Fresh Blood

Some might say “fresh meat,” but not me. I’ve sworn off Peace Corps relationships. Hah, Peace Corps Volunteer Swear-in was in September and Peace Corps Volunteer Swear-off was last April. Still going strong on both accounts. I don’t know how easy it will be for the non-PCV to understand the volunteer community but let me try to expound. You spend weeks (months even) at a time as the one cultural and linguistic outsider in little village, trying to integrate and make a difference in the African’s lives. Then, every so often you get together with other Americans, other PCV’s. Ah, it’s like a relief just to speak your language and talk about things that people will easily understand and commiserate. The loneliness can make you kind of desperate for familial contact and this leads to PCV’s “hooking up” to various degrees. But this is how it goes down: you like someone and you have like 3 or 4 days where you can be together constantly and it’s great and comforting, etc. Then, you go back to village for some amount of time and weeks or months can pass before you see the PCV again and then you have to see if your feelings match up when you see them again. Sometimes there could be an expectation to sort of pick up where you left off. This was something I realized I was no good at fulfilling. Hence my swearing off of the whole fiasco. There are lots of other reasons like the wisdom of avoiding “pissing in your own pool” as it were. The PCV community is your family and they’re what you’ve got for the next year or two.

So that said (TMI? Try living here.), after a year of being the newbie group, it is nice to have some fresh blood to get us excited and to help us see Mali through innocent (or disturbed) eyes again. I heard a couple of stories from our new volunteers that I thought were funny and reminded me of being fresh (you know, like without the trauma of having suffered one hot season, knowing you are destined to suffer another).

Dorome Dorome

One of our new trainees said “when I found out about how they count money, I was ready to E.T. (early termination – go home) right then and there. I felt his pain. In Bambara (other languages have their own equivalent systems) money is counted differently than in French. Money is counted in a unit called the Dorome. The Dorome is not 1CFA but actually 5CFA. So when someone says something costs 10 Dorome, the price is 50CFA. WHAT the origins of this are, I have not yet discovered, but it makes a day at the market quite interesting. So I’ve gotten a lot better at multiplying things by five in my head, but I still screw it up sometimes. Enjoy the sample scenarios:

“How much for the bananas?”
“3, 10. 4, 20”
Translation: Some cost 50CFA for 3, others 100CFA for 4.

“One hundred and forty.”
500 + 200
700 CFA

OK try to keep up.

“One thousand, six hundred, seventy and five.”
5,000 + 3,000 + 350 + 25
8,375 CFA

“How much money did you end up with for your project?”
“Eighty-one thousand, two hundred and fifty”
405,000 + 1,000 + 250
406,250 CFA

Then you compound that by the way the French count. Did you know this? It goes:
10
20
30
40
50
60
60 10 (70)
4 20 (80)
4 20 10 (90)
Why can’t we just say seventy, eighty and ninety like in Spanish? Would that be so hard? So to say 95 you have to say “Four-Twenty-Ten and Five.” Am I the only one who finds this irritating? And don’t get me started on the French keyboard. The semicolon is one of the primary keys but you have to hit SHIFT+semicolon to get the period. Are they just trying to be difficult? WHO IN FRANCE IS USING THE SEMICOLON MORE THAN THE PERIOD? OK I’ve had my rant. I was just never that good at arithmetic or typing in the first place.

Finish your plate…
…there are people starving in Africa.

Ever heard this one growing up? Feel free to substitute Africa with China. Actually, I told some of my Chinese friends in Hawaii that this was an American saying and I don’t think they were as amused as I was. Anyway, I thought this other story was quite amusing.

So there is a trainee whose home stay family gives her bread every morning for breakfast. By all accounts they give her far more bread than should be expected to be eaten so she puts the rest in her bag for later consumption or whatever. So one morning after breakfast she’s on her way to class and she sees a typical (you know, malnourished) Malian dog. She takes pity and gets out her piece of leftover bread and tosses it to the pathetic thing. Wouldn’t you know it, but who should round the corner to witness this merciful act: a poor African child. His reaction was, what could only be described as a “what… the hell?” look of utter disbelief.

Oh, Africa. She’ll put your sympathies to the test, or at least put them into new perspectives.