Meet "Jessica Duncan Kebe." Aka, Alima

That's right! They named a baby after me. Move over Mother Theresa! ok, maybe it's not quite sainthood, but it's a pretty good feeling. Of course, having a baby named after you comes with some attachments, like taking it back to America with me...j/k Oh come on mom! she's pretty cute! Officially her name is Jessica, but everyone calls her Alima fitini (little Alima), which means I have graduated to Alima koroba! (big, old Alima...) what an honor. It's my tailor friend, Vielle's baby.





In other news, I'm happy to announce the start of my first funded project. My women's group got their millet grinder last week and are preparing to install it. They're taking out a loan with the local bank in my town to build a cement house to hold the machine, then work can begin. In'shallah, there will be minimal setbacks and hassles, and they can start earning for themselves quickly.




While not entirely tabled, my plastic bag project is on a bit of a hold while I study for the GREs, and try to figure out the best way to approach things. Although I have found a women's sewing center to produce and bags and children are coming to my house by the droves with collected trash bags, it's a matter of connecting the dots and convincing everyone that the project is worth it. Thankfully, school has started and a handful of children are doing some pretty good advertising for me with their bookbags in class, so I know parents are interested, as well the Supervisor for the NGO I work for. As with most things, anything that could be done in a day in America, usually take about a month, give or take. I'll be sure to post updates.

Initiation

A few days ago, during a 6 hour stretch at the tailor, I faced an inevitable evil at the machine. I sewed my finger.

I was just finishing a sack to match a dress I had made that day and was feeling pretty good about my progress as a ‘seamstress.’ Fasting was about to break, so the sun was setting and because of the late afternoon rains, we had all retreated inside where now my only light source was from the door way into the windowless shop.

On my last few stitches, the machine lost my attention as I guided my hand right under the needle and it stabbed clear through my index finger. Normally, the force of an electric machine would have swiftly pulled the needle out without much hesitation, but this machine is manual. Something as dense as flesh and bone slows it down a bit, to a full stop and my finger stayed pinned down. As I sat there staring at my finger, needle pocking out both sides, in shock of course, I took my free hand to manually remove the needle by turning the wheel.

No blood. No blood. I’m OK. I looked toward Dirisa, a well-seasoned tailor, sitting across from me, not able to communicate what had just happened. Half embarrassed, half pissed that I was so dumb not to pay attention to something so easy to avoid. Then I looked back at my hand as I saw the blood, not a lot, but thick, coming out both the entry and exit wound. For some reason, it doesn’t take much for me to feel woozy in this climate, so I broke into a cold sweat. I thrust my hand to Dirisa, who now understood my predicament and he too was speechless. He called Vielle over to look at my hand. Only seeing one hole, he said to me, “Oh don’t worry Alima, this is nothing. Little Vielle pierced his finger last week and the needle went clear through!” I had my head down on the table, moaning in between bursts of nervous laughter. I heard Dirisa’s voice mumble lowly, “Vielle, it went all the way through, there was blood on both sides.”

Vielle barely reacted. He calmly doused my wound in machine oil(!) and wrapped the finger in a piece of cloth from the shop floor. Work, for me, was done for the day.

We sat outside giggling over my mishap, breaking fast with tea, bean cakes and peanuts. Knowing me almost too well at this point, Vielle joked, “You had better call your mom and tell her what happened!” And I secretly had been wanting to hear her voice, so I called to make her miss me that much more.

The other tailors were on their way back from praying and upon seeing me with my bandaged finger raised above my heart promptly knew what had happened. “Eh! Alima! You stabbed yourself with the machine needle! You’re a true tailor now!” What a way to finally be welcomed into the group. They all proceeded to share with me their war stories of them versus the machine. Some do it all the time, others only once. But in all their years as a tailor, only one of them has never once sewed their hand into the machine, Vielle.

Waste Management

Last month, I followed a hunch down to Ghana to research an organization called “Trashy Bags.” A group of sixty women collect plastic trash bags from the streets of Accra and turn them into recycled accessories ranging from simple handbags and toiletry organizers to change purses and even kitchen aprons.

