Triumph

It took nine excruciating months – more than twice as long as estimated. There were so many, many, many setbacks, and at times I was tempted by the prospect of accepting a half-built, grotesque failure for what it was and quitting. But when the Continental Army was facing hypothermia and starvation at Valley Forge, did Washington say to his troops “being a British subject isn’t all that bad… let’s just go home…”? When the Nazis ran a surprise winter counteroffensive in the Ardennes forest and decimated Allied battalions, did Eisenhower tell his soldiers “Whatever… it’s just the fate of the free world… Let’s pack our bags and fuck it…”? When Han Solo was frozen in a solid block of carbonite, did Luke tell Chewbacca “Well, we can’t fly without a pilot… maybe we should just succumb to the Empire”?

No.

And likewise, even after the village of Tonto surrounded by an endless expanse of sand proved incapable of finding enough sand to make bricks, Zac Mason did not give up. And even when handed a budget for two latrines and a wall and he came back from vacation to see that his construction crew had built three latrines behind his back – and the wall only went up to his ankles, Zac Mason did not give up. And then when the project was 90 percent done but the village of Tonto could not get the subcontractor to finish the job for a whole three months because some pinhead thought that it would be a good idea to pay the subcontractor in full in advance, Zac Mason did not give up. He wanted to kneel down so that he could smash his head against that ankle-high brick wall, but he did not give up.

But Zac Mason could not just build the nyegens himself. No, after throwing his back out carrying a ton and a half of cement from his porch to inside his house, there is no way that Zac Mason could ever have possibly done so much physical labor with his enfeebled spinal cord. Rather, Zac Mason set out twisting arms and working The System so that – despite the fact that Tonto increased the size of this project by 50 percent and threw out the budget that they had originally agreed to – they would still be held to the terms of their contract. Zac Mason had to twist those arms very hard.

And in the end, after a period of time comparable to the gestation of a human being, my own baby is finally finished. And now the students of the Tonto Secondaire Cycle are able to poop and pee within the confines of a modern, sanitary latrine complex. Exceeding all expectations, we have three latrines – one for boys, one for girls, and one for teachers. And we have a barrel with a spigot that the students are going to fill with water so that they can wash their hands – the traditional government of Tonto tells me that they are going to have the women provide home-made soap, and I can only hope that they will in fact do so. And the students are even more responsible for cleaning and maintaining their latrines from now until kingdom come. And so long as the students and adults of Tonto take responsibility for the proper use and upkeep of these nyegens, this construction project will have laid the groundwork for public sanitation and co-education.

Frambara

I believe that it is impossible for any reality to exist so miraculous that it can authoritatively prove the existence of God. However, the fact that the United States government assigned me to live and work in Mali because of my background in French is so absurd, in fact, that it ipse facto proves that if there is a God, He must have a sadistic sense of humor.

You see, the general rule among Peace Corps Assignment Officers is that if an applicant has any knowledge of the French language, they get sent to Africa, anyone who can speak Spanish goes to Latin America, and that one linguistics major who wrote her thesis on Kyrgyz poetry gets sent to Kyrgyzstan. This rule generally makes a lot of sense, for it efficiently utilizes Volunteers pre-existing skills and places them in communities where they can most readily integrate. And when PC Washington was going through my application way back when, they were apparently very impressed by the fact that I took 6 years of French back in junior high and high school – so much, in fact, that they decided that I should be assigned to a country in Francophone Africa.

The fact that I do know French has been more of a liability than an asset here in Mali. When people like me arrive with a solid background in French in this officially Francophone country, we wrongly assume that we can communicate with the locals and that they will understand what we are saying. I am one of those pretentious assholes who spends his free time reading Camus and Baudrillard in the original, so when I first came here and bank tellers told me that they too spoke French and I reflexively told them what to do with my money in the conditional pluperfect subjunctive tense, time and time again I would become enervated when they mangled my instructions. Presuming that people here actually speak French only leads to situations in which the Francophones get frustrated, the locals feel lorded over, and everyone loses.

