The Number Five

There are so many deficiencies in human capital which make it difficult for the Malian economy to function that one might be tempted to cast the blame on economic illiteracy. Very few people here understand that profits = revenues – costs because the Bambara language has not evolved different words for money to express those three distinct concepts. Quite often rural shops fail because the butigitigis purchase their wares in the cities and then resell those wares to their customers in village for the same exact prices – with every sale, they actually lose money. Most vendors don’t even bother to keep ledger books; they just eyeball how much money is flowing through their business in relative terms; “a little”, “a lot”, “enough”.

But economic illiteracy is only the tip of the iceberg; it has not been uncommon for merchants to hand me incorrect change – not because they are necessarily trying to cheat me, but because they simply cannot handle the math. Most owners of big shops in this country are able to invest 500 francs in a small calculator, and most are so uncomfortable doing subtraction in their heads that they whip out their machini every time they make a transaction – but that doesn’t mean that they know which buttons to push. The deficiencies in Malian human capital run even prior to arithmetic.

I myself never really understood how devastating ignorance can be on the local economy until I sat down one day in market to talking with a Malian vegetable-seller named Ma about the prices of the goods she sells at market. As we were discussing all of these numbers Ma stopped her own thought in mid-sentence, smiled radiantly and hunched over to trace her index finger into the dirt:



“One, two, three, four, five, six!”

And that is how I was introduced to the concept of “innumeracy”: the inability to read or write numbers. Innumeracy is a phenomenon causally related and integrally tied to illiteracy, of course, but it comes across to the numerate observer as incredibly more astonishing. In a society completely bereft of novels and plays or anything application of the written word more complicated than the labels on tea boxes, being unable to read does not seem to be all that much of a handicap. But numbers are an intrinsic part of material existence prior to their utterance by humans, and for an adult member of society to be unable to recognize or portray the visual representations of these numbers in any system at all means that they cannot possibly comprehend a base-ten system, that they can at best comprehend mathematical concepts as complex as the amount of digits they have on their two hands.

The sorry fact of the matter is that the Malian monetary economy is predicated on society’s inability to recognize and identify the numbers printed on their own currency. Back in the days of colonialism and the first two and half decades after independence, Malians conducted business with the sou – the smallest denomination of which was a 1 sou piece. But in 1984 the Republic of Mali joined the Economic Community of West African States and adopted the CFA as their new currency, and since this new currency had already depreciated in value from rampant inflation the smallest denomination in circulation at the time was a 5 CFA piece. Those who could actually read those numbers and speak a little French referred to the money with the proper French terms for each denomination: “cinq francs”, “dix francs”, “vingt-cinq francs”, “cinqant francs”, etc.

But very few Malians could make sense of the squiggles representing those concepts on their coins and bills, and even fewer could speak French. Though the different denominations of this new currency were easily distinguishable by size and color, the vast majority of the Malian population could make no sense of the “5”, “10”, “25”, “50”, “100”, “250” and “500” engraved on their coins, and they especially couldn’t decipher the “1,000”, “2,000”, “5,000” and “10,000” printed on their bills – that is, if an innumerate person could ever get their hands on a paper bill to begin with. So they referred to their new ECOWAS currency with the same names as the sou; since the 5 CFA coin was the smallest denomination like the 1 sou piece, innumerate Malians referred to it as the Bambara word for “one”, the 10 CFA coin as “two”, the 25 CFA as “five”, the 50 CFA as “ten”, etc. There were a lot of people who could in fact read those numbers, but if they read them correctly they couldn’t do business with the innumerate.

Moreover, this is a culture that regularly bows to the lowest common denominator - no matter how absurd. The older generations who came of age during colonialism were disproportionately more likely to be unschooled and innumerate, and Malian society is largely structured upon youth’s deference to elders; in this country, if Grandpa has no teeth, then no one can eat solid foods for dinner so as to not hurt his feelings. So just as the House of Habsburg purposefully mispronounced every “s” as a “th” to humor the grotesquely underbitten, dreadfully lisping King Carlos II, the entire population of Mali established the practice of misidentifying their currency to accommodate those who do not recognize that the numeral 5 stands for the number five.

As though Malian shop-owners don’t already have enough problems staying in the black without any accounting or arithmetic, there is a unique problem which besets those who are in fact numerate; the spoken terms used to identify prices are five times smaller than when those prices are written down – thereby making every transaction at least five times more confusing than necessary. If a shop-owner does know math and he knows that a customer’s order is 9,750 francs, he has to ask his customer for “one thousand, six five hundreds and sixty” no matter how nonsensical that is.

