So, full disclosure, I am a bit of an idiot/rebel/risk taker when it comes to malaria prevention. I have tried, over my 7 years of traveling in Africa, to take my malaria meds. I have tried both Malarone and Doxy (I am too scared of Lariam because I had a couple of friends have very bad experience with it). However, I have never been quite able to complete the recommended dosage. When I took doxy in 2003 - it ended up building up in my stomach. Now, as I try to take Malarone - it gives me an intense headache and literally knocks me out and puts me to sleep for hours. This isn't conducive to getting fieldwork done. In addition, most people around me (Malians) don't take any malarial preventatives, I have opted for the strategy of developing a natural resistance. This- i know is dumb. The CDC website throws red flags everywhere: Do not try it at home. However, it has worked for me up until now.
I found myself in a regional capital - far from "toubab" health care providers in Bamako. It's rainy season aka mosquito season and I live in the mosquito quartier and while I live with a mosquito net - I happened to accumulate a couple hundred bites on my legs just from walking around/taking the occasional beer by the river. I came down with some ambiguous symptoms: nausea, headache, cough, fatigue. I tried to do my due diligence and decided I should find out if I maybe had malaria. After 2 days of symptoms - the image of a cerebral malaria induced stroke was plastered in my head and I told my host family I wanted to get tested.
One of my host sisters - Fatou - who is also one of the prettiest Malians I have ever seen - took me to a health clinic where an aunt had a friend who worked as a doctor. Every bureaucratic encounter I have had in Mali has started and ended like this - find a relation who works in the appropriate office or who knows someone who does and avoid wasting 4 days there trying to get service. It was quite a sight - us on a moto and every guy in town waving to her as she road by. We went to recommended office #1 - which was actually the center for social and economic development (but somehow housed nursing classes) and the known acquaintance was not there. So then we walked to a rather sketchy looking clinic (peeling paint, open windows everywhere, lots of pepople waiting outside) - we learned that the doctor who the acquaintance knows was not there. So finally in checking with a 3rd semi-acquaintance we headed to the actual hospital.
All patients pay $2 to be seen (this charge was $1 until recently). Then you get in a long line in an outside courtyard next to the doctors air=-conditioned consulting rooms. Luckily, we had another connection and skipped the 20 person line and met with a doctor someone knew who was in the surgery consultation center. I told him that I, unlike most toubabs, was not on preventative meds - and he recommended I get a test at the laboratory - which had a 45minute turn around.
So back on the moto (again dodging police officers trying to flirt with Fatou) - we went to the laboratory - which was clean and friendly. I handed over $4 and the nurse sterilized a cotton swab and pricked my finger and put the blood on a slide. I waited for the 45 minutes and then they handed me my results. No counseling, no results, - just a sealed envelope. I asked the nurse if I could open it and he shrugged. I opened the results and to my happiness it read: negative!! Triumph of my immune system. We returned for a courtesy visit to the physician and he confirmed my non-malarial status. I instantly felt better.
Most Malians coming hours and hours on foot or donkey or moto don't know doctors who help them to skip the lines. They sit outside in the sun after their journey. I watched some doctors speak in French although they were capable of communicating in local languages. To their defense, I am sure they are working crazy hours and dealing with many illnesses that their supplies/equipment is unable to heal. I am scared of hospitals in general. I can't imagine what this experience must be like for people who leave their village and travel to such a foreign place. I salute all my friends working to assist and improve the health sector in Mali and across Africa. Mali recently moved from about 6th worst to 12th worst on the human development indicators. We've got a long way to go.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Weekend in Kayes
So after some worried emails from my parents, I was concerned that the image of Kayes I painted in my last two emails might be a bit grim. So this email is dedicated to all the great things about fieldwork. I am currently in the nicest hotel in Kayes drinking $3 imported Belgian beer which is fantastic. I just went swimming in order to recover from an intense Friday night of clubbing (with my RAs and extended household members) and an early 9 am start for 16 household surveys. The club was packed with us, Kaysians, French/Malians back in the homeland for vacation, Canadian nursing students, South African gold miners, and various other Malians out for a good time. We got home around 3:30 and woke up at 8 or so. While painful, it was a kind of wonderful moment of solidarity for our research team (much like 5 am practices for sports teams). After walking house to house, we retired to a delicious lunch at around 1. Then i headed over to the fanciest hotel in Kayes to go swimming and to do work (ie get on the internet). The management of this hotel oddly has a selection of 20 or so different Belgian beers. So here I am - in an air conditioned restaurant drinking $3 Beligian beers. While this seems completely indulgent and almost excessive by my Malian standard of living - I figure this is going to hold me over for the remaining 51 interviews on this side of the river and the 100 we will do on the other side.
