Unfortunetly, I was having some troubles with this blog address for a while and have switched to another website address. The new address is: http://still-traveling.blogspot.com. Please go there to see my most recent postings.
Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.
I don’t think I’ll get internet for at least another two weeks when I come back here to Tubaniso. I'll then find out where I’ll be for the next two years and what exactly I’ll be doing. On the 26th or so, we’re all going to do some site visits and go spend a week surveying our sites and acquainting ourselves with the what we’ll be doing, the resources we’ll have, seeing the house/apartment/mud hut Peace Corps has set up for us, etc. If any of you are thinking of being saints and sending me care packages, I was originally told DHL but am also hearing the International Economy rate with FedEx got here in just 3 days so that might be a good option too. Some ideas include trail mix, dried fruits, hard candies or any that wont melt, snack cereal that doesn’t need milk, nuts, drink mixes, meal/energy bars, etc. Creativity is appreciated.
Of course, a simple letter will do too (only 84 cents). Thank you Julia and Cam for being the first to write me. Even just the simple fact of receiving mail is an awesome feeling being so far away from home – especially since I have such limited internet time and will be more prone to responding to written letters. I was hoping to find some postcards to send but since I haven’t seen any around, I am going to just start writing some letters to send and get the post cards off when I find some.
The address again is:
Yuri Horowitz, PCV Corps de la Paix BP: 117 Segou Mali West Africa
I don’t even know where to start… Mali… I am now back in Tubaniso from two weeks at my homestay in Sanankoroba, a big town south of Bamako. Honestly, I really don’t how to begin describing how my life is here. Unless you’ve been to Western Africa or somewhere in the middle, I don’t know if you can realistically imagine life here. And when I say “life,” I mean life of a local. Life how Malian’s live it; something so different from any other living I have ever experienced in all my travels now to 35 countries on six continents.
Sanankoroba is considered a large town or small city with a population just under 8,000 people. It is located on a main road south with one gas station on the far end of town. There is a school, small medical clinic, a few soccer fields, an outdoor market (remember think primitive here), some Boutiques, a few telephone cabines and a few other various shop type places. The Boutiques or ‘Butiki’s’ sell some common goods such as soap, vinegar, millet, rice, sugar, and kerosene for lamps since almost no one has electricity; everything else is bought at the market. When I say nobody has electricity, this doesn’t mean they don’t have anything that runs on it – they simply will have large car batteries and a crude system to plug appliances into it. When that runs low, my family pulls out a gas generator to run our nightly tv watching of a French dubbed Spanish soap opera. For my family to even have the battery to run something off of is quite rare and only because I live in a large community. Only two other trainees in my village out of nine have tv’s and now after talking with a lot of other trainees back here in Tubaniso, an even lower percentage nearer to 5% have similar living conditions as I do. Most are in mud huts using their kerosene lamps at night with no appliances whatsoever.
All of us share the common bond of the Negan. The Negan is where Malian’s shower and go to the bathroom. They vary in size and whether or not they have a roof or not but basically all have concrete floors with a hole the diameter of a large coffee can or so to go to the bathroom in. Try and imagine an outhouse with nowhere to sit (you have to squat) and you also take your shower in there (shower being a bucket of water drawn up from a well and a cup to pour the water over yourself with). The negan is a big part of life here, especially for us newcomers. We get visits from “Mr. D.” and tend to be in there squatting quite frequently. I myself am just finishing a 6 day bout with Mr. D.
Regarding the tv, I personally wish I didn’t have it. Having a tv means mostly the same thing it does in America only with one channel. Everyone stops talking and stares at the glowing box for hours on end with very little conversation – conversation I desperately need to improve my language skills. I would rather be forced to communicate with my family rather than become familiar with the lives of Spanish soap opera stars. I appreciate the cultural lessons from the various Malian commercials and news programs but would prefer to go next door to watch one night a month or at least keep it under a sheet except on rare occasions rather than stare every night at the glowing box. I didn’t really watch much tv when I was back in the States and now find myself drifting even further away from that mentality if you will. I talked with an uncle (some related member not quite sure how) and he has a DVD player, when I come back from Tubaniso, I am going to bring my Power of Four DVD to show my family Aspen and where I’m from. Considering they don’t even have a word for “snow” in Bambara, I think it will be quite interesting. (Power of Four for those that don’t know is a promotional video produced by the Aspen Skiing Company and is essentially a great way for me to show people here where I am from).
