In India, More Women Demand Toilets Before Marriage

Here's an absolutely wonderful article in The Washington Post explaining how the development of water sanitation infrastructure goes hand in hand with social development, namely the empowerment of women.

Moreover, this article hammers home a point that I really struggled to convey to my young male Malian friends: Improving your toilet improves your chance of gettin laid! If you don't have a quality toilet and septic tank, ain't no girl gonna be into you!

Maybe one day I could even disseminate similar sentiments about greywater recycling, urine separating and composting toilets amongst my American brethren... (insh'allah)

Help Fund Pilar's Nyegen Project!

Though the eponymous hero of this blog can no longer volunteer his own ditch–digging skills, the brave activists of Operation Sphincter Plug continue their valiant effort to rid the world of gastrointestinal disease. Continuing this imperative work in another village down the road from Sanadougou is Peace Corps Volunteer Pilar Lyons of Pine Bush, New York. Pilar is a civil engineer with a special zeal for water and wastewater infrastructure!

Pilar’s village is much smaller than Sanadougou – only about one thousand people; however, it has even more dire sanitation needs. This particular Minianka village lies atop soft fertile soils adjacent to a series of seasonal ponds with a very high water table – only 1.5 meters below ground in some places. Though this is a prime location for agriculture, since the water table is so high and the soft soils are not supported by solid rock, their “traditional latrines” built from mud and logs often rot and collapse while some unlucky person is squatting on top of them. Even worse, the high water table and soft soils mean that the groundwater which feeds this village's wells is particularly susceptible to contamination from the unlined latrine pits; in other words, their drinking water is directly polluted with human fecal matter. Without any means of containing wastewater, raw sewage flows out into standing puddles in the street which serve as fertile breeding grounds for malaria-spreading mosquitoes, as well as filth flies and cockroaches which carry giardia cysts and amoebas into the people's food and drinking water.

Inadequate sanitation in a Minianka village is not just something icky – it is the reason why giardia, dysentery, hookworm and malaria are absolutely endemic in this society, it why two out of every five children die before the age of five, it is why so many adults cannot work in the fields because they are sapped and emaciated by dysentery. Without the monetary wealth to purchase reinforced concrete and plastic tubing necessay to build adequate sanitation infrastructure, these poor Miniankas are mired in a cycle of filth, disease and poverty.

A few months before I packed my bags for Ameriki, Pilar biked over to the mud mansion of Xanadu with two masons from her village both named Daniel Dembele. They came to inspect the many dozens of nyegens and soak pits we had built throughout town. My main man Sidiki Sogoba taught the two Daniels how he assembles proper latrine platforms so that they could apply this trade in their own community. Sidiki doesn't mind the competition, because "We need so many skilled masons in every village in Mali. Even near Sanadougou, we need so much work that I could never do it all."



Now Pilar and the two Daniel Dembele’s are committed to organizing a village–wide sanitation campaign similar to the one which Sidiki and I conducted in Sanadougou. With your help, they would like to build 30 concrete latrines with lined latrine pits to safely store solid waste and a combintion of soak pits and infiltration trenches to safely store liquid waste underground in such a way that it does not directly contaminate the groundwater and it cannot be spread by flies and vermin to indirectly contaminate the food and water. The villagers who would like to participate in the program will have to procure all of the sand, rocks and gravel and either contribute or pay for all of the necessary labor; 27 percent of the total cost. Funds donated through the Peace Corps Partnership will go to pay for cement, rebar, plastic pipes, plastic sheets and a few masonry tools which the town does not have at their disposal.

If you would like to contribute to Pilar’s nyegen project, click here!

Ini’che kosibe kosibe!!!

This is Why UNICEF and NGOs Should Stop Giving People Free Mosquito Nets

Madu Bigmeat: What are you doing?

Gajuma: I am cutting up a mosquito net.

M: I can see that. But why?

G: I am making rope.

M: You can make rope out of old rice bags, you can make rope out of cotton or grass or even old rope. Why - of all things - are you making rope out of a precious mosquito net?

G: This mosquito net was free.

M: Do you have another mosquito net?

G: No.

M: Are you going to buy another mosquito net?

G: Of course not! The doctor gives them to pregnant women for free!

M: Is your wife pregnant?

G: Of course not! She is 70 years old! She is too old to have another child.

M: Then you're never going to get another free mosquito net! Why on Earth are you destoying this one?!?!?!

G: It doesn't matter - my sons have wives. And soon they will have more children. And the doctor will give them another mosquito net.

M: Yeah, that new mosquito net - if they ever get it - would be for the mother and her infant child to protect themselves from malaria. No doctor is ever going to give you a new mosquito net!

G: Yes, but when my sons' daughters get new mosquito nets, they will give them to me because I am an old man.

M: And are you going to sleep under them?

G: No, I will use them to make more rope.

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 many children 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 800 million sub-Saharan 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 is that it creates some perverse incentives. 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 live and work in land-locked Mali only 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 who 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. My reaction to the cheap prophylaxis had gotten so bad that I was engaging in conversation with my cat. 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.

