I love Dramétou!
I went back to my original village this week for Tabaski, and it was one of the best times I've had in Mali. There's not a lot of phone reception there, and not many people have phones, so prior to my actual arrival only one person in village even knew I was back in country. After borrowing a bicycle from another volunteer in Bafoulabé, my old market town which is 9 kilometers away, I met the first Dramétou-ite while crossing the river. Mahmet and I were pretty close during my time there, so the look of shock quickly turned into a big grin as we shouted our greetings across the water. We were going in opposite directions, so I climbed out of the boat and headed off on the still familiar trail into the bush.
Once I was within sight of village, my excitement was tempered by nervousness. Most people didn't know I was coming, how would they react? Also, had any of my friends moved away or died? Things don't change very quickly in rural villages, but they do change sometimes, and I hadn't had any contact with Dramétou for over a year.
A young girl saw me right before I passed the first group of huts and started sprinting into town. I couldn't make out what she was saying, but a few people emerged from their compounds to see what the fuss was about. Two men intercepted me in the road, their mouths open in surprise. When I told them I had come back to celebrate Tabaski they rattled off numerous blessings and continued on their way. The first compound I entered was Sané's, one of my old homologues and the one person I had been able to reach by phone. She had gone out to work in the fields for the day and would be back in the afternoon, her niece told me, so I continued on to Modibo's, my other homologue. He also wasn't around, but his second wife was there taking care of the children. Her hand flew up to her mouth in surprise, 'Eh Allah!' We exchanged greetings and I continued up the path towards my old huts. I stopped to say hello to one of my host sisters and her family. She jumped up from her stool when she saw me and her husband's other wife started shouting to the next compound over that I was here. After exchanging greetings, I extricated myself and continued on to my old compound. The reaction there was the same as everywhere else and a small crowd gathered to escort me to my host family's. When I got there most of the family was off working, but my favorite two host sisters were there and my two favorite host nephews as well. My sisters' mouths literally fell open. I spent the rest of the day hanging out there and napping as person after person came through to greet me and welcome me back. At one point in the day, an older man that I didn't know very well came over and told me how good it was that I had come back for the celebration. 'I've been really sick and I was going to get better,' he told me, 'but now that you've come back I will.'
The next day was Tabaski itself. I got up, put on my fancy new complet, and had my favorite breakfast of moni, then went out to the prayer area with my host mom. Since Tabaski is the biggest holiday of the year, the village mosque isn't big enough for everyone and instead we all headed out of town to an area designated for Tabaski prayer specifically. I sat down on a mat in the back with the women, and the leaders began the ceremony up in front of the men, draping a light cloth over their group and leading prayer in Khassonké. I mostly observed and took pictures, but also stood and kneeled with the group, throwing in an 'Amiina' (amen) every once in a while. There was a sadness to the proceedings this year, as our Imam (muslim religious leader) had died the previous week. I didn't know the ceremony well enough to notice much difference, as I had only gone once before, but on the way back to my family's compound we stopped to sit with his family briefly and deliver funeral blessings. Similar to the old man the previous day, one of the Imam's good friends told me how grateful he was that I had come and blessed Dramétou again after it had suffered from this loss. Throughout the day, we all ate a ton of meat, and different families exchanged bowls of food so that you could have a little bit of everything (if your stomach could handle it all). The evening was capped off with a traditional dance party in the middle of town. My sisters and I arrived pretty early and chose our spot on the edge of the circle as boys began hauling brush to the opposite end, where it was lit to make a bonfire. After the drums had been rolled over to the fire and heated, the music began. The women danced and sang while I watched and clapped along with them, everyone showing off their new clothes and dance moves. Unfortunately the party got cut short when a little girl got sick, with promises to restart in a couple days. Also unfortunately, I would be gone by then...
The next day, Tuesday, was my last day in village, for this visit at least. I spend most of the day hanging out with my host sisters, then went over to Sané's in the afternoon. I ended up going out to the peanut fields with her, which seemed very appropriate for my last day of village. We sat together on the ground pulling the nuts from the plant and chatting until the sun started to set and we had to head back into town. That night I kind of wanted to stay up with my family, but everyone, especially myself, was so tired and full of good food that I didn't make it past 8pm.