Even I have a really hard time converting between numeric prices and Malian illiterate prices, accepting the cognitive dissonance between seeing one value of numbers on budgets and currency but referring to it as something else. Let’s say I’m haggling over cement prices and the market price for 83 sacks at 7,100 francs a sack and the vendor’s starting price should be 589,300 francs, but I don’t have any scratch paper on me so I have to figure out in my head, what’s 589,300 divided by 5?... well, 100,000… then… what’s 89,000 divided by 5?... um… 16,000… plus 1,800… then 60… so 100,000 plus 16,000 plus 1,800 plus 606 equals… 117,860…

“The price for this should be '117,860', but since I’m buying so much cement here how ‘bout you cut me a break and cut it down to '100,000'?”

“ '100,000' is too low. '107,225'.”

'107,225' ... what’s that in real numbers?... multiply by 5… 500,00… plus 35,000…”

And even I have to give up and take out the calculator application on my phone and translate every numeric price into an illiterate price, and even though I and the cement seller can actually do relatively advanced math the negotiations take so long that we get confused as to what the other is trying to say and we completely lose track of each other’s offers because the only common language we share requires that we manhandle our numbers out of deference to all of those who don’t know what to make of the numeral 5. This is why – as much as I hate speaking to people in French in this country – Bambara and all of Mali’s other tribal tongues are wholly inadequate and the language of the former colonial power is in fact necessary for dealing in transactions more complicated than a few thousands francs.

If you can imagine how difficult handling money in this country is for people like me who can in fact do math, now try to imagine how much harder it is for the masses who need to use their fingers to count to ten…

It is pretty hard to find statistics quantifying the population of the innumerate – maybe that makes a lot of sense, actually – but if slightly more than 70 percent of all Malians are absolutely illiterate, and identifying individual numbers is significantly easier than sounding out combinations of letters into words, then the innumerate population must number at least a few million persons out of a total population of 13 million. But seriously, when is the average millet farmer eking out a hand-to-mouth existence going to interact with any amount of currency so complex that it cannot be adequately expressed with the illiterate numeral system? The fact of the matter is that most people living in countries like Mali are still living in a pre-modern subsistence level agricultural economy in which they farm the coarse grains that they eat, they eat the coarse grains that they farm, and there usually isn’t enough to feed the whole family to begin with. Unlike cash crop farmers, it is fairly rare that subsistence farmers can produce any sort of surplus that can be traded for currency, the whole question of money is a relatively minor aspect of their overall business plan.

And so long as they are illiterate and innumerate, Malians are extremely vulnerable to exploitation by the better-educated urban elite. There probably isn’t very much exploitation present when two rural peasants trade between themselves, like when Amadou the farmer goes to his village market and sells handfuls of tomatoes or onions to his neighbors. Though exploitation is certainly present if Amadou farms cotton on a third of his fields and sells it all to the representative from the nearest big city textile mill. Mills like CMDT and Comatex enjoy perfect monopsony over their respective local cotton markets, so they can still collect supplies of raw cotton year after year by paying the farmers only 200 CFA for a kilogram of cotton. A typical small-scale farmer will sell about 100 kilos after an extremely successful harvest – so for that year, they will take home a monetary revenue of 20,000 CFA (roughly $40). To an innumerate farmer who does all of his counting on his fingers, all of those zeros equate to a completely incomprehensible sum of currency – he will consider himself such a wealthy waritigi that he will spend without abandon.

But in reality, the innumerate farmer is getting royally screwed. The only reason why the textile mills can pay below market value for their raw materials is that no one else in town is buying – the peasants can either take the below-market value offer from CMDT or get nothing. Maybe the executive leadership of the textile companies knows about this disparity, but Amadou the farmer has no means of tracking global commodity prices, he doesn’t even know that he is being exploited. He understands so little about the value of money that he thinks that he is coming out on top, so the next year he is going to whittle down his acreage designated for cereal crops so he can grow even more cotton.