Even in Africa where each and every tribe has developed their own language which they have been speaking for thousands of years, there are some African countries which have wholeheartedly embraced the language of their former colonial masters. In Ghana where there are 47 traditional tongues, the government is promoting English as the single national language in order to mitigate tribal identification and shore up national identity. Some former French colonies like Senegal and Benin have also forged such a post-tribal national culture that parents raise their children to converse exclusively in the official, formerly colonial language. And such profound cultural shifts don’t just happen with a presidential proclamation; the reason why English is the common vernacular in Ghana and French is so prevalent in Senegal and Benin is that the governments of these countries have spent the past half century investing in the education of their citizens, particularly in literacy and language instruction.

Senegal and Benin are exceptions in that they truly are Francophone countries. In the bulk of the former French colonies like Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Mali, there is an elite class of government officials, soldiers, gendarmes and teachers who use French for the workplace. And there is an even smaller minority of persons who do not work in government but can command the French language because they were born to such immense wealth to have attended private lycées. Though after decades of gross government neglect of the public welfare, the vast majority of adults have never received even a cursory elementary education, more than 70 percent of the population is absolutely illiterate, and they definitely do not speak more than a few token words outside of their local tribal tongue.

… But if asked, they will tell you that they do in fact speak Tubabukan ¬– the “language of the white people”. Of course, there is no such thing – the Tubabukan spoken here is a patois hybrid of French and Bambara we call “Frambara”; the nonsense that Malians who have never interacted with foreigners mislead each other into thinking is truly the “language of the white people”; usually, it is only Bambara laced with a few French nouns, maybe "est-ce que", "le voila", or - my favorite - "peut-etty". And likewise, most Malians are taught that if you see a Tubab, the proper thing to do is to address them in “their own language”:

“Bozu le Blanc!”

Here, the colloquial “Ça va?” – “how goes it?” – has transformed into functional equivalent of “Bozu”. People will shout “Sava! Sava!” and they think that they are greeting me. It is also common for Malians to greet Tubabs “Sava! Sava sava byen!” – which must have originated in the dialogue of an introductory French textbook “Ça va?”/ “Ça va bien!” and has now regressed into a greeting uttered by one single person. Thus it is thought that "Bozu sava sava biyen" is how we white people say hello.

The most entertaining phenomenon is how Frambara has taken certain phrases and so warped their meaning that they induce cringes in anyone with a rudimentary understanding of their etymological origins. For example, in Mali it is perfectly customary for people to come up to me at 8:00 in the morning and greet “Bo swa, Monsieur!”

“Soir means ‘evening’. You cannot greet anyone ‘Bon soir!’ until the sun is setting.”

“No, when you see a white person you are supposed to greet them ‘Bo swa’.”

“That… doesn’t make any sense.”

“That’s what we do in our country.”

“… As I said…”

Other times I am greeted “Bo swa, Madame!” When this happens I like to think that these kids must have learned this phrase in the context of a female teacher, which must mean that at one point in their short lives they have in fact sat in a classroom. But there are other Tubabukan bastardizations that suggest more nefarious settings.

Children in the cities greet me with a bastardization of French with a mission: “Bozu cadeau? Sava sava cadeau?” When I am confronted with such obscenity, it is apparent that some asshole taught this kid that if they see a white person, all they have to do is say these magic words and the white person will smile and give them a lollipop. But when you’ve been living here for an extended amount of time and have been petitioned for a cadeau every single day by kids and adults alike who think of white people as arcade machines which will give you a toy if only you toggle the joystick and push their buttons the right way, these childlike Frambara-isms quickly become downright dehumanizing.

The absolute worst bastardization of French is when I’m in the city and I’m approached by one of the barefoot, tomato can-toting beggar children and they blurt out, “Tubabu! Do mwa cinq mille francs!” Initially, such an utterance impresses me in that it is in fact a complete sentence – a lot more than can be said of 95 percent of the "French" spoken here. However, in every such situation it is fairly obvious that if I were to reply “Préferez-vous un billet de cinq mille francs ou cinq billets d’une mille francs?” or even “Tu t’appelles comment?” the kid would have no idea what I’m saying. These kids are never going to be taught proper French greetings, introductions, how to ask for directions or the weather. “Do mwa cinq mille francs!” constitutes the entirety of that garabout’s French, because their “Quranic teacher” only instructs their cash cows in that one saying to finance their sedentary lifestyles. Accordingly, the marabouts instill the despicable misunderstanding that the language of Senghor, Césaire and Fanon is the language of humble supplication to white people.

