Liquid Gold

One of my investment banker friends wrote to me musing how a poor country like Mali could escape its current stagnation and undergo economic development; “Africa will need to diversify its economy away from commodities and raw materials into manufactured products if it has any hope of prospering”, he said, and when it comes to advancing from a subsistence agriculture economy to industrialization, “the bottom line is capital investment.” My friend saw the problem of African poverty in terms of underperforming GDP, a lack of final goods sold at market for currency to be saved in banks to accumulate with marginal compound interest and invested for profit so that capital can regenerate and expand as an end unto itself. His view from Manhattan was fairly typical of anyone who makes their living in the trade of credits and debts, who views economic development in terms of developing a monetary economy and a self-contained industry of finance.

However, here in the muddy village of Sanadougou, most economic activity occurs in village without currency ever changing hands. Here the bulk of the population spends most of their labor planting and harvesting millet and rice and corn for their own family’s consumption. When the farming season is done, men spend the next largest chunk of their time building and rebuilding their own homes and granaries with mud and rocks and sticks that they find out in the fields. Women toil day in and day out drawing water and cooking and cleaning and taking care of their many, many children. Gross Domestic Product is such a grossly inadequate means of measuring economic development in this economy, for the food and housing and family networks which make up the bulk of the people’s tangible wealth are never sold as final goods on any marketplace.

The work done by Malian villagers that does count towards the monetary economy is decidedly secondary to food production, house construction and child rearing. In the relatively fertile Sikasso and the southern portions of Ségou, Koulikoro and Kayes provinces, surplus fields are allocated to farming cotton as a cash crop to be sold to the textile mills. In villages like Sanadougou, farmers produce such an excess of peanuts that they can sell them to urban populations who cook tigadegana. During rainy season women also gather shea nuts to cook a butter which is used to make soap and moisturizing cream. And of course all families raise some combination of cows, sheep, goats, chickens, guinea hens or rabbits for meat – only on holidays or weddings few people could ever justify slaughtering an entire goat, so villagers raise livestock mostly to sell to urban butchers. The majority of such commerce is not transacted between villagers, for it consists of producing raw materials for the consumption of the urban merchant class or for manufacturing into finished goods by multinational corporations. The money these villagers earn in exchange for these cash crops is what pays for their tea, sugar and gasoline.

The most significant cash business in the traditional village economy which stays in the village for local consumption is the tilling of vegetable gardens. Most families have a small plot in their concession fenced in with sticks where they keep a papaya tree, a banana tree or two, and during rainy and cold seasons they can raise an annual patch of tomatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, manioc, onions, cabbage or lettuce. People tend to specialize in one or two crops and sell most of their output from garden season at market, but since tomatoes could never last the 57-kilometer motorcycle ride to the nearest city let alone pay for the cost of the gasoline, produce can only be sold to other villagers. Fruits and vegetables are just about the only cash crops which are consumed in village and therefore insulated from the vicissitudes of global commodity prices and the distortion of First World subsidies. And thus in rural villages the most sustainable economic development takes the form of building gardens and improving their yields. Not only do improved garden yields increase monetary income, but since those yields are consumed in village they increase the population's intake of Vitamin A, Vitamin B, Vitamin C, potassium, phosphorus, etc. An investment in gardens is an investment in economic development and public health.

The World Bank and USAID and NGOs get this quite well. The Western bureaucracies of Third World development love investing in vegetable gardens because not only does it beget economic activity that can be measured by capital-centric indicators like GDP, but building vegetable gardens sounds less like impersonal business and more like good ol’ American humanitarianism.

Unfortunately, the Humanitarian-Industrial Complex understands the value of vegetable gardening only so much as it can be conducted from the confines of their air-conditioned offices in Bamako. If the only tool in in your tool belt is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail - and at times it seems as though the only tool at their disposal is a big wad of capital that can only be spent on high-tech contractors also based out of the capitol city. So they buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of hardware, pile into SUVs and swoop into villages and construct elaborate irrigation pump systems and build long chain-link fences for the Malians to plant gigantic community gardens.
But they never stay long enough to teach the people how to maintain the pumps – or they try as best as they can in French to a community that speaks only Bambara, so the pumps inevitably fall apart and no one can fix them and the “beneficiaries” of this big agricultural development projects can benefit themselves in no perceivable way other than dismantling the LEED-certified, solar-powered irrigation pumps and selling the parts as scrap metal. The professional vegetable gardening consultants designed their entire plan on the premise of a functioning irrigation pump, so they didn’t bother investing in quaint technologies like wells and pulleys, so even manual irrigation of this gigantic community garden is now impossible. With no irrigation system this vast plot becomes agriculturally useless, so the villagers pull up all the fence posts and use them to make fences around their own private gardens. And thus the financial largesse of taxpayers and well-minded donors is all but wasted in a gargantuan orgy of cadeau give-aways and outright theft which does little more than enrich the most enterprising of bandits, discredits any future development efforts, and saps the motivation for truly impoverished people to do anything more than sit on their butts watching Akon music videos on their iPhones and wait for the next SUV full of white people handing out presents.

What the Humanitarian-Industrial Complex doesn’t seem to grasp is that if there is ever going to be sustainable economic growth on the village level, it has to be done without massive infusions of Western capital; in fact, if it requires the investment of foreign capital, it is going to end once the money dries up and is therefore almost certainly unsustainable in the long run. One guy with a cousin who works high up in the national bank might somehow be able to land enough cash to buy a tractor, but mechanized farming equipment is still much too expensive to serve any foreseeable benefit to the masses with no savings, no landed property to secure vast sums of credit and no connections to defy the natural laws of capitalism. The only way that truly sustainable economic growth is going to occur on the village level is if Malians adopt methods of augmenting their own gardens’ yields with technologies so cheap that they are practically if not one hundred percent free, simple technologies that they can assemble themselves, technologies that are literally too small to fail.

Often when I am walking through my village’s filthy, disgusting, sewage-filled streets, I think of how underdevelopment is just a fancy way of saying that resources aren’t being utilized adequately. But this isn’t South Africa or the Congo; there aren’t any valuable mineral resources underneath Sanadougou’s meager soils and sandstone. There really isn’t much to be employed here besides sand, dirt, mud, crumbly rocks and sunlight. Hell, this economy is suffering because water is scarce…

I also think of the profound dilemmas of sustainable development while I’m micturating, stircumating and taking bucket baths in my nyegen. I wonder what of economic value there could possibly be here that Malians aren’t already capitalizing upon…

After such profound thinking sessions, one of the first things I see when I exit my nyegen is my soak pit – still purposefully unfinished – and one of my four papaya trees. They have become such fixtures of my everyday life that I don’t really give them much thought. But after a while I started to notice something…

Way back in November of 2008 after the late James Brown's inspirational urination and my digging of Sanadougou’s first ever soak pit, the adjacent papaya tree wasn’t much to sneeze at. It was a wimpy, pathetic looking thing.



But a year later, after 12 months of my peeing and bathing and washing all my urine away into that soak pit, something breathtaking has occurred – that wimpy-looking papaya has blossomed into the most prolific fruit tree in my entire garden!



It is the most magnificent papaya tree in all of Sanadougou!



It is full with more than 30 football-sized fruits!



When I’m toiling away in my garden, the neighbors walk by and marvel at the papaya tree and wonder how it is that I make it bloom so. They assume that I went to the city and bought sacks of “Tubabu fertilizer”, because it is well-known in this country teeming with livestock manure that white people are known to spend exorbitant amounts of money on imported, factory-produced chemicals to fertilize their gardens.

“Well, I water it just the same as the other papaya trees, and I don’t feed it with any more cow poop than the other papayas. The only difference that could explain this one papaya’s great fruits is the fact that it is planted right next to my soak pit, so all of the sewage from my nyegen just happens to flow underground directly towards the papaya’s tap roots. It must be the economical reuse of my own wastewater that is reaping Allah’s blessings upon my garden!”

“Your papayas are dirty!” some neighbors say “Do not eat them!”

Au contraire, my nyegen-fueled fruit is perfectly safe and perfectly delicious! There are few things more rewarding than slurping the flesh of a juicy ripe papaya and knowing that the fruit which I am eating was fertilized with my very own urine.


Out of all seriousness, the use of human urine as fertilizer is a wonderfully efficient and absolutely cheap means of increasing the yields of most garden crops. Many individuals might have religious scruples about fertilizing food for human consumption with human waste, many more might be repelled by the “yuck” factor because it almost sounds like humans are directly consuming their own sewage and all of the pathogens associated with it. But that’s not the case – only intermediary plants are consuming the valuable nutrients which urine contains, so these nutrients are simply being recycled. When you think about it, there really isn’t any substantive difference between using human waste and the waste of other animals as fertilizer – there are minor variations in the chemical content of the excreta of different species and especially depending on their own food consumption, but excess nitrogen passed through homo sapiens is no different than that passed through a cow or a sheep.

The most significant matter to consider when choosing between fertilizers is the N-P-K ratio: the relative proportions between nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium contained in the mixture. The reason why chicken manure is such a more productive fertilizer than the manure of other farm animals is because chickens don’t separate solid and liquid waste through a urethra and rectum – birds dispose of it all at once in one N-P-K rich smattering with one multipurpose cloacae. Compared to human feces, human liquid waste is remarkably richer in all three nutrients – especially nitrogen. In different proportions, the urine of all mammals is more nutrient rich than their feces. The only reason why animals feces are used exclusively for traditional fertilizer and not animal urine is that it is very easy to send a boy out with a bucket to collect cow poop days after the cows have grazed over a particular field – to collect livestock urine would either require training those same cattle to pee in a bucket, or for that boy to wait underneath the bovine nether-regions in anticipation of those valuable showers of gold.

We humans, however, have over millions of years of evolution developed the ability to control our bodily functions with behaviors conducive to avoiding disease and enhancing food supplies. Not just agriculture but also sanitation is one of the hallmarks of an advanced civilization. The Bambara people have on their own initiative pieced together mud and sticks for the basic nyegen technology which contains fecal matter underground and disposes of liquid waste out into the village streets. My introduction of more sanitary concrete platforms and soak pits is a significant improvement of their pre-existing technology in so far as further reducing human exposure to dangerous pathogens; however, unless everyone in Sanadougou plants their gardens directly adjacent to their soak pits, even this sanitary infrastructure is a tremendous waste of valuable nutrients which could be used to improve the yields of their fruits and vegetables.

The next step in improving waste management in this society is to promote an appropriate technology which renders human urine into a usable, portable fertilizer that can easily be transported to the nearest garden. Merely walking out to the cabbage patch and taking a whiz doesn’t suffice because undiluted urine is so acidic that it is harmful to most plants, and moreover, peeing all over cabbage significantly reduces its desirability to potential customers at market.

I invested 4,500 CFA (~$9) worth of plastic and rubber sold in Sanadougou’s weekly market and made a simple contraption which changes the whole equation. I took a 20-liter plastic gasoline drum and spent a week cleaning and treating it extensively so that it is so antiseptic that I could store drinking water inside it. I filled the drum with 4 liters of water and marked off the water line so that I could know when it was 1/5 full. Then I took a plastic funnel and fastened it to the drum’s opening with sliced-up motorcycle tire inner tubes. With this, I could now pee into this plastic drum and store it with ease.

However, my urine storage tank was still incomplete. What makes urine fertilizer so effective is its rich nitrogen content, but if urine is exposed to the air then most of the nitrogen will escape in gaseous form. So I took five sturdy plastic bags, placed them inside one another and filled the inner-most bag with water so that they would seal the opening of the funnel.



Now when I have to go #1, I just simply aim for this funnel instead of the ground-level aperture of my nyegen. It is no extra hassle – if anything, it’s more convenient because there is less of a risk of splash-back for those of us men with superb aim. Though do not think that urine fertilizer is a technology limited to those endowed with dexterous urine-aiming devices – numerous phallicly-challenged Peace Corps Volunteers have overcome their anatomic handicap by peeing into a cup and then pouring the contents down into their urine storage tank up to the 4-liter mark.

Then I fill the urine storage tank almost all the way to the 20-liter mark in order to fully dilute the urine so that its pH is acceptable to the plants in my garden. It is important to let this mixture sit for a good length of time so that the urine and water are evenly distributed. And then I use the nyegen like normal for the next three days until application.

The use of human urine as fertilizer is much less of a health risk than using untreated human feces, which can transmit giardia, dysentery, amoebas, hookworm, ringworm, roundworm, etc. if applied directly to garden crops and is therefore quite dangerous to the gardener and as well as those who consume their fruits or vegetable. Pure urine, on the other hand, is so acidic that bacteria cannot live very long in it; it is so sterile that in extreme situations where freshwater is inaccessible humans can drink their own urine. The only disease that one should really worry about transmitting via urine fertilizer is schistosomiasis, and for this reason after reaching the 4-liter mark I let my liquid gold sit for at least two if not three days before application. The logic behind this is that schistosomiasis is a disease transmitted by infected persons urinating in bodies of water where other people are bathing or swimming; if an infected person were to directly apply their urine fertilizer in, say, an extra-large banana furrow, the schistosomiasis cercariae could penetrate the skin of another gardener working in that banana furrow later that day. But if the water-borne parasites do not find another carrier within 48 hours of their initial urination into a body of water, they die. If I wait until the third day until applying, urine fertilizer is perfectly safe.

There must be a structured means of applying urine fertilizer as well. It must be applied directly to the soil as close to the roots as possible so as to avoid potential contamination of the edible fruits and vegetables, and so the acidic urine does not damage the plant itself. Directly after application, each recipient plant should be irrigated extensively to ensure that the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium percolate down into the soil. One should apply only modest amounts fairly evenly amongst all plants, and to alternate fertilization with many non-fertilized irrigations so as not to overload the soil.

