Development with a Healthy Dose of Conservatism

I would probably sound like too much of a cliché of myself if I were to tell you that this guy who spent his days until recently stomping his sandal-clad feet around campus, spouting incendiary rhetoric about Democracy and Socialism and rousing the masses to the barricades, has spent a year in the Peace Corps and has since been so violently mugged by the cruel realities of human nature that he has transformed into a Conservative.

So I’m not going to tell you that. It is very difficult for those of us who have come of age during the intellectual leadership of George W. Bush, Tom DeLay and Sarah Palin to respect Conservatism with a capitol “C” as a coherent ideology. To me and so many members of my generation, the history of the past decade has utterly discredited the movement which seeks to build a double-layered fence across the Mexican border, to amend the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, to defend "real Americans" and Western civilization itself from illegal immigrants, homosexuals, atheists, French people and the United Nations. Especially in the midst of this prolonged recession, with their hostility to any sort of government intervention in anything to do with the economy asides from more tax cuts and more bailouts to the banks, the dogmatic amalgam of supply-side economics and right-wing Christian fundamentalism that is the American Conservative Movement is rapidly atrophying into an obscure cabal as completely divorced from matters of this world as is the Church of Scientology or Zoroastrianism.

But nevertheless, I must sheepishly admit that my after one year in the Peace Corps, my experience so far has made me substantially tempered my faith in our power to “remake the world anew”. Living in a real-life African village and seeing first-hand the innumerable failures of past governments and foreign NGOs to revolutionize Malian society, I have unintentionally come to terms with the fact that one can only do so much. If after two years I can walk from my house to the center of town without having to tiptoe around puddles of human waste, I will consider my service a roaring success. Not only have I come to appreciate the values of prudence and restraint, but experience has taught me that private property, capitalism and individual responsibility are remarkably more effective in achieving long-lasting institutional change than any socialist principles of collective ownership. It would be fair to say that I have become significantly more conservative with a lower-case “c”; as defined by Merriam-Webster:

“con•serv’a•tive, adj. 1. skeptical of change. 2. avoiding excesses. 3. of or relating to a political philosophy based on tradition and social stability, stressing established institutions, and preferring gradual development to abrupt change.”

To be a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mali is in many ways like being bashed over the head with a hardbound copy of Atlas Shrugged all day, every day after day after day. Part of it is for the first time in my life having my own house and plot of land which I can call my own, and being completely and utterly responsible for its upkeep (technically I don’t own the property, but we’ll get to that in a minute). Part of it is the realization which comes with biking way out into the bush where its just me, sand, trees and scrub as far as the eye can see and realizing that if I were to fall and crack my head open on a rock, no one is ever coming to get me. Technically there is the Peace Corps Medical Unit in Bamako – but that’s two provinces and 400 kilometers away. If I get a nasty cut, if my latrine is dirty, if my house is full of termites, no one else is going to do anything about it out of the generosity of their heart – I have no choice but to be completely responsible for maintaining my own health, my home and garden. In this neck of the world, it’s really every man for himself.

By no means can my sharp veer towards rugged individualism be attributed to my having adopted the values of my host culture. The Bambara society amongst which I currently reside is tremendously more communalistic than anything I have known in America – even the semester I lived in the Vegan cooperative house. Here in the village of Sanadougou, every man and every woman share almost every daily activity with their family; they plow their fields together, they plant their seeds together, they reap their harvest together and then the women cook it together, it is unthinkable that anyone would ever eat a single meal alone. Though the dugutigi assigns each plot to certain families as determined by their historical usage, the fields are officially held amongst the whole village. There are even a handful of fields which are explicitly shared, and every couple of weeks during rainy season a man marches through the streets beating a drum to hail all the men to till the commons. There is a significant degree of familial autonomy – the head of each household has their own indivisible property and is responsible for feeding his own progeny, but no Bambara man would ever his relatives go hungry while stores remain in his own granary. And since 90 percent of all the families in this town share the last name Sogoba, the traditional family safety net for all intents and purposes extends throughout this entire society.

That is not to say that Bambara society is a Socialist Utopia for the whole world to emulate. The sharing of food is a practice born out of evolutionary necessity in this culture where death by malnutrition if not outright starvation is fairly ordinary. If Boubacar sees that Amadou’s millet granary has gone empty, he is probably going to invite his neighbor to na duminike until the next harvest – not just because Boubacar is such a nice guy, but because he would like Amadou to reciprocate the next time that he suffers the same fate. If there were a few more months of precipitation, if agricultural production was more efficient and food were not so scarce to begin with, food-sharing might not be such an indispensable bedrock of Bambara culture.

There is a fair argument to be made that Mali is so poor, that the output of its primarily agrarian economy is so diminutive precisely because of the traditional practices of communal land ownership. There’s plenty of land, and there’s certainly no shortage of labor – but there is not enough capital to spur significant economic growth. Almost all planting and harvesting is conducted with simple manual plows, hoes and scythes made out of wood and iron; no matter how hard and how long a family works with such limited tools, it will always remain a challenge to eke out a subsistence diet – let alone see enough windfall profits to invest in new physical capital and expand agricultural output. In the history of American and European economic development, farmers were able to escape this poverty trap by using their real estate deeds as collateral to take out loans and invest in tractors, irrigation pumps and other machine tools which expanded yields many times over. But such innovation will forever remain elusive to Bambara farmers who have only the dugutigi’s word to their parcels of the communal fields, who technically have no landed property to their name, and will continue to be shut out from the credit which they need for investment and growth.

During the heady days after independence in 1960, the nationalist revolutionary President Modibo Keíta tried to take Mali’s communalistic ethos even further and institute a People’s Republic modeled after the Soviet Union and China. Keíta aimed to establish Malian Communism on the organic village level; every man was ordered to harvest a pre-assigned quota of millet which was to be stored in village-wide granaries – which were in turn distributed back to central granaries in the capitol city of Bamako, and then redistributed back to each village and to each individual in order to ensure a perfectly egalitarian division of wealth. It goes without saying that the government kept the lion’s share of each harvest for in Bamako for its own purposes, Communism eviscerated the private incentive for industry, millet production plummeted and famine was the order of the day. Since it was widely accepted that the only way for many individual subsistence farmers to survive Malian Communism was to shirk their national obligations and fend for themselves, the People’s Republic soon became a parody of itself. By 1968 it was clear to all that the centrally-planned economy was so mismanaged and public opinion had so turned against the Communist regime that Modibo Keíta was overthrown in a coup d’état led by General Moussa Traoré – who would dismantle the state-run agricultural economy and institute one of the World Bank’s first structural adjustment programs.

And yet the most jarring aspect of Malian culture to my Western bourgeois sensibilities is not this country’s land ownership practices or its short-lived membership in the Communist bloc, but something which I encounter at least every day I take public transport or walk down city streets. Here – as in all of Muslim West Africa – there exists a class of religious beggar-children known as "garabouts". Picture a 12-year-old boy, barefoot and gaunt, rushing to shove a plastic bucket in your face while mumbling some fusion of Bambara and Arabic “prayer”: Allah ka dumini di n ma/Allah ka I deme ka n kongo dogoya... There are blind men and widows begging for coins in every country without a welfare safety net. But the garabouts are different in that they are fully capable, able-bodied boys who should be in school learning how to be a productive member of society, or rather, in the fields with their fathers learning how to farm. Ostensibly, these garabouts are instead begging on the street in order to learn humility and submissiveness to their Lord as a part of their “Islamic education”.

I often find myself duly offended by these garabouts – and not just the ones who yank on my arm and scream Tubabu! Donne-moi un cadeau! It has less to do with religion than it has to do with child labor, slavery and exploitation. These pre-pubescents are not begging for money because they have chosen a life of poverty in order to be closer to Allah – they are begging because their “Quranic teacher” commands them to bring in a certain amount of cash each day with the threat of a stiff beating if they fail to deliver. The garabouts are assigned this Dickensian fate by their parents, some of whom sincerely believe the marabout who comes to their village and promises to teach their boys the way to enter Paradise. But a good portion of all garabouts are praying for coins because dad did the math and realized that this year’s harvest was too paltry to feed the mouths of his 17 children, and so he decided the time is right to send his sons to the closest city’s Quranic teacher. And thus a not-so-insignificant number of Malians use the institution of the garabout as a fig-leaf for their own lack of responsibility as parents, and to pass the buck for feeding their children onto society as a large – all under the respectable and even admirable pretense of “Islamic education”.