People here have been very welcoming and very frank. Every once in a while somebody's response really hit you. It might have been the lack of sleep but I found myself tearing up in our last interview. A woman we had interviewed in Bambara - had been extremely articulate and opinionated. She never had any formal schooling, but her children attend public school in Kayes. When asked if she would ever run for local office she said know. She said that she could never run for office because she never went to school. I am usually the notetaker, but I was struck by her the emotion and authority in the way she spoke. I jumped in to say that she knew how to speak well. Yes - she acknowledged - she knew how to speak well, but she never went to school and thus could never become a politician. How bizarre that in a country where there is approximately 40% literacy in the former colonial language (less than half of that for women) - French language skills become the barometer of who gets to fully participate in democracy. While this is not unlike the NGO community prizes English speakers over those with other kinds of technical competences, this was a shocking, but important reminder of the barriers that remain between the majority of citizens and what is considered to be formal politics.
People here have been very welcoming and very frank. Every once in a while somebody's response really hit you. It might have been the lack of sleep but I found myself tearing up in our last interview. A woman we had interviewed in Bambara - had been extremely articulate and opinionated. She never had any formal schooling, but her children attend public school in Kayes. When asked if she would ever run for local office she said know. She said that she could never run for office because she never went to school. I am usually the notetaker, but I was struck by her the emotion and authority in the way she spoke. I jumped in to say that she knew how to speak well. Yes - she acknowledged - she knew how to speak well, but she never went to school and thus could never become a politician. How bizarre that in a country where there is approximately 40% literacy in the former colonial language (less than half of that for women) - French language skills become the barometer of who gets to fully participate in democracy. While this is not unlike the NGO community prizes English speakers over those with other kinds of technical competences, this was a shocking, but important reminder of the barriers that remain between the majority of citizens and what is considered to be formal politics.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Playing Frogger in the Regional Capital
Kayes is a pedestrian town with no pedestrian space. There is little public transport so it is common to walk 6-12 kilometers a day. Some neighborhoods live in secondary flood plains off the river and this makes walking around a perilous and exciting adventure (we toubabs play a game called – “don’t fall in the nyegen ji (toilet water).”
Yesterday I went on one of my cross town adventures. I was headed from Khasso neighborhood over to the Peace Corps house in Legal Segou to check my email. My friend Brandon (aka supreme Bamanan speaker and esteemed mayor of Bamako and Kayes)had graciously allowed me to sit in on one of his interviews, so that I could meet one of his many Kayes VIP contacts.
I walked down a narrow road along the river. The road, unlike most in Kayes, was paved. Decaying colonial buildings walled in the road. Large trucks transporting merchandise from Senegal lined the walled street, thus making the road narrower and narrower. The road cuts through a market and as darkness fell, people, cars, and motos dodged in, out, and around the layers of building and trucks. About half the way through my walk, pirogues coming across the river (the bridge is out and everyone and everything crosses in a small pinasse) were unloading massive bulls into the road. The bulls, whose legs were bound as if they were planning to win a 3-legged race, were shepherded by a couple of teenage boys holding ropes tied to their back legs. Four groups of bulls funneled out of the pirogues into the narrow road. I watched as the teenage boys struggled to control the bulls meters away from me. Cars zoomed up behind the bulls and only a few feet away noticed the thick walls of livestock zig-zagging along the road. Motos zoomed around the cows and I tried to stay a couple of steps behind them – always anticipating an impromptu and unscripted running of the bulls. Only in Mali would one worry about being hit by both a moto and a pack of bulls in a regional capital.
Yesterday we completed 17 surveys. Today it is raining (12 hours straight and counting): the roads are ruined and people are sleeping, so I suspect we will do none.
Yesterday I went on one of my cross town adventures. I was headed from Khasso neighborhood over to the Peace Corps house in Legal Segou to check my email. My friend Brandon (aka supreme Bamanan speaker and esteemed mayor of Bamako and Kayes)had graciously allowed me to sit in on one of his interviews, so that I could meet one of his many Kayes VIP contacts.
