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

sorcery

hello again!

we had a lovely day today at Adama's house -- after a torrential rain, we walked with his friends through groves of mango trees and a rushing chocolate-colored stream behind their neighborhood. they showed us the street corner where they've talked into the night and sipped tea every evening since they can remember. back at the compound (which is lovely, old stone in pastel colors -- Adama's dad was a well-known filmmaker, and his mom is a coordinator for the SIT study abroad program), we discussed 24 (when does Jack Bauer pee? when off-screen he is always driving), and sorcery. poor guys -- when we assured them that wives eat their unfaithful husbands in the states, they were REALLY freaked out. there are good and bad sorcerers, not so much in Bamako, but certainly in surrounding villages -- you don't know they're eating you until they've eaten your head, at which point you check out for good. adama was really serious -- one of his cousins had baby twins who were visited by a bad sorcerer, and one was "eaten" and died suddenly. at the end of the evening, we met a friend who goes by "le dinosaur sentimental" (strong yet emotional like the mighty t-rex). we ran out of time to watch pirated nigerian dvds ("best world movies 88 on one dvd" including "The Holiday: 1 through 5" and the alluring yet family-friendly "Jennifer Lopez vs. Kate Winslet")

i got to talk to so many people today. Djallo, a man who works from 6 AM to midnight at an egg sandwich stand; groups of old men on my way to buy bananas in the market this morning; the sentimental dinosaur; many, many kids and mothers in front of their houses on the way to the office. it was lovely. current daily banana record: 4 (anticipating one when I get home tonight)

the economics of sikoro are cloudy: in the market, many women sell identical arrays of mangos from sunrise to midnight: tomatoes, bananas, dried-old-man-fish, all in small piles by price. it seems like magic: a trading circle of malian francs for mangos (they're in season) that leaves everyone better off, that lets so many women make a living. many men that aren't vendors in the Sikoroni market commute to the Grand Marche in packed green buses. one lady's in the Sikoroni market's competitive edge: alongside a pile of ripe mangos, a teetering tower of amoxicillin. get it while it's hot.

some more pictures of sikoro -- it's very beautiful, a rural-feeling slum in a capital of a million people, nestled among red rocks with vibrantly green trees after the rain. its rural feeling is deceptive, as it's actually one of the densest of Bamako's neighborhoods -- upwards of 30 people often live in one compound.

don't forget to write! i'll bring you back a 2-day-old baby goat. xxx Hawa

p.s. note to self: check if folks were pulling our leg re. goat head soup. ingredients: water. goat head. tomatos. onions. stir. chop into chunks. enjoy.

sunday morning

hey all!

lazy sunday morning -- poor caitlin is sick, so we brought her a Djalo (pinapple soda) and are going to spend a couple hours under the office fan before heading out to explore a movie or the artisan's market.

the pictures below are a few from one walk into work in the morning -- I'll post some more here. the morning walk is one of the loveliest parts of my day: everyone seems so happy to see us. i walked in with Soukeina the other day, and it took over an hour (she has cousins like woah).

highlight reel of the past few days:

1. i found a (i'm going to hold off on "the") love of my life: my bugnet has just enough room for me to pull in my fan with me, and my fan and i spoon, cuddle and whisper sweet nothings all night long. blissful.

haha we unfortunately have a third wheel: hereafter named charlie, a massive, fat lizard that chills out on my bugnet a couple inches above my nose, so his underbelly can share the fan's breeze. he's completely unbothered by pokes and flicks -- last night i scooped him out my window. now i kinda hope he finds his way back to me.

2. broadway cafe: an expat zone, but in a nice way. last night was the goodbye dinner for paul and nora, two wonderful north carolina-ans who are heading back to UNC psychology and Duke med, respectively. also: BABY ZONE! 3 of 4 women at the table -- who worked for save the children and oxfam -- had become pregnant in mali. i'm considering it, mom.

3. soukeina's cousin took me for an afternoon at her home on the other side of the river. i wasn't sure what to expect -- when I got back at about 7 pm, caitlin asked, "did you eat a massive malian lunch and then all pass out on the couches?" YES! exactly. in front of "extreme makeover home edition" and "love island" dubbed into french. for like 5 hours. it was actually super restful. we took a break for a meal of rice with a palm oil tomato chicken sauce -- it was delicious. pickles, too.

they are a very well-off family -- it was interesting to see such a different side of bamako, about 25 minutes away across the river. her husband is a government official who studied for 10 years in Russia (like many other well-off Malians 20 or 30 years ago). many malian families have "bonnes," young girls who live with the family and cook, clean, take care of the baby; this family's two "bonnes" were really lady-in-waiting-esque.

i was taken aback when Soukeina saw the guy who plays David Palmer on 24 ("that's Allstate's stand"). "Ca, c'est Will Smith."
"huh! i guess i could kinda see that but i think it's this other guy..."
"ah! c'est Eddie Murphy! oui, c'est ca."
it's funny that Soukeina's interest in the names of black American actors would result in the same mix-up that you'd expect more from a confederate great-great aunt.

now we're off to visit Adama -- an intern who's headed to Ohio University for six weeks next saturday. this week will be DAUNTING but could be really productive -- finishing our baseline survey, translating into bambara, writing up a contract with the clinic and selecting our list of essential medicines to give "prise en charge" to participating families. also downloading Ubuntu onto the 10 laptops we took through JFK security (thanks for the tech help, pop)

thinking of you in sikoro!