A Constant Tension

At the end of my time in Mali, I picked up a book called, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice and Beauty to the World, by Paul Hawken. It is a thought-provoking and inspiring chronicle of the synergy found in the intersections of the social justice, environmental protection and human rights movements. In the intro to the first chapter, I found a quote that blew my mind. I had been trying to put into words a set of conflicting ideas and emotions, and this quote from Barry Lopez in Arctic Dreams nailed it:

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the the midst of such a paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

And from the same book:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
So much has been destroyed
I have cast my lot with those
who, age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

- poet Adrienne Rich

Home Sweet Home

I was thinking that I should take the time to let everyone know that I made it home safe and sound to Mason, MI on Aug 14th. I had a 24-hour delay in NYC, but I kept calm and polite and got a voucher for a good, free hotel as well as dinner and breakfast from Royal Air Maroc . After all, it was their fault I was going to have to stay overnight in NYC. I did not mind the giant, down pillow-top bed, flatscreen tv and free wireless internet at the hotel for my first night back in the US! I was even honestly surprised to see they had shampoo and conditioner in the bathroom waiting for me... I had forgotten all about service like that.

I will be living at my parents' house for a while, because I am not planning to start graduate school until next fall. I'm not sure where I'm going yet, and I haven't even taken the GRE. I believe I will be applying to Masters in Public Health (MPH) programs. I know, I need to get on it NOW. But I will say that I am incredibly happy spending the days out in the gorgeous countryside of Michigan this summer. If I hadn't done Peace Corps, I think I would have been disappointed in myself or bored to live here, but now I am enjoying the peace and sunshine and having my friends only a free phone call away.

A few highlights of the last couple weeks:

Riding 4-wheelers and talking for hours with Ashley Dalman, who came out from DC
Spending time in East Lansing with Lia, including drinking intriguiging new beer and going to a PlayMakers run clinic
More 4-wheelers, and kayaking on the Grand River, with Ashley McNamara and Lia
Making/eating delicious Indian food and going to a baseball game with Jason
Biking and running along the gorgeous stretches of country roads around my house
Going to Ryan and Whitney's gorgeous wedding outside of Ft. Wayne, IN (I only hope mine is someday as fun as theirs was!)

There are still lots of people I want to see and spend time with, so a trip to Grand Rapids is in order soon. Denver hopefully sometime this fall, as well... I'm excited to see my cousin Nathan and his fiancee Noel very soon and go on some adventures around Michigan with them. I'm also very happy to have the luck that one of my oldest/best friends, Lia, is almost as free as I am right now, and lives nearby :)

Life is kind of up in the air for a while, but I'm confident that I'll find a soft spot to land.

Best of luck to all my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers who are going through the same transitions I am right now, and to all of you who aren't finished yet. I'm honestly thinking about you constantly.

Bad Habits

There are certain things I've caught myself doing in the last few weeks that  have horrified me when I imagined doing them in the United States. They are completely culturally appropriate and expected here, but do not lend themselves into a graceful transition back into daily American life. 

Trash disposal:
In Mali, I simply drop whatever piece of trash happens to be in my hand at the time on the ground wherever I find myself. (Trash= anywhere not in my hand) Malians are very casual about this, and will even toss trash on the floor in my house.This rule is true for me anywhere but in Westerners' homes or workplaces. In my house, we  have several trash buckets. Away from my house, I am a dirty, rotten litterer, because there are no wastebaskets or trashcans or anything resembling public waste management anywhere. Believe me, that is a long, uphill battle in Mali. I need to re-train myself to look for trashcans before I drop that granola bar wrapper on the ground outside.

Clothing:
I have become accustomed to people who love me more when I am wearing loud "African prints" from head to toe, including a big head wrap of the same material. Also, people don't give me a second glance when I don't match at all.  Envision an orange and purple skirt with a green and yellow top. No big deal, as long as my knees are covered. I've been consulting other volunteers about clothing I've had made here to see if they think I could pull it off in the US. No big surprise that 99% gets a definitive, "No." So if you see me in the US and wonder whether I looked in the mirror before I left the house, I probably did. My sense of style has just been skewed by a culture where the brighter and flashier the better, and bold prints are the rule. I'm also going to feel slightly uncomfortable if you can see my knees...

Eating: 

Yesterday, I made a meal for myself at my house and ate it with my hands without thinking about it. Dates are going to be a challenge.

Greeting:
Greeting is a huge part of Malian culture. In Bambara, I ask how someone passed the night (peace only), how their health is (no problems), and about their various family members (they are all there, thank God) before getting down to whatever business I may have with them. In rural areas, you greet pretty much everyone you encounter. In more urban areas like Kayes, you greet people you know, and whoever catches your eye when passing. First, I need to stop greeting everyone. I seem to remember that it's considered weird to enthusiastically greet strangers in the United States? 
Second, I need to stop reflexively greeting people who have dark skin/hair/eyes in Bambara. Have you seen  the movie "Mean Girls"? There is a scene in the beginning where Lindsay Lohan's character (who has just moved to the US at age 16 after growing up in Africa) greets a group of African American girls in an African dialect. Well... I greeted some African American guests of my American friends here in Bambara the other day. They just stared at me for a minute until my friend explained to me that they were from Virginia. Embarrassing, but somewhat understandable here. Gotta rein those impulses in before I step off the plane!

