Ethnography

Ethnography as defined by the dictionary is the study and systematic recording of human cultures, exactly the thing that my blog has tried to do. Many anthropologist believe that it is important for people to tell their own story.

This project was inspired my daughter Lani BonaDea. I gave my camera to two different Malians to let them tell their own story and this is what they pictured.

Owa's Family













































Awa the mother of my name sake.

Mali - A Recycling Program

We are starting to collect empty water bags that are for sell here in Mali. The need to be washed and then we will make purses or other types of bags out of them. Here are some pictures from our first days.

Bogolan Training

A volunteer in the village of Diola asked Koro to train a Women’s Association to make Bogolan. The Women’s Association takes in children who have become orphans because of AIDS. In the last year Koro has taken a training to expand her bogolan skills and now she would have the opportunity to train others.

When I first proposed this to Koro she seemed nervous this was a big step for her.

The bogolan business was booming so when the time came to prepare for the training it became more than we had bargained for. Koro had been offered 10.000 cfa a day for seven days, transportation to and from Diolla as well as room and board while she was at the training. This was a good income for Koro. She just needed to come up with a supplies and materials budget. This was not as easy as you would think. The mud which is the main dying compound needs fermenting for a long period of time in a large pot. Koro has had her pot fermenting mud for longer than I have known her. Most of the dying materials are natural plants.

We arrived in Diola with rice sacks full of plants, bark, and fabric along with paint brushes, plastic gloves, stencils, and everything Koro needed for the formation. Koro stayed with Nako the woman who runs the NGO that sponsored the training and I stayed with a fellow Peace Corps volunteer. I don’t know about Koro but I was nervous about how it was going to go. Koro and I mostly visit her family we don’t go into situations where things are not familiar.

At the start of the first day all my worries were over the women showed up enthusiastic. The big surprise for me was how much I learned and I watch bogolan being made every day. Koro started out making designs freehand going through all the color processes then moved into stencil work with applying the color white as the grand finale. We ate together, danced to gather, and made bogolan together and so much more.

At the closing ceremony the Mayor the Dugitigi, several NGO’s came and were presented with some bogolan material that the women made. Koro and I made many new friends. We contacted a woman who does trainings on how to make soap which will be my next project if I can squeeze it before I leave.

Seeing the Fruits of My Labor

Today the second literacy serious held their graduation ceremony. Thirty five Malians received certificates. They learned adding, subtracting, multiplying, the metric system, reading, writing and some even wrote poetry. The mayor and the prefect (kinda like a county executive) came to the ceremony. I gave a speech in French. In the middle of the ceremony the Mayor presented me with a banner that read in Bambara “Kori de la pe Sababula Kucala boloa baara law ya kalan soro. Which means Peace Corps works with artisans of Koutiala.


This week Koro and I did math together. We were going over the cost of some new products for pricing and sales calculation. There have been many times in the past months that I tried to facilitate tracking expenses, reassessing prices, and just crunching the numbers as a routine business practice.

When I first arrived here in Koutiala I saw so many things the Bogolan Association could do to improve their business. In the last several weeks many of these have been implemented successfully. There were things like pricing, product development which included new motifs, colors, products, and marketing; business practices such as purchase pricing and sales calculations, just to name a few.

Last week Peace Corps held an In-service Training Session (IST). Koro spent several weeks preparing new products with all the skills she has been developing over the last year and a half. This includes new designs, new patterns and new colors. A lot of these skills were acquired during the bogolan training in Segou (which is known as the bogolan capital of Mali). We were going to the IST with this product debut for the Peace Corps volunteers to browse, buy and give feed back to improve. We didn’t sell as much as we wanted to but you never do, do you. Koro did get some good feed back manly on quality control.

What I didn’t know then that I know now is that no one in the Bogolan Association knew much math. As a Small Enterprise Development volunteer I did get some training in Illiterate Bookkeeping which seems like an oxymoron. Now that most of the Bogolan Association has gone through two of three series in the Literacy program they now know what we in the States would call basic math.

At the ceremony for the Literacy II class all of this came together for me so when the mayor presented me the bogolan banner I got so emotional I had to hold back the tears because tears just are not appropriate to cry in public here in Mali. I am going to miss everyone here so much.

Journee Internationale De La Femme 2010

We celebrated here in Koutiala. I had my outfit made and was looking forward to the day. The night before I went by Koro’s for a visit. She had a head ache and said she was not going to participate in the next day’s festivities. I was so disappointed.

The next morning started with my usual bike ride. When I got home I left the house with the top of my IWD outfit and a skirt on my way to the market down the street. My host mom was dressed in her IWD outfit and invited me to go with her in the car. Now this doesn’t happen very often and I wasn’t sure where the celebration was so I took her up on the ride.

International Women's day is an important day in developing countries to rally people together for women's rights. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton identified equality for the world’s women and girls as the central challenge that will determine the peace and progress of the 21st century.

This year marks the 100th aniversary of International Women's day. In 1910, the first international women's conference was held in Copenhagen and countries around the world began celebrating the event annually beginning the following year. In places like China, Russia, Vietnam and Bulgaria, IWD is a national holiday today.

Every year, there is a theme to the day. The UN's theme for International Women's Day 2010 is Equal "rights, equal opportunities: Progress for all." Here in Koutiala there were two themes to this year’s IWD, one a National Malian theme because 2010 marks 50 years of Malian women’s freedom from colonial rule and the second a local Koutiala theme was Husbands helping their wives space the birth of their children for the health of the family. There were speakers, women from the audience giving testimonies, and theater skits with a woman dressed as a man that got a big response from the audience.