This practice is good for most garden crops; I use it for my papayas, guavas, oranges, lemons, bananas, zucchini and butternut squash – all of which have grown tremendously since I began this practice. Urine fertilizer is especially effective on crops which respond to nitrogen levels such as lettuce and cabbage – though with vegetables which are usually eaten raw in salad one must be particularly careful to not splash any diluted pee on the plant itself. There are only a few crops that should not be applied with urine fertilizer, most obviously nitrogen-fixing plants like beans and peanuts, and also rice because paddies are usually flooded with water and those cultivating it would have to wade through potentially schistosomiasis-carrying urine.

The end result is that gardens fertilized with diluted urine can see dramatic multiplications in output. Finnish agricultural chemists found that tomatoes fed with urine fertilizer saw 4.2 times as much yield as the control samples, and calculated that the urine produced by one average adult in one year contains enough nutrients to increase a cabbage crop by 160 cabbages (141 pounds) more than a cabbage crop fertilized with standard commercial fertilizer. And the intensity of urine fertilization has profound effects as well; all of my papaya trees are fertilized with urine – but the one directly adjacent to my soak pit has such a reliable daily stream of nutrients that it has borne 6 times as many fruit (and much larger fruit) than those that have been only mildly fertilized.

The potential of urine fertilizer to jump-start Mali’s gardens and its stagnant village economy is enormous. If a small gardener here were to multiply their tomato yield 4-fold or their papaya yield 6-fold, if they grow an additional 160 heads of cabbage (141 pounds) in one gardening season, they could augment their family’s nutritional intake accordingly. And if they can’t consume an extra 160 heads of cabbage, well, let’s just say that that’s more cabbage than what is sold in Sanadougou’s market over the course of an entire year. Even if just a handful of gardeners in my village were to take urine fertilization to their own plots, it could significantly expand their yields, increase these farmers’ incomes, maybe even lower the price of fruits and vegetables to such an extent that they could become a more regular addition to Malians’ carbohydrate-based diet and improve the health of this entire malnourished society. And the practice of urine fertilization doesn’t require anyone to take out any loans, it doesn’t require some NGO to swoop in and build some overly complicated contraption – all that it requires is the purchase of $9 worth of plastic and rubber, the construction of a nifty little urine storage tank, and for gardeners to pee in it.

If that's not sustainable development on the organic village level, I don't know what is.

A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

For centuries the various tribes of Mali have weaved garments out of domestically-produced cotton.
Back in the day, the cotton was weaved into string which was in turn knitted into large streams of bogolan cloth – which was for the most part colored with mud for various geometric patterns of brown and black and white.

As Malian merchants got their hands on more varieties of dye from Ashanti and Ewe caravans, many weavers began to make brightly colorful, psychedelic-looking bogolan to be tailored into dresses, headwraps, pants and boubous.

Bogolan is still produced by hand, but its sales now go disproportionately to Western tourists. Now the bulk of Malian pagnes are made in mills run by CMDT or Comatex – the firms which are all but shepherding this country’s nascent industrialization. Though even large-scale manufactured Malian textiles carry a wonderfully bizarre spirit of their own; e.g. patterns of lamp shades, egg-beaters, and the life-cycle of schistosomiasis.

Older generations prefer to wear locally-made bogolan or pagnes;
long-robed boubous for men,

...flowing dresses with matching head-wraps for women.

Younger folks might have one pair of formal attire for going to mosque, weddings, baptisms and the bank – but they opt to wear Western-style jeans and t-shirts on an everyday basis. Part of it is practicality – it is pretty hard to bend over and hoe a plot of land in a full-length boubou; the absurd driving factor, however, is cost.

One would think that in this country where most rural farmers grow cotton to at least some degree, where textile manufacturing is one of the few industries, it would be economical for Malians to wear Malian-produced clothing. Cotton and textiles are among the few things that this country can produce, but it is significantly cheaper for people to buy shirts, pants, underwear and dresses from America. To be more precise, it is cheaper for Malians to buy clothing made from cotton that they have grown, exported to China where it is processed and sewn into a finished product, sold for consumption in America, and then exported back to the people who grew the original raw materials in Mali.

Year after year when charitable organizations and churches collect used clothing from humanitarian-minded liberals who want to cloth the naked, it sounds perfectly good-natured to send to the ever-needy masses on the African continent. Some of the clothing eventually winds up in refugee camps or orphanages like the donors might have intended, but the great bulk of it is donated to local entrepreneurs who make a killing selling these goods on the open market. Since these merchants paid nothing or some negligible amount for all of these free, second-hand clothes, they can sell them to Malians for any price greater than zero and make 100 percent profits. Only after these clothes have gone through a number of middlemen do they have to resell them at some sort of equilibrium price.

Most of the American clothes which get donated to charity are those things which people have outgrown, ugly birthday presents from that great-aunt with no taste, and of course all of those promotional t-shirts given away for marketing and fundraising purposes that no one in America would ever be caught wearing in public. Before major league sporting championships merchandisers churn out a supply of t-shirts for both teams – the t-shirts for the teams which actually win sell like hotcakes in the States, the shirts for the losers get dumped in Africa. Here in Mali, I inhabit a parallel universe where the Arizona Cardinals won Super Bowl XLIII and the Detroit Tigers were champions in the 2006 World Series.

Your average Malian consumer thinks only the world of these American clothing imports, though they don’t really understand how they made their way from point A to point B. It is unthinkable that some living person would own some perfectly good items of clothing with no stains or tears and still not want to wear it. And so the Bambara expression for these clothes literally means “dead Tubab”; in Togo, it is pretty much the same – “dead Yovo”; in Ghana, the expression means “a white person has died”.

To a typical Malian man or woman, your hand-me-downs represent the latest in what is cool and hip. Most rural peasants wear their shirts until they degrade into a mass of rags and string which no longer covers the nipples. To have a fully intact shirt is a matter of pride. To have a shirt emblazoned with the visage of Jay-Z, Tupac Shakur or Barack Obama is to be the coolest guy for a dozen villages in any direction.

One of the most interesting aspects of “dead Tubab” clothing is that this is a very illiterate country and one in which next to one can read English, so people will be sporting shirts and they won’t have the slightest idea what they mean. A friend of mine in Sanadougou who is a 28-year-old guy sports a crisp white t-shirt with pink lettering that says I’m a Girl Scout Because It’s Fun! – I haven’t the heart to translate it for him. Other people in Sanadougou wear shirts which read Babycakes, I Had an Awesome Time at Jacob Greenblatt’s Bar Mitzvah! and I Love Hockey Moms! It is hard to keep myself from laughing at times.

It is really bizarre how many hockey-themed shirts make their way to this country where no one has ever seen ice that wasn’t made in a freezer for the purpose of cooling beverages. The Vancouver Canucks, Buffalo Sabres and San Jose Sharks all have fans living in my dusty village of mud huts. I’ve tried making small talk out of this topic and failed miserably each time:

“So, Mario Lemieux led the Penguins with brilliant fakes and dekes which fooled the other teams’ defensemen! He was one of the greatest forwards in NHL history!”

“What?”

“Y’know… Mario Lemieux! The hockey player on your shirt!”

“Who?”

“Oh… nevermind…”

Though the all-time greatest example of “dead Tubab” irony was this one time I saw a very conservative Tamashek man walking down the streets of Koutiala wearing a Rocky Horror Picture Show tee with the trademark blood-dripping lettering and “Science Fiction, Double Feature” lips. What this means is that either the elderly Muslim fellow did not quite understand the libertine values which his shirt represented, or he does – and the subversive clans of Mali’s northern frontier are quietly undergoing a revolutionary deconstruction of gender and sexuality…

Despite the fact that Malians are enjoying these cheap new duds, and Americans like myself often find great humor in their fashion selections, there is something sinister to this phenomenon. Every time I see one of my peanut-farming neighbors going out to the fields wearing an Abercrombie & Fitch golf shirt, I can’t help but think that he is wearing that shirt because some kid in America had his mom buy it for $50, for whatever reason that kid decided he didn’t like it anymore, and then he donated that $50 golf shirt to charity. The fact that I come from a society where we have enough spare cash to blow on designer clothes we don’t need and don’t even want makes me feel downright spoiled.

On a more substantive level, when charities dump these clothes on the Dakar or Abidjan clothing market, starting with a price of zero, after a few middlemen it gets sold by Malian street peddlers for practically nothing. It’s great for Malian consumers who need some cheap clothes, but it’s killing domestic textile producers who simply cannot compete with free goods. Charitable donations have eviscerated a number of African textile mills, and those like Comatex and CMDT which are still standing can only stay in business by gearing their products towards the wealthy elite and Western tourists beyond the price range of local consumers for everyday wear.

The people who bear the brunt of this downward pressure are the urban sweatshop workers and rural cotton farmers who make so little from their toils in the textile industry that they cannot afford to buy the bogolan and pagnes which they produce themselves. The only way that they can cloth themselves for everyday wear is to buy these “dead Tubab” clothes made from cotton which they picked, sold to Chinese mills where they were made into textiles and garments, sold to American consumers, and donated back to the people who planted and picked this cotton in the first place – via a half-dozen middlemen.

If there is anything that wealthy Americans want to do to cloth the poor and naked in Africa, the best thing they can do to stop sending Africans free clothes.

Zac Mason - Published Toiletologist!

This blog's dashing hero has been published by - of all mediums - journals of modern theology and Progressive Judaism! Oy Kevult!!! Has Zac Mason rescinded his adolescent angst towards organized religion? Has the Jewish community readmitted into its flock the most outspoken and argumentative 12-year-old that a Hebrew School teacher could ever endure? Will he raise his children as Jews? When is he going to apply to law school? Is he wearing a sweater?

Read here to find out!

The Journal for Inter-Religious Dialogue:

Tikkun Online

I Say I've Got a Real Solution...

I don’t think that you have any obligation to give to charity. I don’t think that people in Mali have any right to expect your generosity. I don’t believe in Socialism, I don’t believe in hand-outs, I don’t believe that just throwing money at the endemic disease and poverty in this country is going to make anything better. The vast majority of the time, I think that the best thing for Americans to do is to let the people of Africa solve their own problems themselves.

But every once in a while, someone like Etienne Dembele rides his motorcycle up to my gate. He wanted to know if I could help him find a certain “Madu Sogoba” – Dembele had heard that he builds toilets.

“Vous êtes arrivés à la vraie maison”, dit Monsieur Sogoba.

M. Etienne Dembele explained the situation. He hails from the village of Tounto – a 12 km ride from my own Sanadougou. Tounto is a settlement of some 4,000 people who are mostly simple millet farmers. They have a market, a small clinic, a primary school. Until recently they didn’t even have a secondary school – if the children of Tounto wanted to continue their studies to the 7th, 8th or 9th grade they had to wake before dawn at the call to prayer and walk the 12 km to le Diaramana Secondaire Cycle and back every schoolday. Dembele organized the parents of Tounto to petition le Bureau de la Mairie de la Commune, le Sous-Prefet de la Cercle, even their representatives in the national parliament and every NGO they could find to try to build them a secondary school. They all said no. So Dembele spent 4 years collecting funds from the people of Tounto itself and in the last year commissioned some local masons to build the school themselves.

If you’re not really familiar with the customary patterns of development in countries like Mali, the story of Etienne Dembele and le Tounto Secondaire Cycle is about as remarkable as they come.

However, there was one little problem; Monsieur Dembele was able to raise all the funds for a schoolhouse – but he came up short to build anything else. There is no well or pump in the schoolyard, so before class each day kids have to fetch drinking water from the clinic 1,000 meters away. This is a hassle, but it’s doable.

But more importantly, Dembele wasn’t able to raise enough funds to build latrines. So when the 7th, 8th and 9th-graders have to “go to the bathroom”, they have no choice but to just squat in the field next to the schoolhouse. The schoolhouse was built in a pretty open plain by the main road going through town, there aren’t even trees or bushes to hid behind, so these kids are more or less urinating and defecating in plain sight of each other and anyone else who happens to pass by on their motorcycle.

Since there’s no nearby water source, there aren’t even the customary plastic teapots that Malians typically use to wash their hands after they cleaned their butts. Maybe the kids can find some grass or leaves and wipe their hands off. But no matter how hard you wipe your hands with a couple of twigs they really can’t get all the poop or pee or diarrhea completely off their fingers, there will always be some residual germs. And then when they come back to the classroom they’re going to share their scarce textbooks and pencils with all the other students. And of course they’re going to share whatever germs they might have.

Etienne Dembele estimates that 75 percent of all of the students at this school come down with diarrhea over the course of the year, at least 65 percent come down with full-blown dysentery because they have to learn with classmates who cannot go to the bathroom in a sanitary fashion.

The Director of the Secondaire Cycle, Monsieur Fousseyni Sogoba is a generally cheerful young professional in his early 30s. But when he speaks of the lack of sanitary facilities at his school his face contorts into a raging scowl, “My students are children as young as 12, but in the highest grade they are as old as 16, 17 years. The female students are of marrying age, and in our Muslim society it is dishonorable for a woman to be seen undressed by a man who is not her husband. For them to urinate and defecate in the open is the greatest shame. The girls who have diarrhea are condemned.”

The epidemiological hazards of open defecation effect all students equally, but the shame factor hits schoolgirls the most. When girls feel disgraced by shitting in the field for the whole town to see, they simply stop going to go to school – this is especially true when puberty hits and they start menstruating. Though women slightly outnumber men in this society, girls make up less than 40 percent of the student body at Tounto Secondaire Cycle. They make up less than a third of all Secondaire Cycle graduates.

I agree with the Peace Corps philosophy of development which emphasizes those projects which consist of pure education, which require no financial expenditures. But in certain extreme situations, no progress can come about without some significant capital investment – this is one of them.

I told Monsieur Dembele that if he was really serious about building latrines, he had to find out the prices for all the materials we would need and to write up a budget. Two weeks later, he showed up at my gate once again - with a comprehensive budget, typewritten in French. Even after checking all the prices out myself there wasn't all that much to edit. I had never before witnessed this kind of gumption and initiative and professionalism in this country, and to tell you the truth I was downright dumbfounded.

