Family Time and the Continental Divide

This is a marriage sack according to a Google image search.
I always imagined something more ominous looking.

I set this blog up with the intention of writing about the work that I'm doing in Mali, but I feel like this particular aspect (re: project development/grant writing...aka office work with occasional excursions into the country) of "international cooperation" (I'm translating that from French....international solidarity in English?) is probably pretty boring to anyone else but me. It's even boring for me sometimes. For example, last week I worked on a "cadre logique" for a project, do you want me to tell you what a "cadre logique" is? Didn't think so.

There is however, one aspect of international cooperation that has proven immensely entertaining to me at least, and that's "intercultural learning". At the epicentre of  intercultural learning is the time I spend with my adoptive Malian family.

But how can International Cooperation Jam It?
It appears that my family's "introductory offer" of spoiling me has expired. Moreover, I have reason to believe that I was never actually as spoiled as my colleague told me I was. In fact, I believe that he is the only one in my "grin" (clique, I'm told) being spoiled and the only princess around would be him since he gets everything that I want without having to fight for it like I have.

Usually I am thrilled to be living with a Malian family: laughing and cheering with them as baby Lamine took his first steps, seeing what they see, and sometimes I'm even happy to eat what they eat, but occasionally I feel like international cooperation can jam it, because it's just too awkward to put a grown woman, especially one with a robust independence streak, in such a situation. This sentiment grew particularly worse after my meeting other fellow PSIJ  interns who only had to put in a few weeks of time with a family and now live in some ex-pat palace with a pool...just down the street from yours truly.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?
My "mi-stage" (mid-mandate) break is just around the corner, so I now have to decide if I will spend the rest of my time in Mali with my family, or if I should venture out on my own. On the one hand, I am getting a "real deal" experience as an adoptive Malienne, on the other hand, I am also experiencing certain minor indignities that I know other ex-pats don't have to suffer.

Occasional pangs of jealousy about how other ex-pats live aside, my family is great and I like them, make no mistake. My maman is always teasing me and I find it hilarious. My little sister is my night-club partner in crime and the little kids are fun to have around so long as they don't go snooping in my room, remove my leather sandals and destroy them. I'm even starting to figure out what Papou, my mentally handicapped older brother's hand gestures and noises mean. It turns out that he has a wicked sense of humour, and an insatiable appetite for women apparently. He loves to ask everyone for money, but if you show him your empty pocket he says "Wari a ta!" (money's all gone!) and then mimics praying to Allah for more money.

He also loves to claim women that he sees on tv as one of his three wives. He's not being greedy, since technically he's allowed four. Sometimes he tells me that I'm going to be one of his three wives, and I tell him that he's only allowed one and then he replies "Ooooh wari a ta!". Not too sure what to make of that, but everyone laughs so I'm assuming it's all in good fun. Only very rarely does the Larium get the best of me and I worry that the family is secretly preparing the marriage sack and Papou is really trying to warn me.

 Operation Feed the T:
All anti-malarial-induced paranoia aside, certain everyday family going-ons have made the first half of my time here a little difficult. For example, getting a proper breakfast has been an uphill battle that still is raging despite me bringing it up with first my maman, then my boss, then the Canadian partners, then my maman again and then my local boss again. The short version is that I am not supposed to pay for my living expenses while "outre-mer" (overseas, that's one of my all time fav french words! And a hilarious misunderstanding...I'll explain later) so the family is given a very reasonable by Malian standards stipend to feed and lodge me since voluntarily taking on an extra mouth to feed here would prove too difficult for most families.

Nevertheless, they started out by just giving me a slice of bread (which costs approx only $0.25 and is the tiniest fraction of what they're paid daily) and a cup of coffee in the morning. At first I said nothing, got ravenously hungry by 9:30 and then had to go out and buy second breakfast with my own coin. Then I started hearing about what the 5 five other interns that came over with me were getting for breakfasts and decided that I should get the same, so I told my mom to give me more food in the morning, even if it means getting less for supper. She in turn bought me some jam and started saving some of what she made the family for lunch so that I could have a snack after work. I decided that I would rather take it warmed up in the morning, even if that means eating really, wierd stuff like fish heads on rice for breakfast than have a heavy "snack" two hours before a heavy supper. We had more or less a good thing going there, but then the maid drama happened...

OMG maid drama:
I have to explain showers in order to explain why mornings are so difficult here.

Showers are typically out of a bucket since very few people will have a stand up shower in their home. My family is ballin' by Malian standards because they have a stand up shower in the bathroom, but only glacially cold water flows from the tap since outside of swanky hotels, no one here has hot water.

The family well, aka 2 tickets to the gun show.

