Update: Ready for America

Leading up to our highly anticipated trip to America, we have had an incredibly challenging couple of weeks at site.

We both got amoebic cysts, making us drowsy and occasionally nauseous. On top of this, James has bacterial dysentery two weeks ago and a nasty cold last week that kept in bed with a fever for four days. Also, one of our close friends in village also passed away unexpectedly to some possibly preventable illness (we were not told he was sick until after he died). He was young with a wife and children, and the haste with which he came and went was very unsettling for us. Lastly, since we were planning for Hunger Awareness Week – in which we only spent a dollar per day on food – we finished all of our American food reserves. This meant that even when we got sick and wanted to stop Hunger Awareness Week, we could not, so we ended up doing it anyways. It was rough.

Thankfully, it all ended when a Peace Corps supervisor from Bamako came out to our site for a planned visitation. When she arrived, our bags were packed and the house in order, and we enjoyed vehicle transport from our village for the first time all the way to Bamako where we could enjoy air conditioning, electricity, and take our medications to rid us of the amoebic cysts.

Normally, life in village is not so terrible, but the misfortune of the past few weeks has one perk -  we could not be more excited for our quick vacation home. It’s like when it downpours continuously for the last day of your backpacking trip. Sure, all week you occasionally thought about home, but that last day, you long for dry clothes, a warm bed, and a hot shower and think of nothing else.

Hopefully we will be able to see a lot of our blog readers on this trip. However, we have a very busy schedule as is – Joye is taking the Pharmacy College Admissions Test and is in a wedding – so we do not meet up, please do not be too hard on us. We miss everyone and everything dearly and are thrilled to spend a few weeks taking in who and what we can.

Thanks for keeping tabs on us once again!

-James (& Joye)

Culture: Malian Education-Part 1

As we learned in our pre-service training, its difficult to know where to start when you talk about Malian education. Its a huge complex subject, and I could fill pages and pages on my observations and opinions. But  since many of you have expressed interest in it, I’ll try to start with the main overlying structure and problems.

Language and Literacy: First, Mali is a huge country, filled with many diverse ethnic groups and though French is the official business language, there are between 7 and 11 other national languages. Thus, it is common for a teacher to be placed in a village that speaks a minority language that he does not. Consequently, the students are taught in French or Bambara, 2 languages that none of them understand. Therefore, unlike the American system, Malians take many different paths to learn to read and write. If they would like to learn French, they attend a formal government school. Adult or young Bambara learners attend community literacy centers..  Those that drop out of formal school attend trade school literacy classes or begin learning Arabic at the madrasa (koranic school).  These various institutions have been set up over time to try to accommodate the diversity in languages and in lifestyle, thus trying to provide an option for everyone. However, despite the combined efforts, on the part of the Malian government, non profit organizations, and foreign aid, Mali still has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the world! According to the World Factbook, the literacy rate of Mali in 2009 was 46%. However, that varies greatly depending on rural and urban settings. In a recent survey of our village, James found that only 40% of adults had been through primary school or literacy class, and from experience, we know that maybe 1/2 of those people can read and write at a functional level.

Access to Education: We currently live in the densely populated Sikasso region, so access to Education is not as difficult as it is in the far north of Mali, where formal schools are few and far between. Near us, most villages have a primary school (Grades 1-6), though many only have 3 classrooms, meaning they can only take new students every other year.  However, after 6 grade, finding a school becomes more difficult. The nearest middle school is often 10-15  km away and the nearest high school  is even further away at 15-50km.  Therefore, families usually send their children to live with a relative or friend in a town where schooling is available. However, this means the family must pay for food and living expenses as well as transport to and from that town. Often, the family decides that high expenses are not worth the seemingly irrelevant education the child receives, especially when they are at an age where they can be a valuable worker around the house. Nevertheless, the formal schools are being built by the national government and NGOs and access is constantly improving.

Quality of Education: Once a village has a school, the question is: can it handle a school? In the US, we are incredibly involved in our schools. The school board and PTO monitor the curriculum and state of the buildings, etc. Parents are constantly volunteering as chaperones, lunch ladies, team banquet organizers. They sign permission slips and look over their children’s homework, and habitually ask “Hey, what did you learn in school today?” and actually expect an answer!  However, all of that came about organically, because in America, we started to promote the idea that children are the future and they are worth the investment.  Now, Westerners have built schools all over Mali believing that education is the key to development (and I agree). However, part of my job as a volunteer is to convince Malians that taking care of that school is worth their time and that its their own responsibility to care about the quality of their school. Every village is different, but in general, repeatedly low test scores and the difficulties with multiple national languages has created a huge lack of morale within the Malian education community, leading to discouraged and lazy teachers.  However, when poor test scores come back or the village sees that the teachers are not spending time in their classrooms, they often don’t understand that its their job to fix it. There is usually no parent-teacher organization and a school board that only meets a few times a  year.

