Ya
making improved shea-butter
I am not sure what the protocol should be in terms of maintaining the privacy of my villagers as far as this blog is concerned, but the fact is, I don’t think any one reading this will be meeting any of the people of Kola any time soon, if ever at all, so these names might just as well be fictive. Even so, for the sake of protecting the interest and privacy of Kola’s villagers, I will withhold last names, and perhaps just hint at them (those who are a little familiar with Mali should know that, given there are only about twenty last names in Mali, your chances of guessing someone’s last name off the bat are pretty good). But anyway…here goes the first post:
I love that “Ya” is a legitimate name in Mali. My host brother’s name is “Yaya”, and my forty-something year old neighbor friend is also named “Ya”. As my neighbor-friend is a woman, the name is apparently cross-gendered. I may be mistaken. The name may just be short for something, like a nickname, but I’ve never heard these people called anything other than “Yaya” and “Ya”. When yelled across the courtyard, as it usually is, “Yaya” is also pronounced “YA!”
In any case, I’d like to try to describe “Ya”, as she is older and more interesting than my seventeen-year old host brother “Yaya” who spends his vacation days pimped-out in baggy pants and an oversized yellow baseball cap, grabbing his crotch, listening to Akon, awkwardly trying his game with his older tubab (white) sister, and….reading the English dictionary under my mango tree. His goal is to make it to America , like his older brother, and become the next Akon, who, for those who aren’t familiar with Akon, is a rapper with Senegalese origins. Well, maybe Ya is sort of interesting in his prototypical teenager way. But I think I’ll leave him for a later post.
So just yesterday I took the early bus into Bamako, with Ya, who I had chosen to come with me. The goal of the trip was to do a hit and run visit to one of Bamako’s many markets, Marche de Medina, or Sugu Kura, in order to buy a bunch of shea-nut boiling materials, so that Kola’s recently formed shea-butter co-operative can transition from roasting their nuts to boiling their nuts so as to get better prices for there butter. I wrote a really long, descriptive, shea-butter-themed e-mail a while back, so I will try to spare you all the details again now.
Before describing the success of our trip yesterday, I wan’t to say something about Ya. She is one of my favorite people in the village, and though generally a pretty subdued, behind-the-scenes sort of person, she has basically taken the reins and become the leader of this shea-butter experiment-of-sorts that is happening in Kola right now. She was the first one who got really interested when I started talking to Kola’s women about changing their shea-butter production techniques, she was the one who attended the ameliorated shea-butter training in Banamba, organized several months ago by another Peace Corps volunteer, she is also my go-to person before I hold women’s group meetings as she has, for months, always been able to understand anything I say, from the first time I say it, even when my Bambara skills really aren’t there to relay whatever fairly-technical shea-butter related thing I want to say. Anyway, when the other women in the shea co-op give me exasperated or impatient looks, mimic my Bambara, and say “what do you want to say? can you hurry up? we are tired and want to go home!” (This is generally said in good fun, but will often make me want to go in my little mud house and escape Mali for a while), Ya is pretty much always there, always patient and ready to segin a kan, or “say again”, what I have just said, but in more eloquent Bambara.
Ya, with her third grade education, which is quite hard to come by in women of her age-group (mid-forties), has been, for awhile, a leader of Kola Bambara’s women’s credit group, which meets on a weekly basis, and depending on the time of year, after lunch or after dinner. Since she can write, she was also nominated secretary of Kola’s shea co-operative. She is one of the many people in Kola who strike me as incredibly smart, and who, in the end sadden me, because I always think of the wasted potential of these people who could, under different circumstances, go a lot farther but have not been given the opportunity to do so. That said, I think Ya is pretty happy, and she is lucky to have been given, or to have been chosen-by a very kind, smart, and honest-seeming Malian farmer. I noticed him two nights ago with his little toddler on his lap, giving him little kisses on his stomach, which is a very rare site in Mali. So any way, unlike some Malian women I know and feel really sorry for, Ya and her co-wives seem to be in really good hands.
Ya’s whole family is also really good-looking. She and all of her children have a lighter complexion than most, and she has passed on her huge green-ish eyes and curled eyelashes to all of them. My twenty-three year old sister, Fatim, once pointed out to me that Ya used to basically be the beauty of the village, but that years of work in the fields have tired and aged her prematurely. Though I know she works really hard, I don’t know if Malian life has really taken all that much of a toll on her appearance. She is still quite pretty.
In any case, Ya and I came into Bamako yesterday to buy our shea-boiling materials. At first, I was a little hesitant about coming in with her, and wondered whether the shopping couldn’t have just been done myself. Walking into the Peace Corps headquarters in Bamako with her was particularly awkward. The guard, who provided her with her fancy ”guest pass”, which I helped pin to her dress, lectured her about not having travelled with her “carte d’identite”. Then, passing about fifteen shiny white Land Cruisers and a few dozen recently-arrived volunteer bicycles, still with their plastic wrap on, we walked into the air-conditioned Peace Corps computer lab so I could drop off my bag full of books I have either read or decided I have no interest in reading.
This is the kind of situation where the whole “haves/have nots” dichotomy becomes glaringly and painfully obvious to me, and I begin to feel that my life out in the village is really just comic. It’s like some sort of joke or farce. I wonder what is going through Ya’s head in this computer lab, though she doesn’t say anything. When we got off the bus, Ya had mentioned something about having a relative in Bamako who she had wanted to call. I had told her she could use the Peace Corps bureau phone. Once in the bureau, I lead her to it, but she makes me dial, as she clearly has never seen or used a landline-phone before (on the otherhand, let me clarify here that ninety-percent of Kola’s villagers have Nokia cell phones. I don’t want to send the wrong message. In some ways, Kola is very avant-garde. Cell-phones arrived before landlines). I ask, a little hesitantly, if she needs to use the bathroom, and am thankful that she doesn’t. I am not sure if she would know what to do with a flush-toilet. I also wonder what she is thinking about these computers.
So anyway, we get lunch at the “rice-lady” outside the Peace Corps bureau with another volunteer and then take off into the market. We walk around for a bit, not knowing where to find the giant cauldrons and large ladles. I keep suggesting we ask someone, but for some reason, maybe a combination of embarrassment and pride, she decides she can find everything without asking. Twenty-minutes later, we find the cauldrons, and start the bargaining. I am, in the end, very happy to have Ya with me. Though our prices end up being over what we had originally estimated, she is a viscious bargainer, and doesn’t give in. I think she actually scared the merchants. So anyway, charged with all of our cauldrons, ladles, and burlap bags, we head to the bus station and just make the 3:30 bus. I put her on it, and tell her I’ll see her tomorrow. I need my couple of days of anonymous bliss in Bamako. I also need to vote for our president.
Ok, well I need to catch today’s 3:30 bus. Will hopefully update again next week. Hope all is well in the States.
