Picturama!!!

I'm feeling really really patient today so I updated the whole blog and went back to add pictures here and there... Here are a few more fun ones, enjoy! Only three weeks or so to go, and I'm not ready to go back home... Time flies when you're having fun and learning lots, that sure is no lie! Of course, I can't wait to see all of you, though, so I'll be hopping on that plane. Because school is cool. Argh.

My boys in Waterloo should enjoy this one. My maple syrup obsession, confirmed!

This one goes out to my Waterloo boys as well, or anyone else into Ultimate Frisbee. Here is a picture of a cute kid with the world's most beat up frisbee. Oh you should see the other side of it. It's all black from their attempt to melt the thing back together. Here's the best part: they still play with it every day. I don't know how they manage to get that thing flying, because it weighs a ton, but it makes you appreciate their love for the game!

I think this one so cute. This is my girl Em and I when we went clubbing in Sévaré. The party stopped when there was yet another power outtage ahaha!

This is my best buddy Amadou. He took me to the traditional brewery where they make Chapata. You really need to get used to the taste, but the whole tour explaining the brewing process, given by Amadou himself pretending to be a great brewmaster, made it all worth the trip :)

Development with a capital D

My next big adventure consists of a five day escape to Ségou, some 7 hour bus ride away from Sikasso, for a mini-internship at the FODESA. Alex, another short term EWB volunteer from the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, was assigned a placement with this extraordinary NGO. When Louis had come for a routine check-up before the retreat, he had detected my falling motivation. I suspect he was still under the charm of the exemplary pro-poor approach used by the organisation after coming straight from Alex’s routine check-up, but he suggested that I take a few days off to go see what a functionning NGO is capable of on the field. I knew that I could benefit from observing experienced facilitators and that I would apply any found best practices to improve my interactions with villagers in the vitamin project. So I wrote up a nice letter to the FODESA coordinator, who was already familiar with Engineers Without Borders for having worked with Alex. I clearly stated my objectives, rubbed them the right way (because they actually deserve it, don’t get me wrong) and then patiently waited for their enthusiastic approval.

The bus ride to Ségou was an adventure in itself. That day everything happened so fast. I had been trying to reach Alex for days now. I found his “green light” in my inbox and I was immediately anxious to get going. Four months in Mali is so little time, and I wanted this learning experience to happen as soon as possible so that I could use it to a maximum. But Alex was impossible to get a hold of. I finally got through to him on a Tuesday at 4 PM. He told me that ideally, I would make it to Ségou that same night, that we would go into the office the next day for me to meet everyone, and that I would leave the next for a rural area with an employee from Promavie. FODESA Ségou contracts out to another NGO specialized in village facilitation to do start-up and follow-up work directly with the involved villagers, prior to and following the implementation of the appropriate technology selected by the beneficiaries. The idea was for me to leave Thursday morning with a facilitator and be his partner for three days.

Diallo drove me immediately to the bus station, where one little indie bus was getting ready to leave for Ségou at 6 PM. I asked how long was the ride, did the generous math accounting for the countless stops, and asked clearly: “Alright, so this means that I will be in Ségou tonight at about 1 AM, right?”. They assured me that this was the case. I phoned Alex back: “Allo, Alex? Hey, I’ll be there early morning, around one-ish. How do I get to your place?”. I went back home, threw a few essetials in my backpack, bought a snack for the road, and I was on my way.

By 11:30 PM we were only halfway, in Koutiala. The driver decides that there is more money to make if we wait for the bus to fill up in the morning, since we lost many passengers at this stop. “We’ll be spending the night”, kindly informed me another passenger who must have pitied my tired, confused look that screamed out “I am in no condition to even try to follow this conversation in Bambara right now!”. So I made friends with some young dudes making omelettes on the side of the road. I tracked down a guy with a cell phone to let Alex know that I wouldn’t make it in that night. I then had my typical bread/2-eggs/warm-mayo combo, chatted for a while with these guys, and lied down for a snooze across a full row of seats in a different, narrow bus that ended up taking me to Ségou when the sun came up. I made it into the office with undereye circles reaching my armpits, but here things went more smoothly. I would actually leave for the villages the next day. I thought I was dreaming: was part of our plan actually turning out? “Alex, pinch me!”.

Alex took me to see his friends at the djembe shop. We chilled on the front porch as Alex played some familiar tunes and his friends tightened the skins on the djembes as they smoked a few joints. We bought some trafitional malian alcoholic drink and we all moved to the resto-bar where they were performing that night. I knew it was time to go when I wouldn’t even get my butt off the chair for a little dance and that I was nodding off despite the pounding right next to my ears...

Alex posing and Jean-Luc on the left, who was just arriving when I left Ségou to go back home
The next morning, bright and early, I was sitting on the back of Khader’s motorcycle. Khader is an amazing thirty-something year old man with the world’s coolest job. I followed him around to visit the many villages under his responsibility with already installed appropriate technology projects, where he would hold meetings with the villagers or women organisations to build capacity and address concerns. We also visited the other villages who were at the requesting stage for a certain technology project. This means that he would help the villagers organize themselves to conduct activities to raise the required 10% of the project cost. FODESA finds the partners that will invest the other 90% of the total amount.

Visiting a FODESA community garden

The beauty of the FODESA method is that they first approach certain counties and ask them which communities are most in need. FODESA then sends contractors on the field in these specific villages to perform a week-long feasibility study. A team of specialists settle in the village for a week to run a series of participatory activities with the villagers. The result of this initiative is a very complete “Rapport Diagnostic” which draws a comprehensive socio-economic portrait of the village. Some villages identify “Poor access to clean water” while others will identify “No income generating activities”. There is clearly a long list of possible constraints, but most correspond to something in the menu of appropriate technology projects that the FODESA offers.

