Mali

So here is my belated holiday post!  Next year I’ll be in America for Christmas and New Year’s!

This year I went to Mali for the holiday break.  A few days before Xmas, my friend Val came to visit my village.  Her town is just 20k south of the capitol, and she commented how much colder village was and how many more stars are visible at night :)  We went for a bike ride around the area, had lunch with my favorite professor’s family and had drinks with the president of the local PTA.

Xmas eve morning we made the trip from my village to Bobo and you could definitely tell it was a holiday!  The trip took about 2 hours longer than normal…  That evening we went to a new bar/grill right down the street, watched an xmas movie and went to bed.   There were about 20 volunteers there and xmas day we made dinner and watched movies all day (I definitely watched movies more than helping with dinner)

The next morning Val and I left at about 6:30 for Mali! We went to Mopti, a city where the Niger and Bani Rivers meet.  The bus ride there was about 14 hours, but we had a remarkably uneventful trip up there.  Our first morning there we had a tour of the city – saw their markets, a local mosque, the ship builders and just some of the side streets. I know that I can’t really compare Mopti – a tourist city – to my rural village, but I was surprised by the amount of development surprised me.  Mopti is between Bamako, the capitol of Mali, and Timbuktu and the city has been a part of the trade route for centuries.  We saw some of the big chunks of salt that is mined near Timbuktu as well as lots of smoked fish, all ready to be shipped one way or the other on the rivers.

Salt mined near Timbuktu

That evening we went on a sunset canoe ride around the area.  There were a couple islands right across from the city so we got off and walked around a couple of them.  We saw fish being smoked (they cover a pile of fish with grass, then light the grass on fire) and the evening nets being dragged. 

The evening catch.

The next day we sat around the pool reading with a walk along the river.  The rest of our group got in that evening – two other volunteers (from MN!) and their four friends visiting from home, one of whom works about two miles from my house. Craziness.  Our guide for the hiking portion of the trip also got in that evening, so we figured out the last couple details and headed into Dogon Country.

Dogon is an area of south eastern Mali – just north of Burkina Faso – where the Dogon people lived in villages built into the cliffs of the Bandiagara Escarpment.  Our tour started on top of the cliffs and ended a couple days later at the bottom.  Our guide, Oumar, is Dogon and was both super knowledgeable and super awesome.  He spoke English and you could tell from different phrases he used that he had definitely spent time around Americans.

In each village we passed through Oumar would explain different parts of the village and its significance in the culture.  Each village had several “town halls” where men would go to resolve disputes.  The parties in conflict would go in with several village elders and no one could come out until they reached a resolution.  And not a strict democratic, 51% say yes 49% say no type conclusion, but a resolution where everyone was in agreement.  They would talk around and around the issue, each side trying to convince the other of their validity.  You’ll also notice how that the ceiling is very low on these buildings.  The reason is so no one can stand up in anger and make any move to hurt another person.  A kind of cool concept.

The 'town hall.'  It sounds like the US could've used a couple of these this past year...

As I said, the Dogon lived in cliff villages: today the villages have all been rebuilt either above or below the cliff.  We were able to see an ancient village, though.  Oumar informed us that the Dogon weren’t the ones to build the villages; they moved in after a people called the Tele left them.  The villages consisted of mostly houses and grain silos.

One of the ancient villages on the cliff.

In the last village we visited we were able to see a mask ceremony.  While these are typically just preformed for tourists today, traditionally they were done at funerals to guide the spirits.  Each different type of mask represented a different person or belief in the traditionally animist culture.

Giant Mask! He was also doing these awesome spins and dips and i thought he was going to fall or take someone out, haha.

After our 4 days hiking we made our way back to Mopti, then back on into Burkina.  Our bus ride back was equally uneventful as the one out, which really is a quite surprising in West Africa.  We got back to Bobo where I was able to hang out with some volunteers from Ghana.  We ran into them in Dogon, then again in Bobo.  Also, they were from MN!

Overall, we had a really great week and it was pretty great way to ring in the New Year.  Happy 2012, friends! 

Aubin

Tuina Aubin.  He's 15 and a student in my 5e Math class, 3rd in his class overall, and he passed away this week.  When I showed up at school Thursday morning, the director was talking to the Bureau des Eleves (student council) and when he was done he came up to me and said that he had some bad news: a student had died.

When the director told me the name, I recognized it, but couldn't put a face with it immediately.  And that killed me.  I've spent about 4 months with these kids now, and I doubt I could name 10% of that class.  I knew what area of the class he sat in, I know that I recognized the name, meaning it was someone who participated, but I couldn't picture his face for the life of me.  It wasn't until a couple hours later when all the professors sat around talking about him that I was finally sure I was thinking of the right kid.  It just felt like i was doing him some sort of injustice by not even being able remember him.

As to how he died, no really knows at this point.  He was sick this last week, he had come in to school Tuesday to get the Medical Notebook (they have the local health clinic sign it to justify their absence from school) and he apparently had some sort of local medicine on his forehead (used for headaches) and he was sweating a lot. So it could have been anything.  And apparently the situation escalated over night, and being that my village is at least 2 hours from a hospital, I doubt anyone thought to take him there.  Or they thought it wasn't that serious.

After hearing the news that morning, the school staff and the bureau des eleves went to his family's house to give our condolences.  And it was the hardest thing I've ever done.  As we approached the house we could hear the crying; as we got closer we saw the roughly 30 women sitting around under a hanger.  The women were all crying: heavy, pained, anguished crying.  In this cultural it is not acceptable to cry unless someone has died.  Meaning that small frustrations and struggles we often cry over in America are dealt with in silence here.  Part of me wonders that because a death is the only time they can cry or let out their frustrations, they take it to another level.  Another part of what makes it so different is that in the US, mourning families are supposed to maintain some level of self-control.  It's often considered uncouth to be overly distraught in front of others.  Here, they don't care that anyone is seeing their grief: their child just died, of course they're grieving.  That's how they see it, and that's how everyone else sees it, too.

After a couple minutes the person standing in front of me moved a little to the side and I noticed that their was a bundled blanket in the middle of the women under the hangar.  It took me about two seconds to realize that it was his body.  He was just wrapped in a simple fleece blanket - the same blanket every market sells and every home has one or two of - and was laying on a straw mat.  I found out later that my director asked if we could see him, but they declined.  I later learned that the body was washed the next day as part of the burial process, and it is at that point that men also join the wake.

When we got back to school the biology teacher just kind of walked slightly away from the rest of the group and simply states "that was too hard."  He was the one to ask why only women were there.  None of the professors are the same ethnic group as the village, but our secretary is Bwaba, so she explained some of the customs to all of us.  As we were sitting around talking the biology teacher once again speaks up, "just this week, I used Aubin as an example of one the good kids we had in 6e last year."  The french teacher commented that if there were too many players for soccer, he could always ask Aubin to wait for the next half and Aubin would never make a fuss about it.  He was polite, kind and smart.

I've talked to a couple other volunteers about this, and I think that most volunteers experience a student death in their two years here.  Pretty sad statistic and I wonder how it compares to a lifetime of teaching in the US.  When I was student teaching at DCIS, one of the teachers was talking about his motivation for joining the Peace Corps and he said that he did it because he wanted to see dead bodies.  Not in some disturbing morbid way, but just that he wanted to live a life closer to edge of life.  A little less protection between you and the realities of life and death the world over.  And whether or not that is something I was expressly looking for in my service, it's certainly true.