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.

My Augean Stables

In previous episodes of this adventure serial, our hero was inspired by his kitty cat digging cat holes in his litter box to dig a big deep hole in back of his nyegen. The American reader who has lived all of his or her life micturating and stircumating into a porcelain toilet flowing into a septic tank or a municipal sewer system might not understand the import of this action, but as a brief primer let me introduce you to the mechanics of a pit latrine.


First, I must emphasize the not-so-obvious reality that in some parts of the world a pit latrine is considered newfangled technology. In the year 2009 there remain many societies in which few people have bothered to build any sort of infrastructure to dispose of human waste in a sanitary matter. What that means is that everyone in a small village poops in the woods, in the fields, or on certain designated rocks or directly into the water. In more densely populated towns and cities, that means that people just pull down their pants and shit in the street where other people are selling and selling food. Oftentimes if a society lacking in sanitation infrastructure is located near a pond, a lake, a stream or a river, that means that everyone in this rural society disposes of their solid and liquid waste in the very same body of water which also serves as either their own or another human community's sole supply of drinking water - putting that society at grave risk of cholera outbreaks. This is the absolute nadir of public sanitation.

There are other cultures which have collectively decided that defecation out in the open, in and near water and food supplies is a hazard to public health if not humiliating to everyone in that society. And so they have developed their sanitation practices somewhat and built designated areas which are reserved exclusively for the depositing of feces and urine. In the Bambara and Minianka cultures of Mali families often build their own structure known as a bokeyuro – euphemistically, a “traditional nyegen”, but literally, a “pooping place”. It is what it sounds like; an area demarcated by a mud brick wall inside which people poop. The chief advantages of a bokeyuro over open defecation are that 1) fecal matter is controlled to some degree – people are no longer shitting all over the place, but rather in one place; 2) it spares its users the indignity of shitting in the street for all the world to see. The primary disadvantage of having everyone in a family of 35 shitting in one place is that it very quickly becomes full of shit – and a concentrated smorgasbord for filth flies, cockroaches, pigs and every disease vector which enjoys eating human feces.

The bokeyuro and its close relative, the sugunyekeyuro – “peeing place” – are not confined to undeveloped rural villages; I have been to a number of sketchy bars and restaurants in densely-populated urban areas where – upon asking for the nyegen – I have been shown to a seemingly empty room. Seeing no toilet seat, no urinal, no chamber pot or even a hole in the ground, I was at first confused as to what I was supposed to do. But after noticing a foul-smelling puddle on the floor it became quite apparent that the standard protocol in this establishment was to just do as one likes so long as it’s confined to this one closed container – and to leave the mess for someone else to clean up. The only aspect of a “traditional nyegen” which could be fairly called a virtue is that at least no one can see the user as they suffer the indignity of using it.

After many generations of building and managing “traditional nyegens”, proprietors of bokeyuros became disillusioned with the fact that they had to sweep up floors full of shit and piss every day. And so they discovered that if you dig a hole in that designated shitting place and bury a clay pot up to its brim, the pot fills up more slowly and one does not have to sweep up shit so often, and moreover the chamber pot can be closed with a lid. Eventually this semi-buried chamber pot evolved into what is known as a “pit latrine”, which is exactly what it sounds like – a hole in the ground on top of which people squat and poop, though a hole which leads to an underground pit which is so voluminous that it can store many months if not multiple years’ worth of fecal matter. Due to the fact that the shit is safely stored underground, a pit latrine is the simplest technology to contain and concentrate human solid waste in order to reduce fecal-oral disease transmission. In Mali the pit latrine is called a nyegen, and especially in rural villages a nyegen is more often than not constructed out of logs, dried mud and mud bricks.




Though a major step up from open defecation, a "traditional nyegen" has many faults to its design. The first and most significant is that the vast majority of nyegens are built out of mud - which is a perfectly adequate construction material so long as you don’t mind seeing your nyegen disintegrate under the heavy rains and having to rebuild it all over again every year. When I was living in Sinsina last rainy season I woke up during a torrential downpour one night and came out with my raincoat and headlamp prepared for a nocturnal stircumation - when I realized that the nyegen which I had struggled so hard learning to use over the past month had collapsed into the pit. It wasn’t a very fun night.

