Observations

Some things I’ve noticed.

* I like living in a small village.  I suppose every place has its pros and cons.  I only have access to one cell phone provider here, and it’s not the one that everyone else is on, so it’s a common mistake for our friends to send messages to our phone numbers that don’t work.  We don’t have a very extensive market, and some things that can be bought in bigger towns can’t be found here.  Everyone knows everyone else’s business, and we can’t even stop by Mountougula’s one bar for a cold beer every now and then because that could potentially be scandalous! 

But at the same time, everyone knows our names.  No one calls me Toubabu, except for one little kid who just finds it funny.  Everyone else calls me by name (or by Ashley’s name, Kanje.  I’ve learned to answer to both).  Everyone knows where I live, and where all the other PCTs live.  If by some chance I would ever get lost in this small place, anyone off the street would be more than happy to show me my way home.  At our market we don’t have to bargain down prices from sellers trying to overcharge you.  Prices tend to be fixed at a fair amount, and we’re all buying from each others’ families anyway.  I like it here.

*Village women spend their lives bent over double.  I haven’t decided if that’s good for their backs because they end up so flexible, or bad for their backs because it’s not a natural posture.  From the time they are little girls, females are assigned as babysitters for their little siblings and carry around the babies on their backs.  In order to get the baby in this position, they have to bend over double, arrange the baby, and wrap a pagne around both of them to secure the little one.  Daily household chores include sweeping the dirt courtyard to remove the trash that is carelessly thrown there throughout the day.  I’m not sure why no one ever thought of attaching a handle to the broom, so women bend over in half with their little broom, often with a baby on their back.  Well water is drawn using buckets or leather bags that are dropped down 30 feet and pulled up hand over hand.  Food is cooked in a squatted position (this takes several hours), and moving from one pot to another usually means stretching the legs to slide over, still squatting.  Often women are responsible for having a small business to earn money to buy sauce ingredients for the family’s daily meals.  So the women in my family, like many women here, walk 40 minutes to their garden every day (baby on the back, lunch carried on the head) and spend the afternoon watering and weeding green onions – bent over double.  Even my grandmothers weed and water onions, draw well water, sweep, and tote grandchildren on their backs, and they must be anywhere from 60-80.  Meanwhile, the men sit around and drink tea.

*I learned in one of my Anthropology classes that globally speaking, black, white, and red are the only colors that all cultures identify and differentiate.  That was kind of hard to understand until I came here.  Things are changing as Mali becomes more modernized, but previously, many illiterate people only identified things as “fin” (dark) and “jε” (light).  The only colors that have their own adjective form are black (ka fin), white (ka jε), and red (ka bilen).  All the other colors only come in a modified adjective form.  And while there are two separate names for green and dark green, orange and yellow are called by the same name unless you use the new frambara word for orange.  Purple also only has a frambara name.  This seems so crazy to me given how many colors are in Malian fabric, dishes, and everything else!  Speaking of fabric, the specialized Malian fabric, bazan, has a special name when its blue.  Anything else that’s blue goes by the umbrella term for blue, but blue bazan has its own name.  My friends and I are were talking about what Malians might think if they saw all the crayons in a Crayola box of 96 and how each one has its own name: “cerulean,” “burnt sienna,” “tickle me pink,” “macaroni and cheese.”  How different we all perceive what seems so basic!

*We learned the words for cardinal directions last week.  I really like their origins.  “Kɔrɔn” is the word for east, and means “sun rises.” “Tilebin” is the word for west, and means “sun falls.”  “Kɔkɔdugu” is north, and translates as “salt city.”  Timbuktu, a city in the north of Mali, originally earned its wealth and fame as a main stop on the salt caravan that traveled from the north (Algeria-ish) to the south.  And “worodugu” means south.  “Woro” is the Bambara word for kola nut (and also thigh), which are important in ceremonies and when asking for pardon or giving thanks.  They originate in the Ivory Coast, which is directly south from Mali.

Of course, you have to remember that not everyone uses the same words for things.  For instance, my family didn’t have a clue what I meant by kɔkɔdugu, and informed me that the proper term for north is “ba fε.”  *Sigh.*  What can you do?

*Malians are impressively resourceful.  One day Lemin dropped Moussa’s cell phone in the dust and it was recovered, broken.  Determined to fix it, Moussa took the whole thing apart and found a wire loose when it should have been attached.  I then watched as Moussa pulled a coal out of the tea maker, picked a trashed piece of plastic off the ground, and secured the rogue wire by using the coal to melt the plastic against the wire.  This was a long process full of trial and error, but amazingly when the wire was successfully soldered into place, the phone worked again!  All part of a lunch break…