I’ve struggled, as most first year Peace Corps volunteers do, with not only starting a project, but finding something that inspires me as much as it inspires my community counterparts. While some volunteers find solace in soak pits and community gardens, I’ve been drowning myself in the local language and culture, while patiently waiting for a project more creative to present itself.

Only now, at the year mark, do I have the confidence in my relationships, language and integration to feel like I can go out, have some semblance of blending in, and start a “dooni dooni” project. That being, a lifestyle change that I set as an example, seeing it catch on by people who feel capable of doing so, and having that action stay sustainable until after I am long gone.

For the past six months, I have worked closely with a tailor to learn how to cut and sew complets, dresses and handbags. I started off on his grandfather’s antique foot peddle machine watched by the other tailors as they snickered at me trudging along, fighting with the machine to hem a straight seam. Recently, however, I’ve graduated to the better machines, gaining trust amongst even the tailor association heads who frequent my “sewing station” tucked back in the market place which is barren during the days of the week until Sunday market day when it booms with children and women’ selling various goods.

Before arriving on this continent I was told that Africa’s 'flower' was the plastic bag. “You’ll see it everywhere, just prepare yourself.” Imprinted on my subconscious, that comment is finally taking shape as a possible project. Only, instead of stopping to smell the roses, I’m picking them up off the ground of my village, washing them and sewing them into stuff. Litter is carelessly scattered everywhere, which originally lead me to think that it would be difficult to convince Malians to pick up the trash on their own streets, so I set out one day and just started picking up plastic water bags as a sort of social experiment. I went only as far as my block when I had to turn around and get another receptacle to fill up. Within minutes I had children following me with their own trash bags, pointing to areas where I could get more while women even brought me their own collections from inside their concessions. I was impressed by the community’s receptiveness to cleaning up.

That morning, I washed the trash in alternating buckets of soap and bleach, lay them out to dry on a reed mat in my concession and took them over to the tailor’s to experiment. That day I made a small purse, a book bag and a dress.

Upon seeing my creations, Malians had varying reactions. Mostly they were very impressed by the book bag, women wanted to buy the dress and children were screaming for me to make them one. Ok, not exactly what I was going for, but it’s starting a conversation. One of the tailors asked, “Alima, why are you picking up trash when you can just buy plastic and make things out of that?” As I started to speak, a women sitting in front of my machine, waiting for her complet to be finished interjected, “this opens people’s minds about picking up dirty trash, buying plastic does not help people.”

Ok, so the ideas are there, Malians do not want to live in their own filth and are not shocked by people picking up trash, even if that person is white. I am still in the VERY early stages of this project as an income generating activity, but my smallest success was measured this morning when I returned to my concession. Three children were at my front door waiting for me. They each held out a trash bag full of empty water sachets they had picked up from around town. “Here Alima, you can make something out of this.”

One year in...

My Women's Association and me after our training last week.

Women participating in a community map!


Wedding motorcade through town for my host family

Signing the marriage license at the mayor's office

How to eat a mango

I love mangoes. I love mangoes so much that I agreed to come to Mali for two years and live in a mud hut, 100+ degree heat with no A/C, poop in a hole and eat only rice, millet paste and dirt sauce because I read that Mali had ‘the best mangoes in the world.” Thankfully, what I read was true and all the other stuff is worth it because the mangoes here are phenomenal.

My favorite part is not just eating the mango, but how. I was recently surprised by Americans who cut into a mango, befuddled by its mechanics and end up with reckless chunks, peels and a yellow sticky mess. I've always known mango eating as a ceremony that pays homage to the best fruit on earth. First, remove all white clothing and stand near a sink or easily accessible paper towel. Then cut the two large sides off the mango around the pit. Taking each halve, score the “meat” like a checker board, invert it so the perfect square pieces unfold into a flower. This method has relatively little mess aside from the pit section, which is peeled and the remaining fruit bitten off around the pit with nature’s floss as a takeaway. I had always assumed that everyone knew this was the proper way to eat a mango…I was wrong.

