First Week in Edinburgh

Edinburgh is a city of dual natures. It has aristocrats and highlanders; laborers and intellectuals; criminals and religious reformers. These dichotomies are even apparent in the city’s design. Edinburgh’s Old Town grew on the slope around its namesake battlement for nearly 1,000 years; in the 1600s, desperate for protection within the city walls, its people crammed together, built narrow cobblestone streets, and lived in some of tallest stone dwellings in the world. Then around 1800, Edinburgh’s New Town was designed and built with wide streets and luxurious housing—one of the best planned cities in the world. Today, both Old Town and New Town are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and both towns are Edinburgh. It is not surprising then that Edinburgh-author Robert Lewis Stevenson’s most famous character is the two-faced Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde.

This makes Edinburgh a fascinating place. With Joye at work, I have had an excuse to tour around and see some of Edinburgh’s less popular sites. In museums I have learned about Edinburgh’s history, its famous poets and authors, and even visited the gravestone of Adam Smith, “father of economics” and just one of many academics who defined the Scottish Enlightenment. Together, Joye and I went to a public lecture on evidence-based public policy that was hosted in the basement of a haunted pub.

Here are some of my favorite pictures from the last week in Edinburgh:

Update: Welcome to Edinburgh

Hello Everyone,

We've decided to continue our blog to share about our experience in Edinburgh this summer. Joye is just starting a 6 week pharmacy rotation with the National Health Services and James is tagging along, doing research and working on writing and publishing manuscripts while we are here.

Today was our first day! We arrived at 8 am to cloudy, drizzling weather, exhausted and ready for bed. However, we knew we had to stay up to get over jet lag. So after a quick nap, we went out and explored our new city! The sun came out and it really was the perfect weather. We walked past the Edinburgh Castle, saw the cafe where Harry Potter was written, and walked to Hollyrood Park where we hiked up a rock outcropping and had a beautiful view of the city. On our way back, we strolled down the Royal Mile and ended up enjoying a free concert in St. Giles Cathedral.

Update: Back and Forth, Twice.

In the past two months, we have driven from Kentucky to Michigan and back, twice, and all for very different reasons. Searching for an apartment, writing a thesis, moving, and vacationing have kept us too busy to write a blog… until now.

KENTUCKY: We mentioned in our last post that we spent a few weeks in Kentucky in May, house-sitting for some friends while finding an apartment of our own. What we did not mention was that I also had the privilege of going to Washington DC to speak at a Peace Corps sponsored kick-off event for a global partnership between USAID and Peace Corps focused on food security. Speaking on a panel to a crowd of a few hundred Peace Corps employees and other public officials, I shared some highlights of the food security work we were doing in Mali, including our task force. In addition to reconnecting with my former supervisors from Peace Corps Mali, I also met many international development professionals, including Peace Corps Director Aaron Williams (left in first picture) , who surprised me by telling me that he used to be a Peace Corps recruiter at Alma College, our undergraduate alma mater.

MICHIGAN: We then drove north, and I then spent the next two weeks subletting a room near Michigan State in order to work on my Master’s thesis. Naively, I’d hoped to finish it, but I didn’t even write a word. Instead, I spent the time meeting with professors, reading dozens of academic papers, and changing my thesis topic every other day. It was miserable, but my last day there we came up with an idea that is new, relevant, and feasible. Maybe another day, I’ll write a blog about what my thesis is about… but I’ll skip it for now.

KENTUCKY: On our next trip south involved a rental truck full with everything we owned, which was only a small storage unit worth of cardboard boxes. We moved into our apartment and discovered quickly that about half of these boxes were college textbooks, and that it did not include any furniture. So while Joye prepared for pharmacy school and I wrote my thesis, we also procured a mattress (our first with box springs), couch, television, and dining table (no chairs yet). While all this was accomplished during a heat wave, at least we got to enjoy the beautiful lawn outside our apartment window and a little creek nearby.

MICHIGAN: To beat the heat, we then travelled to northern Michigan to spend the 4th of July in my hometown of Harbor Springs, a coastal community on the shore of Lake Michigan with a population that quintuples every Independence Day with a crowd wearing khaki shorts and polo shirts. When we weren’t relaxing at the beach, we helped my folks clean out the house as they too are moving. As it was probably the last time we will visit Harbor Springs for a while, it was nostalgic week, but one that was filled with plenty of new memories.

