One Month Down

            A month in this country and I’m finally beginning to feel like I’m settling in. Although I’m still not used to being gawked at walking down the street, something tells me that I will never be accustomed enough to not be bothered by it. However, I’m definitely getting used to the heat (which is hardly bearable lately; my room gets down to a “comfortable” 89 degrees at night), the constant loud noises and screaming in Bambara surrounding me, and learning how to navigate this city. I can finally successfully take a sotrama, the public transportation system in Bamako that consists of green vans that circulate the city, by myself. I can also understand bits and pieces of the Bambara conversations that occur in my house, although by no means do I know what is fully going on.

            I do feel settled in my homestay, but I’ve just had to accept the fact that I will never really feel part of the family, the language barrier being the biggest reason. In addition, my family doesn’t allow me to contribute in any way even when I offer to cook or wash my own clothes, so I automatically feel like a guest in my house. I’m also becoming increasingly frustrated with Aka, my roommate. She is certainly not easy to share space with, and although I feel somewhat guilty that she is forced to share her room with me, I can’t help but be upset with how she treats me. Every night she comes in at around 1 or 2 in the morning, turns on the light, gets ready to go out, and talks on her phone. I have to go to bed early since I leave for school at 7:00AM, so it’s very frustrating to be woken up for at least an hour nightly. She goes out clubbing at 1 in the morning and doesn’t come back until around 5 or 6 and often calls me to let her in.

            Apart from Aka, I do like the rest of my family. My two younger sisters are very sweet and always try to include me to an extent. I spend a lot of time playing a board game or watching TV with them. My little brother Mahammed spends the entire day running around the neighborhood – I see him go out when I go to school at 7 and he doesn’t come back until dinner time, covered in dust and exhausted from running around and playing soccer all day. He always eats dinner and immediately passes out in front of the TV, his eyes not even fluttering before he falls asleep, and must be carried to bed by a sister.

            My father…well, that’s another story. I spent the first few weeks at my house completely terrified of him. He does a lot of yelling: at his children, his wife, and the maids. He’s a very demanding man, and does very little for himself. In fact, he won’t even get up to get the TV remote when he’s sitting in the living room. I’ve talked to the other students about their fathers, and while some of theirs don’t yell at their families to the extent that mine does, none of them do any housework or cooking to be spoken of. My father is also extremely religious. Every morning I hear him drive to the mosque at 5:00. The walls in our living room have pictures of him visiting Mecca. Aka told me that she goes out so late because it is after he has gone to bed, therefore he won’t know since she knows he disapproves. Despite all of this, I’m beginning to see some good sides of my father. He always speaks French to me and is genuinely interested in me and my life in the United States. I’ve also seen him be very sweet to his children and his wife. However, I can’t really get past his bossiness and apparent cruelness to the maids.

            This past Thursday we went on our first overnight excursion to a town 110 kilometers away called Selingue. It was great to get out of Bamako and made me realize that I want to spend November, when we do our independent study research projects, in another town. There is just an ease and quietness outside of this bustling and very crowded city that can’t be found here. We spent one night in Selingue, staying in a hotel that was heavenly… especially since we had air conditioning! It was great to actually sleep a whole night through. The next day, we visited a hydroelectric dam that provides a great deal of electricity to Bamako. The trip was wonderful but way too short – less than 24 hours. Now we are back in Bamako, and the heat is really picking up which is uncomfortable and difficult to handle. It’s so strange to picture going back to a Minnesota winter at the end of the semester!

