Thursday, July 15, 2010

miss me?


of blogs and men


Hi everyone, welcome back. It dawns on me, that, in a world already over saturated with blogs and worse still, over saturated with people eagerly willing to treat the very idea of a blog as though it were the golden spined volume of some lost and cherished epic from days when people wore burlap and ate bear paws, that my blog has gone the way of so many inspriational and fantasticly leather bound editions of the past. In short the demands on the modern blogger by the salivating and clearly opinion starved masses is tatamount to some act of religeous prostration, daily flaggelating the keyboard in hopes of just one glance of the pixilated, 12point divinity that has informed there lives for so long. If I sound a bit self-importent there, its merely an inverse projection of the reality that I daily live here in Mali. That wouldnt be to imply that things are not going well over here. On the contrary, I am more comfertable here than I have been at any point in the past and having just now hit the one year mark, it seemed like a good time to remerge from the ether of blogosphereic obscurity and explain away all the lost weeks and months of blog free livin'. You see, its true that people want a blog, they like to read about all the kooky adventures befalling a peace corps volunteer, specifically one they know and love. But there comes a point when, even for a suburban white kid from america living in rural west africa, life just stops being all that terribly kooky and kinda just becomes real. Or, rather, some vauge semblanceof reality paste's itself on to the flimsy miasma of life here that I accept everyday. To exalt every little thing that I do here would have started to feel like, in this case, like a bit of a shame, because at the end of the day life here pretty much just goes on, which I find preferable to the alternative. As some of my doe eyed fellow bloggers have taken to doing, I too could describe waking up to golden sunrises and floating out to the furrowd, angel kissed fields on the most magical and inspiring donkey cart man has known, sowing gods own millet seeds whilst cherubian malian children dance and sing in tiny concentric circles of pure love. I could tell you about cool malian nights sitting around the sacred hearth drinking the sweet tea of life and discovering the depth and richness of the malian ethos, talking about love and war, politics and the crux of humanity. I could spin it tighter than a spider spins her web, but at the end of the day that would be a bit like guilding the millet stalk because in reality, my reality, mali aint like that. The fields are hot, the donkey carts, rickety, the children, often to emaciated to be cherubian in any context, sing racial epithets and swarm like bumbelbees, and the conversations rarely verge to far away from bean jokes and the repeted explination that the moon here is the same one as in america, only that it gets here first. I dont mean to sound cynical, I am not, and I do in fact like mali on the whole, if anything, I am now wide awake to this place, and its for this reason that I find bloggin so hard. I dont want to know who you bummped into in the checkout line at the wal mart today, or who looks good on dancing with the stars this season, and thus, I probaly find it hard to talk about the 1,798th time that I have explained why I am not married and how I oh so desperatly hope that allah will give me many wives in the near future.
Thats a little bleak I know, but its just an abrupt push into realism that I have come to cherish. Mali is the thrid pooerst country on earth and wears that distinction on its tattered sleave. But there are finer points, places that very nearly push me back into realms of the fantastic and for the sake of balance, ill describe just such a place now. Its called Manantali, thought the name is irrelevent, its situated in mali's extreme west on the Bafing river. Getting to Manantali is alot harder than it otherwise needs to be. begining in bamako on the infamous truckbus, a flatbed truck with a big box type construt on the back with seats. Truck bus is a neccesity becase the last half of the trip, or around 5 hours worth, are on something that is graciously called a road, in that, a road is a clearing through an other wise inpasable area. Our trip out there was uneventful, in the Malian sense of the word. It did rain for severel hours, and if you were like me, sitting next to the unclosable windows, you'd have been drier had you jumped into a swimming pool fully clothed. That wasnt so bad, rather cold, but at least I wasnt drenched in sweat which was the only other forseeable alternative. I had heard of the places virtues from the volunteers who live there, three people whom I now call the luckiest son's of bitches in the peace corps family. You come into Manantali on a cliff, high craggy exposed rockface hills surround the green, realativly lush vally that the old and ''new'' city sit in. The view is nearly epic, ill say, and vast. It's sort of lion king style, all that you see will one day be yours young simba. As thought the curtains have been drawn back on the very idea that beauty can exist in Mali. the centerpice of this vast expanse of newness, and beauty is the dam. I know very little about the historical logistics of the dam other then that a few years (decades?) ago, Germans came and decided to dam the Bafing. Hydroelectricity drives the region and keeps this otherwise isolated and unreachable area alive and relevent. There is one odd if not unfortunate tertiary expression of the dams otherwise virtueous existance in the region. The NEW city. Manantali, like all of mali is a mud and thatch kinda town. Their house's are largley round per regional asthetic mandate, but otherswise, just like the rest of the country. Just imagine a fiscally well to do German dam worker willingly living in a ramshackle malian burg whilst working on high level hydroelectric generation projects. That was apperently unthinkable to them and so they built there own city. The NEW city, a stucco, brick and mortar, manacured, landscaped and well paved similacrum of a droning suburban nightmere, as close an aproximation as Mali can muster under the guidene of xenophobic european overseers. Your likely to find a wall mounted AC unit in this part of town which, across the board, is a sign of wealth and prosperity in a country of plastic fans. Worse still is that, allegedly, there was a rule in place, No black people allowed. it was apperently Mali's first ''gated community.'' and kept that way until most of the dam workers had left the area. now, as the towns been reclaimed by malians, one cant help but marvel at the ghosts and signifiers of days gone by when they wernt even allowed to walk the very streets they live on. Even as nice as the new city is, it does still at times resemble a low rent housing project in america somewhere, the kind of place you lock your doors to drive through. The aminities are nice, some well stocked boutiqe's, an 'american club' with a swimming pool and a weight room, tennis courts and street lights, but its otherwise a very divisive place, full of contridiction. drawing similarities between my neck of the malian woods and manantali wood be like riding a tricycle in the tour de france. its beauty is vast. the peace corps stage house sits litteraly on the river, a small steep bank is all that divides the yard and the water. hippos frequent the area around the house and can be seen lazing in the water as clear as a high gloss national geographic photo. Monkies with with baby monkies on there backs live in the canopy of eucylyptus and neem trees that shade the area and giant, colorful lizards roam the underbrush. being about a kilometer back in the woods gives the peace corps house manantali the kind of isolation that people pay for when vacationing. I wont say that I wasnt a little bitter, all things being random and thus equal, MAN did I get the short end of the stick!! really though its just nice to know a place lile that exists...in a country like this. As i move foward, now approaching a series of ''lasts'' my last this or that in mali as the months tick by, rest assured that while I am an open book, willing to experience all that Mali has to offer me, well... dont hold your breath because until they pave the streets in gold, were still walking through the mud.