A problem of scarcity occurs not just when these garabouts are on the streets praying for subsistence farmers to part with the fruits of their labor – eventually, these beggar children grow up to be adults with wives and children of their own. And a lot of them seem to have taken home some valuable lessons from their “Islamic education”; namely, you don’t have to work to eat, you can just count on other people, and in the end Allah will figure it all out. Talking to so many farmers in my Malian village who spend eight months every year sitting, drinking tea and complaining about how poor they are, these guys know very well that they can plant a vegetable garden, but don’t bother because of such deep-seated fatalism and renunciation of control over their own destiny that has crippled their sense of personal initiative. “If Allah wants me to be poor, then that is his command.” “If Allah wants me to find money, then Allah will provide.”

The sense of fatalism and helplessness perpetuated in this society is downright jarring. There was one Peace Corps Volunteer who recently watched as her host father more or less let his daughter die of what was probably simple pneumonia. As the Volunteer noticed that this 5-year-old girl was having trouble breathing and her wheezing was becoming worse and worse, she suggested that the man give his daughter some medicine. “No, there is no medicine for this illness.” The Volunteer insisted that there was, and offered to pay for it. “No, Allah will heal her.” A few days later the girl was dead, drowned in her own mucous. The father concluded: “She is gone. Allah has taken her.”

What it all comes down to is that a good share of people in Mali are poor – not just because the government doesn’t provide enough social services or because they are being oppressed by Global Capitalism – but because they and/or their parents have made some really irresponsible decisions. In the past I have written about how overwhelmed I became after seeing my neighbors’ gaunt kids with their black rotten teeth and their bellies protruding with protein deficiency and realizing they looked so sickly that they probably wouldn’t make it through the year. I was so beset that at one point I considered buying a sack of beans and condensed milk and giving it to their poor parents. But my attitude changed after I saw that these kids’ dad had a brand new Yamaha motorcycle. And you can only imagine the sound system at the party a month later when this guy married his second wife. And they’re almost certainly going to have many, many more offspring. As callous as it sounds, for me to intervene and provide these children with protein and calcium would only further enable their father to blow his money on toys and parties.

The bleeding liberal in the left ventricle of my heart is inclined to giving money, write a check as a knee-jerk reaction. This attitude is nothing new; to my recollection, there was this Judean rabbi back in the day who healed the sick and gave eyesight to the blind, who gave a big sermon about giving alms to the poor, clothing the naked and feeding the hungry, and how this moral obligation of selflessness is so absolute that it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter Heaven and so anyone with surplus wealth must give it all to charity. Judging by the African development scene today, apparently a lot of people still believe that this is an effective means of conducting economic development.

It is difficult to drive down any major road in Mali for any considerable distance without passing by a school built by Christian NGO X, a water pump built by Muslim NGO Y, or a clinic built by International Relief Organization Z – the road itself was probably financed by the Belgian Embassy. When missionaries and secular-minded do-gooders parachute in for Spring Break, distribute medicine and shoes and soccer balls and candy, take the mandatory photo-op of themselves hugging skinny black children, and within a week or two hop on the next plane home, they can then brag about their superior worldliness to the Save the World Club and put another chit on their résumé to help with grad school applications. Due to the sense of satisfaction derived from building schools and handing out goodies to poor malnourished Africans, there is no shortage of humanitarian relief programs on the ground here.

There is a shortage, however, in any sort of humanitarian relief programs that do anything more than perpetuating the sense of helplessness and instilling a mindset of inferiority among the Malian people. Imagine how a typical Bambara millet farmer might feel when he has been breaking his back in the fields for months just trying to eke out enough grain to feed his family for the coming year – maybe if this year’s harvest was particularly bountiful he can buy them all a new pair of cheap plastic sandals – and he sees a bunch of white people drive up in an SUV, distribute brand-new Nike high-tops to all the kids in the village, and leave. He’s probably going to think “Hamd’allah! And to think that I was almost going to buy my kids shoes! How foolish of me! Now I can blow that money on tea and sugar!”

And a few years down the line when that Bambara millet farmer sees that his kids’ Nike high-tops have all fallen apart and they’re walking around in the mud barefoot again, do you think he’s going to buy his kids new pairs of shoes? “Of course not! I can just wait for the next SUV full of white people to come!” No one in this village is ever going to by their children shoes again.

The fact is that African subsistence farmers might be poor – but they sure aren’t stupid. They are rational beings who respond to economic incentives just as much as anyone in the developed West; rather, since they have so little, and the simple act of receiving a free pair of shoes is so relatively generous, they respond to these incentives much more dramatically than the bureaucrat sitting in an air-conditioned office on the Upper East Side might ever imagine. Oftentimes these perfectly benign donations can lead to the most sinister repercussions.

This is not a phenomenon unique to Western donors. There is a village by the name of Yelemani located way up in the desert near the Mauritanian border; the economics of this village are drastically different from that of most communities in Mali, because a few years back a number of local men went off to France to find jobs and by some stroke of luck they succeeded. The men of Yelemani all live together in a one-room apartment and they are doing menial labor and custodial work that no Frenchmen would ever want, but compared to the mud hovels and hand-to-mouth existence they knew before the blue collar life in Europe seems to good to be true. They can afford to eat meat and drink Coca-Colas and watch TV every day, and what’s more, they are making such a surplus that each year they can send a big wad of cash back to their families in Yelemani.

During the first few years that these Yelemani families were receiving remittances, the problem was not that their expatriate sons were insufficiently generous; in fact, it was that they were too generous. When their subsistence farming fathers who made monetary incomes of less than $400 a year went to the bank and received checks worth ten times what they could ever make cultivating millet and peanuts, they had so much money that they didn’t know what to do with it. So they splurged on motorcycles, TV sets, cell phones, iPods, and fancy new clothes for themselves and for their wives. Yelemanikaw felt so rich that they didn’t even bother going to the fields during rainy season. Of course, they burned through their fortunes quicker than you can say “MC Hammer”. By the time they realized this, their granaries were empty and it would be months until they could even start planting again. And their children, the little brothers and sisters of the men of Yelemani who had made it, they ended up far worse off than the children of those who were not receiving remittances – while the latter were merely malnourished, the intended beneficiaries of such a liberal cash infusion were literally starving to death.

The best/worst example of this half-baked liberalism is a building which I see almost every day, Le Jardin d’Enfants (kindergarten) built by a perfectly well-intentioned Christian NGO named WorldVision. In addition to two classrooms for three- and four-year-olds, they also built two latrines, a well and a playground complete with three swing sets and a merry-go-round. The benefit of this Jardin d’Enfants to the education of Sanadougou’s youth, acclimating these children to sitting in a structured environment classroom environment is beyond doubt. However, their inept attempts at construction and ensuring simple maintenance practically negate any social benefits which might accrue from the existence of a Jardin d’Enfants in the first place.

To begin, WorldVision told Sanadougoukaw quite explicitly that after a given period of time they would be gone and the people of this village would be wholly responsible for conducting and financing any maintenance themselves. Within a year, the hinges on the metal doors to each of the latrines and also the large double-doors to the entrance rusted to the point that they could hardly open. This problem could have easily been fixed if someone in town had been willing to pitch in some simple axel grease – but that costs money, and few people feel like donating above and beyond their taxes to pay for public education. So they just took all of the rusted doors off the hinges entirely.


The latrines happen to be placed in an end of the schoolyard where the kids like to play. Without doors to these latrines, any child who wants to urinate or defecate there during the school day has to do so in plain sight of his or her classmates.


WorldVision also failed to build a storm drain in the walls enclosing the schoolyard. We’re not talking about anything complicated here; all they had to do was put a little piece of plastic piping into the wall at the lowest point where rainwater flows - like in every single family's concession in Mali. This slight omission was a humongous mistake, because without a storm drain the torrential rainy season downpours would flood the schoolyard and turned it into a giant pen of mud. So a teacher at Le Jardin d’Enfants had to take a pickax and pound a makeshift storm drain into the wall. Of course, he overcompensated and knocked out a whole much too big to only let out water runoff. Now even when one teacher might be watching the front gate, the children can easily crawl out the storm drain.


Controlling the children’s free movement in and out of Le Jardin d’Enfants’ schoolyard is so very important for reasons of public health, because now that the kids are too scared to pull down their pants in the latrines without doors, they either scurry out the front gate or crawl through the storm drain and urinate and defecate behind the perimeter wall. When school is in session, this area is covered with the children’s feces.


As for the playground, since no one could lock the proper entrance with its doors off the hinges, adults were able to enter and exit at their own leisure and cut the chains which once composed the swing sets. And they lifted the merry-go-round off its rotor and sold it as scrap metal.



