Welcome to the Red Den: Peace Corps Training in Toubaniso, Mali

Peace Corps Training

Toubaniso, Mali

Training Hut at Toubaniso

The Peace Corps has a very nice Training facility in Toubaniso, just outside the capital of Mali, Bamako. The staff here are a mix of Americans employed by Peace Corps, a variety of native Malians (Bambera, Dogon, Tamashek, and several others) and of other PC volunteers with 1 to 2 years of experience here in Mali. The staff claim to have one of the best Peace Corps training facilities and training programs in all of Africa and we PC volunteers are not here to doubt them. Bess and I arrived here on July 20th with 81 other PC volunteers. We all have 5 days of intense training before we leave to go and live with our host families.

Our living conditions at Toubaniso are quite hospitable, running water, electricity, Internet, and most importantly... good food (meaning... meat, fruit, and vegtables along with our rice). Toubaniso does help us slightly integrate into the reality of the Peace Corps experience by forcing us to use squat toilets and to wash ourselves, by hand, with a bucket and cup. The ceiling fan in Bess and my hut does not work so it does get pretty hot at night, but nothing bad.

Our training is very intense and our days are full. We have some language classes (Bambera) but most of the day consists of lectures concerning Health (what is in our med kit, etc), Safety and Security, and Peace Corps Policies. I believe that most of us here find this all very boring and want to escape the prison of Toubaniso and go experience the Mali culture and get the real life experience we came for, not just sit around and talk about it.

However, Toubaniso is very rich with experienced volunteers who know the country well and are able to teach us what we all need to hear to avoid making unnecessary mistakes. The native Malians are even more knowledgeable. It seems that Peace Corps hires the local people who have a lot of connections, who are respected, have solid educational backgrounds, and speak between 3 to 7 languages. Indeed, it is very valuable to receive so much local information about a country within only a few days. We will all be well prepared for life in Mali, I am sure, but there may be some who are missing the important message here. As I mentioned before, one volunteer went to the nurses house and then disappeared. Although I do not know the entire story, it seems that this volunteer had a psychological problem, perhaps from his malaria medication, when he was told he had to return to the U.S. he jumped out of a two story building in the middle of the night and checked into a hotel in Bamako. Peace Corps did their thing and sent out the local search party and they found him in less than twelve hours. Someone personally escorted him back to the U.S.

It is funny how God works, and how God wishes us to do what it is we do not want to do for ourselves. There are two local Malians, Tamashek men, who stand out from the rest of the local staff. Everyone at Toubaniso from Mali is black in appearance but these two men are less black and more Arabic in appearance. I immediately identified these two men as the people hired to teach the Tamashek language, but I never gave them much attention because I knew I would not be learning Tamashek. One, Tamashek is the hardest Malian language and I am not linguistic, two, they are nomadic people who raise animals and live in the desert where nothing grows (I am doing agriculture here in Mali), three, I came here for a traditional (BLACK) African experience and not for some African minority. When I said that, God laughed and said Jared is learning Tamashek. In a meeting with the head of the Agriculture program (a man named Omar), I expressed that Bess and I did not want to learn Tamashek for the reasons I already mentioned (slightly re worded). He said too bad because he had already placed us with the Tamashek people (or Tourget people) months before our arrival and it would be too hard for us to be relocated. At that moment a cultural festival was happening in Toubaniso, Omar said that the music I was already listening to was Tamashek. After the meeting with Omar, I immediately told Bess that we were going North to speak Tamashek and we both cried inside ourselves and then went to embrace the Tamashek music that was already playing, we then danced to the music and felt much better about the next two years, and about how everything was not in our control, and how God had a plan that was better then ours.

Life is funny... I had been neglecting the two Tamashek men at Toubaniso, you could even call me racist because I was overlooking them based on their Arabic appearance. One of them, Elmedi, had a particular interest in me. Every time he looked at me, I smudged him with an uninterested glance because he represented what I did not want to learn, the Tamashek language. Now I understand that Elmedi knew something that I did not, he knew that I was the only male in a group of 4 PC volunteers who were to soon be his personal students, I was the only male who would become part of his large family, become one of his cousins, and who would be the lucky man to unlock the unknown mysteries of the Toureg people, a nomadic people far removed from the traditional BLACK African experience, the experience I thought I had come for. I was wrong and know I realize how privileged I am. No PC volunteers have ever learned Tamashek or have even lived in a Toureg community, Bess and I are two of the first four people to do this, and now we realize that God wishes to Bless us... One of the musicians who was playing his Tihardent (traditional Toureg guitar) during my conversation with Omar (when I was discovered my unwanted fate) is named Abdalla, Abdalla is my age, 25, and is now my brother, Abdalla is here with me now, at the Cyber Cafe in Kalabankoro (a section of Bamako), in fact, I could not survive here in Kalabanborko without my brother Abdalla, I must go now to follow him back to his house where his mother awaits us with dinner. Bess and I will sleep in Abdallas bed tonight as he has graciously given us his room. Abdalla will be there in the morning, and in the afternoon, he is there for us, he will be there for us always... forever and ever... as he was there playing his Guitar when Bess and I came to dance to the music we were already listening to...