The Help … and Other Cultural Qualms

            A few times throughout this blog I have mentioned the maids in my house, but I think I need to finally devote some time talking about them.  Rokia and Bintou are two girls the young age of fourteen. After a few days of living in this house, a few things about them struck me: the enormous size of their muscles, the amount of work they do (never sitting down for a break), and the tiny quantity of time they spend sleeping each night.  The girls sweep the courtyard, mop the floors several times a day (not with a mop, mind you, but bent over a wet rag on the ground), cook the meals, and wash the laundry and dishes, among other things. They stay up later than everyone in the house, and are already awake when I arise at 6:20 every morning. They do everything for me – they wash my clothes, cook my food, tuck in my mosquito net at night, and even follow me around with a plastic chair if I go to sit outside in the kitchen or on the front courtyard. I cannot stand it; I feel guilty and useless and shameful. I am six years older than these girls, yet they wait on my hand and foot. It is not right.

            After a week or so of living in the house, I asked Aka about them. She says that they live in the small outbuilding next to our outdoor kitchen. They are from villages outside of Bamako and have come to work so they can save money for their weddings. At the age of fourteen? Yes. Our French teacher told us more about this awful convention. He said that all of the maids that come to work in Bamako are from farms in the countryside. They have to save up money to by pagnes (cloth material) and other expenses for their weddings. The minimum wage for maids is $12.00 a month, with room and board provided. This wage is sickeningly low; even if Rokia and Bintou save every penny for the next couple of years, they will by no means be able to support themselves. On top of that, they are fourteen years old…shouldn’t they be in school, learning to read and write? This is a part of this culture that I’m having a really hard time accepting. Ousmane told us that a growing problem is that maids become pregnant in Bamako, yet must abandon their children when they return to their village in order to find a potential husband.  He said that these orphans are very rarely adopted by Malians since family lineage is so important here.

            I’m definitely struggling a lot with some of the aspects of life here. While I of course want to remain respectful and nonjudgmental about some things, there are others that I cannot ignore and simply do not like. The inequality between males and females is striking and upsetting. Polygamy is still accepted here, and when women marry they must go into the relationship knowing that her husband can and may take on another wife later in the marriage. Divorce is looked down upon, and if a couple does break up, the woman must move back in with her parents. In fact, it is seen as poor form if a woman lives on her own. Finally, and what I truly find most disturbing, is that female circumcision (excision) is still widely practiced in this country. Some believe that a woman will not be able to control her desires and therefore must be circumcised. I came here knowing that it was still going on, but I had no idea that the majority of females in this country have had some form of genital cutting.

            These facts of Malian society have been a problem for me to grapple. I came here wanting to love everything, but there are blatant facts that I can’t ignore and that my heart of hearts believes is wrong. Unfortunately this post was somewhat depressing and I apologize for that, but I think it’s important that I not censor these issues since there is already very little discussion about them going on here.

A Long Week and Preparing for the Cinquantenaire

This past week at school was long, long, long and exhausting. We had a series of guest lectures that .... well, some were better than others, I'll leave it at that. It's just frustrating to be in a lecture about malaria in Mali and have to hear about basic biology of disease: "the mosquito is the vector and can therefore transmit the disease when it bites a human being." We know! And when we asked how exactly the anti-malarials we take work in terms of prevention and efficacy, and we were told "you take the pills and they work." Frustrating, to say the least. They weren't all bad, however; we had a pretty interesting talk on traditional medicine by a practicioner that was realistic about the fact that in some cases, modern medecine is the better solution. It was a bit strange, however, when he was shocked that blind people exist in the United States. French class is pretty great. Our professor, Ousmane, is a really great resource. We can ask him about anything in Malian culture and he won't shy away, so it's almost like he makes up for what isn't said in the lectures. He is a very interesting man; we had to interview an "elderly" person in Mali (which is shockingly young, since life expectancy is 53), and I chose him. His father fought for the French army in WWII and was captured and lived in a Nazi concentration camp for five years until the Americans liberated him in 1945. Upon his release, he moved back to Mali and lived as a polygamist with four wives and seventeen children. Ousmane saw how polygamy did not work in his own family, and since then swore that he would only have one wife. He spent his life as a teacher, and now works at a large university in Bamako teaching English.
A few days this week, we went on excursions after school. We visited the National Library, which was nice but surprisingly small in its number of books, the National Museum, also small but well-kept with a beautiful garden and wonderful cafe, and the French Cultural Center, which has its own library and venue for musical performances.
Bamako is currently gearing up for Mali's 50th anniversary on Wednesday. There has been a ton of new construction: a new roundabout in downtown, a gigantic new governmental building that opens tomorrow and will hold all of the ministries, and a very strange-looking garden at the bottom of a cliff, perched under the president's house. There is also just a lot of painting and sprucing up of the city. I'm looking forward to seeing what the actual celebration entails on Wednesday!

