Fetes and more

Nov. 17, 2009

Dear friends and family,

I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written! It is hard to find the
time and place here to read and write – in my village, Koyan, there is
no computer, no electricity, no internet – and even writing with pen
and paper is considered unusual, especially the kind of writing I want
to do – reflective, descriptive. Students copy texts from the board in
school and the men who run the school management committee and the
small bank in the village write to record payments, but they are not
comfortable enough with writing to use it as a tool in the way I do.

Now, however, I’m in Bamako, Mali’s capital, typing on the Peace Corps
office computers (which, thankfully, have English keyboards instead of
the French ones in the internet café in Kati, a town between my
village and Bamako that I can get to and back from within a day).
Unfortunately, this office has only three working computers and there
are often up to ten volunteers waiting to use them – so it’s hard to
type long emails. However, I’m going to be selfish for once . . .

Note: I posted some pictures of my current village and host family as
well as my homestay host family to Facebook and if you’d like to see
them but are not on Facebook you can access them here. Enjoy:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2270723&id=121893&l=30ac6ed2d4

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2268639&id=121893&l=c4933600fe


1. Fêtes

Right after I first arrived in my village, Koyan, three large
celebrations took place (and no, they weren’t just to celebrate my
arrival, although people were pretty excited about that and have said
that if my parents come to visit, they’ll hold a celebration for
them): first, Seli, the celebration of the end of Ramadan, next, the
Malian day of independence, and lastly a celebration of the
circumcision of many of the boys in the village. This string of
‘fêtes’ (the Bambara use certain choice French words in their
vocabulary) involved three in a row all-night dance-parties. On the
day of the fête, people tend to congregate in their age- and
gender-groups, sitting together and drinking tea all day - the men
much more so than the women, since they can afford to take a day off
from farming, but the women can’t exactly stop cooking, doing dishes,
washing clothes, and getting water. Instead of the normal dish of to
(which is something like corn or millet polenta) with leaf sauce, they
eat rice with leaf sauce, which is considered a specialty as, unlike
millet and corn, they do not farm it themselves and so have to
purchase it at the market. In addition to the groups of elderly men,
elderly women, middle-aged men, and middle-aged women, the boys or
girls of different age-groups will save up money to buy their tea and
sometimes food to cook for the fête. Groups of women often buy fabric
of one pattern to wear on that day, which they call ‘uniformu’ (I have
gotten an outfit made in the same fabric as the women in my household
to wear for an upcoming celebration, Tabaski – it’s going to be pretty
awesome). Whereas regularly it is only the early afternoon and
nighttime when people sit around and chat, on fêtes this is what is
done all day. The act of sitting and talking or not talking (although
talking is seen as preferable, and wit is valued) makes up a big part
of Malian life and is probably part of the reason community bonds are
so strong. This was very overwhelming for me as I had just arrived in
the village and everyone wanted to talk to me – in a language I had
only started studying a few months ago, however I did my best to be
patient and not let their teasing get to me. (Villager: Can you farm?
Me: I can learn to farm. Villager: No, you can’t farm. Me: I don’t
know if I can until I try it. Villager laughs as though they’ve never
heard anything so silly in their life. I have this conversation at
least once a day – also on the subjects of millet-pounding, cooking,
clothes-washing, and pulling water – these being things I can do much
better than farming and therefore I can go ahead and show them that I
can do it – to which they respond with shocked stares. They clearly
don’t have the idea we do that you can do almost anything you want to,
you just need a good teacher and some perseverance – unfortunately I
think this also informs their lack of blaming the teacher for the
students’ failure and instead blaming the students.)

The dance parties were held at a different person’s house each night,
under the large shea or mango tree that shades the center of many
households (houses are built in a somewhat circular pattern around the
open area under the tree, where much work, play, and rest goes on).
Three musicians set up their instruments here, two ballafo players and
one man playing something like a tambourine with little pieces of
scrap metal hanging off the edges, making a jingling noise. The
ballafo is like a large xylophone and has a bouncing, steel-drum-like
quality. The musicians were all men, probably in their late 20s. Each
song seemed to go on for however long they felt like, often ten
minutes or longer and there seemed to be a lot of improvisation. They
would take brief breaks, people bringing them tea (the Chinese green
tea brewed almost to bitterness with heaps of sugar caramelized in the
pot) and water, but mostly they played all night, the sweat dripping
from their tense bodies as they threw themselves into their
instruments, the ballafo players’ arms flying up and down too fast to
see. A sound system and speakers were powered by a car battery, as
well as a single fluorescent light hung from the tree.

At the beginning of the night, the early adolescents danced and the
groups of boys and girls dancing progressively got older until it was
the 20-year-olds who danced till dawn. At any moment, there was a
rough line of boys and a rough line of girls in the center of a circle
of on-lookers of all ages. Little kids wandered about, dancing
individually on the periphery of the circle and generally having a
fantastic time. Each person danced somewhat differently, but the men’s
dance consisted of lots of quick footwork, while the women were often
bent over in a position similar to the one they are in to beat shea
butter, as well as making a similar motion with their hands. The boys
and girls danced facing one another, but not touching or overtly
observing one another – yet the tension between them was obviously
high and periodically they would weave in between each other and
switch places.

