My Parent's Visit (2 of 2)

In Mali, as in most sub-Saharan African countries, the human being is more important than anything. When people meet, hands are shaken and held while talking to the person in front of you. A long string of life-giving greetings, wishes, questions and answers follow. They ask about health—our own, our respective fathers', mothers', families', villages' and even questions about the health of the United States. Wishes for a long life and many children and that Allah might be with us and protect us, guide us and allow us to live another day are exchanged. Billy is an expert at these customary greetings.

The Malians have the marvelous tradition of giving the foreigners they host native names. In this way, it is easy to enter this rich society that asks nothing more than to be discovered. It is an honor for them for a foreigner to have a Malian name. Billy’s original host family during his training gave Billy his name; Younoussa Samake . Billy’s host father gave Bill his first name; Mamadou and he gave me the first name Fanta. Later in our trip a tailor in the market in Kenieba gave Bill the same last name as Billy and gave me the last name Sy, since women are still called by their maiden names even after they are married. Yes, that means my Malian name is Fanta Sy.

The soil in Africa is clay that has been enriched with Iron and aluminum that has been developed over long periods of time by the heavy rainfalls and the intense heat. Sometimes the material is rock hard but when scuffed by vehicle wheels it becomes a choking red dust. The iron is the origin of the red color. The red dust is everywhere in Kenieba. It is a never-ending battle trying to keep the dust out of your things. It covers your house and the contents of your house and covers your body daily. It reminded me of the character Pig Pen in the Peanuts cartoons. You feel like you have a dust cloud surrounding you most of the time. Pig Pen referred to the cloud that surrounds him with pride as the dust of ancient civilizations. That is exactly how I felt.

Growing up my mother used to tell me not to eat with my hands. In Mali they only eat with their hands. They have a communal bowl and everyone uses their hands to scoop the food into their mouth. You only use your right hand; the left one is used strictly for personal hygiene. The food is usually rice and sauce and some sort or meat, fish and/or vegetable in the center. A particular favorite of mine was Yassa Chicken. It is chicken with a lemon onion sauce. After a meal they enjoy a small cup of very strong sweet tea. You see them everywhere in Mali, groups of men and boys grouped around a tiny kettle over a small fire stove brewing ataaya, a bittersweet strong tea that has a lot of sugar in it. It is a social ritual and it takes hours to brew the tea. It is served in small glasses. There is a froth that forms on the top of the tea. I found it too sweet and potent for my taste.

As you travel through Mali you notice that children, garbage, cattle, sheep, goats, dogs, abandoned old cars and motorcycles are everywhere. Sadly, the garbage is thrown on the streets and in the streams. A very small percentage of rubbish in Africa (approximately 10 percent) makes it to dumps, with the rest left to rot in communities or burned in acrid bonfires. Plastic bags are truly the environmental scourge of the developing world. It is unbelievable how many landscapes have been trashed throughout Africa. Especially in nations that are more developed and thus can afford to throw out their plastic bags rather than re-use them. Along the garbage ridden streets there are often children playing, standing or walking. To my eye many of the children seem way too young to be out on the street unattended. Family sizes are very large, often there is extended family living in the same house. The young and old live together in the same household. One reason that women give birth to many offspring is because the infant mortality rate. More than one in ten babies will die. Many women understand the prevalence of infant mortality and give birth to many children, an average of 7 per Malian woman. It seems like most women had a baby on their back or a child at their side.

While we were in Africa Sargent Shriver died at the age of 95. Sargent Shriver, the first director of the Peace Corps, was an inspiring figure who had a unique perspective on the world, getting to travel to so many remote places and inspiring young Americans to give up two years of their lives to live in these corners of the world. Thanks to his great leadership the US Peace Corps is a viable and sustainable organization. Billy has had an excellent experience as a PCV in Mali. He is learning to live outside his comfort zone and appreciate the mundane and simple things in life. He is committed to the mission of the Peace Corps which is to promote world peace and friendship. Through his work with the Shea Butter Women’s cooperative, the Women’s Investment club, the school gardening project and his daily interactions with the many vendors and native people, he is providing opportunities to people to make the world a better place to live. He is realizing that it’s not what you get out of life that counts, it's what you give and what is given to you from the heart. It was great to have the opportunity to venture beyond the more typical African tourist routes. People know a lot about South Africa and the African safari. But Africa is a very diverse continent. Our journey to West Africa showed us a slice of the “real Africa”, Billy’s home away from home for two years. We miss him very much but we are extremely proud of him and his dedication to making the world a better place to live and promoting world peace and harmony.