I walked down a narrow road along the river. The road, unlike most in Kayes, was paved. Decaying colonial buildings walled in the road. Large trucks transporting merchandise from Senegal lined the walled street, thus making the road narrower and narrower. The road cuts through a market and as darkness fell, people, cars, and motos dodged in, out, and around the layers of building and trucks. About half the way through my walk, pirogues coming across the river (the bridge is out and everyone and everything crosses in a small pinasse) were unloading massive bulls into the road. The bulls, whose legs were bound as if they were planning to win a 3-legged race, were shepherded by a couple of teenage boys holding ropes tied to their back legs. Four groups of bulls funneled out of the pirogues into the narrow road. I watched as the teenage boys struggled to control the bulls meters away from me. Cars zoomed up behind the bulls and only a few feet away noticed the thick walls of livestock zig-zagging along the road. Motos zoomed around the cows and I tried to stay a couple of steps behind them – always anticipating an impromptu and unscripted running of the bulls. Only in Mali would one worry about being hit by both a moto and a pack of bulls in a regional capital.
Yesterday we completed 17 surveys. Today it is raining (12 hours straight and counting): the roads are ruined and people are sleeping, so I suspect we will do none.
Goodbye Bamako, Welcome to Kayes
My first and only visit to Kayes was in 2003. Drissa and I were taking the train from Bamako to Dakar and we stopped halfway (24 hrs) through our journey. I remember eating delicious fish and rice during that brief stopover, but that is about all.
Besides the railroad, Kayes is famous for a few other things. It is fabled to be one of the hottest cities in the world (supposedly the iron ore below the earth pulls the heat in); Kayes was the original French colonial administrative capital in present-day Mali. The French built the firsts schools here in the 1880s. In a contemporary context, Kayes serves as a customs junction between the ports in Senegal and landlocked Bamako.
I arrived in Kayes on Sunday. My team and I are staying with my Aunt Djeneba (who ran for mayors)’s family. It is a large concession with trees in the middle. I’ve had to adjust to family-style living: no inside toilet – just an outside “nyegen” (a whole in the ground with cement walls around it, no personal space (my suitcase sits on a series of other suitcases along the wall – I rifle through my suitcases to find items as needed); I sleep outside on a bed with a mosiquito net surrounded by women and children watching TV (people greet me as I sit in mosquito net feeling rather like a pet or zoo animal). I had a David Sedaris moment the other day when I brought some butter cookies into the nyegen with me so that I could eat them in isolation because I didn’t want to have to share.
That said, the pros of my set-up completely outweigh the cons. That a family could so quickly accommodate 4 people is incredible. Completely unlike me trying to run a Bamako house, everything is done for me here. People assembly and disassembly my bed, they bring out food, buckets of water to wash with, chairs, etc. And the food!!! The food here is incredible. A couple of months into my fieldwork I had decided that I no longer liked most Malian food. Kayes has changed everything. I eat and love every sauce that is presented – even the leafy ones like fahgwe and saga saga. I try everything – a Peule woman cam by with fresh yogurt milk which I drank and I am currently sipping millet pourridge as a I write. The food in Kayes is so much better than the food in Bamako. I have asked people here why and they say that it is because the servants cook in Bamako and in Kayes the women in the family cook. Evidence A is my Aunt’s incredible 70/80 something mother who must sleep less than 4 housr a night, who tirelessly prepares breakfast for us every morning. The other theory is that Bamakoise eat out of their homes less often and are thus less invested in food preparation. Whatever the reason I am happy that my faith in Malian food has been restored.
Besides the railroad, Kayes is famous for a few other things. It is fabled to be one of the hottest cities in the world (supposedly the iron ore below the earth pulls the heat in); Kayes was the original French colonial administrative capital in present-day Mali. The French built the firsts schools here in the 1880s. In a contemporary context, Kayes serves as a customs junction between the ports in Senegal and landlocked Bamako.
I arrived in Kayes on Sunday. My team and I are staying with my Aunt Djeneba (who ran for mayors)’s family. It is a large concession with trees in the middle. I’ve had to adjust to family-style living: no inside toilet – just an outside “nyegen” (a whole in the ground with cement walls around it, no personal space (my suitcase sits on a series of other suitcases along the wall – I rifle through my suitcases to find items as needed); I sleep outside on a bed with a mosiquito net surrounded by women and children watching TV (people greet me as I sit in mosquito net feeling rather like a pet or zoo animal). I had a David Sedaris moment the other day when I brought some butter cookies into the nyegen with me so that I could eat them in isolation because I didn’t want to have to share.