What exactly is Amadou the farmer going to do with the 40,000 francs he earned from selling cotton this year? Perhaps he will invest it in a new plough, another donkey, some better hoes and shovels. Perhaps he will hide it under the loose brick behind his bed in case of emergencies. But most likely, he is going to blow it all on tea, sugar, cigarettes, warm Coca Cola, millet beer and prostitutes. If he hasn’t already, there’s a good chance that he will spend 20,000 francs on a cell phone which he will use can play Tetris and the snake game – he will have to pay more for credit if he wants to actually make any calls. Amadou will spend hardly anything on better food, clothing or medicine for his family; taking care of the children’s day-to-day needs is generally considered the complete responsibility of the women of the family. There’s a good argument that such profligate spending could be reformed if women had more say over family decision-making or if men knew enough about science that they appropriately valued modern medicine– but there’s an even better argument that money would be spent more wisely in this country if people actually understood its value.

And while Amadou the farmer has blown all of his cotton money on toys and candy, the cotton he planted last year has mined all of the nutrients from the soil and put nothing back in, so the third of his fields used for cotton production have become too barren for food production in the long run. Amadou might have money, and he might have even more of it if he expands his cotton acreage the next planting season, but if this trend continues he will eventually be forced to purchase his food – and the 200 francs earned for each kilo of cotton will by no means suffice to compensate for the lost food production. So even though Amadou made what looked like a lot of money this year, the nutrition and health of his family will suffer from the paltry stores in his granary. If Amadou was duped into planting too much cash crops in proportion to food crops he will have to sell off some of his cows or donkeys, maybe even take out a loan at an usurious rate of interest in order to feed his family until the next harvest.

Maybe the typical Malian farmer could avoid such hardships if they could buy better fertilizers, high yield seeds and machine tools. Maybe they could be better off if they actually knew how to manage their finances. But neither can become a reality so long as the typical Malian farmer does not comprehend that the numeral 5 stands for the number five.

Liquid Gold

One of my investment banker friends wrote to me musing how a poor country like Mali could escape its current stagnation; “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 compound interest and re-invested so that capital can regenerate and expand 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 could most people ever justify slaughtering an entire goat, so villagers raise livestock mostly to sell to urban butchers. The money these villagers earn in exchange for these cash crops is what pays for their tea, sugar and gasoline. Altogether, the majority of such basic 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 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 onions, tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, sweet potatoes, yams or manioc. 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, perishable 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 that they can water by hand. 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 an economic development project 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 I'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 – though 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 Minianka society's waste management practices 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 disadvantage 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, hookworm, 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 should 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.

Ini Che a Sanadougou!

Note: official directives from Washington prohibit me from revealing my true location on the Internet for terrorists and other such evildoers to see - and so I will affectionately refer to my village from here on out as "Sanadougou". All of the material here is true, though the actual names of places must be changed to protect the innocent.

The first few months of living at site are kind of like first-semester freshman year. I am not really expected to just plop down and start digging wells; first I have to spend most of my time getting a feel for my new village, putting my home together, just drinking tea and chatting with my new neighbors. And like it was that first semester, it is quite overwhelming trying to learn all of these new names. Everybody in Sanadougou’s last name is Sogoba, and apparently the Sogobas have some ancient blood rivalry against the Doumbias who previously named me, and hence I have been rechristened Madu Sogoba. In the Bambara tongue, Sogoba means “elephant”, or literally “big meat” – which I find to be quite flattering. Also, there are twenty other Madu Sogoba’s in town, so I am known as either Madu Sogaba #21, Madu Sogoba the Fat and the Hairy, or simply “The White Guy.”

Sanadougou is a village of roughly 4,000 people, which for Malian standards makes it a fairly large town. It is also the Chef de la Commune - which is the equivalent of a county seat - so the good news is that there are a lot of people who want to work with me. In addition to the traditional gerontocracy there is a formal Office of the Mayor, and significant public facilities like a health clinic, a kindergarten, an elementary and a junior high school, a public library and a bustling market on every sixth day. Sanadougou is a mostly Muslim community with four mosques, but there is also a significant Christian population which maintains a vibrant church. Everybody wants the new Peace Corps Volunteer to help out at their respective workplace.

Like most other villages in Mali, pretty much everybody here is engaged in farming in some way, shape or form. Right now is the tail-end of rainy season – the only season that people can grow the staple grains of millet, rice and corn, so my neighbors are very busy. As people are done harvesting their staple cereals, they dry them in the sun and stock their granaries for the rest of the year, and since it is nearly impossible to grow water-intensive grains the rest of the year, Malian farmers rotate their fields to cultivate vegetables and fruits which can be grown with much less rainfall. Now the markets are starting to teem with a lot of okra, yams, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, garlic, eggplant, this thing called nkoyo which is like a really bitter pepper, hot peppers, and of course a plethora of beans. Sanadougoucaw also grow bananas, plantains, yellow melons, watermelons, oranges, lemons, mangoes, papayas, guavas, pomegranates. And in terms of animals, they raise chickens, guinea hens, pigeons, rabbits, goats, sheep, cows, and pigs! After eating plain rice and millet for the previous two months, the abundance and variety of food makes me very happy about my site selection.

