december update

Happy Holidays Everyone!
(id hoped to post pîctures but the internet is too slow...next time)

May you share this holiday season with those you love and may the new year bring you much joy and fulfilment in all you do!!

I just spent a wonderful couple days here in Gao with my Malian Peace Corps family to celebrate the holiday. Not all of Gao bori (Songhai for people of) was here but we had guests including parents, girlfriends and friends who joined us and shared the holiday. We had a cocktail party on Christmas eve. Everyone dressed up and we drank mulled wine, mojitos and Scottish whiskey! We also had quite the spread of desserts and appetizers to munch on and great music to dance the night away to. WE went to Church on Xmas day and although the mass was mostly in Frnech and Bambara there were some songs the choir sang that we knew some of the words too. It gave me a warm feeling just to be in a place that had some Christmas decorations and Christmas songs. This year has been harder than last in terms of nostalgia and missing you all. It got bad enough that I decorated my house back home with snowflake cut outs and stars made out of pictures from magazines (see picture) and even taught my little sister how to make them as well. My walls are now covered in square snowflakes made by her and I’ll have some explaining to do before I can take them down. I received lots of delicious foods and warm clothes in packages from my family so I was able to open presents just like we do at home.

While in Gao we also held a bachelorette party for our friend who is marrying a fellow volunteer in Hombori. We went on a scavenger hunt through the Malian market, our bride to be adorned in tinsel and fairy star headband. We actually got less catcalls and harassment than normal because I think we left them all in shock ! We were telling those who asked that in our culture every new married woman has to go out on the town, dressed up to the nines on the day after Christmas to bless her marriage. Then we came back to the house for food and pedicures. It was my first bachelorette party ever and considering the circumstances, I think we had a pretty good time.

Before we came to Gao for Christmas, Bess, Rachel, a fellow volunteer from Gao region and I held a Girls empowerment and HIV/AIDS education camp over three days. All the girls worked really hard, paid attention and contributed in all of the sessions. We had a the local clinic nurse come to speak about AIDS and a visiting doctor from Gao talked to the girls about her life career and striving towards your goals and fulfilling your dreams. I believe that it was the first itme that many of the girls in the room had learned any of the stuff we talked about, and certainly the first time a fellow Malian woman had told them they had to take control of their own lives, work to pursue their dreams and make choices for themselves. She talked about waiting until after you’ve finished your schooling to marry, a very uncommon suggestion and path in my village and in the country. The girls were truly in awe of her and I’ll feel enormously happy if even one girl in our group decides to continue on to high school and even university.

At the camp we also presented on health and nutrition, hand-washing and talked about role models and women in African history. The last day the girls divided into three groups and created skits that they will present at local schools and on the radio. They also decided to have a “soiree” night at the local youth center and a traditional music night which they will use as an opportunity to educate the audience about HIV/AIDS. We’ve got some giggling fits we have to get past before we’ll be ready to present but there are some true leaders among the girls, who set a great example (except when anyone has to say les relations sexuelle non-protegees!). Check out the pictures of them doing team-building activities like the human web.

Our work with these girls has truly been some of the most fulfilling I’ve done here and reinforced my commitment to the youth in village. As I wrote last time, all the funding has come through for our youth center project and we’ll start construction in the coming month! Giving these girls, and the boys too!, a chance to know the world outside the village and actually develop dreams beyond the daily grind of life here is so important and I thank you all once again for your support and commitment to my work!