When I saw my first mango eaten by a Malian, it was barbaric; the way they bite right into the skin like an apple, and then suck the juice out through a hole. Once they had gotten most of the meat out, they’d pop out the pit, chew on the skins, then throw the remains on the ground for a donkey, sheep, or closest wandering farm animal to graze. And I rarely see a Malian eat a perfectly ripe mango; always the super tart green ones, or those way past fermentation. I would cringe, and even tried to show a few of them my method to no avail or impression.

As with every other Malian habit that takes some getting used to, at first I’m appalled and then shortly after the shock wears off… I’m integrated. Malian mango practices are now endearing, romantic and above all, practical. Of course they’re not going to take the time to cut, score and flower their mangoes. There are just too many mangoes to get through before the season is over and they’re all rotten on the roadside, who has time to waste with a knife? And lastly, once the fruit under the skin is exposed, it’s a race between you and persistent flies the size of dogs that swarm instantly and stick into the pulp.

I’ve since thrown away my meticulous scoring and flowering method and dive right into these huge, buttery delicious mangoes. I barely even rinse them off at this point (sorry Dr. Dawn!) I usually bite off the bottom, then peel away the skin with my teeth, eat the rest like an apple while doing the "Macarena" in a circle and waving the mango hand back and forth to keep the flies away. Then, with my upper body drenched in mango leftovers and flies at the ready, I race to a salidaga*, rinse off and wait for the next mango eating time to present itself, which is usually within the half hour. Ah, Africa redeems itself.

(For those of you who don’t know what a salidaga is, I guess I didn’t bless you with a “Peace Corps Mali” bathroom story while I was back in the states. Like an acid flashback I remember the graphic descriptions I gave to some of you, and for that I am so, so sorry… They are plastic tea pots filled with water used instead of toilet paper and running water… think about it.)

I ni fama

May 3rd, 2010

Well, I’m back. From America ...fuck... At least that’s how I felt when I landed on the plane in Bamako. I sat there frozen, enjoying the last little bits of recycled cold air, gripping the arm rests and staring forward at the blank TV screen while everyone else unloaded. My trip home was so surreally wonderful I had forgotten everything remotely good and rewarding about Africa, Peace Corps and my village. But today - after a week of hiding out between friends’ houses and the stage house in Bamako, delaying the inevitable – I made the journey back to site. The hardest part truthfully is the anticipation of coming back. What has or hasn’t changed since I’ve been away? Will my people be mad at me for staying away for more than a month? Those hesitations, teamed with pining away for the American distractions that whisked me away from certain realities and tempted me to stay away from Africa again. Take a hint, Jessie(!); sick grandma, coup des ta, VOLCANO!??? I guess I can’t say that I heed much caution to signs, no matter how blatant.

But here I am. In my bed, under a mosquito net, fan blasting for another 45 minutes before the power cuts out for the day. And I think I’m OK. My saving grace? The “wet noodle” which is a wet piece of cloth, continuously dunked in a bucket of water by my bed then draped over me as I lay in the 100+ degree heat, trying to doze off. I was told about this technique at the beginning of training while older volunteers boasted about how they got through hot season. I remember thinking it sounded ridiculously soggy and uncomfortable, but it is in fact, divine… It’s so effective that it has me feeling like the rest of hot season just might be bearable.

When I climbed down off the bus onto my street, toting my guitar case and back pack, I searched the road for a familiar face. While I didn’t recognize anyone right away, they all knew me. “Traore!” (my Malian last name) “In I fama!” (it’s been a while) rang out from under thatched hangars that lined my street and I looked ahead in the near distance, fixated on the entrance to my concession. Then as I had hoped and secretly feared, the children came running down the street to greet me and grab my bags, all too heavy for their little frail, boy sized old man frames. Two took my guitar case, almost toppling over as they hoisted it proudly on their shoulders. “Alima na na!!” (Alima has come). They chanted. As soon as I crossed the threshold into my house, greeted by my Mango tree with fruit the size of my head, host dad Brahma and his colleague Dada ironing clothes in the shop next door, I knew I was home. Or at least I can call it that for the next 17 months.