In the evening after a run, I love me a glacier shower, but in the early morning, my acclimatised (really!) self finds it too impossibly cold (semi-desert climate don't judge!) to shower.

Getting warm water for a shower is a complicated task though. It involves either hoisting water up from a well that's several metres underground, which is incredibly hard on the biceps and explains why every maid here is ripped. Or, it comes from the tap outside, which is taken apart every night (because people will come in the yard and steal water? I really don't know), so I would have to wake my maman up to get the key for it.

Once the water is collected, you then have to use wood, straw and charcoal to start a fire then fan it continuously for a spell to keep it going. Once warm enough (which can take upwards of 30 mins), you pour the hot water out of the cauldron and into a bucket and then mix it with the glacier water to get it to a temperature that you don't mind pouring all over yourself. So in short, it's a big, effin' hassle, but I never said anything was easy in Mali.

Nevertheless, I got warm water with the first family and the other family members get it  for their bucket showers later on in the morning or in the evening, so I figured I could ask the maid for "ji kalan" in the "sogoma", and M (I never got her name, just the first letter) happily obliged. I could have my warm bucket shower early in the morning, then my re-heated yesterday's lunch would be there for me to eat and I could get to work on time. 

Then my maman inexplicably fired M and everything went pear-shaped. Paye, the other maid who was hilarious and my best Bambara teacher to date would warm up my food, but not my water. My maman and her kids don't get up early enough to warm up my water for me, so I asked that they show me how to do it myself, but their solution was for me to wake up the new maid, which made me uncomfortable.

I  tried reverting back to glacier showers but it's getting progressively "colder" here and I'm getting wimpier acclimatised, so the water was just too icy. I said something to my maman and hot water reappeared, but later and later in the morning. I ended up having to choose between not showering, so going to work with unwashed sunscreen-and-obscenely-concentrated-DEET-saturated hair, showering under a mountain stream, or waiting for warm water to shower but then being embarrassingly late for work considering that out of all my coworkers, I live the closest to my office. Basically, every morning became an awkward exercise in decision-making for my most indecisive-self.

Then Paye left, which for me meant a raincloud formed over my house in Hippodrome for a while, and also meant that I was back to getting only a slice of bread for breakfast. Cranky from my morning hypoglycemia and worried that this would become a trend I brought it up with the bossman who told me to bring it up with my maman who assured me that she would keep giving me yesterday's lunch. To me this is already somewhat of a compromise, because I know other ex-pats would not tolerate what is being given to me as breakfast. Seriously, I met one Québécoise who complained that a bar we went to was too "Malian." Um....I thought we were in Mali. Anyway, try getting her to choke back fish heads on rice in the morning is all I'm sayin'.
 
Then Djemogo showed up who I traumatised with my pasty pallor then made friends with, but then who started crying all the time until she was sent back en brusque brousse. I knew there was never any point asking her for water.

Then it was Alamatou who warmed my water for me one morning and then announced that she too was leaving. This family is hard on maids, and I feel like only once was it my fault.

Again, I tried hinting to my maman that things needed to happen sooner so that I could be on time for my "important meetings" and again she told me that she would not wake up early enough to do it for me, but refused to show me how to do it myself. My intercultural sensitivity training that I took before I left suggests that for them, it's embarrassing to see a guest do something like that herself, but for me it's embarrassing to be unwashed and so late for work.

So between the maid drama, the weird breakfasts, and the family's need to sleep in on weekdays, it's been really hard to get into a good routine. As an addict to wanderlust who frequently uproots herself, I have learned that establishing a routine where I do a few things the same every day is comforting and helps me adapt. So far, I've got my nighttime routine down pat, my exercise regime more or less solidified but I am almost halfway through my mandate and this has not happened yet for my mornings and in all honesty, I'm getting kind of tired of facing the daily shower-breakfast-work-on-time-gamble. I have been debating for well over a month leaving or staying.

They Could Make this Easier on Me:

Lamine in a toque...could you quit this face?

Nevertheless, in the spirit of a conflicted spirit, I have become closer with my little sister who is just lovely, and my maman took me on an adventure last week that was truly amazing. This means making the decision to stay or leave is particularly difficult.

Sometimes I think Mali is less of a place that you visit, and more of an experience. I don't find it as breathtakingly beautiful as I do Costa Rica or the Rockies  for example. Moreover, seeing all the garbage in the city and the children with obvious signs of malnutrition in the villages is exceedingly difficult, but the little pockets of beauty in this country have crept under my skin slowly, and despite every hang up, I find myself consistently in awe and the trip with my maman last week was no exception. 

She asked me before the new year to get one day off in mid-January because she wanted to take me to a village "derrière Ouelessébougou". I asked mon patron and he said it was all good because it was part of the intercultural learning aspect of the internship that gets western donor agencies all excited.

