Missing Mali, an attempt at poetry, & AmeriCorps NCCC FEMA Corps

Babies on backs, bright fabric swaying in time to the beat of breaking millet.

Hot sweat dripping down hard work in liquid form.

Laughter and language not known but understood to mean friendship in a metal and thread chair, shaded dirt beneath the posts.

Small ones playing with boxes on a string, pulling along a childhood dirty, raw, sad, and beautiful.

Shouts of joy turn into pain as laughter is substituted with tears in the stroke of a hand or the naked branch of a tree that once provided shade to a metal and thread chair.

Sweat mango juice dripping down dirty faces, a stream of happiness and mud, life in liquid form.

Stretched out arms to give mangoes, friendship, peanuts, acceptance, hot corn, hugs around knees.

Ne somogo

My family.

Aw be yen, N be yan, nga An be taama nyogonfe tumabee. 

You are there, I am here, but we walk together always.

If you can’t tell, I miss Mali. I’ve been talking with my fellow Team Leaders here in Vinton, Iowa and reliving some of my experiences in Peace Corps, so a lot of things I haven’t been thinking of often get brought to the forefront. I need to make a plan to go back to Mali in the future, hopefully within the next 5 or so years. It is just such a special place full of amazing people. Please keep up all your positive thoughts and/or prayers for the people of Mali as they continue to face an incredible amount of challenges to their health, well-being, and safety.

I hope you all have been enjoying this hot summer and have been able to get to the pool or beach often. Believe it or not, Vinton Iowa has a kick butt community pool complete with a waterslide. It is a little oasis in a sea of corn. Some Team Leaders and I plan to go there tomorrow if the weather is nice.

I have been in Vinton since July 23^rd and everything is going really well so far. The AmeriCorps NCCC staff at Vinton is really great (almost as awesome as Perry Point staff), and I feel well taken care of and that I will be prepared as best as possible to be successful when I get my team. Our Corps Members come to Vinton around July 27^th and then real life will begin. We are enjoying our time with just us Team Leaders before the craziness ensues. I can still remember my first day at Perry Point in AmeriCorps NCCC Class 16 and how excited/nervous/scared I was. I remember Dave Beach with his Harry Potter wand talking to us while we did in-processing paperwork, ate sandwiches, and began the foundations of friendships to come. What a start to an amazing adventure that was. I only hope that the Corps Members of this class will have as great of an experience as I did in NCCC. The program is what you make it, and if you are determined to put in hard work, be open to growing as a person, and not give up, those are the ingredients to a beautiful AmeriCorps experience.

I will keep you all updated on how life as an AmeriCorps NCCC FEMA Corps Team Leader (our official title) goes. I am excited for this journey and appreciate all of your support. I am lucky to have so many people in my life that are happy for me and are supportive of me following my dreams.

Congratulations to my awesome sister Marni and her husband Josh who welcomed my nephew Jackson Carter Clay into the world on July 25^th. I can’t wait to meet the little nugget, and hopefully in just a few weeks I’ll be able to hold him in my arms for the first time!

Take care and thanks for checking out what’s new in my life!

Love, Jamie

The (long overdue) Obligatory Mali Evacuation Blog Post

Greetings from Minnesota!

Tomorrow is my birthday and as a birthday present to myself I am FINALLY going to write a blog post about our evacuation from Mali and catch you guys up on my latest goings-on.

Writing a good-bye Mali blog past has been in the back of my brain ever since I left the country. I was worried I couldn’t put into words something that would do my time in Mali justice, that I wouldn’t be able to describe my gratitude and emotions fully about the experiences and leaving behind those experiences. So I never wrote about it. But now I am going to do my best to give some closure, at least in cyberspace to my time in Mali and not worry if it’s what I feel it should live up to.

When I last wrote, the volunteers in my region and I were in consolidation in our regional capital, Kita. It was frustrating for us to be kept away from our sites because we were hundreds of kilometers away from any of the fighting, the protests, and the danger. All we wanted to do was be with our community members, continue our projects, and live life as normal, but we were stuck in a house with twenty-something twenty-somethings, and we had to make the best of it. During this time we played games, made family dinners, went out to the bars when we were allowed to leave the house, and in our insanity of being cooped up when we weren’t allowed to leave the house, made a zombie movie complete with a choreographed dance number(I know, we’re super cool). I have to say that if I had to be cooped up with twenty people during a coup, our region (Kita Kaw) was the best to do it with. It didn’t hurt that Dave, my boyfriend, and Natazia, one of my close friends were there with me.

