Im up at 439 unable to sleep after the dust wind storm woke us up and moved us inside and then the heat pushed us right back outside. the sheet over my head didn’t keep much of the sand out of my hair and with the mosquitos buzzing intermittenly between wind gusts outside my mosquito net I eventually gave in, planning instead on sleeping in the car today down to Bamako. Iv'e written some blogposts at site jsut on paper that i type up later so I can share more with you when i do get to internet.
Fadi
I sat outside of the Gao house today talking with Fadi, the girl who comes here to wash dishes and do laundry and whose family has helped us out for years of volunteers. Because there’s so many of us sort of living here and moving in and out its nice to pay someone to help us with stuff so that it doesn’t pile up and fall on one person to do three days of dishes and this way a malian earns an income. She was sad that James and Dave, two volunteers who are just finishing up their service, had left and that she didn’t have a photo of them. It really touched me because even though sometimes the only interaction we have with her is a quick hello as we catch her on her way out of the concession and shes seen a lot of volunteers come and go, she still really valued our friendship and just wanted a picture to remember them by. I promised to find her one.
Earlier on she’d confided in me that she was pregnant and asked if I would have children a question I often get here. I told her someday I would but not while in Mali- and would it be a boy or girl that I wanted she asked. I told her a girl and asked her in turn. She said a girl and joked she would name the baby Aisha, my malian name. While sometimes I grasp for conversation topics with my limited vocabulary, Fadi seemed content to just sit next to me even in silence enjoying my company and my friendship. This wise young girl, my age or younger, expecting her second kid, and never having attended school, agreed the kids in Gao could be rude and mean to us. After all she professed, all that was different about us white people was that we wore white people clothes. I loved that. Although she used a major physical feature, our skin color, to differentiate as to whom she was referring, she didn’t recognize it as a divisive characteristic. Only our white people clothes gave us away as “white people”. We were all of one god, so what was the big deal? I usually try to avoid conversations around this topic, religion can be tough to navigate without the words to describe. But fadi understood so much more, so much more simply.
Some noises
One night when Bess was sleeping over (its considered indecent for a woman to sleep at home by herself if her husband is our of town) a huge chorus of children yelling banging pots plastic whatever they could get their hands on broke out all around us. Now this sort of noise is not unprecedented but usually the racket follows the curve of the passing of a speeding train, rising and falling quickly as the group of people celebrating a marriage birth etc. turns the corner around our concession.
This time the noise started in my own concession, Suleiman and Moussa on a chore to bang out a piece of metal, I thought on the border of sleep. But why did they have to do it now and right next to my house. The protests of an old man visiting to watch it TV in my concession pushed them outside the concession door and it was then that I realized behind me, in the gendarmes concession, across the street where the Bambara functionaries family lives and from down the street where a group of children must have gathered came the sounds of banging plastic bottles shouting singing pots being smacked with wooden sticks. It was truly a cacophony and wasn’t dying down anytime soon. I peeled my fatigued, nearly asleep body out of bed and trudged to the front of the concession to inquire as to the purpose of these sounds. My mom pointed at the almost full moon nearly obscured byt the clouds and said “because the moon is being taken” I immediatesly thought of an eclipse which made perfest sense. Even in the US I’ve heard of superstitions surrpuonding lunar and solar eclipses but as I quickly turned to look at the moon again it appeared as it had earlier that night—nearly full and partially obscured by clouds. I protested to her that there was still a little bit showing, that it wasn’t completely gone but that didn’t matter to her nor the kids. As I walked back up to my house, having resister the urge to commence a lecture on lunar cycles and to exact an explanation as to why the amount of moon showing now was any different from when we had a quarter moon or even a sliver, I glanced back at the cloud cover and knew the noise wouldn’t stop until the kids fell asleep drumming, sticks in hand, heads on pots or pans serving as pillows. The clouds would certainly win this match. Bess explained to me that she’d just heard the other day that they believe the moon is being stolen by a car and so they bang the pots and pans to scare it away. Eventualy the banging just faded into all the other noise I’ve grown accustomed to, singing me to sleep.
