Narena

Aug. 16, 2009

Dear friends and family,

I am at the Peace Corps training site again, about to take off for a
week’s visit at my permanent 2-year site! I will be in the village of
Koyan, near the town of Kati in the region of Koulikoro. It is fairly
close to Bamako. Koyan is a village of about 1,000. I will live there
in my own ‘house’ in the compound of a family. For now, that’s about
all I know!

Each volunteer has a counterpart, who is a Malian who works in the
volunteer’s sector and is supposed to be the volunteer’s partner on
all projects and generally help the volunteer with any of his or her
needs. This is the first year that the Peace Corps brought all the
counterparts to the training center for three days to do a workshop on
PACA, Participatory Analysis for Community Action, Peace Corps’ system
of determining a community’s needs and wants and mobilizing the
community to implement them. Most of the counterparts are from rural
towns and seemed a bit overwhelmed by being here. However, I am amazed
that the workshop seemed fairly successful since the day before
yesterday we went out in small groups to neighboring towns with our
counterparts to practice PACA and we were able to have a pretty
successful meeting in which we determined the priorities of a group
that operates a mobile bank.

The PACA trip . . . Friday morning, the volunteers and counterparts
trickled into the cafeteria between 6 and 7am, some carrying
mattresses and overnight bags. The Malians’ dress runs the gamut from
traditional-style cloth caps with pompoms hanging, something like a
poncho, and baggy gathered pants to the more standard bubu (long loose
dress with pants for men) in a beautiful iridescent violet fabric,
worn with Casio, a silver bracelet, and rings, to the young man in
distressed jeans, tennis shoes, and a button-down shirt or an Obama
campaign t-shirt. Most of the counterparts are men but the few women
wear long loose shirts in bright prints and abstract or quotidian
patterns (a tube of toothpaste with cream squeezing out, lemons,
chickens, or scissors cutting fabric) over a skirt, with a headwrap
and often a sheer scarf over the head as well, which they constantly
readjust. This dress signifies that the woman is married. Unmarried
women do not cover their heads and wear shorter and tighter tops (it
is rare to be past 20 and unmarried here). As a woman, being married
earns you more respect, as does having lots of children. (If anyone
knows about the production of the fabrics worn in Africa, I’d like to
know where the companies are based and where the fabrics are made.) In
the cafeteria we eat our daily breakfast of Lipton’s or Nescafe
instant coffee with powdered milk and hot water, fresh French bread,
and peanut butter or jam (most Malians would normally eat a porridge
made from millet in the morning). As usual, we do not leave on time.
We have been told we’ll be leaving at 7am, but our bus isn’t ready
until 8:30. Since most of us can’t communicate very well with our
counterparts yet because of the language barrier, volunteers chat
together and counterparts sit and wait. I greet my counterpart, Zan
Diarra, and he tries to talk to me, which I don’t understand. I smile
a lot and say in Bambara that I don’t understand. Finally we pile into
a big bus the Peace Corps has hired to take three groups to three
separate towns to practice community assessment.

The big bus leans over the narrow road and we sleepily watch the
shrubs and mango trees stretching out into the distance, the copious
trash on the side of the road, the small houses, donkeys, children,
general stores with their Orange (a telephone company) and Coke signs
displayed prominently, and the ‘Oui au preservatif’ billboard with a
hand wearing a condom on two fingers. As we pass children, they stare
up wonderingly and wave, while adults watch wearily and go on with
their business of farming, waiting unexpectantly at their roadside
stands for customers, and doing endless household chores. After about
45 minutes of driving the green of the landscape deepens and the mango
and shea trees become bigger and fuller. We pass a giant rock
formation and even a tiny waterfall. Some volunteers say with relief
that this is what they expected Africa to look like. Malian music
videos play sporadically on a small video screen in the bus. The sound
is rhythmic and peaceful, the videos caught somewhere between a Malian
and an American sensibility. A young woman wears a strapless top and
pants and sings, looking into the camera uncomfortably, in a few
different poses. She’s in a Western-style house. A young man wearing
M.C. Hammer-style pants dances with back-up dancers in a village
surrounded by children. The videos are a surreal reminder of the
impact of (in some cases the worst aspects of) Western culture here
and make me feel uncomfortable as Westerner.

