Nescafe fueled Training

It's about 9 pm and I am exhausted. This is partially due to the dust. It's like dustbowl everywhere in Mali - it is on your skin, in your hair, and you can just feel it in your lungs. Many people riding motorcycles wear those Air France/Air Morroco sleeping masks over their noses. I haven't figured out how to pull that off (or the bandana look) while coaching baskteball without looking like a bankrobber or sorta OCD. However, the bizarre thing is you wake up with a cold feeling like a complete dork (like I haven't spent the last two and a half year of my life in Freezing Ithaca) and need to remind yourself that it was dust-induced. Today, Drissa brought me some Lipton full of pepper as a remedy, which tasted good but then seemed to take all my energy away. I swear I need to google pepper to see if it has some crazy healing/body cleansing characteristics.

The second factor is my week long training. So back at Cornell I ran 3 hour long discussion sessions (in English). Now I lead a training from 8 am to 4 pm (in French) - we dicuss various topics and then we usually do some computer training (word, excel, etc) then we eat lunch then I work with one student on Bambara lessona and I give random tasks to the other two (translation work, reading articles, fixing my written french). As I mentioned before - I have two recent undergrads (maitrise in Sociology and another in Econ) and an intern who is still at university. The intern is supposed to have school 3 times a week and come to our trainings the other days. So far, every day her school has been cancelled or the profs haven't shown so she has come.

Sample material - Week One:
Monday - state formation, sovereignty, legitimacy, nationalism, etc
Tuesday - Education as a tool - statebuilding, nationalism, socialization of citizens, teaching democrats, building legitimacy, and intro to educational trends in West Africa, ed stats in Mali; word and excel training
Wednesday - Research methods - hypothesis formation, causaliity?, different types of variables, observable implications, different research methods etc; composition and budget creation in word and excel; translation
Thursday - review of my hypotheses, primary descriptive data questions, methods for obtaining that data, discussion of: why parents send their kids to different types of schools? why certain schools are built in certain places?

It's tough and tiring, but I feel like we are covering a lot of ground. It's awesome to have them gut check my assumption and quesions. It's also great to work with them to come up with research questions they think are interesting or ways to get data on phenomena (diploma-buying) that ministries or schools don't keep stats on. So far we have come up with some really fun side projects - doing interviews with univesrity students about the easiest and hardest highschools in Bamako and looking at the politicians's use of soccer games when they announce their candidacy.

We do the training at my house. I have food brought from my host family's house for lunch each day. The funny thing - in the US once you say work/training is over - people generally go home. However, my team has a tendancy to just sorta hang around after we are done. The Malian way? I've got a lot more learning to do.....