Bon Voyage Bakary

Especially given how little has changed since I was here in 2009, it is always a little disconcerting when something major changes. Our friend and friendly neighborhood cyber owner Boubacar/Bakary left for Ghana this morning. He is going to study English for 6 months so we won't see him again before we leave. Fortunately, we got to go on a lovely outing to the Parc National with him last weekend, which you can see the pictures of here.

Boubacar is an incredibly lovely and generous person (he informed us that he would make sure his employees keep giving us the ridiculously discounted rate on cyber time we enjoyed while he was here). Several of you have already met him as he introduced himself into a couple of Skype conversations we've had with our  families. He was also by far the most dedicated of my various English students and I hope some of what we studied will be of use to him in his Anglophone adventure. So this is just a little blog to say good luck, we'll miss you at the cyber and we hope we'll see you again soonish.

The First Thanksgiving

Sarah and I came to the realization last night that this was the first Thanksgiving we've spent together, despite coming up on six years of being a couple. And perhaps true to our relationship, Thanksgiving this year felt anything but "traditional".

The week leading up to National Turkey Day* was essentially split evenly between managing hoards of children come to read the books in the Niamakoro library and salivating over pictures of Thanksgiving food. Needless to say, the monotony of eating the same three dishes here for months on end has led to some indulgent food fantasies. Did you know there's such thing as food porn**? It's too bad we don't get those cable channels here.

Sarah did an english lesson about Thanksgiving with the 9th grade classes during their time in the library last week, which involved some searching for pictures of Thanksgiving food, football, and good-ole' American family gatherings. We were highly disturbed by Google's auto-suggest. An image search for "family thanksgiving" suggested we may really be interested in "black family thanksgiving". *Facepalm*. We quickly found some pictures demonstrating the ideal Nuclear Family, which were probably photocopied from a Health textbook.

Thanksgiving day itself was very pleasant. The day was spent working on the project, where the children are still overly excited and arriving in unmanageable numbers at the library (we've had to institute the rule that if there are no seats, you have to wait until someone leaves). Then, in the early evening we had some nice Skype conversations with our families. There's something to be said for modern communication technology -- the fact that you can video chat with someone literally half-way around the world, from a poor part of one of the most under-developed countries in the world, is truly incredible. But it was nice to talk to them all, even as we lamented the fact that the oven smells weren't making it through the 'tubes. They must've been clogged.

Then, following a tradition that dates back to as early as the Mayflower, we proceeded into downtown Bamako for a Thanksgiving dinner of Chinese food. We could've attended a (rather spendy) ex-pat dinner hosted by the American Club of Bamako, but decided there was a certain poetry to eating Chinese food for Thanksgiving. It just illustrates the day-to-day absurdity of living in a foreign country. But thankfully, it was a tasty absurdity which did not consist of beans. Here are the lovely pictures to remember our First Thanksgiving.

 

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* Little known fact: the reason we eat turkey on the last Thursday in November is to commemorate the wisdom of our Founding Fathers and give thanks to the fact that the Eagle, not the Turkey, is our national animal. Thanks, Ben Franklin, for almost screwing that one up :)

** From the New Oxford American Dictionary: porn (n) - ... (2) Television programs, books, etc., regarded as catering to a voyeuristic or obsessive interest in a specified subject : The Food Network captures a delectable display of exquisite cuisine -- food porn of the highest order.

The Library Has Finally Opened!

We've finally opened the library! With surprisingly little fanfare, we officially opened the doors last Tuesday to a school of overly-excited children. (I say "surprisingly little fanfare" because typically Son Excellence, Amadou Toumani Touré, President de la Republique et Chef de l'etat, is present at such events to cut ribbons and shake hands and give away presents to small children as he cures a new batch of lepers and turns water into wine for the reception afterwards. Or at least that's our impression from the state-run ORTM television station.)

If you're just looking for pictures of cute African children reading books, skip to the bottom ;)

Each class in our partner school, which runs from kindergarten to 9th grade, has a scheduled time to come to the library (or in the case of the larger classes, several different times for disjoint subsets of students). This first week Sarah and Robert introduced the library and talked about a few rules for its use (no running, no yelling, no fires taller than the bookshelves... your average common-sense library rules). Then, depending on the age of the students, they either had time to read and/or look at picture books, or Sarah read them some stories with Robert translating into Bambara.