Now for some stories of the past month. To get to Gao from site we have to wait on the roadside for buses coming from Bamako to pass. They can come any time from 4am to 12 noon sometimes even later and we’ve had days where we’ve waited hours to catch a bus. As I described before, I was very anxious to get to Gao to celebrate Xmas as were my fellow volunteers so as the hours passed on December 23 and no buses were passing we were considering everything that passed a transportation option, except donkey carts of course. We were settling in for a long day, Jared had his guitar out serenading the children, women roadside vendors and store owners and Bess, Rachel and I were striking up conversations with anyone who would listen to us talk about our wonderful fete (holiday) coming up. Then a blue midsize truck pulls up, one you might see making deliveries to Staples or a small size moving truck. Out climbs three white people, a middle aged man, and two women, one in her late twenties, the other maybe her mother?(always exciting to see “takafarts”-we’re as bad as the Malians when we see white people now, exclaiming and pointing and forgetting that they might speak English) and we strike up a conversation. They’d travelled all the way from France in this truck to bring supplies to their “adopted” Malian friend/brother/son who lived south of Gao. The inside of the bed of their truck was converted into a little house, with a kitchen, bed shower couch etc but was also crammed with all the stuff they were bringing in no discernible system of organization. It looked like they were bringing some computers, clothes chairs and other miscellaneous items They offered us a free ride to Gao and being the cheap PCV’s we are we all climbed in discovering the mess that comes with bumpy roads, not tying or nailing things down and the carefree lifestyle that allows one to take off however many months from work to travel down to Africa by truck. There were some tipsy moments in the back during our two hour ride, mainly because there weren’t seats per se to sit in. Jared made himself quite comfortable, climbing up into their bed and taking a nap, but the rest of us were too busy avoiding falling light bulbs and catching ourselves so that we didn’t fall into sharp objects. In retrospect it may not have been the safest thing I’ve done but I also have never ridden in the back of a truck before (well at least an enclosed one), so now I can cross that off my list of life things to do. We decided that the people with whom we were riding could be categorized as modern travelling people—they certainly embraced an out of the ordinary lifestyle; the man had even adopted Toureg dress yet refused to conform to Malian standards of footwear, opting instead for bare feet and challenging the thorns to prove him otherwise. We never did figure out what the relationship was between all three of them but they were exceptionally kind to us and it was an honor to meet them and hear about the selfless adventure they were taking over the holidays. The way they lived also made me think about living simply and remembering what’s really important about the journey.

Two days before our trip to Gao, on the last day of our AIDS camp, I came out of my house in the morning to two other white people greeting my host family and asking for Raisha. They turned out to be two archaeologists, one a college professor and the other her doctoral student who was looking for a spot to do her fieldwork for her thesis. They inquired after artifacts in the area and I helped them as much as I could with contacts, maps and info that I knew. I also brought them out what I had believed to merely be a rock with which a young Toureg man had attempted to woo me, proclaiming it an object from the paleological era. I’m ashamed to say I’d laughed it off with my Malian brother, wondering how this guy could think I was such a sucker and was he really trying to curry favour by giving me a ROCK? The doctor and her student took one look at it and confirmed it to be a tool from 4000 years ago and within the hour off to the town where it had come from. When they came back that night they had found all sorts of tools and objects and now the doctoral student is considering returning here for her studies. Sharing a meal with them and discussing Mali in a totally new and interesting way was really enjoyable and had us all intrigued by the geological and ancient history of the region. The doctor has already done a lot of work in Djenne and now some of her students are working in Gao as well tracing back the culture and history of the trans-saharan trade routes and other interactions between the different communities. The doctor and her partner’s work has served to prove that major trade was occurring along the Niger, long before scholars had previously believed, prior to the beginning of the trans-Saharan trade. If anyone is interested in reading more about it, I can send you articles about it. It was also neat to hear about Africa from a academic scholars perspective, who could look at the society objectively and not through a development social responsibility lense. While I’m sure they notice the poverty and difficulties this country faces, they’re see the geological fixtures and the rocks beneath our feet and the stories they tell and have dedicated their life to these studies. Of course it made me want to be an archaeologist haha so tack that on to my list of things to do.

Here’s another article that was just in the new york times about mali, security and radical Islam. (see below) Its hard to judge what really is going on up there in the desert but I can certainly speak for Timbuktu region and gao and say that there is none to VERY little danger of radical islam or al-quaeda taking hold here. They make a very good point about the lack of jobs for young men and the new mosques springing up. But that’s for another blog post-read the article and ask me questions if you have them and ill write more next time.

