The Revolution of Hearts and Bowels

Most other Volunteers in the Water Sanitation Sector have degrees in civil engineering, environmental engineering, mechanical engineering or architecture, one of us has worked for urban hazmat disposal programs, anther individual has worked for more than a decade designing and managing water sanitation infrastructure on the municipal level. Likewise, a number of them find it somewhat deprecating that my primary qualification for Water Sanitation was my prior stint guarding lives at the Oakridge Condominiums pool. But the more that I think about it, the more I realize that I am a perfect fit for this sector, not just because of my practical experience testing the water quality, adding chlorine and adjusting the pump. The most important thing I learned how to do as a lifeguard was how to walk around watching what everyone’s doing and when I saw people do things that were unsafe, unsanitary or just plain stupid I would blow my whistle and bellow how they should conduct themselves in a normative scenario; “No Running” “No Diving in the Shallow End!” “No Peeing in the Pool!”

The more I think about it, I distinctly remember that when I was applying I had to fill out a sheet explaining in precise detail every single task thing I have ever done at every single job I ever had, I definitely wrote that during my three glorious summers at Oakridge every morning before I opened and every afternoon before I closed the pool I had to mop the bathrooms, spray disinfectant, restock the toilet paper rolls and when little kids missed the bowl completely and diarrheaed all over the place I was the lucky guy whose job it was to get down on my knees and scrub that toilet seat until it was so clean I could see my reflection.

So I can easily imagine my recruiter looking over my application to the Peace Corps and thinking “This guy Zachary Mason says that he enjoys organizing political campaigns in his spare time… and he has years of professional experience cleaning toilets... Hm… I know – we should him a Water Sanitation Extension Agent!”

So I was walking down the road past the Sanadougou elementary school one morning when I was dismayed to find a girl maybe 10 years old and certainly old enough to know better squatting in a field along the road taking a whiz. I’ve become inured to seeing babies age 1 to 3 running around with only a string of beads around their waist so that they could poop and pee as they please, but seriously, 10 years old? Right along the road along which every one of her classmates walks on their way to school? In Malian society all adults in the village are at liberty to discipline children when necessary, and so when I see kids doing things that are beyond the pale I have become reacclimated to issuing decrees as though I were sitting in the lifeguard chair with a styrofoam buoy in my lap.

“Don’t Pee There!!! It is Bad!!! People Can See You!!!”


The girl was clearly embarrassed and pulled up her dress and ran back to class. But then as I walked around the latrine I saw another girl squatting down peeing in the field. And another, and another, and a group of boys all peeing together. Something was clearly wrong.


“Goddammit, there are brand new latrines right next to you so why are you all pissing out in the open?!?!?!?!”


A boy told me that they couldn’t go pee in the latrines because the doors were locked.

I was furious.

I ran over to find Karitie who is the Primary Cycle Director and has the only set of keys to the latrines. I barked that it was unconscionable to lock them closed during the school day and demanded that he open the doors at once.

“It is the children’s fault! The children urinate and defecate in the nyegen and they never clean up! I told the children many times that they have to clean up after themselves or else I would close the new nyegens and yet they refused and so I did just that!”

I was even more incensed. To think that I was here trying to improve sanitary conditions in this village and a Japanese NGO just built these brand new improved nyegens and my jatigi whom I respect and admire would lock them during the school day took me aback. When I get as angry as this my speech sometimes becomes a bit hyperbolic and over the course of this shouting match I said some things that maybe in retrospect were really unnecessary, but in the end I think that I got the point across well enough that the situation we then had in which elementary schoolchildren were relieving themselves in a field was absolutely unacceptable.

“The children have the responsibility to clean up after themselves! The student government knows that they have to wash with soap and water pots and brooms I keep in my office!”

I yelled and cursed “Goddammit Karitie they are just children and each and every one of them cannot be expected to clean up properly every time especially if the tools are kept in your office and that the collective punishment of the entire student body was just as disproportional and uncalled for as Israel’s cutting off of electricity to the Gaza Strip leading a million Palestinians to fester with neither plumbing nor water treatment plants and… wait a second… did you say student government?

When I heard the magic words “student government” I harkened back to the glory days at John Jay High School where I played second saxophone behind Ted Lechterman organizing the student body to agitate for our rights to freedom of expression and tried to change the Indian mascot and rallied demonstrations against the war in Iraq, I remembered the war cries of the Amherst College Democrats and our voter registration drives and the marches on Washington and the campaign to divest the endowment from Sudan. If there was a student government in the Sanadougou Première Cycle, then we needed to have a little talk.


I demanded that I meet with them at once. So Karitie brought me down to the fifth grade classrooms and called for Kadi – age 14, Oumar – age 12, Salif – age 12, Brahma – age 11, and Minata – age 10 and took them out of class. We led the elected representatives of the elementary school government to an empty adult education room for an impromptu meeting. For dramatic effect I took off my aviator sunglasses and looked each one of them long and hard in the eye. And I paced back and forth across the blackboard as I performed the part of General George S. Patton in the call-and-response style of West African oratory.