No one has ever asked me to help them buy a new playground. The people of Sanadougou never asked for a playground in the first place – kids here are content to play with sticks and rocks. The idea that children need thousands of dollars worth of playground equipment which then needs to be shipped from France for at least another thousand dollars certainly never originated in the mind of a Malian who provides for his family's livelihood with simple hoes, picks and plows which cost no more than a few dollars.

Every day when I walk out my garden in Sanadougou, I am greeted by the enormous 2,000 square meter dongeyuro - “dance hall” – which was also built by WorldVision. I can only surmise that they had a conversation with a couple of teenagers who complained that there was not a lot to do here on weekends – et le voila, local demand! So WorldVision shelled out about $20,000 and bought enough cement and rebar to build sustainable, sanitary latrines and conduct top-well repairs for perhaps 40 or 50 families, and instead the hired masons from out of town to build a dongeyuro. Over the course of the year that I have lived here, there has been exactly one single event held there. I really don’t know where to begin on this monstrosity of a cadeau...

One would like to think that maybe giving out presents could serve some societal benefit if they came with strings attached. I am told that WorldVision wanted to do something about female genital mutilation, so they organized a meeting with the bolokomuso – the lady who makes an income on the side as this village’s go-to gal for circumcising little girls’ clitorises with a shard of glass and thus rendering them “marriageable”. WorldVision asked the bolokomuso, “What tools do you want us to give you so that you can have a new source of revenue? If you promise to stop this horrid practice, we’ll give them to you.” She wanted a donkey cart, two donkeys and a big wad of cash. WorldVision gave them all to her. And do you think she stopped bringing girls out to the fields and hacking away at their vaginas? Of course not – it’s the only job she’s ever had.

Other development agents are more liberal than I. In the town of Tominian, an NGO – let’s call them Basketball Court-Builders without Borders – swooped in and realized that this town was severely lacking in its basketball-playing infrastructure. Everyone knows that black people love basketball! So they gave the people of Tominian – whose wells all go dry for a good quarter of each year – what they most certainly needed more than anything else: a basketball court. Within a few years, the blacktop weathered under the extreme elements into a hardly-recognizable remnant of itself. In time the rim and the backboard were unscrewed and sold as scrap.

By then, another NGO rolled into town and realized that the public basketball court was in shambles. Instead of conducting repairs, they decided to start from scratch and build a brand-new basketball court next to the vestiges of the old one. And it was only a matter of time until it too decayed and the men of Tominian – it was probably the same ones as before – unscrewed this new basketball rim and backboard to sell as scrap.

When the new Peace Corps Volunteer rolled into town and started looking for projects to organize, you can probably guess what the young men asked him, “Hey, can you help us build a new basketball court?”

I suppose that the most cursory rule of sustainable development which one can surmise from these anecdotes is that 1) Giving people toys is not development. Even without foreign NGO and development agency intervention, people in Mali are perfectly capable of entertaining themselves. It is already somewhat obscene to see how men who live in mud huts – who cannot provide their families with adequate water, food or medicine, whose children might wear the barest of rags on their backs if anything at all – can somehow manage to scrounge enough money to treat themselves to iPhones and televisions. Philanthropic-minded Westerners swooping into Africa and building playgrounds, soccer fields, basketball courts and dance halls only makes things worse by teaching people that they can get something for nothing, that white people are bottomless sources of money, and that if Tubabs are spending all their cash on big, expensive toys then we should just continue to do more of the same.

2) No one should ever be in the business of simply giving people money – with or without strings attached. Money is perfectly fungible, and even if an NGO distributes cash to be spent on basic necessities, it is just as much if not more likely to be blown on tea, sugar, cigarettes or an iPhone (and thus violating Rule #1). This might sound quite paternalistic – it is – but for all their shortcomings professionally-run charities tend to be much better at spending their money in a constructive manner than individuals who have no sense of budgeting or even the basics of a monetary economy. If you are for some reason adamant about giving directly to a particular individual, it is best to give in the form of an in-kind transfer such as tuition at a private school or credit at a cereal bank; i.e. something which cannot be traded for booze and cigarettes.

Malians and Africans in general need to spend less of their own money on toys and luxuries and spend more on basic necessities like nutritious food, mosquito nets and medicine. Though except in the direst of humanitarian crises - e.g. catastrophic droughts or refugee situations - 3. No one should be in the business of giving to people what they can provide for themselves. Once this precedent has been set, it is nearly impossible to undo. Direct handouts of basic goods completely distort incentives to such a degree that they undermine the natural market forces which need to play out on their own if there are ever to be functioning economies of these necessary commodities. What development agencies and NGOs need to be doing is not giving away the basic necessities of life, but establishing the durable infrastructure needed for Africans to be able to provide these things without any foreign assistance.

Since handing out free rice and mosquito nets distorts markets, you might think that the durable infrastructure which I describe as “sustainable” must be composed of permanent edifices made out of concrete which will last for decades. To a degree, yes, the work of an NGO which parachutes into Africa and builds a schoolhouse will probably benefit the people of Africa longer than a care package of calcium supplements. But even then such development must be taken with a grain of salt. With the erratic climate which shifts between scorching heat and dryness to torrential downpours, termite colonies so ferocious that they will eat through any organic material, unemployed youth ready to steal any materials that can be removed and sold at market, and of course the mobs of children who tend to manhandle the most important tools of public infrastructure as their playthings, here in Mali things really need to be made out of steel and concrete if they are ever going to last more than a few years. And even then, they would require constantly vigilant maintenance and upkeep.

Moreover, once the schoolhouse has been built, who is going to hold classes there? How is a village of 200 subsistence farmers supposed to pay for teacher? Who is going to pay for chalk and paper and pencils? And after a few years when the schoolhouse itself starts to wear and tear – even steel and concrete degrade over time – who is going to conduct the maintenance and repairs? Unless the schoolhouse-building NGO can adequately answer these questions, and if the answer to all of the above is not “the villagers themselves”, then that wonderful school they just built is going to remain empty, unused, and it will eventually be dismantled and sold for scrap or disintegrate into rubble on its own terms. Unless the local population is willing and able to manage this school themselves, it might as well have never been built.

So a year into my Peace Corps service, what do I think is the single best thing that foreigners can do to implement sustainable development in struggling countries like Mali? Waking up in the morning at the call to prayer and spending the rest of the day hoeing dirt and pulling weeds in my garden like every farmer in my village. Sanadougou has been downright spoiled by NGOs who pull up in SUVs, build schools, hand out cadeaux and leave. If I do anything in my two years here, I have made it my personal mission to fight tooth and nail that Tubabs are just a bunch of playboys so rich that we never work, that the only thing we should do is buy more presents. I see to it that when my neighbors walk by and see this hairy Tubab, 9 times out of 10 they see me caked in mud, toiling with a pick in hand.

If entanglement in foreign quagmires is inherently suspect, the most effective development work that Peace Corps Volunteers like me can possibly do is to simply do what the Malians are doing, just tweak their methods a little bit and demonstrate that there might be a new way of doing things a little bit better. Me tending my own banana trees doesn’t directly put any more bananas into the mouths of potassium-deprived children, but by doing so I have introduced this society to the wonders of Nafosoro pumps, drip irrigation and mulching. If I tend the banana trees so well that my Malian neighbors can see that I am producing more and better fruit, if my neighbors are so impressed that they take to these methods in their own garden, then insh’allah next season Sanadougou’s banana farmers might just see that their own banana trees produce greater yields. To date no one has yet to emulate my conservationist irrigation technologies, but I have seen that a couple of my friends have already adopted my compost rotation and urine fertilizer practices. And thus in a perfectly Jeffersonian fashion, the private gardens of Xanadu serve as a shining patch of sustainable water/waste management upon a hill.

And every once in a while when my orange or lemon trees bear fruit, after I have enjoyed consuming the fruits of my labor and composted the peels, there are some remnants which are even more useful still: the seeds. Though I am loath to give away cadeaux, I can see no possible harm in handing out seeds because they come into my possession for free, they can’t really be traded for anything else; in fact seeds have pretty much no economic value at all unless someone invests the time and energy into planting, irrigating and fertilizing them. The seeds borne by my orange and lemon trees are purely positive externalities of my own selfish labor.

