I am sitting in a barricaded, air-conditioned internet cafe in Bamako, on the main East-West drag, the “route de Koulikoro”, somewhere between the Peace Corps Bureau and the Hotel Tamana. My mom’s visit to Mali came to a close last night when I accompanied her on the long taxi ride from our charming oasis-like French hotel out to Bamako’s “Senou” airport, a good half an hour south of the city. I could have gone to the Peace Corps bureau to write this post, but the prospect of a crowded computer room combined with a reluctance to jump back into my normal pace of life as a Peace Corps Volunteer, has caused me to seek temporary shelter in this excedingly clean and modern internet place. So before worrying about the reproducive health classes I need to be planning, our non-functioning shea butter cooperative, and the stalled nutrition/baby-weighing campaign in Kola, I am going to try to synthesize these past couple of weeks with “Mama Dowell”, so as to convince myself that this whirlwind trip really did happen.
At some point around the time of Obama’s inauguration, I got a surprising text message from my dad telling me to call back as soon as possible regarding “your mother’s trip to Mali!” News of this trip came as a complete surprise, as I had left home after Christmas with the idea that no one in my immediate family would be visiting me in Mali. If I were living just about anywhere else in the world, I would have had to really scramble to make hotel reservations and plan transportation . Fortunately though, I live in West Africa, where things tend to miraculously come together, and the way of life is favorable to last minute planning (though this is probably becoming less true in terms of booking places at the artsy hotels or chic thai restaurants that are popping up in Mali like the ones I will soon mention). So, while I was a little stressed out about the length of my mom’s trip–sometimes even losing sleep over thoughts of how on earth we were going to keep ourselves occupied for two whole weeks in Mali, I still wasn’t worried enough to start planning the trip before the day my mom arrived. I should actually mention that one thing that did stress me out a bit about my mom’s trip, maybe more than its length, was the climate factor. Mali’s hot season basically begins in mid-February and continues on through May, when the first rains come. The warmest months are April and May when it gets into the 110s and even 120s in some areas. The high season in terms of tourism ends right about now. I was having visions of my mom and me waking up at dawn and going on a pre-breakfast walk to avoid the heat of the day, lazing under my mango tree from noon until around three, and then regaining our strength and resolve for an afternoon stroll through the village. In the end, I completely underestimated my mom’s stamina and ability to adapt seemlessly from one climatic and cultural context to another. I was often the one who was complaining of heat and physical and mental exhaustion. Anyway, onto the trip itself…
My mom’s flight arrived in Bamako on Wednesday, February 18th at 9:20 pm. It just so happened that another volunteer named Amanda had a mom coming in on the same flight. Since we were staying at different hotels, we didn’t head out together, but were able to find each other at the arrival gate, where we laughed and worried a bit about how each of our mom’s was going to manage getting through the baggage claim area . We exchanged information on the physical appearances of our respective mother’s so as to help each other locate them. I was a little disappointed in myself for not knowing what length my mom’s hair was, but I said confidently that she will be wearing Indian clothes. The other Amanda described her mom as “red haired and frazzled”, but at first I though she said “red hair and frizzy”, which made me really confused when I saw a frizzy redhead walk out who Amanda completely ignored. I located my mom first–I was surprised at how together she seemed given that she had just come off a long transatlantic flight with an anticlimactic destination. Anyway, shortly afterward, the other Amanda found her mom, and we headed off to the city and our separate hotels.
My mom spent her first evening in Bamako in the city’s hippest area: “the hippodrome”. Our jungly french hotel/ “guest house” (I still haven’t figured out what defines a ”guest house”) is located right across from a trendy club called the “bla bla”, which, according to the guide book, is popular with Bamako’s “art scene” (??). It really amuses me how journalists describe Bamako. Anyway, all along the street running perpendicular to the hotel are various bars and restaurants which are bustling, even on a Wednesday night. Again, I wasn’t quite prepared for my mom’s stamina. After moving into our immaculate room at the hotel Tamana, my mom was the first to suggest that we freshen up and hit the clubs (she didn’t quite say it like that). I think she was hoping to have a poignant experience somewhat like the one she had in Madagascar when I took my parents to see some live-music and she exchanged a smile with a Malagasy prostitute. Her night in Bamako may not have lived up to these standards, but “La Terrasse” , the club we chose to go to, still provided some good people watching.
