Tuesday, April 8, 2008

The past few months.

Here’s a little update of the past few months. I haven’t been very inspired to write much lately, so I don’t have a ton to share.

Life in Mali is good-- not wonderful but definitely not bad. We’re heading into the hot season now, which will be a bit tough-- it’ll be around 105 degrees in the shade for the whole months of May and June, and not much cooler than that at night. It has already begun getting hotter during the last month or so, and the heat definitely has a negative effect on the motivation level of everyone, including myself. It’s just too hot to go out and do any kind of work in the direct sun during the day.

Speaking of work, I haven’t done a ton of it up to this point. I think a lot of people have an image of development work as rapid, and improvements and change being life-altering and quick. The truth is that integrating into another culture takes many, many months, and progress comes very slowly and in small steps. Since being here, it has become clear to me just how much Americans measure success by tangible results and by doing things-- we constantly think we have to be completing tasks, staying busy, and always getting things done in order to have an impact and make a difference. But we’re called human beings for a reason, and sometimes we just need to be rather than do.

I have now been living in my town for about six months up to this point. The first three months were pretty much just spent learning about the surroundings, people, language, resources, and needs of the community-- I didn‘t do any real work. For the past three months, I have been occasionally teaching English to a couple of different classes at the local high school and also helping with English lessons at the elementary school three days each week. It’s a lot of fun-- I enjoy being up in front of the class, and the students love having me there. I have also been planning different projects that I would like to do during the next year, and that I will be starting to organize and get the ball rolling on within the next few weeks.

I’m going to teach my villagers how to collect and apply urine to their crops as a fertilizer. The supplies for collecting it (a large jug and funnel) are super cheap and affordable for most people, and the results are huge-- urine is a wonderful fertilizer! My goal is to start with a small group of about a dozen people and teach them all about it and get them committed to trying it, then once they see the results on their crops and gardens, they’ll be stoked and tell others about it-- I want to eventually expand to gardening associations and larger groups of people. I’m going to have the whole town peeing into jugs and putting it all over everything!

I would also like to explore a better garbage collection system for my town-- there is apparently one in place now but it doesn’t seem to be operating very well or efficiently. It’s a typical Malian town-- there is garbage absolutely everywhere. So we need to sensitize people to the benefits of a clean environment and get them to develop some sense of pride for a clean town. I do believe that people want their surroundings to be clean and sanitary, but there just isn’t the correct infrastructure and leadership in place right now to really make it happen. So I’ll be working with a small group of locals to try to improve the garbage situation.

Language is going well-- I didn’t know a word of French when my plane landed in Mali, and now I can understand most of what is spoken to me and can express myself well and as much as I need to. The language dynamic in this country is interesting. French is the official language, but is the second language of everyone here-- each Malian learns the local language of his or her ethnic group from birth. The result is that people almost never use French in daily conversation (since it isn‘t their first language and many do not know it well, if at all), which has made learning the language much more difficult. It’s tough to learn a new language when you are constantly surrounded by people who are speaking a completely different one. But I’m getting by well, and have started to learn Bambara, which is an ethnic language that about eighty percent of the Malian population speaks and uses almost exclusively.

That’s about it for now. I don’t have internet access in my town, and am only online for a few days every two or three months-- the next update probably won’t be for awhile.

Wherever you are, I hope life is beautiful. Take care.

Oh, I added a handful of new photos to the album titled “My Home.” The link is on the right sidebar.