The logic of a Malian greeting white people in Tubabukan is inherently racist – not necessarily a vicious ideology of racial supremacy, but at least the belief that all persons of a similar skin tone are indifferentiable. Of course, if a given Malian is walking down the street and they see person with pale skin, to the Malian it makes sense to greet this stranger in Tubabukan when 70 percent of all of the melanin-deficient they will ever interact with are in fact French, Belgian, Quebeçois or Luxembourgian. But there are also a lot of Americans, Germans, Spaniards and Italians who come here speaking no French at all, and according to Malian logic they too are greeted “Bozu! Sava sava byen!” because Tubabukan is “the language of the white people” – all of them. The term Tubabu refers to Aryans, Slavs, Arabs, Persians, Latinos, and all non-African persons alike. Even when Japanese or Korean tourists trek through Dogon Country with their brand new video cameras, they too are greeted by the locals “Bozu! Sava bonbon!” When Malians address each and every white person with what they think is “our own language”, it only demonstrates how profoundly unaware they are of the outside world and the crudeness of their racialism.

Even when the adult population addresses made in grammatically correct, polite French along the lines of “Excusez-moi, monsieur, est-ce que tu es perdu?” or “Je vends du pain du qualité superieur!” it strikes me as patronizing and just as innocently racist. When people speak to me in French, it means they assume that I am a lazy NGO worker or gold miner who is only here to interact with government ministers and rarely leaves the hermetically-sealed, self-contained expatriate biodome – or even worse: a tourist.

So when anyone in this country ever speaks to me in French, I instinctively reply in Bambara – and after a few lines of dialogue in which the Bambara is speaking broken Tubabukan and the Tubabu is speaking fluent Bamanankan the former eventually realizes the folly of their efforts and switches gears into their own language. Now that I’m starting to pick up Miniankakan – the really, really local language which only has any use in the tiny homeland of the Minianka subgroup of the Bambara tribe, around my home base I can show off how dedicated I am to integration with an even greater effect. The response is universally effusive, for these people have spent their entire lives thinking that they have to learn the language of their former colonial masters if they ever want to do business with the West – with much detriment to their collective self-esteem. Thus when an Occidental comes to live amongst an isolated culture and takes the time to learn to speak to them in their own obscure tongues, the symbolism is lost on no one.

When people ask me why I do not speak to them in French like all the other Tubabs do, I point out the ideological chasm between my country and the Old World powers:

Americainw Mali la kono be Mali kanw kalan tiyenna barisa folofolo Angleterre tun be an mara i na fo jonw ye, ni an ye keleke fo an ye an yere ka jamana mine. I be se ka fo ka an te fe ka jamanw were mara.

“Americans in Mali take the time to learn Malian tongues largely because of our own history of exploitation by the British and our War for Independence… You could say that our own experience has left a particular distaste for colonialism.”

Calling All Soapmakers!

As a Peace Corps Volunteer serving in Mali, I am doing my part to improve water sanitation on the village level. Due to the utter lack of infrastructure, the vast majority of Malians have nothing to wash with other than well water often contaminated with giardia, amoebas and other parasites transmitted via the fecal-oral cycle. This is among the reasons– and without a doubt the most easily preventable one – why juvenile diarrhea is endemic and 25 percent of all children in Mali die before age five. It is also the reason why I would like to enlist American pharmaceutical companies such as Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, Jergens, Proctor & Gamble or Estée Lauder to help fund the construction of hand-washing stations at Mali’s public schools.

Here in Mali the most widely-practiced sanitary practice is that people wipe with their left hand and eat with the right. After going to the latrine and before eating people will rinse their hands with tin can full of water, but when one has fecal germs on their left hand and they just get it wet and mush it around with their right hand, and then they pass the can of now-filthy water to the next person to “wash” their hands, it kind of defeats the whole purpose. Add the fact that Malians eat with their right hands from a communal food bowl, and it is not very difficult to understand why giardia, amoebas, cholera and dysentery are so widely transmitted.

The most feasible, cost-effective means for Malians to mitigate disease transmission and improve health conditions is something quite simple: washing one’s hands with soap. It doesn’t sound very profound, but the Malian Ministry of Health has invested a good deal of its resources organizing adult education programs and broadcasting public service announcements to persuade her citizens to undertake this basic hygiene practice. It should be any easy task. Soap is cheap and readily available; most Malian women are in some way, shape or form involved in the collection of shea nuts or the cooking of shea nut butter which is used to make soap.