I have found it very difficult to find personal time to myself here, a similar theme in most trainees’ homestay experiences. Just time to pull away and study, read, listen to music, take a nap, or even just sit in my room to stare at the wall is almost impossible to come by. Peace Corps “pre-service training” or PST is very structured, something supposedly quite the opposite from when we move to our permanent sites for 2 years at the beginning of October. We have training class every day from 8am to 12:30 and then from 2:30 to 4:30 Monday thru Saturday with class only in the mornings on Sundays. That one afternoon off a week doesn’t leave must time for the personal activities I mentioned above considering when you’re at your homestay you are swarmed around by all your family members.
When I say ‘all’ the family members, I mean all fifteen of them! A grandfather, father, three wives, and ten children ranging from 3 months to 18– this doesn’t even include the at least 5-10 other relations and friends always around in some quantity or another. They have taken me as a part of their family and even renamed me Djiné Moussa Doumbia. Mali is Islamic and men are allowed to take 4 wives and then also end up with many many many children. My father is involved with a sister city program in Canada and raises chickens and other various animals in our ‘concession’ or little compound. It makes life interesting and quite different from that people in the US are used to with the ‘nuclear family’.
My three meals a day consist of some instant Nescafe and a foot-long baguette, some rice dish with sauce for lunch and either pasta or potatoes and sauce for dinner with lunch typically being the biggest. This is all done with a twist, or rather a flick of the wrist to be more accurate. Malian’s eat with their hands out of a communal bowl. I am getting better but still need quite a bit of practice. I challenge all of you to do this: cook up some regular long noodle spaghetti al dente, mix in some tomato sauce, put in a large mixing bowl (the size you would you use for a cake or a large salad) and eat with only your right hand. Hard huh?! Yeah, welcome to my life, even if just a small fraction of it. Seriously, I want to hear some feedback on how it goes – oh and no napkins or anything during the meal, lick your fingers!
Another observation I’ve made here is that women do a lot of work around the house. Originally, I was not allowed to do my laundry, pull up water from the well, carry a chair outside to sit, sweep the dirt from my room, cook or anything related – basically they are the ultimate hosts in the way they view a guest. They insist on them doing as close to nothing for themselves as possible. I have since been allowed to get water from the well, but that is a rare occasion since they usually come into my room and grab my bucket for showers and take it full to the Negan.
When I say it is probably very hard for the average American or even the experienced traveler to imagine life here in Mali, I’ll end with this: imagine chickens, chickens everywhere. Sure I have a lot at my family compound with my family raising them (in addition to the donkeys, cows, rabbits, turkeys, pigeons, small baby deer size animals looking related to an antelope and one parakeet). However, chickens, chickens are everywhere. When were sitting outside in our language lessons during the day they are constantly walking around, they’re walking down the main road in town, through the market, into your room, into the phone cabine, into the butiki, and even in the Negan. I don’t’ think you can quite grasp what this means without actually experiencing it first-hand.
I’ll end on that.
I am getting on the interent for one last time for a while... here are a few entries I wrote in the past few days.
Today marks our final day here at Tubaniso before starting our homestays. It is time to leave our refuge of “Camp Peace Corps.” Sure, we’ll be back here in two weeks, but we’re at a turning point in our journey. I imagine it will be a time people who haven’t experienced their reality punch-in-the-face, this will be the time. Whether it be when we’re first dropped off with our host families, tomorrow night when we’re lying in bed, or the net morning waking-up; I suspect lots of people are going to finally say, “wow, I am actually here. Here in , doing the Peace Corps and I’ll be here for the next 27 months!” If I am going to come to that realization, I don’t know. tomorrow, I just might find out.
Luckily they gave us all our anti-malarial, Larium, as it is commonly referred, the morning before we got on the plane. Don’t mind that it is supposed to be taken at least a week – better still two weeks in advance. In addition to my Larium pill, I was given a cocktail of Yellow Fever, Polio and MMR (Mumps, Measles, and Rubella) and remember this was all the morning before all 75 of us boarded our fateful flight to . Now, today, a full week into the journey, we qued up once again for more pricks in the arm. I count myself among the lucky ones – I’ve had quite a few vaccinations through my travels. Today, I only go the first in a multi-shot series (I think it will add up to ~10) of Rabies. On Sunday, I only had to get one Meningitis. The others, in an overwhelming majority, continued on the triple cocktail regime started in Philly on each of our three sessions thus far. Of course I’ve had my Hep A, Hep B, Tetanus & Diphtheria (TD), and Typhoid shots, but it is an entirely different ball game when you’re doing the triple cocktail method. I’m also not having any serious adverse reactions. My original trio of roommates in Tubaniso has turned into a duo. After the first night here it went from Ben, Jeff and I to just Jeff and I. Ben has since spent the past three, soon to be four, nights in the infirmary. His body didn’t like the Larium. He broke out into sweats, fever, nausea, etc. and has been cooped up in the medical office all day every day since we got here. Sure he finally made it out to attend some sessions today, but not well enough to move back to our mud ‘shack’ (Hey Matt – Mi shack es su shack!). Anyhow, that’s his condition and hopefully he’ll be able to rejoin us as a PCT soon… we do leave for our homestay’s the day after tomorrow.
