Site Visit

I just spent five days my visiting my future site, starting to get to know my community and the people I’m working with. The region around Kita is really pretty, right now it’s very green because of the rainy season. Compared to the rest of Mali, it’s quite hilly, with lots of cliffs. Even though my town is on the main road from Bamako, it’s very quiet, which is a nice change from all the traffic in my homestay village. Also, there are less flies! Everyone in my village is of Fulani (aka Peuhl aka Fulfulde), but luckily they speak Bambara, which is the language I’m learning. They have still maintained the Fulani tradition of cattle raising, so there is quite a lot of fresh milk and beef.

So far, I am really impressed by my village. They have already organized several projects on their own or with local NGOs, and seem to have a lot of energy for making more improvements. As I’m the first volunteer at my site, I don’t really have any idea what my role will be yet. My host organization is officially the CSCOM (local clinic) and the maternity next door. The structures are in reasonably good shape (although my perspective may be warped after having been here for a while now), considering that they are colonial era. It’s staffed by two matrones, one of whom is my homologue, a doctor, a pharmacist, and two vaccinators. I stayed with the doctor during my visit, since my house had not been completed yet.

I really did very little during my visit. I did some language study with my local tutor, visited the volunteers who are nearby me, and then I spent a lot of time sitting around outside of the CSCOM and at the doctor’s house. One morning, I spent hours outside of the CSCOM with my homologue and the other staff, sorting peanuts. By the way, I never realized how many uses there were for peanuts until I came to Mali. You can eat them raw, roasted, in sauce on rice, peanut butter, peanut oil, peanuts ground and mixed with sugar and millet. People even make peanut soap. I also attended a wedding, which was a confusing experience. I never figured out who was getting married. The hardest part was knowing when to make these particular hand motions that resembled pantomiming cupping water, and then washing your face, but I just tried to follow what the other guests were doing.

I’m still not really sure what my role is at my site, and there’s no former volunteer there who has already laid the groundwork. During the first few months, I imagine that I’ll be spending some of the time at my CSCOM, weighing babies and such. I’m also supposed to be surveying the community to find out what their needs are. If possible, I’d like to go to surrounding villages as well, because it seems that they may have fewer resources than my own.

One downside of my site is that there is no phone access right now. All landline is out of service, but they are hoping to have cabines soon after my arrival. I have cellphone access but it’s a few kilometers away.