I acknowledge that tilling my garden and occasionally handing out seeds might not live up to the incendiary rhetoric of which I am so fond. You might be thinking “Damn, Zac – you have just become the bourgeois reactionary which you used to despise.” Not quite – I never was too keen on smashing the capitalist superstructure to begin with, I've always been critical of left-wing extremism and making pains to accomodate with rational, lower-case "c" conservatism. I still have those same dreams of remaking the world anew, just now I have let go of my more socialist sentimentalisms and want to achieve those same ends employing the power of human nature, market principles and that all-American philosophy of pragmatism.

Sometimes sustainable development can only be achieved by narrow protection of private property. For instance, there is a solar pump-fed robinet used almost exclusively by myself, the two houses of doctors and teachers who live in its immediate vicinity – though occasionally a mob of kids will walk by and stop for a drink. And over time a group of kids manhandled the robinet so badly that they broke the handles right off the faucet heads – all three of them. The doctors, teachers and I pitched in to buy brand new faucet heads. And within a month kids somehow managed to destroy the new faucet heads as well. We could have bought a third, a fourth, a fifth faucet head and provided the kids with potable drinking water and expensive steel toys indefinitely. But instead we decided to cut our losses and buy just a third faucet head – one with locks on the handles which can only be opened by either myself, a doctor or a teacher.


It’s a pity that this privatization scheme must deprive a substantial chunk of the population from using this water source at their leisure – but then again, having a limited scheme in which only 3 key-holders can access the robinet derives a greater good to a greater number of people than the communal scheme under which no one could use it at all.

And every once in a while someone like Etienne Dembele rides their motorcycle up to my concession gate and asks if I know where he can find a man named “Madu Sogoba”. Dembele rode all the way from the neighboring village of N’tonto, 12 km away. He is one of those rare birds who was distraught by the fact that if children in his village wanted to continue their studies past elementary school, they had to walk those 12 km all the way to Sanadougou Secondaire Cycle. He organized the families of his village to try to petition the Communal government, the Cercle government, the Regional and even the National government to build a Secondaire Cycle in N’tonto - to no avail. So Etienne Dembele organized the families of N’tonto to pitch in and build the school themselves. And they did. I was taken aback by his story of Malian gumption.

“So what do you need me for?” I asked.

“We built the school, but we haven’t any nyegens. The children have no choice but to relieve themselves in the bushes. This is intolerable! We must change!”

“Monsieur Dembele, I think you’re the kind of guy with whom I can do business…”

… to be continued!!!

Michael Jackson, Tubabu Hair and Racial Transmogrification

Abel: Madu, the American singer Michael Jackson has died. Why is this?

Madu: Apparently he took a few too many drugs. Not drugs like heroin or cocaine, but medicine drugs. You see, even if medicine drugs can help a person fight illness, if you take too many pills at once or if you take certain drugs together at the same time it has such a powerful reaction that it can be deadly. Michael Jackson was taking many medicine drugs at the same time it seems.

Abel: Why was Michael Jackson eating so many medicines?

Madu: Michael Jackson was a little bit off his rocker. He had many operations of what is called "plastic surgery" - not because there was anything wrong with his body, but because he just wanted to change how he looked.

Abel: How does this "plastic surgery" work?

Madu: Well, in America there are doctors who can change your skin! If people do not like their nose, they can have the doctor cut their nose bone and put their nose back together and have a brand new nose! Or if their ears stick out too much and they think it is ugly, the doctor can pin their ears back closer to their head. Michael Jackson was born with black skin like African people, but he did not like his skin to be black, so over the years his doctors conducted many operations and changed his skin so that it was lighter and lighter - to the point that his skin was as light as white people!

Abel: This is very bad!!! Black people should not transform into white people!!!

Madu: I agree. I think that Michael Jackson looked just fine the way he was originally with black skin.

Abel: ... But I can understand why Michael Jackson wanted to transform into a Tubabu. All of us Africans know how you Tubabus have much better doctors, much better schools and you are all so much richer and have big houses and fancy cars. If we could, we would all become white-skinned like Michael Jackson!!!

Madu: I think you're missing the point. Michael Jackson was rich before he had plastic surgery on his skin. When his skin was still black, he was selling so many records and concert tickets that he had many millions of dollars. He was a very rich man, a very rich black man, and he had a big house, fancy cars, and the best doctors in the world. He didn't need to change his skin for any of those things!

Abel: No, Madu. Many of us Africans want to become white simply to become white! We think that the white skin is more beautiful than the black skin, and especially the women want their hair to be straight like Tubabu women's hair so they buy it at market. Has anyone asked you for your hair?

Madu: No. Why would anyone to wear my hair? I practically have a buzz cut!

Abel: No, no one would wear your hair. It is too small. They would use it to cook medicine.

Madu: What?!?!?!?!

Abel: Yes, we take Tubabu hair - especially the hair from the arms, the chest, the legs - and we pound it into fine powder and simmer it in a pan. And then we brew tea and add the simmered Tubabu hair and drink it as medicine.


Madu: You've got to be kidding me. What exactly do people think this Tubabu hair will do for them?

Abel: Clearly the Tubabu men have such ease with finding women because of their hair. The women find it to be very spicy!!! And so if you drink Tubabu hair in tea, it will help you catch the woman of your dreams.

Madu: That is debatable. I can't think of a single instance when my chest hair has been an asset in such matters.

Abel: Oh, but it is surely true! That is why Michael Jackson wanted to be a Tubabu with white skin and straight hair! So he could catch the woman of his dreams! So he could have much money and have the biggest house and the most expensive cars and the best women and schools and the best doctors in all the world!!!


Madu: But now Michael Jackson is dead. Even with all that Tubabu skin and hair, his expensive doctors could not keep him from dying. In fact, it was precisely those expensive doctors and medicine which killed him!

Abel: .... Oh.... That is a good point. Maybe he should have just changed his hair then.

Pool Patrol: Mali

Thankfully over the course of my three glorious summers at Oakridge Condominiums not once did I ever have to utilize my rigorous training in lifesaving skills. For the most part my First Aid was only applied to superficial knee scrapes and bee stings. The most serious emergency I ever had to respond to was this one time a severely autistic kid decided to see how far he could stick his hand into the wading pool filter and of course he could stick his hand all the way in but he couldn’t pull it back out. Replying to his cries I sprinted to the pump room, I pulled the levers to turn off the filter suction, drained the pool, and not knowing what else to do I called the Vista Fire Department conveniently located across the street. Within 60 seconds my fellow 12-graders Nate Vass and Wyatt Lansdale – Volunteer Firefighters – drove the fire truck down with the siren blaring, strutted across the pool deck in their full firefighting suits and were quite amused by this dire situation. Nate pulled the plastic filter entirely out of the concrete pool deck, and while he held the screaming, frantic kid’s hand in place Wyatt took out a small buzz saw and cut the filter in half. The child’s hand was unharmed, but I applied a Band-Aid to calm him down. Nate and Wyatt received a round of applause. And that was the closest I ever came to saving a life.

… That is, until I joined the Peace Corps.

I had just hours ago introduced my new kitty James Brown II to my lovely mud mansion and the garden of Xanadu. He was busy wandering around the papaya and banana trees, inspecting every square centimeter of his new home. I assume that he enjoyed the tranquility and shade of this living space devoid of cruel, tortuous children and cat-eating humans.

I decided to start irrigating the garden, so I removed the palm fronds which were temporarily serving as a well cover and lowered the Nafosoro pump’s intake hose. Rainy season had just started and Sanadougou had still seen only paltry precipitation to date, so the water tables were still so low that my 7-meter well contained less than a meter of water. I kicked the pedals up and down but before I could even adequately water a single tree my pump sucked up a soggy slurp; it had already hit mud.

I heard a distressing cry beyond the fence – Snoop Doggy Dogg wanted to come and wrestle. So I opened the gate and he started sniffing around and he smelt a new friend! : James Brown II. Snoop wanted to play!

“Word up, brosef! You gonna think this place is dope!!! Let me smell yo ass so we kin have a propa intraducshin…”

James II freaked out! He had never seen anything like this before! So he bolted and ran to the far end of the garden and jumped for cover in what looked like a safe hideaway: the well. After 6.8 meters of silent free fall I heard a splash.

“Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!! James Brown II!!!”

“… Mewwwwww…”

“I am a Lifeguard trained to save you!!! Do you accept my offer of assistance?”

“… Mewwwww…”

“Okay, first thing I am going to do is reduce the volume of water in this well so as to remove you from immediate danger of drowning. Do not worry – help is on the way!!!”

“… Mewwwww?...”

“There was hardly even a single well-bag full of water in there!!! You are going to be just fine!!!”

“… MEWWWW!!!...”

“I’m still here!!! Now James, climb into the well-bag!!! I will hoist you to safety!!!”

