Hello all!
I just finished up the first two months in my village! I've been learning a lot about the local plants and improving my language skills, as well as meeting all of the people of Kissa. Now I'm back in training for a few weeks, learning about fun stuff like composting, organic fertilizers, tree nurseries and grafting. It's wonderful to have access to western food, americans and the english language.
Kissa is a village of about 1,000 people. All the houses are made of mud, some with tin roofs, most with grass roofs. It is surrounded by forest, and patches of cleared forest where farmers grow peanuts, corn, millet, cotton, some beans and some root crops. Cows, goats, sheep, chickens and guineafowl wander freely throughout the entire village, gobbling up weeds, mango peels, and kitchen scraps. Now the rainy season is here and all of the reddish soil has been covered by a vibrant carpet of grasses and herbs. Kissa is beautiful, quaint, and very poor.
On a typical day in the village, I'll wake up around six, shortly after sunset but much later than most villagers. Before dawn the loud, rhythmic thudding sound of women pounding millet and other grains fills the air. The thudding sounds so much like a T-rex that I often wake up to them in my dreams. I'll make breakfast, maybe guineafowl eggs, or oatmeal (if I have any) mixed with powdered milk, and then set out to the town center to find someone to work in the fields with. I try to find farmers I havent met before, as well as to do different farming tasks I havent done before. So I'll do some sort of farmwork: milking cows, vaccinating cows, planting millet or peanuts or corn, scraping weeds, plowing (which is surprisingly similar to water-skiing), spreadig manure. That lasts until around 10 or 11, when the sun is brutal and I am exhausted and blistered. I'll go back to my hut then, but most villagers will work until noon, and again from the early afternoon until the evening. There is a lot of work to do now that the rains have come and it is the planting season. I spend midday reading or maybe chatting with Malians, but many of them go to sleep at this time. In the afternoons, I'll spend a lot of time chatting with people, working on my Bambara and seeing what their lives are like. People are very curious about america. Sometimes in the late afternoons, I'll go on walks through the forest and fields, bringing plant and bird ID books to learn the local wildlife. Everyday at least once I'll check on my Moringa seedlings (a nutritious tree that I am encouraging), as wells as ride my bike to the water pump to fill a big jug of water for bathing, drinking and washing dishes.
Thats a typical day, but what I do varies a lot. On Mondays, I go 23kms to the town of Kolondeiba, sometimes by bus and sometimes by bike. There, I meet up with Regis and Thera, two volunteers posted nearest to me. Unfortunately, there is no internet in Kolondeiba. For weddings, funerals and births there are big festivals, where nobody works and people dance literally all day. Literally. There was a particularly big and colorful festival to start of the rainy season. Before the rains came, villagers would go fishing periodically at the river, 9km away. One day I went on a bike tour through the smaller villages and campments around Kissa with two men from my village to vaccinate kids against polio.
Im starting to get an idea of what the next two years will look like, and I'm excited... Mali is getting better every day!