“We have a big problem on our hands. Today your classmates are all peeing in the field. Do you think that that’s alright?”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“It is dirty!”

“You’re right. Peeing outside is very dirty. Beasts and babies pee outside. Are you beasts?"

“No!”

“Are you babies?”

“No!”

Where do adults pee?”

“In the nyegens!”

“Today the nyegens are locked and your classmates are peeing in the fields. Why is that?”


A long silence followed.


Karitie reminded the student government of their explicit responsibility to clean the latrines at least once a week. And the future leaders of the Sanadougou elementary school student body looked down at their feet in shame. They knew that they were given an important responsibility and that they knew exactly what their job was and they blew it.


I then stepped in and gave what I think was a rousing little speech on the responsibility of a student to his classmates, the duty of a citizen in a democratic society and especially an elected representative of public office. I don’t think that Plato and Locke translated very well in my pidgin Bambara – I described the “Democratic Man” as a kumbatigiba – “Big Power Owner” – and the Social Contract as cenijamanabarasongo “Man and Nation Work Agreement”. In all probability I was sputtering nonsense to these ten-year-olds, but they certainly seemed to understand what I was talking about when I told them that they had to either led, follow or get out of the way so that the kids in this school could exercise their rights as members of a civilized society to not have to conduct their bodily functions out in the open.


Many teachers in this country use corporal punishment in order to instill submission, but Karitie has taught me that the mere fear of public beating is usually enough to compel children to do just about anything that you want. I did not even have to mention the possible consequences of insubordination, but Malian children have been conditioned to following their elders’ commands or risk a mighty walloping with a switch. So when I told them to clean the toilets, the Sanadougou elementary school student government hopped to it with soap and water buckets and brooms and scrubbed those nyegens until they sparkled. And I smiled.


Karitie tells me “Just you watch, the new nyegens will stay open and the children will continue to pee in the fields regardless.”


Indeed they might. Though that evening I was in my mud mansion rifling through my medical kit and realized that the Peace Corps issued me a plastic whistle – presumably for when a Volunteer is walking through city streets at night and receives unwanted advances from thieves or perverts or other scoundrels and wants to bring public attention and humiliation upon the offending individual and get them to stop doing what they know is wrong. This rainy season when I can’t do any construction work and have a lot of time on my hands, I might just set up my lifeguard chair next to the elementary school nyegens.

(… dum da DUUUUUUMMMM!!! To Be Continued!!!)

It All Looks the Same on the Way Out

My loyal readers continue to complain that this blog wallows in the muck of human excrement and should devote more attention to the vibrant, joyous aspects of Malian culture. I reiterate that the Republic of Mali and the Village of Sanadougou have specifically requested my presence as a result of my expertise in water-poop management infrastructure development, and thus my thoughts linger in the bowels of the imagination these days. But in order to throw a bone to hose snobs of haut culture, I devote this post to the subject of Malian cuisine before it is digested and evacuated.

In order to understand Malian cooking, the first given which one must grasp is that the vast majority of Malian agriculture is centered on the cultivation of millet. Despite its coarse kernels and bitter taste, millet is a hardy crop which can produce dependable yields without irrigation, its cultivation requires little to no capital investment, and it provides sufficient calories in order to sustain human life. In a society in which very few can afford to purchase food in a monetary economy and variety is a luxury, the utilitarian attributes of millet cultivation make it the primary staple of the Malian diet. Since most millet farmers have many children and struggle to adequately feed them all, almost all millet is consumed in the farming communities in which it is grown and comparatively little surplus makes it to the cities – millet is the marker of subsistence agriculture.

For lunch and dinner, day in and day out from the day they are old enough to eat solid foods until the day they die, most Malians eat toh, a dish made from millet kernels pounded into powder, mixed with water and then baked into a grey gelatinous goop. Toh is rather bland on its own, so Malians dip it in a concoction of dried baobab tree leaves, peanut oil and on special occasions some little salty dried bottom-feeder fish which combined form a sticky sauce which has the consistency of mucous and tastes a lot like what would expect leaves, oil and bottom-feeder fish to taste like. For diplomacy’s sake I will refrain from offering my opinion of Mali’s staple dish, but I can boast that I have lost 25 pounds since arriving in country.

Coming in a distant second, the next most important crop in Mali is rice. The cultivation of rice requires a generous supply of water – when you think of rice farming you might think of Vietnamese peasants wading in inundated paddies – which is why it is really limited to those fertile lands directly adjacent to the Niger River, its tributaries and irrigation channels. Due to its abundance of vitamins and minerals, its wholesome taste and versatility, rice is in every way a superior good to millet. Hence rice is a much more lucrative commodity to be sold at market, and the frequency of rice consumption is a fairly accurate indicator of a person’s wealth in this country. Only in Mali’s cities which are all located along rivers does the population at large consume more rice than millet. In rural villages rice is consumed only by the elite few who can grow it or pay for food; in my villagerice can only be grown in the aqueous and therefore wealthiest Filablena neighborhood.

