last months here

So much has happened over the last couple of months. I'm hanging in transition waiting to settle down again but my time here makes me wonder if I ever will "settle down" somewhere again.

something i wrote a couple days ago....

How many times in your life do you leave a place you love behind? I don’t mean places like a beautiful beach you visited on vacation or an overlook that you passed on a trip somewhere that you took out your camera and took lots of pictures of. I don’t even mean a city that you fell in love with on a trip, an exotic place unlike any you’d visited before and became one of your favorite places. I’m talking about the places that have hurt you, where you’ve fallen and almost couldn’t get up, but when you did you came to like yourself and the place that much more for challenging you; or a place where you have memories of joy and sadness, where you’ve cried your eyes out and also laughed with abandon until you almost cried as well. These are places where one might have relationships with street corners or trees or maybe a library carrel. Maybe it’s a home where you lived growing up, a school or university where you attended or a neighborhood block where you bought your first home or where your first boyfriend lived.

I left one of my places two weeks ago. My town in Mali has become a place I love but from now on only a place I will visit. I’ll admit, I cried pulling away as I looked down on my family and town through the wide stained glass of the dirty fogged bus window, fuzzing my last image of my village.

I’ve been in Bamako several weeks now, and other volunteers and friends have asked if I will go back before I leave Mali the first week in September. There’s no way I could I reply. To cut the ties again like that and feel another empty hole near my stomach, that I try to hold in by wrapping my arms around my middle?

I’ve called a couple times and they’re happy to hear from me. Have they already moved on? Yes. Absolutely. It would be naïve to think that people who have been moving and watching people leave their whole lives wouldn’t be able to adjust to my absence, I who had only ever promised that I would be there two years. They knew all along I would leave them, just as every other white person has. And I wonder if they doubt my commitment to stay in touch, for which I wouldn’t blame them either.

I can already hear myself starting to lose the language so I seek out other people who speak it. Friends probably think I’m showing off but really what I want is for someone to appreciate and jabber away with me. Just like a toddler makes noises to hear himself speak:

No matter where I am here, I don’t want this part of me to leave; The brain that has to translate and gets frustrated sometimes when it cant make the sentence it wants perfect, the humor I can instantly invoke or the conversation I can strike up with anyone and their appreciation for my effort to speak their language, even if I use the wrong words and phrases, the kamikaze smile- here we go who knows what will happen attitude, the irony of the most simple situations and the smiles it brings out in me, my patience and the people who refuse to be discouraged so they bring it out in me, the random friends I make each day women, men taxi drivers, and the small high it gives me and even the frustration I tackle each day, absorb, acknowledge and let simmer and sometimes even boil over if the jerk on the corner deserves it for being really impolite, even though he probably meant well in the end. I enjoy the challenge because the happiness is so accessible if you’re just willing to play along.

I thank my village and this country for all they’ve given me; Not for the 15 keychains or the interesting neon thread wall hangings (I cant really even describe) or even the jewelry, cultural experiences, friendships although I appreciate them all. It’s the challenges they forced upon me, the questions they made me ask and the lifestyle I’ll hopefully now be able to live, wherever I am.


pictures and videos from my last months at site. leaving our gao house, leaving site and the family










Our youth center and library!





getting my hair braided and xadijatu's new bear strapped to her back

as i am not doing a good job of updating my blog ive put some links up to other people's in the hopes that you will keep coming to mine to connect to theirs when I'm being negligent.

post tomorrow

Please read the following article

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/05/18/mali.drought.elephants/index.html

this is absolutely heartbreaking. I'm in the states for vacation but wish I was back and able to help in some way.

some pics of home

its been awhile again..... i have my excuses tho. the whole no internet thing in Gao is part of it and i was studying to take the gmats in Dakar. heres a cute video of xadi and the kids dancing to some awful american music. and some photos. its hot and really horrible here so I won't go into detail. Mangos are in abundance tho and that makes hot season well, actually not bearable at all. But mangos are delicious.

long time in coming

I spent yesterday and the day before on the long voyage down to Bamako from Gao, a trip of about 20 hours by bus but by Peace Corps shuttle 15 hours or less. The change of the landscape over the trip is drastic. The dry desert of Gao and the sand dunes pockmarked with shrubs change to the high cliffs and mesa of Hombori and Boni in Mopti Region. The outcroppings of rocks gradually diminish to fields, deforested and eroded by slash and burn techniques. Then town after town crowds along the guidron , the main highway down from the north, and the women and children of each little seemingly identical village lines up the tomatoes or cassava roots or peanuts, piles and piles, attempting to sell whatever they can to the passing cars and buses. I see encouraging signs of development projects including community gardens and woodlots, filled with tall eucalyptus trees shivering in the wind. I also see discouraging signs of poverty in these “cookie cutter” villages south of Sevare, trying to scrape a living off the land, but slowly being buried in trash. Cookie cutter is obviously not the appropriate term.

It may be because I’m unfamiliar with the cultures of the South, their history and lifestyles, but I think I’ve been spoiled by the cultural diversity of the north and its rich traditions. When I head down to this region of the country, the view out the window becomes boring and even depressing and I truly feel separated from the people in our air conditioned car, speeding by, only slowed down by the speed bumps they’ve placed at the entrance and exit of the town, a protective measure for the children and adults running back and forth across the highway on their daily errands.

In the beginning of the trip, I enjoyed watching the camels reaching up, bending their necks like a pool noodle, eating the few leaves remaining on the trees as hot season approaches and food becomes scarce. The elephants have evolved in the same way, using their trunks and tusks to shake leaves off the trees. The goats gathered beneath them benefit from the leaves the elephants have missed, a symbiotic relationship, one of many in the Gourma. On my trip down yesterday I started to think about the dependent relationships including those that exist between humans and animals here.
In the states, unless you are a farmer or a rancher, you are disconnected from the animals that provide us with our food and products of daily life. Here, I walk out my front door every morning and have to dodge cows and goats to just get to the bathroom. My family spends a good part of their day, preparing and setting out the food for their animals and for this work, they get some milk and occasionally some meat, when they slaughter a goat.
Their animals are like their bank account, when they need money they sell a cow or goat, and when holidays come and its time to celebrate they tap into their funds, and have a special meal, one goat or two eaten over three days, meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Their choice of investment is not necessarily the most secure option with the threats of drought and desertification but banking isn’t readily available. The nearest caisse de credit and savings system I know of is 3 hours away.
Even between the elephants and the humans there are numerous connections and relations, although some growing increasingly complicated and negative. With dwindling resources and easy access to the farmers’ fields of millet and sorghum, an elephant will sometimes serve him or herself from the storage granaries located in the fields. As they pass through these increasingly agricultural areas in the southern part of their range they are put at risk of falling into the large, deep watering holes that farmers dig to water their fields. If they fall in, they can’t get out on their own, and if the government is unable to get a crane there in time, the elephant may die. The elephants for the most part have started avoiding large population areas, choosing to “streak” through areas where there are human settlements, to get through as quickly as possible. Females and Calves are especially wary of humans, and tourists are advised to stay far from them. Near Gossi, my site, there is a group of males who brave Gossi mare, a heavily populated zone for the region, and where most of the rest of the herd will not come. When you go to see them, they are aware of you but don’t hurry off and continue on with their business.

It can be a tense relationship at times, especially when an elephant has just eaten someone’s reserves for hot season. Yet the people here appreciate and claim the elephants as their own and I have confidence that with education and discussion this relationship can continue to be a positive one and just as the humans here get along with their own herd they can also share the land with a much bigger herd that we all own.