A Malian Perspective on President Obama

Though Barack Obama has yet to take the oath of office as President of the United States, it seems this election has already made immeasurable progress in America’s standing with the rest of the world. Why do I think this? Because people tell me so.

Now when I walk down the street, people randomly come up to me and say "thank you". Thank you for what? “Thank you for voting for Barack Obama! America used to be very bad, but now you are my friend!”

Despite the general disapproval of our foreign policy in the Middle East and our occasional kooky outbursts of Christian supremacy, every Malian I talk to has an effusive attitude towards America per se. A common conversation starter here is “America… it is… Good!” I try my best to explain in Bambara income inequality and xenophobia, but it seems that nothing will shake the belief that America is a virginal exception to the Old World tradition of colony and empire.

Though Malians have their doubts. A general rule of thumb is that the more literate a Malian is and the more they identify themselves with Islamic culture, the more likely they are going to have an ax to grind with America. If they can pronounce “Abu Ghraib”, I brace myself for an uncomfortable feeling of personal responsibility for the collective sins of my countrymen. Unlike most governments in African history, America is a democracy whose faults cannot be ascribed to one man – if the government does something bad it is all the people’s fault.

No one in Mali other than President Toure has ever actually met George Walker Bush, but they know enough about the archetypical Tubabu to have a very negative view of him. “Joje Boosh is racist!” I am told, “Joje Boosh kills Muslim people in Iraq and Palestine because he thinks that Jesus is the prophet and Muhammad is a liar!” We have eight years of serious damage to control.

Some people have a few kind words to say about the incumbent administration, “Joje Boosh buys chemicals to kill mosquitoes and kill malaria banakise – but he wants us to become Christians because he thinks that Islam is a terrorist religion!” I do not know how much of these views are formed by al-Jazeera a few madrassahs removed, how much they are simply products of homegrown prejudice, or how much they are based upon an objective analysis of discernible reality. But I can say for sure that the negative attitude towards the President who said that America was fighting “a crusade” is somewhat related to generations of Malian interaction with well-meaning missionaries whose handouts have been laced with ulterior motives.


But no matter how many bones they can pick with America, all eyes light up upon the mention of Barack Obama. “Barack Obama… is… Good!”

Part of it is simply because Barack Obama is black… well, he’s actually half black, but he’s more black than any other President of the biggest most powerful white country in the world. Also, many Malians believe that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. You see, unlike America where calling someone a Muslim is tantamount to slander, in Mali it is a praise of a person’s ethics and morals. In an Islamic country, boys are regularly named Hussein after the grandson of Muhammad who rebelled against the Umayyad dynasty’s tyranny and injustice.

Some people here have an interestingly self-interested perspective on Obama’s victory; “Now that America has a black skinned president, America will give more money to black skinned Africans!” When I am told this I explain that yes, the Obama-Biden ticket did in fact pledge to increase the budget for foreign assistance – some of which might be allocated to Mali’s irrigation projects. But the understanding assumes more of an iron law of wages, “The black president is going to take money from the racist white people and give it to his brothers and sisters in Africa!”

Other people have a more comprehensive understanding of the history of American race relations. “You Americans used to own slaves from Africa, and then you freed the slaves. But you were still racist for many years…” I am lectured by shriveled old men. “But now you have a black President, and Barack Obama is going to smack the racists hard like a dirty old donkey!” Right on, brotha (terrorist fist jab).

I think there might be something a little more profound to what has happened, something with a connection to what I am doing here right now which I am still digesting. I think that after eight long years of insularity and fear of foreign-sounding Muslim people, America is – like Kevin McAlastair and the furnace in his basement – not afraid anymore.

I think that what America just did has something to do with why I left my comfortable, air-conditioned existence in New York and decided to spend the next two years living in a mud hut in a village of peanut farmers who eat millet porridge with leaf sauce and pray to an almighty Allah whom I can only begin to comprehend. I think that maybe it has something to do with the fact that instead of sitting by myself all day behind a locked gate, I have finally worked up the courage to invite my neighbors over to my garden to sip hibiscus tea and tell me their life stories. And the more that I hang out with the people in my village and listen to their fart jokes, the less anxious I feel about locking my gate all the time.

I think most of all, it has something to do with the fact that I spend each day walking the dusty, filth-ridden streets of my village, walking into people’s yards and simply having a chat about developing water infrastructure. People here think that their village is dirty and crumbling, though for years they have had the tools and the capacity to improve it. It just seems as if everyone has just always accepted malaria and gastrointestinal disease and poverty as immutable constants – and if anything could be done about it, it could only be done by white French people beyond their control. My job in the Peace Corps is really to explain to people that they don’t have to sit idly as they wait for the Messiah to return, that they have always had the power to change things themselves, so let’s turn off the boob tube, get off our butts and get to it.

If anything, the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States has demonstrated to the people of Mali that change is, in fact, possible.

As I explain in Bambara, “Owo, an be se.”

Yes we can.

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!