An unseasonable, unexpected thunderstorm is drenching the dusty ground.
Under a tree dripping with not-yet-ripe fruit I ate my first mango in the baking heat of the afternoon.
At a camp just outside Bamako, I saw two scorpions and a black six-foot spitting cobra.
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Sénégal
Two weeks ago, as the relatively cool days of the Malian winter were quickly being replaced by oven-like heat and scorching winds of spring, a much-needed break offered itself in the form of the West African Invitational Softball Tournament. Though once a traveling event, the four day phenomenon now only haunts Dakar’s Club Atlantique where several hundred Peace Corps volunteers and expats gather under the pretense of sport to basically enjoy the beach. Since the four volunteers I work with in Kati were all going, I bought a bus ticket.
Presumably in an attempt to avoid the fiasco that is Bamako’s rush-hour (or really any-hour) traffic, the bus was scheduled to leave at 5 in the morning. The bus lurched out of the station promptly at 6:30. We were just settling in for a quick nap when we pulled into another bus station on the other side of the city. After 30 minutes of waiting, several men pushed large platforms up to the bus and unloaded all the baggage from the roof. The task completed, they proceeded to take every single bag and put it back on the roof. As the sun rose over the Niger we hit the road.
We were approaching Kayes (Wikipedia is kind enough to inform the prospective tourist that the name means ‘a low humid place that floods in rainy season’), the hottest city in Africa when the lack of opening windows, a negligible problem in the cool hours of the morning, became something of a concern. As we bumped our way over land and past mountains that comprised mainly of iron ore (imagine a bus trip across a frying pan) the tiny crack that the emergency exit on the ceiling provided became our lifeline. Our stop in Kayes gave us enough time to pick up a few other volunteers (who now had the deepest sympathy of those from other regions) and stock up on 10 cent cold bags of water. We pushed forward across a landscape whose variation was a shift between small bushes on red rock and bigger bushes on grey rock.
As the sun set we came to the Senegal River and the border to what, in the last 8 hours of vivid daydreams (mostly about ice cream eating and not-in-Mali being), we had decided was a golden paradise. But first we enjoyed an hour plus of waiting for who knows what bureaucratic process to finish and a harrowing 5 minute trip-in-reverse when the road was blocked by a parked truck. Eventually we crossed the river. At first we were disappointed. Kids were still bathing in questionably hygienic water and broken down huts with sheet metal roofs sat in small groups. But then we saw it! Acres of irrigated waving grain, fleets of gold-plated ice-cream trucks instead of motos, a beach in every village, gleaming skyscrapers. Actually, we saw the same dusty parking lot for two hours as the even more scrupulous Senegalese officials copied ever bit of passport information into their notebooks. The only thing noticeably different about the country were the extra-large bottles of Sprite.
Back on the road, the chilly air that was so refreshing outside the bus was whipping through that small gap in the ceiling. Within seconds after the vent was closed, however, those napping would wake drenched with sweat and demand to have it opened. Not that we had much time to worry about this though. Every 45 minutes a man with a blue-tinted flashlight would appear in the middle of the road and wave our bus to the side. The single police officer orders everyone off the bus and proceeds to extract, open, and search every bag in the cargo hold, apparently in an attempt to stop smuggling of fabric from Mali to Senegal. At some point during the night we heard that there had been an incident on the other bus. During one of the many stops a young guy ran onto the bus and started grabbing bags. He escaped into the maze of trucks and egg-vendors with three bags including one that had all the money for one volunteer’s vacation. We all slept clutching our backpacks after that.
When we woke up in the morning the landscape had switched from baobab-sprinkled desert to Camargue-like salty flatlands. Sometime in mid-morning we crested a hill and saw a thin strip of blue Atlantic. Moments later at, surprise, a checkpoint, we saw the first really exciting thing of the trip. Mandarins. Finally a fruit that’s not green (in Mali lemons and oranges never quite make it to their expected color). After declaring it to be the best fruit ever we pushed forward towards Dakar only to get stuck in two-lane two hour nightmare. Without movement to push air into the bus and with the sun burning the back of our necks we sat waiting to move even a few inches on suburban Rufisque’s thoroughfare. The silver lining was an extended glimpse at life in Senegal as compared to Mali. The first thing everyone noticed was the lack of motos. Who knows why the helmet-shunning craze hit Senegal’s eastern neighbor but it was such a relief not to have a rushing stream of commuters crashing through larger traffic. The ocean breeze does much to clean out the exhaust fumes and keeps the place relatively bearable even when the sun is blazing. We also marveled at the discipline and order of the various vendors who kept their stands at a decent distance from the road (instead of right on it like in Bamako). Donkeys are replaced by scraggly looking horses decorated with colorful ribbons. Produce stands look slightly photoshopped in their vibrant colors. People are slimmer and much better dressed (at least in western clothes, traditional Malian fabrics are more beautiful).
After a few more hours of inching along and a speedy taxi ride across the city proper we arrived at the American club where exhausted travelers from other places had already set up shop by the pool. We washed off the bus trip, ate grilled cheese sandwiches (cheese is hard to come by in countries without refrigeration), soaked up the salty breeze, and were shocked at ourselves being shocked to see little white children. The club is on Dakar’s corniche and late in the afternoon we walked up the coast a bit to the Mosquée de la Divinité which sits right on the beach. We dipped our feet in the frigid ocean then strolled back admiring the white mansions dripping with bougainvilleas and the relatively trash-free streets. We were installed in a cavernous but simple Peace Corps house and went downtown for dinner. After a visit to N’ice Cream (by now a place of legend) which looked like a store from southern California and which seemed to attract a middle class (mostly of foreigners, especially Lebanese), we slept like babies on our crumbling turquoise foam mats.
