living in heat

Back here in Bamako - the expensive taxis where only the metal frame of the door is left - pool parties in Military houses with ex-pats, NY Times photojournalists, Marines, architects, aid workers, all the Americans who are stranded together in this surreal world of pseudo western living in the poorest city in the world - I can't shake off the creepy feeling of this strange life here in the capital. I like the real Mali better. Well, sometimes.

I came here after a week long training session in Kita, where me and Foune'ba, the Matrone, developed plans for projects we want to work on in the next few months: getting electricity for the health center, cooking fortified porridge for the mothers of malnourished children, making mosquito repellent, etc. We met with several NGOs in the Kita Cercle, and had training sessions on how to deal with food security, an issue Peace Corps is stressing right now with the global food crisis.

Home has been the usual - great but a rough few weeks, I have barely been sleeping and my jaw hurts from grinding my teeth, I realized I really needed a break. In general I have been doing a lot of teaching at the health center and the school, talks on AIDS and pre-natal care, handwashing and birth spacing, etc. Kristin and I did some drawings with the crowded fourth grade Bambara class to send to the States for an art exchange program. All we had were my crayons and colored pencils and the flip-chart paper Peace Corps gave us, but the kids were thrilled and drew pictures labeled in Bambara of their huts (sobugu), drums (tam tams), millet pounding mortars (colon), donkeys (falli) and other things they see in their village. After they would finish a part of their drawing each one would come up I also helped out with a training session for community health workers (Relais) who are trained to go house to house to educate the villagers directly on general family practices such as malaria prevention, family planning and water sanitation.

I think the heat really is beginning to creep up on everyone - the feeling of suffocation clogs your mind and its hard to, well, just deal with anyone. Theres been alot of violence lately. Babies crying everywhere - my host father hits his son with a stick, goes back every time he whimpers, and sits there for the rest of the night slowly hitting it on the side of the house. Does it make you feel like a fucking man? I would love to ask, but I know I need to live with these people for two years, so I go home and draw furious charcoal sketches instead. His wife recently ran off with her 2 year old daughter to her boyfriend's, and he hasn't seen his baby since, I know he's sad. Sitting in my health center a huge commotion at my neighbors house. I watch as the 16 year old second wife runs out, I saw the birth of her baby a few months ago when she was still 15. The first wife and her husband run after her and grab her, each hitting her with a stick. She is screaming and I run halfway out but I know I can't help her. Someone stops them and she runs towards me, I lead her away and tell her to sit at the health center for a bit, just let her calm down for a minute, but no, my host father (who is the Vaccinator at the health center) yells at her to go back and draw water from the well. She stands at the well sobbing with the water pull in her hand, letting the rope down even though theres not even a bucket next to her. Her bright orange shirt reads: Rejoice With Me. I know, its not my place and not worth the risk to get involved. And they don't see any alternative. But hell, who's place is it then? For now, the disgust on my face tells them something, I hope.

So yes, I needed a break, and I am here in the air conditioned PC stage house with wireless internet and I want to go back already. But when I walk outside there is still the street food lady who sells rice and sauce under a shack covered with old rice sacks, and she'll make fun of me for being a Malinke and I'll joke with her about her ethic group. And I'm still in Mali after all.

Earth babies

My house is built from mud and wood -

I watched them make one just like it the other day, a crowd of shirtless men in dirty cotton pants weaved the soft new wood into a circle, glued with a slab on wet dirt; over it they spread more mud and made a cone shaped roof, added bundles of straw. Together they lifted the roof and it lay on the mud foundation, and that was that. No aluminum siding, or iron supports, no fiberglass insulation or plastic window frames. It is the earth and I am it –


The days here are now hot, it clings blanket like in the form of beads of moisture all over my body. It is exhausting and I nap for hours and wake up with raw heat rash on my neck and arms. Most days I sit under the mango tree outside my hut where the men spend those long daytime hours, under the little green mango bulbs that are threatening to unveil their seductive yellow-orange fruit and I can’t wait till they start to fall, they fall on our heads they say and we won’t be able to sit there anymore. And days like this I miss NY and the rage of art and music and people don’t stop, not even to drink tea but here it takes hours to brew and mix one small pot. Its dry here now and the vivid (slight hallucinations) I get from my malaria medication tips the straw roofs with an orange glow and the leaves of the trees are sometimes outlined in neon blue. I remember an early Francis Bacon painting I saw of an African boy squatting in a pale green yellow field, he’s alone and the field is immense and almost colorless but still bright against the dark boy, and I think damn did he get the simple fervor of this place. I feel sad knowing that these children will never be inside a gallery but there is art in the baby blankets they sew with big colored flowers and tie their babies to their backs. That’s as close as art can get, wrapping your little warm vulnerable family on your back.

And it is here the balance lies, the painful ignorance of love, the endless toil of Zen clad, monotonous labor. At times I feel such tragedy knowing that I have ever heard of a food processor, while women here gather around a big hollowed out wood mortar, three women in elegant fabric uniform from their head wraps to their skirts. They pound their grains together in the narrow bowl with heavy sticks bigger then they are, it’s a flawless rhythm – one, two, three – each brings the stick down from over her head, sometimes they clap as they throw the sticks in the air. Their daughters are next to them, sifting out the shaft from the pounded grain, it sounds like soft maracas. My own flabby arms feel songless after years of microwave buttons. But of course they toil and sweat under the grueling sun for hours, making meals for their families, they call this “husband work.” Of course they all want to go to America where its so much “easier.” Still I cringe at the thought of my dusty villagers in America – I can see them in sad crowded Harlem apartments and they don’t have their nieces to bring them gourds filled with peanuts but they can eat cheaply at McDonalds with a plastic fork, no Griot excited off Kola nuts will bless their sick babies and no one greets them and asks how the people in their home are, how they are feeling, how is the work in the fields – but their floors are made of dirt and their children are tiny from malnutrition and maybe this is all just romanticizing.

But I recall a scene from a month ago, the old traditional midwife (now phased out by western medicine) was attending a young woman’s birth as the usual Matron was having a baby of her own. Both were on a thin mat on the floor, the young woman in child’s pose grasping the midwife’s back while she squatted on a low wood stool, she was grasping the young woman as well. The woman’s head lay on her shoulder – and with each contraction they swelled and groaned together, as if the midwife as inseparable from the woman and taking her natural share of the pain (oh, Great Sisterhood!). They held each other, and the ground was there as well which rose up to meet them, the little arrows of gravitational force always pointing up, their support –
The most rational birth I’ve seen.

And so here I am in my house of mud and straw, it is friendly and cool in the heat of the day. After all, who needs iron when you are this close to the earth?