After spending a day and another night in Bamako, during which we visited the “national museum of Bamako”, and walked around the city a bit, my mom and I headed to the village. The village experience is almost a complete blur for me, partially because I was running on such little sleep (that whole week I was having really bad insomnia), but I do remember that both my mom and I were completely overwhelmed by the welcome that she received. The bus we took from Bamako didn’t arrive until after dark, but we got off the bus to find around fifteen village women awaiting our arrival. Children became little porters and took all of our baggage to my house. That first night is really a blur, but I do remember my host mom coaching my real mom on how to eat with her right hand. I also remember all of the meals we ate, because it was all remarkably better than what I am used to, which I made sure my mom understood. (It is important for her to know that her village experience, during which she was welcomed by a constant procession of villagers bearing chickens, guinea fowl, fresh fish, eggs, and different Malian dishes, in no way resembles my day to day Peace Corps experience.)
Highlights from the village stay include watching my mom slowly but surely get a handle on the outdoor bathroom situation and hearing her impressions of the villagers, particularly those who I really appreciate, and seeing that they have made similarly strong impressions on her, despite the language barrier.
Though the village experience was a highlight for my mom, I was happy to get out and experience Mali as a tourist, looking forward to experiencing the luxurious but fair-priced hotels I had previously admired from afar in Segou and Mopti, and learning about the history of the country, which I have pretty much failed to do during my year and a half as a Peace Corps volunteer. I did learn a ton about Malian history during these past couple of weeks with my mom, but the transition from volunteer life to life as a tourist was much harder than I expected and often put me in a foul mood. I loved the romantic sunset pirogue ride we took on the Niger in Segou, but I was disturbed by the subsequent tour of the “Bozo fishing village” on the other side of the river. There is something really unnatural and wrong about walking around a village where people are busy barely getting by, and snapping photos as if they were zoo animals. My mom was busy documenting the fishing nets rather than the people, but in general, I was really strict with her about picture taking throughout the whole trip; probably much more than I should have been. She was never rude or invasive about it. I was just scarred by the German guy I once saw with a huge telephoto lens sticking into a Malian woman’s face. Peace Corps has made me a really self-conscious tourist. I don’t like the voyeuristic element to touring other countries, and the racial divide makes me all the more uncomfortable with the whole situation. I definitely noticed a harder edge to the Malians in Segou and the Dogon country than the ones in Kola, and I am sure this is directly related to all of the tourism in these areas. For instance, I was deeply disturbed and frustrated when I greeted a Malian woman on a donkey cart in Segou and she just stared back with an angry, hurt expression–maybe she has had one too many photos taken of her by strange white people.
From Segou, a city which both my mom and I really like (despite the jaded nature of some of the people), we went to Djenne with a hired driver named Abdoulaye in his run down but reliable car. My mom had read about a nice hotel run by a Swedish woman in her Air France magazine on the flight over, and we were able to get a room there. What this former interior-designer has managed to build in two years completely blew me away, and while I left the place inspired to start flexing my own artistic muscle more in Kola, it also made me sort of insecure about the comparatively meager contributions I’ve been able to make to my own village in the past year and a half. I made up for this insecurity by speaking to her staff in Bambara…I think I got her there.
This hotel, the djenne djeno, named after an ancient city near today’s Djenne, is constructed out of mud, in the traditional Sudanese style which Djenne is famous for. The owner has managed to equip the place with interior plumbing and electricity, has impressive tropical gardens growing out of a desert landscape, and has even started an atelier supporting local artisans, where she designs her own hats and other textiles. Her place actually reminds me of a sand castle…as does the city of Djenne more generally, because the buildings need to be re-crepissaged (dont know the word in English) with a new layer of mud every year during the dry season. If not, they will gradually dissolve.
I am not going to go into detail about the tour of Djenne I took with my mom, during which I got really angry at our guide who had an attitude problem, and got really concerned that my mom was going to unintentionally buy out Djenne’s cultural heritage (she wanted to buy ancient beads and old Koranic school tablets). I was trying get a straight anser from someone to figure out if this was illegal or not. My favorite quote from our guide though, was when he got offended when I wanted to pay him seven bucks for the tour (already a rip off) and he said very seriously, “I have been in this business for fifteen years”. The guy couldn’t have been older than twenty-two. I think you sort of had to be there.
