ad lib quid pro quo verbatim
today i am in kangaba, my circle capital. yee-haw, i just got off five weeks straight at village. it is nice to come in for a cold beverage, some quality time on the internet, connecting with my people back home. how are you? good i hope as you all have at some point held starring roles in my dreams. mona and luna your fuzzy, playful ways make me laugh out loud in my sleep, waking me up...
soon, i will be heading into bamako for further training in language and technical aspects of my job. i am happy to report that after 2 and a half months at site, i can understand alot of what i hear. woo-hoo. once the ear hears it, as with my linguistic experience, soon comes the ability to speak. i'd say i am probably at a 9 or 10 year old language level, with an ability to explain more complicated ideas and concepts. i have grown up, a little.
the rains have started which means i will be out in the fields, with the women, planting peanuts. you cannot imagine how good raw, un-roasted, peanuts begin to taste. they even start to have a meaty taste, since i get so little animal protein in my diet.
i have been here for five months now. only 21 to go. just kidding but now that i have been here, getting eased into the culture through better communication skills, it's strange but my experiences here are either very mildly intense or severely intense. there is no in-between. either it's really boring, or really exciting or infuriating or scary. (please don't worry about me mom.)
on site visit when i was still a newby in february, just getting to sombo was an ordeal. the pcv ben and i went to the bashee station at about noon. it was hot. we found a bashee going to sombo. we waited for two hours, then they said to us, we're not going today. we had to find another car going to guinea. four hours later, we finally got going. it's still hot but the sun was starting to set. on the road, the driver was white-knuckling the steering wheel and looked really nervous. he's also only going around 20 miles an hour. we had 70 miles to go.
in bankmana, about half-way to sombo, we pull over for an hour. the driver and his apprentices take off a tire and tinker with it for an hour. this is around 10 p.m. at night. we get back going and 30 minutes later, we get pulled over by gendarmes, or national border patrol. most of the 12 or so are wearing ski-masks and carrying ak-47's. no kidding. turned out that they were looking for either a cigarette or human traficker who had killed a gendarme on the same road to guinea a month earlier. ben doesn't say a word, no explanation or anything. after more slow-going down the road, we finally make it to kenegue, our stop, by 1:30 am. we still have to walk 2 km in the dark to sombo. ben admitted it to being the worst dry-season transport he had ever had. that's it. end.
another funny thing happened involving transport. i spent some time in bamako in may. i needed to go to the bank and take care of some work. my time came to go back to site. that morning i flagged down a taxi to get to djikourouni, the bashee station. as of then, i didn't know how to get there any other way. the taxi driver pulls into the station and a bunch of malian men completely surround the taxi and shout, 'you can't come here, go home, turn around, it's prohibited for you to be here, ect.' egads. i turn to the driver and says it's the bashee apprentices and that's it. i get out of the bashee and am instantly surrounded by men and they basically take my bag and tell me that i have to take their bashee since they were going my way apparently. kinda scary and i didn't know what to do other than to be pushed and bossed around. i hate submitting but there were no other bashees going my way. yuck.
i told my homologue, sayon, in sombo about what happened that night that i rolled in. he kinda laughed and said that they see me as only a rich white woman and these are poor people and that's why they acted so aggressively. what? i told the same story to a friend of mine in village and he said that what they did was completely inappropriate. my teammate leslie said she had never had that happen to her at the station. a couple of weeks later, sayon told me he talked to the men at the station that it was inappropriate for them to act like that with me, basically shaming them. leslie did likewise. shame is an excellent tactic in mali. end.
sombo was the recent recipient of a maternity by the fondation de l'enfance de luxembourg (childhood foundation of luxembourg). now, women around the area can go there for prenatal care, to give birth, and to have continued childhood medical treatment. yeah. the inoguration was on the 11th of june and guess who was in attendance? the first lady of mali, lobo traore toure. yes yes, she is the president of this organization. i got to sit behind her, i took some pictures of her, and it was all wonderful. so happens that her personal chauffeur is from sombo and hooked the village up with a maternity. crazy. end.
a couple of days later. corporal punishment is still widely used in mali, hell, it's legal to beat people. i walk into my host-family's concession and right into the beating of the second oldest son by his older brother, with a belt. what? and fanta, my host-mom, sanctioned it, locking the two of them in a house for quite a period of time. guess he had it coming to him since he not only beat his younger sister massetou, giving her a black eye and blood in the eye, but he punched a girl in the face, unprovoked. the little girl had a bloody mouth. he also insulted a family member to her face.
this last incident was the worst. i ended up leaving for a few days and going to leslie's village of balanzan. fanta promised to never beat her children in front of me again and it turns out that she never had to hit the eldest son, he apparently listened, didn't beat other kids, or insulted his elders. end.
these are events that puncture a really peaceful place and life. it's mostly smoothe and flowing, then there are these jarring experiences that take me sometimes days to process; do you see why i had to write haikus at the beginning? dang.
books!!!
Mating: Norman Rush. excellent
The Great Unraveling: Losing our way in the new century-Paul Krugman. excellent, an economic writer for the nytimes gives indicting evidence of the b$sh administrations' fiscal and monetary policies, basically stealing money from everyone in the lower and middle class. can anyone spell i-m-p-e-a-c-h?
The DaVinci Code: Dan Brown. okay. i needed to... the goddess-worship aspect of it was nothing new, but still well researched
North of South: Shiva Naipaul. four-stars, huh? trinidadian-born indian goes to kenya, tanzania, and zambia for five months and discusses socialism and it's failures in east africa (written in 1978), the indian contribution to development, and the expat community.