Every other food item found in Mali is really considered a nafen – a “sauce thing” to put on top of either millet or rice – though if a Malian can afford to eat vegetables or meat on top of the cereal staple then they are more than likely eating rice. For most millet farming peasants, rice itself is a treat and only on special occasions like the end of Ramadan, Eid al-Adha or weddings will a typical Malian family have a meal of only vegetables and meat. Any solid nafen is thoroughly overcooked until it becomes a semisolid absent any resemblance to its original shape and composition – which is a shame due to the many nutrients which are lost. Malians like their food soft and mushy. However, there is good reason for the overcooking of all nafenw which are placed on top of the rice; due to the lack of refrigeration and completely unsanitary butcheries eating raw meat is a fool’s errand, and since very few people over 50 have a whole lot of teeth crunchy vegetables are not an option.

Thankfully, my village of Sanadougou is located on the southern-most edge of Ségou province, which means that it is a relatively fertile region where even if the bulk of my neighbors’ caloric intake comes from toh, there is also a lot of rice, corn, fruits and vegetables grown here. My host family is relatively well-off according to Malian standards – the father Karitie Sanogo is the director of the Commune’s school system, their three sons are all in private lycée or medical school – which means that they eat a lot of rice and they can afford to put vegetables and even meat in their sauce just about every day. When Durcas Dembele is not busy campaigning for Mayor she cooks sweet rice siri for breakfast, and usually rice with peanut butter sauce for lunch and dinner. About once a week she will make a meal of beans, sweet potatoes, yams or – something radical in this culture – a salad. I emphasize that my host family is the most Western family in the village.

Don’t think that I’m missing out on the authentic Malian experience – I eat everything with my hands out of the communal food bowl placed on the ground where I have to fend from ravenous dogs, cats and chickens. And I am served toh on a regular basis – I usually feign a little nibble to humor my host family and then realize “oh look at the time… I told Daoudaou that I’d measure his well ten minutes ago!” and run back to my kitchen where I have a constant stash of sweet potatoes and spaghetti packets waiting for such occasions.

The agreement I worked out with my host family is that I am welcome to eat three square meals a day and in exchange each week I fill my backpack with all the vegetables I can find at market to raise their level of actually well-balanced nutritious meals. But even with my supplemental vegetables and the fact that Durcas is hands down the best cuisinère in town, my body has a hard time stomaching straight glucose on a constant basis. There is a good reason why Peace Corps Volunteers in the Health Education sector often focus on teaching mothers about nutrition, and our medical officers advise us to cook at least one meal for ourselves every day: the typical Malian diet which consists almost entirely of carbohydrates simply is not healthy. To eat millet or rice three times a day is only slightly more wholesome than three square meals of pixie sticks.

Not that I’m a historical materialist or anything, but I trace Malian malnutrition as with just about every other problem which exists in this country back to the economics of subsistence agriculture. Especially in regions like southern Ségou province with its high water table, even during the months from October through April when there is zero precipitation people can still grow fruits and vegetables in their gardens with well water – well-watered gardening constitutes just about the entirety of food production between the months of October and April. In my village gardeners grow onions, garlic, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, okra, lettuce, tomatoes, cabbage, manioc, this eggplant-like thing called ncoyo, squash, peppers, hot peppers, watermelons, oranges, lemons, papayas, bananas, mangoes, ginger, mint and tamarind.

If each farmer and his family ate everything they produced, one could theoretically have a sufficient intake of vitamins and minerals to supplement the empty calories of toh; however, there is this thing called “money”. In this subsistence agriculture economy absent anything resembling life insurance or pensions, a man breaks his back working in the fields and eats what one grows until Allah willing they become an old patriarch with so many children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren working in the fields that they can sit back, drink tea and be waited upon by their many offspring. Out of his rational self-interest to ensure and maximize his consumption of food later in life, a man in Mali has every interest in having as many children as possible. Kids need a certain number of calories in order to subsist, and from the perspective of the rationally self-interested patriarch it makes little economic sense to give fruits and vegetables to children to eat when those garden products could be sold at market for money to buy more millet to cook even more toh – thereby using garden crops cost-effectively in order to maximize total caloric consumption. Why let your children eat a nutritious squash for a day when your children can eat millet for a week? When you put it all together, the subsistence logic of reproduction mixed with an inchoate market economy creates a perverse incentive for farmers whose gardens might very well yield a wholesome cornucopia of vitamins and minerals to eat very few of their own fruits and vegetables – all but guaranteeing that every member of their family will suffer from severe malnutrition.

Other fans of Zacstravaganza gripe that my blog does not shine a light on the happier aspects of Malian culture, and somehow I manage to write a disheartening post about a subject as tame as cuisine! Well, there are very good reasons why most of my descriptions of life here are quite gloomy; Mali ranks near the very bottom in some of the most important statistics – i.e. per capita GDP, literacy, life expectancy, infant mortality – which all but define a society’s standard of living. Nutrition is not an exception.