My Parent's Visit (1 of 2)

The following is the first of two posts about my parents' visit to Dakar and Kenieba, written by my mom. Enjoy!

Visit to West Africa, January 2011, to visit Billy, PCV in Kenieba, Mali

By Nancy Budd

Mali, the largest country in West Africa, is bordered by seven other states: Algeria lies to the north and northeast, Niger to the east, Burkina Faso to the southeast and the Ivory Coast, to the south. To the west are Senegal and Mauritania. We flew into Dakar, Senegal and spent a few days there. After exploring Dakar and visiting Gorée Island and the city markets we hired a driver to take us across Senegal. These photos are from our visit to Gorée Island.

It took a day and a half to make it to the border of Mali. We crossed the Falemé river from Senegal to Mali in a small dug out wooden boat.

Although Mali is today one of the poorest countries in the world it is known as a jewel in the crown of West Africa; it is culturally and historically rich, but economically poor. We were warmly welcomed, but I was surprised by the "Third World" infrastructure and conditions in the smaller towns.

Our introduction to the people of Kenieba started with Billy’s host family. They were amazing. Doh, Billy’s host father works at the gold mine and comes home every few weeks. We were able to visit him in the village at the mine.

Zakariyah, Billy host brother, is 12 and is very attached to Billy. He is a very smart young man who is curious and eager to learn. Billy is teaching him English and keyboarding. Zak loves to “hang out at Younoussa’s house”.

Tenin, Billy’s host sister, was very gracious and particularly enjoyed watching Bill try to eat with his hands. Mariam, best friends of Billy’s host family, is the mother figure who cooks and provides a stable home. Her son Levieux is a precocious and adorable four year old who loves to play the drum and smile. Here is a picture of Zak, Tenin and Levieux on the front porch of their house.

Unfortunately Billy’s host mom died in childbirth just weeks before we arrived. We were very sad that we did not get the chance to meet her; Billy could not say enough wonderful things about her. Billy’s PCV house is next door to his host family’s home. It is much larger than I thought it was going to be and he seems to have what he needs to live.

There are no toilets or running water. His African toilet (the photo above) is a hole in the ground with two cinderblocks and his “shower” is a bucket with water that he has heated on his gas burner and a cup to throw the water over his head. He does have a satellite dish that the Peace Corps installed a few weeks ago. I call it ET, so he can phone home.

To me, the best adjective that describes Kenieba is colorful. It was one of the most colorful places I have ever visited, full of wonderful people, great varieties of cultures and languages, and strong traditions of art and music. The streets are filled with people in shimmering embroidered colorful garments. The flowing robes or grand boubou of the men and the long wraparound skirt or boubou and matching headscarf of the women make quite an impression. Most women carry things on their head and a baby on their back. The babies are carried piggyback style then wrapped in a cloth that is pulled around their mother’s body and knotted around her front. It creates a snug sling like seat for the child. From the front you can only see the child’s feet sticking out from its mothers sides.

We found music everywhere we went in Mali. The Sikoloton Shea Butter cooperative that Billy is working with gave us a festival with hours of singing, dancing, and playing traditional instruments. The women and the school children danced to the drummer’s music in their beautiful colored outfits. It was a site to behold. As with most celebrations some animal must give if its life, it was a sheep in this case. The sheep was presented to us as a gift and then taken, slaughtered and cooked for our lunch.

September Musings

After the trainees officially became Peace Corps volunteers at the beginning of September, I helped the new Kayes region volunteers buy stuff for their houses. I helped them navigate the labyrinth of the Kayes market and bargained for mattresses, kitchen supplies and other big items. It really put things into perspective realizing that I was in the new volunteers’ shoes this time last year, with everything being so new and foreign. Now that I’m so used to bargaining for just about everything I buy, it’ll be hard to transition back to shopping in stores when I get back to the states!