No matter how resistant I was to returning to Mali and finishing up the 2/3rds I have left of service I knew there had to be something real pulling me back, and I remembered as soon as I set foot in my village. I have a family and real friends here. I may not have the most motivation to start projects, build a school, dig a well, or save the world, but I’m making real connections with people that I know in time will pay off. Even if its 5-10-20 years post my service, I’ll know that my time spent here was important to me and the people I’ve met. And who knows, I may save a baby or two.

I have spent the last month in gluttony, vacationing back in the states to see my family, eat real food, drink real beer and reconnect with my American self, who I didn’t know how much I had missed. The best part of all is that being around everyone was effortless and I don’t feel like I’ve missed a beat. Volunteers hear from the past that upon returning home, there is a disconnect between yourself and the people you left behind. But I strongly disagree. If there was one thing missing the most from my life in the first 10 months in Africa, it was being with the people who knew me before all of this. My new friends here, while important and wonderful, have no frame of reference to my personality prior to coming to Mali, and it was nice to come home to familiar and heartwarming faces. Thank you everyone who I saw and talked to while I was home. It was great to see everyone and I’m excited to come back to you some day.

Tailor

In an attempt to break up a stale routine I had established back at site, I varied up my greeting route and went over to the tailor for a quick, “Good afternoon, are you well? And your family? Children? Wife(s)? it’s been a while? And your family?” This tailor is the town favorite, and a good tailor in Mali is hard to find, so I’m eager to be on good terms with him. Also, there was a trusting familiarity in his “Andre 3000” voice.

Sitting there in his workspace in between small talk, I looked around at the fabric strewn everywhere, two small kids, and another guy at three foot peddle machines, turning gaudy waxy fabric into Malian couture. The heat is starting because it’s the end of February and you can feel how thick the air is, and literally the walls are sweating. We’re trying our hardest not to talk about how oppressively hot it is because it only makes us sweat worse.


Every Malian asks me if I can do what they do. Women pounding millet, or cooking t’oh, breastfeeding babies: they all ask, “Alima, can you do this?” Sometimes I say “yes”, sometimes “no,” depending on my mood, because sure enough, I’ve found my self hopping into the millet pounding lineup, or strapping a baby to my breast. (just a joke, but recently, the little girls in my concession have been really touchy feely with my boobs. They keep asking me to see them because they’ve never seen a white boob before. I think I’ll leave that one to their imagination.)

So, in true Malian form, the tailor asks, “Alima, can you sew clothes?” I’ve seen a few other tailors at work and I think to myself, “God, if my grandmother saw what they were doing she would flip!, they are so sloppy.” So I had thought sure I could do it better than half the Malian tailors. After a little banter about how he’s so busy and has no time or money to finish all these clothes, he sets me down at the foot peddle machine and patiently watches me try to sew a hem on a piece of fabric.

That was yet another humbling moment in Africa. All my notions about Malian tailors have dissolved since my time spent with this tailor. Sure, he blindly cuts huge chunks out of fabric and doesn’t pin or iron a single seam, but the way these guys work is nothing short of remarkable. I knew nothing about how to work a foot peddle machine and they are impossible beasts. Just getting it started takes incredible arm strength, then to keep it going is a whole other work out with your legs. I get so excited when I can finally get the machine working, but then my hands can’t function at all because I’m so focused on peddling. It’s like patting your head, rubbing your belly, doing hopscotch and having a really serious conversation about American politics simultaneously. Also, as soon as I start getting the hang of it, everyone and mother (literally) comes berating me with questions. “Oh! Alima! You’re learning how to tailor!? Are you used to it? Can you do it well? Really well? Oh! (As the turn to the tailor) Did you find yourself a white woman? Did you buy her at the market? Are you teaching her how to sew? What’s her last name? Oh, Traore, that’s bad, she’s a bean eater, she can’t tailor…” And so on…
I’ve gone there now for 5 afternoons now, so in Peace Corps Mali time that’s like 8 months. So far, I’ve gotten the hang of it a little bit more, but as I sit there struggling to hem one side of a pagne, while the guy next to me bangs out three ornate complets, all with satin hems, and elaborate embroidery. Everyone gets a kick out of seeing the white girl try to do anything, so I’ve now added another trick to my repertoire as the town mascot.

