Chapter 8: Malian Inventions We Love!

This post is dedicated to all of the Malian inventions that made our lives easier, starting with this amazing clay pot, called a fine (in our village's dialect of Ganakan), or a jidaga in Bambara. You fill it with water, and bury it in sand or set it on top of sand, and keep the sand wet. Inside, the pot gets to about 70 degrees F, which gives you a little bush fridge, no electricity required! Genius! I know 70 doesn't sound very cold, but when it's 110 out, it makes such a difference to have 'cold' water.

Chapter 7: Gardening

As an environment volunteer in Mali, my primary role was helping our local rice group with their crop production. Because we were evacuated, I never got a chance to help them with that, but we were able to help them work in their community gardens. 

What you do in Mali changes based on the season because of the weather and resource constraints. There are three main seasons: the rainy-hot season from around June-September, the dry-cold season from October-February, and the dry-hot season from February to May. You'll notice that for a majority of the year, there's little to no rainfall; when the rains do come, people have to make the most of them to survive. Beginning in late May, they are usually preparing their fields for planting corn, millet, sorghum, peanuts, or rice. Thus, during the cold season, people start small gardens to supplement their diets. So how do you grow veggies in dry season? Here's how. 

Chapter 6: Market Day

Now that you've seen Niena, especially the aerial view, you can tell it's pretty big for a village. We had roughly 10,000 people (we think), and one of the best markets around! I wish we had gotten a picture of the market empty, because it's so big and deserted it's creepy. But alas, I can only bring you pictures from a Sunday market day. Welcome to Niena's market (entrance below)!

Chapter 5: Tour of Niena

Now that we're evacuated, we can actually disclose to you where we lived and give you a brief tour of Niena (below), a small rural community in southern Mali. The following is a photo tour of our village that we composed right before we had to evacuate.

Coup Runnings

Hi Friends!

We were evacuated from Mali on Sunday after a lot of time consolidated at our regional capital, Sikasso, and at Tso, our training center. In both instances, it was mostly hanging out and holding our breaths to get details on WTF was going on. Basically a lot of this:

Evacuation

Hi everyone,

We are very sad to say that we have been evacuated from Mali. While it's the completely correct decision to make with the security/coup/Touareg situation going on, it doesn't make it any less heartwrenching. We love Mali so much and love our community, our family, our friends, and even our stupid chicken, Pizza. This is extremely difficult for everyone whose lives have been touched by PC Mali.

We are currently in a super-secret, safe, and lovely country in West Africa doing a "close-of-service" evacuation conference for several days to discuss our options and do all of the paperwork to close out PC Mali. Things are very intense right now as we try to make decisions about our lives for the next months and years, so we will try to update you guys when things are less insane. Right now I think it is safe to say that we will not be transferring to another country to serve right away (as in, straight from secret location to a new country next week), but we may not return to America yet either. We still very much want to serve, so we are exploring those options and will let you all know what happens.

Please keep all of us PCVs, and all of our Malian family we love so much, in your thoughts this week as we try to deal with our loss, grief, confusion, and disappointment.

-Caro & Cass

Chapter 4: Malian Fashion Show

We know you all want to know what we wear every day in Mali...so here is our fashion show for y'all! You are bound to see other outfits too as we post pictures from our lives in PC, but here is a good start of all our awesome outfits we've had made here in country.

(Creeping in this photo is Jeneba on the far left, and Toshi in the middle--our neighbor's kids. They are adorable and hilarious! Toshi deserves her own blog post for the entertainment she provides us.)