You and Travel

I just returned from site visit yesterday.  I now know exactly where I will be living/ working for the next two years.  My beautiful new home is in Niagadina about 90k from Bamako.  Now you might be thinking, oh 90k (55 or so miles) that must be like an hour, hour and a half from Bko.  If you are thinking that, you’re wrong.  It took me and my homologue (work partner) 4 and a half hours to get there.  My village is a decent sized village, maybe like 4 or 5,000 people.  We have a once-weekly market, a health center, and a school.  The women’s garden is huge and beautiful.  The previous volunteer set me up; I have everything including 3 papaya trees in my concession.  There is a very weird pot of sand in my kitchen and I have no idea what it could possibly be for.  My curiosity got the better of me so I had to write to the last guy to ask him about it.  I haven’t heard back yet.  I have a pretty gross rat situation so I’m gonna get a cat.  All in all, it’s awesome.  I feel very lucky.

Now, I’d like to expand on this 4 and a half hour 55-mile journey.  I had to take a Sotrama, which is basically a very run down van that they fill with people, animals and stuff.  When the bus was at its fullest, there were 28 people in there (not including the babies).  It was bananas.  We stopped every 20 minutes to let MORE people on and for vendors to shove shit through the windows, which surprisingly everybody bought.  I have never seen such huge loaves of bread and I have definitely never seen people buy so much of it.  Seriously, there was SO much bread on that Sotrama.  Keep in mind that this is my first experience on public transportation in country.  PC has been driving us around like the privileged Americans we are in really nice air-conditioned vehicles, so it was a whole new experience.  Also bear in mind that I have been studying this language for just over a month, so I had no freaking idea what was going on.

Here are some other notable things that have happened to me in the past couple weeks:

            -The negen’s (bathrooms (well holes in the ground)) at the PC training facility are pitch black.  You literally cannot see your hand right in front of your face.  So one must take a flashlight with them.  There happens to be a flashlight on the top of my cell phone so I usually just take that.  This one particular night my bestie Carly happened to call me as I was running to the negen, bursting at the seams.  Naturally I answered the phone because I didn’t want to miss her call, but I also really, really had to pee.  So I multi-tasked.  I immediately dropped my phone and thought I had dropped it down the hole, so I was frantically searching for the phone in the pitch black while peeing and as it turns out I didn’t drop it down in the whole, I was just peeing all over it.

            -The money system here is absolutely ridiculous.  When they say the money in Bambara you have to multiply it by 5 to get the CFA amount and then if I wanted to know the American dollar amount I would have to divide it by about 500. 

            -My state of confusion now feels about as permanent as my diarrhea.

            -I was studying Bambara and I was translating some sentences from Bambara back into English and the sentence was “They greet the village people everyday.”  Maybe it’s not actually that funny, but I sure got a kick out of it.

In the Future We Will Study the Past

Well, I’ve been in Africa for 3 weeks now and it honestly doesn’t quite feel like it.  I kind of feel like I’m back in Portland because there are white people everywhere. I’ve been in homestay for 3 weeks as of today, living with an awesome family and learning Bambara.  It’s a crazy language.  Everything sounds the same.  I’ve had some pretty hilarious conversations with my family.  And by conversations I mean fragmented sentences, excessive gesturing and awkward laughter.  On many occasions, I’ve felt as if I’m in a movie or like someone is playing a big joke on me.  After several minutes of attempted communication, I’m just like okay you guys are joking right, someone tell me what’s going on, where are the subtitles?  Unfortunately I’m not in a movie and no one is playing a joke on me, we really just don’t speak the same language.  The second day of homestay was Seliba (in Bambara) or Tabaski (French) or Eid Al-Adah (Engish?), a big Muslim holiday to celebrate/ commemorate when Abraham sacrificed a sheep instead of his son.  So everyone walks around the village and greets each other all day.  They give each other an absurd amount of blessings (that’s all the time really not just on a holiday.  Everyone said that the first day of homestay was going to be the most awkward day of my life, but they lied.  Seliba was.  I had zero language skills, and was a vegetarian on the biggest sheep (or goat if you’re poor) slaughtering day of all.  Here are a few other things (short hand) that have happened in my first few weeks with my family:

            -There’s a dog in my family’s concession.  His name is Polisi and he’s a racist.  My family has got a racist dog.

            -Several babies played in the hole dug in the dirt to collect the slaughtered sheep’s blood.

            -My water filter fell over in the middle of the night and dumped about 12 liters of water all over my sunken floor.  I swept it out with a “broom” which is literally a pile of twigs tied together.  It took about 2 hours.

            -Everyone is so cold here right now.  When it’s under 85°, they bust out the parka’s and the wool hats.

            -We made a dinner for our language trainers to practice cooking over a fire.  The rice was the hottest freaking thing I have ever touched in my life and it stayed hot forever (like all food here).  Our teachers didn’t like it because we mixed the rice and the beans together.

A bana (It’s finished).  The journey continues…

What! You're going to Africa?

So the time has come for me to write my first post.  I have said all my goodbyes for the last two weeks and they were wonderful and awful, happy and sad all at the same time.  I drove from Oregon down to Tucson with my Dad, my best friend and a very packed mid-size rental car full of my stuff about a week and half ago.  I felt so good about the amount of stuff I managed to get rid of until I had to shove it all in a car with three people.  I stopped at both sets of g-rents houses along the way to say goodbye.  I played an extremely good game of Quiddler with the Schlarbs (probably a couple of words in that sentence most people have never heard before).  I won't say who won.

I have had so many mixed emotions in the months leading up to my departure, I'm not even sure which one  I'm feeling at any given moment.  I feel like a baby or like I'm on drugs, you know since they're basically the same.  I'll be giddy with excitement one moment and the next I'm near tears imagining my life (or at least trying to imagine it) for the next two years.  I managed to bring just about everything I wanted, including some chocolate peanut butter and a spoon.  That's right, bringing fat-girling to the motherland!

Speaking of fat-girling, I managed to eat myself silly in Tucson with all my besties who just happened to be home right as I was preparing to leave.  I don't know how I managed to have such good friends and such good luck.  If a person really was what they ate, I would be a big-fat burrito right now.  No joke.  I'm at a plush hotel in Philly right now trying to mentally burn off the past week's (well let's be honest, month's) calories by watching the Project Runway finale and furiously typing this first of hopefully many blog entries to come.  Thanks for reading.  I'll miss everyone and I can't wait to share my new life with anyone who wants to read about it.  FAREWELL AMERICA OF THE NORTH!  See you in 27 months.