An Uncomfortable Sunday

            Sunday morning began like any other: I woke up a lot earlier than my sister, read in bed, got up, took a bucket shower, got dressed, and brought my book into the living room.  I ran a couple of pages, but was interrupted by the sound of someone crying. I looked up and saw Nene, my 16-year-old sister, bawling. I had no idea why but we locked eyes and she didn’t really offer an explanation, so I tried to ignore it and go back to my reading. A few minutes later, my mother walked into the house. I smiled at her and said good morning, only to notice that she too was crying. She went back into the kitchen and was talking to the maids, all the while crying pretty hard. I realized then that something pretty bad had probably happened. Nene walked by a few minutes later carrying a suitcase upstairs to where my parents live. Finally Aka, my roommate, came out of her room. She sat down in the living room without saying good morning and stared blankly at the television. After a few minutes, she went back into our room. I was really uncomfortable especially because I could still hear my mom crying, so I followed Aka into the room hoping to get an explanation. She was furiously packing a suitcase but didn’t even look up when I walked in. I asked, “Where are you going?” She answered abruptly, “Segou” (a town about 400 kilometers away). No other explanation. I decided not to ask any more.

                I walked back into the living room because there really was nowhere else for me to go. Women kept coming in to the house in groups talking to my mother in Bambara and giving her money. Finally, after about an hour of not knowing what was going on, my mom explained that her father had passed away. She said they were leaving for Segou immediately. I gave my condolences and sat with her for some time, really wanting to hug her or put an arm around her but not knowing if that is culturally normal here. I have never seen anyone hug before. She left to pack her things, and my sister Haby came in. I asked her if she was going to Segou, too, and she said that only the oldest child goes to the burial.

                My father, mother, and Aka left pretty quickly after I found out what had happened. I spent the rest of the day with Haby and Nene. It was hard being with them since they were really upset. I asked Nene if she wished she could have gone to Segou as well and she said she did but that was not the custom. It is hard for me to imagine being told that your grandfather is dead and then immediately being separated from your parents and your older sister, left to tend to the house on your own. They also said that they are not sure when the rest of the family will be back. This really has made me realize how mature these girls are. Haby, who is 13 years old, not only looks my age, but she also acts significantly older than an 8^th-grader. Nene and Haby, along with the two maids, have been cooking for me and cleaning my dishes…whenever I offer to help they say no. It’s hard for me to remember that they are younger than me since they have such autonomy and skill.  It truly is humbling.

The Food

                You are probably wondering what I have been eating since I arrived in Mali. Having spent the past three years as a vegetarian, the food situation has been extremely difficult.  Growing up, I had the good fortune to attend a school with a pretty good cafeteria, so I never got the stereotypical school food experience with disgruntled lunch ladies in hair nets. However, this trip I am finally learning the meaning of “mystery meat.”

                Most meals consist of a starch (and lots of it) with a meat sauce. The starch can be rice, fonio (similar to couscous), pasta, to (a dough made from pounded millet), or yams. The sauce…well, that varies. On days when I consider myself lucky, it’s a light(ish) red sauce made with…well, I don’t really know what’s in it since my family doesn’t let me help with the cooking. I know that there are onions, garlic, and palm oil (and lots of it), but I have no idea why it is red. On days when I consider myself extremely unlucky, it’s the same thing, but with a huge amount of fish paste which makes it very, very smelly and unappetizing.