We didn’t manage to sleep in the next morning, but we did notice with great relief the absence of the schwiiit schwiiit schwiiit sound of sweeping at 5 a.m. Though we had no real intention of taking part in the actual softball tournament, friends were competing so we cheered them on for a while. It was strange to be in a place that was so far removed from its surroundings. There we were sipping sodas and eating hot dogs under a stars-and-stripes tent watching a softball game while just a few hundred feet away kids who have never heard of America or softball or hot dogs are playing with plastic bottles and asking for change. After a few innings we took a taxi downtown and the social and cultural dichotomies became more vivid. Homeless people sleeping in front of the Aldo store, boys in tattered clothes polishing gleaming Range Rovers and Porches parked next to women selling 30 cent bowls of rice and sauce. At the same time, though, while Bamako’s population is divided between the 98% fairly poor and the 2% well-off white foreigners, Dakar seemed to have a wider range of economic levels. There are plenty of Senegalese driving nice cars and eating at restaurants and there are more shops that seem to cater to only slightly better off clientele.
We walked past the presidential palace down to the continuation of the corniche where we found a strip of luxury hotels (for second-world prices), their private pools hidden by exquisite landscaping and the restaurants on piers over the water. The actual sands of the beach though seemed to be egalitarian. Women washed clothes; men sat chatting and praying. We continued down the road, hemmed in by the razor-wire capped walls of embassies on one side and a sheer cliff on the other. As we were enjoying the panoramic view of Gorée Island a suspiciously friendly man came up to us and started getting a little too touchy. Minutes later in broad daylight he unzipped one girl’s purse and almost got his hand inside before he was shouted down. Travel tip #1: Read the guidebooks first. That night, a little too late, Lonely Planet let us know that that particular stretch of road is notorious for audacious and frequent robberies and muggings.
We rounded a point and found ourselves in the more obviously shady port district where sketchy men and boarded up windows gave us a blast of adrenaline even at noon. The port seemed bustling enough, however, and highlighted the major disadvantage Mali is at by not having a coast.
We went from there to the other side of the Dakar peninsula where, every day at 5 p.m., a flotilla of fisherman land their boats. Sure enough as we moved toward the water dozes of ‘pirogues’ came ploughing toward the shore, their peeling colorful paint jobs announcing the name of the boat’s owner. Knowing that West Africans can be less than happy to have their picture taken, we were trying to sneak some photos when a few men who were struggling to tug a boat onto the sand called us over. They threw empty oxygen canisters and logs under the keel to roll the boat and cued by a word we didn’t understand we pushed and pulled the wooden mass up past the farthest reaches of the waves. Even before the boats were safely stowed hundreds of fish were being unloaded from styrofoam coolers onboard and locals were gathering around tables and tarps covered in fish. There were massive barracudas and well…I don’t really know any of the other ones, but they were red. When we found out that a good-sized box of fish costs only $20 we almost bought some to cook on the beach, but laziness won out and we only admired.
Dinner was at a Portuguese restaurant where the waitress initially refused to speak anything but Portuguese and the paella was dry. Afterwards we tried to go to Magicland (a Navy-Pier like amusement park) but it was closed so we went home and prepared to congratulate ourselves on the decision not to go to the club where, as we later found out, 5 volunteers had gotten their wallets and cellphones stolen.
A good sleep later we ate breakfast at a very cheap and very delicious café before our trip to Gorée Island. As usual it was a battle to get the taxi driver to accept our price. Usually what happens is you hail the taxi, he pulls over, you tell him where you’re going, he tells you to get in, you say you want to know the price, you see him pause trying to gauge how stupid you are, he quotes you 7000 CFA (about $15), you say 1500 CFA ($3), after a minute of arguing you start to walk away, he honks and gives you that price. We got to the pier and after attempting to get a 50% discount by convincing the ticket booth that I am with Peace Corps (and failing), we sat down to wait for the ferry. Next to us was a Cambridge man who has worked as a graphic designer in Paris for 20 years and who recently started his own firm in Dakar (their first project is logo design and rebranding for a shipping company merger). He said he spends every Sunday that he is in Dakar at Gorée and gave us a quick background history of the island. Though architecturally French, the spot of land switched hands several times between allied and axis powers during the war. Vichy France even sank a British ship whose remains require the ferry to skirt the buoy marking its resting place.
As Beer, our ship, pulled up to the quay a half-dozen teenaged boys jumped into the water and started calling for coins. At first, I didn’t believe that anyone would actually encourage the behavior but the paradoxical situation, rich white people on a big boat watching african boys flounder for a few pennies (on an island whose name is synonymous with the slave trade), didn’t stop a small shower of metal from being tossed down. Once ashore, we first stopped at the Maison des Esclaves a holding cell for west africans about to be shipped to the new world. We listened to the end of the Catholic mass at the island’s church then continued through the sandy streets up the big hill. From the top of the cliffs we saw Gorée’s brightly colored well-tended colonial architecture spread out over the island’s 900 meters and one could imagine it looking much the same 300 years ago, minus the tourists. We ate sandwiches on the beach and watched a group of kids practice wrestling in the sand. The extraordinarily fit guy in the spandex didn’t do quite as well as his swagger would have you imagine and their younger counterparts kept falling into the water. On the ride back to the mainland we craned our necks to see the massive steel expanses of the oil tankers and container ships whose business has helped make Dakar the exception to whatever rule grips other west african countries.
Our plan was to leave for St. Louis the next day but we needed to find lodging for when we returned so we headed to Ngor beach. The first hotel was out of reach of our extremely tight budgets and at the second hotel an excessively hung-over man and his silent brother failed to convince us that we should patronize their suspiciously empty establishment (or that any of our belongings would be safe left in the room or that turndown service wouldn’t include a healthy portion of lice and scabies). We gave up on the search and instead had dinner at Caesar’s fried chicken, supposedly of New York-Paris-Dakar, with a guy who had been a volunteer in Thailand 30 years ago and who is now solving sewage problems in central Mali.
The next morning, after an invigorating brunch of French fries and strawberry ice cream, we headed to a beach so secret that no one in our group actually knew where it was. After walking along the beach in the general area for some time, a sign proclaiming “The Secret Spot” welcomed us to a steep rocky beach. The goal of the excursion was to satisfy the surfing ambitions of Yik and Mark and soon they had rented a board and were out at sea. As a beginner I opted for the boogie board and after suppressing my particularly relevant phobias of drowning, deep water, and getting my head smashed on rocks, I splashed my way out to the waves. Luckily the two waves I “caught” outnumbered the one time I almost died so I consider the adventure a success. Yik was about to go out to try again when the surf shop owner told him that we needed to get out of the water because the waves were getting too big (nice of him considering he had threatened to punch us when we started sharing the wetsuit) and when the locals started gathering on the beach to watch the monster swells come in, we thought he might be telling the truth. It was only after we returned the equipment that he told us someone had died at the beach in January. The budget I set for myself quickly starting to look like a joke, I ate a cheap dinner and went to sleep.