Once again, the FODESA does not do the implementation of the technology with its own staff, but instead contracts out to specialized NGOs or companies in the particular domain. The FODESA simply plays a coordination role, placing the big bucks in the right places. It ensures that the right technologies end up in the right places by having the demand originate from the villagers who identify their constraints on their own during the feasibility study, and it provides the necessary follow-up to ensures the sustainability of the chosen technology. All in all, their approach is hard to beat: if I was an NGO, I would want to be the FODESA!

An MFP women cooperative meeting. Can you spot Khader, the only man on the picture?

Welcome to Sikasso Beach (now don’t be fooled, there is no such thing as a beach in Mali!)

The time has now come for me to describe my “new” surroundings. Okay, perhaps they are not so new anymore, since it may have been over a month since I moved here... But between a little bit of malaria (please note: there is no such thing as a little bit of malaria), a 5-day escape to Ségou, another 5-day escape in one of our vitamin villages and absolutely no days off in between, I have had problems finding the time or simply accessing a computer to update my blog. The MFP project has still not received the 2006 funds necessary to start up the activities in the different regions of Mali. Which means that the Sikasso office physically exists, with computers, printers, photocopiers, a conference room and everything Diallo and I could possibly dream of to keep the show on the road but... the power was turned off long ago because the bills were not paid!

Ahhhh! So we simply do without, going around harassing Diallo’s (rich!) family in the area. Yet again another reason to be thankful for the extended family concept in Mali. Uncles and aunts are doctors or owners of large, prosperous companies. Diallo is also somehow related to one of the two notaries in Sikasso (for a total of less than 40 in the country, to give you an idea of how special that makes him). So I am actually writing this from the notary office. Mohamed has kindly granted me the use of a computer for two days while Diallo took the 8-hour bus ride back to Sévaré to pick up his cheque.

Thinking back now to life in Sévaré, Sikasso feels like a different country altogether. First of all, when I first moved to Sikasso in a packed, old, decorated school bus in the middle of the night, I was woken up by some intense shivers running through my body. And it wasn’t even malaria (yet)!!! It was simply air: the suffocation was over. The wind entering the bus no longer made you feel like you were standing in front of a massive hair dryer. I had reached heaven. I don’t even know how I had managed to fall asleep in the first place. Our bus driver, apparently exhausted, had been driving in a giant slalom across the paved road while the front passengers, sitting right next to me, had been taking turns yelling to keep him awake. They were holding on for dear life and that of forty oblivious others who had long left for a few hours in the arms of Morpheus. Our time had not yet come, so the three prayer stops we made along the way must have paid off (I suspect what they were praying for), because we made it in one piece.

Within a week of my arrival in Sikasso, I moved in with the family of one of Keïta’s wives. Keïta is one of the technicians at the MFP Sikasso office. There was enough space for a bed in the servant’s bedroom, so I moved in with her. She is a lovely young Peul lady also named Awa. Like the majority of the other Peul women, she has the characteritic black permanent tatoo surrounding her mouth, numerous earrings and a thin, elegant silhouette. We got along immediately, though we couldn’t understand very much of each other. If a picture is worth a thousand words, gestures, I believe, are worth much more! Here is a bad picture of us in our room.

The yard was very lively, full of adorable children with their typical screams, cries and giggles. It seems as though one of the little girls, Mariam, made it her objective to become more reliable than my shadow. From experience, I know that these little girls are the key to fast integration in a family, so I very much appreciated her company. But I left for a few days to go to my mid-placement retreat in the Pays Dogon, and I came back to a nearly empty yard. The kids had gone to Bamako to spend the summer with their cousins and grand-parents. No need to say that I was quite disappointed. From what I can tell this is a popular move in rich families that do not depend on agriculture. In farming families, the reverse phenomenon is true: all their children come back from the cities to go lend a hand in the family fields. Some had originally left after harvest to go to school in the city, if they could afford it. The less fortunate had gone in an attempt to find employment.

One thing that strikes me about Sikasso is the absence of in-your-face extreme poverty on the side of the roads. As opposed to Sévaré, I saw no women bathing in roadside puddles after the rain. People here greet me with regular salutations rather than a difficult “Donne-moi 100 francs!”. The streets are not filled with young children pleading for food destined to their marabou in their tomato cans recycled in buckets. You never have to run for cover because of a sandstorm, but instead you better watch out for an unannounced downpour. There is maïze everywhere you look! It is tall, green, strong and has nothing to do with the large, dry fields of Sévaré, where it was difficult for me to imagine anything ever growing...

Hence tô and baga are both made of maïze here, rather than the drought resisting cereal (mil, I don’t really know what that translates to) used in Sévaré, which makes it much more pleasant to eat. Baga is a basically corn flour and water. Rich families, or in poor families the head of the household, add milk powder and sugar. I couldn’t tell if it was the colour, the actual taste of the cereal, or some particular spice that perhaps everybody uses that made me gag in most (all?) Sévaré traditional meals... But those days are over, since I have been pleased with any and every thing that found its way to my stomach since I made it here. My stomach and and my tastebuds still disagree, though, and it looks as though I will have to deal with a “ventre qui coule” until my return to Canada. And according to past EWB volunteers and past experience after my return from Peru, it’s not as simple as walking off the plane and your tummy bugs (bacteria, amoebas, worms?) are gone. They have a frustrating tendency to overstay their welcome...

Mmmm... tô!