We just finished the third week at our homestay sites and are back at Tubaniso (PC training compound) for a few training sessions, but mostly to celebrate July 4th. Homestay is the majority of our overall ten-week training period and is an immersion approach that Peace Corps Mali adopted in the mid-2000s. Us 28 trainees are split between four villages and each live with individual families while learning the local language (Bambara). The first week was the hardest thing I have ever done. What did it involve? Mostly greeting and chatting with new people. It sounds comically simplistic, but that is really all we do other than go to classes – the difficult part was that the Peace Corps takes the strategy of “learning to swim by jumping in the deep end” to heart.
When we arrived at homestay, we had only been in the country for about a week with minimal language exposure and only knew how to greet, ask ones name and profession, and say goodbye – we knew no verbs and very little objects at that point. We were then dropped off with our families to live full-time for the remainder of training. One nice bonus is that we are all top-notch charades players now. I mentioned we knew how to greet, but I should clarify that greetings here are nothing to scoff at. When you run into another person on the street, whether complete stranger or lifelong friend, you open with a specific “hello” depending on the time of day, and then proceed to ask how each member of their family is. It doesn’t matter if you saw this person 10 minutes ago, or ten years: you always take the time to ask about everyone. To put this in perspective, every morning I walk to language class at 8am which is roughly 1km from my house down a quiet dirt road, and it can take up to 30 minutes to make that walk due to greeting everyone on the way.
Seven other Peace Corps Trainees (PCTs) and I are in one of the four homestay towns used by PC Mali. I’m probably being paranoid, but I will refrain from mentioning the specific village so as to avoid becoming yet another social media OPSEC nightmare in the news. We are roughly an hour outside of Bamako in a small agricultural village. Which brings me to my family. They are a fantastic group of people who live on an open-layout compound in the center of town and treat me as a real member of the family. As is common here, we have grandparents, siblings, cousins, etc, all living together and I’d say there are about 15 total who live there full-time. They have given me the name Soloman Diarra (nickname “Solo”) and that is what I am known by around town. Malians in general, are incredibly welcoming and that reputation is known all over Western Africa. Mine is an agriculture family and they farm rice, corn, millet, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, and mangoes. There was also something mentioned about cucumbers, but my language skills could not keep up – I think we harvest them but don’t own those fields. Also living with us are three donkeys, two cows, about ten chickens, eight goats, four sheep, and two cats. I’m being pretty literal when I say “living with us” because the animals roam around freely right outside our houses. One of the donkeys is tied up about 3m from my bedroom, and my morning entertainment while eating breakfast is watching the younger goats play “king of the hill” on a large pile of firewood. I was joking with the other PCTs about making a snooty polyculture-farming blog post, but it can be summarized by saying that it is the norm/standard here. The other impressive thing is that all of this is farmed by hand – there isn’t a single tractor in town and the loads are all hauled by donkey-carts.
I was given a room in my brother’s building in the back of the compound. It is a small structure with a concrete floor, mud walls, and a corrugated metal roof and door. The bathroom is a roofless latrine about 5m from my room which is simple but adequate and relatively clean. Showering also takes place there through use of a 15L bucket. The walls are shorter than I am when standing, but Malian culture stipulates that others can’t acknowledge or speak to someone using the facilities even if visible. I don’t have electricity in my room, but the Peace Corps has issued us solar charged lamps which provide decent lighting at night. My bike and water filter occupy the most space in my room other than my bed and mosquito net. My daily routine (6 days/week) involves waking up either by the mosque’s call to prayer at 5:30, or by the donkey brae a bit earlier than that (some day I hope to sleep until my 6am alarm). We have Bambara class from 8:00-12:30, return home for lunch from 12:30-14:00, and then back to language until 17:30. The rest of the evening involves sitting around attempting to chat (key word being attempt) with my family which is finally getting easier since we learned past-tense conjugations recently.
I’m sure there are a few people wondering about our security since the two recent attacks near the Cote d’Ivouir border were in the Sikasso Region of Mali where we will eventually be placed when we begin out two year positions. I will just say that our security team is watching the area closely, is quite risk-adverse, and I am not worried about our safety. Inshallah, Mali will be able to keep things stable enough for us to continue to operate.