The new Kenieba volunteer and I headed down with Peace Corps transport for installation. It was a relatively quick trip down the long dirt road in the Peace Corps car, but the road was basically all mud since it was the middle of rainy season. The new PCV has been off to a great start, bonding with her host family and meeting her neighbors and potential work partners. She’s also working really hard to learn the language spoken in Kenieba, a mix of Bambara and Malinké. Both she and I learned Bambara during pre-service training, but it’s hard to keep using Bambara since it’s not the language spoken here. The structure is the same as Malinké but most words are pronounced differently. People can understand us when we speak Bambara, but they will respond to us in Malinké or the hybrid Kenieba language. It’s definitely not the easiest way to learn a new language! I’ve picked up key phrases in the time I’ve lived in Kenieba and can have basic conversations, but usually I resort to communicating with the men and some literate women using French.

There have been some issues with the new volunteer’s house, mainly the bats who moved in and don’t want to leave. Nobody lived in the house since June, so the bats made themselves at home. And they really are a nuisance, flying around inside and making noise in the middle of the night. A carpenter spent all day on the roof, closing up all the holes and making lots of noise which we thought would get the bats out. After the carpenter’s attempts were unsuccessful, a boy came in and killed some of the remaining bats. But there were still a few stubborn bats that just wouldn’t leave. Though it’s taken a while to persuade him, the landlord agreed to install wooden paneling to create a lowered ceiling. Right now, there is no ceiling, just the metal roof. Once the paneling is installed the bats may still get in, but they won’t be nearly as annoying if there’s a wooden barrier between them and the PCV!

The end of Ramadan was in the middle of September, and there was a big feast and sense of relief after having fasted during every day for 28 days in a row. I noticed this year that people who had fasted, the healthy adults, were noticeably thinner and weaker by the end of Ramadan. I can’t imagine that it can be healthy to fast every day for a month, but it is an important part of the Muslim religion.

Not much happened workwise in September outside of the usual chatting with artisans and other entrepreneurs in town. When I was in Bamako I bought plastic containers for the women to sell their shea butter in. We worked together on pricing and selling strategies for the 45 containers of butter. We decided that I had been keeping track of how much the women were spending each time they made shea butter, things like soap to wash the basins, the fee to use the grinder that turns the nuts into a paste, and firewood to heat the shea butter. We came to a consensus on how much to charge, which gave them a good profit on each container sold. It is more than traditional shea butter is sold for in Kenieba, but we all agreed that since this butter is high-quality, the higher price would be justified.

Shea Butter Formation

I was very busy during the last few weeks in Kenieba, preparing for, organizing and running a shea butter formation for thirty-six women that took place on May 12, 13 and 14. (Quick French lesson… training = formation, female trainer = formatrice). My funding proposal was approved in mid-April and the money arrived in my account soon after. When I returned to Kenieba at the beginning of May, I met with the women’s association who worked with me to host the formation. There was still a lot of work to do, from buying the materials that were needed at the training, to planning food and drink needs, and making sure the women would contribute some of the necessary supplies. When I mentioned to my friends around town that I was holding this formation, they suggested that I invite women from rural villages to come. That was logical because the shea trees (where shea nuts come from to turn into shea butter) are all out in rural areas, and women in Kenieba will not be as interested in making shea butter because they have other things to do in a big town. So I handwrote four invitations that were delivered to four villages around Kenieba.

All of the preparations seemed to be going smoothly, as the funds had arrived in my account 10 days before the formation was scheduled to begin and the women who were helping me prepare completed the things I had asked them to do. I should have been more suspicious when everything was going so well, because two days before the trainer was scheduled to leave Bamako to come here, I received a call that the formatrice would not be coming out to Kenieba for the formation. She needed to fill in for another trainer at a shea butter formation near Bamako. I was shocked to hear that only four days before the training was to begin, I wouldn’t have a trainer to run the training! A miscommunication resulted in the formatrice thinking that the dates of my training had not been set, so she thought she could hold the training a few weeks later. I had already bought most of the supplies and sent out invitations to four villages, and booked a flight to Europe the last week in May, so postponing the formation by a few weeks was out of the question.

