Can We Still Be Friends?

Dear people who may or may not still be willing to be my friends due to the fact that I have been keeping horrible contact, and who are only reading this because it came up on their Google Readers,

Haketo! Afere! (Sorry! in Bambara and Bomu) I don’t really have an excuse, just a proclivity for laziness. I am sorry that I haven’t been around much lately. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I am not fulfilling the PC goal of sharing my experience with others. But enough of this, let’s get to the good stuff. Since we last spoke, a lot has happened. A quick rundown:

All the PCTs visited their future sites (which are now our current and permanent sites). Mine was a blast and was very indicative of my life now. More soon.

We came back from site visit and finished up homestay. Halleluia. Language classes ended, and somehow by the grace of God or Allah or whatever higher power you may happen to believe in, I passed my final test in Bomu!!! I think we were all a little surprised. AND I am happy to report that all the Banankoro PCTs passed their tests, too! Leaving homestay was nothing special; a white van pulled up to my house, we packed my things, I exchanged handshakes with my family members but they were busy being confused about why I was leaving a mat behind (it had termite damage). No tearful goodbyes but I remember the Traores fondly.
We went back to Tubaniso for a few more days of training and preparation for our site installation. More on site later. Promise I’m not avoiding it.

SWEAR IN!!!! September 3rd, 2010. Ceremony at the US Embassy in Bamako. We were on TV! I gave a speech in Bomu. One PCT-turned-PCV-during-the-ceremony from each language studied gave a speech in their language. We had French, Bambara, Tomokan, Bomu, and Fulfulde. I didn’t expect anyone to understand what I was saying but when I greeted the audience at the beginning of the speech, a bunch of people greeted me back! I got confused and flustered for a second but then continued on. A few weeks later my boss, Daniel (which I will again explain) told me that he watched the ceremony on TV (we were on TV!) and when I gave my speech he tried to call me to congratulate me. But I was on a podium and my phone had been turned off, so needless to say I did not get the call.

We spent the day in the pool at the American Club in Bamako, celebrating and eating free food. Then we went to the hotel that had been rented out for us, and we ate dinner in the city then went out to Pirate’s Club, then later on to Zen. Fun was had by all that night! Definitely worth the two months of training to be sworn in as an official volunteer and celebrate with all 80 original members of our staging group present and happy.

Then we moved to our site. Here’s where things get good. I love my site! Some things and people you should know:

Maimouna: my homologue. PC sets up each volunteer with a Malian work counterpart, and she is mine. But she’s my mother first and foremost. Sometimes I forget that we actually have to start working together soon! She is a relais at the CSCOM (health center—see below), in which her job is to travel to neighboring villages doing informal health education.
Do (pronounced ‘dough’): Maimouna’s husband. Works as the pharmacist at the CSCOM. He’s a big guy who’s always smiling, and I can never understand him regardless of what language he’s speaking, which includes some English.
Dugutigi: Bambara word for ‘village chief’. The dugutigi of Fangasso is named Baba Kamate, but everyone calls him ‘dugutigi’. I refer to him as dugutigi when I’m speaking English because it’s been engrained in me thus far.
Daniel: the chef de poste (head doctor) at the CSCOM. He lives adjacent to the center within the walls of the health compound. He is so nice!!!! He doesn’t speak Bomu, but rather Bambara and French. I enjoy this arrangement because I get a free pass to speak in French without having to worry about not wanting to speak Bomu.
Adaman: vaccinator at the CSCSOM. I work with him from 8-2 on Wednesdays.
Modibo: worth mentioning if for no other reason than that he has an awesome name. He also works at the CSCOM.
CSCOM (pronounced ‘SESS-comm’): I honestly have no idea what this stands for, but allow for a quick explanation of the Malian health care system (perhaps what some of you have been most interested in). I live in the village of Fangasso, which is within the commune of the same name. A commune is an administrative district that determines things like where one may go for healthcare, etc. The commune is made up of a total of 29 villages, and is within the ‘circle’ of Tominian. The CSCOM in the village of Fangasso serves the 29 villages within the commune as well as a few others from other communes within the circle of Tominian. Confusing enough? Each CSCOM reports to a CSREF (SESS-ref), which serves as a health center as well as an administrative body for the CSCOMs within the circle. My nearests CSREF is in the city of Tominian. I may or may not have to report there depending on what types of work I want to do at my CSCSOM.

This brings me to my work. I moved to Fangasso the first week of September, and things have been going really well since. I’ve started (and will hopefully finish soon, with pictures!) a mural at the school in Fangasso. I work at the CSCOM every Wednesday as a way to fill my time, get to know the staff members, and familiarize myself with the group’s inner workings. I admist I don’t do much, I assist the vaccinator with his work (charting baby measurements, consulting mothers and expecting mothers, etc). My work there must change, though, because I although I feel needed, I don’t feel that I am contributing anything extraordinary or creating any change. Granted volunteers are not ‘allowed’ to start any official projects during our first three months of service, I still feel like I’m doing little. Soon I have to start what we call the baseline survey, which is essentially an observation and interview survey that we use to gauge the needs of our communities. I’ve been avoiding it but have to start soon because volunteers are required to report their findings in December during our in-service training at Tubaniso (Dec. 6-17).

