In for the long stretch

We leave in 15 minutes for the long stretch of our pre-service training. This will be a stint of 3 weeks at our homestay, receiving more language training and finally some SED technical stuff.

So, forgive me for not being around to send messages for a bit. My homestay site DOES have great cell phone service and that means that you should call me/message me, preferably in the late evening my time (7:30 pm or after Malian time-- 4 hours ahead of EST). The only reason you wouldn't get me is if I haven't been able to charge my phone.

During this time I plan to start making the connections and building the relationships that I will need for the next 2 years. Since my homestay is only 8 km from my actual site, a lot of the resources I will need will be based at my homestay on the main road. Bringing the surrounding communities together will both help me to integrate and help the local economy to grow.

Miss you all! Thanks for the messages, comments, and birthday wishes.

I only have 10 fingers,

but this guaranteed that 10 children "held my hand" as they accompanied me around my new town. That being said, I felt more like the child-- having no idea where I was and mostly unable to speak in my new language. I played, I don't know how many games of cards and danced to random drumming in the street almost every night. Check out my awesome house-- it has two rooms. The bathroom is the building in the back to the left. And then I get a sweet hangar to chill outside. The previous volunteer said that she was able to sleep outside most nights during the hot season when the tin roof makes the house more like an oven than actual living space. The spiders, however, will always be present and I can't wait to overcome my fear. Ugh. I don't even want to look at this picture right now.

My time in brousse (at my small site) was difficult the first few days. Adjusting to the fact that the people I met would be my community for the next two years of my life in Mali, for better and for worse. After the first few days though, it was definitely for the better. Once the townspeople realized that I was a new person to be living, with them for a while, I think the initial questions began to wear off. And thank goodness, because I was tired of being awoken not 10 minutes after I had told them I was going to lie down, tired of responding to the previous volunteer's name and tired of being treated as if I were incapable of doing anything. And of course, these situations came about only because the Malian people are so welcoming and might not appreciate privacy and quiet as much as Americans do. It's that genuine care that I valued more than the minutes of silence. My backyard is also absolutely beautiful, with two large cottonsilk trees. They remind me of Pocahontas and make me more than happy every time I wake up. Directly behind my house is a cornfield which turns into a field for the grazing of animals like the sheep, goats, and an occassional donkey.

My thoughts about development were definitely challenged my week at site. I think that there has to be some great compromise waiting to happen between the cultures of the world. Neither group of us can keep going the way we are without self-destructing. In so many instances, we seem to be on polar opposite sides of the same question, with each of us struggling to find the answer. In both cases, people are suffering: some right now, some a few weeks or months from now and some a long time from now. I don't mean to be apocalyptic, but I don't see how postponing/ignorning/separating ourselves from the suffering makes it any less real or painful. The responsible to ourselves is a responsibility to those around us-- and everyone else.

I got to celebrate my 22nd birthday by returning to Bamako and eating a 4 cheese pizza. It has to be one of the most delicious things I have tasted since living in Mali. Cheese = love. Someone should send me some Velveeta, pronto. Everyone was truly fantastic back at our training village-- they sang happy birthday and the cooking staff prepared some pretty good cake. I'm not the youngest person in our group... she turned 22 today :-) So I beat her by two days. Regardless, I felt that today was my real birthday celebration.

We started the day by travelling to one of the stellar shea nut butter production places in Mali. Since I will be working with the women's association in my village, we will be trying to improve the quality of the shea produced and then finding market for it. The day was seriously encouraging and fun fun fun. My friend Caroline and our Assistant SED trainer helped with the beating process in which the shea butter begins to separate from the other part of the ground up nut.

After the presentations, we got to visit some fabulous sites in the area. Waterfall, rock formations, and hiking made the day just great.

Tea for twenty and two kinds of tea

Tea
I'm learning the best techniques to making the immense amounts of foam necessary for real Malian tea. And by tea, I mean tea flavored sugar with foam. Everyone drinks this sweet tea all the time-- it's a great excuse to just hang out and share stories with family and friends. There are three rounds of tea per pot, two shot-sized glasses used, and everyone shares. I get the other tea for breakfast each morning. It's lipton and it's so cute that they pronounce it lip-tone. The concept of "communal" extends to everything, from a small lollipop shared by all of the children in my concession (walled in group of multiple families/houses) to articles of clothing and our dinner plates. The picture is from our training center of our first attempt to eat from the communal bowl with our hands. This is how I eat dinner every night in homestay-- no utensils unless it's a liquid. I do like sharing, but we've been told to be careful what it is that we're sharing, considering that sicknesses are other things that get passed around. But for more good news, I haven't gotten sick yet! Knock on wood, but I think that I have even adjusted to the food. Granted, I've been spoiled beyond belief by my family, but I seem to be one of the few that have made it this far without a trip to the medical unit.