Though to end on an upbeat note, there are a number of Malian recipes which I find to be quite delicious and plan on bringing back to the States. Durcas makes this thing called wosonama which is a sweet potato mash with tomato sauce, she makes yams with meat sauce, rice with fawkoi which is a meat and leaf sauce which unlike toh sauce carries strangely pleasant taste, and of course her tigadegana peanut butter sauce is absolutely delicious especially with sweet potatoes and cabbage added for texture. There is also this lady in San named Fatimata who sells fried plantain-sweet potato fry-fried meat sandwiches with onion sauce which might just be the most fattening things in the world but constitute 6 inches of utter bliss. Guinea hen meat is more tender and richer than chicken, and since none of the fruits are genetically engineered to be unnaturally humongous they actually have this thing called “taste”. And there are few things in this world more fun than eating a bowl of peanut butter with your hands.

And if you would like to do your part to enrich the Malian diet and maybe even jumpstart some sustainable economic development, send me some seeds for fruits and vegetables that have yet to be introduced to this country! I know jack about agriculture, but I do know that while I’m tilling my plot of organic paradise there’s really little societal benefit in me trying to grow crops that people here have known how to cultivate for generations – but if I leave here having done nothing more than introduced my village to the wonders of spinach, cauliflower or zucchini, I will consider my two years well spent. Think vitamins, think minerals, think of the Sahel’s bizarre precipitation patterns. I’m all ears!

Mud

During my first week at site when the last monsoons of rainy season gave me a compelling reason to stay in, I eventually became so bored of hours of silent meditation that during a break in the storm I ventured out into my yard of mud puddles. And I stood there in my raincoat taking in the violent reds and oranges of the rainy season sky, looking at the mud huts on the horizon and the mud puddles all around me and it gradually dawned on me that I was standing amidst the primary indigenous construction material. At that time I was only capable of thinking in the simplest of polysyllables:

Bogo
Mud.

As I have been sent here to organize the development of sustainable water sanitation infrastructure, it dawned on me that knowing how to make things out of mud is essential to my very existence. It was a slightly disheartening concept to grasp as I was just getting reconnoitered with my new neighbors, for after the last torrential downpours of August many of the huts in the neighborhood had collapsed entirely. When I was meeting the kindergarten teacher Jirré whose house is in back of my garden I could not help but stare at his concession wall which had just fallen into rubble the night before. Though I possessed the Bambara vocabulary of maybe a slow 2-year-old, I thought it was a good occasion to offer a friendly neighborly hand.

“We… Make… Wall… Together.”

Jirré told me that there was no point in rebuilding the wall then when the rains still fell and there were still cereal crops to tend to. People in Sanadougou save their construction for dry season when agriculture has come to a standstill.

Now that that time has come, Jirré and the other men in his concession started amassing mud bricks and I told him that I still wanted to help him rebuild the wall. He thought it was a funny idea. Despite my last name, I’ve never built a wall before and I know nothing about making walls. But the educational component of the Peace Corps goes both ways: I teach the people of my village how to treat their drinking water, they teach me how to survive in Mali. As my numerous trips to the medical bureau can attest, surviving in Mali is remarkably difficult and so I am grateful to my neighbors for teaching me how exactly it is that they do it. An essential part of learning how to survive in Mali is making use of mud.

If there is anything I can do to create a sufficiently vivid imagery of my Malian village, think of mud huts. Dirt and water are mixed up into a formable consistency, mushed into the desired shape and left in the sun to harden. Many people have wooden molds which they use to form mud into uniform bricks which are dried for at least three days and then mortared together with wet mud to make walls which are then slathered with another smoother layer of mud. Only the very wealthiest people in society have tin roofs and cement floors, but except for logs as support beams and thatched roofs many people build their houses exclusively out of mud. Mud is the primary component of just about every house, latrine, stable, chicken coop, butigi, granary, mosque, even the Grand Mosque of Djenné – just about every structure not built by the State or a foreign NGO – which exists in the country of 11 million people which is Mali.

Now that my Bambara skills have progressed significantly, the level of the conversation went up a few notches. It only went up a few notches though, because it has gotten to the point where I have had this conversation about a hundred times before.

“Madu, when you go to back to America, bring me with you.”

Other than just saying flat out “No, Peace Corps Volunteers are not sent out to site with a suitcase full of green cards… by the way, what’s your name again?” whenever I have to deny this request for the umpteenth time I try to be as polite as I can and make this into a learning experience about why my Malian friends want to flee their country.

“People can find a lot of money in America.”

As I am mucking the tops of the bricks with a fresh layer of adhesive mud, I tried my best to explain that it is not as easy as that. In Bambara, one does not “earn money” or “gagne de l’argent”; E be wari soro – “you find money” in America, as in “I was walking in the woods and I found a four-leaf clover”. It’s not as though they have a business plan set up or even the slightest idea of what it is that people do in the industrialized West, it’s as simple as the fact that money is there – and they are going to find it. The best image which comes to mind would be the first English colonists who came to Virginia and and thought they could just start digging until they struck gold.