Most nyegens are not closed properly - if at all. Just as all of that fecal matter is concentrated in one place, so is the stench – and all of the insects and vermin which are attracted by it. And if flies are feasting upon human waste, they can transmit those pathogens equally well if they are from waste on top of a soccer field, the central market square or from inside an unclosed nyegen.

Pit latrines without proper coverings are also hazardous to small house pets. One Peace Corps Volunteer who failed to properly cover her nyegen suffered the fate of curious kitten peering into the hole and falling into the pit. She tried hoisting down a bucket, but the kitten could not be made to understand that it was supposed to climb in. Every time that the Volunteer crouched down over the hole she would hear her kitten mewing – and she knew that she was peeing all over it – until the mews became weaker and weaker and the poor critter eventually died of starvation.

Moreover, the greatest weakness of a latrine is that the latrine pit is ultimately going to fill up without some sort of outlet. This does not necessarily have to happen, for if a given latrine is seldom used and it also serves as a food source for a considerable population of worms, flies, cockroaches and dung beetles, the mass of the pit’s contents could technically decompose faster than it accumulates. But more often than not it is the other way around. Even a latrine pit is used only for the disposal of solid waste, eventually there is going to be a big stinking mass of human feces and someone has to perform the unenviable task of jumping into that latrine pit and shoveling out its contents. This job is so objectionable and yet so necessary in a society with pit latrines that Indian civilization created an entire caste of persons – the Dalits – who are born to the foul and dangerous occupation of shoveling other people’s shit.

Latrine pits fill up particularly fast if they are misused for the disposal of wastewaters which stifle aerobic decomposition and turn the nyegen into a stinking cesspool which serves as a breeding ground for pathogens, is never going to evaporate, and is difficult to remove. It’s most likely no big deal if a little bit of pee trickles into the poop pit because while squatting you had to #1 and #2 at the same time; it only becomes a problem if this happens to a great extent on a regular basis. What’s really bad is if a family dumps their average weekly 1,600 liters of greywater produced from washing persons, dishes and clothing into the latrine pit – in which case it is going to fill up in no time at all.

One means of significantly reducing the quantity of mass inside a latrine pit and requiring less-frequent shoveling sessions is to separate the solid waste from the liquid waste. Malian cultures which developed mud nyegens found this out pretty quickly, which is why just about every nyegen in this country is made with a second hole on the bottom of one of the mud brick walls which allows wastewater to flow out. These outflow holes work just fine in terms of reducing unpleasant latrine-emptying labor. However, simple outflow holes kind of defeat the entire purpose of containing disease-spreading pathogens, for even if the squatting hole is aptly closed there is now raw, untreated sewage lying in the open where it is accessible to every species of disease vector known to mankind.


Some families - especially those who live in the outskirts of town next to their fields and gardens -simply place their nyegen in a remote corner of their concession so that their wastewater can flow out to a lightly-trafficked part of their living space. My host family’s nyegen water empties out in back of their house where no one has to see or smell it. The agglomerate of mud and sewage which has been generated in back of the nyegen after years of use also serves as their pigs’ favorite location for recreation, so every time the mucky sow and her piglets trot by we get a whiff of general nastiness (this is also serves as a prime reason to never eat pork in this country).


Though when I walk into the center of town where the concessions are closer together and there is no field or garden into which the wastewater can flow out, every family’s greywater and urine flows directly into the street where everybody walks, their children play and their animals roam. To say that the streets of Sanadougou are "foul" or “disgusting” would be a gross understatement.

On a typical day when I have to walk to the center of town and buy some sugar at the butigi, this is what the streets look like:


If you’ve never before lived in Mali or a similar underdeveloped country, you might be wondering: “What the Hell are those big crater-looking things on either side of the road?” Those, my friends, are puddles of human liquid waste.


Ewwwwwwww....


Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww....


Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.....

Sometimes people will dig a little hole to “contain” their wastewater so that instead of spilling all over the street it sits in a relatively smaller, fetid and actually more hazardous cesspool.


Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwyuckkkkkkkkkwwwwwwwwww….


Ewwwwwwwwwwwwgrossssssswwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww…
Oftentimes people use their wastewater ditches for garbage disposal too.


Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwrrrrrretttttttcchhhhhhhhhgagggggggggggggggggggggg…


Some of these nasty puddles are really, really big. Karitie Sanogo stands in the background for perspective.


Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww......

Even my Minianka neighbors who believe that diseases come from wizards and evil spirits understand that these wastewater puddles are really, really bad because they serve as breeding grounds for filth flies and mosquitoes. They believe that the wizards turn into flies and buzz over to place their curses in other people’s food. The Miniankas are like ¾ of the way there…


The worst part about standing wastewater is that it threatens the health of everyone in the community – not just those who produced this uncontained pee and greywater. Let’s say that the Sogoba family is currently sharing a really bad case of amoebic dysentery; most of their diarrhea fell down into the nyegen pit, but little Bakary missed the hole and splattered all over the floor and so his mother washed the floor down with water and it flowed out the drainage hole into the street. A female filth fly is hungry and thirsty, so she sticks her proboscis into the Traorés’ effluent of human waste – while she’s at it, she will stick her front two legs into the water and pick up whatever unicellular amoeba have been previously evacuated by the Traoré family.

Let’s say the Dembele family does everything right; they get their drinking water from the hand pump in the village square, they filter their water and treat it with chlorine bleach, they wash their hands with soap after going to the bathroom and before eating. As the family gathers around the communal food bowl for dinner, the female fly which was just drinking from the Traorés’ cesspool swoops down and lands in the Dembeles’ tigadegana. Now the Dembele’s peanut butter sauce is spiced with a dash of Bakary Traoré’s diarrhea with a few young amoebas to boot. Now the Traorés and the Dembeles all have amoebic dysentery! This is why improving sanitation on the household level alone does not suffice to improve a family’s health – sanitation campaigns must be conducted on the community scale.

So this is where I, Zachary Mason a.k.a. Madu Sogoba, Peace Corps Volunteer, come into the picture. Before anything else, after being roused into action by the hardest-working man in the sanitation business, my kitty cat of soul James Brown, I took the initiative of spending a week in back of my nyegen digging a big fat hole. As this was the first time that anyone in Sanadougou had ever seen a white person doing manual labor, the week that I dug that hole behind my nyegen was a major spectacle.

However, what sets the hole in back of my nyegen apart from the couple-inch craters which my neighbors have made to create stinking cesspools of slime is that there’s a more planning and a little bit of industrial-age materials involved in my creation.

What I have made here is the pinnacle of water sanitation technology appropriate for a rural Malian village: a soak pit - or in the local vernacular, a wuluwuludinge. Instead of any old hole, it’s a hole filled with rocks with a plastic tube leading from the outflow hole in the nyegen. It’s not quite finished - but that’s the point; over time I’m going to fill it completely with more rocks, cover it with sturdy black plastic, line the plastic tube with cement, and cover the entire thing up with mud so that looks no less wholesome than the rest of my garden. But in the meantime it serves as an excellent teaching tool for all of the people who walk by and ask me “what the Hell is that?” I invite all of the curious onlookers into my concession to inspect my new wuluwuludinge, show them what its purpose is and how it works, and offer to help them build one behind their own nyegen(s).

A soak pit really isn’t all that complicated. The purpose of this contraption is to thoroughly contain human wastewater so that it flows directly underground with absolute minimal interaction between other humans, livestock, and disease-transmitting insects. If one were to put a plastic pipe directly between the nyegen and the ground without a storage cavity, the water would not be able to seep quickly enough into the soil. Thus a soak pit serves as rudimentary septic tank; the first thing that it does is provide sufficient volume for the wastewater produced by a given family to sit in a contained location, and as the wastewater sits there, donné donné it will seep into the soil surrounding it. The pit should be filled not with concrete rubble or mud bricks but only with sedimentary rocks which can be permeated with water and still maintain their form. And every couple of years the owner of a soak pit should open it up, let the rocks out in the sun for a day to dry and clean them off so that they remain permeable.

My water sanitation how-to books say that soak pits can also be built in rural villages with indigenous materials; if there is bamboo available it can be hallowed to serve the same function as the plastic pipe, and then instead of plastic sheeting the hole can be covered with straw, corn husks or leaves. If available locally, bamboo and agricultural refuse is available, these materials could be economically-preferable to plastic piping and sheeting because it can be absolutely free of charge; however, organic materials eventually rot and need to be replaced – whereas plastic is relatively durable.