We drop off two different groups (only after getting lost twice,
asking many people on the side of the road for directions, and turning
the giant bus around on the tiny road, which takes about 15 minutes)
and finally come to the village of Narena, where myself and five other
trainees get off, along with our six Malian counterparts and two Peace
Corps trainers/translators, Mama and Moussa (who are Malian). Dan, the
volunteer currently stationed in Narena, rides up to us on his bike.
When we get off the bus, we are right by the main market area of the
village and see different parts of a cow and a cow hide lying on the
ground. Dan informs us that that’s what we’ll be having for lunch
(and, as it turns out, dinner, breakfast, and lunch again). We unload
our mattresses and bags and walk to an empty school, where we’ll be
sleeping for the night, all the volunteers in one empty classroom and
all the counterparts in another. Like most of Mali, the town has no
electricity or running water, although it does have water from a pump
instead of from a well, which means we have to filter it but do not
have to bleach it.

Greetings . . . Any time you arrive in a new place, the first thing
you must do is greet the important people there. We first go to the
mayor’s office and greet the mayor and his two aides. One aide is
dressed in a jean shirt, jean pants, blue-tinted glasses, and a khaki
trench coat. The mayor himself is wearing a bubu. The mayor talks
little. Mostly the aide in the trench coat talks on his behalf. Dan is
the third Peace Corps volunteer who has come to the village. The first
came 5 years ago. The mayor’s aide says they are really pleased with
what the volunteers have done and they welcome us and hope that we
will do good things for our villages. The meeting room at they mayor’s
is a modest but neat room with a central row of tables surrounded by
chairs and a bench running along the outside. There are four large
windows that look out onto the surrounding greenery, cows, goats, and
donkeys. Periodically during the meeting a goat or donkey will wail
loudly for a few minutes, an interruption Malians are well used to.

Politics . . . The town of Narena has two dugutigis or town chiefs.
Apparently when the last dugutigi died, he left the choice of the next
dugutigi up to his council and they split on the decision. The village
is split in allegiance. The village has a radio station, which only
one half of the village listens to because it is controlled by the
clan of one of the dugutigis. So we greeted both dugutigis, but only
invited one to our meeting. They are both old men who look like the
rest of the villagers and live in similar houses. They listened to our
trainers explaining why we were here and then said that we were
welcome.

Since it was Friday, we had to wait until after everyone returned from
the mosque to start our meeting. Dan had arranged it so that the
people who run the mobile bank would come to the mayor’s after the
mosque. Once people had started arriving, three women came carrying
giant plastic bowls of food on their heads. They set them down on the
ground and we all gathered around the bowls and dug in (after washing
our hands of course!). It was zamen, something like fried rice, with a
few pieces of beef (sogo), a hot pepper (foronto), and Malian bitter
eggplant (ngoyo). After lunch the mobile bank members (about 15
people) and the Peace Corps trainees and counterparts gathered in the
mayor’s meeting room. The meeting started with introductions from
everyone. The president of the bank, the mayor’s aide, and the PC
trainers gave speeches of introduction and welcoming. The president of
the bank, a fairly serious middle-aged man with a large belly, was
wearing an orange bubu with a pattern of hearts and the words in
English “I LOVE YOU.” After introductions (which took at least an
hour), the PC trainers explained the PACA activity, which was to
identify the problems of the bank and then prioritize them. The bank
members split up into a group of men and a group of women and came up
with problems, which they wrote down (all in Bambara – Dan translated
a little for us so we could understand some of what was going on). Our
counterparts helped facilitate all this. We were all very impressed at
how well our counterparts understood the PACA concepts and were able
to work with the bank members to help them identify their problems.
After the men and women identified ten problems each, they chose their
five most important and then voted as a group on an overall ranking of
importance. At first they identified the problems as being
money-related (not being able to purchase notebooks and transportation
means), but after they discussed the causes of their problems, they
decided their real problem was the fact that they weren’t having
regular meetings, which is what Dan was hoping they’d come up with.
All these discussions were remarkably democratic. This one meeting
started around 2:30 and ended around 7. The next day we further used
the PACA tools to find solutions to the meeting problem, having a meet
from 8:30 to 2 (although we did take a break from 10:30-11 to have
beef sandwiches made with bread cooked in a mud oven in the village,
which was delicious). It was very cool to see these villagers making a
group decision and really having a democratic discussion (although my
understanding of what went on is very limited, so I may have been
missing out on certain things that happened, for example I’m sure not
everyone’s voice was equally taken into account since some people were
much quieter than others. Normally women in Mali don’t speak up as
much, but this meeting had two women who were pretty vocal.).

I hope you are all well and love hearing from you!

Best,

Lauren