That said, the pros of my set-up completely outweigh the cons. That a family could so quickly accommodate 4 people is incredible. Completely unlike me trying to run a Bamako house, everything is done for me here. People assembly and disassembly my bed, they bring out food, buckets of water to wash with, chairs, etc. And the food!!! The food here is incredible. A couple of months into my fieldwork I had decided that I no longer liked most Malian food. Kayes has changed everything. I eat and love every sauce that is presented – even the leafy ones like fahgwe and saga saga. I try everything – a Peule woman cam by with fresh yogurt milk which I drank and I am currently sipping millet pourridge as a I write. The food in Kayes is so much better than the food in Bamako. I have asked people here why and they say that it is because the servants cook in Bamako and in Kayes the women in the family cook. Evidence A is my Aunt’s incredible 70/80 something mother who must sleep less than 4 housr a night, who tirelessly prepares breakfast for us every morning. The other theory is that Bamakoise eat out of their homes less often and are thus less invested in food preparation. Whatever the reason I am happy that my faith in Malian food has been restored.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Happy Retirement Mom
My mother has just completed her last day of teaching summer school and the last day of her 34 year career! Congrats Mom! Enjoy the rest of your summer and think about coming to Bamako!!!
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Maggie's in Town
My best friend Maggie is visiting Bamako and doing a photo a day blog: www.bko24.blogspot.com.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Back in Bamako!
After 6 weeks in the US- Ghana - US, I was happily surprised how excited I am to be back in Bamako. I stepped off the plane into less than stifling heat that smelled like the Sahel ecstatic to be back home. Six weeks away had been a pleasant vacation - a nice rest from the wear and tear of hot season, but now a Bamako at 80 degrees was like a whole new (yet familiar) world. I came home to find my sub-letter in my bedroom and our cleaning guy Drissa living in my office. My courtyard has transformed into the neighborhood card spot. My dog - much to my delight and amazement - got fat! My nieces and nephews crawled and squirmed all over me as I distributed beenie babies from my grandmother. In thirty minutes they were already parading the stuffed animals across real livestock, attaching rubbery wire "leashes", and throwing them up into the air.
I have made a pact with myself to only update this blog while on Malian soil, but here I will offer a quick update of the last month and a half of activities. In 6 weeks away I conducted a mini East Coast tour (NYC-Ithaca- NJ-Philly) and saw great friends, family, my dog, and my husband. Activities included: house party in brooklyn, lots of Ithaca fun, my mom's retirement party, snuggling Zumana, and a weekend date with Drissa to Philly (I love that city). Then spent 3 weeks with 20 profs from all over Africa at the American Political Science Association Africa Conference in Accra. Accra was overwhelming - there was a mall and coffee shops and a Shoprite! In addition to the intellectual exchange, I got to check out dwarf soccer, bring Obama posters to local nightclubs, visit an Ashanti palace, and jump into freshwater in Africa for the first time ever. Go Team APSA Accra! Jokers foreva? A special shout out to my comrade Jessica - who traveled 12 hours overland to come visit me in Ghana - it was fabulous.
So, now back to work. It's nice to be home.
I have made a pact with myself to only update this blog while on Malian soil, but here I will offer a quick update of the last month and a half of activities. In 6 weeks away I conducted a mini East Coast tour (NYC-Ithaca- NJ-Philly) and saw great friends, family, my dog, and my husband. Activities included: house party in brooklyn, lots of Ithaca fun, my mom's retirement party, snuggling Zumana, and a weekend date with Drissa to Philly (I love that city). Then spent 3 weeks with 20 profs from all over Africa at the American Political Science Association Africa Conference in Accra. Accra was overwhelming - there was a mall and coffee shops and a Shoprite! In addition to the intellectual exchange, I got to check out dwarf soccer, bring Obama posters to local nightclubs, visit an Ashanti palace, and jump into freshwater in Africa for the first time ever. Go Team APSA Accra! Jokers foreva? A special shout out to my comrade Jessica - who traveled 12 hours overland to come visit me in Ghana - it was fabulous.
So, now back to work. It's nice to be home.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
