The Power is in the Pagne

During the past two weeks at home stay I found myself getting more and more frustrated with the gender roles on Mali. Everyday I see women working so hard. Women are always the first ones awake in the morning-off fetching water, firewood and items for breakfast. While the breakfast is cooking the women start pounding corn or millet for the rest of the days meals. As the children awake, of course they want their Mamas, usually for nursing and simple affection that is given. As other family members rise, buckets of water are fetched for their bathing and breakfast is served

After breakfast, last night’s dishes must be washed and dirty clothes gather for laundering-by hand. Most women then head to the fields with babies and small children tied to their backs, leaving their daughters to finish washing clothes and preparing lunch. The women work alongside the men planting rice, or picking corn all the day long-heading home before it gets dark. While the women prepare supper the men tend to yala yala away the evening and half of the night at times only being home long enough to eat.

Currently most people are fasting throughout the day and only eating before the sun comes up and after the sun goes down. Everyone eats and then heads to the mosque when they are called to prayer. I had the opportunity to go to mosque with my grandparents. Wearing my veil I followed them and every other villager over the age of 60 to the mosque ( seemingly only the elderly go) as I start to head inside my arm is grabbed and I’m pulled backward-women don’t actually enter the mosque they pray outside. –Learning this only added to my frustration of women’s inequality! After going through the motions of the 30 min prayer I am told it is over and I turn to leave once again my arm is grabbed and I’m told I have to wait. The women have to wait until all of the men exit the mosque before they can leave! I don’t like it, and I don’t understand! Women work extremely hard all day long and cannot even enter into the same room to pray to the same God as the men.
After expressing my annoyance and frustration to a fellow volunteer I am reminded of a few Malian proverbs we were told upon arriving in Mali- one being “the power is in the Pagne. A Pagne is the fabric used to make the skirts wore by the women, and the fabric used to tie children to their backs. After being reminded of that I started to realize that no one really does give the women any grief about anything! They all know better! Children know if their mom finds out they did something bad they have a tree branch or a hard hand waiting for them at home. Men know not to argue-more often than not they stay silent and let the women get their say before walking away.

Also I remembered telling my PC recruiter at my interview that I didn’t need to have four walls, a roof and a sign saying United Methodist Church to praise and worship my God. So I guess these women don’t either. The walls of the mosque hold no special power, God still hears their prayers outside of its walls.

Another Malian Proverb that I have grown to liking is, “Whatever the beard says during the day was whispered to him by the braids the night before.”-Which is equally empowering to women!

This past round of home stay was full of Bambara classes-no “field trips” to Bamako, and nothing too exciting happened-but all of the classes paid off in the end because I passed my language exam! Right now most Malian are celebrating Ramadan like I previously mentioned, one great part about Ramadan is that my family still made me lunch a long with the big feast they ate every evening- so instead of fasting I was practically eating double. They break fast around 7:00pm eating millet porridge called Monni. It. Is. So. Good.!!! Everyone would eat monni and then there would always be something else, rice with sauce, to, or noodles- sometime even a third thing to eat. I would always eat at much monni as I possibly could and then only eat a few bites of the next course-which my family thought was hilarious. “Marium you ate too much monni! Your stomach is too full of monni,” or my favorite “ Marium your stomach is going to get really really big if you keep eating monni!”

My two weeks were also very full of conversations with my host family comparing Mali to America. One night when the moon was full, I asked my host mother the word for moon (Kalo) then she asked me if we had a moon in America. I told her yes, we do, and I tried to explain that it was the same moon in American as in Mali. She seemed to believe me, until I told her it was the same sun too. Then she just thought I was crazy! “ Ohh Marium you don’t know what your saying! Its hotter here than America, it can’t be the same sun!”
One night my host father decided he wanted to learn English, and I was going to teach him. Greeting people is really important here in Mali so I decided to teach him how to say “Good Morning, Good Afternoon, and Goodnight.” After he got that down he told me that he was going to keep studying English for the next two years and then he would come back to America with me and marry one of my friends -thinking this was a full proof plan until I told him a few facts about America. First I explained that in America men can only have ONE wife, and men cook, clean and wash their own clothes! He thought that was absolutely crazy! On my last full day at home stay he took me to the cornfield with him. We were picking corn and putting it on a pile and then gathering the pile into a big feed sack and then dumping the feed sack on to the back of a donkey cart-and when I say “we” I really mean “they”- I was hot, sweaty, dirty, it was muddy, I couldn’t keep my shoes on, and I was afraid of snakes; therefore I mostly chatted and followed others around the field pretending to work. When I told my host father that in America a machine does all of this he laughed so hard and said “Marium you are so funny!”

Since I had been sharing so many facts about America with my family, my host mother thought it would be a good idea for me to make American food for them before I left. So being really unprepared to actually cook something I decided to go with the classic peanut butter and banana sandwich. Malians use peanut butter in their sauces, but they only use a little bit so buying a lot of peanut butter at one time was a really hard concept for the lady selling peanut butter at the market. Explaining that I was going to put peanut butter and bananas inside of bread to eat was an even harder concept to explain to my family. But in the end they all ate it, and they loved it!

Since our education sector did not have any field trips to Bamako or anywhere this time around, we made time to have our own “Tubob time” One of these times we were climbing the rocks and having a really deep discussion as to why we were in Africa, and suddenly a lizard crawls across my friend and we all scream and then laugh-of course I’m laughing so hard and the next thing I know a lizard is crawling up my skirt! I jumped up, screaming and instantly became the talk of the town because when I told my family what happened they told the neighbors! Anyway before that happened, while having our quality time together we found ourselves talking about the things we do, and the things that occur in Mali that would never, or rarely be acceptable in America. We dubbed this “Wearing Mali Goggles”
Here is some of our list of things it is okay to do while wearing your Mali Goggles:
It’s okay to crap your pants
It’s okay to self medicate
It’s okay if you miss the hole
It’s okay to be given goat head for breakfast
It’s okay to not know what it is..that your eating..that your walking in..
It’s okay to have to get out and push three times in one trip
It’s okay to eat it…as long as it’s hot
It’s okay if a baby pees on you
It’s okay to be live entertainment
It’s okay insult people in English
It’s okay when people try to rub your moles off, or the white off your skin
It’s okay to no longer have standards…

* This is a running list that will be continued over the next two years…

As training is coming to an end we are all busy mentally preparing ourselves for the next two years. In a matter of days 81 new Peace Core Volunteers (we gained John from Botswana) will be sworn in to serve the next two years in Mali. This also means that with in a few days everything I’ve known as normal in the past 12 weeks is about to change. The people I’ve become friends with are being scattered all across this foreign country-BUT not until after we party on Friday!!