It was Tuesday and time to head up to St. Louis, the starting block for French colonial expansion into Africa. After filling the small bus with many more people than Renault initially intended we sputtered off towards the north. Our exit from the city was facilitated by the brand new 3-lane freeways that Wade, Senegal’s 85 year old slightly megalomaniacal president has started constructing. Depending on who you ask the massive widespread infrastructure renovations are either of great benefit to the Senegalese people or an attempt at immortality for a certain head of state. Either way, they do make travel easier and soon we were passing through the countryside, though unfortunately not within sight of the ocean. Though in many respects Senegal is very similar to Mali, there are small things that are different. Streets are cleaner. Boutiques seemed to be better stocked and less rickety. There is more of a police presence than one man sitting under a tree making tea. Even in villages, the houses that are made out of concrete are slightly better kept and a little more ornate than equivalent homes to the east.
After five squished and sun-baked hours we powered down the engine on the outskirts of the city and taxied across the two bridges that connect the mainland to the island (the city) to the peninsula (la Langue de la Barbarie), past 500 odorous meters of drying fish and flowing sewage and arrived at our hotel, L’Auberge du Pelican. A quaint multicolored hotel owned by a French couple who happened to have a perfect little cottage on the beach for us (for the attractive price of $6 per guest). We enjoyed sunset on the wide pine-tree peppered beach and a three course shrimp-fish-ice cream dinner. As I got into bed two thoughts crossed my mind. One, I hadn’t taken my malaria pills in two day. Two, I wasn’t covered by a mosquito net. We’re by the ocean though, I thought, there can’t be any mosquitos, so I pushed the anxiety out of my mind. When I woke up at one in the morning I was brushing away more than fears. A swarm of mosquitos had descended upon my juicy body. An exposed ankle had already been sucked dry and I soon realized that this was the first time mosquitos had ever bitten my forehead and ears. For some reason it took me several hours to figure out that making my sheet into a tent was the solution, but finally I got a few hours of musty under-ventilated sleep.
Wednesday was bird park day and after convincing multiple roaming “guides” that we were neither their friend nor interested in their services, we got the tourist bureau (a marvelous thing coming from Mali) to find us a driver. 20 minutes later Moussa pulled up in his shining 1965 Mercedes sedan. His French was indecipherable but his smile was not and his obsessive dusting of every surface in the car was actually appreciated. Djoudj Bird Reservation, apparently the third largest (best?) in the world is two hours north of St. Louis and its border is the Mauritanian border (fun fact: Mauritanian men like their women as big as possible). Though the birds ended up being impressive the highlight of the trip had to be the little packs of warthogs, usually a mother followed by her stumbling clan, that crossed our path several times. After waiting for an hour for an “appropriate” boat to take us on our tour (the four that were idling at the dock were only for the hotel) we roared out into the park. There weren’t really that many birds, February being the end of the peak season, and I was getting ready to be a little disappointed when we heard a murmuring sound. As we turned the last corner of the twisty lake we came across a massive stone island that was completely covered in pelicans. With barely enough space to move they pushed each other around and sunned themselves. More paddled around in the water searching for fish. With stunning coordination a group of 5-10 would convene in a circle at the same moment in the same place and push their beaks into the water. They lifted their heads in unison and moved on to another patch of water to look for more food. As the motorboat pushed through the throngs of birds they took to the air, their massive black-tipped wings aided by their webbed feet that they used to push themselves off the surface of the water.
We drove back to St. Louis and walked around the town for a little enjoying the crumbling French architectural remains. We had shrimp omelets for lunch, listened for an hour as a drumming circle practiced its music, and gaped at the beautiful public high school. For ten cents, we were told, one can hail a deteriorating car (you could see better out of the holes in the door than the smeared windshield) and so we took one back to our hotel.
Having seen all that (we thought) there was to see, we took a van back to the suburbs of Dakar where we met Debbie’s old host family who offered us a riz au gras that was many many times better than what we get in Mali. We found a cheap hotel above the Ali Baba restaurant and after hiding our valuables so carefully (money in closet cracks, cameras hidden in the trash, passports in pillows) that we had to write down their locations for ourselves, we ventured out to try and find dinner. After being assailed by multiple men (one of whom claimed that our non-response was racist and that we were dead according to the black revolution that is coming) we decided just to eat at Ali Baba’s. A taxi trip to find hypothetical nightclubs where Senegalese would be dancing to Senegalese music yielded two closed clubs in exceedingly questionable neighborhoods so we went home to sleep.
On Friday, after multiple sources assured us that buses to Bamako leave every single night promptly at 10 p.m., we finally made it to the ticket desk where we were told that buses do leave promptly every single night except for Friday and Sunday. We bought our tickets for the next night and tried to figure out how to waste an extra day in the city. The answer: spending money. After we had gotten our fill of souvenirs we went to the brand new glimmering supermarket and bought picnic supplies. We made our way as close to Africa’s westernmost point as possible (within sight of the jetty, owned by Club Med, that is actually it) and sat on a shell-covered beach watching both the waves and suspicious men who were watching us. Sandwiches gone, we walked down the coast and up the hill to the lighthouse that has kept watch over the city and its water since the mid 1800s. The guardian was there and he let us up to the top where we saw the tiny (maybe two inches tall) light bulb that, with the help of a massive rotating spherical glass system, makes itself visible 57 kilometers away. In terms of visibility, however, the lighthouse now has competition in the form of a massive new statue rising from an adjacent hill. The African Renaissance Monument is a gigantic bronze (brown) representation of a man, supported by his wife, holding a baby up to the sky. If being ugly and ridiculous wasn’t enough, the wife’s skimpy outfit is hardly representative of a place where knees are supposed to remain covered. The inside of the statue is supposedly being filled with conference centers and a museum as well as a Statue of Liberty style cranial observatory. Now you must be thinking that the genius who came up with the concept should be rewarded. The president agrees. He has proclaimed that 35% of tourism proceeds should go directly to the man who first imagined the project, himself. And it’s being built by North Korea.