Malians use soap made from their shea nuts to wash clothes and dishes, but oddly enough very few people use it to wash their hands. Animist beliefs shared by many Muslims and Christians extol the benefits of washing one’s hands with only water to protect against malevolent spirits, and many people believe that using soap would render them vulnerable to sorcerers’ evil spells

Though a number of Malians are trying to do away with these superstitions and espouse modern sanitary measures. Karitie Sanogo teaches his first-grade students how to conduct basic hygiene practices like washing their hands. To Westerners this might sound like condescension, but when most adults believe in the black magical qualities of soap the fact is that the only way majority of Malian children will ever be taught to protect themselves from fecal-oral diseases is through the public school system. Sanogo explains that he tries in earnest to teach his first-grade students the virtues of soap, but it is difficult to instill modern hygiene in impressionable minds when they cannot even practice their lessons into their daily routine at school.

There are brand new latrines at the elementary school, but there is no place for the students and teachers to wash their hands when they are done. So the headmaster would like to construct a hand-washing station. A hand-washing station would consist of two plastic barrels with spigots raised to a reachable height for children by a concrete structure. Most importantly, each station would be made with a soap dish so that every time a child walks from the latrines back to class they would have an obvious and unavoidable opportunity to wash their hands with soap.

The most difficult aspect of projects like this is not their construction per se, but rather their financing. If I wanted to build just one or two of these hand-washing stations, I could acquire funds from U.S. A.I.D. or the U.S. Embassy. Though what I have in mind is on a somewhat larger scale. There is a program known as the Peace Corps Partnership which allows Volunteers to work on projects financed in whole or in part by private individuals, NGOs or corporations. In this sense capitalism is not just a means unto itself but can be used as a means to humanitarian ends.

I would like to petition one of the aforementioned corporations to establish a fund for Peace Corps Volunteers to construct hand-washing stations throughout Mali, or even Africa at large. Much of this shea butter cooked from Malian harvests is consumed locally, and in recent years Western companies have begun to purchase Malian shea nut butter to manufacture gourmet soap, moisturizing cream, shampoo and conditioner. I would like to argue that those companies which earn hundreds of millions of dollars of profits selling shea butter products have an ethical obligation to invest a negligible fraction of those profits into promoting the hygiene of those populations at the bottom of their supply chain.

Even from the rational self-interest of a profit-maximizing firm investment in hand-washing stations is beneficial in that they are meant to create a whole new generation of consumers of soap. The fact that tens of millions of people in Mali and elsewhere actively refrain from washing their hands with soap should be seen as a lost consumer base which can be captured with a bit of public education and investment in simple sanitation infrastructure. Even if the company does not sell its products in Malian markets, the good publicity which such a humanitarian campaign would engender could certainly help to establish a favorable reputation among socially-conscious consumers.

This is a win-win proposal which would benefit both soap producers and the people of Mali. So please, if you happen to work for a company that makes shea butter soap, shampoo or moisturizer, or if you know anyone who does, please drop me a line. There are a number of Peace Corps Volunteers in Mali who would like to put together a joint venture.

A Discouraging Moment

When people meet this strange white man with aviator sunglasses and hydrofoil sideburns, it is clear that I am… from out of town, so one of the first questions I am always asked is “Where are you from?”

“America”, I say, “in a village near the city of New York”

“Oh, New York! I know of that place!” they reply, and then scan their memory to remember how exactly they know of it. Then they ask me in a jovial, getting-to-know-you tone, “Was anyone in your family killed on September 11th?”

Thankfully, no. But at this point the conversation always comes to a somber lull. In America and especially in New York, anyone other than Rudy Giuliani has a hard time making small talk out of the deadliest terrorist attack in world history. But with the hyperliteralism of the Bambara tongue, subtlety does not quite exist in Mali. As much as I would prefer for them to ask me about the Yankees, Broadway or the Museum of Modern Art, the only one of New York’s landmarks they could possibly know is the former World Trade Center.

One time I was hiding from the noon-day sun brewing tea with a group of men and I had to suffer this horrendous dialogue once again. I have had this simultaneous conversation starter/ender more times than I can count, but this time it really touched a nerve. Directly beforehand, the person with whom I was speaking had asked me about my religious affiliation.

