Babies-R-Us

One of our program objectives is to increase the level of nutrition and improve health in the villages we will be targeting the next five years.  In order to measure whether or not our program activities will help achieve that (in 5 years) we have to measure children under 5 today in order to get [...]

Playing the field

I’ve worked the past 6 weekends in a row, but I’ve never been happier being in the ‘office’.  After six strenuous weeks of planning, we are finally getting ready to go to field to begin our ‘real’ work.
Beginning this Saturday I will be going out to the field (the field=the villages where we will be [...]

Girls Just Want to Have Fun

This year in Mali, Eid (the holiday celebrating the last day of Ramadan) and the first day of school were only a week apart.  Lucky for the girls, the proximity of these two important events helped their mothers justify spending money to style their daughters’ hair.  Lucky for me, I get to look at the [...]

A Wrinkle in Time

 
I wouldn’t have been surprised had Moses or Jesus crossed my path yesterday.  In fact, I was kind of expecting it.  In addition to being made entirely out of mud and sand, the sandcastle city that is Djenne, nestled between a river and a flood plain, requires one to take a ferry to even get [...]

Sandcastle City

There are only a few places that exist in the world that give you a shock as you enter; places where your skin crawls with wonder and intrigue while your mind tries to sort out some kind of logic in the magic.
Djenne is one magical town.  Recently declared a Unesco World Heritage Site, the city [...]

Nikes on a Mission

I grew up in Chicagoland.  He grew up in Chicago.
I went to a Jesuit high school.  He went to a Jesuit college.
I studied abroad in Tokyo.  He studied abroad in Hong Kong.
I did the Peace Corps in Senegal.  He did the Peace Corps in Benin.
I graduated from Columbia with one degree.  He will be graduating [...]

Rest Stops in the Bush

Minutes after we left the smoggy streets of Bamako today, I knew I was in for a tumultuous trip.  Squeezed in tightly in the back middle seat between two colleagues, I braced myself, literally, for the 8 hour journey back home.  I dropped my head down to my knees; my stomach hadn’t felt this uneasy [...]

Celebrating Eid in Mali

Despite the fact that I came into the office yesterday for three hours, and that it was 90 degrees, it kind of felt like Christmas.  The city was brewing with excitement (and slaughtered cows) as everyone put on their finest outfits and jewels to celebrate the end of Ramadan.  Festive music was being played loudly [...]