Creatures of the Night, Part I

Hello!

Hopefully this will be a one-part series, if I am careful from now on...Let me set the scene: It’s midnight. Pitch black in Fangasso. Quiet night all around. I’m sleeping outside on my mattress (with my mosquito net, like al good PCVs and literally every person in Fangasso), and am awoken by something crawling on my arm. This happens sometimes, during sleep time and otherwise. You just brush them off. So I brushed this one off in my half-asleep stupor, and I can feel that it’s quite a large something based on the weight against my hand. And immediately my hand starts to hurt. Whatever this bug was just bit me…I find my headlight next to me, turn it on, and my suspicions are confirmed: A SCORPION GOT INTO MY BED. He had the nerve to just sit there as I flashed my light on him, knowing I was too scared to kill him. I called our PC doctor to find out approximately how long it would be before I died from the poison.

As it turns out, Malian scorpions are only slightly (and not fatally) poisonous, to my relief. So I moved inside to finish the night in peace, and when I woke up in the morning it was like nothing had happened, not a mark. I went outside to put away my outside sleeping stuff, and the little guy was still inside my net. I felt that his brazen presence merited death by flip flop. Then I threw him in the latrine just in case he wasn’t all the way dead. I wasn’t taking any chances. Then I found another one inside my house that afternoon…Is nothing off limits? Guess I’ll be dealing with those for a while.

In other news, Tabaski was last Wednesday. Tabaski is kind of like Malian Thanksgiving, since we’re probably all still in the Thanksgiving mood. Tabaski is a celebration 70 days from the end of Ramadan in which many Muslims gorge on sheep (it us called the féte de moutons—festival of the sheep—in French) in honor of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son. I spent three days going from house to house eating delicious food. The first day I spent with the chef de poste (main doctor at the CSCOM, who, as it turns out, isn’t actually a doctor) and the vaccinator. There is also a Mauritanian family in Fangasso who brought us some of the most delicious rice and sauce I’ve had in Mali. I had been having really bad food cravings for American food the last few weeks, but Tabaski kind of helped to squash those for the time being. During the last few weeks, I have had dreams about Oreos, frosting-covered Oreos (which don’t even exist, to my knowledge—my brain is now just inventing foods that I can’t have in order to torture me even more), walking around a grocery store and looking for ice cream and dried fruit, hitting a buffet, and eating dinner at Chipotle. But those have been gone for now.

We also ate a fabulous Thanksgiving dinner yesterday. The San PCVs met at the house and ate what was pretty close to an American dinner: guinea fowl (aka Malian turkey; not really, but it was as close as we could get), stuffing, mashed potatoes, mashed pumpkin, salad, cornbread, pumpkin pie and cake. All homemade, organic, and fresh. Yummy. HAPPY THANKSGIVING! Hope you all enjoyed spending time with their families and friends and ate as well as we did.

Other than that, site work has been going well. I’ve been working, not so diligently, at my baseline surveys, going around asking as many villagers as possible a series of health-related questions. We’re encouraged to do about 30-50, according to our materials, but I’ve done 5 so far. The results are “due” on the 6th. But Maimouna told me she was no longer interested in doing baselines with me, so I’ve kind of been working on my own for the last two weeks. It’s hard to do it without her, because she knows everyone in village whereas I know so few people, and she also served as my translator. I can do some of the surveys in French, but even then it’s still hard to ask a near-perfect stranger to talk to you about their health habits. I’ve tried doing them in Bomu, and people have a hard time understanding me without Maimouna there to clarify. All volunteers are also supposed to do food security surveys, but those are long and complicated; I’ve been doing them in conjunction with the health baselines, and I’m afraid people will start to get sick of my questions. We also have to do assets surveys, interviewing people like the CSCOM workers, mayors, sous-prefets, teachers and school directors, etc. Those I have enjoyed because I can do them all in French and they have been proving a good way to meet the so-called “important people” in village and see what their opinions are on the state of health in Fangasso.

These surveys have led me to an idea for my first project. Fangasso has a small water tower that provides clean drinking water to the village from a series of pumps. World Vision funded the tower, but it is not, predictably, in working order. They are not interested in funding a repair of the well (which is fair, but still angers me when I consider the amount of money they have spent on projects recently that have, from what I observe, have had very little effect on Fangasso). It’s nearly impossible to regulate the usage of a public utility like a water source, but the village has hopes of setting up some sort of payment or savings system for all people who use the water so that the next time it breaks there will be adequate money to fund any repairs. I obviously want to get the tower fixed as soon as possible, but I have no idea how to start. I want to make sure that whatever system is set up will last and will not be subject to the corruption that is also unfortunately present in Fangasso (long story). I had a meeting with the mayor that was canceled when I called him the day we had agreed upon just to confirm, and he had left town). So hopefully next tie we agree to meet both parties will be interested. I stopped by once to say hi, and said that I hoped I wasn’t bothering him, to which his response was, “You’re not bothering me at all. Don’t forget that I’m the one who requested you to be here in Fangasso.” That seemed nice at the time, but now rings a little false. But meetings get cancelled all the time here because people with means to travel do so often, so I’m trying not to take it personally.

Interesting facts about Fangasso:

Our school: grades 1-9, more than 700 students…and 6 teachers.

Our CSCOM serves 29 villages and only has a staff of 3 for illnesses and three for maternity-related work. (I’m staring my work with the maternity next week, updates about that soon!) The Malian government pays for all vaccines for children and adults, but does not pay for the paper that that records are kept on, so each woman with a child has to pay 400 cfa (about 80 cents) for the paper and the rest is taken care of. To give birth at the maternity, a women pays $2.

There was also what can maybe only be described as a tribal war in a neighboring village last week. The Fulani people of West Africa are oftentimes nomads but have settled in many places in Mali. They tend to have a lot of sheep and goats (still herders at heart) and also tend not to tie them up…So they get into neighboring fields and eat crops. Apparently some Fulani sheep ate a large amount of another villager’s crops, and somehow resulted in 4 serious head injuries inflicted by farming tools, and a series of village meetings on how to solve the feud. This didn’t happen in Fangasso, but the injured parties came into our CSCOM for treatment so we got to see some of the aftermath. They mayor had to get involved. Bad news!

This is all for now. Back to village for a week before heading to Bamako for more training. Love to all! Happy holidays!!