Hi everyone!
TL;DR: We are fine, we love Mali, and we're going to see our permanent site next week! Hooray! Oh and we love you all too!
So, for the last several weeks we have been learning Bambara at our homestay sites about an hour away from Bamako, where we don't have internet. Sorry for the dead blog! It will be like this until January though--definitely off and on. Cass and I are in different villages, but we are only about 2k away from each other, so we bike over and hang out at each other's houses. It's pretty fun! The last bike ride we took together was in the mango groves at sunrise in Cass's village. Personally I don't think it gets any better than that.
My homestay village is larger than Cass's and more metropolitan by Malian standards, but I like Cass's "brussie" village better. We can get phone credit and signal, salt, ice, cold drinks, white-people ("Toubab") food like Laughing Cow cheese and fake Nutella, and there are taxis and a vegetable/clothing market every day from about 8-11 am. It's a bustling city of anywhere from 5,000-10,000 people depending on who you ask. We also have pumped water, a community health center (CSCOM) and birthing center (Maternite), a radio station, schools, etc. It's kind of like what you might find in small town USA except with more roaming livestock and fewer white people. I LOVE my homestay village, the other PCTs there, and my host family. At this point I kind of hate coming here to Bamako and I would so much rather stay with my family and chill!
So my family, let me just say, is amazing. The hospitality here is incredible and people seriously treat us like we are their most honored guests--that's just how they treat foreign people here, whether they're from a different country or just a different town. My family tells me basically daily that I am at my own house, that I left home to come home, just really sweet stuff. They are so amazing. They also insist that Cass is family too, and think it's wrong that we are not living in the same house--they are righteously angry on our behalves, haha. He gets to spend the night at my host family's house, and vice versa. It's so nice!
My family is from Timbuktu and they are Sarakole ethnicity, so their first language is not Bambara, but they still speak it all the time. At our house, we have one brother (Ibrahim), two sisters (Fatumata and Marjane), my host mom Bokana, my host dad Sekou, and their granddaughter Kadi whose nickname is Jolie ("beautiful"), shortened to Jo. Kadi's mom is Mariam, and there is another brother, Moussa. Mariam and Moussa visit but they don't live with us. My dad is a retired teacher who also speaks French, so if I ever really need to communicate with them, I say it in Bambara and French. I have my own room, water filter, screen door, locking door, bike, bed, etc. We have concrete floors and stuff like bednets and mats and trunks that really help us feel like we have at least some furniture. My walls are mud, but my roof is tin rather than thatched. I share the latrine/bathing area with my family, and it's called a nyegen (spelled negen, but you pronounce it nyegen). We do bucket baths, but it's cold right now, so they heat water for the family. Also, our families feed us 3x a day, so I get furufuru in the morning (fried balls of millet and rice dough), and rice and sauce at lunch and dinner, with some kind of meat generally. We eat with our hands, on the ground, all from the same bowl. It's fun except I suck at it and get rice all over myself, haha.
We are here at the training center and about to head to our site visit! Our counterparts, or homologues, are here and going to travel with us to see our new home for a week. I am assigned to a CSCOM (community health center) in the Sikasso region, and obviously Cass is going to be in the same place but doing different things. I will be working with a relay, who is basically a community outreach person at the CSCOM, and we'll be doing health education on malaria, malnutrition, handwashing, HIV/family planning, vaccinations, etc. I will also be working with a microcredit group (super exciting!) and health education in schools. I'm also really excited about the prospect of helping with organizational development at my CSCOM and stuff like trainings, record-keeping, and just helping increase their institutional capacity to do the things they need to do. I am really excited about my post and we will definitely be able to give you more once we get back from site visit! My APCD told us we had a "nice house," haha. No idea what that means, but I'm excited to see it!!! Also, I am the first health volunteer at site, and Cass is the second environmental volunteer--though the previous one left Mali early. We will report back as soon as we can to tell you all about our awesome site! And I will totally try to take pictures too, and somehow upload them. Internet here is slow...but I have also not taken pictures yet. I know. Fail Caro. But I promise they will come!
We love hearing news from home, so please don't hesitate to post here or e-mail us! We do check our e-mail every couple of weeks, but getting back to everybody has been not very easy, because I've been spending a lot of time working on Kenya manuscript communications and student loan stuff rather than personal communications. :( That being said, I also want to take the opportunity to give some shoutouts:
HUGE CONGRATS to Mary and John for getting engaged! We're so happy for y'all, seriously, and you are perfect together. We wish you all the very best of luck!! And let us know if you want us to help you with anything from afar!!
Also, many many thanks go to my mom, who sent us the most amazing care package ever full of goodies like chocolate, coffee, and beef jerky! We don't even want a Christmas present because that was such an awesome box. Thank you!!!
And huge thanks to Tara, for letting us hold her place and her cute kitty hostage for several months while we prepared for Mali, as well as letting us stash our extra stuff there for another few months. You are amazing! And we're so happy to have you and Fluke as friends in ATL!
Okay, a bana, as they say here: it's finished. Love you all! Thanks for being awesome!
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