The main trend of what’s been going through my mind came to me in a Larium dream. Larium, for those of you blessed enough not to have ever had to take it, is a really strong, once-a-week Malaria medication, also known as Mefloquine, that is known to have such severe psychological impact, through hallucinations, anxiety, crazy dreams, and other things, that they recently stopped giving it to the US military. But, I take it once a week, and therefore have dubbed Mondays—the day I take it—and Tuesdays—the aftermath—as the days of nightmares. They’re not always nightmares—to the contrary, I take it whenever I go to Kenya as well, and a lot of the time, they’re actually super fun and kinda trippy and lucid. And so was this dream, where I was in a 20-story Marriot hotel, asked to go to the 13th floor for some reason, and was whizzed down with a narrating voice and able to observe the most exquisite feast through glass panel-doors with the best dressed people my imagination could conjure up. And so the narration went:
“And now, we would like to especially welcome our American guests to the Feast of Life. It is huge, it is huge, and the epicenter of decadence. Here, you can have everything so long as you have none of it, and people may spend hours, just feasting [their eyes.]”
It was during this narration that I noticed that none of the people in the banquet hall I was observing feverously were actually eating, though they were moving their cutlery and lifting it to their mouths with food and lifting their wine glasses in toasts and all looked exceedingly happy and incredibly well-to-do. They were touching silverware to their mouths, but not eating. They were bringing cups to their lips, but not drinking. And I awoke with this incredibly bewildering sense that I’d been missing something all my life. And it led to the following realization.
I know that my main drive career-wise has become to work with people to discover healthier relationships—with themselves and with others. It is in such spirit that I want to go into international constitutional law concerning reproductive and sexual rights, rights I have observed to be the most neglected and therefore those that are left the most vulnerable to be mistreated, though so important central to peoples’ happiness. But I had never focused on my own relationship with life itself: I had never thought to myself, is this relationship I have with life healthy? In other words, what are my non-negotiables, things I am not willing to give up in this, literally, life-long commitment? What are the things I’m willing to bend on so my life grows? What do I want from my future with life? What’s holding me back from telling life what I need, and what I think is reasonable to want?
And so, I sat down to make an intense, OCD list, in true Shapiro-family fashion. What has been preventing me from making this relationship healthy? My fear of messing things up that are totally under my control, like not getting a job one day, or not being a supportive family member or friend, or not exceeding in everything I do, work-wise or for pleasure, like spitting spoken word poetry, guitar, singing, or dancing. The fear is there because I’m the only one to blame if I fail at these things. And have had amazing enough support throughout my life to be happy other people were responsible for keeping me alive and successful, though constantly aware that my fair share of responsibility in that hadn’t really kicked in yet. And so, I realized, what do I want from life? To not be constantly afraid of falling, but happy. And so, I thought, what will make me happy? And so, I realized, the things that were on the OCD list:
-doing something that shows me I can challenge my body to successfully work for my mind, like jogging, bicycling long distance, or dancing my heart out
-keeping things clean so that I don’t feel like a dirty college student anymore
-reading so that I support my own intellectual pursuits into myself and what I think, to hull out who I am throughout what I do
-playing music, to create something beautiful with my body
-helping something grow, like plants or an animal, to help something as I feel needed and helped myself
So, I started jogging three times minimum a week, bicycling the 10k to my market town faster and faster, setting up a cleaning schedule, reading whenever I had the energy to, budgeting to save enough to get a guitar here to start playing again by April, and will be starting both a garden in a week with my homologue and getting my puppy as soon as it can open its eyes. No, we haven’t met yet. Yes, it will be love, literally, at one of its and my first sight.
Then, I began to meditate on what kept my community going. Doing a health baseline survey that Peace Corps outlines for us, I have found that there are three major issues—and have discussed these liminally with my work counterparts here already—that I will need to work on exhaustively during my two years here:
- Many people in my village do not have latrines at all, let alone well-constructed soak pits to soak up waste water coming from them, especially during rainy season.
- People either do not wash their hands with soap consistently, or never wash their hands with soap at all.
