Homestay part 2, and SITE announcements!

WOOT WHOOOO! Passed the one month date! I’m feeling pretty accomplished now… and significantly less of a silent mute. Not a lot but I have gotten really awesome at the smile, head shake and “mi famay” (I don’t understand). So, an update since the last post… I went back to my home stay site (Niamana, a village of about 3,000, just outside of Bamako) and went back to the daily grind of 6-8 hours of language classes and field trips for various health-related activities and back to my host family at night to sit, watch and occasionally mumble a few somewhat comprehensible words. My family has stopped feeding me toh every  night, which I can’t say I am sorry about, but they still prepare it for themselves so I have become the sifter. To make toh, you have to grind up the millet into a powder and sift the whole thing so you don’t have any big particles. Apparently I have gotten the sifting down so even though I now eat beans (black eyed ) every night for dinner (bought from a man not too far away), I do a lot of millet sifting.

Health Training: Some of the health field trips have been super interesting. We painted a mural on the wall of the nygere (toilet/ hole in the ground/ bathroom)of a school. I think it turned out pretty well; it was a community health message that people should wash their hands with soap, before cooking, before eating and after using the nygere (because somehow people haven’t quite put it together that using your left hand in the nygere and eating with your right might not be a fool proof way to avoid certain illnesses... That and the fly issue… When your hole is left uncovered, or the bathroom is just in the field… flies swarm, right? Well they swarm there and then they also swarm around food… without washing their feet in between… if you catch my drift.

We also had a baby weighing session at the maternity in my village where we weighed 35 babies in a morning (pretty successful with only three babies in the red zone – malnourished). The following day we invited the women back to the maternity where we cooked a gigantic pot of ameliorated porridge comprised of ground millet, ground rice, ground corn, ground peanuts, sugar, salt and limes for the women and their babies to eat.

Okay… the big one…: SITE ANNOUNCEMENTS! We got picked up from homestay sites on Wednesday and found out our sites! I will be going to Kouna, south east of the city of Mopti. Apparently its population is about 3,000 and I will be working at a CSCOM (Community clinic) promoting maternal and child health and nutrition education and I guess there is a woman’s association that wants to garden! I’m really really excited about this prospect.

In addition, our homologues (Malian counterparts at our site) came into Tubaniso yesterday and this morning I met mine! I seem to have the good fortune to be matched up with another extremely old man (probably the same age as my host father… which is pretty old.) He is a relay in Kouna, acting like a health education contact in the village… I’m still a  bit unclear about the job of relays because I know they are unpaid volunteers. His name is Mama Nerakoumana and has one wife and five kids. In terms of appearance, he is about as Fulani as they get (or so I imagine) and while I think he has a few inches on me and more than a few years on me, he is almost certainly lighter than I am.

My village is 38km from my banking town, Severay, and a 12 km bike ride to the main road where there is a daily market. I guess Kouna has a market only on Saturdays. Which should be interesting.

Plan: I’ll stay at Tubaniso until Sunday morning then take public transportation the 675km northeast to Mopti with my homologu, the other volunteers in the region and their homologues, oh, and my BIKE. I expect to come home super buff from tossing my trek mountain bike up on the tops of buses for long and hot and probably unpleasant bus trips. Pretty nervous and also really excited to go to site! I’ll stay there a couple days, meet the dugutiki (village chief, also my new host family) and meet people in the community then I have to be back at Tubaniso by Saturday for another couple days and then back to homestay (Niamana this time) for two more weeks of language training until swear in (when we become actual volunteers instead of mere trainees)… Hopefully I’ll be able to post on my site in about a week! Fingers crossed!

Weather… So I thought I was done… but I can’t end without making a note of how hot it’s getting. I now bathe 2 times a day if you don’t count the bath in my own sweat every night.

Skype name: susiev9