The next morning I got up and got my things ready to leave. Sané had come by the evening before after I had gone to sleep and delivered a big bag of peanuts that we had harvested together. Fortunately, I was about to make some extra room in my bag: it was time to deliver gifts. Before I had left the US I had gone to get some simple gifts for my host family and close friends in village, knowing that I couldn't go back to Mali without going to visit Dramétou. That morning, I handed out the hats, fingernail polish, and squirt guns and then tied my bags on the back of my bike. As I prepared to leave, my family and friends gathered around and shook my hand to say goodbye, even getting the legendary left hand handshake from both my host parents: in Mali the only time it's appropriate to shake the left hand is during leave taking, the premise being that it's wrong, therefore you must come back again someday to make it right again. Some people took their leave as I left the compound, but a group of women and children walked me out past the edge of village to the first bend of the road, apologizing for not taking me further. It was as if I was getting the goodbye that I hadn't gotten last year, and I felt incredibly loved.
Now, as I sit in Manantali writing, I am so thankful that I was able to have the village and the experiences I did. Hopefully I'll be able to go back again before I leave Mali, or later on in life, but this visit is going to sustain my love of Mali for awhile.

I work with some truly remarkable people. I’ve just completed an 8 day stint out doing visitations in my villages, and I am astounded by how extraordinary some of the local workers that I have the privilege to be supervising are.
A week ago, I had just finished my supervisory visit in the village of Koro and was getting ready to bike the approximately 7 kilometers back to Tetou, where I was camping at a friend’s house. One of the local workers that I supervise in Koro, and my main contact there, had some papers to drop off at the health clinic in Tetou and wanted to speak with the doctor there so he suggested that we bike back together. Since I still don’t know the roads incredibly well, I was grateful for his company. Especially in rainy season, which is now, the roads are extremely difficult to navigate in certain sections: nomadic herders have established many spur roads that wind their way back into remote parts of the bush, and this is further complicated by the rains creating large swaths of mud which eradicate signs of the main road and also contribute to slowing the pace of travel even more. There are certain parts where it is simply easier to dismount from the bike, take my shoes off so that they don’t get pulled off by the mud, and slog my way to the other side of the muddy patch where I promptly seek out a Malian to ask for directions since I have inevitably lost my way (or at least suspect that I have). The first time that I biked out to the villages of Borokuy and Kira, it took me 3 hours and one tire repair to go what should have been 9 kilometers. That time and the previous trip to Koro I am fairly certain I took a wrong turn but was then lucky enough to take another wrong turn and still ended up in the correct village.
So, I was grateful that Dabou wanted to bike back to Tetou with me. While I had been in Koro for the day, he had bent over backwards to be a good host. I drank several rounds of Malian tea, was offered innumerable bowls of toh (the local food), given the best parts of the meals that I was actually able to partake in, and practically forced to take some recently ripened corn back with me to cook and eat later. Just like with all our favorite grandmas, in Mali food is love. When it was actually time to leave, I strapped my notebooks on the back of my bike, threw on a camelback and climbed onto my mountain bike. I had Dabou start ahead of me for 2 major reasons: he knew the route better, and I also suspected that he would be slower than me. I was right. This man, who is probably over 6 feet tall, was riding a Flying Pigeon, the endemic bike of Mali which was originally provided to a select few by UNICEF but is now widely available. These bikes come in one size only, which means that children ride them by sticking one of their legs between the crossbars, and men of Dabou’s size are hunched over as they ride. I don’t think that it’s possible for me to be more acclimated to Malian temperatures than a Malian, but the discrepancy between our bikes resulted in his shirt being soaked in sweat by the time we reached Tetou, whereas I was essentially dry. After he dropped off the paperwork, he turned around and headed back to Koro, hopefully completing the approximately 7 kilometer trip just before sunset.
