SANANKOROBA! (days 1 & 2)

here is one big long entry for the first big chunk of the village stay, most of it just copied out of my journal... i'll finish the rest of the entry later, but there's not much to say about day 3 because it was mostly more arts and crafts / me being really lonely and depressed, and day 4 deserves an entry of its own because i was alone with the family for the whole day... day 5 didn't really exist because we left in the morning...


DAY ONE - monday, 9/24/07

my host family here is big and loud and confusing and awesome... the compound incorporates a bunch of different families into one, and it's impossible to tell whose children are whose - not that it matters since most of the women seem to breastfeed and it's totally appropriate to beat kids that aren't technically yours... i live in a little hut of my own where we rigged up my mosquito net over this little mattress the SIT people brought for me (everyone got one). from what i've seen in the other rooms, the mosquito nets are pretty commonly used by everyone, which is good to see. there are lots of programs i see about on TV where mosquito nets, vaccinations, and malaria pills are provided to children and pregnant women in the villages, but a lot of times the TV info doesn't sync up very well with reality, so it's good to see the evidence of some of the stuff they claim to be doing to ameliorate the infant mortality rates and maternal-care miseducation.

i prayed today for the first time, with my host (brother?) dramane traoré, who doesn't speak very much, even though he's the only person in the compound who can really claim to communicate in french. during the month of ramadan, it's apparently customary for groups of people to congregate and pray outside in the evenings, instead of at the mosque. when i joined the ranks of men, people were still in the midst of their personal prayers, but the regulated, group-stuff began soon afterwards. my feelings about the experience were very open at first, and while i don't necessarily agree with what we were doing, the idea of everyone reaching down and placing their heads on the earth beneath the bright light of the full moon was very calming at first, and gave me the same kind of good feeling that the idea of ramadan does -- this kind of intentional sanctity with the less fortunate of the world. after about 50 minutes of the repetition, however, i was long ready to be done. i was interested in the conversation that went on between the marabou and the rest of the men at the end of the prayer session, but like many things here the gender seperation made me pretty uncomfortable: it seemed as if the leader of the prayer ceremony was asking various things of the men, and then they would just yell back to the women, only one or two of whom got any chance to respond... it just seemed like the sea of women behind us might as well have been invisible... but then i suppose there are some mosques around here where women aren't even allowed inside, so it was better than that.

i mentioned the moon a second ago, and it was cool that the moon happened to be rising in the direction of mecca, so it felt like we were praying to it, but i just need to explain for a moment how utterly amazing the full moon is when you escape the sprawling lights of a major city... as excited as i was about watching the stars under the same uncontaminated circumstances, they were almost impossible to see because of the intensity of the moon. i thought to myself tonight that if we must have light pollution, let it be the full moon. i will watch the stars later on in the week.

unfortunately, however, the light of the moon was not mesmerizing enough for the people in my family: after prayer time and a wonderful dinner of eggs, casava and plantains, they brought out an old black and white TV set, which they plugged in with an extension cord to an electrical outlet i hadn't noticed (there isn't one here in my little room, and we'd been told there would be no electricity). this ritual was kind of depressing for me, because it halted most conversation (though not to the extent that it does in the states), and most of the fuzzy mess we watched was blaring off in french, instead of bambara. i interrupted it a few times to ask the words for "stars," "moon" and "sky," but by the end of the night a little square had burned itself into my retinas and continues to frame everything in a much-too-small, much-too-geometric little space.


