What do you do? Why do you do it?

Sorry folks, sorry for the break in posting! It has not been for a lack of things to say, but merely a lack of a computer as a means to say things. I offer the photo, left, from the Fouta region of Guinea, as proof of my absence

When compared to the developed world, I have rather large communication gaps--no internet, phone, or print material until the next major city. Sure, this is an occasional nuisance, but my living situation does have one up side: I was granted a village...on the paved-road(!).

Yes, in my situation, you take what you can get.

But take a 10 minute walk on the 5 foot wide dirt path to my other village. While not far in proximity, there is something distant about the village as a whole: there are no stores, no school, no mosque, no televisions, and perhaps 2 or 3 mopeds in the 300 person village. The most elderly woman in this village, never venturing to the paved road, speaks a slightly different kind of Bambara than my own neighbors.  And the village doesn't even recognize French when they hear it.

Several months into my service, my friends from this village invited me to the Animist celebration just before rainy season. I was having a pretty good time, watching one of my friends paint with mud onto white cloth for the upcoming celebration. That is until her kid presented a recently cut and bloodied toe. "Give that to me!" the child's mother shouted at no one in particular. She yanked the child's foot towards her, and rubbed some mud into his wound, then told him to go off and play.  She sat there, clearly contented, while I was not surprisingly stunned and shocked. I asked around to find out if this was normal--"well, sure, you need to stop the blood, and dirt does exactly that. After all, we are black, you are white, you use soap, and we use dirt."

Since that first encounter, I've discovered that it is not unheard of for an Animist to rub mud in an open wound, use chanting to excise a "bad spirit," perform a sacrifice for revenge, or to push upward on the roof of a child's mouth when she is very dehydrated. My Animist village also doesn't treat their water or sweep their living areas regularly. In fact, my own village reels at their poor habits:"They drink to excess, they eat dog meat. They are Bambara and therefore dirty!" This is what my predominantly Muslim and Christian village says when I asked why they did not rub dirt into open wounds.

So what is it that makes my two villages so different?



Quite simply, my village is on a major road. There are always truck drivers who stop in my village for gas or for the call to prayer, city-dwellers who come from for market, and NGO workers or tourists driving to Kayes and Dakar.  Their Land Rovers are always fogged from the air-conditioned interior. Village-locked residents chat with truck drivers, see and buy goods from outside vendors, and gawk at the white NGO workers. Twenty years ago, Protestant missionaries stopped along every village on the main road. Fifty years ago, Catholic missionaries stopped in every village on the main road. Many many years ago, Muslims came south from the Middle-East to spread Islam...again on most of the main travel routes through Mali. While most of my village is too poor to go anywhere, the paved road alone has Westernized certain tastes, attitudes, and beliefs in my village. Likewise, most messages about health and hygiene have resulted from a Coca-Cola ad or a religious missionary, not from a doctor or a vaccinator-- everything is a result of imitation (proper behaviour) and not information (proper knowledge).

The post-modernist in me hears Edward Said groaning at every action which has been broken into racially coded oppositions: black verses white, rich verses poor, science verses spirituality, clean verses dirty, good verses heathenistic.

And of course me and my thoughts are part of this Western-construction too. I have been raised since infancy to value rationality over religion, to judge the clean and well groomed as morally better than the dirty and unkept. Think of your own childhood and how you were trained to wash your hands--it was not until much much later when you learned the reasons for your behaviour.


I've had to remind myself that there's nothing inherently clean about religion, or dirty about a lack thereof. My Animist friends have constructed themselves in opposition to white people and Theists, and all those behaviours and attitudes that I also endorse. But how to explain handwashing and sanitation in terms that are not from a rich,white, Western paradigm, but rather, from terms that can be considered universal?

"Children shouldn't die," I tell them. "And in general, people shouldn't needlessly suffer. I don't care what you are or how you are living. You can roast kittens on spits and believe in any number of benevolent spirits, or even no sort of spirit if that makes sense to you. But I know that children should not die. I know that dirty water and dirty hands make my stomach hurt, that uncleansed wounds often don't heal properly. And no belief or disbelief in a God or Gods will change our own shared observations and experience."

My adult-women friends are still skeptical of soap and sanitation. True, I myself coming from a position of faith in observation and experience, another sort of religion to which they are only just beginning to understand. But the kids are unbiased, open to the strange habits of what seems impossible--me, a poor white person who eats African food, wears African clothes, and lives in an African house!
"Fatim washes her hands with soap," they shout, splashing the soapy water before eating. "She says it kills the bad spirits!"

I laugh to myself. I think that actually, their explanation isn't so far off the mark after all.