So for the first time in more than a year in Mali, I have agreed to help a local activist fund his project.

Dembele and I have submitted a proposal to Peace Corps Washington to build two first-class latrines - one for boys and one for girls – and three hand-washing stations at the Secondaire Cycle. First the people of Tounto are going to pay a team of well-diggers to excavate the latrine pits. Then after the harvest the dugutigi is going to charge the men of the village out to the fields to gather 100 donkey cartloads of sand, 60 carts of gravel and 12 carts of porous sedimentary rocks. Once these are in place, we are going to Koutiala to buy all of the cement, rebar, plastic tubes, roofing, doors, etc. Tounto is going to pay a team of masons to build the latrines, and I am going to build the hand-washing stations.

Altogether, Tountokaw are paying for 29 percent of the overall cost in labor, transport and raw materials – the labor isn’t just being donated, they’re collecting 170,000 francs (~ $400) to pay the well-diggers and masons, and another 20,000 francs (~$48) to pay for the truck to carry it all from Koutiala to Tounto. The community’s contribution in cash is roughly equal to Mali’s per capita GDP.

And once construction is complete the village of Tounto is going to be responsible for cleaning and maintaining these latrines and hand-washing stations. Most likely the schoolchildren will be doing most of the cleaning themselves. UNICEF provides the school district with some soap, but it is nowhere near enough for these kids' hygienic needs and so parents will be responsible for paying for additional soap as part of the annual school fees. And of course, the teachers will be responsible for teaching and enforcing proper hygiene practices indefinitely.

Despite the drought and the fact that this is going to be a really bad year for all of Mali’s cash crops, the village of Tounto is ready to invest a significant amount of their scarce resources into improving the sanitation at their children’s school. I cannot emphasize enough that in a community as poor as Tounto, this effort is absolutely extraordinary. But they could use some help to pay for the cement, rebar, tin and plastic without which nothing that they contribute can be of any use.

And so, if you would like to donate to a cause which will prevent diarrhea and dysentery and help girls to have an equal opportunity in education, click here.

Update: Apparently so many people donated to fund this project that all of you donors cleaned up shop within 100 hours of it being posted on the Peace Corps website, before I could even bike into the city to post this on my blog. To all of those who contributed, from here in Mali I grant you a big "In'i che kosibe kosibe!!!!!" Thank you very very much!!!!!!

And to those who wanted to donate but didn't make it quickly enough, do not fear - all signs point that after the latrines are built in Tounto, there are plenty of other schools within biking distance of Sanadougou lacking in proper sanitary facilities. Stay tuned!!!!!


U

Malaria

It’s somewhat remarkable that I’ve been sitting here in Mali blogging about matters of public health and I’ve managed to go 15 months without addressing the subject of malaria.

For starters, malaria is caused by a parasite called Plasmodium, the most common and dangerous being the Plasmodium falciparum which is carried by female Anopheles mosquitoes.



The Anopheles mosquito is merely a carrier of the parasite and likes to drink fresh mammalian blood just as the tamer mosquito species of North America, but when an Anopheles carrying the Plasmodium parasite feasts on human blood, some Plasmodia backwash through its proboscis into the human blood stream.



Young Plasmodia parasites spend a brief stage in the liver and then mature in the red blood cells where they trade gametes and conduct sexual reproduction. When the red blood cells have become so full with Plasmodia spawn the cellular membranes burst, sending a massive release of new parasites into the blood stream where they in turn effect more red blood cells. Once the population of Plasmodia proportional to the volume of blood reaches a certain tipping point,the human carrier experiences severe fevers and chills in a cyclical manner as each new batch of parasites is released. Unless the human carrier receives proper treatment, the parasite population will continue to expand exponentially, potentially causing the victim to experience delirium, kidney failure, culminating in a coma or death.

Part of the reason why this Water Sanitation Extension Agent hasn’t been able to do much about malaria is that – whereas diarrhea can be comprehensively diminished with the establishment of proper toilets, wells and hygiene practices – the only way to completely eliminate malaria is to completely eliminate water. In the tropics, where there is any body of water from a lake to a puddle that is not flowing at a swift clip, there are almost certainly Anopheles mosquitoes. In any desertous region without any standing water, there aren’t many mosquitoes and there isn’t much malaria – but there also aren’t very many people. So long as human beings are going to cultivate rice paddies and build settlements along rivers and lakes and anywhere that is at all fertile enough to make a living from the land, we are going to have to deal with malaria.

A better reason why I haven’t concentrated my attention on the greatest preventable cause of mortality in Mali and all of Africa is that it’s already received plenty from international development agencies and NGOs. Here in Sanadougou the local maternity distributes mosquito nets to every expecting mother and teaches her how to properly tie it above her infant’s bed and to come and treat it again every year. The community health organization conducts extensive formations on malaria prevention, teaching a mostly illiterate and ignorant audience how to monitor their children and when they display symptoms of malaria to bring them to the CSCOM to receive quinine injections. And PMI: The President's Malaria Initiative – one of the actually admirable legacies of the presidency of George W. Bush – pays for the “Mosquito Killing Wagon”; a truckload of men who drive around to people’s homes and bodies of standing water to spray insecticide, hopefully reducing the mosquito population.



Though my latrine and soak pit construction campaign is primarily meant to curb diarrhea, dysentery and cholera, containing people’s raw sewage underground does carry a secondary benefit of reducing the bodies of standing water. If this campaign ever reaches a critical mass and entirely rids certain neighborhoods of wastewater puddles – which during dry and hot seasons serve as the only bodies of standing water – the village of Sanadougou might experience a significant dip in seasonal mosquito populations and the incidence of malaria.

During rainy season, however, any anti-malarial externalities of Operation Sphincter Plug are nonexistent. There are little sprinkles now and then throughout the year, but the months of June, July, August and September are known as “rainy season” for a reason. When the monsoons come every week or so the thunder on my tin roof makes it sound like a battle’s a-raging outside, the sheets of rain will come down so thick and so strong that they sting my eyes if I dare venture to peer out of my rain jacket hood. Hours later when the storm has calmed to a drizzle, the streets will be so full of storm waters that a mighty creek will have formed, carving a gulley to the floodplains downhill. For days afterwards the landscape will stay pocked with large gaping puddles which render some roads impassable.

During rainy season – no matter how much insecticide America disseminates – there will always be standing water and there will always still be mosquitoes. To be honest, I’m not sure if the spraying of insecticide even does all that much good, because if it’s toxic enough to render a puddle infertile for mosquito breeding, then it can’t be that great for the health of humans when it inevitably percolates down into the groundwater and infiltrates into people’s wells from which they’re going to drink it straight.

Also thanks to the intervention of the international development agency/NGO complex, every woman who walks out of Sanadougou’s maternity with a newborn baby also leaves with a mosquito net. If she has twins, then she leaves with two. If she has many more children, over the years she will still have at least one mosquito net per child – free of charge. Lack of access to mosquito nets is not at all the problem, and one couldn’t say that the women aren’t adequately educated.



Nevertheless, a rather odd thing happens with those mosquito nets. In all fairness, some women diligently act upon la matron’s instructions and string them above their babies. But the vast majority of women put the nets up the first few weeks after childbirth (if even) – and for whatever reason they grow tired of the habit. And eventually Malian women shove these perfectly good mosquito nets away in some corner where they will be nibbled by mice and termites. And this is a better-than-average case scenario; a significant number of women never open their free mosquito nets at all and just hoard them, never to be used.

It is really amazing how in this village where there is truly a mosquito net fairly allocated for child born over the past 5 years, hardly anyone ever sleeps under a mosquito net. I’ve inquired far and wide why this might be. Economic studies have shown that people who receive mosquito nets for free are significantly less likely to actually utilize their mosquito nets than those people who pay for them in full, or even those who receive heavily subsidized nets and have to pay at least some of the cost. Perhaps the problem is that those who don’t pay for their mosquito net don’t realize its full value – William Easterly writes of women who cut up free bed nets to make lace trimmings for their dresses and wedding veils.

I ask the doctors, the teachers, my host brothers why Sanadougoukaw don’t put up their mosquito nets. They unanimously reply: “People are lazy!”

Thus despite the good efforts of PMI, UNICEF, Oxfam, Save the Children, WorldVision, malaria is still endemic. One could say that the worldwide NGO axis isn’t doing enough and that they should shower Africa with more aid, but it really wouldn’t be fair to blame the continued incidence of malaria on any miserliness of the globetrotting humanitarian-industrial complex. Asides from physically tucking all billion Africans into their mosquito nets each night, I really cannot think of anything more that we the West can do.

One fair argument to make against the distribution of free mosquito nets to new mothers that is creates some perverse disincentives. Everyone I’ve ever spoken to about the subject wants a mosquito net, and there are perfectly good mosquito nets available in every market and many sizable butigis – but the fact that mosquito nets are being given out for free to someone makes it seem foolish for anyone to spend their own money on this basic consumer item. Adults contract malaria and die of it too. And even in my relatively wealthy host family where the parents are beyond their reproductive age and their kids are in their late teens and 20s, they are reluctant to spend money on something that can be gotten for free.

I’m extremely skeptical about distributing free mosquito nets to all people regardless of age, or even distribution at a subsidized price. The standard model sold in markets like Sanadougou’s go for 2,500 francs (~$6). Yes, Mali is a poor country. But a packet of tea costs 200 francs, a kilo of sugar costs 450 francs, a full pack of cigarettes costs 2,000 francs, and a full motorcycle gas tank costs 2,000 francs – 3,000 if it’s a Yamaha. In a small town like this, phone cards are sold for denominations of 1,000 or 2,000 francs. 2,500 francs for a potentially life-saving device is not so unaffordable to explain why so few people here sleep under mosquito nets

One day, after coming down with malaria, my host brother Jafete angrily demanded that I buy him a mosquito net.

“Every time I leave town I pay you good money to water my garden and feed my animals. What’ve you been spending it on?”

“Gasoline, phone credit, cigarettes, tea and sugar.”

“This conversation is over.”

Even if every single person in Mali had a mosquito net and they diligently tied it and slept under it every night, that still wouldn’t solve the problem. Mosquitoes are active so long as the sun is down – and they bite during dinnertime, when people are sitting around at night listening to the radio, and when they wake up before dawn to pray. If you roll over in your sleep and your foot is leaning against the net, mosquitoes can bite through the holes.

At the onset of rainy season, as the proud owner of lemon trees I received a steady stream of visitors who wanted to cut some lemon leaves. According to traditional Bambara folklore, a brew of lemon leaves with certain tree barks into a strong tea serves to protect the drinker from malaria. I saw no harm in it and said yes to all. The lemon leaves are just an old wives’ tale, but there apparently are some bona fide anti-malarial properties to the tree bark – after all, quinine is derived from the bark of the cinchona tree, which was used as a similar remedy by the Quechua people of Peru and Bolivia.

Back in the olden days of Western colonialism, European outposts in Africa went no further than the coasts because those battalions which ventured any sizable distance inland were decimated by malaria. But present day Western neocolonialists like Peace Corps Volunteers can only live and work in Mali because over the past two centuries modern science has developed a number of dependably effective malaria prophylaxises which inhibit the reproduction of Plasmodia. I most likely have malaria Plasmodia in my bloodstream right now, but the fact that I took my prophylaxis contains their levels to such a minimal number that they can hardly reproduce - and one would not say that I "have malaria".

Even then, a lot PCVs still come down with malaria because the prophylaxis isn’t a cure-all. Even Mefloquine - the first choice prescription for all PCVs - is only effective 95 percent of the time. And every so often there have been Volunteers intentionally don’t take their prophylaxis because they actually want to contract malaria in order to “fully experience” what it’s like to live as a Third World peasant – last year a Volunteer was brought comatose to the Dakar PC Medical Unit. Official policy states that a Volunteer found not taking their prescribed malaria prophylaxis gets “administratively separated” i.e. sent home.

Since I’ve been diligently sleeping in my mosquito net tent and taking my Mefloquine prophylaxis, I have yet to contract malaria. However, it must be noted that this particular malaria prophylaxis has some significant side effects. Night after night Mefloquine was giving me these extremely vivid, realistic, dark and violent nightmares; a recurring theme involved various permutations of hungry West African night adders, green mambas, crocodiles, musket-wielding cannibals and me armed with only a machete. To refer to these dreams as merely “nightmares” wouldn’t be doing them justice – Mefloquine dreams are so lifelike that it is rather difficult to differentiate between what has really happened in my waking life and what has only happened in my head, and so my memory would store them like actual life experiences and really fuck with my subconsciousness.

Once in the wee hours of the morning I dreamt that my next-door neighbor was chasing me through the woods shooting above my head and just barely missing – and by some luck I managed to ambush him, get a good swipe with my machete just above the shoulder and proceed to hack him to pieces. An hour later I woke up in a pool of sweat, and had hardly rubbed the gunk out of my eyes when I went out to fill my bucket at the water pump - and there my neighbor was, friendly as always, greeting “I ni sogoma!” I struck pallid with terror and curtly raced home without returning his greeting.

Generally speaking, the psychological side effects of Mefloquine were causing me to be become unfoundedly anxious, paranoid even. I could discern a profound change in my general personality - I was bugging out over things that never happened. I explained these symptoms to my psychiatrist father, who diagnosed via Skype that my malaria prophylaxis was most likely throwing my neurochemistry out of whack; in extreme cases, Mefloquine has been known to trigger full-blow psychosis and manic behavior.

I explained these disturbing side-effects to Dr. Camara. As though I don't already have enough crazy shit to worry about in this country, I could do without the crazy shit that really isn't. For the same reason why they distribute oranges at Hampshire College's acid-soaked Halloween fete, I wanted to change my medication so that these macabre dreams would end.

The next drug of choice is Doxycyclin - which does just as good a job at curbing Plasmodia multiplication as Mefloquine, and falls in the same price range. But in a number of cases - such as my own - Doxycyclin causes whatever matter the user has consumed as their most recent meal to transform into a high-speed projectile.