I also think of the tens of thousands of Malians who descend upon Bamako especially in dry season to find themselves some money. There aren’t many factories even in the capital city, there is hardly any value added to the food products grown in the villages – there are really only middlemen. But people are buying things, currency is changing hands there, and it is thought that if you somehow stand in the middle of the flow of goods and get your hands on some of those goods and pass them from Point A to Point B that you might be able to skim enough from the top to eventually buy yourself an mp3 player. The number one job for men who migrate to the cities in search of work is to buy a 12-pack of phone cards for 11,700 francs and after standing in the middle of the road all day waving phone cards in pedestrians’ faces maybe if they're lucky they can hawk them all for 12,000 francs - a day's profit of 300 francs which is equivalent to about 60 cents. When women come from rural villages to the big city most likely they will end up finding money in the oldest profession: prostitution. A good number of fortune seekers realize that since there are phone card peddlers on each corner and the bars are of course full of hookers realize there is simply too much competition and so the only way to find money is to walk between cars in the congested crossroads and hold their hand out hoping that one of the middlemen will find some sympathy and toss them some small change.

So when people tell me that they want to do in America, I ask them what exactly it is they want to do when they get there.

“I will farm millet.”

I try my best to explain politely that no one farms millet in America because Americans like to eat corn and wheat and rice and barley and oats instead. Millet is an inferior good with so little nutritional value which is only grown in the West African Sahel because it is the only crop which can feed the exploding population with so little rainfall. What I don’t say is that you couldn’t pay people in America to eat toh with leaf sauce and that millet is only sold as birdseed. And in America you can’t just mosey on over to a fallow field and till it until the village accepts it as yours; unless you feel like homesteading in the Alaskan tundra, in order to farm in America you have to first buy your land – the Anglo concept of private ownership of land according to a titled deed is an alien concept amongst traditional farmers.

“Then I will build houses.”

When I am rebuilding a wall out of mud and mud bricks because it disintegrated last rainy season and my fellow masons tell me that they can simply go to America and find themselves some money in the construction business, I find myself at loss of words. In America, if a carpenter were to build a house which collapses in the rain then he could face millions of dollars in fines and litigation if not imprisonment. I am pretty sure that if one were to build a Malian mud hut in the United States, then housing authorities would prohibit anyone from living in it and would probably force them to tear it down.

I have yet to find a way to explain the fact that there is absolutely zero demand in the American labor market for the millet farming and mud construction skills possessed by your average illiterate Malian who knows not a word of English without slaying hopes and dreams. So I simply tell the truth that they have to understand that America is not Heaven, that there are in fact many problems in my country. This is a hard concept to convey to a people whose only knowledge of the outside world comes from the state television station whose managers know very well that no one in Mali wants to sit down after a long day’s drudgery and learn about watch news broadcasts about poverty in America.

"On TV there was a man from America and he owned many cars!"

An even more difficult concept to convey is that the United States is currently suffering from an economic crisis, let alone to explain how exactly this crisis came about in the first place. “Well, due to a climate of low interest rates and predatory lending practices the real estate market was distorted by artificially-high prices…” Here in a traditional Malian village, you build your mud hut where your father built his mud hut and you sow the fields which have always been sowed by your family since time immemorial, and if your fields lie fallow then the dugutigi will grant them to someone else to make use of. The concept of holding a legal title to land simply does not exist. It is remarkably onerous trying to translate into Bambara that my mother earns her income by selling real estate, let alone what a mortgage is. If formal land ownership even existed in the world's third-poorest country and the banks could accept as collateral sandy farmland which only receives precipitation 7 months a year, the only mortgages which would exist would be subprime. The concepts of stock exchanges and investment banks and derivative markets, the basic ingredients of the modern crisis in capitalism are completely unexpressable in the language of a culture which is just beginning to develop private property ownership.

So I try my best to bring it down a few levels and explain that the car factories are closing and there are already 12 million Americans who speak fluent English and have been to high school if not college and graduate school who cannot find any jobs (the population of Mali is 11 million), so maybe they should wait in Mali for a while and pick up some more skills before they try to make it big in America.

“But Barack Obama is the President. He will solve all problems to make peace and riches.”

Insh’allah.

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!)

Let There be Light unto Xanadu!

When I signed up for this gig, at first I was kind of apprehensive about housing because most Malians live in mud huts that collapse every rainy season. But my mud hut is awesome! A nice Christian NGO which once operated in Sanadougou built this structure for their employees, and so I have a bedroom, a kitchen, a mud room, a walk-in closet, and a completely empty room reserved for silent meditation. It is the perfect place for me to slowly lose my marbles over the next two years.

For the first time in my life, I think I should thank Jesus.

Just as Jesus gave me a home, he also gave me a tropical fruit and vegetable garden. As I gradually integrate into this community of subsistence agriculture I am learning to take care of my own plot of millet, corn, beans, okra, sweet potatoes, hot peppers, oranges, bananas, papayas and guavas which the Son of God gave me as a house-warming present. It is my own little plot of organic paradise. God has bestowed unto me water and firmament which brings forth grass and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind. And it is good.


