The Name Game

It’s absolutely incredible that a month has passed since we swore in at the Ambassador’s house.  I arrived in my community on January 10^th and it’s been a roller coaster ride of a month let me tell you.  There are only 500 or so people living in our village and you would think it would make life easy as far as getting to know everyone is concerned.  I’ve discovered I can remember a face, but all the names go in my good ear and then get lost somewhere in the bad one.  

It’s tradition for all the villagers to stop in to greet the new person in the community, and so far there have been an endless stream of people coming to my house to say hello and check in with me to make sure all is going well.  It’s very kind of them.  Though, I have to admit, every morning I get a little bit of anxiety because I know I’m going to forget more than five people’s names.  This starts to get to me after the third or fourth person.  

I would like to add here that Malians LOVE to joke.  And when I say joke, it’s more of a teasing or messin’ with like we say in the south.  They mess with everybody; their families, their friends, their neighbors, and man oh man do they absolutely LOVE to tease the new white-ish girl who’s just moved to town.  I, like them, also take time to do the rounds to greet people, say good morning, and see if everyone has slept well.  They KNOW I can’t remember everyone’s names, and they get a big kick out of me when I get their names wrong.  Typically, when someone arrives, the person arriving will say the last name of the family they’re stopping in to visit.  In my case, no matter if I’m the one who’s arriving, or if they're arriving, they’ll yell my family name, “SUKO!”  Sure, it’s easy for them to remember my name, but good lord, there are just so many new people for me to remember, and FAIL.  It’s like a game to them.  They yell my name, rush over to me, and they just smile and wait with this teasing, shit eating grin on their faces.  What I’ve found that works to my benefit is that about 90% of the people in my village are either Sissoko’s or Keita’s, so now if I just guess one or the other I have roughly a 45% chance of being right.  They throw curve balls at me though and they sprinkle in a Djarra, Damba, Kanute, or Fofana from time to time, and there again, FAIL. 

 

Oh you just wait, it gets worse.  The women will have different names for specific families, but not all families.  Take my family name for example, Keita, all the men in my family are Keita’s but because I’m a woman I go by Suko.  And if you are a woman in the Sissoko family, you go by Sakiliba.  Sometimes family names will even have two different names for women.  Like some Keita women will go by Coulibaly, and Coulibaly and Suko are the same, duh.  Everybody knows that right.  Yeah, everybody except for the confused Peace Corps Volunteer who’s still struggling to recognize when people are talking to her because she has an entirely new name.  I’m convinced they think I am mentally challenged.  Sometimes they’ll call my name for a solid minute and a half before it registers that they are talking to me.  “Goundo, Goundo, Goundo, Goundo!” Nothing.  Then they start mumbling something about the silly Toubab and I realize, oh yeah, they’re talking to me.  By then it’s too late and they’re just shaking their heads smiling.  They always finish it up with a heartfelt, “Ah, Goundo.”  This is the routine.  Lately when people greet me and wait for the great name FAIL, I just run through the list of ALL the family names I can remember until I get it right.  But remember, this is only for the family names.  

It dawned on me the other day, “shit, people here have first names too you know Luna, I mean Suko, f@#k!”  See, I’ve gotten comfortable in the neighborhood of family names. With this first name business, I’m a little nervous, like I’m moving into a whole new neighborhood all over again.  My strategy is, I’m starting with the little kids, like ones that can barely speak.  They tend not to get their feathers so ruffled over this whole name game business.  The other day I was sitting in our concession with my host brother, Fasago Keita.  I got his name down after about two and a half weeks.  Not too bad.  Anyhow, we’re sitting there chatting and there’s a little girl in our family, she’s like 2 years old, and her name always escapes me.  I pointed at her and asked, “hey, what’s her name?”  He looked at her, then looked at me, and there she was just staring at both of us. There was a pregnant pause, then Fasago sheepishly smiled really big, and admitted he didn’t know!  Ha!  But then he quickly told me her family name was Suko in an effort to make himself look better.  Duh!  We’re all Keitas and Sukos here!  I gave that boy so much shit.  I gave him enough shit to make up for every single person who’d given me shit over the past month for getting their names wrong.  He just laughed and said, "Ah, Goundo."

