Holding Grudges

“Kash, we have a problem,” my colleague exclaimed an hour after we reached a village to conduct surveys to 50 of its residents.

He elaborated, “Turns out there are two parts to this village.  The family that originally settled here got into a fight and broke off into two parts, and since then they’ve lived only 2 kilometers apart but never talk to one another or work together.  Although according to Mali, this is one village, we have two chiefs of the village and it turns out the one from the original village is livid that we did not see him first.”

Not a happy chief.

“They live 2 km apart but don’t talk to one another!  How bad could it be?  What happened and when!?” I asked.

“Nobody remembers why or when, but it happened over a hundred years ago,” he replied ambivalently.

This wasn’t the first village that held a grudge for that long.

In the village below, people live in cliff dwellings.

Kikara Village

Some of them have started coming down a few years ago and are encouraging others to do the same.  The chief believes within 5 more years most of the residents will come down and settle on the land.  It’s tough living up on the rocks, having to carry water and food up there several times a day.  So why are they living up there?

“Well…” explains the town’s teacher, “you know there was a war between the Fulani and the Songhay tribes in the East of Mali….The Fulani pushed the Songhay out of their homes and killed their leaders so they fled and settled themselves in the cliffs of Douentza to hide from their attackers.  They just now finally feel safe enough to come down and lead normal lives again.”

“When was this war?” I gently probed.

“Atleast 150 years ago,” he replied.

And this is what you get in a culture where oral tradition prevails.  With no access to technology, transportation and markets, only elders’ stories are transmitted as infromation from generation to generation, making history and current events hard to differentiate.

The Post I said I wasn’t going to Post

When I first started this blog in preparation of my big move back to Africa, I made a promise to myself and to my readers that I wasn’t going to get all sappy.  I thought I had exhausted my ability to transmit the hardships of life in rural Africa when I blogged about them for over two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal.  During that time I lived in a village side by side with the most hospitable, wise and beautiful people I had ever met, yet that was often overshadowed by my tales of disease, accidents, and poverty.  So this time, I took a more light-hearted approach, hoping to prove to you all that Africa is NOT the Dark Continent.

Then I went back to the field.

Again, I experienced that one of a kind West African hospitality.  I saw the most beautiful ornamental women on this side of the continent, saw majestic scenery that looked as if it had been painted in watercolors, and was accosted every day by bubbly, smiling, rambunctious children.  You would have agreed with me that Africa is in fact the continent of Light had you been by my side on this journey (not only because you would have been burnt crisp by the sun).

But there were scenes I witnessed that could not be ignored.

I saw a whole village supply of food for the year literally diminish overnight, when their fields were attacked by crickets a week prior.

Infested millet stalks

I saw the brown, parasite infested ponds that another village uses as their primary source of drinking water.

Muddy manmade ponds of rain water accumulation

And the hardest thing to see, was always the malnourished children.  We came across dozens of acutely malnourished children along the way, and each time we did, we turned a blind eye to work policy, as we immediately rushed the child and their mother to the nearest health clinics, often a hundred kilometers away. The mothers knew their children were sick, but they could not do anything about that.  Imagine that!  Most of the people we interviewed were only eating one or two meals a day, as it was the difficult season, right before harvest.  Their meals usually consist of 150g of millet or rice.  That’s all.

So despite my initial instincts to make this blog more light-hearted, and I hope that you have enjoyed the many lovely and bright stories about life in Mali, I also want to share with you just a few of the reasons I came back.

If the band crosses into the red, it means the child is severely malnourished and must be rushed to a hospital. As you can see, this poor baby was way into the red.

If you’d like to donate money to causes such as this, first of all, I’d suggest you research the poverty levels in the world and donate your money to countries that are always at the bottom, such as Mali.  Although donating to emergencies should be applauded, too often peaceful countries are left to bite the dust.

A great organization often overlooked to donate to in Mali is the Peace Corps.  If you go to the Peace Corps site, you could literally search volunteers by where they are from in their states as well as what project they are raising money for.  Peace Corps volunteers receive no funding so all the money they use for projects is from their own fund raising.  I would bet that 95% of the money donated goes straight to the program they are installing, and in my case it was 100% when I was a volunteer.  Thanks for listening.

The Greatest Job You’ll Ever Hate

The motto of the Peace Corps is The Greatest Job You’ll Ever Love, and as a returned Peace Corps volunteer, I’d say that is dead-on.  I feel the motto can also be applied to my current job, although perhaps calling it The Greatest Job I’ll Ever Hate is a little more accurate.