After one last chicken sandwich we packed our bags and went over to the bus station. We snagged the last three seats right in the front row (one of them was a even less comfortable flip-down version that fit in the aisle) and after 30 minutes of heated argumentation, i.e shouting, the bus started rolling with a few extra passengers who jumped aboard. Apparently this wasn’t in the protocol because a few seconds later a massive man (what they would call ‘gros bras’, ‘big arms’) jumped on and started ripping people out of the front and throwing them off the bus. The situation taken care of we moved out. It was when our bus barely had enough acceleration to make it up the freeway on-ramp that we realized we were in for a long trip. Spluttering, our bus dragged itself away from the ocean towards the desert and at times it seemed as though a bicycle would be a more efficient form of transport. Two hours on one side of the border and another two, sitting on mats in the shade of a truck, on the Malian side were our welcome back home. We finally got to Kayes where we were told to switch busses. We gladly jumped off our bus and grabbed three seats by windows. It was night again by now and and just as I had dozed off, maybe an hour out of the city, the bus stopped. Nothing surprising, but after a half and hour they turned of the motor and the driver came back on grabbed a mat from the overhead bin and disappeared into the night. We asked someone who seemed to know something: “Mobili mein”. “Bus bad”. He told us just to go to sleep, but the stagnant air on the bus was too much so, using backpacks as pillows, we slept on the asphalt in front of the bus. The heat radiating off the highway kept us warm during what turned out to be a fairly chilly night. Parched, cursing the water-seller who decided to raise his prices, and wishing there had been some explanation for our little stop, we got back on the bus along with more people than the day before. The next six hours were spent trying to avoid bashing my knees into the old woman, the little girl, and the sullen Mr. Chewing gum who had taken up residence in aisle and consequently half my seat. Exhausted and sweating, we stumbled off the bus after 40 hours (15 of which were spent off the bus at checkpoints) and into the beginning of Mali’s hot season.
[link to pictures at right]
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Up North
Read-Learn-Lead (RLL) is the name of IEP’s newest project, a student-centered reading curriculum for which the Kati office has produced 65 different booklets (in four national languages) as well as countless instructor support packets and various other materials. Two years in the making, the Fulfulde (a language prevalent in north-central Mali) squadron headed up-country last Tuesday to install themselves in what is to be their temporary home while they establish RLL and train teachers, and I tagged along.
The plan was to leave at 7 A.M. Sharp. I was simultaneously waking up and dashing out the front gate when Debbie told me that the driver had called to say there would be a little delay. Translate “little delay” into the local African vernacular, and you get something like “three hours later.” We left town and I was just beginning to settle in for a comfortable trip, when two more IEP team members hopped in, each with 70 pounds of bulky luggage. I was feeling a little guilty about not even making an effort to take public transportation but once I realized how cramped the car was going to be, I decided I was getting a comparable experience. We sped out of Bamako, past the beautiful new government-subsidized (though strangely empty…) housing development, and up into the heart of Mali.
As we left the capital behind us, the number of motos and cars on the road dwindled, only to be replaced by a constant trickle of pedestrians and villagers on rusty, no-speed bikes. We blasted through countless tiny villages huddled by the side of the almost-gravel strip of pavement whose insistent, bold red line on the maps I looked at would have you believe it is somewhere between a divided two-lane and a superhighway. The distances between visible villages started to increase, but the flow of foot traffic didn’t seem to abate. I invented a game (granted, a rather boring one) where I would try to figure out the next place down the road the people drove past could possibly be walking to. The game ended quickly as I found I had completely forgotten about the person in the 15 minutes it took us (going 85mph) by the time I got to the next settlement. I was curious where all these people (and especially the kids who should have been at school at 11 on a Tuesday morning…) were going, and I soon found my answer.
Mali seems to have made the decision to divert its transportation funds away from luxuries such as street signs, street lamps, or police officers (Maybe just police cars. There as more than enough costumed men with whistles sitting by roundabouts) and straight into a feverish construction of speed-bumps. Every village, and by this I mean a combination of 2xHouse, 1xTree, 3xMen Sitting, is guarded against speeding donkey carts by a system of 20 warning bumps and a coccyx-jarring main mound. After an hour of driving and a less than gentle warning from a hump of asphalt we pulled slowly into what appeared to be a market. Several busses and 18-wheelers and at least a dozen Soutramans defined the gathering as a truck stop and it was here that I found those walking kids. From the moment the silver hood of our Landcruiser (read: rich people) was in sight, an army of surrounded the car. Many had little plastic buckets, telltale signs of kids asking for money (who are often, in the style of Oliver Twist, forced to give any earnings to some back-alley boss). Others tried to stick everything from carrots to 5 cent boxes of tissues in the windows. A few feet off the road, women sat on piles of watermelons selling Malian drive-thru: little bits of fried dough, slices of fruit, the occasional hacked-off piece of mutton. We pulled through the waves of teenagers waving sheets of prepaid phone cards and back out onto the road.
Thus far, I had stayed in the Bamako region where a (very relative) abundance of materials and money means that all buildings are made out of concrete, but out in the countryside this is not the case at all. Between groves of trees and planted fields, out on the dusty gravel expanses that seem to be the main natural feature of Mali, the tectonic action of millions of termites has formed mountains of red-brown earth often taller than your average Malian man. In many ways the human construction, because it relies on the same materials available to the insects, takes on similar qualities. The mud-brick houses have slightly tapered, smoothed walls and pointy roofs and are often under trees which provide shade, instead of nourishment (unless it’s a mango tree). Though I was never in a particular village for more than a few seconds, over the course of the trip I was able to make a moving picture of village life. I would get snapshots, individual frames, and over the seven hour drive the fractions of each action added up to whole scenes. I saw the men in the fields harvesting the last of the rainy season’s crop, the women (at all hours of the day) pounding millet in giant mortars, kids biking along the road, toddlers sitting together next to a giant baobab playing in the sand, men drinking tea and listening to the radio in front of their boutiques, and the endless number of signs informing us that an NGO was working just off the road. Luxembourg, Japan, Germany, America, Italy. It seemed like almost every country had something to do in Mali, and their big white SUVs, logo on the driver’s door, seemed to be the only other cars racing down the road.
