The Beige

Everything is organic, a shade of taupe – mud and bamboo and straw and wood, except for the occasional tin roof or a blue plastic bag half hidden in a pile of discarded peanut shells. Even the leaves of the mango trees are pale and powdered with sand-dust. But everything else – the chickens, the old broken buckets, the chairs and gourd bowls, the goats and piles of hay and the weaved baskets and even our skin – are all a continuum of white and brown, so quiet you feel subdued by their modesty, but nonetheless unjudged. Perhaps out of fear of being lost in the Great Beige they wrap themse3lves in rebellious fabrics. The royal blues and seafoam greens and magentas and lemon yellows lay on their body loosely, like an extravagant afterthought, in concentric circles, repetitive patterns of abstract stars, flowers, strange items like pinapples, purses and ladders. The women fill the paleness with these colors, sitting forwards and backwards on the wooden benches, all of the younger women with a baby strapped to their backs with a mismatched sheet.

We drove here from our “big village,” the doctor, midwife and I, to talk about women’s health issues – pre-natal care, giving birth, family planning – and how they can improve all these issues by coming to the health center. The fifty or so women in the last few villages seemed mixed. I asked if they could think of any benefit to birth control the outspoken old woman screamed “none;” the younger ones, though, seemed focused on my explanation of contraception, or how to count your ovulation days. Today, as the doctor mentions birth spacing, a fight breaks out between him and the old men listening, citing Allah and words too quick for me to grasp, clear though through their dramatic body language. When we talk about going to pre-natal conversations or giving brith in the health center, the men groan about the $2 fee. I do the math with them, and we realize that they only need to drink tea twice a day instead of three times, for only a week, and the money’s there. They gasp, laugh. But will they give up their precious tea? This is nothing new; even in America people with buy flat screen TVs and not health insurance. I get it.

After our little talk we get ready for tomorrow – another village, a few more women. Maybe we are just rubbing the sand in our throats but it’s something to talk about. If fabrics can’t combat the meek, subdued Great Beige, well maybe sex is a start.

If I forget thee, Jerusalem

In the almost finished fenced garden the women’s association we celebrated our success, the women thanking me over and over for completing the project as we danced to the djembe; my cheeks sore with grins. Wonderful. Incredibly awkward. I did dance bit and was surprised with how naturally I fall into their dance style now; my body leans and my feet swish and I move easily, not like the awkward days in the beginning, and I get laughs and ahs as much as the next muso. We did lots of dance-walking in the circle where the women grabbed my arm up high in recognition, “shooow!” We stopped when the hot sun was high for dinner and baths, later reconvened after in the town center. This time it was dark, and the drums seemed to beat more passionately as the younger girls danced and kicked up dust, backlit by streams of flashlights and hazy, like some dark sultry jazz dance – easier to dramatize the animalistic fervor in the dark. The fires of hay were sometimes lit to soften the animal hide drum tops, it smelled of cold and moist and sweet smoke. Finally after a few hours we marched together to greet the village chief and danced and sang in his concession. His old bent wife came out in her wizened excitement and sang “Dugutigi ma bo – mga a b’I fo!” The chief won’t come out, but he greets!

I step outside later to pee – the dust swirled in front of my headlamp, and I smelled the dust-desert, acrid and deep, it seems dark and dry in my nose and I remembered sleeping in a Bedouin tent in Israel and always at night the sand still holds the heat scent of the desert despite the night breeze. Love studying here, yes, even MCAT prep is okay; even the ugly orgo, the awkward carbon chains seem friendlier, more digestible than before, and I remembered first learning this under the fluorescent lights with the projection so far ahead, so inhuman and antiseptic and now there is always a child with his head resting on my lap or jumping over my shoulder as I try to explain what this is and here this is a brain – the head owner – and they grasp and laugh so that I can’t help loving these heavy MCAT books even though I’m scared shitless of my future I’ve got these bright white teeth giggles glowing in the bonfire to remember.

Light Chasers (or, Everything is Illuminated...sorta)

Oh, my stifled bleeding heart! What a tourniquet development can be.

