So, here are some pictures of my house! I got furniture made by the local carpenter - a bed frame, book shelf and two tables. I went to my post office and banking town to get a mattress, rugs for my concrete floor and some baskets. It's hard to make this seem like a home, but I'm doing my best...and I love my stick chairs!
I really like my house, and it turns out, I might have some really nice concrete floors! When my friends came to visit on my birthday, they told me my house was nice! When my friend came to visit this weekend, he said my concrete floors were really nice. I was thinking more like my termite mound are nice, but you win some, you lose some.
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| I sleep with this next to my bed, after that cockroach attack. I'm pretty sure there's no regulation agency to monitor the poison in this can. Ha, this is a good thing! |
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| This is my compound. My house is in the back, on the right. |
Just kidding, but I'd say that it gets interesting the things that become normal to you. I remember thinking before I came to Mali that no electricity and bucket baths sounded like torture, but really, it's quite nice.
The bucket baths are a huge relief twice a day after getting heat rash so bad it looks like I have chicken pox on a daily basis. The cold well water I use for bathing is the only thing that makes that head-to-toe heat rash chill out a little.
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| This is my hang-out at my house. It's our hangar. This is where we hang out, cool down, drink tea when it's still day light and chat. I'm telling you, there's a lot of "chatting" going on here in Mali. |
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THIS IS MY STICK CHAIR! Isn't that awesome!!? I have one in my house too. A local Malian made this by hand. It cost me a total of $2.50 to get this made, as the dollar equivalent. This is under the hangar, by the way. The chickens hang out here too. They're annoying. That green bowl is my hand washing bowl with the soap bowl next to it.
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| MY HOUSE! My host dad is building a hangar for me right now, so I can have a cool place to hang out and not sweat bullets while trying to relax and get me-time. I'm going to hang up my hammock in here. Keep in mind that my host dad did all of the work for this by hand. He busted the concrete to fit the wood with a steel tool, by hand. He transported the logs by donkey cart and chopped the wood with a hand-made axe. So different from how it would be done in America. |
The no electricity - really not a problem, considering how taboo it is to go out after dark, and that bright Home Depot lantern I have. I can buy the big batteries at the butiki behind my house for the equivalent to 75 cents American. I read by the flash light on my cell phone.
It's also really nice to have to do laundry by hand, outside each time. It's physically exhausting, like most work in Mali, but I take it as my time for relaxation. I listen to my Ipod and scrub away. I find it nice and relaxing. It's a couple of hours for me to just chill and collect my thoughts. |
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| My compound after some laundry was done. Laundry is all hand washed on a washboard here. It dries super fast because the sun is so hot!! |
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| The other angle of my compound. That's my host mom and dad's house and the hangar. |
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| This is what I call my "garage" area - it's like an inside porch to my house. This is where I hang out and relax. That's my water filter, stick chair, bucket bath bucket, salidaga, the usual. |
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| Other side of the garage. |
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| This is my first room of my house. It's where my clothes and trunk are. I want to make some type of closet area, but who knows. |
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| This is my bed and my mosquito net. It's really dark in my actual bed room, so I don't hang out in there a lot. And as you know, I don't have electricity, so I use that lamp. Which is awesome by the way. $20 at Home Depot, LED lights and goes into a night light too. haha |
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Bed room window
The heat, I thought, was going to be a lot better than it is! It's so much hotter than I thought, but we did get here right as hot season was approaching. The worst part is actually the sweating through the night. I wake up in the middle of the night and fan myself until I've cooled off a little. I'm so happy I brought two sheets, because they get drenched with sweat. |
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| My bedroom. As you can see, that table is DUSTY. I should dust it with a broom (because Im not sure dusters exist here) more often. It gets REALLY dusty here. |
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| Garage area from my relaxation point |
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| Trunk, etc in my clothes room |
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| This is the plastic that lines my ceiling . They put it there because my roof is logs and mud, which leaks when it rains. The fix, here, is to nail black plastic to the ceiling to catch the rain. This works except for the one part that leaks, which is next to my pillow. My host dad's supposed to be fixing that. And he forgot to wipe off the footprints before he put it up. Haha. |
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| Well, if you thought you had a beautiful view from your window, I might have you rivaled. Just kidding, but here's the view from my front door. |
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I'm not about to live two years without a mirror, so here's my mirror. Hand made of course.
I thought the squatting in the nyegen was going to be horrible too - but really, you get used to it. Like I said, it's amazing the things that become normal after a while. The hardest part about the nyegen is the fright I get from the cockroaches, but as long as I avoid it after dark, all is okay.
