june winding down (towards the survey promised land)

Hello from bamako!

sorry for my delinquent blogging - things have been CRAZY! we've been coming into the office by 9:30 and not getting home till 11 pm or later -- it's been a stressful couple of weeks.

but never fear: i've made time when i wake up early in the mornings to reread the princess diaries, naked by david sedaris, and my mom's favorite Mary Stewart mystery, set in Avignon (it joins forces with a packed-by-mom hella daily course of Probiotics to make a lovely package of overseas-mom-care).

i wish i could post pdf files.

the baseline survey is complete.

IT IS SEXY.

i'm going to make an umbrella out of it, laminate that puppy and wave it through the streets of providence.

boxes. columns. positive and negative space. french in italics, bambara in bold. 18 pages plus 5 extra pages per household, containing the moustiquaires section (bugnets). you can pre-order your umbrella now if you want.

poor lassi. he's my partner in crime, a malian MHOP intern -- starting tomorrow at 9 am, we'll be co-leading 8 hours of training for 12 teams of health worker and surveyor for the pilot next week. lassi, a lanky and boy-ish law student, was sucked like an unsuspecting sparrow into a relentless Midwestern twister of anxious list-making. i put that boy through the ringer. (AND he thinks he's suffering the first twinges of malaria!!! i'm heartless!) i still feel like we're soaring by the seat of our pants, but lassi is suffering a slow death by bullet points - he's a sweet guy though, and we average out into a team to beat.

_

In other news:

1. the rainy season is starting. the sky opens up almost every day, with billowing clouds capturing the red cliffs in a black and white photograph.

2. there's a sea-monster in our nyegen (outdoor bathroom). a little background: the nyegen is oddly....NICE. under the stars....never a line...flushing irrelevant (it's way deep)...doubles as a drain for your refreshingly cool bucket bath. but last week, i heard the ocean in our nyegen. it's just a hole. there's no underground river. there are lots of cucarachas but they're not THAT big. only possibility: i found Nessie.

3. my dad has been helping us download an Ubuntu operating system onto the 10 laptops we brought through security -- our long skype dates, from bamako afternoon to early-morning DeJong living room with laptop, robe and coffee (i can picture it with great accuracy), have been a real treat. thanks pop.

_

4. i got schooled in the politics of the CHAG (community health action group), the spirited group of 12 elected to run the show, and almost all of whom are community health workers in our program. i didn't update soukeina before the meeting on the training stipend that each surveyor would be offered -- and i was completely caught off guard when she went to bat for the other sum we'd previously discussed, unleashing a FIRESTORM. owch. i just got an F in diplomacy.

leading the training tomorrow and the following week is incredibly daunting. but, we'll make it through. in a couple weeks, when things settle down, i hope to start spending more time with my host family -- we've been spending so much time at the office. not enough allotted to getting schooled by four-year-old Papa and his friends in soccer. also on the list: a picnic in the red rocks of sikoro. (it looks like Sedona, Arizona -- have you been there?)

_

miss you! all is well here -- what makes the work terrifying also makes it exciting, like we've pushed a boulder off the top of a hill and are chasing down after it. the thing to realize is -- in the end, boulders tend to get wherever they're going, irrespective of shepherding efforts.

below are some pictures from adama's last night before heading to six weeks in the states (lassi is second from the left), the family compound, and my room (messy so my suitemates know it's the real me)

thinking of you,

_

xxxx hawa