“… Mewww…. Mewwwww…”

“James!!! Just climb into the fucking well-bag!!! I am not climbing down there without a proper helmet to ensure my own corporeal safety!!!”

“Mewwww!!!... MewwWWW!!!!”

“What’s that? You’re afraid to get into the well-bag because has neither sufficient volume or structural integrity to hold you without bending? Hold on!!!

“MEWWWWWW!!!”

“I said hold on!!! I just untied the well-bag and replaced it with a 20 liter plastic bucket! It is heavy and dense enough that I can lower it down to the well bottom and it will remain right-side up for you to climb up into it – and then I will hoist you to safety!!! Do you hear me?”

“Mewwwww!!!”

“Alright… good kitty!!! You’re in the bucket so just stay still!!! You’re almost at the surface!!!”

With only 1 meter left before ground level James II jumped up and tried to climb the remainder by the strength of his soggy claws.

“NOOOOOOOO!!!! JAMES!!!!! YOU’VE GOT TO TRUST ME!!!”

“MEWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!”

While James had mere centimeters to go, I dropped belly first onto the now-muddy ground. With my left hand I continued to hold the rope for the bucket right in place beneath him – and with my right hand lunged for a firm grip around James’ collar bone. And I pulled the sopping wet kitten to my chest.



But for a few scrapes to the nose – it seemed like he had jumped face first into the wall of the well – James didn’t seem too hurt. But his fur was soaked, and he was shivering violently. Young kittens are largely incapable of maintaining a steady body temperature – especially when wet. Though it was 90 degrees out, James Brown II was in serious danger of hypothermia.

No matter how hot it was, the danger would remain so long as his coat remained wet and wicked body heat away from his extremities. So I brought him inside and dried him off with my fuzzy towel. Within a few minutes all I could do was continue fluffing his fur until it was bereft of moisture, and James took care of the rest licking with his dry tongue.

“That was a close one, James. You owe me big time – no more jumping in the well.”

“Yeah, and you owe me some formal top-well improvement so that I don’t have the urge to jump down there in the first place! How can I be expected not to do stupid shit? I’m just a cat, dig?”

“Point considered. Now let’s just hope that you spend your other 8 lives at a much slower pace.”

On a Marrakesh Express

There are few things more unpleasant than Malian hot season. At this point in the year the village of Sanadougou is close enough to the Equator that it receives such direct radiation, the Sun beats down with such intensity that I cannot even look outside without my sunglasses on – the reflection from the sand is practically blinding unto itself. During hot season the temperature rarely dips below 100 degrees; often times the thermometer hovers around 110. Here it is just flat, sandy scrub in all directions with no body of water, no topography of any kind; pressure in the air is fairly uniform in all directions, so there is no wind to blow the sweat off your brow. The heat just sits on top of your head and refuses to ever go away. April is more or less dry hot season, so the entire Sahel is kind of like a big unpleasant sauna. But by May the rain clouds are starting to form so it is not only 110 degrees but also as humid as the cavities between the folds inside Rush Limbaugh’s ass crack.

I am not exaggerating when I say that it is a full-time job merely surviving in this climate. Human beings sweat so much that we have to be constantly drinking water simply in order to not die of dehydration. Even the water is hot. I drink about 12 Nalgenes full of hot water a day – and even then I still get massive headaches because I'm dehydrated.

This time of year, people just sit under the shade of their gwa and try their best not to melt. No one has any desire to get off their ass and do anything. Watering a garden would be downright futile. Nobody can do any work, because it’s no matter what they do it's just too……… fucking………hot……………

My Malian neighbors spend their time escaping the Sun's wrath under the gwa brewing pots of boiling hot tea and sugar.

“Madu, you drink tea?”

“NO!!!!! Get that shit away from me!!!!!”

Hot season sucks.

And if I thought that hot season couldn’t suck any harder, the night guardian at the clinic across the street from me shot my kitty cat with a colonial-era musket and ate him.

A mere seven days after the Assassination of James Brown the gardens of Xanadu were graced by a visit with Dr. Dawn – the Peace Corps Medical Officer – on her scheduled annual site visit. She seemed to be concerned for my mental health.

“Zac, you haven’t let go of this cat thing. It’s time for you to move on.”

She was right. There were few worse strategies force coping with the wanton slaughter and consumption of my kitty cat then to wallow at the scene of the crime, especially in this Allah-forsaken weather where one is so busy sweating one’s balls off and struggling to remain alive that it is nearly impossible to experience any semblance of joy.

So I packed my bag and got on a plane to Casablanca!



I was supposed to meet my family at the airport – at which time they would have for me a new functional debit card. Though due to a malfunctioning hydraulic system, my family’s flight from JFK was canceled. And of course the Moroccan currency exchangers did not have the slightest interest in trading for Malian francs. So for my first hours on Moroccan soil I was penniless, hungry, and shit out of luck.

But somehow or another my mom got Iberian Airlines to feel an enormous amount of pity and they whisked me to a luxury Casablanca spa and hotel with air-conditioning and a flat-screen TV and a toilet and a bidet and a steam bath and unlimited room service so long as I promised to never badmouth Iberian Airlines all over my blog. And I stand by my vow. When Iberian Airlines’ flights are grounded by hydraulic malfunctions, they treat you like a king.

As this grimy Peace Corps Volunteer has not had a proper shower or bath in almost a year now, I dawdled in this soapy, shampoo steam bath of bliss for at least an hour. When I was done there was a manifest ring of sludge around the bathtub.

And then I stepped outside onto the asphalt-paved street and walked along the concrete sidewalk and re-immersed myself into modern cosmopolitan existence. I sat down at the café with the morning edition of Le Monde and poured over the editorials as I sipped a carafe of red wine and a cappuccino and ordered a big hunk of lamb steak, as bloody and rare as the chef will agree to serve it, smothered in peppercorns. Only current or former Peace Corps Volunteers who have lived in villages of mud and sticks and eaten a steady diet of millet goop could ever understand just how amazing this felt…

Morocco is the most amazing country I have been to on the African continent thusfar(3 out of 54). Unlike Mali or Burkina Faso – which are landlocked agglomerations of various tribes which often have nothing in common besides the fact that they were once governed by the same French colonial magistrate – al-Maghreb is actually a nation-state of 34 million people with a sort of cultural coherence. Yes, in addition to the Arab majority there are distinct minority groups here such as the Berbers, the Gnaoua (black Moroccans) and Jews. However, since this is such a highly tolerant society there has been such intermarriage and exchange among the various subcultures over the years that now most Moroccans speak a patois of Arabic and French with a little Berber. And of course, this culture had their share of influence from the Spanish, the Romans, the Carthaginians, the Phoenicians, and - judging by the indigenous redheads - the occasional Viking raiding party.

What I enjoy about this country so much is that it is hard to pigeonhole into a greater region. In America, one would say that Morocco is in “the Middle East”. My Egyptian Arabic teacher would say that Morocco is in “Africa”. My Malian neighbors would say that Morocco is in “Europe” (it’s halfway to Spain)! All are kind of correct in that since it is located on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar, and pretty much all maritime traffic in and out of the Mediterranean had to dock in either Tangier or Casablanca to trade for supplies at some point in time, Maghrebee culture is a deliciously cosmopolitan hodgepodge of East, West, North and South. And the result is a culture which mixes the best of all worlds.

The most conspicuous thing about Moroccan culture seems to be that men between the ages of 18 to 100 spend every afternoon at the café sipping mint tea. No women are ever present at the cafés unless of course they are serving the men. I thought this was kind of cool until I was joined for the second leg of my journey with my feminist friend – after that, I came to see the light that of course, the café is a bastion of misogyny and sexism. Nevertheless, at more gender-neutral establishments one could be treated to a constant smorgasbord of olives, couscous, spicy bean soup and crock pots full of goat and lamb and cumin and turmeric… but you know what? I’m really bad at this Condé Nast culturati fluff – I’ll leave that to a blogger with a significantly greater estrogen quotient than myself.

This blog isn't about art and dance and cuisine. It's about manly things like CONCRETE and PLUMBING and SEPTIC TANKS and SHIT. Yeah, that's right.

So here's my take on Morocco: Morocco is so incredibly awesome, not just because of the olive oil and couscous but because between 65 and 1.8 million years ago the European and African plates collided. The result of this tectonic confrontation were the High Atlas Mountains - which were pushed with enough force to reach heights of 4,000 meters. At this altitude moisture that just happened to be traveling along in the air, minding its own business, got interrupted by these ginormous mountains and so the moisture condensed and actually formed clouds - which often saturate to a point that they actually conduct precipitation. Many peaks of the High Atlas Mountains - such as Toubkal, the very highest mountain in all of North Africa (pictured below)- are so cold and receive so much moisture that that water falls as snow or otherwise freezes into snowcaps last until mid-August.