So not only am I teaching people about the merits and joys of soak pits – I’m also in the process of organizing a project to build a preliminary stage of 30 of these babies throughout the village of Sanadougou. The scheme Peace Corps has for project funding is that the local community has to pay at least 30 percent of the total project cost (which can be paid in raw materials, tools and services as well as cash) and USAID funds up to 70 percent. I had a series of meetings with my boss, the dugutigi of Sanadougou and his posse of old men and le Bureau de la Mairie, and we worked out a deal that if individual families can provide for all of the rocks, sand, and either pay for or provide in-kind all of the skilled and unskilled labor that goes into the making of a soak pit, then the American people will chip in for all of the plastic piping and sheeting.

What’s more, we’re going to throw in a brand new, cement-floored nyegen! One can certainly build a soak pit in back of a traditional Malian mud nyegen, but when the rains come all of that mud on the floor is going to rapidly fill up the pit and clog the pipe. There are about a dozen latrines in this village made with at least cement floors, and for those all that we need to do is make sure there’s a cover over the hole and dig a soak pit in the back and its disease-transmitting days are effectively over. But if we’re going to build a soak pit in back of Sanadougou’s more numerous mud nyegens we are going to have to remake the flooring with cement if not rebuild the nyegen from scratch.

And thus my job nowadays entails walking down Sanadougou's filthy streets, stopping to chat with my fellow villagers and talking to them about their nyegens and wastewater, to measure the dimensions of what needs to be dug, and let them know about an offer they can't refuse: you get off your butt and provide the labor, rocks and sand, and then the American people will provide you with $80 worth of cement, rebar and plastic and we're going to build a brand new cement nyegen which they'll never have to rebuild it again. There will be no sewage spewing out into the streets, filth flies and mosquitoes will have less stagnant water to lay their eggs in, and maybe just maybe pathogens will be reduced to such an extent that you will be able to discern a measurable improvement in their families' health. I think that's a pretty good deal.

After 8 weeks of canvassing and meeting with dozens upon dozens of families, however, results have been quite underwhelming. One guy down the street has dug 3 holes and filled 2 of them with rocks, another guy on my street has accumulated a pile of rocks in front of his nyegen, and after shaming them into action my host brothers have made a half-assed effort at digging a hole. A lot of people seem to be completely indifferent to the fact that their children are playing in, their livestock are drinking from, and they are inevitably ingesting their own and other people's wastewater.

I was trying to persuade one family which just so happens to supplement their farming income with a "pharmacy"; a mud hovel with bootleg Chinese manufactured medications which are in all likelihood nothing but sugar pills. They also have among the worst, most disgusting cesspools in the entire village (their twin nyegenji puddles are pictured above). Time and time again they would laugh me off, "Oh Tubabuke, don't you see that we have so many better things to do like drinking tea and selling medicine?"

They didn't even give me direct eye contact until I started talking dollars and cents. Walking by one day I mentioned to the pharmacist "I've got a headache and I would really like to buy some medicine - but I'm going to buy my pills from the other pharmacist down the street because his sewage isn't spilling out into the street and so his medicine is probably a lot cleaner". As I continued along my way I could hear the gears churning in his head...

Despite the lack of worldly-physical action, in spirit everyone seems to be behind me. I'm told every day "May Allah help you in your good work!"

"Allah-u-akbar; however, He's not going to clean up our village. But you can give me a hand..."

A Wormhole into the 12th Dimension

Sometimes I cannot help but feel as though I was walking down the street one day, minding my own business, when I accidentally slipped into a wormhole, traversed 12 dimensions through space-time and wound up somewhere on this planet but eons back in the dawn of human civilization. In the year 2009 I live among a village of Bambara farmers who live and die according to the whims of the rain spirits, who use primeval methods to till the land with simple hand tools, who build their most complicated structures out of mud and rocks and sticks. A short walk away from my hut is a thatched mud hovel where old men gather in the middle of the night, slaughter a dog and drink its blood to impart the wisdom of the animal spirits. The inhabitants of this village tell me that they are an advanced society – they look down upon other tribes which are known to conduct ritual human sacrifice.