While we were consolidated we received updates from Peace Corps about the situation in the capital and in the North. There were times where it seemed as though things were getting better, that order was going to be restored, but in the end that didn’t happen, and things still aren’t right in Mali.

So we left, and so did many other aid organizations. The kids who were in life skills classes, the women who were working to regain the health of their children, the farmers who were trying to make their crops better and reliably feed their families, the girls who had a glimpse at a future in education, all of the families and community members who were striving to make their lives better in partnership with aid organizations are being hurt by the nonsense that began in March. Malians are incredibly resilient and positive people, but this is an equally incredibly tough time for them as last year’s rainy season produced poor crops, and many families are facing hunger in addition to the other problems aid organizations were helping to combat.

When we were consolidated in Kita and right before we had to consolidate further to our training complex outside of Bamako, I was given permission to go to my site for the night. I arrived after dark and greeted my family and work counterpart and told them that I thought I was going back to America. “Noooo, no, you won’t go.” “They are having a meeting on Thursday and everything will be resolved.”

“Why are you going?” “There’s fighting here and Peace Corps says we will probably go home”  “No, the fighting is far away, there is no fighting here. You will stay.”

I went home to pack that night, put things in a suitcase that I wanted Peace Corps to mail to me, and told my work counterpart to divide my other things up between his family, my host family, and other people in the community if I didn’t come back. The next morning I said goodbye to my family and sat on the side of the road waiting for the bus. My host father gave me $10 for my trip which is A LOT of money in Mali and it was strange to take but he would have been offended if I said no. I waited longer and thought about going back to see my family who live close to the bus stop, but I just sat there. I didn’t know how to deal with saying goodbye, especially since I was still holding out hope that we would be able to return to our villages for good. About 20 minutes after getting on the bus, however, I received a phone call from Natazia saying that Peace Corps had made the decision to evacuate us, and that we wouldn’t be returning.

In one way I was very sad, and in another which I don’t usually talk about when talking to people about leaving Mali, I was relieved. Ever since the safety and security issue I experienced in my first village, Koyan, I had been a little wary and on guard. During my time in Guetala I had become increasingly paranoid at night while I was trying to sleep that someone was sneaking around my huts. I had had someone knock on my door once in Koyan, and again on my window in Guetala, and I was freaked out. I had a hard time sleeping and was in fear over tiny noises at night, which were plentiful because of the animals roaming around and grazing on trash or straw during the night. I kept a safety whistle that Peace Corps gave us in my bug tent and sometimes would put it to my lips several times a night in sheer panic. I don’t have to tell you that it is no fun living in fear, and that is the reason for the relief at the news.

 My time during the day in contrast was wonderful in village. I had made real friends, and even though my village was around 3,000 people, all of the kids called me by my name (Assetou) instead of yelling “toubab” (white person) which I feel is a pretty good accomplishment! My work counterpart was great, and we had recently held a meeting with the school director and teachers about different projects we could do at the school such as tree planting, fence mending, and creating visual teaching aides. I had completed three map murals in the school, three health murals at the local health center, and was about to put the finishing touches on a mural about wearing helmets in one of the school classrooms. Two very motivated people from my village and I had recently attended a tree nursery workshop at the Peace Corps training complex outside of Bamako, and we were excited to start new tree projects in Guetala. For two weeks prior to being consolidated I held an informal running and workout group with kids from the village and had some teenage girls get very interested which I was hoping could turn into something great. So many things were going well, and so much potential was on my side to make the rest of my service in Guetala great, but with the nightly paranoia I was experiencing, the news that we were being evacuated lost a bit of its sting. I still feel a little guilty about this, but it doesn’t mean I don’t miss Mali. I miss it a great deal.