By the time that I and my parents and my sister went hiking around Toubkal in mid-June there was still a little bit of snow left. If you squint and block out the glare from the Sun you might be able to see some patches out in the distance. Yeah, there they are... Eventually enough solar radiation gets absorbed by those snowcaps that they melt and flow downhill, forming little mountain streams. Those mountain streams serve as the lion's share great of the Berbers' water supply for drinking, cooking, washing and irrigation.



The higher up we went, naturally the less vegetation there was on these mountains. Much of the valley was just full of boulders and scree; Allah did not create many prime plots for farmers or pastoralists in the High Atlas Mountains.

However, back in how many days of yore some Berber shepherds decided to pick up a bunch of heavy rocks and throw them across the mountain streams. Eventually these rocks caught enough sticks and leaves that they formed modest pools - which bit by bit accumulated enough organic matter to create a fertile humus. And grasses grew in the moist soils where they never would have otherwise among the rocks and the shepherds created for themselves prime new places to lead their goats to graze.



In some places the Berbers had gathered so much soil and were able to control the water levels so well that their rock walled-in areas would be fertile - but not flood - and grow figs and cherries and apricots in the alpine terrain.



For thousands of years this rock wall technology was pretty impressive. But then sometime in the 20th century the World Bank came in with some cement bags and fancypants engineers and created permanent, concrete irrigation canals to divert a smaller, more reliable fraction of the mountain streams so as to improve agricultural yields and simultaneously preserve the natural habitats of some of the endangered fauna which call Toubkal National Park their home.

I could totally build something like this... a piece of cake!



Yeah, political science majors from Amherst College know all about building big concrete-looking canal things...



Check out how the Berbers took a hill on something like a 45-degree angle, built ridges and then with a diversion of this irrigation canal built a cascading, multi-tiered garden plot.



And here they have diverted naturally-flowing mountain stream waters to fill a clothes-washing basin.



And since that water was once in solid form mere hours ago and is probably around 37 degrees Fahrenheit, some Berbers used rubber hoses to divert the canals further, poked holes around one loop of the hose, and created a 100-percent sustainable, gravity-powered refrigerator to chill water and soft drinks for hikers passing by their village.



All of these infinitely awesome water systems are - along with olives, couscous, turmeric and traditional Berber lute music - among the reasons why I am in love with the nation of al-Maghreb and I think I might have to live there for at least some part of my life... or at least become filthy rich and buy a villa in Chefchaouen like Robert Plant.

You might think, "Yeah, and now when you get back to Sanadougou you can build a snow cap > irrigation canal > natural refrigerator system there too! (sigh)...

Unfortunately, the village where I live in Mali is as topographically interesting as Sarpy County, Nebraska - none of these things could ever happen there.

... So until a major tectonic plate collides with the vast Malian interior, it looks like I'll be concentrating on solid and liquid waste management from now until the Mahdi returns...

On the Jewish Question

the very appropriately-named David Nice: Madu, if you don’t mind me asking, I have a very important question.

Madu Sogoba: Fire away.

D: Why are the Jews so clever?

M: Um… I’m not really sure what you mean by that.

D: You Jewish people, you are all so clever! Copernicus, Galileo, Einstein – all Jews!

M: That’s… incorrect. Copernicus and Galileo were Catholics – Copernicus studied astronomy under the Polish Church, and the Pope excommunicated Galileo from the Church because he said that the Earth revolved around the Sun. Galileo and Copernicus definitely weren’t Jewish.

D: But Einstein! He was a Jew!

M: Yes, Albert Einstein was certainly a Jew. He fled from Germany when the Nazis came to power, and then when the State of Israel was founded a lot of Jews there wanted Einstein to be the first Israeli President.

D: OK, so the Jewish people are only the people of Einstein. All clever! There are no dumb people among you – why is that?

M: No, that’s not true at all. There are lots of Jewish people who are really, really dumb; for example, the fanatics who are stealing Palestinians’ farmlands to colonize the West Bank – even most Israelis think that the settlers are frickin’ morons.

D: So except for Israeli settlers in the West Bank, the Jewish people are for the most part very clever, more clever than other people. Why is that?

M: I’m still not exactly sure what you mean by that. Do you mean “clever” as in intelligent, or “clever” as in scheming and mischievous? The former I would take a compliment, but the latter could be construed as somewhat malicious.

D: No, no… not crafty like weasels… I mean that you Jewish people are all so clever, you have discovered how to make complicated things such as the atomic bomb. We have not the atomic bomb in Africa – we have neither the tools nor the scientific knowledge. Only the Jews could build such an enormous weapon out of tiny, little atoms. How do you do it?

M: I don’t know how to build an atomic bomb.

D: What do you mean - you don’t know how to construct an atomic bomb? But you Jews invented the thing!

M: If I knew how to make an atomic bomb, do you think I would be digging shit holes here in Mali?

D: OK, you, Madu Sogoba, do not know how to build an atomic bomb. But you Jews can do so many other things, difficult things which other peoples cannot – Therefore you are all so clever. You have found so many ways of making money! So many ways of finding power! If only we Bambaras could have found these ways!

M: Alright, that is kind of true. We Jews do have disproportionate weight in the diamond district, the banking sector, Wall Street, Hollywood, journalism, psychiatry, dentistry and orthodontics… Much of that is because for millennia we have been shut out of official government power, and so the Jewish people place great emphasis on professional education of our children so that we can find lucrative careers in the private sector regardless of the whims of the King.

D: What king? There is no king in America! You have President Barack Obama! Jews in America have no reason to fear no king.

M: It’s a figure of speech… But it’s based on fact. Throughout history from Egypt to Babylon to Persia to Greece to Rome to Spain to Russia to Nazi Germany – we Jews have traditionally been held as slaves, banished to distant lands or systematically murdered in government-orchestrated extermination campaigns. That’s why we have been perpetually migrating from country to country all over the world in what we call the Diaspora. Maybe we Jews have had to become particularly clever as an evolutionary adaptation?

D: But here in Mali there is no king! Here the people are free to be any religion they want! But before you I have not met one Jew. Why have the Jews not migrated to Mali?

M: Actually, some did. Perhaps as early as the 12th century Jewish merchants traveled from Morocco to trade in the fabled markets of Timbuktu, and they eventually carved out a monopoly over the overland trade route. Some Jewish merchants eventually left members of their caravans behind in Timbuktu to establish ties with local gold and salt retailers. When the King of Spain declared in 1492 that all of his Jewish subjects had to either convert to Christianity or leave his kingdom, many Sephardic Jews left for Morocco and some continued south and found refuge with the existing community in Timbuktu.

D: But I hear nothing of these Jews of Timbuktu! Why have I not met them?

M: Well, at first the Malian Emperor like his Moroccan counterpart accepted the influx of Jewish merchants and their financial know-how with open arms. But within the year of 1492 a new Emperor Askia Mohammed assumed the Malian throne - like the Spanish king, Emperor Askia Mohammed dictated that the Jews must convert or flee.

D: What did they do?

M: Most of the Jews of Timbuktu converted to Islam, and their descendents have acted as practicing Muslims ever since.

D: No, Muslims should pray as Muslims, Christians should pray as Christians, Jews should pray as Jews! Why did the Timbuktu Jews not continue the Jewish religion?

M: Then they would have been exiled to the Sahara Desert where they would have probably died of dehydration - Or the Emperor would have had them killed. So they practiced Islam for many centuries - and told their children about their true identity only in secret. Only now some of them are beginning to practice Judaism in public once again.

D: Very clever, those Jews!

The Assassination of James Brown

Straight-up – being the one non-Bambara tribesman in Sanadougou and being constantly watched and gossiped about and petted and accosted for my bicycle and my underwear all day, every day, 7 days a week is emotionally and spiritually exhausting. And it is even more frustrating and damaging to one’s sense of self-worth when I go walk over for a friendly chat with the dude for whom I just built 3 brand new, cement nyegens complete with soak pits and feeling all bright and optimistic and accomplished and he screams at me for being a “nasty, greedy Tubabu” because I won’t give him U.S. A.I.D.-financed cement to line his entire house and I walk home flustered and fed up and not a single person in this entire town can relate.