U.S. Training in Africa Aims to Deter Extremists
By ERIC SCHMITT
KATI, Mali — Thousands of miles from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, another side of America’s fight against terrorism is unfolding in this remote corner of West Africa. American Green Berets are training African armies to guard their borders and patrol vast desolate expanses against infiltration by Al Qaeda’s militants, so the United States does not have to.
A recent exercise by the United States military here was part of a wide-ranging plan, developed after the Sept. 11 attacks, to take counterterrorism training and assistance to places outside the Middle East, like the Philippines and Indonesia. In Africa, a five-year, $500 million partnership between the State and Defense Departments includes Algeria, Chad, Mauritania, Mali, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia, and Libya is on the verge of joining.
American efforts to fight terrorism in the region also include nonmilitary programs, like instruction for teachers and job training for young Muslim men who could be singled out by militants’ recruiting campaigns.
One goal of the program is to act quickly in these countries before terrorism becomes as entrenched as it is in Somalia, an East African nation where there is a heightened militant threat. And unlike Somalia, Mali is willing and able to have dozens of American and European military trainers conduct exercises here, and its leaders are plainly worried about militants who have taken refuge in its vast Saharan north.
“Mali does not have the means to control its borders without the cooperation of the United States,” Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, a former prime minister, said in an interview.
Mali, a landlocked former French colony that is nearly twice the size of Texas with roughly half the population, has a relatively stable, though still fragile, democracy. But it borders Algeria, whose well-equipped military has chased Qaeda militants into northern Mali, where they have adopted a nomadic lifestyle, making them even more difficult to track.
With only 10,000 people in its military and other security forces, and just two working helicopters and a few airplanes, Mali acknowledges how daunting a task it is to try to drive out the militants.
The biggest potential threat comes from as many as 200 fighters from an offshoot of Al Qaeda called Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which uses the northern Malian desert as a staging area and support base, American and Malian officials say.
About three months ago, the Qaeda affiliate threatened to attack American forces that operated north of Timbuktu (or Tombouctou) in Mali’s desert, three Defense Department officials said. One military official said the threat contributed to a decision to shift part of the recent training exercise out of that area.
The government of neighboring Mauritania said 12 of its soldiers were killed in an attack there by militants in September. By some accounts, the soldiers were beheaded and their bodies were booby-trapped with explosives.
Two Defense Department officials expressed fear that a main leader of the Qaeda affiliate in Mali, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, was under growing pressure to carry out a large-scale attack, possibly in Algeria or Mauritania, to establish his leadership credentials within the organization.
Members of the Qaeda affiliate have not attacked Malian forces, and American and Malian officials privately acknowledge that military officials here have adopted a live-and-let-live approach to the Qaeda threat, focusing instead on rebellious Tuareg tribesmen, who also live in the sparsely populated north.
To finance their operations, the militants exact tolls from smugglers whose routes traverse the Qaeda sanctuary, and collect ransoms in kidnappings. In late October, two Austrians were released after a ransom of more than $2 million was reportedly paid. They had been held in northern Mali after being seized in southern Tunisia in February.
Because of the militants’ activities, American officials eye the largely ungoverned spaces of Mali’s northern desert with concern.
This year, the United States Agency for International Development is spending about $9 million on counterterrorism measures here. Some of the money will expand an existing job training program for women to provide young Malian men in the north with the basic skills to set up businesses like tiny flour mills or cattle enterprises. Some aid will train teachers in Muslim parochial schools in an effort to prevent them from becoming incubators of anti-American vitriol.
The agency is also building 12 FM radio stations in the north to link far-flung villages to an early-warning network that sends bulletins on bandits and other threats. Financing from the Pentagon will produce, in four national languages, radio soap operas promoting peace and tolerance.
“Young men in the north are looking for jobs or something to do with their lives,” said Alexander D. Newton, the director of A.I.D.’s mission in Mali. “These are the same people who could be susceptible to other messages of economic security.”
Concern about Mali’s vulnerability also brought a dozen Army Green Berets from the 10th Special Forces Group in Germany, as well as several Dutch and German military instructors, to Mali for the two-week training exercise that ended last month.
Just before noon on a recent sunny, breezy day, Malian troops swept onto a training range here on the savannah north of Bamako, the capital, aboard two CV-22 Ospreys, rotor-blade transport aircraft flown by Air Force Special Operations crews from Hurlburt Field, Fla.
