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.)

Chapter 3: Moving into Site

Welcome to our house! These pictures are all from when we first arrived at our site. There was NOTHING inside the house--apparently the previous volunteer (who we have heard horror stories about, even from the Malians) gave away everything in the house when she ET'd ("early termination", or quitting), including stuff that wasn't hers to give away, like the Mayor's chairs! Anyway, this is what we started with. We bought the two chairs to the left, but the ones to the right are the Mayor's. 

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the lack of updates--as you might have heard, there has been a coup d'etat in Mali basically overnight and we know less than y'all do at this point. But never fear! We are safe and happy and very far away from all the craziness in Bamako. They are taking good care of us and trying to keep us updated, so we'll try to do the same. People in village are kind of upset and it's eerily quiet, but nothing bad has happened at all. We love it here and hope that we can stay with these amazing people!

We will be working on our previously-planned blog posts since it's a lot of not working and waiting right now. Stay tuned!

Hi friends,

We just wanted to write you a quick note to say that we are not able to upload pictures to the blog from our village, despite our best efforts. We can basically check e-mail and upload text, but very little else. We really like showing you guys what life is like rather than describing it, so we're going to just compose a horde of blog posts here at site and upload them in Sikasso, our regional capital, when we go next. That means no more awesome photo posts until maybe late March, but look out for them then! Blog posts to come: first few weeks at site, photos of our house, and themed blog posts about stuff like gardens, water, food/cooking/our market, day-to-day living, malaria, our counterpart organizations, making shea butter, and more! We have a lot of great stuff to show you, we promise!

<3 Cass and Carolyn

Chapter 2: Homestay Villages

In this second installment, we'll give you a brief introduction to what it was like to live in a village with a host family. As part of our training and integration, we spent two months living with a local family under their roof, eating their food, and basically hanging out with them for the times we weren't in school. We'd awake early to get to school by 8:00 am each day, Monday through Saturday, break for lunch at midday, then resume at 2:30 pm to study up until 4:30-5:00 pm each day. As for language, despite Mali being a predominantly French-speaking country (colonially), the dominant language is Bambara, so most of us volunteers have been learning that. 

Below are some photos from Cass's homestay situation. This first one is of a large rock, a landmark, that identified the village of Soundougouba Kora.

Chapter 1: Adventures in Bamako

We've started a bit late with getting this blog rolling so we're going to rewind. Here are some pictures and text of what we found in Bamako, at our training center Tubaniso, and at our various adventures in the big city. Slowly (dooni dooni), we will catch you all up!

A bientot!

Hi guys! We have been super busy swearing in, getting stuff for our house in Sikasso, and getting ready to go to our site (which is happening today!). We will definitely make some detailed posts once we are settled in at site and have time and energy to think and write. In the meantime, however, please check out the site of our stage-mate Cathy and her amazing photography. It will give you some idea of the beauty we are surrounded by...but also, there are some pictures of us too.

A bientot!

Happy new year!

Happy New Year (and Merry Christmas)! Hope you are all having a fun holiday season so far!

Here are some quick highlights of the last few weeks that we've been away from the interwebs:

- Seeing our awesome site, where we plan to (half-jokingly) open a bed and breakfast in our HUGE new house
-Getting sweet Malian clothes made (more pictures to come)

Mud stoves and mango groves

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.

A bit into homestay

Hey guys! We know it's been a while since you heard from us and it's because we've been incredibly busy with training and learning and living with our host family. Homestay has been great so far and usually consists of about 6 hours of language training a day with a few breaks in between for food and sanity with the rest of the day spent walking or biking around the area greeting people or trying to use our new language skills with our host family. Which is to say that there's a lot of laughing at various faux pas that we commit on a daily basis.

Post-staging and good to go!

Hi everyone!

So after staging in Philly, a long long flight, and lots of fun at the airport in Mali, we are here! We've already survived day one and even our first lesson in Bambara. Cass and I get to stay in the same hut which has a mosquito net, a slow fan, and a light. Yay electricity! We do have taps outside and showers with running water (sometimes) as well, but the toilets are holes in the ground you squat over. And as you can tell, here at the training center, we have computers and wifi to communicate with y'all, though it's only temporary.

Beginning of our service

Hi guys...I am testing this out. As you probably know, Cass is WAY more technically inclined than I am. Please bear with me! And big ups to Cass for setting all this stuff up!!

Apparently if you want to sign up for updates you can put your e-mail in in the box to the right and it will magically send you updates from us. Hooray! I think you could also use RSS to get this into your Google Reader somehow, or link our blog to your blogger.com blog. Blog blog blog blog.