I miss riding around in the crazy taxis in Bamako, feeling proud of the language I had learned to get around and solve problems. I miss shopping in the market, an experience that was once so terrifying to do alone, and at the end being able to joke with the women selling fruits and vegetables, make new friends, and have them slip me an extra banana or handful of lettuce. I miss my little friend Sita who couldn’t walk when I first met her and was deathly afraid of me. At the end we she was walking like a champ and we were best friends, she fell asleep in my lap one night. I miss sleeping on the rooftop of our regional stage house in Kita and hearing the several melodies of the morning calls to prayer mix harmoniously as the warm air and dust held them in the air. I miss bouncing around from group to group on my way to my host family’s house and greeting women of different ethnic groups on the way in their own languages. I miss the warmness of Malians who were always looking out for me whether it was bad prices at the market, helping me get water, making sure I was eating enough, giving me shade for me head, giving up a chair to sit in, making sure my laundry was being cleaned properly (I wasn’t very thorough), and so many small things that were at first overwhelming and sometimes frustrating but then turned to such a great source of comfort once I let go and realized that they meant friendship. I miss the dirty little hands that would invariably be in my own hands as soon as I walked out of the door. I miss hearing “I be se!” (you can do it!) when I would surprise Malian women with an action like dancing, painting, or speaking Bambara well, and I even miss hearing “I te se!”  (you can’t do it!) when they would laugh as I tried to do something that Malian women are so good at like pounding millet with one hand, or carrying 10 gallons of water on their heads.

There are a lot of things that I miss, and I hope one day I can return to Mali and spend some time with the people that I grew to love. I am grateful for the experience and all that Mali and the people of Mali have given me.

Since leaving Mali I have been living with my parents in Minneapolis, and on July 23^rd I begin a new journey as an AmeriCorps NCCC FEMA Corps Team Leader. This will be a similar experience to my AmeriCorps NCCC gig in 2010 but this time I will be leading a team, and we will be travelling around the North Central region helping on projects in collaboration with FEMA. It is the first year of this new partnership between AmeriCorps and FEMA and I have a feeling there will be a lot of growing pains, but I am ready for a challenge and am excited to have to opportunity to continue a life of service.

I want to thank you all who have offered me support during my time in Peace Corps. I truly appreciate all of the kind words and warm thoughts, and I think that all of the positive energy you sent my way really increased the amazingness of my service during the 10 short months I had in Mali. Please keep the people of Mali in your thoughts and/or prayers.

I plan to keep up this blog during my AmeriCorps service, so stick around to hear what life will be like for the next 11 months!

Also congratulations to my beautiful sister Marni who is due any day now. She and her husband Josh will be welcoming their first child and my first nephew baby Jackson into this world very soon.

Another congratulations to my longtime great friend Kylie who is marrying Dan on the same day as Marni’s due date. Kylie, I’ve been telling Jackson that he needs to pick another day to be born so I can make it to your wedding!

Thanks again everyone for all of your support.

Ala ka nogoya ke (May God make things better). Ala ka Mali deme (May God help Mali). Ala ka funteni waati nyuman d’aw ma (May God give you a good summer) Ala ka si ni keneya d’aw ma (May God give you age and health). Mali mogo b’aw fo (The people of Mali greet you).

Love, Assetou Keita (Jamie)

Stomp Out Malaria Month

Hello Friends and Family!

Greetings from Mali. I know right now there is a lot going on in Mali politically, but that's not what I am going to write about today. I wanted to tell you about Stomp Out Malaria Month and what that means for volunteers. April marks the beginning of Stomp Out Malaria month. Peace Corps Volunteers are encouraged to do a push for Malaria prevention related projects in our villages. Malaria kills over 2 million people a year. It is a sickness which can be prevented by taking simple steps such as sleeping under a mosquito net, wearing mosquito repellent and wearing clothing which covers the arms and legs. Deaths from Malaria can be prevented by being tested and seeking treatment as soon as Malaria symptoms are present.

Volunteers in Mali are working with our community members to make natural mosquito repellent, show creative ways of hanging up mosquito nets, and educate our community members on what Malaria is, how to avoid it, and how to treat it. Out of all the work we do with Peace Corps, I think one of the biggest impacts we can have on the lives of people here is to do this type of work. Malaria is a senseless, completely preventable sickness, and if communities across Mali work hard and change behaviors related to Malaria prevention and treatment, thousands of lives can be saved.