We got to Sevaré that night at 8 where a husband and wife, both with Peace Corps, were going to let me spend the night. Both frustrated with the inefficiency of getting things done in Mali (and confused as to why PC sent them to Mali when he has an MA in marine biology…) they gave me the inside scoop on PC life and how education reform has been working (or not) in their neck of the woods (desert).
With the next morning’s light, I saw that I was now in a noticeably different climate and ethnic zone. The land was much drier and fewer roots managed to find water in the sands to feed their trunks and leaves. We were halfway to Timbuktu, and we had moved out of the Bambara region and into Fulfulde where a mix of Saharan heritage means that many of the people have north African (Mediterranean) faces and skin tones. Our plan for the day was to visit two CAPs (Centre d’Action Pedagogique, basically the school district’s administration) and the local IFM (Institute de Formation des Maitres, a teacher training school) to introduce them to the new program and get their blessings. Apologies had to be made because the team was two months behind schedule, but the main point of visiting the leadership was to respect the Malian tradition of hierarchy. In practice, this means seemingly endless handshaking accompanied by the obligatory inquiries into your health, your family, last night’s sleep, mutual acquaintances, and how your work is going. The process would start the moment we got out of the car and continued back through several offices to that of the director. He would be lounging behind an oversized desk, computer prominently displayed and would lean forward in his bigger-than-yours chair only to shuffle important looking papers. All the relevant advisors and councilmen had to be called in, and every questioned was answered only after thanking the interrogator. But while the directors at the CAPs were generally jovial, the principals of the schools seemed to alternate between being sombre and harried. We spent two mornings going to schools, writing down the numbers of students in each prospective class (usually over 50) and the experience/education level of the teachers (this was often their first year teaching, the age of several was about 20).
Out of the half dozen schools we visited, at least half seemed to have been built by GTZ, the German equivalent of USAID. The problem is that these beautiful schools, and the kids with their sky-blue UNICEF backpacks have no teachers. Last week Bonnie (an American who is also working at the school) and I went to visit the closest IFM to Kati (a 110km bone-rattling journey towards the Guinean border) to see where Mali’s teachers are coming from and to propose a series of workshops/training on active teaching methods and student-centered learning. The Director was reluctant to let us observe any classes at all (he said it would require “improvisation” on the part of the instructors, a suspicious phrase) because we had failed to announce our arrival (there was no way of contacting them) but he eventually relented. The packed classrooms (about 65 student) were at least silent, a surprising fact considering that just six months ago, a large percentage of the students were in rowdy 9th grade classes. Yes, you read that right, you can start training to be a teacher after 9th grade. You get two years of accelerated high school and review of past subjects, then one year of pedagogy and child psychology, and then the fourth year is dedicated to hands-on experience. In theory this is supposed to mean student teaching, but schools in desperate need of staff often throw the new recruits into their own classroom from day one. Now maybe this would have a chance of working (not likely) if they were being given world-class instruction, but it’s not even a requirement for the professors at the IFM to have taught. Most have a two-year college degree and a few years of work experience, and maybe an IFM certificate. So even if there were teachers, their quality leaves something to be desired.
One of the districts IEP is going to work with is the CAP of Djenne, home of the world’s largest mud-brick structure, an earthen mosque. Though the mosque itself is interesting, if not beautiful, the town is fascinating. During the rainy half of the year, it is surrounded by water with only a small causeway connecting it to the land around it. Much like a moated medieval city, the streets are canyons (though in this case mud, not stone) that surround the open central square where the mosque sits. The landscape around the town was a sight for dry, dusty eyes. As part of the Niger’s swampy watershed, the fields around Djenne were emerald green oceans of waving grasses. After seeing only earth tones for the last two months, the seemingly endless expanse of green was captivating. We crossed back over the river on the sputtering two-car ferry that had as many locals souvenir hawkers as travelers and returned to Sevaré.
The next morning, the team started it’s training of teachers for the reading program, and after seven hours of being told our (the driver and I) presence was imperative in case someone needed the car and doing nothing, we headed home. The three crashed busses we saw smashed by the side of road reinforced the advice I had been given never to travel on public transportation at night, but our southernly break-neck dash through a countryside blackened by the lack of light pollution didn’t seem that much safer. I assume the people on their donkey carts or trudging alongside the road in the middle of the night were also going home.
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Education
Even though education is tied with “hot” for first place in the Things-I-Think-About-Most competition, I realized that I have yet to write almost anything here about it here. For those of you rushing off to a power lunch or power nap, I’ll summarize: everything is a mess.
If only it were that simple.
There is a group of about a half-dozen girls, some from Kati, others boarders from various tiny villages, who live in my compound. Most nights, they have some kind of devoir a domicile (heaven forbid you should confuse this with an unembellished devoir, an in-class quiz) or lecon which they “take”. This act of lecon-ta, as it has been dubbed in Bambara, entails sitting down with the notebook in which you copied, in French you don’t understand (more on that later), a page of information, and memorizing word-for-word the physical properties of North America or a ridiculously summarized history of neolithic Mali. I asked Djeneba (Alice), the girl whose summer trips to the U.S. have given her impressive control over English, what she thinks studying means, and her answer was “memorizing.” Now it might be a little difficult to describe exactly what most american students intuitively (or maybe after much guiding…) consider studying, but you might expect that their definition would include some mention of reading or practicing or reviewing etc. But how can you blame them for “taking” their information by heart when even the slightest deviation from the teachers’ definition on a test means an automatic zero? Then, however, you come to realize that the teachers themselves are just doing their best to re-create the classroom from which they rose, a style of education whose very name, classique, hardly suggests innovation or creativity. This is where the problem starts.