Other than that, I spend a lot of time with Maimouna. Most of my time outside my house is spent with her. I’m starting to feel stir-crazy though, and plan on visiting and getting to know more people once I get back to site. (Right now everyone in our staging group is having language training in our respective regional capitals.)

So here’s the deal with my region: I am in the region of San, which is within the larger region of Segou. San is also the city, and is the administrative capital of the region of the same name. (Segou’s capital is Segou, if you catch the drift. So if I refer to San or Segou, I mean the cities unless otherwise noted.) PC has a house in San for all the volunteers in the region to use whenever we are in town (for banking, to use the post office, for training, etc.). Our house is awesome! It has two bedrooms with one bed in each (but there are a total of 13 of us reporting to San, so we’ve essentially established a tent colony in the yard), two bathrooms, a kitchen and library/TV room (with no TV) and a living room. We have electricity and running water (that functions for the most part). No toilet seats, but we do have a cistern that we use as a pool. There isn’t much happening in San, but here I can get good (well, better) food like chicken, yogurt, vegetables all day (any day), Nutella (I mad a Nutella cake!). San kaw (means ‘people of San’ in Bambara) loves to cook and eat, so we always have fun dinners whenever we’re together. We’ve spent an entire week together at the house for training and haven’t tried to kill each other yet, so I’d say the week was a success.

To get to San, I have to walk or bike 5k from Fangasso to the main (ie paved) road. Once you get to the road, you literally have to stand on the side of the road until a bus comes by that is willing to take you to your destination. Most times the buses are full and you’ll end up waiting for several hours until a suitable ride comes by. Coming back from San is even harder, though—you have to wait at a station until a bus or bush taxi going your way is ready to leave. When you ask what time the bus is leaving, the answer is “soon”. Once I was told one company’s bus would be leaving at 4. I waited at the station until 5 only to find out that it was not actually leaving until “7 or 8”. I left and went to get a bush taxi and waited at that station for a few hours until it was too dark to safely travel. Came back the next morning at 8 and did not find a ride until almost 1—and it happened to be a friend of a friend who was able to take me to a village called Tene (about 25k from Fangasso, where another health PCV lives) and I was able to get a bus from there. But it took me more than 24 hours to get home that weekend! I was not pleased and am now not really looking forward to traveling back to site when I leave tomorrow.

Some funny things that have happened to me recently:
1. I was getting henna on my feet, which was a frustrating and long process involving black and orange foot paint, essentially. The women who did my henna did it in a ncie pattern that involved stripes. I looked at my feet and said, “Maimouna, I look like a tiger.” Her response: “What’s a tiger?” Sad.
2. Maimouna pulled her pants down to pee under a tree where her neighbors keep their pigs. There is no further explanation, here, though; it really was as random as is sounds.
3. Maimouna’s son and his wife had a baby recently. Every few days, we have the following conversation (it doesn’t matter who says what):
This baby is cute.
This baby is good!
This baby is not good! She is lazy.
Yes, she is lazy. She does nothing. She eats and sleeps.
Yes, she is bad. She does not work.
She is good.
Yes, she is good.
This really is a direct translation. Bomu is not a very nuanced language. I still can’t speak, though. I’ve got the greetings down cold, but only because I do them 100 times per day. I have a ‘tutor’ in village that I work with sometimes, but the problem is that I just don’t want to study. I know I have to start, though, especially since work is starting soon. I just find it a lot easier to speak French when I can (which is often—not because a lot of people in village speak French, but because I spend most of my time with a family the majority of whose members speak).
4. Google guinea worm. Now. I watched a guinea room removal the other day at the CSCOM and had to leave the room because I almost fainted. Vision went white and tunnel-y, got dizzy, started sweating profusely, etc. They didn’t understand why I didn’t want to stay in the room. Everyone else was fascinated, snapping cell phone photos while the little patient winced in pain.

In other news: My house is the best! Shelby Gale (the volunteer I replaced—as if any volunteer could ever really be replaced) left me a house full of wonderful things, like real people furniture! And lots of art supplies. I spent a solid month getting the house just how I wanted it, and now it’s pretty much perfect. I have three large rooms but only use two because the third one is dark and dirty, and I will never need the space. The front room serves as a living room and kitchen, and the back room is my bedroom. I have a yard and a gate and my outdoor bathroom, and I share a compound with one of the village chief’s sons (Yaya), his two wives (Sata and Fatuma), and their three kids. Sometimes we have issues…Once I left a bar of soap in a dish outside on a windowsill; I left for a while and when I came back half the bar was gone and there were three distinct finger marks where the middle of the bar used to be. Then another time I left an empty peanut butter jar outside that disappeared. When I came back from wherever I was, the jar was gone. My neighbor, Sata, came up to me with the jar that she had already taken, asking if she could have it. Then once I left a bucket outside that disappeared. I told one of the chief’s wives about it and a few days later the bucket reappeared. Whenever I leave dirty dishes or clothes outside (when I’m cleaning), the neighbor wives come up to me asking if they can have them. Then once I was getting ready to burn my paper trash and Fatuma came up and started digging through it looking for…well, I don’t know what she was looking for. I don’t know why, but it really bugs me to have them in my yard because whenever they come in, things start disappearing. It’s funny when you think about it, but frustrating at the same time. Call me crazy, but I don’t like people digging through my stuff.

This is too long. And not proofread. But this is all for now. Love to everyone. I love Mali and Peace Corps! And I miss you all. I'll be better about posting, starting now. : )