I’ll put up photos next post because I’m ridiculous and forgot my cord to upload photos onto my laptop at homestay, an hour away from here at training site, BUT, to continue with my life, basically, some things have gotten better, and other things I’ve been thinking about have become elucidated over the past three weeks.
Let’s start with that Bambara! How’s it coming? It’s going amazingly. I’m actually legitimately having conversations with people I am growing to sincerely appreciate about things that matter to me. The other day, I was not only able to start asking what we were having for dinner, for example, and what I actually wanted to eat, but was able to say, “I think that, when people are good people, G-d gives them zame [a fried rice dish they serve here with vegetables and meat sometimes that is DELICIOUS].” I was also able to tell my mom not only that I wanted to go to Sikasso region for service, but that, “Every night, I dream of Sikasso, and its vegetables, and its fruit, and I’m happy.” She almost fell off her chair laughing. Like, my language has gotten to the point where I can be funny. One of the things I always loved about being Speech Captain in high school was that I could help people find their personality in their voice so that what they said, regardless of who had written or edited it, was theirs’. I can finally do that, to some limited extent, in Bambara. And it’s incredibly empowering. To be able to say that I miss my father, or that I feel bad about my Bambara sometimes because I promise, I promise, I’m not 5 years old but I know I really sound like it. To be able to say that my mother was a beautiful, strong womyn, or to say that the future, basically, might freak me out. Language gives you this incredible ability to feel in control. And that is really something I took for granted, in my language classes my whole life, or even in Brazil to some extent. I never looked at conversations as opportunities to say myself, really.
And I think, the more I’ve meditated on that, the more I’ve come to realize that that lack of acknowledgement, of the power of speaking yourself into your sentences, showing yourself through the words you string together, that absence of understanding of power leads to feeling powerless. I haven’t spent a lot of time in my life acknowledging that I am speaking and therefore actively creating myself, my limits, my desires, and who I want to be. It makes you say words like “No” softer when you really mean them. It makes you trail off your sentences before your thoughts have really been heard yet.
Language is powerful. Lesson learned, and a strong lesson I want to share, especially through some of the work I might be doing at my site!
Like WHAT? And, WHERE’S YOUR SITE?!?? My site is a village of 2600 people called Ziangolodougou. It’s south of Sikkassoville, in the Sikasso region of Mali, south of Bamako, the capitol. It’s the part of Mali that is the least hot, and, because it has the most rain (it rains from March to October, albeit more drizzles and lighter rains on the tail ends of that time span), it has the most nutritious variety of vegetables, fruit, and crops available year-round. LIKE: peanuts, millet, rice, corn, beans, sorghum, cassava, mangos, papayas, pineapple, avocados (YEAR-ROUND), sweet/potatoes, yams, okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, garlic, green beans, sweet peas, and MORE. I really wanted to be posted to Sikasso region, so I’m incredibly psyched. The only downside is the long rainy season, especially when you think about solar charging capabilities, but I think I’ll figure it out with a screen door set-up and a little sunlight during the rain. We’ll see.
There is no market in my village, even though we have a lot of crops, and they want my to possibly do some secondary project work with womyn and gardening. My market town is Zegoua, which is 10km away and I can bike ride once a week to for their market day, as well as to get my furniture made if I need to (we’ll see what I need this week when I visit tomorrow!), and to get internet access. Zegoua, as well as Ziangolodougo, are on a main road, so travel is pretty easy. I can get to Sikasso or Bamako any day of the week, multiple times a day, because I’m on the main road, really close to the Ivory Coast border. Like, 15km! Which is really exciting. It’s apparently less time for me to get to Abidjan, Ivory Coast’s capitol on their coast, than it is for me to get to Bamako! Does somebody hear interesting vacations coming on this season? Because I do.
My town also does not have a CSCOM, which is the most local clinics available to villages, where there are pharmacies, vaccination hangars, and maternity wards. My village only has a maternity house with some midwives and some Relais, which are community health worker volunteers who can do vaccination days, for example, out in the community outside of a CSCOM, and prevention work through workshops and demonstrations of how to make things like ameliorated (more nutritious) porridge for growing babies. I’ll be working with them and then probably biking to the CSCOM and radio station in Zegoua to do some work some days every week. But it depends on what it’s like. I’ll see tomorrow!
I’ll also be apparently living in a two-room house with a patio in the same general concession yard as a family who will be my host-family at site. My family is composed of a husband with one wife (yet again, and that’s a little bit of a coincidence that both of my families haven’t been polygamous) and five kids. I don’t think I have a nyegen yet (they have yet to construct my outdoors bathroom), and I may not have a roof (???!?) yet, but hey, sounds like an adventure’s afoot! I’ve met my homeologue (hopefully my future work counterpart deigned by the village who has traveled to our training site to work with me a bit and get some training before we go to the village together this week). He’s been a homeologue before and seems quite competent, which is nice, because I really want to be able to do good work with my counterpart as well as like them as a person. Person-wise, we seem to get along well as well. He laughs at some of my grammatically incorrect (I’m sure) jokes. He’s happy I know a fair bit of Bambara and helps me with vocab-learning already if I ask him what something is in French, which he also knows (G-D SAVE THE QUEEN AND BLESS MY LIFE). Hope my family’s nice! Especially since, albeit with a wall between our houses, I’ll be living with them.
