, rainy season seems to be nearly over. Clouds have been coming through every night, but it no longer thunderstorms--although you can still see the lighting far away, so someone somewhere is still getting rain. Rainy season is followed my mini hot season, and then by october/november, the winds come off of the desert and it's cold season.

Just because it's rainy season doesn't mean the sun don't shine. Old toenail paint-job courtesy of my younger sister, Fata.