Northward Bound

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After what has felt like a short amount of time in Bamako, I’m headed off early tomorrow morning to Mopti (a 10-hour bus ride), where I’ll meet Nora, who has been in Tominion. The next day, Christmas Eve in fact, we’ll head off to Hombori (a 4-hour ride) together to meet our friends, who are visiting from Durham. I know that I have expressed it repeatedly, but I can’t say it enough just how unbelievable it is that it’s the winter holiday season back home. The sense of timelessness here is so thorough that I often have to pause and consider the date just to make sure that we’ve only been here for 3 months or that we only have 7 more months to go. It makes it especially hard to shake off dreams of being back at home because I am so easily convinced that it’s already the summer of 2009.

It’s funny what the effect of this is on me, too. The other day I was speaking with my Bambara teacher, who had asked me to explain why Americans say “time is money” in Bambara (no easy task, let me tell you!). I tried to explain to her that even if it’s not money motivating many Americans, it’s the sense that there is not enough time, or that time is too precious to be spent in idleness. Maybe I can only speak for myself in that regard, but it’s never been truer (or maybe just true) for me than since I have been in grad school. Here, I continue to work most hours of the day, including weekends, although I have been much more open to pausing to relax with friends or go see music. I think that without much of a schedule and with each day looking like the next, that is pretty easy to do. However, when I try to put in perspective certain deadlines or schedules from back home, such as when the semester will start, hence when I have to be prepared to start various research projects, it’s much more difficult to do without the temporal cues, which can be somewhat anxiety-inducing. It’s somewhat of a catch-22. I guess that it’s kind of like the language thing—I’d like to be better at French and Bambara just as I’d like to be less caught up in the drive to be generative, but I’ve not even been here a third of the total time that I have in Mali, so I’m hopeful that I have more acclimation to do in those regards (although the irony is not lost on me that in order to feel more content in the present I have to remember that I have a lot more time here in the future).

Anyway (pardon the digression), the past couple of weeks have been good and fruitful. I finally got my IRB proposal finalized, submitted, and approved. I am in fact waiting right now for a law professor, who is a friend of a friend, to come by and pick up the questionnaires for one of the four studies that I’m conducting. I’m also waiting for another friend to come by and pick up the huge stack of questionnaires for another study. Fortunately, both are happy to distribute these to university students, so my only labor is to put together the packets and enter the data when they are returned, which, now that I think about it, is not such an insignificant amount of work after all!

I’ve also been continuing with the Bambara lessons, which have been quite helpful. However, my abilities with it are still fairly rudimentary, so if I can get some of the grant money for which I am applying, I’ll probably hire a translator to help me with the interviews. If the money doesn’t come through, I’m thinking of putting together a focus group and training someone to conduct that. In any case, I’m hoping to do that soon, because the interviews will be the best source for getting a sense of a solid future direction for research in Mali. Finally, I met a director of a school just this past week, and when I mentioned that I study child psychology, he was completely thrilled and gave me his phone number. So, now I need to come up with a proposal for him, although I am content with letting that sit on the backburner while I handle some of these other projects. So much to do!

Anyway, I wish everyone a happy holiday! I must admit that it won’t feel like much of one to me, which is not to say that that’s a bad thing. Here, it’s as if it’s still some indiscriminate non-holiday time of the year…. Oh, timeless Mali, if it weren’t for my lingering memory of the traumatic amebic dysentery or the blatant health risks at every corner, it would seem as if time and life could stand still here.

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