                As for the meat…I think I finally figured out that for the most part, I’ve been served sheep. Sometimes I feel like a little kid again, trying to hide my vegetables under the pasta or rice, but this time with hunks of meat. A few times I have been served chicken which is actually quite good, but apparently chicken is one of the more expensive foods in Mali so it’s rare. Whether or not I eat the food has really become a problem. Living with a family is a huge struggle between being rude and feeling sick, but for the most part I’ve sacrificed myself (and my stomach) for the sake of not being an impolite guest.

                All of the cooking is done outside. There are no “conventional” stoves or ovens; it’s all made on coal-burning little stoves. Thus, the cooking takes an incredible amount of patience and time. However, like I said, my family really won’t let me help out, save being allowed to fan away the flies (that really is the most complicated task I’ve been given thus far). The eating is done with one’s right hand out of a communal bowl. The women eat outside and the men inside (at least at my house).

                Breakfast has become my favorite meal. Each morning I am given a baguette, and, though it’s really just white bread, it’s extremely satisfying. I usually eat it with jam, Laughing Cow cheese, or if I’m really lucky, Nutella. Some days after dinner, my family has given me bouillie, a porridge-like rice pudding served warm. It’s not bad but they really pile on the sugar. On our first day here, our teacher Lamine says if food is good in Mali, it probably means it has too much sugar or too much oil. I think that sums it up pretty well.

Guest Lectures and the Festival of Ramadan

Monday was the start to our first “real” week of school. We spend a lot of time there: from 8 am to 3 pm every day, with some afternoons extended to 5 pm if we go on a field trip. Classes are each two hours long. We began the week with a meeting with Modibo, the program director, to go over basic (and final) pieces of orientation such as safety, where we will be going for our upcoming trips, and an advising that we begin thinking about what we want to research for our Independent Study Projects that begin in November.


The official title of this program is Health, Gender, and Community Empowerment, but this week we focused a lot on the history of Mali which is understandable because obviously it’s important to know context to really learn anything at all. However, I do believe having six hours of guest lecturers speaking about the different dynasties, kingdoms, and empires of Mali was a bit of overkill. The lectures were conducted in French by various “specialists,” yet (unfortunately) they were quite dry and included very little student participation…especially disappointing considering what could be possible since we have such a small group.

Every afternoon from 1 pm to 3 pm we have French class. There are only three people in my level of class so we are all definitely learning a lot. Our professor works at the University of Bamako. He completed a Fullbright where he got a Master’s degree at Columbia, so he knows and understands that we are used to a participatory classroom experience unlike what is popular here (lecture, memorize, and recite). The class is especially great because each day he comes in with an interesting topic that we discuss and ask him about, such as gays and lesbians in Mali (which is in fact illegal) or problems faced by orphans in Bamako. He is a great resource because he knows a lot but really doesn’t shy away from topics that other lecturers are far too uncomfortable to discuss.

As we were leaving school on Wednesday, we were told that we may have a four day weekend because of the end of Ramadan, depending on whether the moon was visible that night. I asked my father more about it, and he said it says in the Koran that the moon must be seen for the month of Ramadan to end. There is a commission in Mali whose job it is to decide whether the moon was spotted anywhere throughout the country; if it is they announce it on television, and the fasting can end. Well, this actually caused a lot of confusion. My sister came home from a birthday party at 2 in the morning (I was fast asleep) and told me that the moon hadn’t come out so I would have school the next day, but that morning I woke up and got a text message from our director saying the festival had started. When I came into the living room, my sisters were really pissed off. They explained to me that the commission announced the moon’s appearance at 2 am, but that my father refused to believe it and would not let them celebrate. Thus, while everyone else around us was partying and feasting, they were not. Aka and Nene ended up saying “screw it,” getting dressed up, and going to their aunt’s house for the party. Well… that left me with nothing to do, and I definitely didn’t want to eat the fried sheep head that they were preparing outside (unfortunately I am not joking about that) so the other students and I took a cab to a pastry shop where lots of toubabou (white people) hang out.