There seem to be two main issues colliding at the Ciwara school. First, the problem of language. Back in 2000, the Malian government passed a law saying that all schools had to switch to pedagogie convergante which meant that schools were no longer allowed to teach only in french, but rather had to start kids out in their native language. Arguments for this switch included the preservation of local tongues and the idea is that students learn foundational material better when it’s taught in their first language. You might wonder why the children of an independent state need to learn colonial french at all, but the truth is that any job outside the most menial village employment (or unemployment as is the case for many) requires pretty decent French. Here in Kati, the switch is happening in the prescribed fashion (all Bambara for about the first three years, then a fairly quick switch over the course of three years into only French) but the problem is that it is not happening effectively. This has very wide-ranging consequences.
Pick any subject and chances are that a typical class will consist mostly of students copying definitions and examples from the board into their cahiers. They then go home, “take” the lesson and return to class where their well-trained memories regurgitate exactly what the teacher wants to hear. This is where we run into the second problem, the imported idea of student-centered learning. Though American kids would try to convince you otherwise, their educational system focuses almost more on them than on the curriculum. In almost every school, teachers are taught to work with their students and help them discover the answers rather than forcing definitions down their throats. The end result is an educated, creative student who has the tools to learn on her own. The problem here has to do with the fact that all of the teachers were educated under classique and thus have a hard time even imagining a philosophy that doesn’t give them the power to simply copy out of the book onto the board and then go home for lunch. So now it seems like one should just be able to retrain Malian teachers to work more constructively with their students (which is a whole new topic), but it’s right about now that you realize the problem isn’t only with the teachers.
Imagine trying to lead a class discussion or have your students write a personal response when they a) can barely understand you and b) don’t have the language skills to either speak or write in French. Since the junior high level is supposed to conducted entirely in French, the teachers really have no option other than having the students copy simply because none of the people in front of them can express themselves in the required language. Unfortunately, this means that very little real information enters the students’ brains yet the comprehension checks (essentially “Did you understand that?”) can be answered to satisfaction(“oui monsieur “) with no strings (think: “Okay then, give me an example”) attached.
Another problem is the intense pressure to keep up with the prescribed curriculum. The education that the government mandates is in preparation for two major tests (after 6th grade and after 9th) which determine one’s eligibility to continue schooling. Those the exams are apparently rife with cheating and indeed corruption (proctors often write the answers on the board, thus testing only transposition skills, which most students are surprisingly good at), their role as gateways to continuing education makes them a vital goal to work toward. An aside: a major problem with the examinations in a country that relies on manual labor is that parents often use their child’s poor performance as an excuse to pull him (and especially her) out of school and put them to work for the family.
So it seems like the problem needs to be attacked from multiple directions. First, the kids need to successfully transition from their native language into French, thus allowing them to understand what’s going on at school. Second, the teachers need to encourage their students and force them to think creatively and independently (skills that ideally in the future would help Mali develop from the inside out). And third, if not last, administrators and ministers need to push all this forward and keep track of what all the 9,000 Malian schools are doing.
If only it were that simple.
More about various small adventures later…
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The Bamako Zoo
Just as the road from Bamako to starts to climb up to Kati’s plateau, a large sign announces the presence of the Bamako Zoo. On Sunday afternoon, we filled the car with kids and decided to pay it a visit. I wanted to pay with the equivalent of a $20 bill, but seeing as the admission for 10 people was about 65 cents, the man sitting behind the wobbly desk didn’t exactly have proper change. We crossed a causeway to the first attraction, and apparently the most recent addition, a baby elephant. Oh, by the way, there is no good news in this post. I might actually have spoken too soon, because at what other zoo could you feed all the animals without supervision and touch most of them too….
The elephant had installed himself right up against the wall and since half the chicken wire was missing on top of the fence, he would reach his trunk out and take whatever food was offered. We moved on past the chimpanzees and orangutans were playing around in their prison-like concrete cages behind the handwritten signs proclaiming that their life span in captivity is 40 years. I couldn’t imagine that that was an accurate number, and in fact I was kind of hoping for the animals’ sake that it wasn’t. Across the muddy path from the monkeys a solitary Nile crocodile lounged in some murky water. It has to be said though that seeing the animals in their native country is a little more striking than say seeing a croc at the St. Louis Zoo because you can imagine that just down the street the reptile’s pals are waiting to snack on you.
By this point I realized the lack of half the water in the manatee tank and the greenish hue of the remaining liquid didn’t necessarily indicate the absence of the purported inhabitant, but after a few minutes of waiting for a bulbous head to poke out of the trash we decided to move onto the big cats. We passed the pen of the ironically paired ostrich and turtle and made our way to the lion. At first I didn’t realize why Debbie was telling the kids not to go around to the other side of the pen because that’s where all the people seemed to be. But when I went to check it out and saw that you could press right up to the cage whose bars were wide enough to admit an entire arm if not a leg, I understood her concern. The dozen hyenas were similarly displayed but we decided to move on up to the snake house instead.
I think it’s in the first Harry Potter book that the glass from the cage magically disappears and a giant boa is released from its confinement much to everyone’s horror. At the Bamako Zoo, however, it didn’t seem like it would take magic, or even much imagination, to see the plastic barrier between us and the black mamba disappear. I think the whole time I was in the under-ventilated building I was looking under foot to see if some of the inmates had escaped.
At the top of the hill another lion was roaming around in, for once, a large enclosure. This was apparently the site of a now infamous accident where some american woman accidently dropped her baby into the pit only to watch it get devoured by the (probably underfed) lion. As we walked back to the car along an un-fenced cliff (and past a horse, it was unclear if it was being exhibited, whose bloodied leg was covered in flies) it wasn’t hard to imagine other accidents happening.
I talked to someone yesterday about my weekend and when I mentioned I had been to the zoo, he asked if I’d noticed how hungry the animals seemed. I’m not blind, so I said yes and he told me how the zookeepers don’t feed the animals much because they don’t have enough money to feed themselves. One guy is getting enough to eat however: the monkey that is tied permanently to a tree behind a broken railing is surrounded by banana peels and food wrappers and spilled soda. Don’t get too close though, he’ll jump on you.