The only other anti-malarial prophylaxis which the Peace Corps can prescribe is Malarone. Malarone inhibits Plasmodia just as much if not slightly better than Mefloquine or Doxycycline - only it does not carry the negative side effects. The only reason why Malarone isn't the first choice is that it's so prohibitively expensive at $8 per pill per day. It also causes vivid dreams, but they are for the most part wonderful lucid dreams. Now my slumber is full of flying over moutains and doggies and kitties and frolicking amidst blueberry bushes with long lost friends, and when I wake up I can peacefully engage in amateur Freudian analysis and personal introspection.

And I'm as safe as safe can be from malaria.

The same can't be said for everyone else in Sanadougou. There's no way that even the wealthiest people in this village could ever afford to pay $8 a day for top-of-the-line malaria prophylaxis, let alone lesser quality substitutes. The only economically feasible things that your average Malian can do to protect themselves from malaria would be to sleep under a mosquito net and continue drinking lemon leaf-tree bark tee - and most aren't even doing that.

The Nyegenmason's Apprentice

(click here for musical accompaniment)

When most people recall the classical economics of Adam Smith, they usually think of his reverence for efficiency achieved by the division of labor, natural pricing determined by the forces of supply and demand, and his ideal of a free market unencumbered by arbitrary tariffs, regulations and monopolies. Conservative politicians love Adam Smith, because they can selectively quote bumper sticker-sized postulations of his to demonstrate why the free market is inherently perfect and the State should do nothing in regards to economic affairs but maintain courts of law and a strong military to enforce private property rights.
Though the craggy old Scot would probably be aghast if he were to trade in a modern Malian market, not because of anything the State is doing to interfere in its freedom, but rather the complete and utter lack of infrastructure needed to facilitate commerce in the first place. For your average Malian merchant to sell her goods at market, she must ride a donkey cart or walk with a basket of those goods on her head down many kilometers of glorified cow paths which can only be differentiated by the rest of the fields by the fact that multiple people and livestock have previously tread there. Even the roads in the capitol city are made of slightly more compacted dirt and mud. There is one colonial-era railroad from Bamako to Dakar and it derails about every other week, the few airports are little more than landing strips, electricity and running water are hard to come by but outside of major cities and even there they are spotty at best. With such inadequate infrastructure, so few goods can be bought and sold, so many deals cannot be transacted to begin with that it is difficult to argue that the anemic economy suffers from excessive government intervention.

The third duty of government, Smith wrote, is to provide “good roads, canals, and navigable rivers” to diminish the costs of transport, break down local monopolies and make all goods sold at market more competitive. He claimed that investment in trade routes benefit the country most of all, for “they encourage the cultivation of the remote” and “open many new markets to its produce.”

Adam Smith theorized that commerce runs most efficiently when pricing is set by natural supply and the output meant to match it – and he despised government subsidies which do little more than artificially raising prices for the benefit of favored industries. Smith would be loathe to see the Crown lavishing taxpayer money on the producers of consumer goods such as corn farmers and rice merchants – the only persons whom such subsidies could conceivably benefit would be the direct recipients who are then less motivated to set competitive prices and the government clerks who enjoy their political favor. Everyone else loses.

But what would Adam Smith think about subsidizing the construction of toilets?

In the 18th century, tenured professors at the University of Glasgow shat in chamber pots, which servants then emptied out into the streets. A chamber pot was nothing more than a simple utensil which could be easily fabricated by any blacksmith or tinsmith and sold at market for less than a shilling. Smith’s successors in the 21st century now use porcelain flush toilets which are also bought individually, but are connected to the municipal water grid to dispose of sewage at the local wastewater treatment plant. The waterworks, sewers and treatment plants are undoubtedly public infrastructure no less vital than roads and bridges, and the Mayor of Glasgow very non-controversially collects taxes and user fees to keep these units running. But each individual consumer must pay for their actual toilet themselves. Though a porcelain toilet is expensive, per capita income in modern, industrialized Scotland is so high that even a pauper on the dole can afford one – it is unthinkable that the modern British welfare state would have to intervene in this market at all.

But there are no centralized sewer systems in the small villages of the Malian countryside. The undeveloped agrarian economy is so indigent and struggling to provide even more basic needs like food and water that a sanitary toilet is considered a luxury item. Your average Malian builds his own home out of mud and sticks, and there is a good chance that he and his family scurry off into the woods when they have to poop or pee. If Amadou the millet farmer has any mud to spare, maybe he has built a “traditional nyegen” bokeyuro – a walled-in enclosure where one can shit in privacy. If he has found not only ample mud but also sturdy logs, then he can dig a latrine pit so that the bokeyuro fills up less quickly. All of his urine and dirty wastewater flows out into the open street.

In this economy without municipal wastewater management, an adequate toilet is certainly more than just a consumer good for the individual consumption – it is a vital piece of the most basic sanitary infrastructure necessary to maintain the health of the individual user as well as the public at large. Even a family of subsistence farmers who consume all that they produce, who produce only what they consume and do not trade at all in a market economy – who wouldn’t really benefit much from a railroad or a highway – need this sort of infrastructure so that they might abstain from the commerce of dangerous germs.

If Mali were a perfectly ideal market, all human beings would be so perfectly enlightened on their own rational self-interest and the free market would be capable of supplying those goods at affordable equilibrium prices without any outside interference. And since every person in this perfectly ideal market would so thoroughly comprehend why it is in their own self-interest to not live amongst their own raw sewage, everyone would build their own sanitary latrine and septic tank on their own volition. In a perfectly ideal market, even the poorest of struggling millet farmers would realize this fact and thus save the roughly 25,000 francs ($60) it costs to build a sanitary latrine complete with a soak pit or infiltration trench.

However, judging by the fact that the streets of Sanadougou and every other Malian village where Amadou walks are full of puddles of piss and shit and diarrhea, giving room to fly and mosquito breeding and the most nauseating algae blooms, it would be fair to say that the free market has failed on its own terms to provide adequate water/poop management infrastructure.

There are two major factors holding back the Malian latrine construction industry: lack of education and lack of capital. Amadou might have no desire for a modern latrine because he doesn’t understand germ theory and thinks that dysentery and cholera come from evil sorcerers. And even if he were to appreciate the value of a proper latrine, that 25,000 franc price tag for a single concrete edifice represents 12 percent of per capita GDP (Amadou the millet farmer’s annual income). Without a direct investment of fixed, circulating and human capital, the invisible hand isn’t going to wave Amadou’s wastewater away anytime soon.

The Republic of Mali is genuinely concerned about improving the health and well being of her citizens, but scanty revenue flows preclude a massive latrine construction campaign. But what Mali has been able to do is to call up her good friend Uncle Sam to establish a Peace Corps program. And ever since 1972, Uncle Sam has been sending dirty, grimy, sandal-wearing peaceniks like Zac Mason to this country to live in mud huts and farm organic vegetables side-by-side with our Malian hosts as a big anthropomorphic hand of friendship from the American people.



So should Peace Corps Volunteers like me correct this awfully foul-smelling market failure and build adequate water/poop management facilities for the Malian people?

Absolutely NOT!!! If anything is going to last in this unforgiving climate, it must be regularly maintained. If foreigners do all of the work and then leave, none of the Malians whose health depends upon these latrines functioning will know how to conduct maintenance or repairs, even if they did they would feel that they didn’t have to, and when these latrines inevitably break they will remain broken and unusable until the next NGO rolls into town.

So should the Peace Corps pay for latrines and outsource all the labor to local contractors?

NO!!! Now when the latrines inevitably break, when the soak pits inevitably clog, all of the necessary maintenance skills would be monopolized by a select few. Every Malian man knows how to rebuild his mud hut after rainy season, and likewise there’s no better way to guarantee that each individual homeowner can clean and fix his own latrine than if he builds at least some of it himself. Even when technical masonry is needed, they should be there to at least participate in the more menial aspects of the job. This way, when things fall apart the individual will feel comfortable filling in the cracks, emptying out sludge themselves before it becomes such a problem that they need to hire a professional mason.

So should individual Malians provide all of their own labor and Peace Corps just foots the bill?

Still NO!!! If Malians aren’t willing to pony up for their own latrines, neither should Americans. If sanitation conditions and the standard of living are ever going to improve in this country, Malians have to get into the habit of contributing their own resources and investing in their own infrastructure.

So how do I, Zachary Mason, motivate the villagers of Sanadougou to turn off the boob tube, put down their tea pot, and invest their time and energy and pecuniary wealth into building roughly 500 latrines and soak pits?

I could spend my two years here conducting an educational campaign to sensitize the populace on the virtues of sanitary waste management. Maybe a couple dozen people would ever show up. Maybe by some stroke of divine intervention I would inspire one or two Amadou the millet farmers to save 25,000 francs and invest in a modern concrete latrine and complete with sanitary wastewater disposal. More likely I would waste my breath.

Thus the strategy that I am using to jumpstart the moribund market in sanitary latrines and septic tanks has more to do something about the massive scarcity of fixed capital; to employ a generous direct subsidy program funded with a Small Project Assistance (SPA) Grant by the United States Agency for International Development. According to the SPA Grant formula, for every funded project the people of Mali have to provide at least 25 percent and the American people pay up to 75 percent of the total cost. The people of Mali have more than enough unused land and surplus labor, so in order to spur the development of the latrine and septic tank construction industry, U.S. A.I.D. wired some 1,107,900 francs (~$2,500) to yours truly in order to buy a truckload of cement, plastic pipes, plastic sheets, rebar #6 and tie-wire.

I loathe the idea of distributing presents to my neighbors of Sanadougou, but this situation does not have to cast me in the role of Santa Claus. The purpose of this endeavor is to spur Sanadougoukaw to invest their own resources on sanitation, and unless Amadou the millet farmer is willing to pony up, all of those materials are going to gather dust in my storage room. Anyone who wants these expensive materials can get them for free – but receiving this U.S. A.I.D. subsidy is completely contingent on whether or not they’ve already done the most strenuous, tedious and disgusting parts of the job on their own time.

To catch you up to speed, this is how you go from a bare patch of nothingness to a modern latrine and septic tank:

Step 1: I find a suitable location. It should be someplace close enough to where people spend most of their day so that they can relieve themselves with minimal inconvenience. However, the construction site cannot be less than 30 meters from a well in order to prevent the direct contamination of drinking water. I also have to know that the water table never reaches above 2 meters below ground-level at its rainy season height if it is appropriate to dig a soak pit.

Step 2: Amadou the millet farmer digs a hole. This will become the latrine pit where all the shit goes. After about 0.7 meters of dirt, the earth in Sanadougou is composed of about 5 meters of fairly solid sedimentary rock until it turns back to sand again. So as long as the latrine pit is no more than a meter in diameter, a simple pit dug straight down into the rock like this is quite durable even without any cement lining.

Step 3: Amaou digs another, significantly smaller hole with a surface area of at least 1.7 square meters for person who uses the latrine daily. This will become the soak pit.

A dilemma exists for those who want a modern latrine but their current latrine is nearly full; it makes no sense for me to devote expensive construction materials on full latrines which would need to be broken and emptied or abandoned altogether within a short span of time – I demand that latrine pits be at least nearly empty. If someone’s latrine is full and they have no room to dig a new latrine pit, then we have to build over the old one – but first, someone has to empty the latrine pit. If the homeowner hasn’t the wherewithal to jump down into the warm, maggoty muck and remove bucket after bucket of their family’s shit and piss and diarrhea, they have to hire someone to undertake the most undesirable job in the entire world.

But first, my Malian neighbors have to ante up. Granted, they probably don’t have a lot of cash to contribute. But Adam Smith insisted that the definition of capital cannot be limited to hard currency circulating throughout the economy – there is also “fixed capital” i.e. physically tangible tools and raw materials which can be invested to form additional units of capital. To build a nyegen and a soak pit we need a lot of sand, gravel and porous sedimentary rocks; in the city you have to buy those materials, but here en brousse there are ample supplies of sand, gravel and rocks free for the taking out in the fields.

Step 4: Amadou finds sand, gravel, rocks and stores them in a safe place.

Step 5: Amadou fills his soak pit with rocks.

At this point we call in my homologue Sidiki Sogoba.

Sidiki is a baller to the extreme. He is a fairly traditional Minianka Muslim who has two wives and nine children, he farms millet and peanuts and watermelons and he hunts rabbits with his colonial-era musket. Sidiki is my best friend in town, and the best mason in the entire Commune. He does flooring, roofing, bricklaying and finishing – but his specialty is in nyegen construction. I am his apprentice.

If Amadou gives Sidiki sand and gravel, I give him cement, rebar #6 and tie wire, Sidiki can (Step 6): make a sanitary platform.

A sanitary platform is the keystone to a durable, easily-maintainable latrine. The rebar-concrete slab is built so that it is amply larger than the pit itself, so it can easily support its own weight plus that of whoever happens to be squatting upon it. It would be quite difficult to cause the sanitary platform to collapse if it was installed properly, and even if it did collapse, it is built so that it is easily interchangeable, replaceable and reusable. The sanitary platform is molded with a penis-shaped hole in the middle where the poop and any misdirected pee goes (total coincidence) and two foot-sized pads where your feet are supposed to go to help aim your butt at the penis-shaped poophole (the location of these pads were determined after decades of research by leading scatological projectile physicists). Then Sidiki molds a penis-shaped concrete blob with a rebar handle (this is intentional) so that it fits into the penis-shaped poophole. This is so that the user of this sanitary platform can keep a lid on it at all times when they’re not using it so that flies and mosquitoes and cockroaches and bats do not nest and reproduce in the latrine pit.

After three days of drying and curing, the sanitary platform is ready for installation! Sidiki hauls it over to the construction site via his trusty donkey cart.