When I was talking to my mom on the phone last week we had one of those annoying echoing connections where you’re forced to hear the sound of your own voice after everything you say, which if you’re anything like me causes you to change your pitch and tone to be super feminine and upbeat, like some over caffeinated female news morning news anchor. After several minutes of wondering if my voice really was that deep, I noted an imperceptible noise echoing alongside our conversation. It had to be coming from my end. As I looked around I realized the goats had come home from the garden and their babies were bleating for milk. I had become so accustomed to the background noise that I only noticed it because it was coming back at me thru the phone. Its decibel level had to be greater or equal to my (by now) singsongy cheer and I suddenly realized how terrible it must be for the person talking to me on the phone, wondering if I’m actually trying to stand around as many animals as possible.I started giggling which turned into full on laughter at my situation and how genuinely oblivious I’ve become.
Several nights later, most of my family ahd left the concession to go watch the feuilleton and only tekmanit, my host mom, and my two little brothers, the baby (the three noise culprits) and myself were left in the concession. My host mom went inside to help my little brother find his mattress and sheet with the aide of her flashlight and my baby sister quickly gave chase, her little feet barely keeping up with the forward movement of her body. Oumar, not to be left out, leaped up from his mattress and ran after her, courteously notifying me that as to his current destination. And then there it was. Silence. I hadn’t heard it since when? I couldn’t recall. I aly my head back and enjoyed the stars and my thoughts for a moment until the pitter patter of feet announced their arrival and the return of the noises that I’ve come to know and love.
Now, I’m in bamako leaving for vacation on Saturday. the first time ive left mali in over a year other than to go to burkina for a couple days to pick up my parents. I’m a little nervous about how it will feel. Will I like it too much, remember and savor my dependence on first world goods and services? Will the vacation ive built up towards for a year be anticlimactic? Or will it be a glimpse of the existential crisis I imagine myself to have whenever I think about going back in another year? Or will I just enjoy the break and then be prepared to come back and start fresh after being worn thin from a year of extreme ups and downs
A couple days ago I was talking with another volunteer about how transitory our lives are. We’ve only know just started to really become close with the group who came in a year before us and now they’re leaving us and a whole new batch to get to know is coming in now that we’ll only have a year to share our experience with. And even with the people who are in your year, only a quarter of them you see regularly. The close friends you make during training may end up on the opposite side of the country from you and you only see them occasionally if ever when you’re passing through Bamako or you can coordinate your schedules to vacation together. Then there’s the transition you make every two or three weeks when you leave site, come into the regional capitol for banking internet and a beer or two and before you know it site is calling you back for work, a baptism, a wedding….I sometimes allow my mind to catch up with my body and I realize where I am and this isn’t some dream life I’m living for someone else for two years. Its just that I have changed so much that I feel like this is a different life and I’m a different person living it, constantly adapting changing. This is most likely not making any sense to the reader at this point but as my friend said the other day; you can’t really talk about it with someone who hasn’t done Peace Corps. You can certainly have an amazing conversation, but they won’t truly understand. They can only imagine and these conversations loom over my head a year from now, wanting to make you understand but wondering if I’m wasting your time.
This constant change- even when you’re sitting at site in the middle of the day, waiting for the heat to break and your mind is turning over things you’ve never had or thought to think about before—this questioning, trying to reorganize the way things have always been arranged and explained in my head—or the random dreams about people from high school you haven’t seen and won’t see for years that you wake up from like you’d just been there but find yourself in a different time, in a different spirit and mind amd wondering where and why that person is buried in your subconscious. And that’s what’s weird. You can separate your dreams from reality; you wake up from sleep and know that was a dream. Yet sometimes in the middle of the day as I’m walking down the street in broad daylight I wake up—I wake up but not from sleep and realize this all isn’t a dream. And then I’m leaving again to go to Bamako or somewhere else with each day passing drawing me closer to the biggest transition of them all. What happens when these two people with two different lives merge?
more later
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