If I've learned one thing about the education system here, it's that my expectations always turn out to be wrong. Of course it's hard to really form any "generalizations" after only being here for a few months and interacting with a rather limited subset of students, but I had expected hardly any of the children to know how to read. But once again, as we had our first students on Tuesday, I was pleasantly surprised as one of the girls at the table next to me was sounding out words quite well.

Talking with Sarah later, it seems there are a few things going on. First, while many of the students may be able to "read", many of them don't actually understand what they are reading. How can this be? I'm sure there are tomes written on this subject, but here are a few of our observations:

• French is not spoken at home, and French instruction in schools is decoupled from any sort of context. For example, our nephew Papa was practicing a dialogue the other night for his "Education Civique et Morale" class, which involved such lines as "I do not play on bridges" and "I obey my parents". It was clear, though, that he had no clue what he was saying. Sitting out in the courtyard at school, you can hear the little first graders repeating sentences to their Maîtresse, who stands at the front of the class holding nothing but a whip in one hand and a piece of chalk in the other. The walls are blank cinderblock, and students rarely have books.
• By 4th or 5th grade, students start speaking enough French to get by conversationally (this is the age of our niece Djamelou, for example). However, because (almost all) students in this neighborhood have no access to books, their French vocabulary is limited to the types of words that come up in a very narrow set of conversational circumstances. Thus, they don't know most of the words that appear on the pages they are reading.

That all said, the students' excitement to finally have access to books is incredible. They are particularly enthusiastic about the comic books and this set of "ImageDoc" magazines, which have articles about animals, nature, space, foreign countries, etc. and LOTS of pictures. The younger ones are content to thumb through the picture books (after all, we were told that "learning the alphabet" was a second-grade activity, so at this point individual reading isn't an option. We hope to change that.). The middle-school aged students, however, are pretty serious about trying to read. They'll sit in (almost) complete silence, and bring their book up to Robert to ask what words mean when they get stuck. One student was very intent on reading Harry Potter, although it took him almost a full 40 minutes to get through the first paragraph. Both Sarah and I really hope he sticks with it...

The moral of the story is, there is a lot of work to do. Even the students that can read are doing so far, far below what one would consider "grade level". But, with actual access to books and other literacy resources, hopefully these students will catch the bug and get hooked on reading. Already we're seeing a lot of kids come in during their free time, so things are looking promising. Now, to just keep up that momentum.

Nigerian Princess

(A note from our lawyers: The names herein have been changed to protect the identities of those involved. All references to places and events are real, and have not been altered. The following paragraphs represent the sole opinion of their author, and shall not be construed as an endorsement of Sarah Palin. By reading this sentence, you agree to our Terms and Conditions. This disclaimer is not intended to be a factual statement.)

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Our friend Jean-Claude Chirac recently met the love of his life online. This should come as no surprise to those who have seen advertisements for online dating - it's a guarantee with a $49.99/month membership! This girl - call her Monique - sounded positively lovely. She didn't speak french, but as we've learned from like every romantic comedy, this no barrier to true love (or the masterful manipulation of Google Translate). I'm going to marry this woman, he informed us. It was a picture-perfect story, a veritable romance for the ages.

About a week and a half ago, Jean-Claude asked us to do him a favor. Monique was currently living in Senegal, he said, and had asked him to call her to talk on the phone! However, she apparently didn't have a cell phone herself; instead, we were to call her pastor (who also did not speak french), and he would pass the phone to her. The whole process seemed a little convoluted, but we've long since stopped trying to make sense of everything that happens here. Sarah called and got the pastor, who told us to call back in 45 minutes. Eventually we got Monique on the phone, and thus nurtured Jean-Claude's budding romance.

Everything seemed to be unfolding "most splendidly" (excuse the speech pattern, we've been listening to a lot of BBC radio recently), until we got a worried phone call from Jean-Claude at almost 11pm as we were preparing for bed. "Baya, I need to talk to you," he said, "I'm sitting outside Robert's Coiffure drinking tea." Sarah got dressed again and went down to find him, but we secretly feared the worst.