At this point, (Step 7) Sidiki and I prepare the rest of the nyegen floor with gravel. Then (Step 8) we take the remainder of the cement, sand and gravel, then mix it all into concrete, and lay a smooth concrete flooring. My dad sent me a level once used by my grandpa when he ran a tiling and flooring company, so Sidiki and I can ensure that gravity pulls any pee that falls beyond the sanitary platform urine catchment flows downhill to the plastic tube.

Up until September 10, 2008, Sidiki Sogoba had been doing Steps 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 by himself on the latrines of Sanadougou’s well-to-do who could afford cement on their own dime. However, since I have taught Sanadougoukaw how to dig a soak pit (Step 3), Sidiki’s nyegens now come equipped with a more sanitary outlet for wastewaters than the adjacent street. So my personal contribution to Malian water/poop management infrastructure construction technology is … (drum roll please)…

(Step 9) I take a plastic tube for each nyegen, I stick it between the latrine floor and the pit of rocks, and then I cut it!!!

And then (Step 10) I take a big plastic sheet and cover up the soak pit rocks and tube. And then (Step 11) I shovel mud on top of everything. This way, when you pee, all of that stinky, possibly schistosomiasis-carrying micturate winds up underground where it can’t hurt anybody. Since all of the potentially contaminated wastewater is out of sight, no flies or mosquitoes are going to breed in human sludge or simply stop for a sip and then buzz off to spread whatever pathogens they find in human drinking water or food. What was once a puddle of fetid disgustingness is now a regular, boring patch of wholesome-looking earth!

Then, finally, the most important step: (Step 12) the owner of this brand new latrine pays Sidiki Sogoba for a fair day’s skilled labor. His current rate is 2,000 francs (about $5) per latrine. This step is very, very important, because even if the most expensive construction materials were paid for with a U.S. A.I.D. grant, unless they can do all of the skilled masonry themselves, each individual who wants a modern latrine still has to pony up a sizable amount of his or her own cash. Though this is a heavily subsidized project, no one here is getting a freebie – not on my watch.

In all, if Malians want to build modern latrines under this program, they have to provide all of the land, labor, and raw materials in the form of sand, gravel and rocks – what the U.S. taxpayer is paying for is cement, plastic tubes, plastic sheets, rebar #6 and tie-wire. When you calculate how much work or money goes into digging or emptying the latrine pit, collecting rocks, sand and gravel, and then paying Sidiki for his masonry skills (25 percent of the overall cost), allocating the generous subsidy (75 percent) for manufactured materials does not feel to me like handing out presents – it’s more like just rewards for hard work which benefits not just the individual owner of the nyegen but the health of everyone who lives and works and purchases food in Sanadougou. Especially if the person using this new concrete nyegen already has giardia, dysentery, cholera or schistosomiasis, the new fancy cement formwork isn’t going to help him as much as it is going to protect the rest of society from catching his germs.

Since this is my first project, I conducted it as an experiment in human nature. The SPA Grant from U.S. A.I.D. provided me with funds to build approximately 30 concrete latrines with soak pits and an additional 5 soak pits for those rare families who already have concrete latrines. After I received the money in February, I purchased the materials little by little to see exactly how much of a subsidy was needed to bring latrine construction into steady gear. I started with just the plastic tubes and plastic sheeting for the soak pits. So throughout February and March I canvassed the neighborhood, talking up soak pits with the head of every family, measuring the space behind their nyegens where all the icky wastewater flowed and trying to encourage them to pick up a shovel and start digging.

The response was underwhelming. After two months of canvassing, my host brothers did a half-assed job of digging an infiltration trench. And I somehow managed to convince one old man named Issa Dao (the father of the Secretary of the Mayor’s Office – who worked with me extensively in planning this project) to hire some unemployed idlers to dig holes behind his three nyegens and fill them with rocks. After two months of rabblerousing I had my first customer, and so in early April I went to San to buy 112 sacs of cement.

The tipping point in this subsidy’s catalyst effect would be the day I rolled into town on top of a truck full of 112 sacs of cement. Mind you, this is a society where the vast majority of houses are made exclusively out of mud. Only the wealthiest merchants and professionals can afford to line their floors with cement, the amount of cement that someone has used to feather their nest is a reliable indicator measure of their wealth and status. A truckload of cement is the biggest metaphorical carrot that these people will ever see in their lives. Once passersby saw what Sidiki and I were doing at Issa Dao’s house, and word got out that I had 106 sacs of cement left to whoever dug their soak pits and gathered their raw materials the quickest, it was as though Allah flipped a switch – something just clicked. From April through August, Sidiki and I have so far built 24 out of our quota of 30 latrines. I think we will be done with this SPA Grant’s worth of materials somewhere around October.

This project has also borne its fair share of hiccups. First of all, it seems that this subsidy has its greatest effect in motivating those people who have only a traditional mud nyegen and would like to climb up the status ladder with some cement – even if it means that they have to dig a soak pit that they really don’t care about, if that’s what it takes they’ll do it. I have had a really hard time convincing people who already have cement-lined nyegens why it is in their best interest to do something about their wastewater – if people can’t grasp the concept of sanitation, a plastic tube isn’t much of a motivating incentive. So far I have only received a smattering of takers: Sidiki himself, two teachers and the “pharmacist” down the street.

If you remember in previous episodes, the “pharmacist” had two of the most egregious plumes of wastewater I’ve ever seen, and I told him that I can’t buy medicine there so long as the nyegenji is flowing and filth flies are buzzing around his wares. And y’know what? He dug a humongous soak pit and diverted all the nyegenji underground! I was totally shocked! …and then the “pharmacist” reminded me of “my end of the bargain”. Fuck. There’s still no way that I’m ever going to put one of his bootleg Chinese sugar-coated chalk placebos in my mouth, but now I make a habit of stopping by the “pharmacy” to buy his wife’s newly-sanitary beancakes for breakfast and all parties seem to be content.

The most tremendous problem is that 4,420 out of 4,428 inhabitants of Sanadougou live in mud huts, I rolled into town with 112 sacs of cement, and I want to use it all to build concrete latrines. I’m building latrines with materials more durable and infinitely more desirable than the mud which people use to make their houses. A lot of people have come up to me and said, “I don’t want cement for my nyegen, I want cement for my house!”

I can feel empathetic to their frustrations, but I can’t really do anything about them – this U.S. A.I.D.-financed cement is for latrines and latrines only. Every time I have one of these encounters, I try to explain how a concrete house benefits just one family while a concrete latrine with adequate wastewater removal benefits the health of everyone in society – unfortunately, this argument doesn’t get me very far in a society where illness is known to come from evil sorcerers, frogs, and whistling at night. So the only alternatives I’ve come up with are to either 1) pretend I can’t understand their Bambara and change the subject to “So, when are you going to dig your soak pit?” or 2) offer to sell them cement at the price I just bought it for – which they never will; or if they’re really persistent 3) just ignore them and walk away.

When I see a sac of cement I see it turning into a squeaky-clean latrine and transforming the sewage-filled streets into verdant boulevards full of trees and flowers; somehow other people see a sac of cement and see it turning into a motorcycle. A number of people have been frank in demanding “Madu, gimme cement so I can sell it and find money”, “Gimme 40 sacs of cement so I can sell them and buy a motorcycle”. I find such attempts to suborn my Peace Corps service into a gravy train to be so personally insulting that they don't deserve a polite response.

Though I’d rather not make it into a fight, so I craft an appropriately snarky absurdity, “Give me your entire herd of cattle, your sheep, your goats, the entire contents of your granary… actually, no, give me your granary too.” Joking cousins!!! You eat BEANS!!!

But some jerks are actually serious when they demand that I give them cement to resell. I really love it though when they to pull the cultural card, “In our country, when people have wealth they share it with their friends” – because then I get to throw it right back at them.

“In my country, do you know what we call a government employee who takes public property and sells it for personal gain?”

“No, what?”

“A criminal.”

In spite of these challenges, you, United States citizen, deserve to know exactly how the government is spending your hard-earned tax dollars. This is why I, Zachary Mason, Peace Corps Volunteer, believe so strongly in accountability and transparency that I go to painstaking lengths to keep immaculate records of my project budget and expenditures and document all of it online for all the world to see.

I’m making absolutely no exceptions to the integrity of my nyegen project. A number of people have commented on how disloyal I must be since I’ve made 24 concrete latrines in this village – but my host family’s nyegen is still made out of mud.

“I am tremendously loyal to the Sanogos, and I will cement their nyegen. But first they have to finish digging their infiltration trench, go to the fields and find sand and rocks and gravel…”

The fact that Sanadougoukaw have to pay for a sizable chunk of their new nyegen is what makes this project so much more sustainable than if I were just building them for free. In this country it is really easy to tell the difference between what buildings people have built themselves and what was a big fat NGO cadeau – whereas the former will be cost-efficient and repaired on a constant basis because people have already paid for the sunk costs of preliminary construction, the latter will inevitably decay and crumble and no one will put any time or money into it because they feel that they can just wait for the NGO to come back and build it again. The fact that my Malian neighbors have to pay at least 25 percent if they want a new nyegen is the only way to ensure that they have even the most basic semblance of its economic value – the 75 percent subsidy is the sine qua non which encourages them to spend that 25 percent in the first place.

So there are about 500 nyegens in the town of Sanadougou, Sidiki and I have perfected 24 of them, and factoring in the increased rate of construction, work patterns and the rate of population growth, every single nyegen will be cemented and sanitized in the year 2016. There’s no way that I’m going to be able to completely rid this town of icky wastewater by myself. Indeed, I am going to request that Peace Corps replaces me with a new Volunteer when I’m out so as to continue the successful campaign I’ve got going here. The mighty United States Peace Corps will trudge on fighting the Good Fight, but in the end we can’t be responsible for the upkeep of every last Malian’s toilet - after this period of midwifery, the subsidies are going to come to an end and the free market is going to have to finish the job. Hopefully, the valiant struggle of Operation Sphincter Plug shall demonstrate just how clean the streets can be if people just get off their asses and put their back into it, and we can win the battle of hearts and minds and bowels. One day, I can only hope that everyone in Sanadougou realizes the value of sanitation to the extent that their own reasoning is enough motivation for them to save and invest their own money into concrete nyegens and soak pits and contain their own waste. And if they do that, there might just be less flies and cockroaches and mosquitoes spreading germs around, people will face less risks to getting sick in the first place, and my neighbors the doctors will be less busy treating shriveled little babies on the verge of death from simple diarrhea.

Insh’allah…

Development with a Healthy Dose of Conservatism

I would probably sound like too much of a cliché of myself if I were to tell you that this guy who spent his days until recently stomping his sandal-clad feet around campus, spouting incendiary rhetoric about Democracy and Socialism and rousing the masses to the barricades, has spent a year in the Peace Corps and has since been so violently mugged by the cruel realities of human nature that he has transformed into a Conservative.

So I’m not going to tell you that. It is very difficult for those of us who have come of age during the intellectual leadership of George W. Bush, Tom DeLay and Sarah Palin to respect Conservatism with a capitol “C” as a coherent ideology. To me and so many members of my generation, the history of the past decade has utterly discredited the movement which seeks to build a double-layered fence across the Mexican border, to amend the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, to defend "real Americans" and Western civilization itself from illegal immigrants, homosexuals, atheists, French people and the United Nations. Especially in the midst of this prolonged recession, with their hostility to any sort of government intervention in anything to do with the economy asides from more tax cuts and more bailouts to the banks, the dogmatic amalgam of supply-side economics and right-wing Christian fundamentalism that is the American Conservative Movement is rapidly atrophying into an obscure cabal as completely divorced from matters of this world as is the Church of Scientology or Zoroastrianism.

But nevertheless, I must sheepishly admit that my after one year in the Peace Corps, my experience so far has made me substantially tempered my faith in our power to “remake the world anew”. Living in a real-life African village and seeing first-hand the innumerable failures of past governments and foreign NGOs to revolutionize Malian society, I have unintentionally come to terms with the fact that one can only do so much. If after two years I can walk from my house to the center of town without having to tiptoe around puddles of human waste, I will consider my service a roaring success. Not only have I come to appreciate the values of prudence and restraint, but experience has taught me that private property, capitalism and individual responsibility are remarkably more effective in achieving long-lasting institutional change than any socialist principles of collective ownership. It would be fair to say that I have become significantly more conservative with a lower-case “c”; as defined by Merriam-Webster:

“con•serv’a•tive, adj. 1. skeptical of change. 2. avoiding excesses. 3. of or relating to a political philosophy based on tradition and social stability, stressing established institutions, and preferring gradual development to abrupt change.”

To be a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mali is in many ways like being bashed over the head with a hardbound copy of Atlas Shrugged all day, every day after day after day. Part of it is for the first time in my life having my own house and plot of land which I can call my own, and being completely and utterly responsible for its upkeep (technically I don’t own the property, but we’ll get to that in a minute). Part of it is the realization which comes with biking way out into the bush where its just me, sand, trees and scrub as far as the eye can see and realizing that if I were to fall and crack my head open on a rock, no one is ever coming to get me. Technically there is the Peace Corps Medical Unit in Bamako – but that’s two provinces and 400 kilometers away. If I get a nasty cut, if my latrine is dirty, if my house is full of termites, no one else is going to do anything about it out of the generosity of their heart – I have no choice but to be completely responsible for maintaining my own health, my home and garden. In this neck of the world, it’s really every man for himself.

By no means can my sharp veer towards rugged individualism be attributed to my having adopted the values of my host culture. The Bambara society amongst which I currently reside is tremendously more communalistic than anything I have known in America – even the semester I lived in the Vegan cooperative house. Here in the village of Sanadougou, every man and every woman share almost every daily activity with their family; they plow their fields together, they plant their seeds together, they reap their harvest together and then the women cook it together, it is unthinkable that anyone would ever eat a single meal alone. Though the dugutigi assigns each plot to certain families as determined by their historical usage, the fields are officially held amongst the whole village. There are even a handful of fields which are explicitly shared, and every couple of weeks during rainy season a man marches through the streets beating a drum to hail all the men to till the commons. There is a significant degree of familial autonomy – the head of each household has their own indivisible property and is responsible for feeding his own progeny, but no Bambara man would ever his relatives go hungry while stores remain in his own granary. And since 90 percent of all the families in this town share the last name Sogoba, the traditional family safety net for all intents and purposes extends throughout this entire society.

