Pre-rural village stay...

THIS BLOG IS OFFICIALLY ONE WEEK BEHIND! SORRY!
IT TAKES PLACE FROM September 28- October 4
I wrote it the night of October 4th and am just putting it up now… Sorry about the confusion.

I promised that I would post before I left for the rural visit… it might be a while before my next post so stay patient with me!

Random side notes:
--When my entire class travels together, it is NOT in style. We have one super old school silver van with a driver, Kara. It is used for transporting roughly half of our group. On long road trips, we take the silver van and this other very large, rusty, and uncomfortable red van that plays only Bob Marley over a loud speaker. When we go on our after school fieldtrips, we take the silver van and a Sitrama. Now, if you are a regular reader of my blog you will have seen a photo of a Sitrama… it’s a large green van that has been completely gutted on the inside with a wooden plank bench bolted onto metal stands all around the circumference of the interior of the van, for comfort of course. Normally Sitramas are used as their main bus system but you can also just stop them on the street, pay a fee, kick everyone out who was riding in it and use it as an oversized taxi. This is how we travel… and in 100 degree weather, you do not want to get stuck in the Sitrama van, especially if our professors pulled one of the super-jankie Sitramas for us and the windows have been sealed shut. Most of the time both of the vans are over-crowded with people, especially when we take a good-ole’ Sitrama. Putting too many people in one vehicle is illegal here and because we are a traveling blob of white we are easy to see by the police, meaning we get pulled over somewhat frequently. But here is the kicker, in a third world country… nothing is actually illegal and with the right amount of money, all sins are forgiven.
--Family update: I am really fortunate to have a host family that understands my independent nature and allows me to come and go as I please while still letting me enjoy their company while I am home. Although I am not nearly as close to my host family as some of the other kids on my program, there is something addicting in the hugs of a 6 year old that makes your heart melt. As for a few updates, all of the kids in my family started school on the 1st of October… their summer is officially over. It was awesome to come home on the last day of September and find all of them lying around in the middle of the courtyard with my host mom labeling all of their school supplies the EXACT same way I did when I was young! I then had the pleasure of sitting for TWO hours with them while they went through each of their new items for school and organized (and then reorganized) the supplies for the next day. We also had to have a school supply photo shoot, obvi-- and those pictures are soon to come. Also, my 12 year old sister was on TV! There is a really popular television show here, it’s called Ministar, and is pretty much Mali’s version of American Idol but with young kids. The competition has been going on for a while now… I think all summer. Anyway, the taping of the show is in downtown Bamako so it’s a popular past time for wealthier kids to go and watch the filming of the show… but, because this is Africa and dancing is just what they do, you can also compete to be one of the dancers for the show and who got to go on stage and dance for the semi-final and final shows?? MY 12 YEAR OLD HOST SISTER! She danced her little heart out and made the show with her friend! It was so cool to not only see her on stage but then to sit at home and watch her on TV with her cuddled up next to me. Lastly, because my family watches me write my blog and they know they are being talked about, they think it’s only appropriate to send a message of salutation and a prayer your direction… “I ni ce e here doron” from our family to yours!