As the dull-gray aircraft landed in a swirling cloud of dust, rotors whomp-whomping, the Malians disembarked single file from the rear ramp in dark-green camouflage uniforms and helmets, M-4 assault rifles at the ready. (The Malians normally use AK-47s, but used American-issue M-4’s for this exercise.)
After a mile-long march through savannah grass, the troops walked down a hill into a small valley. Their target — the mock hide-out of the insurgents — was in sight. But what the Malians did not know was that their American instructors were lying in wait, and suddenly attacked the troops with a sharp staccato of small-arms fire (plastic paint bullets), with red flares soaring high overhead.
The make-believe skirmish lasted just a few minutes. The Malians, shouting to one another and firing at their attackers, retreated from the ambush rather than try to fight through it.
“We’re still learning,” said Capt. Yossouf Traore, a 28-year-old commander, speaking in English that he learned in Texas and at Fort Benning, Ga., as a visiting officer. “We’re getting a lot of experience in leadership skills and making decisions on the spot.”
Even more significant, Captain Traore said, was that the exercise gave his troops an unusual opportunity to train with soldiers from neighboring Senegal. Soon after the Ospreys returned to whisk the Malian soldiers from the training range, two planeloads of Senegalese troops arrived to carry out the same maneuvers.
Still, worrisome indicators are giving some Malian government and religious leaders, as well as American officials, pause about the country’s ability to deal with security risks.
Mali is the world’s fifth-poorest country and, according to some statistics from the United Nations and the State Department, is getting poorer. One in five Malian children dies before age 5. The average Malian does not live to celebrate a 50th birthday. The country’s population, now at 12 million, is doubling nearly every 20 years. Literacy rates hover around 30 percent and are much lower in rural areas.
There are also small signs that radical clerics are beginning to make inroads into the tolerant form of Islam practiced here for centuries by Sunni Muslims. The number of Malian women wearing all-enveloping burqas is still small, but the increase in the past few years is noticeable, religious leaders say.
New mosques are springing up, financed by conservative religious organizations in Saudi Arabia, Libya and Iran, and scholarships offered to young Malian men to study in those countries are on the rise, Malian officials say.
In Imam Mahamadou Diallo’s neighborhood in Bamako, a congested, fume-choked city on the Niger River, a simmering debate is under way. Imam Diallo, 48, said that two new mosques had been built in his area with financing from Wahhabi extremist groups in Saudi Arabia, and that they were drawing away some members of his mosque.
“Many people here are poor and don’t have work,” Imam Diallo said through an interpreter in Bambara, one of the local languages. “They’re potentially vulnerable to these Wahhabi people coming in with money.”
Just down a bumpy, reddish dirt road, however, the leader of one of these newer mosques, Al Nour, quarreled with Imam Diallo’s characterization. Ali Abdourohmome Cisse, the imam since Al Nour opened in 2002, said he did not know who had financed its construction. He added that no one on his staff, including an Egyptian assistant who helps conduct Friday Prayer in Arabic, advocated any form of extremism.
At El Mouhamadiya, an Islamic school in the neighborhood, more than 700 students, ages 4 to 25, take classes including math, physics and Arabic. “But we don’t train them in terrorism,” said Broulaye Sylla, 25, an administrator. “We don’t talk about jihad.”
Mahmoud Dicko, president of the High Council of Islam in Bamako, acknowledged over soft drinks in his second-story office that the influence of conservative Sunni and even Shiite groups had become more visible, but he said they did not pose a serious threat to Malian society.
“Their influence has limits because of the importance of cultural ties here in Mali,” he said. “We have a tolerant Islam here, a pacifist Islam.”
American and African diplomats here said Mali was one of the few countries in the region that had good relations with most neighbors, making it a likely catalyst for the broader regional security cooperation the United States is trying to foster. American commanders expressed confidence that by training together, the African forces might work together against transnational threats like Al Qaeda. While Mali has no effective helicopter fleet, for instance, it could team up its soldiers with better-equipped neighboring armies, like Algeria’s, to combat a common threat.
“If we don’t help these countries work together, it becomes a much more difficult problem,” said Lt. Col. Jay Connors, the senior American Special Forces officer on the ground here during the exercise.
American and Malian officials acknowledged that there were other hurdles to overcome. The Pentagon needs to better explain the role of its new Africa Command, created in October to oversee military activities on the continent, and to dispel fears that the United States is militarizing its foreign policy, Malian officials said.
American officials say their strategy is to contain the Qaeda threat and train the African armies, a process that will take years. The nonmilitary counterterrorism programs are just starting, and it is too early to gauge results.
“This is a long-term effort,” said Colonel Connors, 45, an Africa specialist from Burlington, Vt., who speaks French and Portuguese. “This is crawl, walk, run, and right now, we’re still in the crawl phase.”
Eric Schmitt reported from Mali in November, and did additional reporting from Washington