- People eat well enough to not be malnourished, but, though they grow literally anything you could think of that would grow here (except for garlic and onions, onions being that there is an animist belief that, if you grow onions, a spirit called a Jenna, I have figured out, will give you seizures and possess your body thusly), there is not a good understanding of nutrition at all, and therefore, how to eat smart to keep yourself healthy and strong.
With these issues from the get-go, what keeps my community going? Well, to build off of exactly what I was talking about in my last post with the cultural trade-offs ensuring complete support if you do select things to stay apart of the community, my community has literally everything it needs. But it uses none of it. Thusly, it always feels rich, with each other, and with what it makes and doesn’t keep—like the food they sell but don’t really eat, the crafts they create but give all money to the community fund to create things like secondary schools, etc. It is, the Feast of Life. It uses nothing as individuals, like the money it finds through what it does or what it cultivates, both of which are steady sources of economy here, and therefore feels like it has everything. It does. It makes it. It can do anything it needs to do.
I don’t know if that makes full sense. The best way I can describe it is through my matrone, an unofficially-trained midwife, and one of my villages’ two, that helps virtually all of the womyn in my community give birth. She’s basically my best friend here, and one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met. Soft-spoken, amazing with children, undyingly celebratory spirit—I mean, Mariam does traditional henna on her feet at least once a week every week for the past 10 years just because she likes it that way, and makes tea for her and other womyn every afternoon just because she likes it that way—and, has been a midwife now for 15 years, but has never had a child. When I asked her why, she said that an operation had once rendered her unfertile. End of conversation. To make it less somber, I joked that I could give her one of mine whenever I have one, because I don’t have the time for their crap. She laughed.
When I asked Mariam why she became a midwife, she simply said, “A diara n ye” [It pleased me.] Mariam has one of the richest lives I’ve ever seen, albeit somewhat simple, as she’s always waiting around at her house (now, usually, happily, with me eating her food and drinking her tea, as she’s determined to plump me up and fill me with caffeine, apparently) for womyn to give birth. But the happiness doesn’t come from what she herself can do. Like watching those beautiful people in my dream not eat all this amazing food but look like they were having the most wonderful time together, I watch my village every day not engage in anything I would call luxury, but seem far happier than anyone I’ve ever known. I’ll dub it “the socialist collective phenomenon.” You’re free to call it what you want, but I have a feeling that’s exactly what it is. When you’re around people that genuinely appreciate what you do for them and in turn are willing to do anything for you, short of buy you a couple nights at a hotel in Bamako to see the highlife, I call it “the socialist collective phenomenon.”
And so, I’d had the ability to also be happy for so long, I realized, without having extravagant things to get there. Like, I’d wanted a personal trainer for so long. I’d thought to myself, if only I had a personal trainer, I’d be so fit and happy! I have officially, though, never been more fit or happier in my life than I feel here, and I’ll be damned if my volunteer living allowance is paying for a personal trainer to help me do it. Or I thought, if only I could go to Israel to study Torah, I’d be so close to G-d and spiritually fulfilled. Yet, through reading on Torah teachings here in my spare time and meditating on what it means to me to help others, I’ve found a more religious space in my life than I think I’ve ever been to before. This Feast of Life—it is huge, it is huge! I have everything I’ve ever wanted in the world to use, but I don’t have to use it to be happy. Just seeing it can make me happy. Just knowing the possibilities are there, is sufficient. My happiness comes from the ride, the knowledge I gather, the time I spend around the wealth of the world. Not from the actual wealth.
What a revelation! It caused me to look at the issues I was seeing in my own life and around me as infinitely conquerable, because I can see all around me the possibility for improvement, though we may not be using them. Everything on this feasting table is something I can make on my own. So I now see the following in light of new hope, but nonetheless, some things I’ve come to understand here are still distressing to me.
Just to say, being happier and healthier throughout all of it makes it much easier.