Hah. Bad idea. We picked the wrong day to go there. I guess on the day of Ramadan, all the children are given coins. And clearly they want to spend them on sweets from the nice pastry shop. So as we sat there drinking beers and eating crepes, literally hundreds of screaming children were overtaking the counter…so much for our relaxing escape. On the way home, our cab broke down and we had to find our way back home on foot when it was dark and extremely crazy in the streets because of the festival… just one of those days, I suppose. We were able to laugh it all off, of course; I don’t think you could study abroad in Mali without that ability!

Why Bambara is so Great

Probably the most useful course I am taking, at least in terms of daily living in Bamako, is Bambara. My Bambara teacher, Lamine, who also acts as the homestay coordinator for SIT, makes the two hour classes quite entertaining (though they will always remain mentally exhausting).


Greetings in Mali are extremely important. Before any conversation can occur, people must greet each other properly. Even if you are in a hurry but you see someone you know, you absolutely must stop to greet them…so obviously greetings are the first thing we learned on our very first day here.

The greeting goes a little something like this:

In the morning, the greeter begins by saying I ni sogoma! The literally translation of this is “You and the morning!” Or, as Lamine puts it, “You facing the morning: are you the winner?” The greeting changes depending on the time of day; there are different forms for good morning, good day, good evening, and good night. The response to this greeting differs if you are a man or a woman. Women respond by saying n se! or, “my power,” thus expressing that they are the “winner.” Men, however, respond by saying n ba!, or, “my mother!” I guess this suggests how important a mother is to family life here.

Thus, a literal translation of a greeting in Bambara can be expressed as:

A: You and the morning!
B: My power! You and the morning!
A: My mother!
…It seemed strange at first to us, too.

Another odd but loveable trait of Bambara is the addition of the letter “i” to foreign words. For instance, when we say “I am from America,” we say, “N be bo Ameriki.” We asked Lamine how you would say various state names such as Rhode Island, Vermont, and South Carolina, and literally they are pronounced as Rhode Islandi, Vermonti, and South Carolini. So silly.

La Famille

Our last morning in Siby, Thursday the 2nd, we woke up bright and early and ate our breakfast at the lodge, consisting of bread with jam and tea. (One perk of living in a country that was once under French rule is that the baguette is actually quite good!) We then got back into the vans and drove to Bamako. It’s really striking how quickly the view outside the window went from rural to “urban,” though it’s hard to call Bamako urban since it seems more like one gigantic, sprawling town. The vans took us to Modibo’s (the Academic Director) house, where we stopped to pick up luggage some people had stored before traveling to Siby. We all piled back in the vans, luggage in tow, to be dropped off at our homestay families. At this point, I was extremely nervous. One other girl, Maddie, and I were in one van with the staff and the luggage, while the rest of the group was in another.


The vans took off. What added to our nerves was the fact that we didn’t know who was going to be dropped off first. The roads were really, really bumpy due to the rains that morning and Maddie and I both really had to pee because of how nervous we were – a really bad combination! We ended up giggling nervously the entire ride as we watched the girls get dropped off. I was the fourth one to go.

My house is on the side of a soccer “field” (it can’t really be called a field because there’s no grass, just red dirt) where a group of children were playing. Three girls came out to greet me: my older sister and two young girls that cook and clean for the family that took my luggage. They led me into the room that would be sharing with my sister for the next 7 weeks: a small, somewhat dank room with a queen size bed. We have our own FLUSHING toilet (!!!) connected to our room which is glorious (many students’ houses don’t have toilets). The rest of the house consists of a living room with a television, couches, and a dining table, a large bedroom where the rest of the children sleep, a small “indoor kitchen” with a miniature refrigerator, and an outdoor kitchen (most of the cooking is done outside on fire-burning stoves) and latrine. The parents live in a separate house stationed above this one.