"...happy in a paper bag."

January 11, 2010
My mindset when I ride my bike has definitely evolved in the last six months. I remember at first having a healthy fear of riding my bike alongside the main road, whether it was at homestay, or when I originally got to site. I had seen a few accidents already in my short stint in Mali on the roads, so I knew it only took a moment for the road kill to be me.
After a few weeks at site, I had established a few great routes through the corn fields for my morning ride, and could kind of clear my head from the fear that had daunted it in previous weeks. I could predict the slopes in the road, where water would pool from the night’s rain, where the dried nyegen waste to avoid was, and had a new keen eye for donkey carts, goats, and naked children darting across the dirt streets.
One morning in early November, I climbed on my bike and rode out from my house, greeting everyone I could along the way, including my neighbor, Brahma. He was riding on the back of a rickety old moto (this thing had old bike pedals to start it and had parts falling off as it bounced uncontrollably along the dirt road to Baroeli). I was having one of those moments where I really appreciated Africa, its greeting customs and how everyone is so friendly and welcoming. I had just slipped into the groove of the ride, and was anticipating a turn into a large cornfield.
In a second that now replays over and over in my mind like a nightmare in slow motion, I glance up to see less than ten meters ahead of me as Brahma and the man on the moto turn quickly in front of a boche and get run over. I will never forget the sounds of metal and bones crunching, followed by a deafening silence, seeing the bodies in a pile of mess and scraps in the middle of the road, motionless. The boche had pulled off to the side of the road, but the people in it stayed inside, maybe delaying the inevitable because they knew there was no life there in the wreckage. I struggled with shock and confusion as I ran through my mind what exactly it was that I could do. I’m not a doctor, there were other able bodied large men there that could lift the men from the scene of the accident, but all protocol that we have in the states just doesn’t exist here. Is there an ambulance? Would Brahma go to the hospital in Bamako or Segou? Where could he get relatively better care? Here at the CSCOM the extent of their stock room is gauze pads and penicillin. I figured I would alert my family and Brahma’s neighbors so that they could make those decisions for me because I had no where near the language, cultural, or medical where with all to help these two men, who I wasn’t even sure were still alive.
I peddled back to my house in a daze of shock, afraid of how cowardly I looked, fleeing the scene like I did, but I didn’t see an alternative. After a mess of trying to explain the accident to my host brothers, Dada and Brahma, I hid in my house…for three days.
This past fall was a definite test of my emotional strength. It’s a struggle to properly process the terrible things that happen here. One foot in front of the other I guess. I easily locked myself in my room, watched movies, and wrote in my diary, pretending maybe that it didn’t happen... I went to the clinic to visit my neighbor, the older man had died at the scene of the accident, but my neighbor survived for a few more days, while my host dad cared for him with the doctor, without much response. I visited him one day and will never get that image of him out of my head; wrapped in bandages, lifeless on the disintegrating foam mat on the floor, blood speckled on the dirty tile.
Before the accident, I had a hard time connecting with the suffering that Malians and Africans go through on a daily basis. Sure I knew it was sad and horrible and “3rd world,” but there was and always will be too many differences in my upbringing and privileges to identify with them. It wasn’t until the conversations with my host dad in the following week that I began to really connect with a Malian. My host dad was caring for Brahma in much the same ways that I’m familiar with: changing bandages, lifting him to bath, and hurting his back as a caretaker. My biggest frustration when the accident happened was that because of my language barrier, I couldn’t properly grieve with the people in my community. I spoke with my English speaking friend, Brahma (I know, everyone is named Brahma, just bear with me), but it still wasn’t enough to say how I felt. When someone dies, Malians say a number of benedictions to one another, but I couldn’t get them memorized with enough sympathy and frankly, my brain was too full of Bambara and post traumatic stress.
It was in my conversations with my host dad, sitting with him outside on the street every night as his back and heart ached from taking care of his neighbor tirelessly all day that I had the most satisfying cultural breakthrough. We compared stories about me and my dad, motorcycles, careless driving and all while laughing at his children and looking up at the remarkable night sky. We were transcending the language barrier because in the moments between talking, in those moments of silence, I felt a connection closer to him than I had ever thought I could get to a Malian. God was there, helping us both get through this horrible event in our lives that I now see as a landmark in adjusting to life in Africa.