My homestay

I know that you have been anxiously awaiting details about the family with whom I've been staying the past few weeks and it comes down to this: They are AMAZING. I'm very very lucky to live with a family in a concession of people who are more than patient with my struggling Bambara language skills... of course I'm guessing this is because my stumbling along can be pretty entertaining at times. As Mali is approximately 90% Muslim, my homestay family is as well. The Islamic faith allows for a man to take multiple wives and my homestay father has two, one of whom I'm named after and the other who has taken me on as both a daughter and a friend.
Speaking of my name, I didn't know what it was for the first two days at my homestay. Children here usually take their father's last name and keep it forever. Women do not take their husband's name. Therefore, I assumed that my last name was my homestay father's and not my host mother's. When they said that my name was Majo Bagayogo (pronounced Ma-jo, with a nasalized a), I thought that it was one word, and that overwhelmed me. I figured it out when my brother wrote it out for me as two separate names. One of my nieces then henna-ed my hand (see picture), with my mispelled name, but I didn't care because it was gorgeous! This is also the niece who was at the donkeyoro (dance club) with me on a Monday and gave birth to a lovely baby boy on that Friday. Fantastic.

I sigi!!

"YOU, as a guest, HAVE TO SIT HERE, NOW!" It's been fun being a guest and not so fun, as we are expected to sit around to be looked at and touched for hours on end. Of course, not exclusively, and now I'm able to defer some of the attention by offering to help, but I cannot escape being offered the best seat in the joint, wherever that may be and regardless of the others who could also be sitting in that chair. I actually prefer sitting on a mat when I can and my Bambara is improving quickly enough that I can now politely turn down the offered seat and pop a squat on the nearing kuru (small stool).

Our town is very pretty right now-- the rainy season ensures that it stays super green. Although we've missed the official mango season, the trees are everywhere and the fruits still taste delicious to me! Both corn and peanuts will be harvested within the upcoming months and I cannot wait for it to be avocado season!

Learning Bambara (Bamanankan kalan in Bambara) is great and take place in the school yard of the local high school. This picture is actually of the 5 students at our homestay village taking French, but just imagine three of us doing the exact same thing. We study for approximately 6ish hours every day and then practice it when we return to our families. That being said, I'm so impressed with our group: after studying Bambara for only 3 weeks, we all speak Bambara at least to the same level, if not higher, than our French!! Crazy! This is great considering that we are about to head out to places that will speak even less French.

The eight of us at our homestay village get along incredibly well and I can't believe that soon I won't have this group to lean on/play cards will all the time. Our placements are distributed throughout the country. We cooked dinner together the other night with help from our Language and Culture Facilitators (LCFs). We killed, plucked, cooked and ate the rooster in the picture to the right. We bought it the day before at the market and so it spent the night at my friend's house in her coop. The funny story about the chicken is that earlier on the market day we had been discussing what we needed to cook our own dinner-- things like which veggies, seasonings, etc. On our way to the market, we were also deciding who was going to buy what materials so spread out the work of bargaining. One of our LCFs was going to help with the purchasing of the chicken, since we had absolutely no idea. In jest, we started throwing out ridiculous numbers of chickens that we would get, so I said something like "how about 15 so that we each get 1 1/2 of a chicken?" Well, we all reconvened after making our purchases and Elizabeth tells the story of helping to buy the rooster that was then tied to a pole outside our teachers' house.

It was later in the afternoon and the sellers in the market were starting to leave. Our LCF had to actually ask the person with the chickens to get them out of the coop already attached to the top of a public transportation van/bus (called a bache). Elizabeth waited patiently while our LCF did the bargaining. She was handed one chicken... and then another, and another until she holding 7 chickens by the feet. At this point, she doesn't want to interrupt, but thankfully she did and asked if they were decided which one to get. "I thought we were getting 13 for all of us," said our LCF, and Elizabeth quickly answers, "No, no no no! One will be plenty!"

We all got a good laugh out of this and have since learned that our sarcasm still may be hard to understand after a spending a few weeks with well-trained LCFs... and that we need to take care to be clear in our communication. One chicken was more than enough work to prepare and adequate for the delicious pasta sauce that we made. And now I know how to kill and cook a chicken. We'll save those pictures for later.

The next big step/ride

Tomorrow morning I ship out to the actual site where I will end up for the next two years after I swear in on September 12th. The picture is of the group of futher PC volunteers to live and work in the Sikasso region. Today I met my homologue, or the person who will be my main contact in the village where I live. I'll spend a week there and get my first introduction to the town and their people. Although no volunteer has actually been placed at this site before, one volunteer did her last 6 months starting some projects from her site a few km away. My house is newly renovated and I can't wait to check it out! I'm a bike ride away from my current homestay village, which is also our market town, so I will be able to visit my homestay family all of the time or whenever I'm traveling away from/ back to my town. The wife of one of my homestay brothers was raised in my new town and has told me a few people to visit once I get there.