My family consists of four sisters: Aka, who is 23 and my roommate, Toussi, who is 18 and actually studying in Utah right now, Nene, 16, and Haby, 13. We have one little brother, Mahammed, who is absolutely adorable. Everyone in the family, including my parents, speaks French to some degree, but they exchange in Bambara which is…overwhelming and confusing, to say the least. It really sounds like they are always yelling at each other! My mother works selling clothes and my father as financier in a hospital. There are always children from the quartier in the house playing as well… here they truly treat their neighbors like family.

The hardest thing about the adjustment thus far, apart from the Bambara language barrier, is the fact that right now it’s Ramadan and everyone (except for Haby and Mahammed) is fasting during the day. They are all pretty grouchy and tired (understandably) and I feel really guilty when they bring me food or when I have to ask for something during the day. It’s also hard because I am sharing a bed with Aka, who has to wake up at 4AM to pray and eat before the fast begins. I’m also around when the family members pray and I’m not really sure what to do with myself during that time. Ramadan ends in 5 days, however, and there is a large festival at the end that is supposed to be really fun so I’m looking forward to it!

Oh! I almost forgot to mention that on my first morning here, I was given my new Malian name: Raki Bah. My family calls me Raki, and when I introduce myself to people here I say n togo Raki (my name is Raki). Just one more thing to get used to. Everything is an adjustment, but I do think it will start getting easier soon.

Transitions

What a whirlwind of a week.


The craziness ensued when, four hours before I was supposed to leave for the airport, I logged onto my email only to find a brief note from Air France informing me that my flight was canceled and that I wouldn’t leave until the next day. I spent the rest of the day fretting about whether the SIT office in Brattleboro would be able to contact my Academic Director in Bamako before my flight was due in. All ended up working out, however, and during my ten hour layover in Paris I got to go into the city and walk around for hours. It was extremely wonderful but disorienting especially because I hadn’t slept on my red-eye flight there, and even more disorienting for me to think that by that evening I would be in Africa.

When I landed in Bamako, I stepped off the plane and saw the tiny International Airport of Bamako. Getting my bags was… well, as a woman next to me said as we looked at the baggage claim, “Bievenue en Afrique” (Welcome to Africa). There were hoards of people surrounding the tiny conveyor belt. The heat was already sweltering, and the humidity... It took me thirty minutes to even get to the front of the pack to see if my bags had yet arrived, and another thirty minutes before I found them both. After I found them, however, it was smooth sailing – I found Harber, the French teacher, and he took me to the hotel where I got to meet two of the other girls and finally get some sleep.

The next morning we woke up bright and early and headed to Siby, a town about 45 minutes outside of Bamako. We stayed at a hotel with little huts that housed three girls each. While there we visited a women’s cooperative that produces shea butter and got to learn the complicated process. There was a Peace Corps volunteer in the town that oddly enough knows my dad since she went to Boston College! What a small world. We also had our first Bambara courses (more on that later). The group certainly bonded over the food that was served to us… half of us were vegetarians before coming here, so you can imagine our shock at the first dinner when we were each served a gigantic chicken leg with a little bit of rice. That will certainly take some time to get used to. While in Siby, we also went on a beautiful hike up to the some caves that are at the top of the cliffs surrounding the town and were all happy to be getting some exercise after all of the starch we’d been consuming.

After two nights in Siby, we headed back to Bamako to get picked up by our host families. I think I’ll save that story for another post!

All in all, things have been great here. Our teachers are extremely warm and helpful, which is making this transition infinitely easier. Of course many things are difficult – the language barrier, the food, the unfamiliarity – but I know that over time, those things will improve. For now, there's just a lot of not knowing what in the world is going on!