When Sarah came back, she explained the story to me. After several weeks of flirtatious courtship online, Monique had finally spilled her life story to Jean-Claude, the pain and emotion of her ordeal cutting through the emoticons and links to LOLCats. Although she is currently living in Senegal, she was not born there. She's actually a refugee from the Rwandan genocide, where she had to flee after her whole family was ruthlessly murdered. But, as luck would have it, her father had left 7.6 million pounds for her in an account with the Royal Bank of Scotland! She just needs someone (outside of Senegal) with a bank account to accept the transfer of money, which she cannot accept directly because of her refugee status.

Needless to say, we were ecstatic -- our friend had just hit the jackpot! With the 18% cut she promised him, Jean-Claude could easily live and support his family in extreme luxury for the rest of their lives. All he had to do was send his bank account information to M. Nelson Smith, a representative of the Royal Bank of Scotland, who could be reached at either of his official email addresses, rbscustomer_nelson@escite.co.uk or nelson_rbs@switched.com. Monique had already informed the bank that he would be writing them; all Jean-Claude had to do was send his bank information.

We immediately realized there was a major problem with this story. You see, Jean-Claude doesn't have a bank account! Aaaaaand, it's a scam literally straight out of the textbooks. We tried to convince Jean-Claude of this. He agreed it seemed a little odd, and didn't understand why she would want to steal from him when he doesn't really have any money to steal. Plus, I think he really wanted to hold on to a little hope that this woman he had fallen in love with, who he had a 98% match with on eHarmony.com, was in fact real.

Finally, Sarah googled the story Monique had fed him, and found several web sites exposing the scam. It's remarkable how things like this can destroy your faith in humanity. As Sarah wrote back to her in an email (sent with Jean-Claude's permission):

Monique, this is clearly a scam. I have looked it up on the internet and seen that the same thing has been done to hundreds of other people. Do not contact me again, and shame on you for using the horrible things that happened to people in Rwanda to try to steal people's money.

And thus concludes the story of how a Rwandan refugee turned out to be a Nigerian Princess. I didn't think these things actually happened to real people.

Abebi and Asu

As many of you who read this blog already know, we had a very sad event happen this week. My family said goodbye to our super-ancient, super-beloved, super-bizarre poodle Abebi. Such an event could never be well timed, but it happened to coincide this week with incompetence and interference on behalf of the principal at the school where we work, frustration with Malian friends and money, and the spectacularly ill-timed arrival of my somewhat insane host sister Toutou from Mopti. It also doesn't help that most Malians (with good reason) would look at me like I was absolutely insane if I explained to them that the reason for my pensiveness and frequent watery eyes was the death of my dog. In fact, in a country where 1 in 5 children don't make it to the age of five I feel a little guilty being sad over this. But I am very sad, and so would like to commemorate the dog Neal so aptly describes as “beautifully bizarre” in this blog.

Abebi, as some of you know, means “we asked for her and she came to us.” And ask for her we did. Actually, it was more of a sustained begging campaign on the part of Beth (my sister) and I that involved pleading, taking care of stuffed dogs, and reading every book in the elementary school library dog section and memorizing obscure facts about rare breeds (that last one was mostly me). When we finally got her, she was the cutest small, neurotic beast in the world. I distinctly remember her sitting between Beth and I on the back seat coming over the Fremont bridge taking her home. We briefly considered naming her Hannah (I think dad also suggested yellow-jacket-butt) which would have been far too ordinary a name for such a strange and wonderful creature.

In her earlier years Bebi endured a lot of schemes we/I designed to test her intelligence, agility, etc. Perhaps the most unusual of these was  the time I decided I would try to teach her to read with a series of flashcards I made. I did succeed in making her piddle when shown the “yellow” flashcard, but as anyone who knew young Abebi can tell you, she probably would have done that anyway. I'm still unclear as to how my years of dog research had not taught me that she was colorblind anyway.

What Abebi loved most of all (apart from cheese) was being outdoors with her family, rolling in disgusting-smelling things, chasing animals, and trotting along with her attractive bandanas. While people on the  trail would often exclaim “A hiking poodle!” with surprise and amusement, Abebi certainly never let her breeds reputation define her. The few times the groomer put bows in her hair, she ate them.

Her favorite place was probably our yurt, and she was with us from the pre-yurt camping trips (when she chased a deer so far I thought she'd never come back), to the first winter trip (when we all slept in our coats and her water bowl froze every night right next to the wood stove), to the later trips when she mostly dozed on her bed and trotted around.