So, a couple of musings about my village of Ziangolodougou…
I do literally live on the border. I run from my village to a road guard post and back in the mornings. I go to a market in a town only known for being the last town before the border. My village is the second-to-last town. Therefore, it was at first a little daunting to run alone, thinking someone could snatch me away (I’m a paranoid person everywhere, so this really is no different as if I was on the border with Canucks in Vermont, I’d still be a little nervous) to one of two entirely different countries (Burkina Faso or Cote D’Ivoire). No longer so, but just to say, I inhale a lot of truck exhaust in the mornings here and see shady nice cars zoom past either going to or coming from Cote D’Ivoire inexplicably early in the morning. Not like I know why, but I do wonder. This also means that loads of people in my village are from Cote D’Ivoire or, less often but still, Burkina Faso. And those places around this border area I’m in are all also Senufo, for the most part, which is the dominant ethnic group here that I spoke of briefly in my last post. The cultural side of that is growing to very slowly understand the incredible impact the fighting in Cote D’Ivoire up until the past year had on people I’m growing to know and love. People were decapitated in Abijan and had to flee. My host-father never wants to go back.
The linguistic side of people being Senufo, aside from Mariam, my matrone love of my life, who is the only Bamana person in village, is that they do not learn Bambara, the language I’ve been trained in and now know fairly well, in school. At all. In fact, in areas that are not Bamana in Mali, people learn the predominant local language for two or three years in school, followed by what I can only gather is semi-fluid French. For this reason, people in my village only learn Bambara to sell things at the big market once a week to people who aren’t Senufo. And that means that their Bambara is heavily accented as their Senufo language (Senufokan) is, and that they have different vocabulary that is an amalgamation of both Senufokan and Bambara. All of that’s to say, grace a my fairly good Bambara, I have friends now. Which is awesome. But I understand very little of what they say. Like I said in the last post, dooni dooni [slowly, slowly], we’ll get each other eye-to-eye. But now, when I say something to my host-mother in clear, well-spoken Bambara, and she bold-face doesn’t understand, I get a little frustrated. It can be difficult at times to realize that most of what you hear you give affirmation without understanding anything but the general sentiment it might have behind it. And a little existentially confusing.
But another thing to know about my village is that it saves the majority of its money for communal funding. Case in point and pictures to come later: my village, in one month in 1997, made a dam/large lake with “machines” (my homologue didn’t specify which, but they apparently can handle a lot of water) so that their cows could drink water there and that they could garden, as well as get fish from it. I didn’t understand the word for “dam” in Bambara before I came in January, so my homologue showed it to me. It’s literally postcard-perfect. If I’d had a camera on me after the bike ride it took to almost kill me with sand on the road to get there (my village is at least a 40 minute dirt-road bike-ride deep and wide), you’d be able to see. It’s breathtaking. And this is dry/cold season. In rainy season, it’s truly humongous. AND, they get loads of fish from it. What do they do with the money everybody (literally everybody) gets from selling the fish at the market, though? Nothing—they put it in a communal fund. Wanna get that secondary school. And there are womyn’s groups (12, I believe, and I’ve only been to see 4 of them at meetings so far, but want to go to all, even though they only, reasonably, speak Senufokan the whole time) that serve to save set amounts of money per womyn and give to the prenatal consultations fund I wrote about in the last post. And gardeners’ associations collect set amounts of money per each member in order to fix gardening wells when there are problems with them and to help members pay for doctors’ bills when they get sick, to be paid back later by that member when they have the money to pay it forward once again. These organizations started in the 60s in my village, when Mali was undergoing independence and a large socialist awakening. And, to this day, my village functions by donating to funds as a community that help the community. And though they might not have everything they need right now, or in the near future, dooni dooni, they are indeed getting there.
Also important to know: there is a traditional medicine man in my village! I neglected to say this in the last post, though I met him during site visit. He’s incredibly respected in my village, was the first homologue to a Peace Corps Volunteer in my village (I believe there were 3 before me, 10 years before I came), and was introduced to me primarily by my homologue, who is the only person in village, as a Relais (community Health Volunteer, chosen by the community), who sells Western medicine.
