On the year gone by, and progress

It’s been what I know seems like way too long since I’ve posted updates–sorry, faithful readers (that would be you, mom. ) Hot season is, at long last, ending; the rains have quenched the dusty earth and set my village awash in green at lightening speed, and in a few weeks I will have officially been in my little corner of the Sahel for a full year. 12 months. How is it possible that fully 12 months have passed since I was ironing my graduation gown, moving out of my apartment, and packing my bags from the biggest departure from my familiar American existence that I’ll probably ever take?

Time is such a funny thing in the Peace Corps experience; it stretches on, then flies, always leaving you a bit bewildered, wondering what it is you’ve really been doing with yourself for all these months, while at the same time marveling at the way the ins and outs, the ebbs and flows of this experience have shaped you and changed you. It’s hard to believe in the beginning that there will ever be a time when you take for granted being able to give nutritional counseling to mothers and being understood, or successfully learning to pour tea in the distinctly Malian way, or bargaining the price of that shirt WAY down like a true Mali muso. But at some point, I guess imperceptibly, that shift happens; when things become more natural, when every action and every word spoken doesn’t require you to think quite so much.

I certainly didn’t see that change coming; you get into the flow of village life and progress becomes harder to see on the day-to-day level, especially after that initial learning curve when you first get setlled begins to slow down. But it happened. I received affirmation of that this week from my friend Mahadiba, who was my first real friend in Marena when I came last September and my constant companion in the first month after I arrived. He’s been in high school in Bamako for the past nine months, and just returned, after finishing his exams, to help his family with the rainy season cultivation, as most students do here

. After sitting down over a small tea kettle and chatting for awhile about his first year of high school, his first time in Bamako, and the months gone by in Marena, he looked at me with a bemused expression, then laughed. “What is it?” I asked. What stupid tubab thing have I done now?

“Ah, bon, no, Awa,” he said. “I laugh because…e sera Bamanankan na.”

E sera Bamanankan na…literally, you’ve arrived at Bambara. Meaning, hey, wow, you can actually speak my language a little bit now. Mahadiba had no way of knowing how much that little comment warmed my soul, after all the struggles of adjustment, of trying to help my Malinke village understand why their language didn’t come naturally to me. Some volunteers are very quick to get that affirmation, and I’d started to feel my facility with the language getting better, but that little compliment was nine months in coming, and I can’t help but feel, with the halfway point of my service approaching, that it was exactly the boost I needed.

Having more confidence in language has helped me project-wise as well. Last month I initiated the process of getting funding for a cervical cancer screening training for all 36 community health centers in my health district. The process is called visual inspection, and it’s designed to be a more cost effective and realistic alternative to Pap smears in developing countries. Cervical cancer deaths have been reduced dramatically in richer countries due to widespread, annual Pap smears–but the lab work required for Pap smears makes them inaccessible at the community level. Visual inspection is simple–A little vinegar or iodine applied directly to the cervix will change color to indicate pre-cancerous changes, and any trained medical staff can then follow up and make sure pre-cancerous malignancies are treated quickly at the higher, district level. Visual inspection as a method is not as precise as Pap smears, but it is much more accessible and is held to be a promising method for preventing cervical cancer in low-resource settings. As health professionals seek to increase awareness of the very-underrecognized incidence of HPV and cervical cancer in the developing world, visual inspection is an important tool that primary caregivers at all levels of the health system should be capable of using.

Hence, this training. It’s a big undertaking, since we wanted to invite a doctor and midwife from each center, plus a few of the district health staff, bringing the total number to 80 people for 4 days. Luckily, I have met a really charismatic friend in one of the head staff at the district hospital, a young doctor who, when I presented the idea, was especially enthusiastic and volunteered to spearhead coordinating the training with me. I went to Bafoulabe, the capital of my cercle (district) and had a meeting with him at the district hospital, after which we met with the Medecin Chef–the big guy, the head doctor for the entire health district. Talk about an intimidating test of my Bambara and French skills! Stumbles aside, the Med Chef was really supportive of the idea and gave me and the attending doctor the go-ahead to make things happen. A few weeks, one over-extended trip to Bamako, and countless budget drafts later, I just found out today that Peace Corps approved my project and we will be receiving the full funding, near $6000, within a few weeks. So this is really happening. We’ll be setting a date and organizing everything in the coming weeks. And so it is here–just when you’re beginning to wonder whether to ignore the idea of progress entirely, everything seems to happen at once.

On July 1, 2010, I left Chicago’s Midway airport with my 80 allotted pounds of luggage, an empty journal and lots of dreams and anxieties. Nearly one year, thousands of packages of macaroni, countless misunderstandings, laughs, celebrations, funerals, letters, baby weighing sessions, public transport rides (Can someone, anyone PLEASE fix the Tambaga to Manantali road?!) , and overly sweetened cups of tea later, I’m seeing every day how my time here is changing me, as well as the ways it’s not (sorry, I won’t be leaving Mali having become anyone’s second wife… and I am not one iota better at pounding millet than I was the day I stepped off of the plane). The beauty of it all is that I still have a year of laughter, tears, problems to solve and lessons to learn and people to understand and love in this little place I’ve come to see as my own.

Here’s to year two: to make it count.