It is though I have gone back in time to 8,000 B.C. – but somehow these Bambara villagers got a hold of cheap Chinese-manufactured televisions which transmit these messages from an alien civilization 12 dimensions and 10,000 years in the future, and they grasp the basic concepts of the aliens’ advanced technologies.

These alien peoples on the television set do not have to farm because they have these paper boxes they put in a big plastic box, they push a button, and then food comes out! One craggly old man is convinced that we Americans have so much money because we have invented machines where we push buttons – and the machines give us money!

The farmers in my village know of these things such as “Jumping Boats” which every couple of months fly over their fields and cause everyone to stop what they are doing, crane their necks up and stare. These “Jumping Boats” are peaceful, but some of those farmers know that others exist which are divided into the subspecies of "Jumping Boats Which Jump to the Moon”, “Jumping Boats Which Kill Arabs” and “Jumping Boats Which Fight Other Jumping Boats”.

“One day we will have these things too”, I am told by my most optimistic neighbors. But these developments are spoken of in the future tense, the far future tense - as in “One day we will have commuter rocket ships to Mars” – the developments which America and Europe conducted in the 20th century are for all intents and purposes science-fiction for the village of Sanadougou in the year 2009.

There are times when everything I try crashes and burns and I feel that Western interventions are intrinsically doomed and we should let the Bambara society remain unblemished in its natural state. I think of when Homer Simpson stuck his fork in the toaster and with a loud zap found himself transported to the Cretaceous Period. Homer recollected the ancient wisdom which Grandpa Abraham Simpson passed on his wedding day, “If you ever go back in time, whatever you do, don’t step on anything. Even the slightest change can alter things in ways you can’t possibly imagine.”

At first Homer tried his best to heed Grandpa’s message and tiptoed carefully around the dinosaurs, conifers and ferns. But then he heard a "crunch" and realized that as hard as he tried he squished a beetle. And then as mosquitoes start to bite, he slaps them, and in a rage Homer knocks down a few trees and clobbers a giant sloth. When the toast finally pops out of his magic toaster, Homer returned back to his kitchen in Springfield – but the ripples which he created in the space-time continuum have completely altered existence as he knows it!

The purpose of this analogy is that in all honesty I don’t feel that I have been doing all that much “work” in the 20th century American capitalist, sitting in a cubicle making copies sense of the word. I don’t feel that I have changed much of anything at all. But consciously or not, I have stepped on a lot of things, and I have swatted many a mosquito. And according to the chaos theory, even the smallest of ripples of energy can cause a chain reaction which gathers momentum and accelerates and transforms into a giant tidal wave of societal-institutional change!

It is really quite difficult for yours truly – straight from the ivory tower where “economic development” refers to a web of complex macroeconomic issues like globalization, trade deficits and currency exchange rates – to come to terms with the fact that none of those things have much bearing on day-to-day life in a subsistence agricultural society. Here where the majority of a family’s caloric intake is derived from fields which they hoe, they seed, and they harvest, one can go an entire lifetime without trading in a market economy.

And in such a fashion, over the centuries there has been progress in Sanadougou. Here in an isolated backwater which has seen so little change in its means of production over the past countless millennia, the introduction of new seeds from faraway lands has constituted major “economic development”. From time immemorial until about 1880 people in this village really only grew millet, rice, peanuts and onions. About a hundred years ago the French colonial Commandant exhorted the villagers of Sanadougou to farm cotton. Though as le Commandant and his family tired of the monotony of indigenous staples, the colonial bourgeoisie imported for their own use cabbage, cucumbers, garlic and beets, as well as New World crops like corn, squash, peppers, potatoes and tomatoes. At some point in time the colonialists shared some of these exotic foods with their servants who liked them so much that they kept the seeds and began to grow them too. In the 1970s General Moussa Traoré brought to the Malian people yellow melons which now bear his name.

So now the Bambara people are still by and large subsistence agriculturalists, but they now subsist on a slightly diversified number of crops. The change has been modest indeed, but the Bambara apparently like it so much that they have continued the practice themselves – that is what we call “sustainable development.”