Passing half-built suburbs; skeletons of mud bricks, it’s hard to tell whether they are being built up or are falling down – the progress of ruin I guess. Reminds me of the crumbled Roman ruins, beautiful but far. Such hollowness there, like humans were never quite involved in it’s building at all, just a cheesy reproduction of Pompeii or Casarea – but no, it’s the slow sad beginning, only the thwarted start of the great crawl towards development.

Came back in January with bounding satisfaction. The solar electricity I had fundraised for had been installed, and I hopped on my transport with anticipation. With grumbling resolve it had been installed without me; I had waited a week for the electrician and the doctors to show up I finally had to leave for my conference in Senegal. The next day my villagers informed me they showed up, and I was happy to give up some control. Because this is, after all, their health center, their village. As a driver of ‘sustainable development’ part of my job is to empower them to do things on their own.

I got off the van and walked in the (intensly orange unforgiving) late afternoon light. There sat the doctor and some of the other members of the health board, those I worked with to raise their 25% of the cost. They jumped up and praised me for the work we did to finance the solar panels, and my ego rose and fell in cruel repetitions as my graze locked in on the wire snaking sickeningly from one of the six panels atop the health center into the doctor’s house. But he already has a solar panel my mind argued, and I smiled as they told me how well the lights all work – ah yes how wonderful! They can work now at night, the midwives can give birth with real light! - but oh man why the hell is it in his house. They took me on a tour and it is really incredible, a light outside when people run here for emergencies and one in each room, the vaccination room, consultation, pharmacy, maternity, the long recovery room…but then the vaccination fridge, one of the main reasons for installing the solar electricity, wasn’t working.

“Why did you take a wire?” I asked the doctor and off spurned a long soliloquy about how it’s helping the community by way of improving his personal space. “Well I would have put it in your house but it was too far.” Totally missed the point. I tried to explain to him that we cannot fund anything that benefits the individual. After meeting with the electrician I finally got the picture of what happened. It seems the electrician had not checked on the power of the fridge, which blew the system the first day it was hooked up to the solar panels. An expert does not necessarily mean expert knowledge. So instead, we still have a fridge which we pour thousands of francs of gas into, and extra electricity to give over to the doctor. We are working with the electrician now to siphon off the energy, so that the lights and the vaccination fridge will work. Maybe it will, or maybe this will just be another development project that only got so far.

The next week I began building the women’s community garden. The women had scraped together the incredible sum of over $200, from women who have to beg their husbands for a few dollars to give birth at the health center. I raised the remaining $2,000, and together we built the 8,000 square meter garden. Success, yes, we’ve built a fence. Now what. We need a well, we need the land cleared, and most of all we need to have faith that we, the village women, will get the use out of the garden that we hope. Will it save the village? No. But it’s a step, right?

So of course these projects are important. Not only for the shallow ego, or the tangible results of an actual structure (I built this, goddamnit), but as a means to help them, well, help themselves. The garden will allow the women to grow their own vegetables to feed their vitamin-deprived children, or even an opportunity for them to sell the vegetables and make extra cash to save for their children’s clothes, school supplies, pre-natal consultations. The electricity will increase the availability of healthcare during the frantic hours of the night, and to provide better quality care in the dark. But in the end, I have mer faith in the sustainability of the impossibly slow process of teaching, sensitization, and promoting behavior change. I can paint the3 whole town full of murals, all yellow and blue and bright, or give sweet talks on hand washing with soap, rubbing hot pepper or honey to drive my point; but it will take generations until these practices are actually done on any measurable scale, a significant sigma statistic somehow erupting out of these impossible constraints. Any my trainings to screen for cervical cancer will always be limited as long as the Malian government doesn’t think it’s a priority. . The more the word gets out, the more healthcare workers are capable and empowered to screen for it, maybe there will be less cases of invasive cancer, a death or two thwarted. Dooni dooni. Small small.

So here’s my grand inconclusion: aid is as devastating if given purely monetarily and even more so if given without a great follow-up system (sorry, because they ‘deserve it’ is not always enough), and as empowering if given from the painfully slow route of teaching and sustainable ‘leg ups.’ But these lines are more then blurry. So just like most volunteers I know, I can channel the frustrations of Ayn Rand as easily as I do the endless humanism of Mother Theresa. So, will Mali, Africa, the developing world ever get there?
Man, I don’t even know where there is.