In other news, I sent in my first resume/cover letter for a job in the US today, so I'm on my way down that long and arduous road... I believe I am going to be living/working in the US for at least the next few years. I also need to acquire a masters degree in Public Health (MPH) if I want to be able to have the career I'm envisioning lately. Would anyone reading this list of faux pas happen to want to hire me?  :)

K'an ben... kofe?

About a month ago now I went back to visit the village that I lived in from Sept. 2008- Oct. 2009. I tried to contact people ahead of time, but the cell phone reception is so unreliable there that I wasn't able to. Basically, I just popped back into their lives out of nowhere after quite a long time.

The house that they had built for me was still standing, and also in good condition because the school teacher is living there. Oumou Fofana and her one year old son, Papa, took me in for four days in the house I used to live in. The health clinic (CSCOM) is across the street, and I had been looking forward to spending time with the pharmacist (Serenthe Sidibe) and her family. Unfortunately, I had chosen a week when she and her daughters had left to visit her family back in Senegal. I was glad that I at least got to see her husband and my little five-year-old best friend, Bani.

The new doctor of the CSCOM was immediately annoyed with me that I did not come to spend the entire rainy season working in the village. His vocal sense of entitlement to my time and attention in turn raises the hairs on my neck.

I visited the chief of the village, Sekikolo Coulibaly. He received me as warmly as ever, joking with me and teasing me. I had come bearing gifts, and I have learned that I am to give them to him to parcel out to his enormous family. Over four days, we spent many hours sitting in his room on his wooden bed talking. I would never have felt comfortable in a similar situation with pretty much any other man here, but Sekikolo has demonstrated that he respects and cares about me like family. I was feeling brave one day, and I broached the subject of HIV/AIDS. I was surprised by how much factually correct information he knew. We talked about condoms and abstinence, but his best solution/recommendation in the end was monogamy- "one woman, one man." This was interesting to me, because he himself has five wives, which is one more than technically allowed by Islamic statues. I know that he had to marry his last wife because his older brother died, leaving her a widow. I wonder if he had had a real choice culturally how many wives he would have taken. I'm just glad that information has filtered out to this little village, and that people are starting to open up about talking about HIV/AIDS.

Very much related to this, I visited my friend Bakoro Coulibaly. She is an older woman who is very on involved in community life. I feel extremely comfortable at her house with her family, and she needs little excuse to sing and/or dance.

She was a pivotal player in the projects I did with the Health Committee in the village, and since I have been gone she had been chosen by an NGO to receive further training in the health subjects of family planning and HIV/AIDS. Her face lit up as she told me what she had learned about how reproduction works and how (biologically) babies are made.  I asked her, "You never knew how babies were made before this training?" and she, a woman in her fifties, shook her head. She enjoys learning, and she is respected enough in the community to broach sensitive subjects. She took me in her house to show me a wooden trunk full of birth-control pill packs and condoms that were given to her to sell in the village. I praised her up and down and encouraged her as well as my Bambara would allow. I am being replaced in this village by a new volunteer in September, and I have designated Bakoro as his/her work counterpart. I am delighted that women are being given information that can help them make decisions in their own interest about their bodies and their lives.

I did two Neem Cream demonstrations while I was there: one with the women of the Health Committee, and the other with the staff of the CSCOM.

I wanted to have a "State of the Union" meeting with the entire Health Committee, but there were marriages the whole time and many people would have been unable to attend. I talked to many of the committee members to prepare them for the idea of having a new volunteer- stressing that the new volunteer will need friends to help them adjust and learn. I was the first volunteer, and I sincerely believe that the next volunteer will have a much better experience. My time there was not perfect by any means, but I did identify a group of people to work with (Health Committee) and a much better homologue than the one I was assigned (Bakoro!).

As my time comes to an end, I am feeling very philosophical about my two years here. It will take me a while to process my experience and identify the ways in which I have changed. I am looking forward to having the people who know me well back in the US walk with me through that. Please be patient as I stumble my way through trying to articulate my thoughts and feelings. After having met a group of RPCVs (returned Peace Corps volunteers) who have traveled back to Mali, I wonder whether I will end up here again someday.

Also, the group of Peace Corps volunteers that I've bonded with and relied on for the last two years is slowly trickling its way out of the country over the next few months. It's strange to know that our experiences are so closely tied together, but I may never see many of them again. I will miss you guys, and I look forward to seeing where life takes you.

I think she might be on to something...

"Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends."
Maya Angelou

I only LOOK contagious!

I would like to describe to you the absurd situation I found myself in last night.

