"Be Our Guest"

Please welcome guest blogger Julia B. Dyer (aka Mom) as she shares her thoughts on the highlights (and lowlights) of making the trek through Mali...

In January of ’09, Jim and I went to another world. We went to Mali, West Africa, to visit Susie on the last leg of her volunteer commitment to the Peace Corps. For the past 19 months she has been living in a small village in Mali with no running water, two lightbulbs and an outlet 5 hours a day and a diet consisting of a gray-green cream of wheat type mush called “to” (toe), eaten with the fingers out of a communal bowl. She had told us a bit about her lifestyle each time she could make her way to a nearby town with an internet café and email us so we had an idea about what to expect. When we arrived at the Bamako airport, we walked outside the terminal to find Susie. There she was, the one white face among hundreds of others waiting for passengers. When she saw me she ducked under the rope and as we smiled and hugged, all the other people who had been standing around her lit up as well. They seemed so genuinely happy to witness our reunion. This was my first hint that the Malian people are largely a happy group. After a day in the Peace Corps house in San where PCVs stay when they come from their villages to go to the bank, post office and internet café, our driver, Bakary, drove us to her village in Kimparana. This was our chance to meet her host family, take a tour of the village and see exactly where Susie is when we picture her working, eating, sleeping and being.

Of course, all my friends wanted to know how I dealt with the bathroom and the food. Everyone knows the bathroom is a hole in the floor. Luckily, Susie has a hole of her own right there in her hut, a luxury afforded a very few. Most folks are aware that the ground millet cooked over a fire and served hot, is the ubiquitous meal. It was easy to get used to the bathroom arrangements. Susie gave me a quick lesson and I had brought enough toilet paper from home to last me a good two months. The Vanderbilt Travel Clinic where we went for pre-travel vaccinations had advised us to drink only bottled water and not to eat from communal bowls. We had plenty of snack food with us. We ate an adequate amount of the meal prepared by the host family to appear interested. The rest of our meals were taken in restaurants with menu items chosen carefully. (One of us chose a whole lot more carefully than the other.) Yep, that was the easy part. The hard part was watching hungry orphans carrying a plastic bucket around just in case someone had a few bites left from their meal that they were willing to scrape into it. One child stopped me to have me pour the last third of my soft drink into his pail instead of discarding it.

As we walked through the village everyone greeted Susie and us as if we were American dignitaries, carrying on in Bambara, their native tongue with Susie answering their formulaic banter so adeptly that the people gave me credit for knowing the language! It is the cold season in Mali and days were a heavenly 75 or so. For the citizens, however, it was freezing. Babies were dressed in snowsuits, heavy jackets and any other pieces of cold weather clothing they had.

The huts are built in groups, surrounded by a privacy wall. These concessions , as they are known, have a communal open air toilet hole. Beside it, a shallow trench is dug to carry the waste wash water a few yards away where it sits on the ground. Most people step around it but small children and animals walk right through it as if it were not there. It is here that mosquitoes and other insects and bacteria breed. When the stuff does eventually seep down into the ground, it is often just feet from the family’s well. Get the picture? Of course you do.

We visited a clinic (and I use the term loosely) which had just recently added a place for delivering babies. This was to help improve the odds of a delivering mother living to care for the baby. The doctor there showed us a room where babies are delivered. Mind you, there is no water or electricity, just a table and a poster on the wall showing 4 steps to delivering. After the birth, the baby and mother are monitored every hour for 6 hours then moved to a room where there are 2 rows of beds. (Think summer camp.) Obviously this is a vast improvement over delivering at home and taking a big chance on bleeding to death, but it looked pretty grim to me.
To cut to the chase, Susie and I discussed the villagers’ life, good attitude and marveled at it in the face of appalling living conditions. Her remarks during that walk struck me; Susie said she didn’t want to necessarily change the people’s way of life. She just wants to help them be able to drink decent water so they can live long enough to get some amount of education and plot their own course. That’s why she is currently fundraising to conduct a clean water project in her remaining months. I thought that was pretty cool.