No running water can be annoying when I want to wash my hands, but running water isn't really necessary. Fill up a bowl with your soapy water and a bowl with clean water and you're good to go. I pull my own water from the well for my salidaga and for bathing, and that's actually great. There are all kinds of muscles I'm developing that I would probably not use in USA.
Small "workouts" I'm getting here that I wouldn't get in the US 1. Nyegen leg muscles from squatting 2. Pulling well water (that thing is heavy) 3. For the times that I help cook TO again, the muscles developed from bashing the sticky and thick TO until it's smooth. It is not easy. 4. Fanning constantly with a hand fan 5. Walking and biking absolutely everywhere 6...And the best of all - Dancing constantly!! |
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| This is how I get my water. This is my water filter, with the bottle of bleach and pump water next to it. I pour four liters of water in the top of the filter, with 16 droplets of bleach. It filters through and I drink it. I want to buy one of those clay pot things to cool my water down. I heard they work really well. My water is usually lukewarm or hotter. |
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| The essentials - Journal, Bambara verbs, sunscreen, mango a random person gave me, head scarf, French dictionary, spices, letters sent from home and hair brush. Yes, I really needed to dust. |
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| Some other essentials - Harry Potter, my Peace Corps med kit, cards ( I play ALL the time here, a game like crazy 8s that Malians like to play), soap and my hammock. Keep in mind it was that dusty because it was after a dust storm. I dusted. |
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| Bucket bath bucket. |
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| My bathroom for the next two years - actually this is stunningly gorgeous and CLEAN compared to some of the really gross nyegens I've seen here. |
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| My host dad told me I could sit on that concrete slab if I wanted to sit down in my nyegen. |
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| The days of ceilings in my bathroom are over :) |
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| Ha there are termite mounds growing ALL over my walls. Did you know termites not only eat wood, but also clothes? Ha that's what an unsuspecting Malian friend said. I gotta get on destroying the 15 of them growing in my house. When I bike behind my village, in the fields are termite mounds taller than houses. I'm completely serious. I'll try to take a picture. |
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| Garage |
What I'm happiest about that I had full access to in America, but have very limited access to here, is TV and Internet.
I love having the Internet when I come to my stage house, but I can't believe how much time we spend on our computers and online. Malians spend all day with their families and friends, actually spending time with each other. They don't have the constant distractions of TV, computer and Internet that we do.
They do everything with their families. They eat together. They sit around during the day and have full blown conversations with their family and friends over tea. They make tea together. And there is no TV blaring in the background or distracted people because they're typing away on their computers. It's really nice to be able to spend that time with my friends and family without all the distractions.
But, when I come to my stage house, I'll be online all day and all night, with no shame!!
:)
Hi Laura,
ReplyDeleteI'm an RPCV Ecuador 1981-83....a long time ago! Your description of life without running water or electricity reminds me of my PC site. I also lived in a sort of rural family compound in the tropical coast of Ecuador. My bed was in part of the "bodega" or storage wing of their farming household. I had one small room with no windows, but the door opened onto the bright patio where cacao was spread to dry after harvesting, where the children and chickens ran about: the family's central plaza. I recall how hot it was; in those days there was no Internet, so I wrote paper letters, by hand. My sweating hand would stick to the paper, making fluency difficult. The mosquito net seemed to suffocate me in the dripping humidity, but I knew a Ghana PCV who had gotten malaria, so I used the bed net faithfully. I, too, was happy to "work out" by drawing water from the family well. Once, the official malaria eradication team came and fumigated the homes in the village with Malathion pesticide...and I was outraged to see them casually hang their bucket of pesticide in the most convenient place: the well-post! And arrange their pesticide delivery equipment on the most convenient surface: the concrete well-rim! I washed my clothes in one of the many small esteros (streams) that ran through the cacao and orange tree orchards there...everybody did that, all over the country. We women stood in the water (soothing in the heat) and chatted, and used wooden maseta paddles to whack the ground-in grime out of the clothes. At first, I didn't want to hit my clothes (buttons and zippers often broke, and I thought the fabric would tear)...but soon I realized that clothing would mildew if not properly clubbed to deep cleanliness. Like you, I rather enjoyed the low-key, mindless activity. It was one of my first routines in an unfamiliar place, and provided a sort of physical meditation, a reassuring mundanity. It was also a social ice-breaker (or, given the context, an ice-melter!!); groups of women would sit in the stream and gossip would fly. I grew up in the city, and was used to some level of freedom and anonymity; I could speak before I thought, and get away with it, in USA. But in Ecuador, in the "gossip stream", my actions and opinions and mishaps went verbally viral within short order; and spread throughout the village. As I went about my rural public health promotion duties, later, I would see amused smiles (or occasionally frowns) as neighbors sized me up based on the latest washing gossip. I eventually learned to think before I spoke, and became less naive. In a small town, everyone knows everything about you, sooner or later. Maybe Facebook is like that, too.