On the day of the circumcision quite another kind of dancing went on.
The circumcision was of about ten 7-year-old boys in the village. On
the day of the circumcision, I was sitting around my household with
all the men (unfortunately it often seems I tend to sit with the men –
their hang-out is right in front of my house and they’re
better-educated and easier to talk to, and Malians encourage me to sit
with them) when Soungalo Jara, the sixth-grade teacher and one of the
few people in the village who speaks French, invited me to go over to
the household where the operation was taking place to see the boys. I
was quite afraid of what I was going to see – but fortunately I
arrived after the operation and all I saw was ten boys lying on the
ground wearing white robes. I was happy to learn that a doctor had
come to the village from a city to perform the operation. The boys
started school about a month late because of recovery time and
throughout this time wore only their white robes. After I returned to
sitting with the men, a group of women came into our household,
singing, dancing, and wearing men’s clothes, with streaks of mud
covering their cheeks and arms. They formed a rough circle around some
of the men, dancing and singing to them for money (they get small
change and later use it for tea and food for a celebration). They
grabbed my arm, pulling me in to come dance with them, and I did. I
danced in the center with one other woman (the dance movements of
these middle-aged women are different from those of the adolescents –
their dance involves stomping and slapping both hands together onto
the crotch) and she sang a song about me, which I didn’t fully
understand but knew it was about me since she kept saying ‘tubabu
muso’ or ‘white woman’. The circumcision, the women wearing men’s
clothes, the suggestive dance moves – it all made for some kind of
statement about gender and sexuality that was beyond my cultural grasp
and made me vaguely uncomfortable.

2. Madame Aissata Koné

Madame Aissata Koné is Koyan’s new school director. One day I arrived
at Koyan’s three-roomed mud-brick elementary school (this year they
have grades two, four, and six; last year it was grades one, three,
and five) only to see an obese woman dressed in a well-tailored Malian
complet (shirt, skirt, and head-wrap of the same fabric) sitting
outside alone under a mango tree. No one in Koyan has such
well-tailored clothes (most of their clothing has holes in it and is
often covered in dirt if they’ve come from the fields) or much fat on
their bodies (most people are getting enough food – although not
enough variety of foods – but the physical labor of their lives
prevents them from gaining weight). When I started talking to her (and
I can communicate with her fairly well, since she speaks French –
although she knows I’m learning Bambara and seems to prefer speaking
Bambara) I discovered she had just arrived on her friend’s moped from
Kati, a large town that is the capital of the ‘circle’ Koyan is
located in to serve as Koyan’s new school director. During the school
day, I sat inside one of the classrooms to observe the teacher and
students, while she remained outside sitting under the tree. However,
before the day was over she instructed the students to come to school
the next day with their cleaning tools – the girls with their brooms
and the boys with their dabas (a farming tool made of a rectangular
piece of metal inserted into a wooden club) to clean the school. The
next day, when the students arrived she had the boys use their dabas
to extract the weeds on the land outside the school and then had the
girls carefully sweep the outside of the school, watching over them
and threatening them with a switch if they didn’t do a good enough job
(this is used by almost all teachers in Mali). After this (which only
took about an hour), the students were dismissed for the day. Since
she arrived, Madame Koné hasn’t spent much time in Koyan. She has been
going back to Kati frequently – I imagine she finds it quite
uncomfortable in Koyan. She told me that in Kati she had a servant who
did all the chores for her, but in Koyan there is no one. One of the
main problems in the schools seems to be teachers from bigger towns
who get sent to rural villages but then have no connection to the
community and frequently leave to return to their home town. As of now
it is not a big problem for Koyan since there were already three
teachers when she arrived – but apparently the plan is for her to take
over the work of one of the teachers. Her arrival is the result of
Koyan’s school changing status from a community school, where the
community finds and directly pays the teachers, to a government
school, where the government assigns and pays the teachers. So far the
government has only sent one teacher, but I would assume that later
they will send more. As you can see, things don’t happen in the most
organized manner here . . . since Madame Koné arrived, the community
had to choose one teacher to let go in the middle of the school year
(the obvious thing would have been for her to arrive before the school
year began instead of a month into the school year . . . ). However,
the teacher chosen to be let go is still teaching and Madame Koné went
to Kati a week ago and hasn’t yet returned, so I don’t really know
what’s happening.

I did have an interesting conversation with her on one of the few
nights she stayed in Koyan (well, it wasn’t so much a conversation
with her as that I was listening to her talking to another woman). She
had just moved into one of the houses next to the school that the
community built to house the teachers, alongside one of the other
teachers, Soungalo Jara, and his two wives, Fanta and Nyeneba. It was
actually a ‘cold’ night (maybe around 70 degrees) and Soungalo was
resting in his house since he had a cold (people fall sick very
frequently here, especially with malaria), while the three women were
gathered around a fire outside: Madame Koné, Fanta, and Nyeneba. I
joined them and they chatted in Bambara about the prices they could
get for their sweet potatoes, the big cash crop in Koyan, then they
started chatting about Madame Koné’s husband and the fact that he was
the second person to offer to marry her. It seems that in Koyan and
most rural villages, a man will choose a woman to marry and then go to
her father to ask to marry her and negotiate the dowry – the woman
doesn’t have a great deal of say in who she marries, but in the bigger
towns the man may actually go to the woman and ask her to marry him.
Madame Koné said that she didn’t like the first wife of the first man
who asked to marry her so she turned him down. Her current husband is
a police officer.

It does sound cruel and unjust to not allow a woman much say in who
she marries and it probably is, yet it’s less so than it would be to
do such a thing in American society since in Malian society the
marital relationship is very different. It is more about a partnership
whose goal is to run a farm and a household than about emotional
support or love. What you really want in your partner is a good work
ethic more than anything else. Of course, you could argue that this
makes it even more important that the woman gets to choose her
husband. It’s a complicated and personal issue and I hope to learn
more about the matter in the future.

Well, I am headed back to Koyan now. I hope that gives you a bit of a
picture of things here.

Hoping you’re all well,

Lauren