This boggled me: I thought to myself, can traditional medicine and Western medicine really live THAT close together in harmony? I mean, I’ve spent a considerable number of years at this point in my Community Health background in academia and research studying exactly where the two intersect, how they can complement and conflict with each other, and how that works out in several different countries in cultures, from those of the US to South Africa, Vietnam, Brazil, and many other places. So I knew the two could coexist. But, literally a 5 minute walk away from each other?!? I was amazed at first. I asked my homologue as well as my supervisor, and found that, because of both NGO and (albeit somewhat limited) Malian government sensitization, many people go to traditional medicine men in their villages in Mali, but if things appear to be very bad, they go to their health clinic. Done. Simple as that. Through open dialogue and working closely together to keep each other posted on the health situation of their villages, traditional and Western medicine have found their way to live together in a type of harmony. So close, that I believe that I’ll be working with ours—his name is Modiba—to sensitize people on things like latrine importance, washing their hands with soap, and nutrition. Because people respect him, and he respects health. And yo, not to be disrespectful, but he’s mad old, and in Mali, that’s a bit of a feat. So he must know a thing or two about health. My homologue told me he’s seen him get shot at (Modiba’s also apart of a hunter’s association) and not even bruise, because of herbs he uses. I don’t know how to take that, but suffice to say, man’s healthy.
Which had been leading me to question for the longest time, why do people go to the clinics here when they’re sick? This was another big question of mine, especially throughout my studies, finding that loads of people, no matter how much they know it’s good for them, just don’t go to the doctor when they should. Look around you—you very well might be one of them! Men in the US are also notorious for this I’m-fine-don’t-need-to-go-telling-someone-else-I-got-a-booboo-that-won’t-go-away attitude. So how the heck, I thought to myself, do Malians go to the doctor when they have these rich animist and medicinal traditions of their own and were obviously shown these Western medical ways by the French, their very colonizers? Aside from people being lazy or in denial and therefore not going to the doctor, I thought that colonialism’s unbearable arrogance might be an added definitive deterrent.
Well, when I asked my homologue why womyn give birth 95% of the time in the Maternity, and mostly all with a matrone present if they can’t make it to the Maternity, he said, simply, “Because it’s hard to give birth alone.” I felt like an idiot—obviously, people want to go to the doctor if they see people die or struggle at least when they don’t go and people stay healthy when they do go. In short, people here have seen medicine work with people they trust, so why the hell wouldn’t they go to a clinic?! Therefore, people have to know and trust me in order to trust what I say might be good advice to help them be healthier and happier people. And then change their habits that are less healthy for healthier ones. And know and trust me beyond just trusting that I’m a tubabu [rich foreigner] to get to that behavioural change, really.
How do people grow to trust and know me? That’s the next step I’m always thinking about. My village is beautiful: mango trees everywhere, green, animals grazing constantly (FYI, chickens are the weirdest animals on the PLANET—watch ‘em run one of these days. And they eat EVERYTHING and it’s DISGUSTING!), man-made lake, etc. etc. Not even trying to romanticize it—it’s just really nice to be able to sit back and think, hohum, I live somewhere gorgeous! (Which I’m guessing is half the reason a lot of people I love also like California, and I can now fully appreciate!) But the hardest part is being yelled “Tubabu!” and laughed at by children and adults as soon as I walk out my door. Thus, it’s hard to get out my door in the morning. As soon as I do it, everything’s better, and all PCVs I’ve talked to have experienced this feeling too. You just have to get out the door. And my homologue is amazing about telling everyone not to call me a tubabu, first and foremost because it was used to refer to French people, and I’m American, he’s told me adamantly. Which is great. I never thought I’d be so poignantly aware of wanting to not ever be called French, paha. He even got angry when an older guy chanted “Tubabu womyn!” at me over and over again from his bicycle. So, that’s step one: get out the door, make myself a real person to them instead of just some tubabu. People, including myself, thought the biggest “sacrifice” coming into Peace Corps in Mali, as I addressed in the last post, would be that there was no running water, electricity, internet, or the food I like. Those things definitely do make life a little harder, but they’re not what makes Peace Corps, what they say is, the “hardest job you’ll ever love.” It’s causing change in a place where you’re constantly on display and jut need to embrace the attention as a tool in getting the change done as a small-scale celebrity with what you hope are enough skills to do the job—if not, you learn them along the way with all the amazing resources Peace Corps Mali has to offer. At least, that’s the tough part of it right now for me, and for loads of other volunteers, as it seems.
