Rainy Season

1. Rainy Season

They wake up at 5 everyday to farm. Eyes encrusted with sleep, even the 6 and 7 year olds are up, looking for a daba*. The procession to the fields begins: the grandma and grandkids, husband and wives. Around 11 a girl will come with a giant round bowl full of millet mush and steaming leaf sauce. They’ll rinse their dirty hands in a bowl of well water and scoop giant handfuls of mush into their mouths. They’ll farm again until afternoon, then return to the household, tired, proud.

It is easy to understand why Malians believe so strongly in God. If it rains in just the right way, they’ll have a good harvest and enough food for the next year. If not, by May or June of next year they’ll start to go hungry, eating smaller portions and less meals. In a way, they have much less control over their own lives than Americans do. As they say, it’s in the hands of Allah. When their babies die, it’s in the hands of Allah. When their men get severely injured in motorcycle accidents, it’s in the hands of Allah. I’ve never heard anyone in my village blame the more logical causes of their poverty – colonialism or the present incompetent government. They either say “there’s no money here” as if it were a static, unchangeable event or “it’s up to God”.

There is one person in Koyan who gets it: Babo Kulibaly. She’s also the most devout Muslim I know. She would be fasting now for Ramadan but she has a heart condition. She is the matriarch of my host family: she claims to be 55 years old (no one really knows how old they are here) and has 5 children and 10 grandchildren (so far). She gets that what’s missing in Koyan are creativity, dedication, and critical thinking. She’s noticed that I’m very different from the 22-year-olds in Koyan and it’s not just that I’m white or can speak 3 languages – it’s that I show up to meetings on time, participate actively, and even plan and come up with ideas for meetings. She’d never seen a 22-year-old like that before – those kinds of qualities are rarely found in Koyan and if they are, it’s normally in a middle-aged man.

There’s just something about Babo. When I first came to Koyan, she asked me to teach her how to make soap. I organized a soap-making training and now she is running a successful soap business and saving the profits for future community development projects. The dedication and stubbornness she has shown in getting other community members to work with her on this project and working through the kinks in the business are unprecedented in Koyan. And it was Babo’s son, Nfabilen, who came up with an exciting idea for the money we had left over from the desk project: for the School Management Committee to buy party chairs and start a chair rental business.

How do you change a culture from one in which respect is bestowed based on age, wealth, and gender to one in which respect is bestowed based on competence? How do you get people trained either to take orders (women and children) or to give them (men) to function in a democratic way? These are some of the key problems we face in Koyan.

*Farming tool made from a short piece of wood with something like a narrow shovel head attached to it, used for weeding.


2. Desk Project Update

I just got off the phone with my exuberant host, Nfabilen Jara, to learn that the desks are safely on their way to Koyan. I am currently stuck in the Peace Corps volunteer transit house in Bamako with a sprained ankle, unable to make it back to Koyan to see the action. Yesterday the second shipment of desks was supposed to arrive in Koyan, but the road was so muddy that the truck had to stop in Ngalamadiby, a village 5km away from Koyan, and store the desks in that village’s school. Today the villagers of Koyan will haul their donkey-carts with their sad, undernourished donkeys and wobbly wheels to Ngalamadiby and trek back to Koyan’s small mud-brick school with the shiny new desks.

There have been some exciting new additions to the project due to the fact that we found a desk-maker who makes desks for $80 instead of our original projected cost of $90 and the fact that the currency conversion rate worked in our favor. In addition to the 45 desks, 3 teacher’s chairs, and 3 teacher’s desks originally planned for, we are also building a director’s office and equipping it with 2 file cabinets, 2 tables, and 2 chairs. What we’re really excited about, though, is an idea that my host Nfabilen came up with: to buy a large number of the chairs that people here rent out for parties. These will be useful when the School Management Committee or Student Parents Association holds large meetings; more importantly, it will enable Koyan’s School Management Committee to run a business renting out the chairs. With their own small business, the Committee members will have a new source of funding for future projects and will gain valuable business management skills, as well as providing a service to the community (because people in Koyan love to party!). With the leftover project funds as well as a $100 cash contribution from the School Management Committee, we were able to purchase 46 party chairs.

After finally receiving the project funds, the School Management Committee held numerous meetings to evaluate and re-evaluate our action plan. I was really proud of the new ideas that the committee members came up with to make the most out of the project funds and their professionalism in conducting the meetings. In the rainy season, it is not easy to hold a meeting since everyone is busy farming and the rain makes the road very difficult. The committee members trekked through the mud again and again to ensure the success of this project.

I greatly look forward to the start of the new school year in October, when the students will get to use their new desks. Last year there were 180 students in the school; this year the Committee expects there will be 250. Some of the old desks will be moved to the adult literacy center, which is badly in need of them.