good morning starrshine

.
Hey all. Great balls of fire, I'm back in Mali.

Just kidding. Here's a post for the starr fellowship - it funded my time in mali (and let me meet the lovely Alan Harlam and some hella cool kids - check out their adventures at http://siihub.wordpress.com/)

.....Magic

"So who's supposed to do that?

Wait WHAT?”

I said that a lot this summer.

Like my mom, I’m methodical to a T in my work. The same part of me prompted the ten thousand questions I asked our guide in Dogon country. “Yes, you said the Dogon women grew beans here. But I guess what I’m wondering is…what SPECIES of bean?”

The sauce is in the details, the details in the method. My method means spending seven hours to read one chapter of theory in the Sci Li. I never let things go — and the result is an excruciating, inescapable, and perversely glorious non-productivity sandwich.

Working in a small NGO socked the method.

The previous leaders of my project had left by the time we arrived, and my own judgment got a startling promotion. We set dates and raced to meet them; we flew by the seat of our pants. And how did we do? The yardstick to measure our work was hiding out in the same cave as the manual. We invented our evaluative tools alongside their subject.

It’s a fearless, fast-paced language – and MHOP’s Caitlin Cohen speaks it with a striking fluency. It means racing down a road that runs out of bricks, because either the bricklayer’ll get there first or you’ll jump the gap. It’s those SAT prep books’ response to my snail-like reading style: catch the first word and the last phrase, and trust your judgment for what comes in between.

How did we stay sane? Like stressed-out office shepherds, we’d each be fretting over our hillside of tasks. But then. Remarkably, Caitlin would set aside her own mountain range of sheep to call us home.

“Who’s in the mood for Mexican?”

Then, mining a pantry of Malian bouillon cubes, cocoa powder and cajun spice seasoning, she’d fashion the best Mole sauce of my life. Needless to say, without a recipe.

home again!

hey ya to all from the great plains of illinois.

the scent of being home makes my toes stretch out in delight. it feels like the end of a long day - i'm eating farmers market tomatoes like apples, wearing my dad's t-shirts, dog tired and curled up under two blankets even after turning off the AC when no one's looking. lord, i think i became a malian.

dogon country was absolutely striking - valleys of bright green millet, shocking red mountains, and gnarly thousand-year-old trees that stretch and yawn like Ents. during the jurassic period, Land Before Time 1 through 13 were filmed there. we trekked along a sweeping falaise that overlooks the Gondo plains, stopping in square-hutted Dogon villages that cling to the cliffside or perch on top.

even higher than Dogon villages are abandoned granaries of the Tellem - an ancient people who must have had wings. some of the less accessable Dogon villages have been abandoned to new sites just a hundred meters down the cliff side; the Dogon tradition is incredibly alive. we slept under the stars on roofs belonging to the dugutigis, or village chiefs, and offered Kola nuts to Dogon elders who are important in the animist tradition. we slept and woke with the sun, and i believe i ate 7 whole sheep.

my last week passed slowly but all at once as only last weeks can. i spent a lot of time with soukeina's family (and am using flower-ifically henna'd hands and feet to type this).

soukeina’s sister said, “the sun will miss you, hawa gaku. the trees of mali will miss you. even the To will miss you. i will miss you too much, hawa gaku.” aw jeez. their hearts are so sweeping and so full, they couldn't have been kinder. may god hold them in the hollow of his hand.

on my last night, i carried my mattress down to the maternity ward of the Sikoro clinic and followed the wonderful, wrinkled, hand-holding and turban-wearing and breathtakingly competent Asa Cisse, a sage femme who has delivered babies for 22 years, though she assured me that she sprinted out of the room the first time she saw a birth. i first saw a woman being sutured for a tear; and then, the birth of two babies. it's a BYO set-up - women are expected to come with old pagnes (meters of cloth) and a packet of dish detergent to keep things clean. the first woman had walked so far that she was fully dilated, and her baby was born within 2 minutes. a tiny tiny little primate gal covered in goo and so beautiful that you can’t speak. wow.

sikoro still feels like home - i can already feel i'll miss it. not to mention, of course, my mhop peeps. devon, alex, anna - i'm asking you to fashion me a shrine under the office fan, nothing too ornate, just those little raspberry-flavored zinc supplements from the '70s and bananas and a live chicken and a dusting of oatmeal oats. talk to it every once and a while. and if i die and never return, light a candle and let it burn, 'cuz light transcends time. i'm thinking about you guys.

grandma toots is coming to visit next week - i've got to pick out a hundred or so of the 7,234,234,253 pictures i took. i went to the doctor and was surprised to see i'd lost a ton of weight this summer -- no good since i was already scrawny. pretty fixable though, as once my grandma gets here i'm gonna go on a plan i'll call "South Carrot Cake." yesterday i took a glorious, soapy hot shower and have smooth legs for the first time of the summer -- it felt like shearing a sheep.

thanks so much for being with me this summer. i can't tell you how much your kind words lifted me up.

i got the Rolly on my arm and i'm pouring Chandon, and i roll the best To 'cuz I got it going on, but i couldn't mhop it like it's hot without you.

much love, and can't wait to see you.

xoxoxo hawa gaku xoxox

Soukeina

Dear friends,

This past week, Alex and Devon and I went on an overnight trip to Segou, a beautiful sleepy town on the Niger river. That night at dinner, we heard some terrible news from home.

Our wonderful Soukeina, the lead community health worker who took me under her wing from my first days here, had been ill on Monday, complaining of malaria. On Tuesday morning, she was suddenly much worse; she became terribly ill, and at 5 pm she called around her family to ask for their pardon. She died only a few minutes later.

When she was 9, she spent a year in France to have a complicated heart surgery through Medecins Sans Frontiers; all we can guess is that the anemia caused by malaria caused a fatal complication with her heart condition.

To know Soukeina was to love and admire her. She was a nurse, a mother, and a beloved sister and daughter; she was spunky and razor-sharp, kind and generous, with a sassy sense of humor and the biggest heart of anyone I've known.

We caught a 4 am bus and made it back in time for the funeral, which was the morning after her death. The family comp

ound was packed with people; the dugutigi, the chief of Sikoro, led many of the benedictions.

I'm heading to her family's house now - they've welcomed me so many times. I can't imagine their grief. I've got with me the presents I was going to give Soukeina next week and a little money to help out, the next weeks will be so hard for them.

Tomorrow, Alex and I will leave for a week in Dogon country; then, we'll be back in Bamako for a week before I leave for the states.

Love from the 'ko,

xxx Hawa

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.

WE DID IT!!!!!!

a weekend´s surveyor training down the hatch.

awwwwwww yeah.

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