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.