Step two is doing this household health baseline survey. I ask people about womyn and their prenatal consultations, who’s gone up to which level of schooling, what they eat, where they get their water and how, and how they prevent Malaria. Then I give this neat little animation (presentation with pictures, written out and prepared for me to give to people face-to-face) on this amazing tree that grows in this type of climate called “Moringa.” Look it up—it’s amazing. Like, 4 times the amount of calcium in milk, 3 times the amount of potassium in bananas, the same amount of protein as an egg, and 7 times the amount of vitamin c in oranges, gram per gram of leaves, dried or whole (whole, there’s more vitamin c, but whatever, it’s a fucking miracle tree that grows right here in Mali). So, it’s the local answer to malnutrition. And I talk about it, and even though people don’t understand my Bambara, they listen to my homologue’s (his name is Diakaliah, so let’s just go with that from now on) Bambara or Senufokan, and they thank me with all they can muster at the end for showing them something truly “good,” as they all say.
And, through that, they know me. I introduce myself, so they know my Malian name, that I’m a health volunteer, that I’ll be here for, yes, 2 whole years, so I’m not just passing by as some tubabu on a mission to see Africa and all its wonders, and that I’m concerned about their health and want to help them be healthier by sharing with them what might work better for them and their families. And then, I drink tea with them waati ni waati [from time to time], and they give me food, and we chat, but most of the time, we’re silent. And, that’s okay. I never thought that would be okay, really, until getting here, because I’m such a talkative person and love to know what people are thinking, and put them in almost awkward situations where they have to answer my ridiculous questions, just to really see who people are through their unprepared words. But now, I don’t want to be the center of every joke, every bit of amazement people feel over me being “white” and therefore a source of amusement whenever I talk to them about most things, even when I don’t mean them to be funny. On the less-negative side of that, I want them to be the center of a conversation too. I don’t want to monopolize everyone’s ears as the “rich white guest” and take away from their legitimacy as interesting members of a conversation too. So, I say something every once in a while when I feel like it’s worth the energy, and then I lie back in their wooden lounge chairs (yes, they’re as uncomfortable as they sound, because no, there aren’t any cushions on them so they ain’t nothin’ like a La-Z-boy) and relax. The weather’s wonderful when you’re in the shade here, even tilela [under-the-sun time] when it’s hot outside. Why not relax? Watch chickens be disgusting, pet Mariam’s pet kitten, and bask in the shade of her palm tree?
Side Note: Loads of people ask me what it’s like here being “half African” and “in Africa.” While I appreciate that the question’s coming out of a concern for my identity and sense of self, it’s a little misplaced. First, while I strongly identify as half Kenyan, I don’t identify as half of all of Africa. Africa is a very large continent with incredible cultural and ethnic diversity. Being in Mali is nothing like being in Kenya, in many ways. But, to answer the question what it’s like being half Kenyan in Mali, yes, people see me as a rich, white foreigner. This is because my skin is lighter than theirs, and definitely not Fulani (the ethnic group in Mali whose skin colour is, unlike almost all others, lighter, though still Brown, and somewhat close to my skin tone). Thus, I look “white.” Does that make me feel bad? No. Here, by their definition of being a “rich white foreigner,” I am one. Being “white” here doesn’t carry the same weight that that accusation would in Kenya, or the US. They’re not saying I’m less black when they say I’m “white” or a plausibly “rich foreigner” here. They’re just saying that I’m not Malian. And, that’s true! I’m half Kenyan and half Jewish! So, it’s not upsetting for me. In fact, I take pride, suddenly, which I hadn’t before, in identifying myself as American. Look, Americans working with Malians to be healthier with sustainable methods that breed ownership over one’s perception of their own health. Hoorah!