KENTUCKY: And finally, we returned to our apartment in Kentucky today - already it feels like home. The next chapter of our life is set to begin. I will be officially starting work at the University of Kentucky next Monday as a research economist, and Joye begins classes next month. Soon we will start speaking with a drawl. While this will be very different than how we were living only a few months ago, it is a welcome change, and after so much travelling we are excited for some routine – though who knows how long that will last.

I hope this catches us up. Thanks for reading.

-James (& Joye)

Reflection: The List Blog

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)

Travel: Istanbul, Turkey

As many of you know, our original close of service date was June 23rd, but was moved up when we were unexpectedly evacuated due to a military coup. It was a stressful and emotional time, as we traveled to Ghana for a post-evacuation transition conference, and tried to figure out logistics like travel plans and where we were going to live and work once we arrived back in the States.  We were exhausted at the thought of planning a vacation on top of everything else we were going through, but we did a little research and decided that we just couldn’t pass up the inexpensive tickets from Accra to Istanbul. James, who had interned for a semester in Rome, had always dreamed of visiting Istanbul, which, like Rome, has visible layers of history. Hence, it was decided: 3 days in Istanbul, then home.

Because, Istanbul has been conquered by different empires throughout history, it is a city of 3 names : Istanbul, Constantinople, and Byzantium. Therefore, it is an amalgamation of cultures and history. We visited the Hagia Sophia, which was the largest building in the world for 1000 years. It was built as a church and later turned into a mosque by the Ottomans, so it has this strange blend of Christian and Islamic art throughout its interior.

The architecture in the city was unbelievable. We visited the underground cisterns which, admittedly, reminded us of the Mines of Moria from Lord of the Rings and the famous Blue Mosque. We also climbed the Galata Tower for a great view of the Bosphorus, the river which divides the city. Istanbul is an extremely modern western city with McDonalds, Burger King, and Starbucks all very easy to find. For American friends looking to try out an exotic vacation spot, but worried about choosing something too out of their comfort zone, we highly recommend Istanbul.

One of the most amazing thing about Istanbul, Turkey is that it sits right at the crossroads between Europe and Asia, literally. One side of the river is Europe, and the other side is Asia! As we toured the Topkapi Palace, home to the Ottomans, we were amazed that the treasures and artifacts on display rivaled those of the Louvre. Simply by being in the middle of the two continents, they had treasures from China and  Hungry to Saudi Arabia and England. If you do go, don’t miss out on the jewels and the armory—Amazing.

 

The food was also absolutely delicious, and extremely inexpensive in US standards ($2-4 for a sandwich). The streets smelled of kebabs and everywhere you looked, they were selling Turkish Delight and Baklava. One evening, we treated ourselves to moussakas, fresh hummus, and Anatolian chicken. mmmmmh…. When we weren’t trying the delicious Turkish cuisine, we were often wandering the Grand Bazaar, shopping for souvenirs. We found that speaking Bambara was the perfect way to stump vendors who wanted to hassle us to buy their wares. We would simply speak to each other in Bambara and to the vendor in broken English so they never had any idea we were American or interested in buying anything in their store. It worked great as a bargaining tool, but more importantly allowed us to relax a bit and have fun instead of getting frustrated with the overzealous bargaining. One vendor said, “Oh, I see, you’re Scottish!” haha!

Lastly, we enjoyed wandering the spice markets where the smell of curry, saffron, cumin, and many other spices permeate the air.  Warning: just like the supermarket, don’t go there hungry! (Below Right) We also made sure to take a boat trip and visit Asia for a few minutes.

  

After, returning to the US, we couldn’t believe we had been on 4 continents in one week! But it was certainly worth the effort. We really enjoyed our trip and look forward to visiting the rest of Turkey in the future :)

~Joye (and James)

Update: So What Now?

Last we heard from our intrepid Peace Corps Volunteers, they had just completed their service and were awfully sad about leaving Mali in such an unexpected and unfortunate way. If this were a blog solely about our Peace Corps service, then this would have been the logical, albeit tragic, ending. But even though we have left Africa, life is still proving to be an adventure.

Joye and I have been back in the States for almost a month now, after making a detour on our route home in Istanbul, Turkey (a travel blog on that later). We arrived on a low profile – no Facebook status updates – because we wanted to surprise my brother Ric for his graduation from Alma College. We had told him that we would travel Turkey for a while, and then maybe return to Africa, so he was pleasantly surprised to see us at a reception at President Abernathy’s house. And since Alma College is also our alma mater, we were able to meet and greet with many friends and professors, many of whom followed this blog. Most asked us an obvious question: so what now?