Daily Grind:
--Monday
My class traveled, silver van and Sitrama style, to ‘centre ville’, also known as downtown Bamako for a trip to one of the large fabric shops. Fabric is a BFD, or politely put… really important, in Mali. The method of creating the fabric is an intricate process that produces nothing less than art. Putting on clothes here is not for the purpose of covering up ones skin because the truth is Malians are the least body-modest society of people I have heard of or personally witnessed. They put on clothes because the craft in which their clothes were made is so exquisite. Some of my friends’ host families actually create fabric for fun as a side business but how it is fun, I have no idea. It is an extremely grueling process of ‘tie and dye’ where you move and fold the fabric in complicated ways. They don’t use very much cotton here either, their cloth is mostly a slick, somewhat plastic like, fabric which is very difficult with which to work. Most of us were really excited to purchase our first pieces of Malian fabric, especially me because the only Malian fabric I have acquired is the super-electric, bright lime green fabric my family used to make my Ramadan party clothes. I ended up getting two pieces of fabric and then later that day, went with my host sister Moye to the tailor to get measured for clothes. Because I am resourceful, I decided not to just have cloth made into a large paigne, or wrap-around floor length skirt, but instead into something I might actually wear once I am home. I had a knee-length paigne made from a green pattern and a short mini-skirt made out an orange fabric. Although I am excited for both, I am a little nervous for the mini-skirt. My host sister is very… hmm… comfortable in her own skin, to put it delicately, and it was her voice the tailor heard when being instructed on the length of my skirt. Unfortunately, I am not loud enough, or to be more accurate… I am not fluent in Bambara, and so the tailor could not have cared less as to what I wanted. After a relaxing weekend away from the family, I felt this was an appropriate Monday.
---Tuesday
For the health aspect of my semester, we have a doctor that comes into our class every so often and lectures us about the major health issues of Mali and how their health care system works. Basically, there is a three-tiered approach to medical treatment here. Level one is the most basic and located at the community or local level. It is referred to as the SESCom and is established to help the needs of the majority of the population. Level two is the private clinic level that reaches only the most privileged patients. It is the most expensive, obviously because it is private care. Level three is the hospital, which is where we went Tuesday. Much to our horrified knowledge, the specific hospital we visited, Point G, is one of the most advanced in the country. The overall conceptual layout of the hospital is similar to a college campus with different buildings spread all over inside a walled-off area. Each specialty has its own building and after walking around for a while and seeing where each specialty was located, we walked through two specialties. The first was actually not a building but more of a small enclosed compound area for women who have problems or special complications with their pregnancies. My class was able to sit with the women and discuss the different reasons they were in this special ward. We learned of the alienation they face from their village due to their conditions and because many of the problems continue post-pregnancy (for example, they constantly leak waste fluid) many of the women stay in the compound for the rest of their lives. The other building we walked through was for extreme joint problems. We walked around in the rooms and unlike western hospitals, were everything is enclosed within the walls of the building, these buildings are open to the outdoors-- the hallways are more like breezeways. The rooms where the patients sleep are packed full with about 10 beds per room with little to no privacy and there is very dim lighting and everything is covered in dirt. The first room we walked through had a helpless little boy in it who could barely feed himself. He was not mentally handicapped; his movements were just very slow. Also, his hair looked similar to someone who was going through radiation (but obviously, that would have been impossible) and his skin was splotchy with tons of small white patches everyone. No one could understand exactly what he had been diagnosed with and that’s when we discovered… hospitals here don’t diagnose and cure, they simply treat symptoms. If you went to the hospital with a brain tumor, they would probably just treat the severe headache you were experiencing with tons of drugs and then unknowingly let you slowly die of cancer. Seeing this little boy so desperate to feel better and walking away from him knowing that these doctors, the best in the country, literally have no idea what’s wrong with him or they can help , is painful to say the least. The absolute worst part, is that when he sees all of us walk through his room he thinks we are western doctors that are visiting the hospital, probably to help him, but little does a he know the highest level of science I have under my belt is a Geology course I took at Miami because it’s nicknamed ‘Rocks for Jocks.’ We also learned that there aren’t nearly enough beds to cover 1/10th of the amount of patients that should be admitted for critical reasons.
--Wednesday
We visited a SESCom, or the bottom tier of the health latter, on Wednesday. This is where the average person in the community goes to get treatment for almost everything that ails them that they can’t fix with local remedies—which includes everything from vaccinations to giving birth. Each cartier or so has at least one SESCom. It is places like this that I am not literarily talented enough to accurately describe with words. Everything was extremely dirty, poorly lit, beyond underequipped and just all around unsanitary. Their equipment was more rudimentary than a college biology class… and it just felt like it would be a breeding place for sickness, not health. The building it was in was not even close to big enough to house all of the people that needed to use it and is it unbelievably understaffed. We walked through the room where the midwives work and deliveries take place—it instantly reminded me of a ‘hospital’ themed room in a haunted house. As I walked through the SESCom, my eyes could barely absorb everything I was seeing and all I could think was how I wished I was more scientifically savvy so I could benefit more from the experience.
To end my two medicals visits with my feelings of disgust wrapped into one simple thought let me end with this… not a single bathroom, including the bathroom for staff, at either of the medical facilities had soap—no one, not even their doctors, wash their hands with soap.
--Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday
It’s been great bonding with my class and having extra time outside of the classroom to hang out with each other. One of our favorite things to do is go to the crazy outdoor market and practice our Bambara by buying tons of fruits and vegetables. We then cut them up (which sounds like a ‘duh’ statement but actually noteworthy because using a swiss army knife to cut a mushy tomato without a cutting board in the dark is a somewhat difficult task) and eat them together for dinner while relaxing on someone’s roof. We have also started discovering good restaurants around the city including one TexMex and one Italian restaurant that were both tolerable if not actually good. In our class we categorize good food in two ways: ‘actually’ good (yes, we would eat that if we were at home) and ‘comparatively’ good (if it weren’t for the fact that our bodies hate us for taking them to a third world country and our taste buds are far less snooty, we would never eat this at home). Saturday we got adventurous and a group of us went down town to an art exhibit at the Musee National. It included photographs taken in different parts of the country by two Chinese men. Afterwards, we went to the Grande Marche (aka pure chaos on e) and shopped around for a while. I spent the rest of the weekend hanging out and going out with my classmates and only until Sunday afternoon and night did I regroup with my family which was, of course, full of love.


I am at a rural village stay this week and then enjoying the rest of my weekend in a fit of celebration for my 21st birthday, appropriately themed “Rumble in the Jungle”. Although a lot about me may grow and change through this experience, I am discovering that some things are uniquely me and thus cannot be touched or changed… like theme-ing my own birthday party and passing out invitations to enjoying the phrase ‘birthday week’ to an entirely new level.

At a discussion we went to a couple weeks ago with the ‘Save the Children’ Organization for Western Africa, the head coordinator ended his speech with a piece of advice I personally think rings very true. He said, “Go through life acquiring two talents: a sense of humor and the ability to write well”. I’ve decided I must be the luckiest kid on earth because this adventure allows me to have a good belly laugh at least once a day… and you can’t ask for much more than that.

Love, Sarah