Fanta, Fanta, Fanta Soiree

    Wellllll I’ve made it successfully through my first 2 weeks with my home stay family – and its certainly been an experience!  There is an amazing amount of adjustment to be made from America to the villages – large or small – here in Mali.  Life here is incredibly different which brings with it a fair share of challenges and respites.  Lets start first with my new name – Fanta (yes, like the orange soda) Sacko!!  I quite love it.  My family is the Sacko family and they are great :)  I have 2 new brothers and 7 new sisters, a ma and a pa (ba and fa in Bambara).  The neighbors in my village are incredibly friendly – almost ad nauseum at times!!  My typical day goes a little something like this:

• 4:30am – first alarm in the form of the ‘call to prayer’ over the loud speaker in the town
• 5:30am – if not still awake from the first call due to donkey or rooster calls – 2nd call to prayer
• 6:50am - real alarm to get up to go to the nyegen (bathroom) for my cold water bucket bath
• 7:40am – Breakfast in the courtyard normally consisting of a baguette and eggs with the occasional addition of french fries or black eyed peas and sugar tea 
• 8:00am – Bambara class with my Language and Culture Facilitator (LCF), Faty, and 3 other Peace Corps Trainees (PCTs) outside with a standup blackboard
• 12:00pm – walk back to the house for study/nap/lounging and lunch
• 2:00pm – back to school for a few more hours of language or cultural discussion
• 5:00-5:30pm – walk home – greeting each and every person I pass with ‘hello, how are you, how is your family, how is your mother, how is your father, how is your husband/wife, how are your children,’ and the same in return - whew
• 5:30pm- bed time - reading, studying, trying/failing to talk to my family and laughing at the chickens, donkeys, goats, sheep and children strolling seemingly endlessly through the courtyard – dinner is around 9ish most days.

To fill in some of the specific challenges – the food and the heat are the hardest to deal with.  Meals are eaten out of communal bowls with your right hand only – this is a skill, I’ve come to find, that most Americans don’t naturally have – and you mix the sauce with either the rice or millet or cous cous that is underneath it.  You have one specific section of the bowl that is technically yours, but the meat/veggies put in the middle are for everyone to share and you use each other to break apart the pieces (i.e. one person holds the bone while you pull the meat off of it) – as you can imagine I am still struggling with this aspect!  I have actually eaten meat mayyyybe twice since I’ve been here (although there are fish and fish eyes in all the sauces I eat).  One morning as I was eating breakfast I noticed a chicken tied to my father’s chair and he smiled at me and told me it would be killed in a few minutes for me to eat – oh joy! 

The first night in home stay I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it though the night because I thought I might sweat to death!  It’s gotten better since then because I just keep my door open all night –except for the rainy nights because then I wake up to puddles in my room that will inevitably breed mosquitoes – I currently have about 15 bites on my bum – likely from the outdoor toilets (which are a whole other issue)! 

The wonderful things have been the night skies here in Mali, the laughs I have had over and over again with my family with which I don’t share a common language, the informal ways we teach each other (they are learning how to shuffle a deck of cards and I am learning their crazy 8’s card game), the bike rides, the cultural exchange with my LCF Faty since she is amazing, the rock climbing, the genuine smiles, the reality of it all –which can sometimes be good and bad, and getting to share it with all these new people who are going through the exact same things I am.  The next few weeks will likely go by quickly, then swear in, and then real site – which will certainly come with a whole new host of challenges!  Until next time we return for our 3 day respite at Tubaniso (where I am currently with half our stage of volunteers) miss you all and let me know how you are doing and if there are questions you have that you would like to know more about :)

I Ni Su (GoOd EvEnInG)

    Its been a whirlwind of a few days.  It is incredibly humid and hot here, I don’t think I’ve ever sweat so much in my life and its only the beginning!  Life here is so incredibly different I am not even sure how to describe it all.  We are currently ‘Tubabs’ or foreigners so we can get away with lots of faux pas for now.  These early days feel more like intense wilderness summer camp than what the coming days will most certainly feel like.  Time is spent in trainings and laughing over meals with the rest of the trainees about dropping soap down the hole we go to the bathroom in –since we shower and defecate in the same small mud room – or that as women we cannot whistle or we will be seen as ‘women of the night’. 

    We started language training today in Bambara and it is VERY difficult.  It doesn’t translate well so it makes it difficult to visualize (i.e. the title of this blog translates to ‘you and night’) but it’s going to be really cool to learn.  Beyond that we are getting training on how to treat our water at site, ensure our food is safe to eat, how to culturally engage, and how to fix our brand spankin’ new Trek bikes – so father I will be fully capable of maintaining my mountain bike when I return to the states so don’t ruin while I’m gone ;). 

    Us trainees are starting to form bonds with each other which is fantastic, but its also hard knowing we just are starting these relationships and we will be splitting up so soon!  They are dividing us into 2 groups for the next 9 weeks so after Friday I won’t be seeing half the people until Volunteer Swear In :( I am definitely one of the older volunteers, but there are a group of us bonding over having some experience in the real world after college.  It will certainly be good to know I have people to call here to keep me in it through the rough patches. 

   Its looking like its going to be much harder to connect to the internet etc than I thought it would be when I first got here so Skype etc is going to be hard to pull off for a while.  We move to home stays on Friday where we will be living with Malian families and adjusting to their customs while we still have the sounding board of our Language and Culture Facilitators and the other volunteers.  The food is going to be a challenge for me, as expected.  The food is pretty good for now – lots of rice and beans (carb overload) but I haven’t eaten much of any meat yet, but lots o bananas :) 

Okay I will update when I can!

Here in Africa

I’m here!  It was perhaps the longest day of travel imaginable, but we made it – all 80 of us, minus 2 bags (thankfully not mine) – and are trying to get settled. Thankfully I was able to sleep on both planes and watched Invictus and Men Who Stare at Goats.  We got assigned to huts when we got here at 12:30am on Saturday.  They have us three to a hut/cement block which is a bit scrunched but we are making it work.  The compound is in Tubaniso (Tube-ahn-E-soh) which is about 40 minutes by car/bus outside of Bamako (Bomb-ah-koh) which is the capital of Mali.

I’m in the cafeteria area which has internet access but it is slow because we are all trying to get on at the same exact time!  We started training but have mainly been given the policies and rules and I think we are all anxious to get started with the cultural and especially language training.  It sounds like the majority of volunteers will be using Bambara but I will more than likely be getting French since I will be working with the school systems here.  I will keep updates flowing when I can though :)  We have 3 more days at Tubaniso and then they will be moving us into home stays around the area (no more than 30-45 minutes away).  

We got to celebrate the fourth a bit today with other American’s from Bamako, so that was nice.  I am most excited for tomorrow though because we get to start the real training, have our interviews about site and health, and get our bikes :)  We started our Malaria meds today so hopefully I don’t wake up with crazy vivid dreams!  I got the one that I have to take weekly so I am glad about that – I won’t have to take it every day like some of the other volunteers.  My computer is going to run out of steam here since I have yet to find my converter in all the craziness!  I’ll update more again soon.