That is not to say that Bambara society is a Socialist Utopia for the whole world to emulate. The sharing of food is a practice born out of evolutionary necessity in this culture where death by malnutrition if not outright starvation is fairly ordinary. If Boubacar sees that Amadou’s millet granary has gone empty, he is probably going to invite his neighbor to na duminike until the next harvest – not just because Boubacar is such a nice guy, but because he would like Amadou to reciprocate the next time that he suffers the same fate. If there were a few more months of precipitation, if agricultural production was more efficient and food were not so scarce to begin with, food-sharing might not be such an indispensable bedrock of Bambara culture.

There is a fair argument to be made that Mali is so poor, that the output of its primarily agrarian economy is so diminutive precisely because of the traditional practices of communal land ownership. There’s plenty of land, and there’s certainly no shortage of labor – but there is not enough capital to spur significant economic growth. Almost all planting and harvesting is conducted with simple manual plows, hoes and scythes made out of wood and iron; no matter how hard and how long a family works with such limited tools, it will always remain a challenge to eke out a subsistence diet – let alone see enough windfall profits to invest in new physical capital and expand agricultural output. In the history of American and European economic development, farmers were able to escape this poverty trap by using their real estate deeds as collateral to take out loans and invest in tractors, irrigation pumps and other machine tools which expanded yields many times over. But such innovation will forever remain elusive to Bambara farmers who have only the dugutigi’s word to their parcels of the communal fields, who technically have no landed property to their name, and will continue to be shut out from the credit which they need for investment and growth.

During the heady days after independence in 1960, the nationalist revolutionary President Modibo Keíta tried to take Mali’s communalistic ethos even further and institute a People’s Republic modeled after the Soviet Union and China. Keíta aimed to establish Malian Communism on the organic village level; every man was ordered to harvest a pre-assigned quota of millet which was to be stored in village-wide granaries – which were in turn distributed back to central granaries in the capitol city of Bamako, and then redistributed back to each village and to each individual in order to ensure a perfectly egalitarian division of wealth. It goes without saying that the government kept the lion’s share of each harvest for in Bamako for its own purposes, Communism eviscerated the private incentive for industry, millet production plummeted and famine was the order of the day. Since it was widely accepted that the only way for many individual subsistence farmers to survive Malian Communism was to shirk their national obligations and fend for themselves, the People’s Republic soon became a parody of itself. By 1968 it was clear to all that the centrally-planned economy was so mismanaged and public opinion had so turned against the Communist regime that Modibo Keíta was overthrown in a coup d’état led by General Moussa Traoré – who would dismantle the state-run agricultural economy and institute one of the World Bank’s first structural adjustment programs.

And yet the most jarring aspect of Malian culture to my Western bourgeois sensibilities is not this country’s land ownership practices or its short-lived membership in the Communist bloc, but something which I encounter at least every day I take public transport or walk down city streets. Here – as in all of Muslim West Africa – there exists a class of religious beggar-children known as "garabouts". Picture a 12-year-old boy, barefoot and gaunt, rushing to shove a plastic bucket in your face while mumbling some fusion of Bambara and Arabic “prayer”: Allah ka dumini di n ma/Allah ka I deme ka n kongo dogoya... There are blind men and widows begging for coins in every country without a welfare safety net. But the garabouts are different in that they are fully capable, able-bodied boys who should be in school learning how to be a productive member of society, or rather, in the fields with their fathers learning how to farm. Ostensibly, these garabouts are instead begging on the street in order to learn humility and submissiveness to their Lord as a part of their “Islamic education”.

I often find myself duly offended by these garabouts – and not just the ones who yank on my arm and scream Tubabu! Donne-moi un cadeau! It has less to do with religion than it has to do with child labor, slavery and exploitation. These pre-pubescents are not begging for money because they have chosen a life of poverty in order to be closer to Allah – they are begging because their “Quranic teacher” commands them to bring in a certain amount of cash each day with the threat of a stiff beating if they fail to deliver. The garabouts are assigned this Dickensian fate by their parents, some of whom sincerely believe the marabout who comes to their village and promises to teach their boys the way to enter Paradise. But a good portion of all garabouts are praying for coins because dad did the math and realized that this year’s harvest was too paltry to feed the mouths of his 17 children, and so he decided the time is right to send his sons to the closest city’s Quranic teacher. And thus a not-so-insignificant number of Malians use the institution of the garabout as a fig-leaf for their own lack of responsibility as parents, and to pass the buck for feeding their children onto society as a large – all under the respectable and even admirable pretense of “Islamic education”.

A problem of scarcity occurs not just when these garabouts are on the streets praying for subsistence farmers to part with the fruits of their labor – eventually, these beggar children grow up to be adults with wives and children of their own. And a lot of them seem to have taken home some valuable lessons from their “Islamic education”; namely, you don’t have to work to eat, you can just count on other people, and in the end Allah will figure it all out. Talking to so many farmers in my Malian village who spend eight months every year sitting, drinking tea and complaining about how poor they are, these guys know very well that they can plant a vegetable garden, but don’t bother because of such deep-seated fatalism and renunciation of control over their own destiny that has crippled their sense of personal initiative. “If Allah wants me to be poor, then that is his command.” “If Allah wants me to find money, then Allah will provide.”

The sense of fatalism and helplessness perpetuated in this society is downright jarring. There was one Peace Corps Volunteer who recently watched as her host father more or less let his daughter die of what was probably simple pneumonia. As the Volunteer noticed that this 5-year-old girl was having trouble breathing and her wheezing was becoming worse and worse, she suggested that the man give his daughter some medicine. “No, there is no medicine for this illness.” The Volunteer insisted that there was, and offered to pay for it. “No, Allah will heal her.” A few days later the girl was dead, drowned in her own mucous. The father concluded: “She is gone. Allah has taken her.”

What it all comes down to is that a good share of people in Mali are poor – not just because the government doesn’t provide enough social services or because they are being oppressed by Global Capitalism – but because they and/or their parents have made some really irresponsible decisions. In the past I have written about how overwhelmed I became after seeing my neighbors’ gaunt kids with their black rotten teeth and their bellies protruding with protein deficiency and realizing they looked so sickly that they probably wouldn’t make it through the year. I was so beset that at one point I considered buying a sack of beans and condensed milk and giving it to their poor parents. But my attitude changed after I saw that these kids’ dad had a brand new Yamaha motorcycle. And you can only imagine the sound system at the party a month later when this guy married his second wife. And they’re almost certainly going to have many, many more offspring. As callous as it sounds, for me to intervene and provide these children with protein and calcium would only further enable their father to blow his money on toys and parties.

The bleeding liberal in the left ventricle of my heart is inclined to giving money, write a check as a knee-jerk reaction. This attitude is nothing new; to my recollection, there was this Judean rabbi back in the day who healed the sick and gave eyesight to the blind, who gave a big sermon about giving alms to the poor, clothing the naked and feeding the hungry, and how this moral obligation of selflessness is so absolute that it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter Heaven and so anyone with surplus wealth must give it all to charity. Judging by the African development scene today, apparently a lot of people still believe that this is an effective means of conducting economic development.

It is difficult to drive down any major road in Mali for any considerable distance without passing by a school built by Christian NGO X, a water pump built by Muslim NGO Y, or a clinic built by International Relief Organization Z – the road itself was probably financed by the Belgian Embassy. When missionaries and secular-minded do-gooders parachute in for Spring Break, distribute medicine and shoes and soccer balls and candy, take the mandatory photo-op of themselves hugging skinny black children, and within a week or two hop on the next plane home, they can then brag about their superior worldliness to the Save the World Club and put another chit on their résumé to help with grad school applications. Due to the sense of satisfaction derived from building schools and handing out goodies to poor malnourished Africans, there is no shortage of humanitarian relief programs on the ground here.

There is a shortage, however, in any sort of humanitarian relief programs that do anything more than perpetuating the sense of helplessness and instilling a mindset of inferiority among the Malian people. Imagine how a typical Bambara millet farmer might feel when he has been breaking his back in the fields for months just trying to eke out enough grain to feed his family for the coming year – maybe if this year’s harvest was particularly bountiful he can buy them all a new pair of cheap plastic sandals – and he sees a bunch of white people drive up in an SUV, distribute brand-new Nike high-tops to all the kids in the village, and leave. He’s probably going to think “Hamd’allah! And to think that I was almost going to buy my kids shoes! How foolish of me! Now I can blow that money on tea and sugar!”

And a few years down the line when that Bambara millet farmer sees that his kids’ Nike high-tops have all fallen apart and they’re walking around in the mud barefoot again, do you think he’s going to buy his kids new pairs of shoes? “Of course not! I can just wait for the next SUV full of white people to come!” No one in this village is ever going to by their children shoes again.

The fact is that African subsistence farmers might be poor – but they sure aren’t stupid. They are rational beings who respond to economic incentives just as much as anyone in the developed West; rather, since they have so little, and the simple act of receiving a free pair of shoes is so relatively generous, they respond to these incentives much more dramatically than the bureaucrat sitting in an air-conditioned office on the Upper East Side might ever imagine. Oftentimes these perfectly benign donations can lead to the most sinister repercussions.

This is not a phenomenon unique to Western donors. There is a village by the name of Yelemani located way up in the desert near the Mauritanian border; the economics of this village are drastically different from that of most communities in Mali, because a few years back a number of local men went off to France to find jobs and by some stroke of luck they succeeded. The men of Yelemani all live together in a one-room apartment and they are doing menial labor and custodial work that no Frenchmen would ever want, but compared to the mud hovels and hand-to-mouth existence they knew before the blue collar life in Europe seems to good to be true. They can afford to eat meat and drink Coca-Colas and watch TV every day, and what’s more, they are making such a surplus that each year they can send a big wad of cash back to their families in Yelemani.

During the first few years that these Yelemani families were receiving remittances, the problem was not that their expatriate sons were insufficiently generous; in fact, it was that they were too generous. When their subsistence farming fathers who made monetary incomes of less than $400 a year went to the bank and received checks worth ten times what they could ever make cultivating millet and peanuts, they had so much money that they didn’t know what to do with it. So they splurged on motorcycles, TV sets, cell phones, iPods, and fancy new clothes for themselves and for their wives. Yelemanikaw felt so rich that they didn’t even bother going to the fields during rainy season. Of course, they burned through their fortunes quicker than you can say “MC Hammer”. By the time they realized this, their granaries were empty and it would be months until they could even start planting again. And their children, the little brothers and sisters of the men of Yelemani who had made it, they ended up far worse off than the children of those who were not receiving remittances – while the latter were merely malnourished, the intended beneficiaries of such a liberal cash infusion were literally starving to death.

The best/worst example of this half-baked liberalism is a building which I see almost every day, Le Jardin d’Enfants (kindergarten) built by a perfectly well-intentioned Christian NGO named WorldVision. In addition to two classrooms for three- and four-year-olds, they also built two latrines, a well and a playground complete with three swing sets and a merry-go-round. The benefit of this Jardin d’Enfants to the education of Sanadougou’s youth, acclimating these children to sitting in a structured environment classroom environment is beyond doubt. However, their inept attempts at construction and ensuring simple maintenance practically negate any social benefits which might accrue from the existence of a Jardin d’Enfants in the first place.

To begin, WorldVision told Sanadougoukaw quite explicitly that after a given period of time they would be gone and the people of this village would be wholly responsible for conducting and financing any maintenance themselves. Within a year, the hinges on the metal doors to each of the latrines and also the large double-doors to the entrance rusted to the point that they could hardly open. This problem could have easily been fixed if someone in town had been willing to pitch in some simple axel grease – but that costs money, and few people feel like donating above and beyond their taxes to pay for public education. So they just took all of the rusted doors off the hinges entirely.


The latrines happen to be placed in an end of the schoolyard where the kids like to play. Without doors to these latrines, any child who wants to urinate or defecate there during the school day has to do so in plain sight of his or her classmates.


WorldVision also failed to build a storm drain in the walls enclosing the schoolyard. We’re not talking about anything complicated here; all they had to do was put a little piece of plastic piping into the wall at the lowest point where rainwater flows - like in every single family's concession in Mali. This slight omission was a humongous mistake, because without a storm drain the torrential rainy season downpours would flood the schoolyard and turned it into a giant pen of mud. So a teacher at Le Jardin d’Enfants had to take a pickax and pound a makeshift storm drain into the wall. Of course, he overcompensated and knocked out a whole much too big to only let out water runoff. Now even when one teacher might be watching the front gate, the children can easily crawl out the storm drain.


Controlling the children’s free movement in and out of Le Jardin d’Enfants’ schoolyard is so very important for reasons of public health, because now that the kids are too scared to pull down their pants in the latrines without doors, they either scurry out the front gate or crawl through the storm drain and urinate and defecate behind the perimeter wall. When school is in session, this area is covered with the children’s feces.


As for the playground, since no one could lock the proper entrance with its doors off the hinges, adults were able to enter and exit at their own leisure and cut the chains which once composed the swing sets. And they lifted the merry-go-round off its rotor and sold it as scrap metal.



No one has ever asked me to help them buy a new playground. The people of Sanadougou never asked for a playground in the first place – kids here are content to play with sticks and rocks. The idea that children need thousands of dollars worth of playground equipment which then needs to be shipped from France for at least another thousand dollars certainly never originated in the mind of a Malian who provides for his family's livelihood with simple hoes, picks and plows which cost no more than a few dollars.