Nevertheless, my homeboy upstairs was quite erratic when it came to bringing forth light. Between the hours of 10:00 in the morning and 2:00 in the afternoon the blistering African Sun is so strong that even the Malians do not dare leave the shade of their gwa – which is an overhang made out of sticks and millet stalks and palm fronds. I presume as punishment for all of those things I said about Him not existing and all back in my bar mitzvah sermon, God has punished me by leaving my yard completely bereft of shade. So I told God to go screw Himself and I built my own gwa and I tied a hammock underneath so I can hide from the noonday sun and read the works of Nietzsche just to spite the vindictive son of a bitch.



Just as He is overly generous with the Sun’s rays when they are needed least, God is rather stingy about letting there be light when I most need it – like when I wake up in the middle of the night and realize there’s a chameleon crawling on my mattress. I was able to go for months without direct current, and I have a headlamp so it’s not so bad. But the second time my semi-naked self woke up to a chameleon which somehow got inside of my mosquito net and had to catch it under my sheets in pitch blackness I decided that enough is enough. I want electricity.

One problem: the rural Malian village of Sanadougou is not yet connected to anything resembling a power grid. Many people have televisions to watch the god-awful Brazilian soap opera which dominates all cultural life between 7:00 and 7:30 P.M., and there is an interesting system going on here where people power their televisions with car batteries. There are a total of 3 cars in a village of 4,428 persons, but everyone seems to have a car battery.

So I went to the market and bought my own car battery, some wires, alligator clips and with the help of my friend who happens to moonlight as an electrician I set up a functioning circuit for a fluorescent light bulb. And I had light to read at night for about a week. And then my battery died. I was told there were two means readily available in town to recharge it:

Option 1: I could pay someone a day’s worth of food money to rev up their gasoline generator. I ruled out this option because I am earnestly trying to divorce myself from the fossil fuel economy which is a primary cause of America’s stagnation, funding terrorism, causing the aquatic genocide of the coral atoll nations of Kiribati and the Maldives, and driving the polar bear to extinction. Also, I would prefer to eat for a day.

Option 2: I could become a member of the church which has a solar array on the roof to power their loudspeakers with which they let the congregants charge their batteries on off-days. This option is completely renewable and environmentally friendly, so I actually considered it. But as grateful as I am to Jesus for my tropical fruit garden, Hell is going to freeze over before Zac Mason becomes a member of a church.

In so many words, I was told that if I wanted to charge my car battery, I would have to accept either Jesus or Petroleum into my life. Though as much as I want electricity, I do not value a charged battery more than my spiritual independence.

This was on the back of my mind one noon as I was sitting under my millet stalk gwa perusing through the Book of Exodus and reading about the Hebrews’ construction of the Pyramids to satisfy the vanity of a single earthly man. As I pondered Pharaoh’s enslavement of my people to labor in the sweltering Sun, I remembered that even though the Egyptian potentates thought themselves to be gods among men, even they believed that there was one deity in their pantheon supreme above all: Ra, the god of the Sun. I thought that maybe if I want to take ten steps forward to spiritual freedom, maybe I have to take a step back to Bronze Age polytheism. And that is how I decided to become a Sun worshipper.

So I went to the hardware store in the big city and bought my own 50-watt photovoltaic solar panel. Never before have I possessed an electrical appliance of such spiritual and political import. Before I had a little Solio which is fine for things you might bring on an extended camping trip like a cell phone, an iPod, a GPS locator. But this 50-watt solar panel is the real thing; I can use it to charge batteries, to power up fluorescent light bulbs, to power my computer – I could even blast a fan if I so desired. There isn’t a single comfort of the Electric Age that I could realistically want that I can’t power with my solar panel. In honor of my favorite advocate of renewable energy, I call him “Al”.


Now one of the first things that this born-again heliotheist does every morning is place my buddy Al in front of the powerful, direct radiation of the early morning Sun. I kneel before Ra in supplication of his dominion over my electrical consumption and also photosynthesis for Jesus’ papaya patch. And as I go about the day I adjust its angle ever so slightly to compensate for the rotation of the Earth. O Ra, bless me with sustenance! O powerful Ra, bestow unto me energy!

The next time a chameleon finds its way into my sleeping place, I can flick a switch and say “Let there be Light!” and squash it much easier. What is more, not one penny of my money ever has to line the palaces of the House of Saud ever again.

Back in the U.S.A., so-called “realistic” businesspeople tend to pooh-pooh the potential of solar energy as a silly gimmick and that the best we can hope for change in the energy market is find more oil in America. Such “realistic” individuals also told me that instead of joining the Peace Corps I should get a real job for a serious company like Lehman Brothers. Just to prove all of those naysayers wrong, from now on I am going to avoid at all costs charging my car battery, my light bulbs, my computer, my iPod or any other appliance with even a single electron released from the breakdown of fossil fuels. Even this blog is now powered with solar energy. From this point in time until the year Infinite I shall derive my electrical sustenance from the daily supplication of the Sun god Ra.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can suck on my photovoltaic generator.