The Illustrated Man: Ray Bradbury. i'm a fan what can i say. collection of short stories. my favorite short story was 'rocket man.'
now i am taking a gander at an english translation of the qur'an. that's some interesting reading... love and peace to you. leave comments or email.
soon, i will be heading into bamako for further training in language and technical aspects of my job. i am happy to report that after 2 and a half months at site, i can understand alot of what i hear. woo-hoo. once the ear hears it, as with my linguistic experience, soon comes the ability to speak. i'd say i am probably at a 9 or 10 year old language level, with an ability to explain more complicated ideas and concepts. i have grown up, a little.
the rains have started which means i will be out in the fields, with the women, planting peanuts. you cannot imagine how good raw, un-roasted, peanuts begin to taste. they even start to have a meaty taste, since i get so little animal protein in my diet.
i have been here for five months now. only 21 to go. just kidding but now that i have been here, getting eased into the culture through better communication skills, it's strange but my experiences here are either very mildly intense or severely intense. there is no in-between. either it's really boring, or really exciting or infuriating or scary. (please don't worry about me mom.)
on site visit when i was still a newby in february, just getting to sombo was an ordeal. the pcv ben and i went to the bashee station at about noon. it was hot. we found a bashee going to sombo. we waited for two hours, then they said to us, we're not going today. we had to find another car going to guinea. four hours later, we finally got going. it's still hot but the sun was starting to set. on the road, the driver was white-knuckling the steering wheel and looked really nervous. he's also only going around 20 miles an hour. we had 70 miles to go.
in bankmana, about half-way to sombo, we pull over for an hour. the driver and his apprentices take off a tire and tinker with it for an hour. this is around 10 p.m. at night. we get back going and 30 minutes later, we get pulled over by gendarmes, or national border patrol. most of the 12 or so are wearing ski-masks and carrying ak-47's. no kidding. turned out that they were looking for either a cigarette or human traficker who had killed a gendarme on the same road to guinea a month earlier. ben doesn't say a word, no explanation or anything. after more slow-going down the road, we finally make it to kenegue, our stop, by 1:30 am. we still have to walk 2 km in the dark to sombo. ben admitted it to being the worst dry-season transport he had ever had. that's it. end.
another funny thing happened involving transport. i spent some time in bamako in may. i needed to go to the bank and take care of some work. my time came to go back to site. that morning i flagged down a taxi to get to djikourouni, the bashee station. as of then, i didn't know how to get there any other way. the taxi driver pulls into the station and a bunch of malian men completely surround the taxi and shout, 'you can't come here, go home, turn around, it's prohibited for you to be here, ect.' egads. i turn to the driver and says it's the bashee apprentices and that's it. i get out of the bashee and am instantly surrounded by men and they basically take my bag and tell me that i have to take their bashee since they were going my way apparently. kinda scary and i didn't know what to do other than to be pushed and bossed around. i hate submitting but there were no other bashees going my way. yuck.
i told my homologue, sayon, in sombo about what happened that night that i rolled in. he kinda laughed and said that they see me as only a rich white woman and these are poor people and that's why they acted so aggressively. what? i told the same story to a friend of mine in village and he said that what they did was completely inappropriate. my teammate leslie said she had never had that happen to her at the station. a couple of weeks later, sayon told me he talked to the men at the station that it was inappropriate for them to act like that with me, basically shaming them. leslie did likewise. shame is an excellent tactic in mali. end.
sombo was the recent recipient of a maternity by the fondation de l'enfance de luxembourg (childhood foundation of luxembourg). now, women around the area can go there for prenatal care, to give birth, and to have continued childhood medical treatment. yeah. the inoguration was on the 11th of june and guess who was in attendance? the first lady of mali, lobo traore toure. yes yes, she is the president of this organization. i got to sit behind her, i took some pictures of her, and it was all wonderful. so happens that her personal chauffeur is from sombo and hooked the village up with a maternity. crazy. end.
a couple of days later. corporal punishment is still widely used in mali, hell, it's legal to beat people. i walk into my host-family's concession and right into the beating of the second oldest son by his older brother, with a belt. what? and fanta, my host-mom, sanctioned it, locking the two of them in a house for quite a period of time. guess he had it coming to him since he not only beat his younger sister massetou, giving her a black eye and blood in the eye, but he punched a girl in the face, unprovoked. the little girl had a bloody mouth. he also insulted a family member to her face.
this last incident was the worst. i ended up leaving for a few days and going to leslie's village of balanzan. fanta promised to never beat her children in front of me again and it turns out that she never had to hit the eldest son, he apparently listened, didn't beat other kids, or insulted his elders. end.
these are events that puncture a really peaceful place and life. it's mostly smoothe and flowing, then there are these jarring experiences that take me sometimes days to process; do you see why i had to write haikus at the beginning? dang.
books!!!
Mating: Norman Rush. excellent
The Great Unraveling: Losing our way in the new century-Paul Krugman. excellent, an economic writer for the nytimes gives indicting evidence of the b$sh administrations' fiscal and monetary policies, basically stealing money from everyone in the lower and middle class. can anyone spell i-m-p-e-a-c-h?
The DaVinci Code: Dan Brown. okay. i needed to... the goddess-worship aspect of it was nothing new, but still well researched
North of South: Shiva Naipaul. four-stars, huh? trinidadian-born indian goes to kenya, tanzania, and zambia for five months and discusses socialism and it's failures in east africa (written in 1978), the indian contribution to development, and the expat community.
The Illustrated Man: Ray Bradbury. i'm a fan what can i say. collection of short stories. my favorite short story was 'rocket man.'
now i am taking a gander at an english translation of the qur'an. that's some interesting reading... love and peace to you. leave comments or email.
posted by chance @ 8:42 PM
3 comments