Other than my daily rounds of playing the name game, I’ve been spending my time learning how to do the simplest of life’s tasks living in a village.  I’ve been adding to my furniture collection little by little.  I now have a table, a chair, AND a bed.  I’m happy to say I’m not sleeping on buckets any longer.  There are a few furniture makers around and I’ve been amazed at seeing how they piece the furniture together with strands of cowhide and bamboo.  I’ve also been sitting with the women learning how they cook our staple meals such as tiga dega na (rice and peanut sauce) or kabo tuwo (corn toh).  The peanut butter is made by roasting peanuts in a kettle over a three stone fire, and then the women either grind them between two smooth rocks or they use a hand crank grinder.  The peanut butter is then used to make the peanut sauce for the rice.  

We eat a lot of peanut butter here.  I mean a lot.  It’s funny.  I didn’t like peanut butter before I came to Africa.  Never ate the stuff.  I would even go as far as saying, I hated the stuff.  I’ve changed my mind about that though.  When I realized, oh, that really is all I’m gonna get, I shifted myself around a little bit and I’ll be damned if I don’t love the stuff now.  Like my mama always says, “I put on my big girl panties and dealt with it.”

 

I’m learning that over the next two years, “just dealing with it”, will be a daily activity for this American girl spoiled by a life time of modern conveniences.  In village, we pull our water from wells and carry it to a variety of different places depending on the task at hand.  It might be needed for bathing, washing your hands, washing dishes, washing clothes, cleaning a chalkboard, making tea, shelling peanuts, cleaning grains, washing lettuce, watering the garden, making bricks, building a house, putting out a brush fire, the list just goes on and on.  I’m interested to know how much time in a villager’s day is spent moving water from one place to another. 

If we were chatting on the phone or skype right now, you might ask, “what other daily activities are there?”  Well, our fields are farmed using hand “dabas”, gardens are fertilized with cow and sheep manure that is carried in giant baskets on women’s heads for multiple kilometers at a time, donkey carts are used to move larger items from one village to another, but you’ll still find people carrying 50 kilo bags of rice or millet, or GIANT bundles of firewood on their bikes.  Tools are still made by blacksmiths, bricks for building structures are made individually and dried in the sun for one week before they are put to use, and musical instruments are still made using goat skins, such as drums like the djembe, the dun dun, or the traditional Malian harp-like instrument called the kora.  

There’s one particularly interesting activity that a large percentage of my neighbors perform on a daily basis, panning for gold.  Apparently, Mali is Africa’s third leading gold producer, and my region just so happens to be THE gold mining region of Mali.  Day in and day out people in my village forgo gardening work to pan for gold.  From time to time they come home with a few flecks of gold that you can barely see in a tablespoon, and they are so proud.  They spend hours panning for this precious metal, and I have a very hard time understanding why.  To me it’s kinda like the lottery.  They spend hours looking for this element that we’ve assigned value to because of its rarity, but when it comes down to it, the gold itself serves no purpose in immediately sustaining life in a region where people are faced with food shortage challenges on a daily basis.  And they're definitely not guaranteed to find gold.  I feel like people’s time would be so much better spent working to produce food and nutrition for their children, especially given the fact that the resources here allow people to grow such a great variety of foods.  Instead, people spend their days searching for this elusive metal that does indeed bring money, but also brings so many problems. 

From what I've seen so far, it seems like the majority of the people working for the larger mining companies here are foreigners while the local people are panning for gold or they are working on small scale mining projects, which aren't necessarily raking in the BIG BUCKS.  I’ve been through some of these smaller mining areas where they pan when we are walking to collect composting materials for the gardens, and it looks quite dangerous.  They dig holes sometimes up to 15 feet deep searching for gold flecks in loose soil that could cave in at any given moment.  Often times, people will work alone in these places increasing the level of danger even further.  I’ve heard rumors that the working conditions in the larger operations are somewhat awful. Children are often employed in these terrible conditions, and the actual gold refining/smelting process has the potential to expose all the workers to extremely high levels of mercury.  I find myself wondering, what are the benefits for the local people of Mali, when it comes to gold mining?  I'll continue looking for more answers as it's a controversial issue that I know I will not understand anytime soon.  How many benefits can there be, really?  I’ve only been here for three months, so what do I know?  At this point, I’m gonna concentrate on this.  When I am in the garden working and people passing on their way to pan for gold greet me with a friendly face, I'm gonna do my best to actually remember their names.  Dondi, dondi Maningamuso.