weekend

The sun is rising in Sikoro, orange colors meeting red rocks. last night i saw more stars than i ever have here - not just the big ones, but the carpet of shady dots and even some milky way.

i wish i had posted more recently - i've phrased so many posts in my mind but it's gotten away from me. I drafted a couple posts but they kept turning into novellas -- haha i'll try to keep to the highlights of the past couple weeks, novella chapters available on request (caution: reader risks sprouting handsome white beard).

1.mali is meeting the midwestern great plains on the top of my head: i have corn rows!

2. Rock-climbing in Siby – passing rural villages with square brick buildings and lush mango trees, on an adventure led by a rock-climbing fanatic ex-pat high school physics professor named randy (peas in a pod with my dad). It was so beautiful – our guide traversed along the cliff face in FLIP FLOPS! Sweet lord. We rode the back of randy’s pick-up up a gorgeous natural arch. at the end of the day we had dinner at appaloosa’s, home to burritos, waiters in ten-gallon hats and Ukrainian prostitutes. Ole!

4. a wonderful dinner with Fanta and the family and Alex, my new host bro and lovely new MHOP clinic-organizing man. Snapping and popping frying chicken kebabs and potatoes, with salad and onions from the raw chicken marinade up in there, yurrrm! It was my first big amoeba risk, and a rollicking adventure to take it with fanta, host bro papa and alex. if amoebas populate the Zoombiniland of our tummies in the next couple weeks, we’ll set up some Arrested Development and tag-team the nyegen under the stars.

5. (unrelated) SICKNESS! Proudly beasted my first malian sickness – i felt like THIS but it was actually very small fry (no ghiardia mom). More weirdly, I got a bad head cold – usually reserved for wintry providence sci li nights. luckily I stole a bag of my dad’s Halls Citrus. Awww yeah.

6. We tried a new Chinese place for dinner but found out it was 100% brothel dangit -so we went to a Lebanese place that boasted an ass cheezburger, ass salad and ass chicken. we suspected donkey meat but it turned out to mean Assiette (with all the trimmings). Thank goodness – donkeys, as well as cows, walk all through sikoro and their slow clip clop is a lovely shield from the zipping motorcycles on the morning walk to work. (I just ate one though – at soukeina’s house this afternoon, for the 40th day after her mother’s passing.) Our house is in Lei Carre, pig square – an old Christian family has raised pigs there for 300 years.

7. THE SURVEYS ALMOST DONE!!!! Just came back from another “office hours” at the multifunctional center and we can count the number of families left to resolve on one hand. I asked lassi who sells the best bamakois cake – we’re having a PARTY tomorrow.

(party pictures added after the fact! haha one is of ami keita and oumu camara, two lovely and sassy-pants health workers- ami keita is pretending to cut off my head. it was smashing - we demolished 4 cakes! oumou developed her own bambara alphabet and taught it to 200 of her neighbors....i can't even imagine it.)

8. the best-dressed Malian taxi competition continues – each one we enter has a new combo of bright blue fur seat covers, leopard print drapes, life-size obama head flags – or minimalist for the stripped-down-metal Transformers look. Haha furriness is a theme in Malian living rooms too – my host fam has giraffe print furry sofas topped with bright pink chintzy genie-puff bulbs. “see ya later decorator” or “blinded by the light?” definitely the second – I’m a convert.

more pictures -- shadowing Soukeina at her clinic; radio siguida joli, mhop's radio broadcast; and hiking up a rocky cliff to Point G, the biggest hospital in Mali, which overlooks the Niger river and all of Bamako.

Much love from sikoro – thinking of you.

Xxxxx hawa gaku

hawa gaku: Bambam of the surveys

WOAH NELLY!

i just got back from an epic 3-hour frenzy survey-fest in the multifunctional center.

sporting my nouveau corn rows (midwestern great plains meets mali right on my head - think bambam flintstone), i just got back from week 2, day 1 of Survey Office Hours: the 12 different survey two-person teams came in to turn in survey sheets, get fresh ones, hunt down missing kids and scribble down new ones to fix inconsistencies on stacks and stacks of surveys . like ahab chasing the great white whale, we try to make the numbers for each household line up:

# of kids in the Household survey = # kids in all that household's Mama surveys

(not including kids that live without their mama)

we meet in the Sikoro Multifunctional Center every afternoon, technically from 4 to 5 but always going to 6:30 or 7 in a crazy storm of long lines of waiting surveyors, flying sheets of paper, last-minute printing, and the sweet bliss when numbers add up and we can check off another household.

my laptop lays on another coat of Hectic Frosting - it physically hums and sings and can't use the mouse when plugged in, so every five minutes on the brink of battery death i dive to plug it in for a lean thirty seconds. and finally, on the cyber-threat front, my anti-virus program showers us with alerts of new quarantined malian cyber-amoebas.
walking back to the office just now, i ran into a surveyor playing for the Sikoro soccer team on the football field - a great guy named Francis - and we laid plans for households 42 through 47 with other teammembers huddled around the laptop on the sideline.

PHEW!!!!!!!!!!!!

haha alright, thanks for bearing with me on a survey adrenaline rush blog!

i have a confession to make - i've drafted a new blog entry two or three times in the past few days, but it gets daunting when so much time has passed and each time it's come out asa Gilgameshian epic poem. (and what happened in middle school english class - mesopotamian epic poetry - oughtta stay there)

so NEW PLAN - tomorrow i'll post some pictures and the highlight reel - the good, the bad, and the ugly, the chapter titles of my failed gilgameshian epic poem. (plenty more where that came for those with time to burn)

miss you guys. hope all is well.

tomorrow i'll post my new cornrow look - think bambam flintstone.