I remember last time I went to Koro, Dabou said to me, ‘This is a simple village, and we are very simple people.’ The way he said it, I felt as though he was apologizing for the state of things there, and I was struck at how much effort my people actually make to improve the lives of their neighbors. Dabou had grown up there, only completed the 6th year of school, and then embarked on the life of his parents and grandparents. Despite these adversities, he has managed to become fluent in French and been working as a relais, or local health worker. His story is not unique within my project, but through my experiences here I am constantly grateful that I was born into the life that I have, and grew up with the opportunities that I too often take for granted.

Throughout my life, I keep being reminded of the great importance of context. The most clear-cut example of this was in University, when I even had a series of courses referred to as the ‘Context Sequence.’ During my study with Glenn Murcutt in Australia, I was reminded of his aversion to design outside his native country because he has a legitimate concern of misunderstanding foreign context. Here in my work in my villages, I am also constantly reminded.
Even after I have over 2 years of experience working in Malian villages, there is still so much that I don’t understand about culture and custom. Not only am I now working in the somewhat different context, being over on the other side of the country, but there are still aspects of the pandemic Malian culture that I don’t grasp thoroughly. Just the other day I was eating dinner with some of my co-workers and was informed, for the first time that I know of, that shaking my eating hand down and away from the communal bowl is bad. There are simply so many small nuances that I have not yet experienced, or have experienced but not had someone willing to explain their cultural importance and meaning, that I am constantly learning new things about Mali. All of these little factors come into play when I am trying to work in what is still a very foreign context.
I’ve spent the last 3 weeks traveling around to all of my villages, most of them twice, and I have been continually reminded of the importance of noting all the slight indicators for how and when to be most effective in my work. The first 2 weeks of this month I was biking around by myself, staying in the compounds of friends and village chiefs, so I had sole responsibility of overseeing and motivating the local health workers that are part of our project. I found myself often unsure of how to best go about getting the results that we want: Do I do what comes more naturally to me and point out how and what truly needs to be done? Or should I taking the more passive aggressive approach, since in Mali it’s not normal to openly criticize? I found that I usually ended up somewhere in the middle, which is dangerous territory (try to please everyone and you please no one…). I was disappointed overall in how much work my villages had gotten done, but still felt fairly accomplished by the end of those 2 weeks, having logged about 160km of biking, and reached 8 of my 9 villages. There were a few really good times, too. The most project related was when I went to the village of Koya and within my first hour there had introduced the idea of a cheaply made hand-washing station and actually built it (check out some of my pictures posted on facebook to see how excited the kids were to use it). Another more cross-cultural one was when I went to a dance party with my friends in one of the villages where everyone was thrilled when I actually worked up the courage to dance awkwardly with them.
I’m to the point now that I feel comfortable greeting in the three most commonly used languages in my service area, and I know which places are most likely to use which language, so several of the towns I don’t even work in but do bike through know me by sight and greeting, if not by name. Many of the people in the villages I do work in, don’t work with personally still know me and greet me by name. Furthermore, those random people I meet while biking out in the bush, especially when I’m worried about being lost, are constantly getting this big grin on their face when I greet them in their native language and then ask whether I’m on the right road. Every time I hear that recognition in their response or their use of my name even when I have no idea who they are, I am reminded of why I came back to Mali. All of these little incidents make me feel like I’m at least doing something right at far as cultural integration goes.
This last week one of my supervisors came up from Bamako, and he and 2 of my other co-workers went around to all 9 of my villages by car. At first I was concerned about the lack of progress that I had made in the last few months: Would the slow progress of our local workers reflect poorly on my supervision, or would they recognize that this is Mali?
As it turns out, and probably thanks to the fact that all three men are Malian, I experienced far more of the latter sentiment. I could tell that there were also disappointed in the slow progress, and I admit that I was secretly pleased to see them showing the frustration that I had been feeling, especially since it was not directed at me. Lest I give the impression that this last week of visits was an overall bad experience, I must point out that I think this show of frustration from a fellow Malian was more effective in motivating people than mine ever would have been on its own. As integrated as I can ever get in these villages, I will still always be seen as a bit of an outsider who brings their own approach, and I have personally been told on several occasions that ‘this is Mali, and that’s just not how it’s done here.’ So, I was very pleased to have the support of Zana, Kone, and Tounkara this last week, and I have great hope that these dual visits will have a catalyzing impact.
