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 21st, 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)