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Bamako
The first sign that we were nearing Bamako (Mali’s capital) was the exponential increase in moto (the ubiquitous small motorbikes) traffic. I was crammed in the back seat of a pickup truck with two kids and Bonnie, a former Peace Corps volunteer who returned to Kati to work on science and math curricula. We parked and walked over to the electronics store to buy a lamp and an extension cord for Bonnie. The streets were insane. The two actual traffic lanes were clogged (throughout the entire city) by a small number of private cars, and a ridiculous number of the held-together-by-tape-and-wires-peeling-green-paint Soutremains, the staple of Malian public transports, small busses that, judging by the two-dozen people crammed into the back (and often a few on top), have truly discovered the meaning of efficiency. On both sides of this sputtering, honking jumble, moto drivers navigate their steeds, toes brushing the pedestrians who are trying to find a foothold on the sidewalks that are basically causeways over the often open sewers and drainage ditches.
After the obligatory haggling we left the store, I was reminded just how well off my host family when the kids got new bikes and backpacks from another shop down the street. Bonnie wanted to go look at the library at the Centre Culturele Francais, so we broke off from the others and headed into the heart of the city. The first thing I realized was that the extravagantly stocked (think 50-inch plasma TVs and laptops) stores that we had been were no reflection of the real Bamako and its Grande Marche, which, as it turns out, encompasses basically the whole sprawling city. Our first stop was the artisans’ center where traditional craftsmanship is on display presumably for purchase by western tourists who – and I don’t blame them after our experiencing our trek through the exhaust and complete destitution – were nowhere to be seen.
I never realized how many friends I had until I heard the choruses of “mon ami! mon ami!” from the roaming 20 year olds whose job it was to get us into their shop. We popped in and out of the tiny storefronts that lined a maze-like system of arcades in whose shade the actual craftspeople carved and etched. I got a first-hand view of the aggressive negotiations I will have to face as a tubabu (white person) if I decide to bring home some souvenirs. Often, these men will quote you a price that is many times higher than the actual value of the object, so apparently a safe rule of thumb is to say you will pay 1/4 the quoted price.
After leaving the stifling market, we headed back out onto the crushing streets. We passed the Grand Mosque and the outer edge of the food market where I only caught a glimpse of the traditional medicine stands. Let’s just say that you don’t see piles of dried monkey heads, turtle shells, and a good-sized stack of hedgehog pelts at your local Walgreens. More tragic than that, however, were the scenes on the street: toddlers playing in puddles of shiny grey water two feet away from the roaring road, entire families sleeping in the shade of one decrepit car, kids selling boxes of tissues and phone cards instead of going to school. It was hard to imagine how this could be a metropolis on the same planet as Paris or Chicago or San Francisco.
Eventually we stumbled upon France’s bastion of colonial culture and looked around the fairly well stocked open-to-the-public library. After looking at a display about the nomadic peoples of Mali, we hailed on of the thousands of taxis (I guess this is kind of like New York…) careening down the road, and headed back to Kati.
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L’école
If you were to walk out of the garage that serves as the front door of our compound, make a left turn, head two blocks east, then two blocks north, you would probably find yourself facing a large pile of rocks decorated with thousands of bits of colorful trash. But walk 20 feet up the hill and then up the small cement ramp, and you would find yourself in main courtyard of the Ciwara (pronounced chi-wara) Community School. Behind the school is the office of the IEP (for those of you with insomnia, here is an interesting link: http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/ls3_coumba.htm) the foundation for which Ciwara is a basically a laboratory for experimental curricula and teaching methods. The middle school, where I have spent most of my time so far, has three classrooms and an office. The students got new desks this year, along with matching chairs, but the only other object that would signal the space a being a classroom is the blackboard on the front wall (one of the three rooms is the open-air first floor of a three story cement block, thus the tableau just leans on two pillars).
The movement in Mali for the last decade or so has been to part from the colonial system of French-only instruction and to move toward bilingual education at the elementary school level. The idea is to begin teaching kids in their local language (here, Bambara or Bamanakan according to Malians) and then by about sixth grade conduct almost all classes in French. For this reason, I have been spending my time wandering in and out of the middle school classrooms. The students stay in the same room the whole day, and unlike in America, teachers rotate between rooms. Each class is an hour long, with a 20 minute “recreation” break after the first two classes and a two hour lunch break during the hottest part of the day.
Though there has a been a ten-fold improvement since the first two days that I was here (I am not suggesting that it has anything to do with my presence) many of the problems in class stem from an almost complete lack of order or organization. Students walk out of class while the teacher is talking, there seems to be at least one person constantly erasing the already-clean chalkboard, when the 7th graders raise their hands they stand up and shout for the teacher to call on them, and “les profs”, obviously overwhelmed by the situation, try to just continue talking over the racket.
Speaking of the teachers, a lack of them is by far the biggest problem facing not only this school, but Mali as a whole. To add to the list of educational problems, the small number of teachers that the training centers produce have been taught to use the Classique style, the same one they had gone to school with. Essentially, this method is French and instructor centered, the opposite of what the IEP is hoping to encourage. Unlike in an American, student-centered, environment, classes here are basically just copying sessions for the students. They are dictated phrases, often from a textbook they already have, and sit there half listening while they underline their titles with rulers and don’t ask a single question.
Today (Saturday), Debbie organized a group of teachers and workers to clean up the ground and take care of things that should have been done before school started. We cleared out the office where a man nicknamed “le commandant” (who, coincidentally was often dressed in robes with Obama’s face and “Yes We Can” printed prominently on a red, white, and blue background), would sit all day with his feet up surrounded by crumpled maps and unused school supplies. He was supposed to be the superintendent. The room was completely cleared out and given a fresh coat of paint to usher in its new life as the only special ed. classroom in Kati.
More on the school later, I’m off to eat (chicken, I think).
There is a link to a photo album on the left ===>
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Arrival
I though I would be able to at least buy one bottle of water at Bamako’s Senou airport before being thrust into the semi-treated Malian countryside, but the one room that served as a bank, visa center, customs station, baggage claim, taxi stand, security checkpoint (presumably for people trying to smuggle clean water into the country), and waiting room obviously didn’t have space for a shop. At first, I was worried that my contact wasn’t there, but I soon realized that he wasn’t one of the pushy hotel employees who were trying to offer me a luggage cart. I finally found my name on one of the signs fluttering in the pungent breeze (the smell was a combination of greenery, flowers, and earth) and together we loaded my two bags into the back of the Land Rover.