After a stressful 24 hours of trying to decide if I should cancel the training, hold a “conference” where the women could at least come together and discuss their experiences with shea butter, or maybe try to run a basic training myself, I received a call that someone could still come out to Kenieba to hold the training, but the formation had to be pushed back by a few days to accommodate her. Though I was relieved that the training was going to happen, I frantically tried to get the message about the changed dates out to the women in the rural villages, hoping they wouldn’t have to sit around doing nothing for two days! In the end, four of the women did come early, but they didn't mind sitting around. I'm sure it was a nice break from their usual hard work at home.

Anyway, the formation went really well, much better than I expected. All of the sixteen women that I invited from rural villages made it. Unlike practically every meeting in Mali, the shea butter training started on time every day. Even on the first day, the mayor showed up at 8 AM, and gave some opening remarks. The women dressed up in their nicest clothes, and I was happy to see that they took this training seriously. I also donned some nice Malian shirts that a tailor friend made for me.

Some of the women were literate and could speak some French, but most of the women could only speak Bambara, and most couldn’t read or write. Each day, the trainer had all of the women sign in using their fingerprint. The training was held in Bambara, so I couldn’t understand everything that the trainer was explaining, but I could catch some words here or there. Sometimes I would ask the formatrice what she had gone over. But it was obviously more important that the women could understand the formatrice and learn from her.

The women respected the formatrice and listened intently to what she had to say. She split them up into two groups and had them write down the ways that they traditionally make shea butter. After comparing the groups’ steps, the formatrice explained that to make high quality shea butter that can be sold to bigger markets (and sold for more money), they need to make shea butter a different way. She wrote down the steps, explained them numerous times, and even had the women repeat the steps to make sure they remembered and understood them. She would call on someone and ask her to recite the whole process of making shea butter. I could tell some of the women were nervous about doing that. It was like being called out in class and the teacher asking you to recite something you just learned… not easy! Also, if she caught any of the women falling asleep, she would call on them and ask what she had just said, basically embarrassing them! There were men who came to observe the formation, and when some of them were falling asleep, she even asked them to leave! That’s not typical here either, a woman telling a man to do something. But the formatrice had some status as she was a professional trainer who came all the way from Bamako.

As the formation continued into the second and third day, I noticed that the women from both Kenieba and from the rural villages were really interested in this new process for making shea butter, and seemed motivated to actually use it in the next cultivating season. It inspired me to help them during the rest of my time here. If they become well organized and take the proper steps to form a cooperative, they could sell large quantities of pure shea butter to buyers in big markets, and generate income for themselves. Although there is a long way to go between the end of this training and the first sale of shea butter to an exporter, I think the women have the potential to make a lot of money doing this, if they are really motivated and interested in doing it. I’d like to help them form a cooperative, get each women’s association the supplies they need to make good shea butter, and help them find initial buyers.

It was great to see these women so interested in a new way to bring in money for their families. I plan to gather all of the women’s association presidents together when I am back in June so we can discuss the next steps. If they are still motivated, and want to put the hard work in to creating this high quality shea butter, I want to work to help these women improve their lives and find a new source of income, other than subsistence farming and dangerous gold mining. Forming and developing this women’s shea butter cooperative will likely become my primary project for the rest of my time here, and I’m excited to help them get started.

Shea Butter Field Trip

We went on a field trip today to a women's cooperative that makes shea butter. I uploaded some photos to Picasa, the link is: http://picasaweb.google.com/wbudd3/SheaButterFieldTrip#

There is a big effort in Peace Corps Mali to help women improve the quality of the shea butter they produce so that they can earn more money from their labor, and so that more Malian shea butter can be exported.

If you're interested, here are two more links about shea butter in Mali.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7ktkxQuCjI - a Peace Corps Volunteer produced this video
• http://www.maisondukarite.org/eindex.html - the web site of the women's association we visited. The English translation is pretty bad, but you can get the gist of what they're saying.

Our last stint at homestay starts tomorrow. It is hard to believe that pre-service training is almost over... only three weeks left until swear-in!