January 18th, 2010

I have owned a copy of Jan de Hartog’s, Peaceable Kingdom for almost ten years. It’s been on my, “next to read” list since then because its 900 pages and the absurdly small text print are a little daunting for someone who pretty much hates reading. I acquired it in my first years at George School, because it’s a novel about the beginning of the Quaker movement and the love story between George Fox and Margaret Fells. My grandmother, Big Mama, knowing that I was not much of a reader, read it for me and gave me some cliff’s notes as she “trudged” through it every night before she went to bed in Beach Haven one summer. I have always promised myself I would read it, and it is the only book I brought with me to Africa because with my track record, I figured a two year stint would be sufficient time to read one novel. I often think about that summer with Biggie, in her bed in Beach Haven, her little reading glasses on the tip of her nose, I’m standing in the doorway to say good night on my way upstairs to bed and she says, “Oh Jessica! This book is truly remarkable, but it’s a lot to get through!” As I read it now, with all of life’s events unfolding as they did, I am comforted knowing that she flipped through these same pages for me, so that she could tell me what it was all about knowing I never would get around to reading it before her. But now I sit here, finally in Africa, trudging through it as she did, and finding that the story would not have impacted me as it has, had I read it before coming here. Its parallel to my emotional quest, search for truth, or at least a reason for why I’m here has been surprisingly poignant.

The protagonist’s spiritual struggle reminds me of my first few months here, being thrown into a home stay family in a village covered in trash and stench, the streets filled with wild, foreign children all screaming in fear and excitement and crying at the sight of us. Those months were definitely the hardest part so far and I am comforted knowing that the worst is over.

“Now the idea that she would have to lie down in the straw to sleep with the children while there might be rats burrowing all around her was petrifying. The voice of fear was much stronger; anything was stronger than the pitiful whisper that pleaded with her to go to those children. Why should she? What were they to her? She had tried her best, hadn’t she? Was there any hope she would ever get through to them? They were beyond human reach… Then the still small voice rose up inside of her, ‘All He has is thee’

That first step turned out to be the most difficult; once she had discovered the candle flame would survive as long as she went slowly, she took heart. She found that if she concentrated on going down those steps to the exclusion of everything else, the whole thing became possible.

She had never quite realized before how horrendous this place was, how futile her effort to relieve some of its horror. It was not fear that would defeat her, it was hopelessness, the conviction that she would never be able to change this place, that nothing could, that the one thing likely to happen was that it would change her.

As she sat there, in the darkness, with the child on her lap, she felt moved to go into meeting quite alone. She relaxed her body, emptied her head of thoughts, even the small babbling ones, until she sat there blank and passive, waiting for that of God to rise within her.

What rose was a thought. A cold thought, almost angry: ‘What is so godly about sharing in their filth?’

It startled her; she had expected something noble, soothing. Looked at coolly and without religious rapture, there was indeed nothing godly about her sitting there waiting to feel the first lice on her scalp. Rather than sharing their filth, she should make them share her cleanliness.

That of God within her manifested itself to clean out this pigsty first thing in the morning.
She suddenly was sure that Christ, had He been a woman, would have done the same.”