To be continued (they cut me off!)
Continuation of the above!
ReplyDeleteBut I digress; what I actually meant to comment on was life without electricity. As there were no record players (!) or stereo sound systems (!) or TVs in our village, and only the occasional radio, people sometimes sat around and played guitar and sang! Mostly romantic love songs (that seems to be universal). And, as you noted, they visited each other and chatted constantly, sharing the prices the Middlemen were paying for oranges in the big town (farmers had to decide when to harvest their trees, strategically), the news about babies and deaths and other events, who was angry at whom for what, whose water was running out in the dry season, whose land was flooded in the wet season, etc etc. It was a MAJOR faux pas not to greet everyone you saw, by name, with hand-shakes all round, and chat before moving to business. (Being a shy person, this was hard for me to get used to!) We went to bed with the sunset, and got up early around dawn. Kerosene lamps were used for a short time only, in the evening (mainly so the students in the family could finish their homework after the farm work was done). Ecuador being on the Equator, the length of day and night were about the same (12 hours of each), all year long. After 2 years, I was used to the darkness of night. I remember looking up at the Orion constellation in the deep sky, while crossing the baking hot family patio, and trying to remember what the cold of winter was like back in the Northeastern USA--Orion always was a winter constellation, where I grew up! I remember the merciless sun that mandated midday naps...and the seasonal sounds of nature; peepers in the puddle on the dirt road in front of the compound, in the rainy season. Tropical forest noises in the evenings. Wayward roosters calling to Day at 4am; the scream of the weekly slaughtering pig at 5am once a week in the butchery next door. The munching russle of rats partaking of a recent harvest in the extended storage area next to my room....
Everyone in town wanted electric lights, so we worked on bringing electricity to the town while I was there, sending emissaries out to the provincial capital. Two years later, as I was leaving, the power lines had been approved. But I left before they were installed. While I studied in Medical School, I heard about electricity coming to the village, via letters. Everyone felt that the local "Recinto" was moving forward, and there was talk about bring in running water next. During medical school I managed to finagle a Rural Medicine rotation to an outpost Amazon clinic in Ecuador. I was thrilled to return to my town and to see everyone again...and I completely forgot about the electricity. What was my horror, sleeping in my musty old bed once again, when I heard blaring Latin Pop music and raucus drunken conversation at the entrepreneurial Bar next door until 2am, every night of a week!! The whole town was a cacaphony of electronic noises, everywhere I went: TVs, radios, people talking over them...You couldn't hear the forest life at all, and even the roosters sounded hung over. The quaint farming community became crass and craven with the flick of a switch. Somehow, I had the feeling that I had played the role of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Be careful what you work for. Change/progress is not always as good as it sounds. And yet, who are we to judge, who have lived all our lives with the luxury of electricity?
Madau - Thank you for the beautiful piece of advice and description of what seems like, a beautiful and poetic Peace Corps experience in Ecuador.
ReplyDeleteYour accounts make me want to go and cherish the same things as you did. I appreciate hearing your tales, almost 30 years later, and how you still hold your service so dear.
It's inspirational.
I appreciate your idea to look at the cockroaches as a lesson, as a greater philosophical question about their purpose and "harm"...I like the new perspective on what I'd call my nightmare bugs here :)
and isn't it funny, the double edged sword that occurred with the electricity in your village? I feel like a lot of Mali could end up with the same story.
It's beautiful as it is, the culture is amazing, the people are so giving...would development change that? Of course it would, as pros and cons. Who knows.
Again, thank you so much for your stories. It is wonderful to hear your vivid accounts 30 years later and see how much you hold tight the experiences you had as a volunteer. Thank you again. I hope to hear your perspectives again soon!
---Laura
GATEKEEPER YOUR TOUCH WAS PURE AS gold-...I pray
ReplyDeleteGrant me faith, love and hope-I pray
You guard my kife
To ease n=my mind.
Your haert's on your shoulder
It's in the right place......
We;ll look to the sky reach so high
The day we unite
This chance won.t pass me by
GATEKEEPER-Free Me!!!
soul heale
Sorry I wrote that in the wrong place. I loved your post. Your home is challenging but very interesting. I do feel like a spoiled American when I think of where you are.Love you, mom
ReplyDelete