Mutant cockroaches, carbs and gender roles

Ok I have about 6 posts to post, but Internet is unreliable and last time I was in Tubaniso, I couldn't post. So the next posts will go in several posts. Here's a post about culture shock from the end of February...

There is so much to talk about that it’s hard to know where to start. The first thing is that I am safe and happy. Peace Corps tells us a lot that the most successful volunteers come in with low or no expectations…and that has served me very well so far. Take it easy and go with the flow. Know that things will change and every day might feel like a roller coaster of emotion. Haha this is so true!

For this first post, I want to focus on some of the culture shock aspects and the things that…take some getting used to.

I do have to say that there are a few things that jump out to me: I really miss American food, the gender roles are something to get used to (you know me) and the nyegen situation is also…something to get used to. We did a homework assignment on culture shock and I wrote that there isn’t anything that’s particularly devastating for me to adjust to, but there are a few smaller things that take time to get used to.

Culture shock

American food:

We eat almost the exact  same thing every day. Day after day. For example, bread (with peanut butter sometimes) and two hard boiled eggs for breakfast, with sugar tea (tea is BIG here, esp with a shots worth of sugar). Lunch usually consists of beans or rice with sauce or TO. Yes, I said TO. TO is my least favorite thing to eat. It is millet porridge-type malt-o-meal cereal-y stuff and Malians eat it a lot. With a green, slimy sauce or a red sauce with meat in it. But, I eat it, because it’s part of the experience, and hey…I’m eating. For dinner, we usually eat potatoes or rice with sauce or TO with sauce. But usually potatoes. That is the food I’ve experienced here thus far. You may be wondering, where are the vegetables or fruit? Or juice? Yeah…doesn’t really exist, at least in homestay. And the food all tastes the same. Kind of spicy, very salty. Someone gave me a Snickers yesterday and I literally screamed when I got it!! It sounded like I was having a baby or something when my friend gave me that Snickers. So, my healthy supply of granola bars, oatmeal cream pies and brownies have been a real treat after bread, TO and potatoes all day. When they said we’d be eating all carbs, they meant ALL CARBS. Ok, that’s my rant on the food so far.

Gender roles:

We all knew the whole gender role thing was going to take some adjusting for me, but this is also exactly why I wanted to join the Peace Corps. I want to understand, at the experiential level, gender inequality on a completely different level than I had experienced in the States.

Gender roles here are strict. And we discuss them almost every day. They’re apparent as I watch my host sister, Oumou, wash all the family’s clothes on Sunday while her brothers sit there in the sun and baroke fe (chat). They’re apparent as we watched in class one day (my classroom under the shade of a tree in a soccer field with donkeys, bulls, goats, chickens and random fowl), a woman crossing the soccer field with a bundle of sticks balancing on her head. As she walked slowly, a (shirtless I might add) man came sprinting to her, like you would in an emergency, just to grab the bundle of sticks for her because the heavy lifting is the “work of men.” The gender roles are apparent as I sit with my host family for dinner at night. My brothers and their friends (all men) sit on the other side of the compound, while the women, after they had just cooked the meal, sit together. Dinner time can be integrated, but I get the impression that usually it is not. 

Gender roles are prevalent as I chat with a Malian and he is lecturing on how to be a man to my friend. “I will find you a wife here,” he says. When discussing children, he suggests having many children (remember the average number of children per woman is 7 children here), as ways to “be a man.” In addition, in our cultural handbooks, there was a note on the Malian family that is is not uncommon for men to beat their wives. A note on this: None of the people in my village have seen this. I actually doubt that the practice is that common, but it is interesting that it was included as a cultural lesson.  

In Mali, women usually do the cooking, cleaning and child raising while men work. It is not uncommon for men to have more than one wife and many children. In my host family, I live with my host mom, Ramata Samake, her oldest son Modibo, second oldest son Muhammed, Bafin, Ba and Oumou the only daughter, her son Zoumana, and their cousin, Nene. So, in just my family, I have five children. My neighbor, and fellow Peace Corps trainee, has literally 40 people living in her compound. She thinks there are three wives with about 10 kids each.

Ok…the topic you’re all salivating over…just kidding.

The Nyegen, aka toilet/bucket bath area.

The nyegen. The bathrooms here are usually open-roofed cement structures with a hole in the cement where your waste goes. There’s no TP in there (I keep a stash on me everywhere I go), but instead the salidaga is used. A salidaga looks like what you’d water plants with, and Malians fill it up with water as their source of wiping. This is why Malians NEVER use their left hands for shaking hands, touching food, etc, because the left hand is the hand used in place of toilet paper. One must ALWAYS take the salidaga with you to the nyegen. Or else Malians will think you’re a gross American. Ill talk about the cultural aspects of hygiene and cleanliness later.

The nyegen is also the place for bathing. By bathing, I mean twice a day and I mean bucket baths. I use my drinking cup to pour the water over my head and dip my head in the bucket to soak my hair. I have found that a great way to get my hair back in shape after it’s frying all day in the 100 degree heat, is to leave my conditioner in my hair and not wash it out. You might think, wow, your hair is going to get greasy. But it doesn’t. It’s too dry here. The hair just soaks it up.

There’s also something that’s quite well known…it’s called the HUGE nyegen cockroaches that only creep out at night. It sounds like a fairy tale or something, but it’s true. They’re as big as my big toe! Which is pretty damn big. The first time I fell into contact with the nyegen night cockroaches was a few days ago when I had to go at night and the only other person still up was my host mom. I walk to the nyegen with my salidaga in hand (and hidden TP in my pocket, haha) and right there. Is. The. Biggest. Cockroach. EVER. I actually screamed and ran off while my host mom watched, amused and laughing. Of course I couldn’t communicate in Bambara that there was a mutant cockroach waiting in front of the nyegen, so I reverted to grunting and hand motions haha. She went over there and squashed it with her crutches. I thanked her and went into the nyegen, which had an even bigger problem. THERE WERE FIVE mutant cockroaches sitting around the nyegen hole, where you pee. My host mom heard me scream again and she came in there and stomped around and they were all gone.

That was my last time using the nyegen after dark. Turns out almost all the other trainees I have talked to have experienced the same mutants in the nyegen too.