Happy Graduation!

Unlike many volunteers who were evacuated with us, we were already developing a plan for after Peace Corps; after all, we only had a few more months to serve. Avid readers may recall that Joye had interviewed with three pharmacy schools during our brief visit last October. After getting accepted at those schools and two more who interviewed her via Skype, she decided on the PharmD program at University of Kentucky in Lexington; a top-tier school with a dual-degree option for a Master’s in Public Health. The fact that we thought  my job prospects were best there also heavily influenced her decision.

After only a week of being back Stateside, we were bestowed with two major blessings. First, I was offered a job as a research economist for CEDIK (Community and Economic Development Initiative of Kentucky), housed in the University of Kentucky’s agricultural economics department, only a ten-minute walk from the pharmacy school. I been communicating with the department since Joye’s interview there and had applied to the position in early March, but the timing worked out perfectly. I plan on starting in July, hopefully after finishing 95% of my Master’s thesis at Michigan State University.

The second blessing was a house-sitting gig down in Lexington, arranged with the help of a fellow volunteer from Mali, which is giving us two weeks to set up shop. Since then, life has been a stressful and inconsistent whirlwind; we still seem to be living out of a suitcase. We stayed for a week with Joye’s family, then for another week with my family (who are moving themselves), before coming down to Lexington, Kentucky – bluegrass, bourbon, and horse capitol of the world. We have almost secured an apartment, almost secured Kentucky driver’s licenses, and have familiarized ourselves with the area. We even took the time to go see the 25th Anniversary production of “Les Miserables” in Cincinnati!

 

So now that we’re poised to become Kentuckians, are we definitively dismissing Mali? Absolutely not. We have called our work partners Dorro and Rube a few times since returning just to check up on things. Both Kongodugu and Dububa are safe and remain untouched by the horrific events in Mali’s north or in Bamako; one advantage to living in the middle of nowhere. Also, both of our projects are almost finished. Joye’s mud-brick school is near completion after the head mason was delayed with a bout of malaria, and Rube has overseen the distribution of over half of the trees and is waiting until June for the rest to mature. But they miss us, and we miss them, and we even miss their food, which is something I didn’t expect. Indeed, Mali has secured a place in our hearts, and we’ll see if our adventures ever bring us back there one day.

But for now, it’s on to Lexington. Thanks for reading.

-James (& Joye)

Pictures: Saying Goodbye

As I walked around our village a few weeks ago, I tried to explain to my Malian friends and neighbors that if the security situation in Mali worsened, Peace Corps could send us back to the States with very little notice. They all laughed and smiled and rapidly assured me that Mali had already returned to a state of peace. “Achata, stop worrying so much!”  Never being ones to turn down the opportunity for a free photo, many of our friends readily agreed to pose,  even though, they assured me, I could wait and take their picture another day when they were wearing better clothes. As it turned out, I found out a few hours later that I needed to pack my bags for consolidation in a  larger town, and a few hours after that that we were being evacuated from Mali. Therefore, I feel so blessed to have been given the opportunity to photograph my friends and document my last moments with these villagers.

 

 

(Above) Before we knew we were leaving, Joye distributed and some French visual aids made by high school students from Deerfield, IL and Jim harvested a couple thousand Moringa seeds for distribution to the village.

 

(Above Left) Soulemanye, our young village chief, and a main partner in all our work in Kongodugu. (Above Right) Most of Kongodugu practices Animism. Though we missed the ceremony the previous day where they had sacrificed chickens for the coming rainy season, villagers insisted I get a picture of the elders in their ceremonial outfits.

   

Luckily, all our favorite people were hanging out in the village center, which made taking their picture easy! (Above Left) Some village elders hang out at Brahama’s (the carpenter/literacy teacher) workshop (Above Right) Joye’s counterpart Dorro gets his motorcycle fixed by Shila, the head of the maternity committee  (Bottom Left) Jamshe, who helped Joye with health lessons at the literacy center, poses next to a butcher stand.

(Above Left) Our host mothers dig in to a classic meal of corn toh and red fish sauce (Above Right) Joye stands with her counterpart Dorro and the school project head mason Karim in front of the newly built school. As you can see, the cement was still drying! (Lower Left) Joye holds her best friend Nana’s newborn daughter Rebecca (Lower Right) Joye standing behind the almost finished school. When we left, they had only the cement floor to lay, and by now, its complete!

 

~Joye and James