My village is in a very wet region near the border between Ségou and Sikasso provinces. In economic terms, that means that the townsfolk of Sanadougou have so much water during rainy season that besides growing millet and okra for their personal consumption and trade with their neighbors, they can also grow Mali’s main cash crops: cotton, peanuts and shea nuts. The end result is that some rich European or American people are buying clothes, candy bars and shampoo made from their raw materials, a little bit of those profits come back to where they belong. In addition, the market in Sanadougou (which is large enough to allow for a real division of labor) is significantly larger than that in my homestay village Sinsina (which seemed to be more reliant on subsistence farming). Though people from very small villages also come to the Chef de la Commune market town to sell their goods, that little bit of additional income which results in living right next to the big market makes a difference. For a country where per capita income hovers around $400 a year, Sanadougou is relatively prosperous (emphasis added on relatively).

It is really baffling to me how economic development works in Mali. The vast majority of kids walk around barefoot and will inevitably contract hookworm because their parents can’t afford to buy shoes. And though the public schools are free they are not obligatory, and so most people in Mali are illiterate because their parents decided it would be in the family’s financial interests for them to work in the fields instead of going to school. But it seems that everybody has a cell phone – even if they will never make a business call they can play Space Invaders. And a surprising number of people have found it within their means to purchase a television set so they can watch these awful Brazilian soap operas dubbed into French – even if they do not understand a word of the dialogue, they still love to watch their televisions. The concept of keeping up with the Joneses exists in Mali too, but unfortunately it gives disproportionate weight to expensive entertainment technology instead of basic expenses on health and education… just like in America!

The most obvious problem here in regards to water is that, asides from rainy season, there is simply not enough of it. During dry season – so-named because there is absolutely zero precipitation – many men sojourn to the large cities in Mali in search of work. Dry season through the end of the grain harvest at the end of rainy season is known as “hungry time”, because the only food to eat is whatever dried grains and vegetables are stored in the granaries. In the long run I would like to try to do some work in regards to water storage so that people might be able to have more water for their immediate drinking and washing needs, maybe even water a small kitchen garden during dry season – but this would be a very technical undertaking which would require some major financial investment.

My town could use some work in regards to water sanitation. There are no toilets in rural Mali, only a basic latrine called a nyegen which is literally a walled-off area inside each family’s concession with two holes; a deep hole in the ground where people poop, and a hole on the bottom of the wall (hopefully but not always the lowest point in the nyegen) where people should try to aim their pee. Unless a family lives on the periphery of the village, the pee-hole of their nyegen leads to the street – which means that there are many, many algae-filled puddles of sewage trickling out into the dirt roads where people and animals walk. I have a feeling that I am going to spend the bulk of my time over the next two years working to minimize the amount of raw sewage festering in the streets of my village.

A less discernible but even more profound water-related problem in Sanadougou is that of disease transmission. You cannot see it directly – if you are eating dinner with a family and they hand you a cup of water, it probably looks crystal clear. But after spending a day at the local clinic watching parent after parent in tears carrying their delirious or even comatose children, it is apparent that there are some potent disease vectors in the neighborhood. The sole doctor for this Commune of 16,000 people tells me that the most grave health issues here are diarrhea and malaria – both of which fall into my field of water sanitation because the many microbes which cause diarrhea are transmitted through untreated water and poor sanitary practices, and malaria is spread by the Anopholes mosquito which breeds in standing water. The two most deadly causes of infant mortality in Mali are also the most easily preventable, so my job is clearly set before me. If I can make even the tiniest dent in the incidence of either malady, then I will be very content.

That is all for now, but be prepared for future updates. And remember: just as this blog is fully interactive, you can help me implement the directives of Mission Number 0079 from the comforts of your air-conditioned cubicle! Though the Peace Corps is training me well and provides vast resources of technical manuals, I appreciate any suggestions you might have - and it doesn't have to be water-related, and if your idea is within my ability, then I just might do it and tell all of the loyal followers of Zacstravaganza just how wonderful of a person you are. Epidemiologists, doctors, carpenters, welders, farmers and agronomists – I am all ears!