Every day when I walk out my garden in Sanadougou, I am greeted by the enormous 2,000 square meter dongeyuro - “dance hall” – which was also built by WorldVision. I can only surmise that they had a conversation with a couple of teenagers who complained that there was not a lot to do here on weekends – et le voila, local demand! So WorldVision shelled out about $20,000 and bought enough cement and rebar to build sustainable, sanitary latrines and conduct top-well repairs for perhaps 40 or 50 families, and instead the hired masons from out of town to build a dongeyuro. Over the course of the year that I have lived here, there has been exactly one single event held there. I really don’t know where to begin on this monstrosity of a cadeau...

One would like to think that maybe giving out presents could serve some societal benefit if they came with strings attached. I am told that WorldVision wanted to do something about female genital mutilation, so they organized a meeting with the bolokomuso – the lady who makes an income on the side as this village’s go-to gal for circumcising little girls’ clitorises with a shard of glass and thus rendering them “marriageable”. WorldVision asked the bolokomuso, “What tools do you want us to give you so that you can have a new source of revenue? If you promise to stop this horrid practice, we’ll give them to you.” She wanted a donkey cart, two donkeys and a big wad of cash. WorldVision gave them all to her. And do you think she stopped bringing girls out to the fields and hacking away at their vaginas? Of course not – it’s the only job she’s ever had.

Other development agents are more liberal than I. In the town of Tominian, an NGO – let’s call them Basketball Court-Builders without Borders – swooped in and realized that this town was severely lacking in its basketball-playing infrastructure. Everyone knows that black people love basketball! So they gave the people of Tominian – whose wells all go dry for a good quarter of each year – what they most certainly needed more than anything else: a basketball court. Within a few years, the blacktop weathered under the extreme elements into a hardly-recognizable remnant of itself. In time the rim and the backboard were unscrewed and sold as scrap.

By then, another NGO rolled into town and realized that the public basketball court was in shambles. Instead of conducting repairs, they decided to start from scratch and build a brand-new basketball court next to the vestiges of the old one. And it was only a matter of time until it too decayed and the men of Tominian – it was probably the same ones as before – unscrewed this new basketball rim and backboard to sell as scrap.

When the new Peace Corps Volunteer rolled into town and started looking for projects to organize, you can probably guess what the young men asked him, “Hey, can you help us build a new basketball court?”

I suppose that the most cursory rule of sustainable development which one can surmise from these anecdotes is that 1) Giving people toys is not development. Even without foreign NGO and development agency intervention, people in Mali are perfectly capable of entertaining themselves. It is already somewhat obscene to see how men who live in mud huts – who cannot provide their families with adequate water, food or medicine, whose children might wear the barest of rags on their backs if anything at all – can somehow manage to scrounge enough money to treat themselves to iPhones and televisions. Philanthropic-minded Westerners swooping into Africa and building playgrounds, soccer fields, basketball courts and dance halls only makes things worse by teaching people that they can get something for nothing, that white people are bottomless sources of money, and that if Tubabs are spending all their cash on big, expensive toys then we should just continue to do more of the same.

2) No one should ever be in the business of simply giving people money – with or without strings attached. Money is perfectly fungible, and even if an NGO distributes cash to be spent on basic necessities, it is just as much if not more likely to be blown on tea, sugar, cigarettes or an iPhone (and thus violating Rule #1). This might sound quite paternalistic – it is – but for all their shortcomings professionally-run charities tend to be much better at spending their money in a constructive manner than individuals who have no sense of budgeting or even the basics of a monetary economy. If you are for some reason adamant about giving directly to a particular individual, it is best to give in the form of an in-kind transfer such as tuition at a private school or credit at a cereal bank; i.e. something which cannot be traded for booze and cigarettes.

Malians and Africans in general need to spend less of their own money on toys and luxuries and spend more on basic necessities like nutritious food, mosquito nets and medicine. Though except in the direst of humanitarian crises - e.g. catastrophic droughts or refugee situations - 3. No one should be in the business of giving to people what they can provide for themselves. Once this precedent has been set, it is nearly impossible to undo. Direct handouts of basic goods completely distort incentives to such a degree that they undermine the natural market forces which need to play out on their own if there are ever to be functioning economies of these necessary commodities. What development agencies and NGOs need to be doing is not giving away the basic necessities of life, but establishing the durable infrastructure needed for Africans to be able to provide these things without any foreign assistance.

Since handing out free rice and mosquito nets distorts markets, you might think that the durable infrastructure which I describe as “sustainable” must be composed of permanent edifices made out of concrete which will last for decades. To a degree, yes, the work of an NGO which parachutes into Africa and builds a schoolhouse will probably benefit the people of Africa longer than a care package of calcium supplements. But even then such development must be taken with a grain of salt. With the erratic climate which shifts between scorching heat and dryness to torrential downpours, termite colonies so ferocious that they will eat through any organic material, unemployed youth ready to steal any materials that can be removed and sold at market, and of course the mobs of children who tend to manhandle the most important tools of public infrastructure as their playthings, here in Mali things really need to be made out of steel and concrete if they are ever going to last more than a few years. And even then, they would require constantly vigilant maintenance and upkeep.

Moreover, once the schoolhouse has been built, who is going to hold classes there? How is a village of 200 subsistence farmers supposed to pay for teacher? Who is going to pay for chalk and paper and pencils? And after a few years when the schoolhouse itself starts to wear and tear – even steel and concrete degrade over time – who is going to conduct the maintenance and repairs? Unless the schoolhouse-building NGO can adequately answer these questions, and if the answer to all of the above is not “the villagers themselves”, then that wonderful school they just built is going to remain empty, unused, and it will eventually be dismantled and sold for scrap or disintegrate into rubble on its own terms. Unless the local population is willing and able to manage this school themselves, it might as well have never been built.

So a year into my Peace Corps service, what do I think is the single best thing that foreigners can do to implement sustainable development in struggling countries like Mali? Waking up in the morning at the call to prayer and spending the rest of the day hoeing dirt and pulling weeds in my garden like every farmer in my village. Sanadougou has been downright spoiled by NGOs who pull up in SUVs, build schools, hand out cadeaux and leave. If I do anything in my two years here, I have made it my personal mission to fight tooth and nail that Tubabs are just a bunch of playboys so rich that we never work, that the only thing we should do is buy more presents. I see to it that when my neighbors walk by and see this hairy Tubab, 9 times out of 10 they see me caked in mud, toiling with a pick in hand.

If entanglement in foreign quagmires is inherently suspect, the most effective development work that Peace Corps Volunteers like me can possibly do is to simply do what the Malians are doing, just tweak their methods a little bit and demonstrate that there might be a new way of doing things a little bit better. Me tending my own banana trees doesn’t directly put any more bananas into the mouths of potassium-deprived children, but by doing so I have introduced this society to the wonders of Nafosoro pumps, drip irrigation and mulching. If I tend the banana trees so well that my Malian neighbors can see that I am producing more and better fruit, if my neighbors are so impressed that they take to these methods in their own garden, then insh’allah next season Sanadougou’s banana farmers might just see that their own banana trees produce greater yields. To date no one has yet to emulate my conservationist irrigation technologies, but I have seen that a couple of my friends have already adopted my compost rotation and urine fertilizer practices. And thus in a perfectly Jeffersonian fashion, the private gardens of Xanadu serve as a shining patch of sustainable water/waste management upon a hill.

And every once in a while when my orange or lemon trees bear fruit, after I have enjoyed consuming the fruits of my labor and composted the peels, there are some remnants which are even more useful still: the seeds. Though I am loath to give away cadeaux, I can see no possible harm in handing out seeds because they come into my possession for free, they can’t really be traded for anything else; in fact seeds have pretty much no economic value at all unless someone invests the time and energy into planting, irrigating and fertilizing them. The seeds borne by my orange and lemon trees are purely positive externalities of my own selfish labor.

I acknowledge that tilling my garden and occasionally handing out seeds might not live up to the incendiary rhetoric of which I am so fond. You might be thinking “Damn, Zac – you have just become the bourgeois reactionary which you used to despise.” Not quite – I never was too keen on smashing the capitalist superstructure to begin with, I've always been critical of left-wing extremism and making pains to accomodate with rational, lower-case "c" conservatism. I still have those same dreams of remaking the world anew, just now I have let go of my more socialist sentimentalisms and want to achieve those same ends employing the power of human nature, market principles and that all-American philosophy of pragmatism.

Sometimes sustainable development can only be achieved by narrow protection of private property. For instance, there is a solar pump-fed robinet used almost exclusively by myself, the two houses of doctors and teachers who live in its immediate vicinity – though occasionally a mob of kids will walk by and stop for a drink. And over time a group of kids manhandled the robinet so badly that they broke the handles right off the faucet heads – all three of them. The doctors, teachers and I pitched in to buy brand new faucet heads. And within a month kids somehow managed to destroy the new faucet heads as well. We could have bought a third, a fourth, a fifth faucet head and provided the kids with potable drinking water and expensive steel toys indefinitely. But instead we decided to cut our losses and buy just a third faucet head – one with locks on the handles which can only be opened by either myself, a doctor or a teacher.


It’s a pity that this privatization scheme must deprive a substantial chunk of the population from using this water source at their leisure – but then again, having a limited scheme in which only 3 key-holders can access the robinet derives a greater good to a greater number of people than the communal scheme under which no one could use it at all.

And every once in a while someone like Etienne Dembele rides their motorcycle up to my concession gate and asks if I know where he can find a man named “Madu Sogoba”. Dembele rode all the way from the neighboring village of N’tonto, 12 km away. He is one of those rare birds who was distraught by the fact that if children in his village wanted to continue their studies past elementary school, they had to walk those 12 km all the way to Sanadougou Secondaire Cycle. He organized the families of his village to try to petition the Communal government, the Cercle government, the Regional and even the National government to build a Secondaire Cycle in N’tonto - to no avail. So Etienne Dembele organized the families of N’tonto to pitch in and build the school themselves. And they did. I was taken aback by his story of Malian gumption.

“So what do you need me for?” I asked.

“We built the school, but we haven’t any nyegens. The children have no choice but to relieve themselves in the bushes. This is intolerable! We must change!”

“Monsieur Dembele, I think you’re the kind of guy with whom I can do business…”

… to be continued!!!

Michael Jackson, Tubabu Hair and Racial Transmogrification

Abel: Madu, the American singer Michael Jackson has died. Why is this?

Madu: Apparently he took a few too many drugs. Not drugs like heroin or cocaine, but medicine drugs. You see, even if medicine drugs can help a person fight illness, if you take too many pills at once or if you take certain drugs together at the same time it has such a powerful reaction that it can be deadly. Michael Jackson was taking many medicine drugs at the same time it seems.

Abel: Why was Michael Jackson eating so many medicines?

Madu: Michael Jackson was a little bit off his rocker. He had many operations of what is called "plastic surgery" - not because there was anything wrong with his body, but because he just wanted to change how he looked.

Abel: How does this "plastic surgery" work?

Madu: Well, in America there are doctors who can change your skin! If people do not like their nose, they can have the doctor cut their nose bone and put their nose back together and have a brand new nose! Or if their ears stick out too much and they think it is ugly, the doctor can pin their ears back closer to their head. Michael Jackson was born with black skin like African people, but he did not like his skin to be black, so over the years his doctors conducted many operations and changed his skin so that it was lighter and lighter - to the point that his skin was as light as white people!

Abel: This is very bad!!! Black people should not transform into white people!!!

Madu: I agree. I think that Michael Jackson looked just fine the way he was originally with black skin.

Abel: ... But I can understand why Michael Jackson wanted to transform into a Tubabu. All of us Africans know how you Tubabus have much better doctors, much better schools and you are all so much richer and have big houses and fancy cars. If we could, we would all become white-skinned like Michael Jackson!!!

Madu: I think you're missing the point. Michael Jackson was rich before he had plastic surgery on his skin. When his skin was still black, he was selling so many records and concert tickets that he had many millions of dollars. He was a very rich man, a very rich black man, and he had a big house, fancy cars, and the best doctors in the world. He didn't need to change his skin for any of those things!

Abel: No, Madu. Many of us Africans want to become white simply to become white! We think that the white skin is more beautiful than the black skin, and especially the women want their hair to be straight like Tubabu women's hair so they buy it at market. Has anyone asked you for your hair?

Madu: No. Why would anyone to wear my hair? I practically have a buzz cut!

Abel: No, no one would wear your hair. It is too small. They would use it to cook medicine.

Madu: What?!?!?!?!

Abel: Yes, we take Tubabu hair - especially the hair from the arms, the chest, the legs - and we pound it into fine powder and simmer it in a pan. And then we brew tea and add the simmered Tubabu hair and drink it as medicine.


Madu: You've got to be kidding me. What exactly do people think this Tubabu hair will do for them?

Abel: Clearly the Tubabu men have such ease with finding women because of their hair. The women find it to be very spicy!!! And so if you drink Tubabu hair in tea, it will help you catch the woman of your dreams.

Madu: That is debatable. I can't think of a single instance when my chest hair has been an asset in such matters.

Abel: Oh, but it is surely true! That is why Michael Jackson wanted to be a Tubabu with white skin and straight hair! So he could catch the woman of his dreams! So he could have much money and have the biggest house and the most expensive cars and the best women and schools and the best doctors in all the world!!!


Madu: But now Michael Jackson is dead. Even with all that Tubabu skin and hair, his expensive doctors could not keep him from dying. In fact, it was precisely those expensive doctors and medicine which killed him!

Abel: .... Oh.... That is a good point. Maybe he should have just changed his hair then.