I’ve just come back from nearly a month “in the field,” as part of a evaluation team that included 15 Malians and one other American colleague, conducting an agricultural and nutrition assessment of 30 villages as part of a bigger multi-year project we will begin implementing this year.  We woke up each morning at 6 and headed out to villages where we spent the day under trees or shade structures interviewing over 50 people each day and measuring just as many children under the age of 5. At night, we would camp out together under the stars and often were out cold by 9pm, due to the long days of activity in the grueling sun.

The villages we interviewed represent just a sample of the 120 villages we will begin assisting, but 30 was more than enough to experience the magnitude of forces we were fighting against: malnourishment, drought, flood, inaccessibility, malaria, disease, no access to schools, lack of resources, etc.

Although I love my job, I wish there was no need for it here.

On the bright side, I witnessed and experienced Mali in all its riches.  Although most villages had very little or no resources, they were brimming with social capital: the beautiful ornamental woman, the mile-wide smiles, the bubbling children, the endless generosity and the friendly hospitality.

I will organize some themes from this experience and begin writing about them this week, but in an effort to give you some context to work with, here is a short (10 minute) video montage of the last four weeks.

p.s. I know the text is corny, but I can’t help it!

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 our baseline data, that data we will be measuring against in 5 years.  

Today, we spent the whole day weighing babies, taking their heights and interviewing their mothers.  The children were ridiculously adorable, but VERY scared, as they had no idea what 20 people wanted to do with them.  Nonetheless, they were very good sports and acted ahead of their age (well most of them atleast).  Here are some photos from today.

P.S.  As I mentioned in my last post, I am off to the field tomorrow for two weeks.  Take care and see you all soon!

Weighing babies from a scale hung on a tree.

The kids get so scared as everyone gathers around to measure them. (Breaks my heart. but we are checking them for malnourishment)

Babies in Mali are decked out with talismans....around their neck, their waist, their hands and their feet. Each one is to fend off an illness or bad spirit, i.e. teething, flu, Malaria, etc..

For our research on malnutrition we must measure the height and weight of children under 5 years of age. However, many mothers don’t know the age of their children.  So we ask kids that look borderline 5, to put one arm over their heads….if they can reach their other ear, they are most likely 5 and up.  If not, it’s time to get measured. 

More often that not, we measure children lying down so we can get the most accurate height.

She was more afraid of me than getting measured. About 5 kids ran away from me screaming, "Toubob, Toubob (White person)!"

Sharing data with a colleague at the end of the day

A Wrinkle in Time

 

View of Djenne from a rooftop

Crossing the floodplain to Djenne

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 there adding to its allure and intrigue.  Sharing the narrow pathways, that curve like pasta noodles across town, with donkey carts, livestock and old men wearing turbans draped in yards of fabric, it is ONLY the bright neon colors of young girls’ hair beads and overstuffed cargo vans, that bring you back into the 21st century.  In addition to having and annually preserving the largest mud mosque in the world (after the rainfalls), the residents of Djenne are also proud of living in one of the most important Muslim cities in Sub-Saharan Africa, once a major stop on the trans-Saharan caravan passing through Timbuktu to North Africa.

 

With this image in mind, imagine you are a French fashion magazine conducting a semi-naked photo shoot….Where would you go?  Apparently, you would have gone to Djenne and flaunted half naked ladies deeply offending one of the most devout Muslim communities in Sub-Saharan Africa.  

As a result, the mosque has been OFF LIMITS to foreigners since 1996. However, money talks, and we were able to smuggle in a 5 minute visit inside to my great delight.  Sneaking in through the back women’s entrance, I found the interior charming and meditative, not to mention 15 degrees cooler than outside.

Inside the Djenne mosque

 

Below are some more snapshots from only ONE of Mali’s many magical places.  Enjoy.

 

Sudanese architecture is prevalent in Djenne

Peek-a-boo

And now some pictures of me hamming it up for the camera. 

Checking out the fresh milk that these Fulani women are selling

 

Let's hear it for the boys

 

Last minute souvenir shopping

One last shot

Words of Wisdom

I was reading the evaluations today from Malian women who participated in one of our programs that meets weekly in a very poor rural community.  As a result of their participation, most of them acknowledged similar benefits such as an increase in income, an improved diet and better knowledge of preventative practices.  These were our goals, so were happy to see them confirmed.  However one of the points of  evaluations is learn other outcomes of the program, positive or negative, that we hadn’t predicted may happen.

This is an example of one in particular that caught my eye:

Participating in a (…..) group requires bathing before and dressing well for weekly meetings, which causes our husbands to notice and treat us differently (better).

Looking good