She was always the strangest beast, Neal wanted me to add her adorable later habit of sprinting full speed around the kitchen every time she came in from outside before resuming behavior appropriate to a dog of her age. So I just wanted to say, rest in peace Abebi, you will always be the one and only staaanker.


On a much happier note, one of the main things getting me through this week (apart from Neal being lovely and a great outing for Chinese food with our friends Stephanie and Pierce), has been my fantastic niece Asu. Here she is making her, “you did NOT just do that/I will begin screaming now” face.

She is the new kid since I was here before and when I first arrived she cried every time she saw me. Once we made peace, we hung out quite a lot, but I've been consistently worried about her since we got here. She is apparently just over a year old (people were telling me her birthday was in December but actually it is apparently October), but she is quite small, almost never smiled, and usually seemed listless and uninterested in anything going on.

This week it is like she is a new baby. She smiles and giggles and toddles at speeds previously unknown. It is so amazing. Her only downside is that she is often alarmingly slimy and that, although I am so excited about her newfound appetite, her faster toddling speeds mean she is increasingly good at getting her tiny, germ-infested hands into our food before we can stop her. But thanks Asu, for making a crappy week a whole lot better.

Fête des Moutons (Festival of Sheep) 2011

Fête des Moutons (Festival of Sheep) 2011

After much hype and build up, Tabaski finally arrived on Sunday. Here follows the description of our somewhat epic day. It is really long, but it has plenty of pictures I promise. My sister Fadima called us at around 7:30 (she said she would call between 8 and 9, this is the first and only time she has ever done anything early) and told us to come over. We got ourselves all dressed up in our bazin, which elicited delighted exclamations from friends and strangers all day long, and headed over. In case you were worried, we did figure out how Neal's pants work, turns out the tailor puts a drawstring in the pocket…duh.

When we arrived, of course, the men, Na (my host mom), and Tanti (my aunt) were still at mosque, so we just hung out and started taking pictures of the excellent outfits that are such a big part of the day. Here are a couple of pictures. The first one shows our outfits in all of their glory, then Fadima striking a pose in her amazing bazin and her hair-do that she had to go downtown overnight to get done, and finally  Fadima (showing her personality) and I with our nieces Awa and Djamelou and our cousin Kafoune.

When everyone got home from mosque we took a few more pictures (below you can see Neal posing with Na), and then the sheep slaughter got under way.

For some unknown reason our sheep had been moved overnight from their former location in the courtyard to the roof, so they had to be led down the stairs to meet their doom. This is (sort of) visible in this picture of Issouf bringing sheep number 2 down. The less than excellent quality of the photo is due to the fact that I was hiding in the back corner of the courtyard to avoid seeing the slaughter itself. Despite my brother Madou's insistence that there were "plenty of sheep" and Neal could slaughter one if he wanted, we chose to opt out of that process. I think I managed to go the whole day without actually seeing a sheep get killed which was quite a feat seeing as there were A LOT of sheep getting slaughtered in Bamako and then they showed several slaughterings on TV throughout the day as well.

While Madou and Issouf finished up with the sheep, Neal, Fadima, Awa, Kafoune and I headed downtown to greet and bring food to my Grandma Baya. Our sotrama on the way there was relatively uncrowded, and the streets of the grand marché (big market) were strangely quiet. Grandma Baya was very happy to see us and we took a few pictures with her as well. I like the one we're showing here because it looks like Neal and our cousin could actually be related.

The sotrama on the way back was considerably more crowded (there was definitely not enough room for my hips in the spot the assistant put me in). Neal got to sit up front with the driver where it was apparently cool and comfortable and they gave him a banana. However, he did also get to see them starting the vehicle by touching two wires together.  My experience in the back of the sotrama causes me to lodge the following two complaints about basin: 1. It does NOT breathe well and 2. New basin is really slippery, so once I had enough room to actually sit I slid back and forth and into the laps of the poor people on either side of me.

When we got home, the meat was still being partitioned and the cooking was underway. Four sheep produces a lot of meat, and you can see Madou and our neighbor with their almost finished tubs below.

After our first meal of the day (surprisingly delicious sheep organs and onion sauce with bread) Neal took a nap and I helped grill the next round of meat with the women and children. See Fadima hamming it up with the BBQ below.

After eating the delicious grilled meat (I worked hard to insure we got the more well-done parts) we went home to take a nap. On the way we were drawn into having tea with some of the waiters from our favorite restaurant which was fun, although a bit beyond my Bambara skills (Neal says this is lies!).