Pool Patrol: Mali

Thankfully over the course of my three glorious summers at Oakridge Condominiums not once did I ever have to utilize my rigorous training in lifesaving skills. For the most part my First Aid was only applied to superficial knee scrapes and bee stings. The most serious emergency I ever had to respond to was this one time a severely autistic kid decided to see how far he could stick his hand into the wading pool filter and of course he could stick his hand all the way in but he couldn’t pull it back out. Replying to his cries I sprinted to the pump room, I pulled the levers to turn off the filter suction, drained the pool, and not knowing what else to do I called the Vista Fire Department conveniently located across the street. Within 60 seconds my fellow 12-graders Nate Vass and Wyatt Lansdale – Volunteer Firefighters – drove the fire truck down with the siren blaring, strutted across the pool deck in their full firefighting suits and were quite amused by this dire situation. Nate pulled the plastic filter entirely out of the concrete pool deck, and while he held the screaming, frantic kid’s hand in place Wyatt took out a small buzz saw and cut the filter in half. The child’s hand was unharmed, but I applied a Band-Aid to calm him down. Nate and Wyatt received a round of applause. And that was the closest I ever came to saving a life.

… That is, until I joined the Peace Corps.

I had just hours ago introduced my new kitty James Brown II to my lovely mud mansion and the garden of Xanadu. He was busy wandering around the papaya and banana trees, inspecting every square centimeter of his new home. I assume that he enjoyed the tranquility and shade of this living space devoid of cruel, tortuous children and cat-eating humans.

I decided to start irrigating the garden, so I removed the palm fronds which were temporarily serving as a well cover and lowered the Nafosoro pump’s intake hose. Rainy season had just started and Sanadougou had still seen only paltry precipitation to date, so the water tables were still so low that my 7-meter well contained less than a meter of water. I kicked the pedals up and down but before I could even adequately water a single tree my pump sucked up a soggy slurp; it had already hit mud.

I heard a distressing cry beyond the fence – Snoop Doggy Dogg wanted to come and wrestle. So I opened the gate and he started sniffing around and he smelt a new friend! : James Brown II. Snoop wanted to play!

“Word up, brosef! You gonna think this place is dope!!! Let me smell yo ass so we kin have a propa intraducshin…”

James II freaked out! He had never seen anything like this before! So he bolted and ran to the far end of the garden and jumped for cover in what looked like a safe hideaway: the well. After 6.8 meters of silent free fall I heard a splash.

“Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!! James Brown II!!!”

“… Mewwwwww…”

“I am a Lifeguard trained to save you!!! Do you accept my offer of assistance?”

“… Mewwwww…”

“Okay, first thing I am going to do is reduce the volume of water in this well so as to remove you from immediate danger of drowning. Do not worry – help is on the way!!!”

“… Mewwwww?...”

“There was hardly even a single well-bag full of water in there!!! You are going to be just fine!!!”

“… MEWWWW!!!...”

“I’m still here!!! Now James, climb into the well-bag!!! I will hoist you to safety!!!”

“… Mewww…. Mewwwww…”

“James!!! Just climb into the fucking well-bag!!! I am not climbing down there without a proper helmet to ensure my own corporeal safety!!!”

“Mewwww!!!... MewwWWW!!!!”

“What’s that? You’re afraid to get into the well-bag because has neither sufficient volume or structural integrity to hold you without bending? Hold on!!!

“MEWWWWWW!!!”

“I said hold on!!! I just untied the well-bag and replaced it with a 20 liter plastic bucket! It is heavy and dense enough that I can lower it down to the well bottom and it will remain right-side up for you to climb up into it – and then I will hoist you to safety!!! Do you hear me?”

“Mewwwww!!!”

“Alright… good kitty!!! You’re in the bucket so just stay still!!! You’re almost at the surface!!!”

With only 1 meter left before ground level James II jumped up and tried to climb the remainder by the strength of his soggy claws.

“NOOOOOOOO!!!! JAMES!!!!! YOU’VE GOT TO TRUST ME!!!”

“MEWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!”

While James had mere centimeters to go, I dropped belly first onto the now-muddy ground. With my left hand I continued to hold the rope for the bucket right in place beneath him – and with my right hand lunged for a firm grip around James’ collar bone. And I pulled the sopping wet kitten to my chest.



But for a few scrapes to the nose – it seemed like he had jumped face first into the wall of the well – James didn’t seem too hurt. But his fur was soaked, and he was shivering violently. Young kittens are largely incapable of maintaining a steady body temperature – especially when wet. Though it was 90 degrees out, James Brown II was in serious danger of hypothermia.

No matter how hot it was, the danger would remain so long as his coat remained wet and wicked body heat away from his extremities. So I brought him inside and dried him off with my fuzzy towel. Within a few minutes all I could do was continue fluffing his fur until it was bereft of moisture, and James took care of the rest licking with his dry tongue.

“That was a close one, James. You owe me big time – no more jumping in the well.”

“Yeah, and you owe me some formal top-well improvement so that I don’t have the urge to jump down there in the first place! How can I be expected not to do stupid shit? I’m just a cat, dig?”

“Point considered. Now let’s just hope that you spend your other 8 lives at a much slower pace.”

On a Marrakesh Express

There are few things more unpleasant than Malian hot season. At this point in the year the village of Sanadougou is close enough to the Equator that it receives such direct radiation, the Sun beats down with such intensity that I cannot even look outside without my sunglasses on – the reflection from the sand is practically blinding unto itself. During hot season the temperature rarely dips below 100 degrees; often times the thermometer hovers around 110. Here it is just flat, sandy scrub in all directions with no body of water, no topography of any kind; pressure in the air is fairly uniform in all directions, so there is no wind to blow the sweat off your brow. The heat just sits on top of your head and refuses to ever go away. April is more or less dry hot season, so the entire Sahel is kind of like a big unpleasant sauna. But by May the rain clouds are starting to form so it is not only 110 degrees but also as humid as the cavities between the folds inside Rush Limbaugh’s ass crack.

I am not exaggerating when I say that it is a full-time job merely surviving in this climate. Human beings sweat so much that we have to be constantly drinking water simply in order to not die of dehydration. Even the water is hot. I drink about 12 Nalgenes full of hot water a day – and even then I still get massive headaches because I'm dehydrated.

This time of year, people just sit under the shade of their gwa and try their best not to melt. No one has any desire to get off their ass and do anything. Watering a garden would be downright futile. Nobody can do any work, because it’s no matter what they do it's just too……… fucking………hot……………

My Malian neighbors spend their time escaping the Sun's wrath under the gwa brewing pots of boiling hot tea and sugar.

“Madu, you drink tea?”

“NO!!!!! Get that shit away from me!!!!!”

Hot season sucks.

And if I thought that hot season couldn’t suck any harder, the night guardian at the clinic across the street from me shot my kitty cat with a colonial-era musket and ate him.

A mere seven days after the Assassination of James Brown the gardens of Xanadu were graced by a visit with Dr. Dawn – the Peace Corps Medical Officer – on her scheduled annual site visit. She seemed to be concerned for my mental health.

“Zac, you haven’t let go of this cat thing. It’s time for you to move on.”

She was right. There were few worse strategies force coping with the wanton slaughter and consumption of my kitty cat then to wallow at the scene of the crime, especially in this Allah-forsaken weather where one is so busy sweating one’s balls off and struggling to remain alive that it is nearly impossible to experience any semblance of joy.

So I packed my bag and got on a plane to Casablanca!



I was supposed to meet my family at the airport – at which time they would have for me a new functional debit card. Though due to a malfunctioning hydraulic system, my family’s flight from JFK was canceled. And of course the Moroccan currency exchangers did not have the slightest interest in trading for Malian francs. So for my first hours on Moroccan soil I was penniless, hungry, and shit out of luck.

But somehow or another my mom got Iberian Airlines to feel an enormous amount of pity and they whisked me to a luxury Casablanca spa and hotel with air-conditioning and a flat-screen TV and a toilet and a bidet and a steam bath and unlimited room service so long as I promised to never badmouth Iberian Airlines all over my blog. And I stand by my vow. When Iberian Airlines’ flights are grounded by hydraulic malfunctions, they treat you like a king.

As this grimy Peace Corps Volunteer has not had a proper shower or bath in almost a year now, I dawdled in this soapy, shampoo steam bath of bliss for at least an hour. When I was done there was a manifest ring of sludge around the bathtub.

And then I stepped outside onto the asphalt-paved street and walked along the concrete sidewalk and re-immersed myself into modern cosmopolitan existence. I sat down at the café with the morning edition of Le Monde and poured over the editorials as I sipped a carafe of red wine and a cappuccino and ordered a big hunk of lamb steak, as bloody and rare as the chef will agree to serve it, smothered in peppercorns. Only current or former Peace Corps Volunteers who have lived in villages of mud and sticks and eaten a steady diet of millet goop could ever understand just how amazing this felt…

Morocco is the most amazing country I have been to on the African continent thusfar(3 out of 54). Unlike Mali or Burkina Faso – which are landlocked agglomerations of various tribes which often have nothing in common besides the fact that they were once governed by the same French colonial magistrate – al-Maghreb is actually a nation-state of 34 million people with a sort of cultural coherence. Yes, in addition to the Arab majority there are distinct minority groups here such as the Berbers, the Gnaoua (black Moroccans) and Jews. However, since this is such a highly tolerant society there has been such intermarriage and exchange among the various subcultures over the years that now most Moroccans speak a patois of Arabic and French with a little Berber. And of course, this culture had their share of influence from the Spanish, the Romans, the Carthaginians, the Phoenicians, and - judging by the indigenous redheads - the occasional Viking raiding party.

What I enjoy about this country so much is that it is hard to pigeonhole into a greater region. In America, one would say that Morocco is in “the Middle East”. My Egyptian Arabic teacher would say that Morocco is in “Africa”. My Malian neighbors would say that Morocco is in “Europe” (it’s halfway to Spain)! All are kind of correct in that since it is located on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar, and pretty much all maritime traffic in and out of the Mediterranean had to dock in either Tangier or Casablanca to trade for supplies at some point in time, Maghrebee culture is a deliciously cosmopolitan hodgepodge of East, West, North and South. And the result is a culture which mixes the best of all worlds.

The most conspicuous thing about Moroccan culture seems to be that men between the ages of 18 to 100 spend every afternoon at the café sipping mint tea. No women are ever present at the cafés unless of course they are serving the men. I thought this was kind of cool until I was joined for the second leg of my journey with my feminist friend – after that, I came to see the light that of course, the café is a bastion of misogyny and sexism. Nevertheless, at more gender-neutral establishments one could be treated to a constant smorgasbord of olives, couscous, spicy bean soup and crock pots full of goat and lamb and cumin and turmeric… but you know what? I’m really bad at this Condé Nast culturati fluff – I’ll leave that to a blogger with a significantly greater estrogen quotient than myself.

This blog isn't about art and dance and cuisine. It's about manly things like CONCRETE and PLUMBING and SEPTIC TANKS and SHIT. Yeah, that's right.

So here's my take on Morocco: Morocco is so incredibly awesome, not just because of the olive oil and couscous but because between 65 and 1.8 million years ago the European and African plates collided. The result of this tectonic confrontation were the High Atlas Mountains - which were pushed with enough force to reach heights of 4,000 meters. At this altitude moisture that just happened to be traveling along in the air, minding its own business, got interrupted by these ginormous mountains and so the moisture condensed and actually formed clouds - which often saturate to a point that they actually conduct precipitation. Many peaks of the High Atlas Mountains - such as Toubkal, the very highest mountain in all of North Africa (pictured below)- are so cold and receive so much moisture that that water falls as snow or otherwise freezes into snowcaps last until mid-August.




By the time that I and my parents and my sister went hiking around Toubkal in mid-June there was still a little bit of snow left. If you squint and block out the glare from the Sun you might be able to see some patches out in the distance. Yeah, there they are... Eventually enough solar radiation gets absorbed by those snowcaps that they melt and flow downhill, forming little mountain streams. Those mountain streams serve as the lion's share great of the Berbers' water supply for drinking, cooking, washing and irrigation.



The higher up we went, naturally the less vegetation there was on these mountains. Much of the valley was just full of boulders and scree; Allah did not create many prime plots for farmers or pastoralists in the High Atlas Mountains.

However, back in how many days of yore some Berber shepherds decided to pick up a bunch of heavy rocks and throw them across the mountain streams. Eventually these rocks caught enough sticks and leaves that they formed modest pools - which bit by bit accumulated enough organic matter to create a fertile humus. And grasses grew in the moist soils where they never would have otherwise among the rocks and the shepherds created for themselves prime new places to lead their goats to graze.



In some places the Berbers had gathered so much soil and were able to control the water levels so well that their rock walled-in areas would be fertile - but not flood - and grow figs and cherries and apricots in the alpine terrain.



For thousands of years this rock wall technology was pretty impressive. But then sometime in the 20th century the World Bank came in with some cement bags and fancypants engineers and created permanent, concrete irrigation canals to divert a smaller, more reliable fraction of the mountain streams so as to improve agricultural yields and simultaneously preserve the natural habitats of some of the endangered fauna which call Toubkal National Park their home.

I could totally build something like this... a piece of cake!



Yeah, political science majors from Amherst College know all about building big concrete-looking canal things...



Check out how the Berbers took a hill on something like a 45-degree angle, built ridges and then with a diversion of this irrigation canal built a cascading, multi-tiered garden plot.



And here they have diverted naturally-flowing mountain stream waters to fill a clothes-washing basin.



And since that water was once in solid form mere hours ago and is probably around 37 degrees Fahrenheit, some Berbers used rubber hoses to divert the canals further, poked holes around one loop of the hose, and created a 100-percent sustainable, gravity-powered refrigerator to chill water and soft drinks for hikers passing by their village.



All of these infinitely awesome water systems are - along with olives, couscous, turmeric and traditional Berber lute music - among the reasons why I am in love with the nation of al-Maghreb and I think I might have to live there for at least some part of my life... or at least become filthy rich and buy a villa in Chefchaouen like Robert Plant.

You might think, "Yeah, and now when you get back to Sanadougou you can build a snow cap > irrigation canal > natural refrigerator system there too! (sigh)...

Unfortunately, the village where I live in Mali is as topographically interesting as Sarpy County, Nebraska - none of these things could ever happen there.

... So until a major tectonic plate collides with the vast Malian interior, it looks like I'll be concentrating on solid and liquid waste management from now until the Mahdi returns...