I assumed it was for some family thing, like a wedding or baptism or even a funeral so I dressed in my best imported duds, which are always woefully too casual for this crew, and waited for word that our driver was here. He didn't show, so maman asked me to call my "taximan" and friend who tried to help us find a driver, but that didn't work, so I retreated to my room expecting a quiet reading day when around 1pm the original driver finally showed up, since no road trip in Mali is without its hangups, and set out for Kiban. I packed extra water, a sweater and a flashlight having learned my lesson from my other ill-fated roadtrips, but I forgot my camera. Sad face.

We headed out of Bamako along a road that I hadn't traveled on yet which made me momentarly worry that if we weren't going "derrière Ouelessébougou", where were we going?! Would a marriage sack be involved?!

Nevertheless, we arrived surprisingly uneventfully in Kiban around 3pm and were greeted by a slew of curious onlookers, and a few screaming children. Toubabu are scary, I get it.

I took my sandals off and carried them (I learned my lesson) as we walked through the first part of the house where a bunch of men were praying, through a corridor where there a creepy albino sheep was tied up and women were preparing food and then into the second part of the house where even more women were praying and eating. I greeted as many of them as I could in Bambara which of course, made them laugh at me and then we ate couscous and some part of a cow, but I don't care to know what part, out of a giant bowl.

I asked my maman whose house we were at and she said it was "one of her father's". She then explained that we were going to take a drive to see a baobab where her "father" spent seven years, seven weeks and seven days inside the tree until God made a hole so he could get out. In that moment, I learned not to take Malians so literally, and that this was a religious celebration of sorts. As we exited the house, 20 old ladies were out front singing in unison and each in every one shook my maman's and my hands while still keeping a tune.

From there, we slalomed through the countryside on a bush "road" (re: two tracks in the dirt) in a car that I'm sure is older than me for over 40 minutes and ended up in a clearing with a giant baobab in the middle. Another family was gathered under it and some of them were in it!

Soon after, the first group of people left the baobab and my maman and four others climbed into the tree while the people outside of it chucked sticks at the fruit to knock them down. I took mental photos (sorry) and ate baobab fruit for the first time. In the Malian brusque brousse, the sky is endless. The only experience that I think comes even remotely close is standing on the open prairie, but there you would hear birds chirping and grass rustling. Where I stood last week was so silent that it felt like time had stopped, only to be interrupted by the sound of a baobab fruit crashing to the ground.

Think big sky like this, but only bigger.

When my maman was finished praying, we headed back to the house in Kaban which I learned was actually a madrassa, and the 60+ people that I saw there were "students" of the Koran, aka TALIBAN!! But not that Taliban, so it's ok. By now it was getting dark and traveling after sundown can result in being stopped by unsavoury police officers wanting a bribe (although this hasn't happened to me yet), so we quickly said our goodbyes and as we were leaving, the leader of the madrassa came and started praying for my maman who I was standing next to. A crowd formed around us and for a moment I was frozen between 40+ men, women and mostly children all deeply involved in prayer.

He then issued us a few blessings and told me me to come back soon because I was his wife. That means I now have 10 (yeah double digits!) Malian suitors.


In short, the whole afternoon had been somewhat of an otherworldly experience of the sort that is impossible to engineer as a tourist on my own. I need the family to drive me deep into the bush to watch people pray inside a tree.

Alas, a new maid named Gogo (that means that there are 3 Gogos in the house) now lives with us and has been warming up yesterday's lunch (today it was "farquay" (sp?), a gritty, salty, spruce green sauce made out of pounded seeds that comes from the north fittingly, because it has the texture of sand) and warm water for me in almost a perfectly timely matter. I get to work reasonably well-fed and washed only 10-20 minutes late.

I also asked my maman to show me how to start a fire in the stove if Gogo leaves and she finally agreed that she would, but I think we're all hoping that Gogo stays.

I've been working on this post for 2 weeks now (hence it's impressive length...as in I'm impressed that you're still reading!), and I think that I can finally say with a degree of certainty, that I will stay with the family.

I will inshallah have other chances to work and/or live abroad, but I won't have another chance to live with this colourful cast of characters. This is my house in Hippodrome one-off, and now that we've more-or-less-at-least-temporarily got mornings figured out, I think I can do my work and live the good life in Bamako for the rest of my time here.

Next week you can check me away from comms (that's for you Sheri), as I plan on heading north to trek for 3 days through Dogon Country and sleep under the stars on rooftop campements in cliffside villages.

When I get back, I wish to post some pics of my hopefully epic journey, as well as of my family who have worked their way deep into the sub-cockles of my heart, though not that it's hard to do... a little food usually does the trick.