The four lane (and now that I had time to look around, it’s worth noting that it was paved) road from the airport was unsurprisingly empty at four in the morning but as we wound our way up the plateau packs of wild dogs would occasionally trot across our path. The entrance to Kati (a village of about 10,000) is through the 3rd largest military base in Mali, as announced in bold lettering on the giant gate just past the hospital. As the asphalt highway came to an end, it was unceremoniously replaced by the deep ruts and ridges of the red-colored local streets. After a few winding minutes, we pulled into the garage and I was installed in my new home.
All I noticed that night was that there was already a mosquito net set up, and 15 minutes later after I had managed to undo the ties holding the flaps back, I slipped into a 12 hour slumber. I woke up refreshed, but hardly ready to hit the town. I ate my first meal, the first of many rice-based dishes at the table just inside the door to one half of the compound. Life here is based very much around extended family (I have been asked multiple times now what my Malian name is, a designation that I haven’t yet received, but one that can come highly charged with mysterious connotations and make you the brunt of many an inside joke) so it seems as though everyone living around the courtyard here is related in some way. There is one person who also looks out of place, however, but in every sense except for skin color Debbie Fredo (my de facto host) is part of the clan.
After eating, I was introduced to the most popular local pastime: sitting. Much as in Casablanca, people tend to spend a lot of time sitting outside either in courtyards or in front of their houses, sometimes talking, sometimes listening to the radio, but oftentimes just sitting.
It’s getting late now, and though I did go to the school for much of today, I will write about it tomorrow, maybe with the aid of some pictures…
The courtyard and one of the motorbikes that are the main system of transportation
The view from right outside our compound. The fancy car is not a usual resident.
Though there seem to be very few mosquitos, my bed was already equipped with a net...
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I thought the plane must still have been at 30,000 feet when we popped through some reddish fog and dropped onto the Casablanca runway. After navigating, or rather walking right through, the practically non-existent customs, I blended in perfectly with the other men standing around outside the airport. This only difference was that I was white, obviously lost, and was struggling to figure out why there was only one beat-up car idling outside the main air terminal. Eventually a bus came and took me over to the other side of the airport from where the train into the city would depart. The first thing I noticed was how incredible clean everything was. A team of three chattering, jumpsuit-clad janitors from S.O.S Nettoyage was sweeping and mopping already reflective marble floors, and dusting chairs that had just been occupied. I decided not to test my luck and waited for the next train. Second class (i.e. unresrved seats) turned out not to be a problem in the least and soon we were chugging out of the station.
The pancake-flat landscape (even less mountainous than Johnson County…) seemed to divide its time evenly between fallow brown fields and fallow brown fields covered in trash and concrete debris. Whenever a few shacks, their corrugated roofs held down by cinder blocks, appeared a minaret could be seen poking out of the ochre-colored earth. 34 minutes later, we pulled into the Casa Voyageurs station situated, it seemed, about as far from any relevant part of town as possible. I skirted some offers for a “Taxi, monsieur, taxi!” and, consulting my barely legible Google Maps printout, started toward my presumed destination on the other end of town, the Hussam II mega-mosque.
The streets were incredibly crowded and under the vaulted arches that covered the sidewalk (and provided blissful shade) table after table was occupied by a single man with some coffee-based drink. I would have felt out-of-place even if the city were empty, but the thousands of eyes that followed my American form did a good job of reminding me. I kept myself distracted, however, by trying to avoid getting run over by the insane traffic that was flooding the city. With only a handful of traffic lights in all of Casa (just look at that fancy nickname, I’m practically a local) it seemed up to the individual driver whether he was in a position to yield, stop, change lanes, park, etc. Roundabouts were practically two-way, and the little red “Petit Taxis” (the staple transportation of the city) cut people off faster than Bill O’Reilly. I even saw one run into the side of a bus which explains why I decide to walk 45 minutes each way.
Eventually, I got past the stray dogs and armies of motor bikes and made my way into the heart of the city. My western appearance got me waved past the security and into the super-upscale Hyatt Regency where I napped for half an hour under the guise of waiting endlessly for my high-profile acquaintance who would be checking in shortly to the hotel for a minimum of five nights. In the end I never actually had to explain myself to anyone and, after soaking in the last of the air conditioning, set off towards the shore. I arrived at the base of the 800 foot tall (the world’s tallest) minaret, and spent some time marvelling at the massive building which, at maximum capacity, can hold something like 30,000 worshippers.
After my attempt to sneak in with a gaggle of senior french tourist failed, I turned back from the beautiful blue Atlantic and made my way towards the old Medina.
I had intended to skirt around the edges, but it seemed un-threatening enough that I veered a little more in. Unfortunately there is no excitement here. I was accosted by some spanish-speaking teenagers, but I moved on into the narrow streets. Soon it turned from a residential neighborhood into a faux-leather suitcase selling extravaganza, but just as I was trying to decide which Coach purse I wanted (ha), I passed through the gate in the old walls and I was back at my old homestead, the Hyatt. I bathed in the AC for a little while, trying to waste some time so that I wouldn’t be at the airport for eons, and then pointed my bow back towards Gare Voyageurs.
Along the way, though, I did the proper American thing and stopped in at Mickey D’s for a few french fries. I was tempted by the McArabia burger, but I resisted. Surprisingly, McDonalds was one of the few places where I wasn’t demoralized by having my french salvo being batted down with a sigh and an english response. I tricked them!
I decided to simply re-trace my steps, passing once again though the canyons of six-story crumbling colonial buildings (newsFLASH: did you know that Casablanca is the second largest city in AFrica? Neither did I) and landing on a bench on platform 2 with a good hour to spare before my train left (tickets are a reasonable 40 Dirhams, or just over $5).
So here I am, budgeting my time on the not free Wi-Fi of the airport, waiting for another two hours before my three hour flight to Bamako. Next stop: Kati.
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