It’s been a while since I have written an update. Things have been busy here in Koutiala.
Also it’s been 103 plus degrees every day for a while. The good part is that I have been waiting nine months for mango pancakes and finally along with hot season comes mango season. We eat mangos for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I haven’t experienced anything like this since I was a kid in
As for my work I am still very busy. When I first came here there was no way I could see how I could help the people I was meeting. I didn’t know the language, the customs, the office politics, when the holidays were and I didn’t need to go to work. I barely knew how to buy and cook the food that was available.
Today months later the work is overwhelming. The bogolan artisans need to do some work to get export ready. The UAAK has asked for help with a literacy formation, the women at the NGO that does Gender and development would like to do a joint project and if that won’t keep me busy there is an NGO here that does AIDS/HIV work that has been wanting a volunteer for some time. (And all volunteers are supposed to be working on this issue.)
My schedule goes like this Monday’s I meet with Omar to speak English, Tuesday morning Omar and I do Jr. Achievement at a fifth grade class, Tuesday afternoon I go to the NGO for the women’s group, Wednesday I 
spend the morning at the Bogolan workplace, Thursday is market day here in Koutiala and language class, Friday morning is language class. In my spare time I visit the Union of Associations of Artisans of Koutiala and planned a formation on Shea Butter, wrote articles on Gender and Development for the Mali Rag (the volunteer newsletter), attended Gender and Development Committee meetings since I was elected as the Training/Research coordinator for the committee.
It isn’t just work, the people have found their way into my heart. When the women at the Shea Butter formation broke out into song I was almost in tears.
In my travels around the world I have searched for the words to express the joy found even in the poorest countries. Reading Thoreau’s Walden I found them;
However mean your life is meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as your are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring.
This sums up what I see in the poorest people of the world. Through what lenses is poverty defined and how do you know when something is acceptable and when it is intolerable.