Post nap, we returned to the family for yet more sheep eating and socializing. I went with Fadima to visit her friends who are hosting one of the SIT students so I got to chat with her while Fadima worked out her plans for later. In the evening, we joined the family for evening prayers. Neal got a very detailed lesson (more detailed than I ever got) in pre-prayer ablutions and it was a lovely community experience. Tanti wanted Neal to post a picture of me in my headscarf, so here it is.

This seems like a good moment to mention the religious significance of this holiday. It coincides with the end of Haj (the annual pilgrimage to Mecca). Because the Haj absolves participants of all their sins, Tabaski is also a moment for forgiveness among Muslims at home. It also celebrates the broader Muslim community, so sharing (in this case of your sheep) is also an important part of the holiday. It commemorates when Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son to God (and then was allowed to sacrifice a sheep instead) and thereby also represents a renewal of each person's submission to God.

Ironically, given the major religious importance of the holiday, our day ended, as it does for most young Malians, at a bar. We went out with Baïssou and Robert to Baïssou's favorite spot, the Hotel CA (possibly an Eagles reference?). I'm not really sure how to describe the place. It is through a nondescript door which leads into a smoky, mostly enclosed long room of low tables that leads to a slightly larger room with a dance floor. The entire thing is decorated with a crazy assortment of Christmas lights. The music started off with Salsa, then moved to a long section of the mostly Ivoirian and Malian music that is particularly popular here, had a brief break of techno before going back to Malian standards. Here is a picture of our table, where you can see the absurd amount of Cokes that Baïssou foisted on me. He had very kindly decided to "inviter" Neal and I, which meant he insisted on paying for everything the entire night. Neal is not a fan of Malian beer, so we had to work almost as hard to get Baïssou to stop buying them as we did to keep him from having to slaughter a mouton.

We know how hard Baïssou works at odd jobs to help provide for his large extended family, so we will need to return the favor sometime soon. We danced some, and watched a lot of dancing. I decided my favorite dance move is the one where the Malian men hitch up the long shirt/robe on their boubous in order to move their legs more quickly. Everyone seemed to be having a great time and it made an excellent, if bizarre, end to our day.

Observations from the week

A list of random interesting, amusing, distressing, etc. things that have happened this week.

- The sheep that are now truly everywhere, on every street corner, in every courtyard, on top of many vehicles, make for plenty of amusing moments. Yesterday I saw the biggest sheep I have ever seen in my life it was quite literally the size of a donkey or a motorcycle. Everyone in the grin (tea circle) watched it go by in a way that reminded me a lot of how our friends at home watch a Ferrari or a Lamborghini.

- On a more upsetting note, one of our friends/friendly acquaintances appears to have gone missing. We realized over the last couple days that we hadn't seen Chapé, one of the guys who works at the tire “boutique” next to Robert's coiffure in almost a week. This would be strange for anyone since people here tend to be in the same area most of the time, but for Chapé it was particularly weird because he is normally the most dependably present of any of the usual characters. You could pretty much always find him reclined in his chair in his enormous Dior knock-off sunglasses supplying everyone in the area with tea and/or peanuts.

Normally when someone disappears in this manner it means he or she has gone to visit family, started university, gotten a job, gone to Mecca, etc and we as non-Bambara speakers just haven't caught on. Nobody seemed that worried, so I had kind of assumed Chapé's absence was of this nature. Unfortunately, when I asked about it last night Baïssou got a very worried look on his face and said no one has seen or heard from him in days and no one has any idea where he went. This is very uncharacteristic of him, and Baïssou thinks his boss needs to start checking the hospitals and police stations. The situation is most likely grave, but I hope we will see him again soon.

- To end on a lighter note, Baba and I both have our outfits for the fête, which you will get to experience in all their glory in the many pictures I'm sure we will post on Monday. There is just one small problem, which is that we don't understand (at all) how Baba's pants are supposed to work. We are quite sure this is not a tailoring mistake but, as with many things in Mali, there is clearly a trick we haven't figured out.

Tampon picture.

Ok, now I've got you reading. Below is a picture of the project's brand new stamp, or tampon (I'm not making this up: http://www.wordreference.com/fren/tampon). Comes complete with cheap camera and over-used photoshop filters.