A Day In the Life, Part 2

Ok. now that I got that out of the way, I can give you a summary of a day in my life.

I get up at 6am. I know, you can’t believe it, right? Well, let me remind you that I’m smack in the middle of hot season, and 6am just so happens to be a lot cooler than, say, 10am. I enjoy the cooler weather enough to get up at 6. There’s also the added bonus of the extra time alone before the kids come clambering at my door, or Djeneba comes to get me to go to the CSCOM (health center).

So up at 6, I usually take some time to stretch and do some basic yoga. I started this because my back was in a lot of pain from sleeping on my camping air mattress every night and not doing much physical activity. Although I now sleep on a real mattress, and I try to move around more, I still do my morning stretching. Daily stretching was something I always wanted to incorporate into my life but never had the time. And it feels good to start the day off with stretching and get-up-and-go music: aka Akon. I finish off with my inspirational yoga music and sun salutes, which are way cooler when you’re doing them facing the rising sun in Africa.

The rest of my morning is busy: I make my breakfast (usually oatmeal which I never ate in the US), I make tea, I wash my dishes from dinner the night before (too hard to do at night with no light), I take down my mattress/mosquito net setup, I sweep my house and courtyard, and I take a bucket bath and get myself ready for the day. I can easily fill up 3 hours this way and still be rushing to be ready by 9. (Or by 8:30 or 9:52 or 7:15 or whatever time I’m picked up. Watches aren’t very popular here).
Djeneba and I head to the CSCOM where, unless it’s Tuesday, we’re in for a pretty uneventful day. Not much happens at the CSCOM most days. We sit inside or outside. We talk. We nap. We sit. I read or study Bambara. Someone makes tea. We sit. I think you get the picture. There’s a lot of down time. And since my current Bambara skills make me a pretty poor conversationalist, I sit quietly…a lot!

I’m learning, as I’m sure every PCV learns, that sitting is a skill, as is thinking. I spend a lot of time in my own head these days. For instance, last week I attended a community meeting with about 20 other people, to discuss my commune’s official 15 year plan. There was a PowerPoint and everything! It was also in French, which I don’t speak. Luckily French is fairly readable if you know English, which I do, so I was able to follow along and get the main picture. But past the health and gender topics, I lost interest, somewhere around how many kilos of millet are grown in the commune’s 28 villages every year. So I sat. Did I mention the meeting lasted for 7 hours? We had a 45-minute lunch break, in which I clumsily spilled rice all over the floor since I’m totally out of practice eating with my hands. But yes. I sat. For 7 hours. And thought. A lot. I’m learning how to not think, which Buddhists would applaud. I’m reading a book about meditation – I feel like this is an excellent point in my life to learn the skill.

But I digress. I mentioned that Tuesdays are different. Tuesdays are both Prenatal Consultation day as well as baby-weighing/vaccination day, so the mornings are full of pregnant women and babies. Often together. I can’t imagine being a Malian woman. Since I’m 24 – rapidly approaching 25 – I would be married with at least 3 kids by now. The kids here are shocked when I tell them how old I am – I’m practically ancient!

Anyway, I’ve learned how to help out with both activities. If I’m with the PNCs, I’m weighing women, taking their height, and measuring pregnant bellies. If I’m with the babies – which I prefer! – I’m weighing babies and recording information on growth charts. My first time helping I got to weigh 15-day old twins – they were sooo tiny! I also almost let another baby fall out of the “weighing pants” – think of a pair of plastic shorts hanging off the bottom of a fruits-and-veggies scale. That’s what a baby scale looks like. And even if you properly follow procedure for weighing a baby, they’re squirmy little buggers! Thankfully one of the doctors caught the little guy before he face-planted on the cement ground, 3 feet down. I about threw up.