Work-wise, it looks like I’ll be doing a lot of malnutrition work, especially with new mothers about infant nutrition and nutrition for children under the age of 5, prenatal consultations, malaria prevention, water source maintenaince and washing hands, and… (drumroll) FAMILY PLANNING, I WIN. Also, they want me to do health education with school kids and mothers, and work on possible small economic projects and shea production with womyn (can you say healthy skin and hair, Akinyi? Yes, you self-absorbed mutha, ya can).
I’M SUPER EXCITED, but also curious as to how much what they’ve told me I might do matches up with what I might actually do. I definitely am walking into this with a healthy relationships agenda. If I could work with womyn and, more importantly, men, in schools to discuss what healthy relationships are and how it feels good to be treated and to treat others keeping their feelings and sense of self-worth in mind, I’d be happy with the work I’d done here. We’ll see what my community needs, what I can do in my official work and what I can do on my own through the friendships I’m beginning to seriously understand I’ll form while I’m here (because before, I thought I’d just be working in Mali in a bubble without anyone to ever speak to, but now understand that knowing Bambara also allows me not to be isolated and to be at home here).
…And what else is going on, besides your incredibly anxious, crazy self pondering yo’ future? I’ve been thinking a lot about, along the lines of learning myself in another language, the power of the colonization of language, and therefore, the mind. Basically, when the French came in and invaded Mali and forced groups of children at gunpoint to go to schools when the missionaries could not convince them and made them learn in French, they didn’t plan on ever having anyone translate that forced knowledge into Bambara. THAT means, almost virtually all words concerning educational tools and industry in Bambara are Frambara, or French with Bambara pronunciation. Like chalk (lakere), plane (avion), the time (5am, for example, is cinq heure waati, with only ‘waati’ meaning ‘time’ in Bambara), office (bureau), government (gouvernement), president (presidan), and the list continues. Sometimes, I just want to scream at my teachers (when it’s obviously not their fault), SAY THINGS IN YOUR LANGUAGE, BECAUSE IT’S LEGITIMATE AND CAN EXPRESS YOUR WORLD OUTSIDE OF THE COLONIAL FORCE THAT MIGHT HAVE INTRODUCED THEM. It makes me irrationally angry at how we sometimes fail to construct things within the proud context of our individual rich histories and heritage. Does that make sense? It really pisses me off.
Otherwise, making friends is nice J. I feel like I have an actual set of people I can go to when I’m really upset, and that they will make me feel better. At first, it’s hard, because you’re a trainee with a bunch of strangers on top of living with strangers who speak a strange language different from your own. Now, it’s hard in a different way, though: I have some people I really like here that I’ve met, my mother almost cried when I left home-stay for these next 11 days to visit site for the first time (she really loves me, and it feels miraculous to have that motherly support and absolutely sincere love with someone I cannot even help but feel anything but vulnerable around and who I know loves me simply because I am and not because of who I can put on…since I literally can’t, in Bambara, really), and I suddenly am realizing, my last months in the States and with friends was mostly focused on talking about what I didn’t know I’d be doing in a place I hadn’t known anything about yet. It was almost…blank, in a way. A lot of waiting, and talking about waiting, and putting things on hold, and weaning myself from things I wasn’t sure I’d have, need, or want for two years. A lot of anxiety, and suddenly, Peace Corps and trainees are constructing my new life here. Actively, quickly, and I’m just in it as long as I can make it.
Who knows. Maybe I hate site and I go home. Maybe I make it a year and something happens to me (G-d forbid) and I have to leave. Maybe I get through almost 2 years and choose to extend my service another year, because I loved it so much. All I know right now, is that I have to be open to not knowing a lot.
And, I’m okay with it, I think. Right now. I’m okay, with the incredibly long training sessions without a break that echo government bureaucracy out my fuming ears and onto the annoyingly efficiently fly-attracting main hangar, with not knowing people I think I love as well as those I love at home, not having a home until someone gives me one, and living out of suitcases, both physically and packaging away my feelings frequently to be able to deal with kids screaming “white person” when they see me outside their house concessions or with adults laughing at almost everything I try to say in their language at times. It’s okay right now. And that, inandofitself, means I feel like I’ve accomplished something being here.
BIRTHDAY COMING UP SOON! And, thank you so much for all your continued support. You beautiful people who care about me make this a wonderful experience to share. Also, on Skype NEXT Monday and Tuesday night (12am-2am, East Coast time, in 8 days). Lemme know if you wanna chat! And, NEW ADDRESS TO SEND THINGS TO IF YOU WANNA SEND ‘EM will be given out in a week. Thanks in advance to all of you who already sent me some love! Greatly appreciated and loved already J. You guys are great.
ALSO, side projects I’m already planning for my site:
-PUPPY NAMED ‘GUACAMOLE’ (will be able to vaccinate at marketday and deworm, and will have flew collar sent from the States so that I can love it freely J; also, will leave it in village after my service ends with someone I trust loves the puppy and will treat it well, as a legacy of respect for an animal for my village to see and hopefully incorporate into how they themselves treat their animals. See how I’m doing that? I’m excited.)
-Drying fruit
-Making wine out of fruit
-Gardening (sunflowers, moringa, avocado, and mango trees, soy beans, lettuce and spinach, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and green beans)
YAY. I love it.
Ate logo, Populace
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