Snoop Dogg is in My Gwa, Yo

While I was down and out it it turns out that my jatigi's bitch had been feelin like a hot tamale at the midnite hour if y'know what i mean so she was sneakin out and messin round with this other dog and after she had gotten her freak on eventually her tits started getting all big and swollen. The bitch had got herself knocked up. Two months later she goes out to the fields and no one knows where the bitch is at and so we think she's gettin her freak on again. But uh uh the next day she comes back with a litter of puppies.

One of those dogs is my dog. His name is Snoop Doggy Dogg.



Snoop might only be two months old, but he knows how to kick it back and keep it real. He spends most days suckin on his bitch's titties and gettin crunked.



After a long day of work he spends the rest of the day chillin with his homies.




And then he goes back to suckin his bitch's titties. When it comes to T&A, Snoop is all about the T, yo.



If you cross Snoop the wrong way, I'd watch my back if ya know what I mean cuz he is known to tear a motha's face off.

Get On the Good Foot!

(this story works best when read along with the prescribed musical accompaniments)

There comes a point in every Volunteer’s service between 1 and 4 months after being installed when culture shock finally takes its toll. Culture shock is defined in the Peace Corps Wellness Handbook as “the psychological disorientation people experience when they live abroad for an extended time in a culture quite different from your own.” In a remote Islamic agrarian society on the edge of the Sahara Desert, this was kind of inevitable.

Initially everything in Mali is new and exciting. But once it settles on you that your life for the next two years shall entail communicating in a very different language, being either sick and/or injured, pumping all of your own water by hand, the constant feeling of living under a microscope, being accosted for everything you own, the swarms of children chanting Tubabu! Tubabu! Tubabu! Tubabu!, donkeys crying, the call to prayer at 5 A.M., the heat, the dryness, mosquitoes, filth flies, sand storms, etc., there comes a point when even the most indomitable of spirits gives way.

The Pollyannaish reaction is to tell oneself “But I’m making a difference!” Though as I walk the dusty, filth-ridden streets of my village each day I realize that the kids with grotesquely distended stomachs down the street are probably going to die within the next year because their mothers will never cook food with any nutritional content and that no matter how hard I try I can only make the tiniest of dents in the poverty and disease which will remain facts of life in Mali for the foreseeable future.

I can’t put my finger on exactly which straw it was which broke this camel’s back. Dealing with all of the above day in and day out eventually led me to lock the gate, hole up in my hut and not want to talk to anyone for a long time.


In a nutshell, that is what culture shock looks like.


The ability to deal with stress in a healthy, non-self-destructive manner is as necessary to human survival out here as is the ability to prepare food and water. Escapism is usually a good remedy, and for that I have the Lord of the Rings trilogy and an impressive collection of Phish bootlegs. But as much I enjoy alternate realities, at the end of the day the streets of Diaramana are still strewn with human waste, people are still drinking from mud puddles, and the sulfurous clouds of giardiasis gas still waft through the air at night.

Thankfully I brought with me a miniature rinkydink guitar and a two year supply of strings so that I can express myself by strumming blues riffs and crooning tales of woe. Even if I cannot rid the world of evil, I can vent by singing about it. I know the whole neighborhood can hear me, so it is to the good fortune of all parties that I am the only one who can understand a word of my crude lyrics.

Even so, spending two years moping in human misery and fantasy novels was a recipe for disaster and I knew it. What I needed to abate my spiritual loneliness was something of this world that would radiate joy and happiness into my life.

During my bad case of the I-Live-in-Mali-and-There’s-Garbage-Everywhere-and-Nobody-Understands-Modern-Germ-Theory Blues I rode my bike to the mud hut of my teammate Nicole. Nicole is a good source of succor for she has been here more than a year and has gone through all the same things I am dealing with and she has been featured on Malian state television for somehow being able to cook gourmet cuisine out of the few things sold in a rural butigi. This time I came over she happened to have acquired a pair of four-week-old kittens.

At Nicole’s house I was feeling abnormally sweaty and disgusting (a level of disgustingness which you can only imagine) and I took off my t-shirt to lie down and bask in the wind. One of her kittens took the initiative to climb up on me and had a joyous time playing with my forest of chest hair and quickly tired himself out and sprawled out on my belly to take a noonday nap. I’ve never really been fond of felines, but as this huggable, squeezable fur ball was purring and making little kitty snores on my belly, I was converted.



“He’s all yours if you want him”, Nicole offered.

And with that, he was mine.

The next week Nicole biked over to my hut with my brand new kitty cat in a basket. For the first and only time in my life (my dad is deathly allergic) I became a cat person.