I plan on painting Malaria murals in my community and three other communities near me, holding a neem cream formation on how to make the natural mosquito repellent with women, and teaching kids about Malaria through songs and dances.

If you're interested in learning more about what volunteers in Africa are doing to Stomp Out Malaria, check out twitter and facebook (Stomp Out Malaria).

I hope you're all doing well in the States! I miss you guys and thank you so much for supporting me throughout my journey. I'll update this blog soon when I find more information out about what might happen to us Volunteers in Mali... whether we will be able to go back to our sites or seek other options.

Take care!

Love,

Jamie (Assetou)

May God Grant You Lots of Babies!

Greetings from Mali/Senegal!

Christmas was amazing in Kati. It turns out Mary’s mom (Mama C)’s packages were rerouted to our training complex instead of going to Bamako, but even without her (7!!!!) packages there was no lack of Christmas cheer, or decorations since other volunteers’ family sent boxes too. There were 12 of us that celebrated together on or around Christmas and instead of buying gifts we did a white elephant type fabric exchange where we each bought fabric and picked numbers out of a hat to select a bag with the fabric in it. I got a very pretty fabric picked out by Kat and it is at my tailor’s right now being made into a skirt!

The rest of the Christmas break was full of good food, good company, Christmas movies, trips into Bamako for shopping and eating delicious pizza and ice cream, and spending way too much money.

After Christmas Dave and I headed out to my site where we spent New Year’s and a few days after that together in my community. We made three improved stoves with the help of my homologue and family members of the compounds we were placing them in. We also created three hand washing stations. One of the hand washing stations is at the local community health center where in the future I plan to do murals on general health information including a mural on the importance of hand-washing right next to the station. It was a productive week and my village loved having Dave there. He played with the kids, danced around, and even had my REALLY old host Grandma dancing on her feet. I think the internet it too slow to load the video but I am going to try my hardest to put it on Facebook because it is amazing.

I have two host Grandmas in my village. One named Ja, and one named Kuje. They were the wives my host dad’s father who has since passed. Ja takes care of Kuje now since it’s hard for Kuje to get around. They are like two peas in a pod and really cute. They bless me all the time to have good health, a good day, to have good work, to have lots of babies, and I like to sit with them and just listen to them talk. Before I left to come to Dakar Kuje was pretty sick with a fever which is scary since she is so old, but the day before I left she was feeling much better and sitting outside and chatting instead of curled up in bed. Sometimes I ask her about when she was younger and she likes to talk about that… I don’t understand most of it but she talks about how they used to not have donkey carts and had to walk a long way with all of their water or crops they collected on their heads.

Many of the women speak Malinke/Bambara/a weird form of Malinke. Either that or they are Fulani women who speak Fulakan, or are from Mauritania and speak Syrakan (sp?). This is cool in that I get to learn a lot about different cultures and it has been fun to use my Syrakan greetings with shop owners from Mauritania in Kita, but it’s rough when trying to talk to people about behavior change/ why they don’t send their kids to school, etc. (which is hard to do at my language level even with Bambara speakers).

Even though I can’t talk at length with most of the women, I’ve been hanging out with them as much as I can. Like I said I like to sit with my host Grandmas, and at night I usually sit with the women in my host family and talk or listen to them talk. Also I’ve gone out twice into the fields surrounding the town to gather peanuts, or “Tiga Tumbo” (which always reminds me of Ricky Ticky Tumbo when people talk to me about it (which is around 10 times a day)). The first time I went, most of the village women were out there gathering peanuts together. I gathered peanuts with them, held babies, got peed on by one baby, and greeted the women. I’m hoping this gave me a little bit of street cred with the Malian ladies, especially getting peed on, that’s gotta mean something.

I’m feeling more at home in my new village every day. At first it was rough coming from my old village, Koyan, where no one called me a “Toubab” (white person) going to Guetala where a lot of kids screamed “Toubab” as I walked down the streets. Now that I’ve been there longer more kids know my name and yell “Assetou” at me instead to get my attention. Also I’ve won over my fair share of babies that used to be deathly afraid of me as their mothers laughed and thrust the babies, tears streaming down their faces in my direction. Now a lot of the babies don’t cry around me, and some even crawl over to me for me to hold them.