We’re pretty low on babies these days. Normally every week our baby vaccinator spends 3 days traveling to each of our commune’s 28 villages to vaccinate, but we’re currently out of one of the standard medicines (I haven’t figured out which one). So he’s not traveling, and moms aren’t coming. We’ve been out of this med for over a month, since the day before I arrived. Naturally I asked why we don’t get more from San. Apparently San is out, as is our entire region of Segou! It’s hard for me to grasp this – that would never happen in America. That’s what happens when you live in one of the poorest countries in the world…

Lunch is at the CSCOM, and afternoons are usually more of the same: sit, read, nap, chat, study, sit, etc. I usually leave somewhere between 3 and 5. It’s a toss up: if I go home, I can maybe nap or get some things done around my house, but the kids will soon realize I’m home and start clambering to come in. If I stay at the CSCOM, I can maybe nap, maybe read, not get any alone time but probably be more productive. Lately I’ve been opting for the CSCOM. It’s not that I don’t like the kids, it’s just that I still have several hours ahead of me of their company!

The neighborhood kids have found me fascinating from the start, and spend every available moment at my house in my courtyard. I realized shortly into living here that I would need a way to entertain the kids. Otherwise they would just sit around me and stare at me, and that gets old after awhile (For me, that is. Not for them. They’re perfectly content to stare at me all day). Since the majority of the kids who come over are little boys, I bought a soccer ball. What a stroke of genius! The ball serves several purposes. It gets the kids out of my way and occupied with something else so I can get things done. It gives the kids something to do since they have nothing else to do all day. It gives me an excuse to run around and interact with the kids, it gives me a form of community socialization, and it’s a great bribe. “Nope, no ball today, you wouldn’t leave me alone long enough to nap!” It’s also made me quite popular, especially since they’ve never seen a 24-year old white girl do a header – that gets applause everytime!

Slowly slowly we’re learning how to live with each other. If the kids leave me in peace in the mornings and in the afternoons if I come home early, they get to play with the ball for several hours, look through my photo album for the millionth time, look at themselves in the mirror while wearing my bike helmet, play with my radio (somehow they have a special knack for finding the worst stations), and hang out at my house while I’m cooking dinner, eating, and well past dark until I finally kick them out so I can go to bed. It’s an interesting lifestyle but I’m getting used to it. I realized I don’t always have to entertain them; I can go about my business and they’ll entertain themselves. When I’m cooking dinner it’s usually a competition of radios: they have my Malian radio outside and I have my iPod inside.

Later, I bring my iPod outside and we do the Chicken Dance, also for the millionth time. I learned during my 2-week stint in Niger several years ago that kids of all backgrounds love the Chicken Dance! Sometimes the adults come by to watch and laugh at the ridiculous site we must make: me standing on my front step, closely circled by 10-15 little boys, all of us flapping our wings and wiggling our butts by lamplight. Sometimes I share cookies or candy, and I lay on the ground on my mat while they crowd around and draw pictures in the dirt and show off their “karate skills,” and pull my toes and make their hands into whistles and generally show off in whatever way they can think of. I wish I could understand them better; they’d be a great way to get accustomed to the language here. Although I’ve banned them from speaking Minianka at my house, even when they speak Bambara I find it extremely hard to communicate. Several times I’ve asked my 11-year old host brother, Sinali, “Do you speak Bambara?!” For some reason with him I can’t even recognize the sounds! It’s a shame, because he’s the oldest kid I hang out with and he’s very animated and lively and always wants to chat. I feel like I could learn so much from him if I could just figure out what he’s talking about!

That’s pretty much my day. Sometimes I go out in various areas around the village to play clapping and chanting games with the girls, but I tend to draw a crowd and being surrounded by 40 screaming and giggling girls at the end of the day starts to wear on me, so I don’t play with the girls as much. After I’m alone for the night, I drag my bed setup outside, take my bucket bath, write in my journal, and read parts of several books. I have special “bedtime books” where I’ll read a chapter a night to make them last longer. Always inspirational things, like Chicken Soup for the Volunteer’s Soul or a collection of Peace Corps stories. It seems like a good way to end the night.