I reiterate, I’m not really a cat person – never before had I known cats to have anything resembling a personality. But this particular kitten is something else. My kitten wants to climb on my shoulder and accompany me wherever I go. He rolls over because he wants a tummy rub every 15 minutes and he paws me awake in the morning because he wants to wrestle. My kitten likes to start fights with the other kittens down the street and he clobbers the shit out of them every time. He likes to catch geckos and chameleons and smack them until they are just about dead and eat them alive. And yet he too recognizes the tragedy of underdevelopment and cries sad soul ballads every night. I was thinking maybe I’d call him Sam Cooke or Otis Redding…

I walked down the road with my kitten on my shoulder to meet my host family, who promptly picked him up and inspected his gonads. “He is a man cat”, my jatigi pronounced, “All the other cats in the neighborhood are woman cats. One day all of the new baby cats will look like yours.”

Then and there I knew that my kitten’s name had to be James Brown, because he is destined to be a sex machine.

Mmm… West African Night Adder!

The whole zoo animal phenomenon is usually aggravating in that my most mundane activities constitute the talk of the town. When people I hear the word on the street about myself, it pains me to think that there’s nothing more interesting to talk about. Did you hear that Tubabuke shaved his under-nose hair today? No, that’s not what I heard - I heard that he shaved his under-nose hair AND his chin hair!

Though the zoo animal phenomenon has its benefits - apparently me hobbling down the streets and teaching people how to treat their wells is the biggest thing that has ever happened in Sanadougou since Ibrahim’s donkey had the hiccups. I have so many appointments that I have a two-week long waiting list. So when I come to people’s concessions they are very excited, and oftentimes they want to show their appreciation by offering me some sort of food. Not just any old toh, but real delicacies like guava or honey. I feel guilty accepting presents from people who have next to nothing to their name, but refusing a gift is a huge insult and so I have to accept it. I usually repay the generosity by coming back the next day with a box of tea – which in Mali is considered veritable manna from heaven.

Due to the effort that goes into raising livestock or hunting game, the greatest honor one could ever receive in Mali is a gift of meat. It’s difficult to just give someone a piece of meat to put in their pocket, so usually it is already cooked and waiting for me to eat it in their presence. That is not necessarily a good thing, because the meats which people eat here are sometimes exotic, and when bush meat has been cooked it is often very difficult to discern which animal it once was. Dog and cat are not uncommon. Often I am handed a bowl of charred bones that looks like highway wreckage from the Driver’s Ed instructional video Red Asphalt III. It was once a bird, I think… and it would be a dishonor for me to not give it at least a little nibble.

This one time I was offered some meat I inquired of its origins, and the answer was a Bambara noun I did not know. What I did know was that the meat placed before me definitely included a long, oddly familiar-looking rodent tail – it looked a lot like the mouse my cat dragged back home, only much larger… Eventually I realized that I was being offered a roast of sewer rat (this was one of the few gifts I have had to politely decline).

The most interesting thing I’ve been offered so far has been a West African night adder. This particular serpent had been slithering around Sanadougou biting people left in right and was attributed to the death of at least one child and two goats. Since the nocturnal viper would attack his prey at night – and that is usually when I do my well treatment lessons, during this killing spree everyone would tell me to stay in my house. One night the man of the household I was due to teach that night was walking back from the field and spotted the homicidal snake – by a good stroke of luck he happened to have his machete on him. He snuck up behind it and with a few swift strokes it was decapitated.

About 20 minutes later, I walked in the concession and Daoudaou was peeling the skin off of this full meter-long snake that had been terrorizing the village for weeks. By the time we were done with our water treatment lesson, his wife had sliced it up into little morsels and sautéed it in hot pepper sauce. Snake meat is like a double slab of ribs with two rows of chewy, gamey meat on either side of the spinal chord that seems to never end. But the infamy of this kill only made it all the more enticing - it was though I had been invited to dine on filet of Karla Fay Tucker.

Daoudaou was keen to ask me, “Do people eat snake meat in America?”

“Um… no.”

“Why do you not like snake meat?”

“It’s not that Americans don’t like snake meat, it’s just that snakes in America are very small and there isn’t any meat. If we had West African night adders though, I’m sure we would eat snake meat all the time.”

Bobaraba! Bobaraba! Bobarabababababa!

It has been noticed by one of my loyal readers that this blog has been disproportionately focused on Malian anal-cleansing and farting practices to the detriment of this nation's proud heritage of song and dance. I agree that this is indeed a problem, and yet I feel that it would be a tragedy if Zacstravaganza were to veer from its focus on one of the most pressing issues of our time: the butt.

Lo and behold, in the Obamanian spirit of reconciliation, it turns out that one of the most popular dance crazes to sweep the Republic of Mali as well as the rest of West Africa is the "Bobaraba" In Bambara, the slang term for the butt is bobara - literally, the 'poop gourd' (in a land where Tupperware is prohibitively expensive, dried gourds are customarily used to hold anything and everything). A Bobaraba is a 'big poop gourd', or rather, a really big butt, a J.Lo booty if you will. And according to traditional West African ideals of beauty, to have a few extra pounds of fat on you is demonstrative of ample food supplies and promise as a potential mate - here to have a Bobaraba is considered quite... ahem... sexy.

And as consequence, everyone from Gao to Manantali is getting down and shaking their Bobaraba.

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.