“Tell me this – who told your family not to go to work on September 11th?”

My blood curled. The cruder instincts in me wanted to strangle this particular individual brewing tea before me, shove his face into the glowing embers, and then pour that teapot of boiling water down his throat so he could never utter such obscenity again. But then my superego chimed in and reminded me that I am in the Peace Corps – we are strongly discouraged from committing in acts of violence, no matter how deserved they may be. Peace, Zac, think of peaceful methods of conflict resolution such as the art of Reason and Negotiation. It took me a while though, because at that moment the impulsive option seemed rather appealing.

I simply informed the casual anti-Semite sitting in front of me that no such warning was ever issued to the Jewish community of the greater New York metropolitan area, and that many Jews, in fact, were killed on 9/11. I explained to him that the assertion is absurd on its face, for Osama bin Laden is quite open about his intent on killing Jewish civilians throughout the world.

“But Sidi told me that…” Sidi is an illiterate peanut farmer who lives down the street.

I framed the problem like this: I am from New York – Sidi has never strayed more than a donkey cart’s ride away from his village; I have read the 9/11 Commission Report from cover to cover – Sidi cannot read; I am a New York Jew – Sidi would not know what a Jew was if he clocked him across the face with a bottle of maneshevitz.

In the end I think I won. Though throughout the conversation, I could not help but eyeball that boiling teapot.

There really isn’t much more to this story, in truth it’s not much of a story at all other than a cautionary reminder that even in perhaps the most moderate, pro-Western of countries in the Islamic world, the vilest of anti-Semitic slander is disseminated with the greatest of ease. I can’t really blame the people who fall for it, because they have no source of information other than gossip and hearsay garbled a hundred times down the telephone line.

I feel that I can rightly blame those few demented, self-fashioned journalists and educators who use their power over the minds of men to give credence to such malicious lies. But the sad truth is that sick minds like these have existed since the days of Pharaoh, they always will, and there’s nothing anyone can do to make them go away. But there is plenty that can be done by Israel, the United States, and especially the American Jewish community to dilute their message and undermine their credibility.

From Senegal to Syria to Pakistan to Indonesia, the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims grow up in stifling poverty with little to no access to public education. In many countries the only opportunity that many Muslim youth will ever have at receiving a free education or a secondary education of any form is the madrassa system funded by wealthy Arabs from the oil-rich Gulf States. Despite the awful press they have received in past years, there is nothing inherently wrong about the madrassas – they are in essence no different than Catholic boarding schools. But if there is a madrassa in a given city teaching its garabouts to believe in a global Zionist conspiracy, then that is probably the only semblance of an education they can ever hope to get.

I must admit that when it comes to the most politicized madrassas which propagate such hateful screeds, it might be the only time that I will ever agree with Paul Wolfowitz: the United States and the rest of the industrial powers must embark on massive campaign to finance public education in the Islamic world. This money need not be slanted towards the ideological indoctrination in free market democracy but the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, for that alone is enough to allow students to develop opinions of their own and bust the madrassas’ near monopoly on public opinion.

Furthermore, the State of Israel has a great role to improve this current state of affairs. At the present, there is no sign of an Israeli presence in Mali – which is a shame, seeing that all things being equal Mali remains one of the most tolerant of Muslim countries, the Malian people are unanimously supportive of international development efforts, and the government of President Amadou Toumani Touré is avidly embracing any and every foreign government which offers such aid. Israel more than capable of financing a modest assistance program and I can’t think of one good reason why it has not done so already.


I hate to say it, but Jerusalem should emulate the example being set by Muammar el-Qaddafi. They should open up an Israeli Embassy in Bamako and make a good first impression by embarking on a spending spree to finance the construction of new schoolhouses. If the Livni cabinet could allocate a minute fraction what is spent on subsidies for the building of new settlements in the West Bank to send Israel’s famed water engineers to Mali, they could do for Islamic communities bordering the Sahara what investments in irrigation have done for horticulture in the Negev Desert. Were the Israeli Foreign Ministry to become as visibly involved in West African development programs as say, Luxembourg, one cannot help but think that the soft power influence would deprive local anti-Semitism of oxygen and maybe even establish a few more moderate Islamic allies to prod Palestinian cooperation in a future peace process. If only…

I should quit while I’m ahead. Next time someone asks, I’ll say I’m from Chicago.