Since returning and starting to reflect on our service, a lot of people have asked us, “Was it worth it? Would you do it again? How was it?” Though we believe it was worth it, its always a hard question to answer because, as anyone who read our blog knows, it was a challenging experience that was a lot different than we ever imagined it would be. Indeed, summing up the complexity of our experience and what we’ve learned into any one post or conversation has proved a challenging task. However, just brainstorming made us realize how many interesting competencies we have now that we lacked prior to Peace Corps. So instead of trying summarize everything, we started putting our memories into lists. Here’s a few that we thought you all would enjoy:
Skills we’ve attained in Mali:
- How to eat rice and sauce with our hands and not make a mess
- How to make Urine Fertilizer, Natural Mosquito Repellent, Soap, Improved Nutritious Porridge, Moringa Powder
- How to speak in Bambara and greet in Mianka
- How to live without electricity or plumbing …the key : a quality headlamp
- How to purify unsafe drinking water
- How to poop in a hole and take a bucket bath(these are both acquired skills!)
- How to outrun a rainstorm (though I feel like ‘monsoon’ describes it better)
- How to self-diagnosis and prevent malaria, amoebic cysts, bacterial dysentery, giardia, dehydration, skin infections, and malnutrition
- How to maintain a vegetable garden and compost when it only rains 4 months a year
- How to stay cool in the heat (i.e. wrap yourself in a large wet piece of cloth)
- How to tie a turban and a wrap skirt (pagne)
- How to cook Toh, Rice and peanut sauce, Rice and onion sauce
- How to make flour tortillas by hand and from scratch for amazing quesadillas
- How to plan meals when you have no refrigerator, and access to fresh produce only once/week
- How to kill a Scorpion (James’ weapon of choice: a hammer)
- How to kill a rat roaming through your house (James’ weapon of choice : a wooden club)
- How to smile and tell a mother how beautiful her child is when its peeing all over my brand new clothes.
- How to give an impromptu speech in a foreign language
- How to deal with everyone staring at you….ALWAYS
- How to, as a woman, lead a successful meeting involving 25 village elder men who do not respect women
- How to be a self-starter and work in a totally unstructured environment
- How to do my laundry by hand (and not get made fun of by the locals)
- How to strip a dried fish of its bones in order to get a small amount of protein in your diet
- How to transport myself + 100 lbs of luggage over 7 km using only a mountain bike
- How to appreciate, SO MUCH, the importance of what I used to label “boring” topics like malnutrition and maternal health
- How to bargain like a local (i.e. telling the vendor he eats beans in multiple scenarios)
- How to build a mud-oven, albeit a bad one
- How to identify at least 20 varieties of African trees
- How to pull down a ripe mango that is 40 ft in the air, and then cook and can mango jam
- How to build a school out of mud (using only string, a measuring tape, and an old notebook as a straight edge)
- How to plant trees without rain
- How to kill, pluck, and clean a chicken
- How to position rocks on your roof so it doesn’t blow away in a rain storm
Things Jim has transported on the back of his bike: at one time and over 5 km
- 25 meters of metal fencing
- 2 live bunny rabbits in a cardboard box
- 1 full propane tank (100 lbs)
- a huge green suitcase (think of the largest luggage that you can check on a plane)
- 3 flat-rate postal boxes full of American food
- A 6-foot shovel
- A pumpkin
- Countless bags of clothes
- A 5-foot diameter bundle of thorns
- A 13-year old-boy acting as a guide
- A freshly butchered leg of lamb (ok….this one was only 1 km, but it was memorable!)
Proudest Accomplishments
- Learning a new language
- Completing 56 Radio Shows about Health, Agriculture, and Education
- Biking 40 km roundtrip just to buy some lettuce so that we could make BLTs with the bacon my mom sent
- Promotion of the 3 Malian food groups, training women to make healthier food for their families, and watching the health of a few children improve
- Growing Sweet Corn during Hot Season and presenting it to a very surprised village chief
- Advocating successfully for the superintendent to send high school teachers to Kongodugu
- Watching our village unite around the idea that they had power to improve their own schools, and subsequently build 3 mudbrick classrooms with only some help from Peace Corps
- James’ sustainable collaboration with his work partner : the fact that he continued the tree-planting project, distributing 2000 trees to 10 villages, without him is just so exciting.
- When our neighbor said “You guys are different, you two are married AND you’re friends. If I get a wife, I’d like her also to be my friend.”
- Baking Applecrisp in a mud oven for James’ 24th birthday.
- Getting everyone in Kongodugu to refer to us as “American” instead of “Toubab”.
- Re-writing the “Ant and the Grasshopper” fable into “The Bee and the Wasp” and broadcasting it to a Malian audience (with rave reviews in return) in order to promote the values of an independent work ethic over dependence on hand-outs.
Certainly these are the more positive lists, and those of you who have spoken to us know that we faced quite a few disappointments and challenges while in Mali that are not reflected here. However, with God’s help and the prayers of our family and friends, we do feel that our experience was very positive and taught us so much about development (…more on that later!).
Thanks for reading!
~Joye (& James)
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