Going back to what I was saying in the beginning of this post, about context, I’ve found that in the Mali it’s just as crucial as ever. I’ve also found that, while I will never be as good at the cultural context here as your average native Malian, I still do okay. I try my best to adjust when I can, and I’ve found that it’s usually not only effective enough, but also greatly appreciated. Probably even more so than if it came from one of their own…

Now that I have spent several weeks in the San part of Mali, I have discovered a number of differences between here and the area around Bafoulabe.
The most disappointing change is definitely the lack of peanut butter. I’d always heard that Malinke/Khassonke country was the land of tigadege, and I was aware that we had the best tigadegena (peanut butter sauce) in Mali over there, but it still didn’t sink in until I looked all over market and didn’t find any peanut butter at all for sale. Fortunately crises has been averted and I was able to procure some this morning here in San. While that’s far less convenient that it being in my actual market town, I will survive. I’m far more concerned with my ability to find food for wale now than I was while I lived in Drametou, because this time around I don’t have a host family (yet – I’m looking for one right now). When I had a host family I ate almost all of my meals with them, and only cooked for myself about once a week right after I had gone into market. This resulted in a significant lack of variety (millet porridge for breakfast, millet with sauce for lunch, millet with a different sauce for dinner), but I knew that I would be getting some protein, some greens, and three meals a day. Keep in mind that I chose to eat with my host family regularly, not only for the convenience of availability, but mostly because it was important to me to be eating the same kind of food that everyone else in my village was eating. This time around I’m going to have fresh vegetables at every opportunity, but those opportunities are going to be pretty limited.
One of the most visible changes is the types of animals that I’m seeing on a daily basis. The most obvious of these is the existence of pigs. I was definitely the only Christian in my village before, although there were a few in my market town, so no one was raising pigs. Now there are pigs everywhere. Yum. I’ve decided that pigs are to me now what goats were to me before. Somehow, even though they are disgustingly filthy 99.9% of the time, they are still really adorable. The other animal that I see all the time now are horses. In the Kayes region, only wealthy people had horses, everyone else just had donkeys. Here, I see horses almost as much as donkeys, which is fantastic, because donkeys are surprisingly really loud. They even eat loudly. There were times in Drametou when I would literally be woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of donkeys chewing. I’m really excited that that doesn’t appear to be a problem this time around.
Other than those two really big changes, and the different language (which is a whole different problem), San is really similar to Kayes. People are still amazing. Rainy season still floods the road and makes transport hard. I still worry about my ability to effectively work with all these barriers. So, not that much different. And, the most important thing is that I am really glad to be back.

After leaving Mali a mere 7.5 months ago, I'm back! I arrived safely last night to Bamako with all my luggage and will be here for a few days before heading out to my site.

Seeing as how my last entry was so long ago, here is a short list of what I've done in the interim:
travelled on 4 continents in 5 countries
been in 22 airports
moved about 5 times
held 2 jobs
spoken in 3 schools
attended 1 epic concert (GAGA!)
got in 1 painful bicycle accident
and
met innumerable awesome people

Now I am back in Mali with Peace Corps Response, working alongside Helen Keller International near the town of Tominion in the eastern Segou region. My assignment is working with community health workers, women’s groups, and school personnel to promote improved hygiene behaviors in an effort to reduce disease transmittal, and I will be here for 6 months this time. It seems like such a short time in a lot of ways, but I'm hoping to get a lot accomplished. SInce I will be in a different part of the country I will be learning a new language for trips out to small villages, and hopefully improving my French for more professional atmospheres. I'm excited for the opportunity to make a difference again here in Mali and also to get more experience and contacts in the international development community, since I think it's what I would like to do for a career. I've been looking at graduate school programs and checking out a few jobs, but all of that is being put on the back burner for a little while so that I can concentrate on doing my best work here. Wish me luck!