Bring it back to the Larium, when I mentioned my reactions aren’t serious, doesn’t mean I’m not having any. They’re, well, just not serious. You see, the side-effect Larium is most famous for isn’t the sort Ben has been so privileged to experience. The side-effects usually come in the form of intense, sometimes crazy and scary, lucid dreams. I experienced my first of what may amount to many nights with these lucid dreams. I don’t usually remember my dreams, and when I do, they’ve been nothing like this. I originally thought – “How am I even going to know if I get the dream side-affect? I don’t usually even remember my dreams. Will I just not be sleeping well and not know why?” Well, I’ve solved that question. I do remember and they (the dreams) are intense! As dreams go, at least from my history I can’t give many details, but it essentially consisted of rapidly morphing subjects in my dreams. Crazy things like while I was talking with/looking at someone, they would spontaneously morph – while I was looking right at them! Into a monkey or something… very bizarre. Of course, remember, this is quite a change form my usual sleeping experience – pre-Mali. As it is getting late, it is time for me to delve back into my crazy, lucid Larium filled rest.
Well here I am. I’m in Mali. Wow. I always felt that at some point I would get a punch in the fact type feeling that really let me know that I’m actually, really, truly, doing this. Well, that has yet to happen. Three days ago when I arrived and stepped off the plane into the humid heat of , the Capital, I got a “tap,” perhaps. I didn’t get the full on knock me down punch; sure, the crazy debacle of forming one mob of a line for passport control and what followed, but nothing like what I was looking for or expecting. After the similarly ensuing mob/crazy get your bag experience which included putting it through an x-ray machine not even closely watched by its attendant, and fending off would-be bag helpers.
I am now at the training center, Tubaniso, on my fourth night. We finally started formal Bambara language classes today and I’m struggling along. There are 75 PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees) in my “Stage” here in five sectors – Small Enterprise Development, Agriculture, Natural Resource Management, Health Education, and Water Sanitation. We started our whole 27 month long journey of a life time on July 24th, in . Those 2 ½ days we spent at the Holiday Inn in the Historic District just steps from the Liberty Bell and Ben Franklin’s home – we crammed as much Policy information as we could. We attempted the impossible of preparing ourselves for what to expect when we stepped of the plane and into our new lives. I befriended my roommate, Tyler, from and a few others – bonding over our shared feelings: anxious, scared, excited, etc. Now I’m sitting here in “the Hanger,” an open walled room used for sessions during the day only to become our mutual gathering spot for conversation, games, reading, shared computer/internet use, and just plain reflection of the fact that we’re actually here. In , in , doing the Peace Corps. There are the gradual things such as the giant beetle – “so big it could be named!” according to Jen and the tarantula twice the size of a sliver dollar both found earlier today, but nothing that amounts to the big punch.
Here is a view from Tubaniso where I will be training for the next three months. The rainy season starts right now and there have been some serious downpours during the afternoons.
I don't know how many photos I am going to upload as this one photo took forever! I am going to have to find a faster connection if I am going to upload anymore. All the trainees (all 75 of us) are sharing a few laptops that they brought so there isn't much internet time. I don't think I'll get internet again after this for another few weeks.
I have found out the true address here though if you want to send me any letter which supposedly take about 2-3 weeks. It is:
Yuri Horowitz
Corps de la Paix
BP: 85 Bamako
Mali
I am only on the internet for a second, but wanted to write a quick note and say that I made it!
My trip so far has been great and I'll post a photo of where I am soon...
Yuri
A fellow PCT, Kali, gave me this quote:
Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, a gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever-threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own sufferings and joys, builds for all. ~ Albert Camus
If we are to achieve a richer culture - one rich in contrasting values - we must recognize the whole gamut of human potential, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place. - Margret Mead
One by one, sometimes bold, sometimes hesitant, sometimes demanding, sometimes faltering, they emerge - individuals. People, with voices, faces, eyes. People with hope. People without hope. People still fighting. People with all the courage squeezed out of them. People with stories. - Lorena Hickok, 1937
Put me on a moving train, a car, a boat, a plane if I am sick and I'll get well. It is good for mind and body to get out and see the world. - Maria Brown
The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. government or the Peace Corps.
