It's been a good month since my last email and I'm sure you're all wandering how your favorite ex-pat is fairing. Well, rest assured I'm still alive and well! I won't lie though, this first month at site has been a real challenge, perhaps even more so than I initially expected. There are a number of factors at play here, individually none of which are all that terrible, but combined can make life, err difficult. 1st, As the subject line implies, the food situation here is a bit sub-par. The problem is not that I don't have money to buy food, but rather, there is no food to buy with my money. As a result, my diet generally consists of either rice or noodles 3 times a day. Condiments have become my new best friends and are currently my most valued possessions. I'm not certain I'd be able to maintain sanity were it not for the wondrous inventions of mustard, ketchup, and co. Oh the little things... 2nd, It's still ridonkulously hot, although not quite as bad as it was a few weeks ago (one day i drank 8 liters of water and still got dehydration). 3rd, Going a month without speaking English... kind of makes you want to punch someone in the face at times. Especially when you're trying to learn a language as vastly different as Bambara. I've found a Bambara tutor in my village and I've been meeting with him (Bazu) everyday for an hour or two. There are all the usual frustrations one might expect from this situation: I'm still quite limited in the language, Bazu speaks less English than I do Bambara, and the end result is probably more comical than educational.
Having Bazu as a teacher has led me to some interesting observations on Malian education. Most notably, that nobody in this country really reads or writes Bambara all that well. The reason being that Bambara was a strictly oral language up until about 50 years ago. And, it was largely western academia that spearheaded the movement to turn it into a written language. In schools, if you're lucky enough to be in one past the 4th grade, you pretty much stop learning Bambara and start learning French, Furthermore, the higher your education goes the more everything is taught in French. As a result, someone like Bazu, who's pretty highly educated by Malian standards, can speak Bambara fluently as well as read, write, and speak French fluently. Yet he struggles to read his original language and often times misinterprets entire sentences and ideas, which I may realize hours later, much to my chagrin, rendering all that studying pointless. On the other hand, those who don't go/stay in school speak only Bambara or some other local language, but they cant read or write anything. Another interesting point is how swiftly and dramatically dialogues change. Even from villages a couple miles apart, there can be surprising differences in the way Bambara is spoken. This is due, again, to Bambara being an oral language as well as the fact that over 50 languages are spoken in Mali, Bambara being just the most common. Many people in my village are of the ethnic group, Fulani, and speak Fula as their first language. As a result, my little corner of Mali speaks Bambara with an interesting touch of Fula. As you can imagine, with over 50 different languages there are countless ways in which regional and local dialogues can evolve.
Another source of irritation, for me as well as the village, is that all our wells have gone dry and the one pump in town seems to be broken. Everybody has to go to the next village down the road (about a mile) to get their water. Have you ever tried to limit your water usage to under 3 gallons a day? that includes drinking water, cooking, washing dishes, bathing water, water for my garden and compost pile, oh and don't forget in this country... water+left hand = toilet paper. We don't want to run out of toilet paper, now do we? It's always interesting at the end of the day trying to prioritize your needs based on how much water you have left.
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| organic mango cooperative in Bougouni |
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| urine? no. just mango wine |
P & L
Rege
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