To begin, an uncomfortable condition called "heat rash" is a distinct possibility in Mali's unrelenting climate. Miraculously, last year I didn't get it at all. The hot season is on its way out, but Kayes is still the hottest place in Mali. Everywhere else it has rained quite a bit, which also means that it has cooled down. Not Kayes!!!

I will write about all of these things in the next post, but in the last three weeks I went on an AIDS awareness bike tour, spent time in the village I used to live in, and attended our PC "Close of Service" conference. I had red, bumpy splotches on my fore-arms and chest off-and-on for those three weeks. I was in and out of air-conditioning the whole time. The itchy bumps would disappear when I was in air-conditioning for long enough, and re-appear whenever I was outside for longer than an hour.

I took the 9 hour  bus (without air-conditioning) back to Kayes yesterday, growing increasingly more uncomfortable. By the time I arrived in Kayes, I had an angry, red rash on my hands and up my arms, on my shoulders, neck, back, stomach, upper thighs and face. If anyone has ever run into a patch of stinging nettle plants, that is what it felt like. It isn't a constant pain like sunburn, but it's triggered when your clothes shift, something touches you, or your skin stretches. Basically, I wanted to be completely naked and not moving. That night I didn't sleep, because everytime I moved in my sleep a large swath of my skin started stinging.

The treatment for heat rash is:
Keep cool
Take frequent showers and gently exfoliate the skin, because heat rash is essentially blocked sweat pores
Coat yourself in baby powder or Gold Bond to keep the skin dry and protected
Loose clothing
Oatmeal or baking powder cool baths

I have no air-conditioning, and the water that comes out of my shower is hot (and not adjustable), because wherever it is coming out of is hot (underground, in the sun, I don't know). Air temp is 105 degrees in the shade with a fan. To go anywhere, I have to bike. Biking= sweating! By the end of the day yesterday, I was so uncomfortable I wanted to cry. I tried briefly to do some yoga, but couldn't handle having the mat touch my skin.

At 7:30 last night, I started to fill up the bath tub. I grabbed the little baking soda I have and dumped it in. I also grabbed four frozen 1.5 liter water bottles and plopped them in the warm water. I dumped in some oatmeal and moved the fan to blow directly on me. I tried my best to submerge myself and willed myself to cool down. My face was still stinging, so I found myself mixing some oatmeal with water and rubbing it on my face. I didn't even know if it would help. I was just desperate. I did the same on my neck and shoulders. And then I sat, with the melting water bottles floating around me. I rinsed off, prayed, and went to sleep.

I still have heat rash, but today it is only annoying instead of screaming for attention. The oatmeal incident was worth it, and I'll probably do it again tonight :)

Less than two months until I'm back in the US, y'all!

Amazing Earth

I'm at the Bamako Peace Corps stage house right now, and I was sitting with another volunteer who had put on the Discovery Channel's "Planet Earth" desert episode. The Malian woman who cleans the stage house started to hover near the wide-screen plasma TV when she saw elephants. Then it switched to camels in the Gobi desert who were eating snow.

She says: Are those camels eating ICE???
Me: Yes they are.
She replied with an astonished, mouth wide-open, "huhhhhh...."

Then the camera zooms out to a wide angle view of the Earth.

"What is that?" she says.
"It's the earth- the whole thing," I reply.
Her face belies her confusion and I grab a necklace off the table with big, round beads to explain that this is the shape of the earth- the entire thing- round! She re-iterates it to me in Bamabara, and I know that she has seen a glimmer of the big picture.

Chameleons, snakes and the process of erosion follow onscreen, all to a chorus of, "Huhh?" and "ahhh" and other surprised noises. She is called away to work, and she leaves, saying in Bambara, "I have seen many things today!"


If only these types of educational shows were shown on national television here and translated in French and Bambara, it would produce an entirely different citizenry. Imagine a Mali where everyone knew the shape of the earth, the placement of continents and the science of natural processes just from watching tv. Instead, they have Brazilian soap operas dubbed in French and a never-ending supply of big, out-of-tune screaming traditional griot perfomances. Sure they have public-service announcements about malaria and AIDS, but what if entertainment could double as education here in Mali as it does successfully in so many places in the world?

This has been a question that I've been asking myself since I arrived here: How did I learn what I know?
How did I learn about nutrition? Why do I know about different systems of government? How did I learn how to interact with people who are different from me respectfully and gracefully?

In the United States, I grew up with such incredible access to information: my educated parents, decent public schooling, frequent visits to my local library, supplemental community classes, the newspaper, television (Bill Nye the Science Guy, anyone?) movies and the INTERNET.

Imagine if your parents never went to school, couldn't afford a television or radio, and there were no newspapers available, let alone the internet. What kind of understanding of the world would you have growing up? What if nothing changed with your generation?

I have come to believe that access to information is CRUCIAL to development, and to improving the standard of living of everyone on the planet. When people have no information, it is often difficult for them to make choices that are in their own self-interest. I am grateful beyond belief for the level of access to information I can expect daily simply because I am literate (and also computer literate!).

I believe that you don't need to make peoples' choices for them, but you do need to provide them with information concerning those choices. Without information, there is no real choice.