 

These are only some of the factors that make education work so difficult and frustrating in Mali. Some days, it seem s to be a vicious cycle that can’t be remedied. However, on those days, I have to remind myself that I can’t expect things to change overnight. I can change things little by little by encouraging the school board to meet, talking with my neighbors about registering their kids in school, and providing feedback to the teachers to help them improve. I also work to promote the idea of girl’s education through “Take Our Daughters To Work Day” Camps and awareness activities with the teachers. Certainly, these efforts are only a drop in the bucket, but I do believe that improving the education of the next generation of Malians is the surest way to encourage slow but steady development for this country.

Pictures: August in Mali pt 2

With every Malian family working hard in their fields this month, we had plenty of time for pictures. Here’s a few more from August.

A big rain storm demolished our newly built mud stove. Sniffle sniffle. But when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. So we took off the broken shards of concrete and made a footpath to our nyegen (the bathroom) since it is annoyingly muddy after rain.

 

Here are a few pictures of us wearing our matching end-of-Ramadan outfits, which we wore to greet our villagers on their holiday.

We also managed to snap some pictures of our work partners and their families. First, members of our host family cooking up some peanut butter sauce.

 

Second, James and his work partner Rubé out at his sorghum field (left). And Joye’s work partner Dorro drinking tea with friends on his new land (right).

And a family portrait with Dorro, his two wives, and their six children.

Finally, in honor of Joye’s arduous work in study for her Pharmacy College Admissions Test (PCAT), here’s a picture of her preparing. She will take the test on the second day of our visit to America, which is in less than three weeks! Wish her luck!

- James (& Joye)

Pictures: August in Mali pt 1

At the beginning of August, we enjoyed some time in Mali’s capital. (Top left) Joye with President A.T.T.’s house in the background on the hill. (Top right) Jim stands in front of a model-size mud mosque in Bamako’s Botanical Gardens. (Left) We splurged on one of the nicest restaurants in Bamako, found in the Botanical Gardens, Steak with green beans and salmon. Yum!

 

 

 

 

Below: Now that the rains have gotten underway, most villagers are busy in the fields. So we’ve spent a lot of time enjoying the new greenery, fresh air and the somewhat cooler temperatures.

 

   

Above: In the last few weeks, we’ve continued our workshop series in Duguba and taught 33 women and men about the nutritional benefits of Moringa as well as how to plant and care for the tree.

 

Finally, these were just a few moments that made us smile. On the left, a boy wearing a tie but no pants, and on the right, Winnie the Pooh.

Thanks for reading! -Joye

Update: Ramadan at Site

One of the five pillars of the Islamic faith is an annual period of fasting during the month of Ramadan. In fact, the literal translation of Ramadan from Bambara to English is “fasting month.” From sunrise to sunset, adult Muslims will neither eat or drink anything, unless they are pregnant, breastfeeding, or very ill. However, due to discrepancies between the Islamic calendar and the standard 12-month one, the month of Ramadan varies, usually starting a few weeks earlier every year. This year it just so happened to align very closely with the month of August.

In Kongodugu, this was a challenge for many families since August is already a tough month. This was especially true this year because of a persistent drought in June and July, which forced many to re-plant their cotton, corn, sorghum, and millet later in the rainy season. Hence, there was much work to be done farming stunted crops, yet many families were quickly running low on last year’s harvest. Fasting exacerbates the first problem (it’s harder to farm when you are hungry and thirsty), but adapts well with the latter (eating less food). Thus, in our villages, many families appointed a select few to fast, while the rest stayed busy in the fields.

As volunteers, this made for an interesting dynamic. Most of the time we could not find villagers to work with, since they were in the fields, and when we did they were usually fasting and therefore too tired to do anything. So we kept ourselves busy with our garden, radio shows, some short presentations, and laying the groundwork for larger work once the harvest is over. Though there have been moments of torturous boredom as well!

At the end of Ramadan is a three-day period of feasting known here as (literally  translated) “little prayer.” Families stop their farm work in order to rest, drink tea, and eat good food. Market days prior to this holiday are like American shopping malls before Christmas, crammed with people trying to get the best bargain on new clothes, sandals, and toys. We were amazed how our Kongodugu market tripled in size, and were ourselves caught up in the excitement during a visit to a large market some twenty kilometers away.

But for us, the best part of the end of Ramadan was comparing it to our experience last year, when the holiday fell during our first week in Kongodugu. Back then, it was painful; we spent all day greeting people we did not know in a language we did not speak. We felt like intruders eating their nice food and were upset that they separated us for the entire day – James to sit with the men, and Joye to cook with the women.

This year was very different. We spent most the first day with our host family, moving back and forth between the men and the women as we pleased. Moreover, we brought them plenty of fresh vegetables from a distant market to liven up their meal and even shared tea that we bought in Morocco during our vacation last May. Then the next day we walked through the village and greeted at least twenty households and hundreds of people, many of whom were are friends. And while we were tired afterward, it was exhaustion that was accompanied by accomplishment, not defeat, confusion or resentment.

So, though our development efforts have been slow this month, the past few days have been a reminder of how far we have come and how integrated we now are, which in turn gives us hope that our second year in Kongodugu (& Duguba) will be even better than the first.

Thanks for reading and look forward to pictures soon!

-James (& Joye) Allen