Happenings

Greetings to all in America suffering through the last of the February doldrums–honestly, with the thermometer inching up slowly as we approach the end of the cold season and the beginning of  HELL, I can scarcely relate to complaints of anything  below 70 degrees. While I brace myself for the onset of afternoons of 110 degrees in the shade (okay, let’s hope it’s not that bad), I’ve found that things are starting to happen in village.
I’m still spending a lot of time at the health center. Now, we have started actually weighing babies that come in for any reason, not just saying that we do. I’m not sure whether this had something to do with superviseurs from the cercle (county) level coming in for review, or whether my chef du poste (the health center boss) was fired up by his most recent training stint and came back ready to see things get done, but either way, I’m really glad. I was starting to wonder why we even bothered to say we do infant growth monitoring, when for the first few months I was there we’d be lucky to weigh one baby a week. Now, vaccination/pre-natal consultation days are pretty hectic–the midwife and I trying to bounce back and forth between doing PNCs and conducting the baby weighing outside. We are getting a sort of system going, although some things still need to change–mothers are often in a hurry to weigh their babies and leave immediately after, even before we advise them–which, of course, defeats the entire purpose of the whole thing, to keep mothers informed of their child’s growth and give nutritional advice. Mothers also often don’t have the cards they are supposed to buy with growth charts to track month-to-month weight, which makes it hard to gauge a kid’s progress. Despite the challenges, I am encouraged by the fact that the midwife has gotten more proactive about organizing the mothers for the weighing and making sure they stay to get advice. Although I enjoy being part of this educational component of the health center’s preventative work, I don’t want baby weighing—or any one activity, for that matter–to become “my thing,” because anything attached only to me won’t last when I’m gone. So it’s good to see the staff showing increased interest in growth monitoring.
I also recently got a small amount approved through the Peace Corps Small Project Assistance (SPA) Grant program to organize a two-day training for “accoucheurs traditionelles” (traditional midwives who assist with at home births when, for whatever reason the mother doesn’t go to the health center) on basic sanitation practices and risk reduction during at-home deliveries, as well as giving nutritional, breastfeeding and other advice to new mothers. If Allah wills it, we’ll be doing the training hopefully sometime in April. I’ll be working with my chef du poste to put together the training objectives and program, organize logistics, and of course, be on hand to help with the training.
I and several other volunteers in the Kita area are also working to organize a “Take Our Daughters to Work” week (or 4-5 day event) to bring girls from our villages into Kita for something akin to a girl’s camp. We’re hoping to recruit women working in various professional fields–teachers, midwives, and NGO workers for example–to come in and be “mentors” for the week, and participate with the girls in life skills building as well as fun, social activities. This has the potential to be a pretty eye-opening experience for small village girls, who rarely get exposed to a world outside of the one they have always known, and don’t always have a ton of examples of women in professional roles to follow. The original plan was to try to do this around International Women’s Day (March 8), but we are choosing a later date, sometime during the school vacation, to have adequate time to organize, and so that we don’t have to pull the girls out of school for the event (which would kind of nullify the whole message about staying in school to pursue your goals).
I recently met a dam worker in Manantali who also runs a radio station in the Bafing River valley, and is eager to collaborate on me doing some sort of health-focused talks on the radio. The down side is that right now the station is based in a village more than 30k from mine–not very accessible. But, they are trying to move operations to Manantali, and I’m really hoping to be able to work with them. The radio is an easy way, after all, to reach a very large number of people with information very efficiently, and for that reason probably one of the best mediums for public health messages available in Mali.
In non-work related news, in early February I went to Segou, a city 3 hours east of Bamako, for the annual Festival sur la Niger, which brings in big-name artists from all over Mali and West Africa, including Nigeria, Togo, Morocco, Burkina Faso and others. I have to admit that despite knowing I’m living in one of the richest musical countries on the African continent, I hadn’t done much exploring of Malian music before going to Segou for the festival. I was quite impressed. My favorite was, far-and-away, Oumou Sangare, a Malian singer who has gained international stature with her Wossolou style of singing. Other highlights were Femi Kuti from Nigeria (whose attempts to speak French/Bambara onstage sent the audience into peals of laughter–since Nigerians, of course, speak English), the famous kora player Toumani Diabite, and Vieux Farka Toure, Ali Farka’s son who I had the fortune of meeting in a much more intimate setting when he came to play at Tubani-so. The music from the desert areas–Gao, Mali and Timbuktu–was quite haunting, and as I’m not exposed to the desert culture frequently being so far west in Malinke country, and far away from any tourists coming to Mali for the quintessential Sahelian experience, it was a good opportunity to hear a completely different style of music than I normally hear in village.
Aside from the music, it was a great week of eating cheap and delicious street food (Avocadoes DO exist in Mali, and the street vendor Madame Soucko virtually made my week with her mood-lifting avocado, tomato, onion, cucumber and beet sandwiches) and catching up with volunteers I haven’t seen in awhile. We drank tea with a Tuareg from the Timbuktu region, (who were all over the festival selling the silver jewelry and camel-skin articles they are known for); my friend even got a marriage proposal from one; we found a group of Mauritanian ladies selling the traditional veils (called danpe) that are the common apparel of Fulani women. I can never find danpe in my village or even my region, where there is no significant Fulani population, so I was excited to find and buy a beautiful brown-and-blue danpe, and the reaction when I work it in my 100% Malinke village was itself worth the cost of the material. (Many women in my village never see danpe being worn, nor some of the more traditional dress of the desert and semi-desert areas further north. They joked that I was becoming a “Fula muso” (Fulani woman) instead of a Maninka Muso (Malinke woman), but all joking aside, I got a ton of complements. Danpe are a lot of work to tie and to keep on, but I think I’ll have to wear mine more often.
I also got a chance to visit my good friend Ruvani in her village not far from Segou for one day and night, and it was great to get a sense of how different the Peace Corps service experience is depending on the particularities of the village. She is located in a commune capital, and her CSCOM is as gleaming and spacious as mine is small and falling apart.  I also came to appreciate all the hills and cliffs and trees in my village–while Segou is completely flat, and structures are almost exclusively mud-brick (in my village, bamboo and other wood are extremely common building materials for fences and other structures, since there are trees readily available). Ruvani’s village definitely much more of a dramatically Sahelian, flat and barren landscape, although it made me miss somewhat the beautiful cliffs right behind my house. But the typical Malian hospitality, of course, was the same, and all of the villagers gave me a very warm welcome. Between my friend’s village and Segou, I got my first taste of the other end of Mali–where infrastructure (due largely to tourism) is much more abundant, while the life of the average rural villager is more or less the same.

That’s what’s been up of late! I hope the winter is not too oppressive–Ala ka tile d’aw ma! (May God give you sun!