We are in the heart of cultivation season now, and approaching my one-year anniversary of living in my village. While I've tried to keep my head and my hands busy (see post about my peanut field!), the year mark inevitably sparks certain existential questions.

 What have I accomplished here, really? What legacy am I going to be able to leave my village 12 or so months from now? Am I doing what I came here to do?

And the answers to these questions, despite my generally optimistic outlook on events and on life in general, are not as simple as I wish they were.

What I came here to do was to find a way to hopefully help people, to touch a life or two. To throw myself into a completely new challenge and to see what I could make of it. That’s part of the appeal of Peace Corps, right? To see what you’re made of, to show your initiative and creativity. To be completely free to make something happen. These are big ideas, and when you’re at home in America, applying to Peace Corps and dreaming about what life in a small village mud hut would be like, the experience is full of promise. Sure, you know there will be frustrations you’ll have to overcome, but they fall under some sort of vague mental category you label “challenges,” situations that will no doubt test you but which you have every reason to believe you’ll overcome. After all, you’ve always been pretty good at most things you’ve tried. Off to change the world, everyone says. And you want to believe that it’s possible, that anything is possible in the vast newness of this adventure.

Fast forward to a year and 4 months later. Has anything about Marena substantively changed because of my presence here so far? That’s a question I sometimes struggle with. I’ve done what I feel I can, tried to inspire in my interactions with my co-workers and with my villagers. But has it even made a dent in the very serious challenges this place faces? You weigh some babies, distribute some vaccines, do some breastfeeding and nutritional counseling, organize a training or two. You try to help. But the overwhelming need for, well, everything, blows you away every time. Babies are still dying, so many mothers still going through childbirth at home, malaria still reigns. Your efforts with the health center staff are sometimes stymied by village politics and personality types and distrust, which leads some villagers to turn away from the health center entirely. The people “assigned” to work with you turn out not to have the time nor the interest to improve the village’s health, and you’re left trying to figure out how to focus on “capacity building” when your efforts sometimes seem to have become a one-PCV show.

If that sounds awfully cynical, it’s not. I’ll never be very good at being a cynic, in part because I really and truly believe in the power of shifting just one person’s attitude. I don’t believe the slightest kind or beneficial act is ever wasted; I am a big proponent of the ” single drop of water can alter the state of the ocean” mentality. But, in the vast, incredible ocean of need, can I even be that single drop? I’ll be honest, as I’m trying to be about all my feelings and reactions here; I’ve had definite moments of doubt.

Being in my village for a year, I’ve started to try and take stock of what I’ve done, what I hope to do, and what I’d like to leave behind when I’m finished. I’ve found that my attitude has had to adjust out of necessity, out of circumstances that once fell under that vague category “possible challenges” that have now become very clear and specific in my mind. I know now exactly how it feels to have absolutely no idea where to start or who to work with; to feel bored and overwhelmed at once; to spend months trying to get one person to take baby steps towards better habits; to try and convince an at-risk pregnant woman that it really IS safer for her to deliver at the health center, even if she doesn’t get along with the midwife (for reasons I understand and agree with). These struggles are just some of my daily, real challenges. And, when you had harbored some idea that you could “save the world” as some sort of Super Volunteer, these situations bring you right back down to earth.

But I’m not intending for this entry to be a litany of negativity;  I came here to grow and growth doesn’t ever happen without some pains, or, as seems appropriate for this particular season in Mali: Into every life, a little rain must fall.   So I’m not, won’t ever be the Super Volunteer; I won’t single handedly save my village of 1000 from the clutches of diarrheal disease or malnutrition, and the petty politics that existed before I got here will be around long after I’m gone.  I’ll give advice and try to be a guide as much as I am guided; some people may listen, others inevitably will not. In the end, I have to be okay with that. I have to believe that this place will be better, even if in the form of just one person’s outlook having changed, than it was before I came. Small is big in this context; and you can’t always know who it will be “big” for or when, but then again humans never were the best predictors of the fates of the universe. All we can do is live, and try. One person, one life at a time.

And with that in mind, I cherish the year I’ve been in Marena mostly for the one on one, human connections I’ve made. I’m proud of how hard I have worked to understand the lives of the people I live with and of how far I’ve come in communicating with them, and I’ve proud of the good relationships–even friendships–I’ve developed. These relationships help me to weather the occasional doubts, and they make me glad to face the frustrations on a daily basis and continue an important fight–however miniscule or elusive progress can sometimes be.

“Dooni, dooni” is a handy all purpose phrase in Bambara that means, translated, slowly slowly, little by little, everything in its proper time. It pretty much captures the essence of efforts at changing anything here. And it’s something that I’m having to learn to take to heart.