I’ve also started to make some friends. I have a 15 year old friend that came to Mali from Senegal two years ago, and her older sister (I think) and I have become friends too. The women in my host family are also pretty amazing. My host Dad has a wife named Malado who has been very welcoming, and there are some other women who live with my host family while their husbands are abroad to find better work than is available in Mali. These ladies are hilarious and so far have been really helpful in working on projects at a small level with them before trying to get the projects to catch on at a larger level in the rest of the village.

My town is unique in that it is kind of out in the middle of nowhere where normally there would only be mud huts and farming but many of the people in Guetala have gone off to Bamako, France, or Spain and send money back home. Because of this reason there is an abundance of cement houses, and projects completed by NGOs that have been made possible by connections Guetala residents have made while abroad. They community is very motivated to improve their town which makes me excited that I am placed there. Sometimes I worry that people will expect too much of me since so many NGOs have come in and created tangible improvements to the community, but my work will be at a more grass roots level and produce less impressive visible results, but (hopefully) more behavioral change oriented results.

Other things:

1.)    I have a mouse friend/enemy that lives in my hut with me and likes to rummage through my things at night to try and find treats. I’ve tried to kill him once with rat poison and felt horrible but he didn’t die, so to alleviate my guilt I talked to my American Dad (expert in inventing wacky mole traps) about making a live trap to catch him and release him in a field. Still working on the prototype… I’ll let you know how it goes.

2.)    One of the women in my host family is super excited about Moringa trees and we planted seeds in around 15 small bags filled with soil. Hopefully in a few weeks they will grow and be big enough to transplant into the garden.

3.)    During my first 20 days at site I made a world map on the wall of one of the classrooms at school. When Dave came to visit last week we labeled it. Next I will make a map of Africa, and then a map of Mali in the other classrooms!

4.)    So far to get cell phone reception I either have to go to my homologues store and talk on the phone attached to a cord in front of everyone or stand on a mound of dirt out in a cornfield which I feel really silly doing as people pass on the road and stare at me strangely. Soon I am going to buy a device so that I can have reception in my concession so I don’t have to be a Toubab on parade anymore.

5.)    I attended my first school board meeting (by chance since they didn’t invite me to it) last week when Dave was at my site. My homologue told me he was going to the school, and then another person said they were headed to the school so Dave and I went over to see what that was all about. At first they didn’t want us to sit in on the meeting because there was going to be arguing, but I told them that they need to call me when they have meetings and it was okay that they were fighting because if I don’t know the problems going on in the school then I won’t be able to help them. It makes me feel like I need to sit down and discuss with my homologue and host dad what I’m really there for because that situation made me realize we have some dissonance on what my role is in the community.

So now I am in Dakar to have a retainer made for the tooth I had pulled in November. The West African Intermural Softball Tournament (WAIST) is this weekend too so I will stay for that as long as I am here. Unfortunately this is an off year for Mali volunteers to come to the tournament so there are only a few of us here but I am sure it will still be a lot of fun, and the Senegal volunteers never fail to show a good time to volunteers from other countries when we come to visit.

I hope you are all doing well in America and have started off the New Year well and healthy.

Hi and I miss you to my amazing sister Marni and her husband Josh who are expecting their first child! Marni’s due date is July 21^st, right around Wendy and my birthdays.

If you want to brighten my day, send me a letter, or some pictures that I can show my host family.

My new address since switching villages is:

Jamie Casterton – PCV

Corps De La Paix

B.P. 25

Kita, Mali, West Africa

If you want to send me a package (which would be awesome but see my previous blog post about how I am eventually going to ask you for project donations so you might want to hold off) I would love it!

I like all things candy, things for my kids here (like little toys or educational things), goldfish crackers, hand drawn pictures of animals (I am starting a collection and think it would be funny to have a silly pictures of animals that my friends and family draw – totally random but fun), granola bars, or more candy.

Thanks again for all of your support while I’m on this crazy journey. I am very lucky to have such caring people back home, and it makes the difficult days here better knowing I have people rooting for me. If you want to catch up over the phone send me a message with your number and I will call you while I am in Dakar since I can place free calls to America at the Peace Corps medical office where I am staying!

Love and miss you all!

Jamie (aka Assetou)