But who needs people when James Brown and Snoop Doggy Dogg are waiting at home to play with me? Even on days when my homologue thinks I’m useless and my jatigi thinks I’m lazy and the entire village thinks I’m a stingy bastard, my doggy and kitty think I’m the best person in the whole wide world and Snoop rolls over so we can play the “kick me in the face” game and James climbs up my shoulder and rolls into a huggable, purry furball and at least some creatures on this planet appreciate my existence. And everything is alright.

So the other night I was sleeping in my tent in the papaya patch when I was woken by a deafening BOOM as though a car had backfired just outside my garden. Though I didn’t think anything of it and rolled back to sleep.

The next morning I couldn’t find Jamesy… I went over to my jatigi’s house – James had recently been spending nights with their ladycat – but he wasn’t there either. I was told to go to the house of Seydou Cafa – the night watchman at the clinic across the street. Maybe he knew where James was...

So I stormed in demanding answers when I am greeted by my kitty James – he was hanging from Seydou’s gwa with his head chopped off, skinned to dry for that evening’s sauce. The logic of what had happened that night became all too apparent:

1. I am hungry. (Given)
2. Look… a Cat! (Given)
3. BOOM! (Chain Rule 1, 2)


I went ballistic.

“What’s the big deal?” Seydou asked, “It’s just a cat.”

“That’s not just a cat – that’s my cat you killed!!! You stole my cat and you can’t give it back!!! So now you have to pay up.”

“Whatever – I’m sorry. It will not happen again, insh’allah.”

“No, that’s not going to cut it. You just killed an expensive cat. I vaccinated and treated that cat, and it cost 5,000 CFA. I’ll give you a choice; either you pay me 5,000 francs right now, and while you’re at it give me a goat for good measure so I can kill one of your animals and eat it too – or else I’m going to explain to the Commandant that you’re a lunatic who hunts other people’s livestock with a shotgun on the clinic grounds in a crowded neighborhood 80 meters from where I sleep and 100 meters from where the Commandant and his wife and his children sleep.”

Unlike litigious Americans such as yours truly, Bambaras shy from using the official legal system and instead use their own traditional form of settling grievances. There is kind of an adversarial trial before the dugutigi (the village chief) who resolves both parties’ claims. This was actually a big deal; in an agricultural society, livestock theft is one of the most serious crimes which one can commit. If a Bambara steals another Bambara’s cow or sheep, the thief is usually pressured by his elders to compensate the victim in currency or in kind.

Though unbeknownst to me at the time, even in the extralegal Bambara trial using informal laws and informal procedures, the plaintiff is generally expected to employ an extralegal lawyer. Usually people have the eldest male of each respective adversary’s family do all the negotiating – and so I should have delegated responsibility to my jatigi Karitie Sanogo. For yours truly – former Mock Trial lawyer, material witness for a real-life courtroom disposition and citizen of the U.S. of A. where 23-year-olds are just as full members of society as their real fathers – it never occurred to me that I should employ someone else to redress my own grievances. Thus by stepping into the dugutigi’s gwa to act as my own counsel, I apparently disrupted the gerontocratic social order and already had one strike going against me.

Nevertheless, I put forward an argument based on what I felt was incontrovertible logic:

1. Individuals are granted by their Creator a natural right to Property. (Bourgeois Capitalism)
2. “To steal” is to take another person’s Property without their consent. (Definition)
3. If an Individual steals another Individual’s Property, the Thief must pay the Victim in order to re-establish the State of Nature. (Bourgeois Capitalism)
4. I had a Cat. (Given)
5. My Cat cost 5,000 francs. (Given)
6. I never told anyone that they had permission to take my Cat. (Given)
7. Seydou killed my Cat and his wife is preparing it for dinner. (Given)
8. Therefore, Seydou stole my Cat (Chain Rule [1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7])
9. Therefore, Seydou must give me 5,000 francs. (Chain Rule, Bourgeois Justice [3, 5, 8])
10. And a goat. (Revenge)

The dugutigi agreed wholeheartedly with my proposition. However, Seydou had a right to defend himself.

1. I am the Night Watchman at the Clinic. (Given)
2. The Night Watchman is equipped with a Shotgun in order to protect the Clinic. (Given)
3. Therefore, it is my solemn duty to protect the Clinic as well as myself with my Shotgun.
(Chain Rule [1,2])
4. Evil Sorcerers exist, and they wish to do us harm. (Incontrovertible Fact)
5. Evil Sorcerers can take the form of Cats. (Incontrovertible Fact)
6. While guarding the Clinic last night, I saw a Cat. (Given)
7. Therefore, the Cat which I saw could have been an Evil Sorcerer in disguise.(Chain Rule [4, 5, 6])
8. Therefore, there is no way that I could have known that that Cat was not an Evil Sorcerer. (The Law of Epistemological Positivism [6, 7])
9. Therefore, it was my solemn duty to shoot that Cat with my Shotgun in order to protect the Clinic from Evil Sorcerers. (Chain Rule [1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8])

The dugutigi gave much credence to Seydou’s defense. “He’s got a good point there, Madu – what if your cat was a sorcerer?”

“NO!!!!! I know for a fact that my cat could not cast magic spells. If Seydou believes thinks that he should shoot every single kitten that walks his way because it might be a sorcerer, then he is delusional and insane and he should not have a job which entails holding a shotgun at a health clinic!!! Witches and wizards are not real and they cannot be valid reasons for slaughtering other people’s animals!!! You know what? Maybe Seydou’s cow is a sorcerer!!!! I should kill his cow!!! And maybe his goats and his sheep are all sorcerers too!!! If Seydou’s defense is valid, then I should be able to shoot all of his animals and eat them to protect myself from evil spells!!!!

Unfortunately for my case, the dugutigi also believes in witches and wizards – hence he let Seydou’s defense stand.

“The night watchman had good reason to believe that his very life could have been in danger of black magic, he shot your cat out of sincere self-defense. So Seydou must not give you a goat to slaughter as you demand… However, since you now surely want a new cat and you want to vaccinate it too, Seydou must give you 5,000 francs to cover the cost of cat medicine.”

But the important issue to me wasn’t the money; I wanted Seydou to pay 5,000 francs merely to make his reckless behavior really, really expensive and hopefully to deter his assassination of future cats. What mattered to me is that now my life in the peaceful gardens of Xanadu is lacking a huggable, squeezable furball to curl up next to my pillow and purr me to sleep.

Though this tragedy concludes with a happy ending of rebirth and renewal; within hours of this fiasco, in such an insular village where my nail-clipping habits are considered juicy gossip, every man, woman and child in Sanadougou knew about the untimely assassination of my feline friend who would so often follow me and climb up on my shoulder to accompany me around the hood. James Brown was a Sanadougou celebrity in his own right, and his presence was immediately missed. And by the afternoon the community poured out in sympathy and dozens of people offered me brand new kittens to offset my loss.

I accepted one baby kitten, and his name his James Brown II.

Enter the Poopopticon

The best course I ever took in college was Professor Bumiller’s Regulating Citizenship. The syllabus itself wasn’t every impressive– it was mostly composed of elementary political writings of Locke, de Tocqueville, Thoreau and Martin Luther King which I had read in high school. But what made this course so enlightening was the format and location of our class: once a week ten “outside” students from Amherst College drove down Route 9 to meet with ten “inside” students in the visiting room of the Hampshire County Jail.

The “inside” students were not hardened criminals but guys who happened to have been given a bad deck in life and royally screwed up, but they deserved a second chance. “Camp Hampshire” – as it was affectionately known by those who had made it through the meaner penal regimen at State – provided a community-based rehabilitation program, offering residents drug counseling, psychotherapy, G.E.D. certification, training in carpentry, quilting, and seeing-eye dog training. Through the course of their stay residents were incrementally allowed more and more freedom of movement, culminating in the final stage when they resided in quarters outside the sealed gates of the central compound and could essentially walk in and out as they pleased and vans would drive them off the facility grounds so they could work part-time jobs. The overriding purpose of this entire scheme was to “re-socialize” those whom society had apparently failed the first time around, so that the next time graduates of the Hampshire County could re-enter conventional society with marketable skills, find a decent job and conduct themselves in a lawful manner.

The most tantalizing class was the day when we discussed Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment, namely, his analysis of Jeremy Bentham's ideal reformatory: the Panopticon. According to this scheme lawbreakers should be reside in a ring of transparent cells ringed around a central guard tower so that guards could monitor all prisoners at all times. Every sinner would be conditioned into good behavior by the sight of the ever-present guard tower, for it would always be much too obvious to the prisoner that his every behavior could be monitored. Whether or not there was actually a guard in the tower conducting surveillance at any given moment was irrelevant – the individual prisoner could never know. And so he would have to assume that he was in fact being watched in perpetuity as though by the all-seeing eyes of God. The convicted criminal would thus have no choice but to adopt self-discipline and learn to conduct himself with upright character and morality at all times.