After four months at site, I have learned that the problems of disease and poverty in my village are overwhelmingly vast and I want to actually shake things up for the long run. And so I am thinking small – microscopic, unicellular, nano-level small…

(...To Be Continued!)

The Gentle Giant is Incensed

In Mali there are few things which can let make you angry, or else you're not going to last very long. The men laugh at the fact that I carry Nalgenes of water (that is women's work). The women yell at me for 10 minutes about my wives when I tell them "No, I do not have any wives" and it is obvious that I do not understand 80% of the words coming out of their mouthes, and then they continue to ask me the same questions about my plural wives - only louder. The kids still pet my hairy arms and my hairy feet like I am a zoo animal. And my 2-year-old adopted sister Fatim is visibly scared by this strange white person living in her concession and so she cries and covers her eyes every time I walk past. It is... frustrating, to say the least.

The things which help me through the day right now are my guitar, The Beatles, Aerosmith and Meat Loaf, and a nalgene full of those 2-for-a-dollar gummi peach rings and Swedish fish. So mostly I stay sane by strumming and singing British Invasion love songs and glam metal power ballads, which has helped me and the other Tubabs (Bambara for "whitey", "honky" if you will) earn a reputation for being musical at all times of the day.

I used to have a bag of jelly beans which my mom tucked into my guitar case with love, and I enjoyed them very much (Thank you Mom. I love you!). But one day I came home to realize that there was a veritable superhighway of ants leading in and out of my hut - the ants found my stash of jelly beans.

... which leads me to the single most frustrating thing about living in Mali: bugs. Bugs are a part of one's daily life, and there is no escaping them. Kids are just so used to the ever-present flies that they don't even bat an eyelash when they are eating the spittle around their mouths, noses and eyes. And there are also of course mosquitoes, many varieties of ants, spiders, crickets, centipedes, millipedes, etc. Though this is more of an issue when you are outside - which is most of the time, even when you go inside that is no respite. I share my house with at least the first 4 species mentioned.

I like the spiders. Spiders eat mosquitoes, and mosquitoes try to eat me, so in perfect Machiavellian logic spiders are my friends.

But I. hate. crickets. They are the worst. I live in a house with a tin roof, so right about 2:30 AM when I am asleep the male crickets get all aroused and want to get their sexing on and start singing to let prospective females know how big they are, it reverberates all throughout my little domicile and I have to know all about it. And when I have just plodded through a long, tiring day of learning to speak Bambara and make bricks, and I have undertaken a de facto 2-year vow of celibacy, the last thing I want to think about is how certain animals in my house want to reproduce. And so I have instituted a strict policy in my house: if you sing, and your name is not Zac Mason/Madou Doumbia #5, then you and all of your brethren shall meet a swift and certain death. No judge, no jury. If there are not human love songs but insect love songs being sung in my hut, then everyone is going straight to the motherfucking executioner.

I have become very good at killing bugs. Killing mosquitoes is easy - I can just grab them in my hand. I have learned to catch flies in my hand too; they are attracted to light, so if I shine my headlamp on my hand long enough and keep it very still they will eventually land on my palm at which time I squish them like Pat Morita before the Japanese invented chopsticks. For crickets, the least leathal but the most hated of all creatures which share my hut with me, my preferred weapon is a flyswatter which I inherited somehow.

When I am woken up at ungodly hours by these insects who want to sexile me from my own mud hut, though I am in the Peace Corps a certain primordal urge for death and vengeance surges through my arteries. (cue the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly). I turn on my headlamp. Then in all fairness I announce my policy - in Bambara, so I can practice - so that the crickets have an opportunity to alter their ways. "My name is Madou Doumbia #5, and I am a specialist in Water Sanitation. If you continue to sing, then prepare to die."

Usually the crickets don't accept my offer for reconciliation, and so I go into a killing rampage. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Every last motherfucking cricket in my motherfucking mud hut is pulverized into motherfucking cricket pulp.

And then my blood lust is content, and I can go back to my Methloquine-enhanced dreams in peace, insh'allah.

In the morning I wake up, and all of the crickets and whatever other bugs I killed that night are no longer there. I don't know which of my strategic bug allies carried away my kills, but I don't care. All I know is that somewhere someone is content with a full belly, and somehow my floor and my walls are clean.