I sat with Fanta Diallo my host mom but kept an eye out for my friends the artisan women. Fanta was cooking the food for the event so she left when the time came and low and behold Koro showed up and stayed through lunch. At lunch time my friends the artisan women, Koro and I all ate lunch together. Even though my language is not that good we laughed, talked, and teased each other and just had fun together.

P.S. Kounandy is doing so much better this week.

Kounandy

Kounandy my name sake was born September 2, 2009. Koro didn’t even know that Awa was pregnant I suspected but during training was told that Malian women don’t talk about pregnancies so I never said anything besides Awa never did get big so I shrugged my suspicious off. When Kounandy was born she was the smallest baby I have ever held. I worried that she wouldn’t make it.

I hold her everyday at work while her mother does bogolan. They fitini Kounandy and beleble Kounandy that’s little Kounandy and big Kounandy in Bambara. Kounandy has pissed on me, thrown up on me, and shit on me as well as laughed with me, slept in my arms, and blown bubbles at me.

The name Kounandy was given to me during training by my mom who named me Kounandy after her grandmother. Kounandy means lucky person in Bamabara. I feel it is a privilege to be named this and a privilege that Awa named her baby girl after me. The name is not as common as Fatamata, or Salamata; Kounandy its perfect for me

The worry I have for Kounandy’s well being comes from the fact that Mali’s infant mortality rate is one of the highest in the world. Mali is in sub-Saharan Africa one of the regions making “insufficient progress” towards improving an infants life.

The following are some rankings on infant mortality. These figures show that the situation is getting worst in Mali not better even with all the NGO’s and Peace Corps work. What is the answer I don’t know. I don’t even know what the answer is for this one infant my name sake.

2006 figures

USA ranked 33 under five 7.8

Iceland ranked number 1 under five 3.9

Mali 191 Under five mortality rate 199.7

Haiti 136

CIA’s 2009 estimates

Singapore 1 2.31 out of a thousand babies die within the first year

USA 46 6.26 out of a thousand babies die within the first year

Mali 217 102.05

Here in Koutiala, Mali the public hospital just received funds from a Belgium NGO to improve children’s nutrition in the region. This came out of stats that showed Koutiala as a high risk area for children’s nutrition.

UNICEF says that child survival programs are inexpensive, basic interventions that save the lives of children under five from the leading causes of child death and promote healthy and productive families and communities.

Today, almost 25,205 children under age five will die mostly from preventable or treatable causes. This is a loss of over nine million children each year. A majority of these child deaths are from everyday conditions. Pneumonia, treatable with 27 cents’ worth of antibiotics, accounts for almost one of every five deaths among children under age five each year. Diarrhea, treatable with 6 cents’ worth of oral rehydration salts, causes 17 percent of young children’s deaths. And more than one third of child deaths result from complications related to birth, a cluster of causes that includes tetanus, which is preventable with a $1.20 tetanus vaccine for the mother during pregnancy.

Kounandy is only one face of all the infants at risk, she is the one that has touched my heart.

Mali Notes

You know those days the mind is wondering and your on automatic pilot going in the direction of the usual routine when you meant to go somewhere else. I had a morning like that. Saturday I left my house for my morning bike ride a little later than usual and started taking the turns for work. This just confirmed what I had been thinking. Everything has gotten routine.

Sitting at my favorite street food vendor at the market I noticed for the first time in a while that there was the usual dirty water and trash in the walkway and it didn’t take my appetite away any more.

It seems that I can still make the children cry. The other day sitting at work a young girl who was babysitting a baby for someone in the tailor school got sight of me grabbed the baby and ran into the tailor class. Awa the Bogolan apprentice saw the whole thing and started laughing. As I laughed I drew up my hands in a boogie man pose wrinkled my face and said mean toubab (technically a white French person its used for all white people today).

Koro is my best friend.

Road protocol still puzzles me when my daughter was here she told me I scared her every time I crossed the street. I have learned to think of the road in small sections to be navigated as opportunity presents its self and not wait for the whole way across to be cleared. This has been a especially useful in Bamako, the capital city. When making a turn either on a bicycle, moto or in a car you can actually give a hand signal and anything on the road will respect that and let you take small spaces of the road over to your destination. Another maneuver for turns is that you go across the road when the opportunity presents its self and ride on the shoulder on the wrong side of the road until your turn comes up. This scares me when I do it and when someone else does it.

Maybe it’s just that food is plentiful now but my cuisine repute has gotten better. The list includes French toast, Thai peanut sauce, Russian beet salad, and a variety of salad dressings. Today I even su su’ed something to cook. That’s a process using a big mortar and pastel thing made of wood and smashing vegetables to use in sauces.

My Malian name is Kounandy Diallo. Kounandy means privlidged one or lucky one. It was given to me by my home stay mother during training. I kept that name and changed my last name to Koro’s which is Diallo. Diallo is a Falani name, Falani’s herd cattle and many are still nomads in the northern regions of Mali but there are Falanis all over West Africa. Awa at work had a baby in October and named her daughter after me. She is so cute. At work I hold her so Awa can work when I am not busy.

With routine came homesickness. I miss my friends and family. Fortunately I can skype (internet phone service) and people back home can even call me. On New Years day I talked to my bicycling group in Marysville Washington. The internet has made the world a very small place.