Foucault and Mill were quite relevant to the daily lives of every single “inside” student, for though they enjoyed a liberal degree of freedom at the Hampshire County, they were self-disciplined into good behavior by omnipresent video cameras which were linked to live-feeds into the central guards’ surveillance room. An “inside” student pointed at the silver orb hanging from the ceiling,

“We know what da Panopticon is all about! Here we gotta stand in line cuz we is bein’ surveillanced every single minute of every single goddamn day!”

This experiment in academia has proved to actually be quite useful in my real-life experience as a Peace Corps Volunteer trying to promote water sanitation in Mali. Here the biggest public health issue I’m dealing with isn’t a crime as defined by any legal code, but an act so heinous that it is treated with the palatable euphemism “open defecation”; i.e. children shitting all over the public school grounds.

Every single day when I walk to Karitie and Durcas’ house for lunch, I walk past the Première Cycle. The sanitary infrastructure on this schoolyard is actually quite impressive for a rural town in Mali; there is an India/Mali pump so that the students and teachers can drink clean, filtered water at all times, and there are three sets of latrines – one of them brand spanking new. The kids know how to get their water from the pump – sort of – but it is quite apparent that they do not quite grasp what they are supposed to do with these latrines. In one hour I sat with Durcas under her gwa and counted 14 kids who actually ventured inside the nyegens and do their business, 11 children who defecated in back of the nyegens, and 8 of them who just dropped their pants and shamelessly pissed in the middle of the schoolyard.

“Durcas, this just doesn’t make any sense. It actually takes more effort for these kids to walk behind the nyegens than it does for them to walk inside the nyegens. Why on Earth do they insist on expending more energy to shit and piss outside?”

“Je ne sais pas! You have done everything that you can possibly do to tame these nasty children. You have organized the student government to properly clean the inside of the nyegens on a weekly basis…”

“ – But the problem here is what kids are doing outside the nyegens that’s so unsanitary.”

“You have even trained your puppy Snoop to tackle nasty children he sees pooping…”

“ – But ever since Snoop maimed Bobacar’s sheepling in the fields I’ve had to keep him chained up all day.”

“Then there is nothing more that you can do.”

“But there is! I’ve been trying to get Karitie to let me teach his students just one class on how to go to the bathroom – but he still won’t let me… Speaking of the Devil, here he comes right now! Karitie!”

“Oui?”

“Watching these kids shit so near the water pump day in and day out is simply intolerable. What do I have to do for you to let me teach these kids a lesson in proper defecation?”

“I have already told you that you should beat these nasty, nasty children. Here in Mali when children are misbehaving that is what we do – we rip a switch from the tree and spank their butt until they cry! Unless you teach my students that there is a price that comes with pooping outside, and that that price is a very painful beating, I refuse to let you step foot in my classrooms.”

“I still don’t want to tell these kids that I, personally am going to beat them – some of these 8 and 9-year-olds are my best friends in this entire village! I’m sure there is some way that we can compromise...”

So that afternoon I put on my General Patton face and went from class to class to lead a stern conversation on personal hygiene and sanitation. I greeted all the students, greeted their teachers and after a little small talk abruptly broke the ice; “I have to poop” and squatted down in front of the blackboard as though I were going to do it right there in front of the class. “Do you think that this is a good place for pooping?”

“NO!!!” (Asking questions always catches the kids off guard, they are so used to being lectured at)

“OK then… How about I poop here behind the teacher’s desk? No one can see me!”

“NO!!!”

“Is it ever OK for me to poop or pee inside the classroom?”

“NO!!!”

“Why not?”

“It is DIRTY!!!”

“That is correct! Pooping or peeing in public places with lots of people is the dirtiest thing in the world! And that is why I am very mad . Today I watched 19 children poop and pee outside the nyegens. Do you think that pooping and peeing outside in the schoolyard is OK?”

“NO!!!”

“Do you know what diseases you can get from people pooping and peeing outside?”

Answers included “Malaria!”, “Headache!”, “Coughing!” even “AIDS!”

“Close… but not quite. Who here has heard of dysentery, cholera or schistosomiasis?”

This very unscientific survey made me think that absolutely no one in the subpopulation of Sanadougou most likely to fall ill to these wretched maladies had heard of them previously. That was a very frightening thought. So for each class I drew a diagram of the water pump on the schoolyard all the way down to the water table.



“Here is a schoolgirl named Aminata Sogoba. She is drinking water from the water pump. Do any of you know how other students might make Aminata sick?..

Pooping and peeing outside in the schoolyard, of course!”

So I drew a highly exaggerated diagram of how diseases are transmitted via open defecation and urination – the Bambara language doesn’t take very well to metaphors or similes, so I had to make my diagram as straightforwardly literal as possible.



“…So you see, when Aminata drinks water contaminated with Bakary’s poop she has a good chance of getting sick with giardia or dysentery or even cholera and she might even die because Bakary took a dump too close to the water supply. Who here has had diarrhea in the past month?”

Everyone raises their hand.

“There’s a good chance that you had diarrhea because your classmates have been pooping all over the schoolyard and their poop somehow got into your mouth. Either their poop went directly into the drinking water, or it got on a soccer ball – which someone picked up with their hands – and then they picked up a pencil – and then you shared that pencil – and then you put your finger in your mouth. Every time that children poop out in the schoolyard it gives you a greater chance of getting sick… So does anyone here want to get a really bad case of diarrhea again?”

“NO!!!”

"Does anyone want to get other people's poop in their mouth?"

"NO!!!"

“So what do you think we should do with dirty children who poop outside and put nasty disease seeds in the drinking water?”

“YOU SHOULD BEAT THEM!!!”

“You all should know that Karitie says that I should beat children who dirty the schoolyard with their poop. But I will not, I cannot do that. There are 428 of you and only 8 teachers and 1 of me – we adults can’t watch you when we have to work. Though since all of you go to school here, and it is you the students’ responsibility to fill the water jugs with clean drinking water and to clean the nyegens, it is now the job of each and every one of you to make sure that no one poops outside... You’re going to have to learn to discipline yourselves! So what are you going to do the next time you see kids pooping in the schoolyard?”

“I WILL PUNCH THEM!!!”
“I WILL KNOCK THEM DOWN!!!”
“SPANK THEIR BEHIND!!!”
“SMACK THEIR FACE!!!”
“SIT ON THEIR HEAD UNTIL THEY CRY!!!”

“Wow… that sounds like pretty awful punishment… and you all have wonderful imaginations. Though violence is horrible, and I do not encourage you to ever hurt anyone - but pooping near the water pump is even worse because it hurts many more people in ways that you cannot see. I would prefer that the next time you see kids pooping outside you teach them why they are spreading diseases and threatening other people's lives... But remember, Monsieur le Directeur thinks that kids who poop next to the water pump he drinks from every day should be beaten..."

"So in conclusion, next time that you have to poop or pee, where must you go?”

“IN THE NYEGENS!!!”

“Thank you, my good friends. May Allah grant you a day of peace and happiness.”

After visiting all eight classrooms in the Sanadougou Première Cycle; 1) I finally got the break I had sought for so long to teach these kids about water sanitation and fecal-orally-transmitted diseases; 2) Karitie got the warning he wanted that open defecation in the schoolyard shall result in corporal punishment; 3) Not once did I ever have to say that I would personally conduct any of these beatings. I was able to draw from these students own mouths that not only is shitting and pissing in the schoolyard absolutely intolerable, that it is an epidemiological hazard and a personal offense to the entire student body and faculty, and – the icing on the cake – that the students themselves would personally beat their peers who threatened them with disease and even death by depositing their waste in the vicinity of the drinking water pump. I think that this compromise worked out fairly well.

And of course the best way to judge a utilitarian policy would of course to measure its tangible results. Before my discussions on water sanitation roughly 2 out of every 3 students were shitting and pissing outside on the streets, in the schoolyard, next to the nyegens, anywhere but inside the nyegens. But since I introduced this strict new waste management policy and cooperative disciplinary regime, open defecation has come to a screeching halt. In the two weeks since neither Karitie nor Durcas nor I have yet to see another child drop their pants in the open.

They seem to have internalized the discipline of sanitary defecation out of fear of peer punishment as though they were policed by the all-seeing eyes of Allah.