DAY TWO - tuesday, 9/25/07

I forgot about the language barrier as i woke up this morning... through the last haze of my sweaty, call-to-prayer-infected dreams, i was really confused when the woman knocking at my door was trying to tell me my bath was ready (keep in mind this was about 6:20). although last night i had been excited about the idea of a cold bucket of water in the morning (it was about 91° in my little oven/house), i was pleasantly surprised that the water had been heated up, as it was mighty chilly at that hour of the morning, especially naked in the open air. the bath was really pleasant, even knowing that everyone could see me naked over the really short little mud walls... i think the best part is in this compound, the "room" for bathing is different from the one for bodily waste, so i don't have to hold my nose while i pour water on myself, etc. one of our first days in mali whatsoever, a doctor came to talk to us about health and safety for foreigners; when he was explaining water conditions, he told us that when people first built actual little rooms to house the latrines, most people refused to use them because "they couldn't see the sky while they were peeing." i'm not quite so insistent about the peeing and pooping thing (though the openness helps ventilate the unpleasant smell), but it was super pleasant to be showering beneath a clear sky - it reminded me of being at the beach somehow.

i didn't mention it, but yesterday all the students regrouped for a couple hours at the place called "la case," and from there we traveled to a remote building surrounded by sports fields/courts, and we ended up doing "batik." apparently this is what they call it in english too, but it entails stamping hot wax stamps onto big pieces of fabric, so when you dye them the wax stamps will stay white...(i will return to this momentarily)

anyhow, we met at the case again today, at 8am, and we walked from there to this place called the sanankoroba SOS village (we found out later that where we'd been yesterday was a part of this place). the first SOS village was started by a man in austria right after world war II: it was a place to house and foster orphaned or abandoned children, and eventually it turned into a large school as well. Sanankoroba is one of two SOS villages in mali (the other in mopti), and i think there are several hundred of them around the world, each one catering to the local cultural customs, etc. it was a really wonderful thing to witness as we toured the grounds and asked questions of the director: children followed us around the whole time and we learned that they came from all over the country, completely free of charge, and received an education superior to any other public or private schools i've seen or heard about here. the living situation is organized like a big giant family, the "mother" and "father" serving as parental figures to well over a hundred kids at any given time. until their later teens, the children live in groups (between 4 and 10 kids) with volunteer host-"aunts," where they receive a calculated mix of traditional and formal education. the organization of this curriculum particularly interested me, because i've noticed that the traditional education here is a double-edged sword. one the one hand, it fits better into the culture than does the public education system (which still feels very colonial, albeit taught by african teachers for the most part) and often entails useful agricultural training, but at the same time it promotes many of the gender problems that persist here - it entails a harsh separation between girls and boys at about 10 years of age, which begins the solidification of gender roles where the distribution of labor is heavily imbalanced in favor of the men. at the SOS school, they had a community garden that everyone was required to tend to, and though the girls were more heavily trained in certain domestic activities, the boys were taught to cook and clean and whatnot, which is relatively unheard of if you ask the average man on the street - be it in the villages or in bamako.

overall, seeing the SOS school was really positive, just because it was so overwhelmingly GOOD in its very principles... but on the other hand, it seemed to be able to function better than the average education system here mostly because it was funded by a giant handful of international donors. the mentality was encouragingly progressive in the mixing of gender roles, the fact that the kids aren't beaten, the continued funding through university in bamako, all that kind of stuff -- and best of all, the staff was composed entirely of africans even though they maintained a constant exchange of ideas with other international SOS locations... but it was entirely self-contained (except that the kindergarten section had open spots for some non-orphan children from the village), which was just sad in comparison to the kinds of futures facing most of the kids living in my compound, for instance. anyway, as conflicting as it was, it was refreshing to see, and the children were very happy to see us and hold our hands and show us their classrooms and everything.

(speaking of classrooms, by the way: SOS boasts a limit of 45 students per classroom, which sounded unmanageable by USA standards, but the director told us that classrooms in the average public school often break the 100-student threshold)

we spent a lot of time after the SOS visit sitting under a tree and doing almost nothing, which was nice considering the weather, but conversation here inevitably turns to various forms of birth control and/or menstruation techniques... sounds like a stereotype but it was true today for over an hour, and i kind of wished i could have been experiencing something back at the compound where, even if it was only women talking, i might have a little more to add albeit in a language i can barely speak.

after lunch, we returned to the little building from yesterday, where each of us took our wax-printed sheets and chose a color we wanted to use for dye. this process was not worth describing - i'll just show those who are interested the thing i made once i get back. it'll probably end up as a tablecloth.