Malian meetings, Zan Diarra

The school management committee meetings are theoretically scheduled to begin at 8am. I don’t think I’ve ever attended a meeting that started before 9, and meetings have been known to start as late as 10:30. Yet the on-time mentality has been so well drilled into me that I continue to be the only person who shows up to meetings at 8. The people in Koyan have a strong sense of the importance of everyone being present for a meeting (a fascinating example of how democracy works best on a micro level) and also have a great deal of patience, which is why we wait around and chat until everyone shows up to start the meeting.

The way meetings proceed is very unorganized: someone will bring up a topic, it will be discussed, someone will bring up another topic, and so on. Another very democratic aspect of life in Koyan is the way Malians form consensus in a meeting. When an announcement is made, each person repeats the announcement to the person sitting next to them, a kind of way of making sure everyone is on the same page. The same goes for making a decision. Everyone must have their say, or else a decision will not be taken. The committee consists of eight men and two women. The women talk less than the men, but when a decision is being made the men insist the women give their opinion.

Zan Diarra is the vice president of the school management committee and my assigned work partner or ‘homologue’ in the strange terminology of Peace Corps Mali. He is short but muscular, wearing a dirty, torn old suit that he farms in and a crocheted prayer cap. His eyes are very small, dark, and penetrating. He is the man who, before I moved to Koyan, siphoned off some of the money given to him by Peace Corps to buy my windows and doors, leaving me with termite-eaten, falling apart windows and doors that my host dad had to replace out of his own pocket. But Zan is smart and occasionally motivated: he attends every meeting, knows some French, and is good at leading a discussion. He’s very good at telling people what to do but less good at listening – a bit American in this way!

Zan has attended many, many NGO-sponsored trainings over the years – on sanitation, on health, on farming, on accounting, on democracy, and so on. This is why it is so depressing for me to go to his house, which is composed of four small mud buildings and an outhouse surrounding a narrow courtyard. The courtyard’s ground is made of dirt and is always strewn with chicken feces, peanut shells, dirty kids’ clothes, and old plastic bags, flies swarming over the putrid area. Zan has three wives, the oldest of which is about 45 and the youngest of which can’t be over 25. Whenever I go to Zan’s house, his wives always seem down-trodden, exhausted and slow to laugh. This is unusual: I am normally surprised at how happy Malian women are in spite of their lower position in society; in Zan’s case, his wives are tragically as I’d expect them to be in this kind of sexist society. I suspect that Zan beats them. He also has an absurd number of children: I’m not sure how many, but I would guess at least 20. He is exactly the person in Koyan who should have a clean home, treat his wives well, and have fewer children since he’s educated! But somehow these trainings have not registered with him. At the same time, he is very motivated to work on improving the school in Koyan and realizes the importance of sending his kids to school.

Starting my Second Year

October and the beginning of November are the mini hot season in Mali, following the heavy rains and preceding the sanity-saving cool season that begins at the end of November. The days are hot and humid, the sky free of clouds and the landscape getting browner every day. In the late afternoon a slight cool emanates from the forest and sneaks into the family compound by night.

It is peanut time. Days are spent in the field gathering the dirty little root nodules, still dangling from their clover-like plants, nights waste away as everyone in the family from the toddlers to the musokorobas (old women) cracks open the tough shells to get out the sweet nuts, piling them up in a basket for roasting, or simply popping them in their mouths for dessert.

My host dad, Fablen Jara, told me something very disappointing recently. He said that before the desks arrived in Koyan, many people in the village gossiped, saying that I was useless and had done nothing to help the village, but that once the desks came they were ashamed. It saddened me to hear that people talk this way about me. First of all, I feel like this is how you talk about a foreigner, not your friend and neighbor, which is what I’d like to think I am to the people of Koyan. Secondly, they don’t recognize the value of the work I do that doesn’t involve a huge amount of money coming into the village: the Bambara literacy training, the afterschool groups for kids, the organizational training for the school management committee, the soap-making training, the water sanitation education. Is this because of their background, the fact that they’re farmers who never went to school so they’re oriented towards tangible things and they can’t understand the importance of knowledge? Or is it because so many NGOs have come into the area and given away schools, hospitals, chickens, seeds, school supplies, etc., so this is what they have come to see as the proper role of an NGO?

Some Peace Corps staff members from Bamako recently came to Koyan and conducted an appreciative inquiry, which is a means of deciding what the most helpful development project is for a community by discussing the community with community members. I learned that what they really want to work on, in addition to getting a new school building, which we’re already working on (they will apply for funds from the U.S. Embassy Self-help Fund), is to get a grain mill, so that the women can grind their millet in a machine instead of pounding it by hand, which takes hours. I think this could really help the women of the village, hopefully freeing up more of their time for studying literacy and doing income-generating activities like soap-making and developing a shea butter cooperative. At the least, it will make their lives a little easier, giving them a break from the intense physical labor they engage in every day just to run the household. However, I’m worried this is another big money project, where the village will get something that may very well break in a few years and which they may or may not be able to raise the money to get fixed.

There are other, cheaper ways to make women’s lives easier and provide them with more free time. The first on my list would be for them to have less children. I do work on family planning education, but it’s not something people get really excited about or want to work with me on. This is the real challenge of being a Peace Corps volunteer: you are working on behalf of the village, so you really have to work on the projects the village wants you to work on, but at the same time you think you know better and want to work on other projects. Of course if people aren’t receptive, your work is pointless. Is it paternalistic for me to work on projects I perceive as good, but villagers don’t really care about? I think it is. But I have had a lot more education than them. This is something I struggle with here.