La Fete au Village

I spent the last week visiting my village!  It's called Kissa, and it's located on the main dirt road from Bougouni to the Ivory Coast.  Luckily, I have some cell reception and daily transit to the bigger market town of Kolondeiba.  The village has two large gardens and tons of huge trees.

There's a baobab tree that is just enormous.  Seeing it is like meeting a giant.  Plus, its fruit is delicious: it tastes like pina-colada, and has the texture of the astronaut ice cream you get at Kennedy space center.

The mango trees are everywhere, providing lots of shade, and their fruits should be ready in a month - right when I go back to my site!

It's really incredible how much your emotions fluctuate here in the Peace Corps, making this big adjustment.  During my four or five days visiting site I felt at different times more happy and more sad than I have in the whole time that I've been here.  I guess this just reflects the fact that the PC experience is one that is magical, exciting, and inspring, but also frustrating, isolating and uncomfortable.

Oh, yeah, and my name changed.  Now I'm Madou (kinda close to Matthew) Kone.

Dimanche a Bamako

Hello all

I leave tomorrow morning to see the village of Kissa, where I will be spending the next two years of my life!  What I know so far is that it has about 700 people, mostly farmers, with the majority of the population being youth and children.  It is in the far southwest of the country, very close to Guinea and Ivory Coast.  The region it is in receives the highest levels of rainfall in Mali, which means I’ll have access to a wide variety of tropical foods!

I’ll be working for a small NGO in the region called AMEMP (Associasion Malienne pour l’Emancipacion du le Monde Paysan)(sp?).  I’ll be doing a variety of things, like establishing a community garden, encouraging the use of various forest resources (ie, nutritious leaves and seeds), and planting trees, especially the wondrously nutritious and useful Moringa tree.  Those are all things I’ll be doing in the long term, though; my initial focus will be on learning the language and integrating myself into the community.

I’m very excited to see my village, meet my neighbors, and start to settle into my life here!