Anyway, I’m just finding that I’m getting more and more okay with me as a social being, whereas in the US, there’s all this anxiety people feel about their social selves. All these nervous thoughts about what people might think of you if you say this, or do this, or find out you think this. And you take solace in your private self. Here, the easiest thing to do is to be social—people appreciate you simply being around them, regardless of what you say, and if there’s interesting conversation, well then that’s just an added perk to your presence. And when you’re not around, they wonder where you were and why you weren’t still with them. Case in point: I was sick for 3 days before coming to Sikasso and being able to therefore be back in touch with the internets and you all, and Mariam was genuinely worried. “You were so sick I didn’t see you for 3 days?!” she said in wonderment. “That’s not good.” She missed me, and would’ve loved to see me even if I was sniffling and saying nothing. All to say, I don’t have to talk here to enjoy myself. I can just watch Mariam throw pebbles at a kid in her compound who’s spoiled and cries all the time (fun fact: “spoiled” in Bambara is literally “broken,” so as to say that if a child’s spoiled, they’re like a broken machine that’s supposed to have been good, lol) as she tells him to stop lovingly but nonetheless is throwing small rocks at him with a smile on her face. That shit’s hilarious—I don’t really need to say anything in a situation like that to make it funnier than it already is.
So, working on getting out of my door. Learning more, dooni dooni, about my village. Eating in a way that actually fuels my body and my mind. Jogging past what I once thought were my limits. Getting something to love and nurture. Starting gardening. Writing letters for the first time in so long! (Watch out, some of you, you’re in the first batch!)
My goal is to be as healthy and happy throughout and after this experience as I want my village to be, and that means holding myself to a standard of love for myself and the world around me, this Feast of Life, that most people aren’t taught to or believe that they should have: I’m trying to be grateful, and use what I have to be happy in that humble mental space of acknowledging that I’m not the center of the universe and things aren’t always about me. It’s a delicate balance, but it definitely seems worth a shot and the effort it takes to come out the other end feeling like I’ve accomplished something in the journey.
Last note: all of the e-mails, letters, stories, and bits of love people have been leaving me mean a lot to me. I know I say this every post, but I mean it now more than I ever thought I would, and don’t want the message to seem repetitive or small: coming here was in part incredibly difficult because I thought people would—this might sound stupid to anyone who would take the time I really appreciate to read this blog!—forget about me. You worry about it a lot here. Like, who really wants to talk to me on skype? Who will write me a message on my facebook wall? Or a message, or an e-mail, or a letter? Who will talk about me sometimes while they’re eating dinner with people who know, or knew, me? When they’re at the holiday celebrations I loved so much, will they think about me? Will my absence be felt? Will I come back to still feel the love I felt when I left?!
All of that might sound a little ridiculous, but to explain, I’m a person who feels particularly blessed to have the amount of love that I do in my life. My father loves me precious and we eat out once a week just to chat; my friends send me random messages declaring their love for me and how strong they find me to be, only more and more throughout the time they’ve known me, they always say; my family lovingly welcomes me into their homes whenever I’m around; and, oh yeah, I haven’t ever had a real job before now, and yet, I’m still alive and not incredibly impoverished, grace a the food, drink, electricity/water bills paid (now, kind of funny to think about, paha), and shelter people I love have given me for 22 years! So, coming here has carried a fear with it for awhile that I’ll be forgotten, because of something that’s easy to take for granted: the love that people give you in everything they do, most noticeable when they’re absent in your life so suddenly as the Peace Corps experience seemingly renders them. You wonder, who will remember you?
Well, you all do. Through reading my significant (I’d like to think so! Hope so!) rambles, sending me messages of encouragement and support, and even liking my photos on facebook, you’re reminding me that you care, and, sometimes even more importantly, that I exist! Outside of my sometimes seemingly imaginary village on the border of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Cote D’Ivoire, where I don’t speak enough of the language to be a poet, but speak enough to have lost my care for the poetic nuances of English in favour of the more direct way of seeing the world through the more direct language of Bambara, albeit broken in my mouth at this point. You remind me that I’m here, that I’m me, and that I came here for reasons that are incredibly important to who I am. Principles that make me me.
One day, you all get an amazing shabbos dinner outta me, and we’ll drink and be merry, on my dime, I promise! I’ll be successful and speak better English than I do currently, and we’ll chat about everything and we’ll enjoy each others’ presence, and I can’t wait, I really can’t wait, for that day. Now is great, and later will be even better so, because this Feast,
It is huge, it is huge!
Gotta love the populace,
Akinyi
