Four Legs Good

                This will be my last post from Bamako, and I would be remiss if I did not spend a little time mentioning the flora and fauna that Bamako has to offer. And if there’s anything I don’t want to be, it’s remiss.

By day, the place is packed with doves. Purple-mottled doves that flit about, sadly camera-shy and self-effacing individuals. By night, the sky is flecked with bats. Enormous fruit bats, wingspans at least two feet across, soaring hundreds of feet in the air, or scything out of mango trees at roughly face-height. At dusk they come out by the hundreds to gorge on precisely whatever they want. One of the few ecological bones that this scarcely habitable part of Africa threw to its human inhabitants was the fact that these bats forswear their obvious ability to carry away woeful toddlers, choosing instead to feed on fruit. 

                A family of geckoes lives in my kitchen. They skidaddle along the wall tiles to the safety of the corner as soon as the light comes on, like 6-inch, pink cockroaches that shit all over the countertop.  In the bathroom, there is a little gecko that once upon a time stopped in mid-wall-descent and had a hold-your-breath contest with the world, and won. Because of the outrageous stickiness of gecko feet, a triumph of bionanotechnology that scientists are hard-pressed to figure out, the gecko died, but did not come unstuck from the wall. Is he really dead? Yes, I am quite certain he is dead, because his skin is mostly gone, and there is a gecko skeleton with boots and a facemask made from his own feet and face, viscera splayed out in perfectly indecent fashion. It’s gross. I had to see it, now you have to picture it.

                The unmistakable winners in this zoological theater of absurdity, however, are the ovines. Rams, sheep, and goats have slowly been overrunning this town. In the last two weeks, every patch of flat land has been used to house, hold or feed sheep. The truck dump? Sheep-market.  The dirt soccer field? Pasture and sheep-market. The road? Sheep-market. People with sheep are of course trying to sell them to the passing whiteboy with the same cool indifference of a burger vendor asking if I want a coke.  The influx of sheep has become so bad that a select few Malians have declared the sheep to be illegal immigrants, on the basis that no sooner did they arrive than they began to demand free food and health care, despite making no attempt to learn the language.

Even public transit has also been overrun by sheep. Buses, bikes, carts, cars, you name it. There are few things more absurd than the sight of a donkey pulling a cart full of sheep. The lone book in the GAIA library is a tale of vanilla travel misadventures that always seem to involve a linguistic misunderstanding, an oddity at a local restaurant and the woeful traveling protagonist becoming calamitously late for something. On the cover of this book, the height of all not-that-shocking travel kerfuffles is a man on a motorcycle, carrying a sheep. It is bizarre to even look at a book like this in Bamako, where it is thoroughly unremarkable in this city to see a motorcycle of similar size with at least one or two live sheep accompanying the driver.

               

The reason for all of this is a theatrically insane celebration to commemorate an ancient deed that by today’s standards is grotesque and criminal. It is the Eid-al Adha, or Seliba, or simply the Grand Fête. A festival commemorating Abraham’s decision to kill his son Ismael (unlike the version popularized by Moses and adapted into a screenplay Soren Kierkegaard, where it was Isaac who was to face the knife), before being told by the Lord to instead kill an animal stupid enough to get its horns stuck in a shrub. In homage, every family slaughters, cooks and eats at least one adult male ram – ideally one ram per man in the household. Hence, grand fête. Everyone gets dressed to the nines, in brand new bazins and boubous, ornately embroidered in gold, bright blues, and if you’re really a baller, white. If you’ve ever been to a place where the clay dust is air-soluble, you know why wearing immaculate white makes you a status symbol. Malians spend a month getting ready for this day, buying their sheep weeks in advance to get them good and fat; commissioning their clothes at the local tailors, and generally enjoying the atmosphere of anticipation.

The big day, when it finally came, was surreal. I stumbled out of my house at around 9am, in the ovine equivalent to 28 Days Later. Only the smaller ewes and scraggly babies were still scampering about the streets. Others were laid down on their sides, in various stages of disembowelment. I hung around until just became it became absurdly morbid and went for a walk. Over the course of the next few hours, the charcoal lit up, the smoke began to rise. I was hesitant, because my dad once tried to cook curried goat. In short, there was sleep when there shouldn’t have been sleep, there was fire where there shouldn’t have been fire and for two weeks my house smelled like Satan smeared a brimstone-packed turd on my brain. So that was my point of reference for grilled goat. Imagine the goofy, satisfied grin on my face when the entire city smelled like Kansas City slow-cooker. Good lord.

La viande. Il faut manger la viande, they keep saying as they push the food around  the third or fourth or seventh enormous platter of sheep, rice and onion stew, until it rests in front of me. It’s not polite to refuse, but I can’t help thinking that it’s also impolite to suffer a gastro-intestinal rupture from eating 18 pounds of meat in a single three-hour sitting. I finally learn to subtly push meat to other people’s sectors of the platter. “The meat. You must eat the meat”. I was eating with Kotou’s friend Alou and his family, who were as hospitable as could possibly be. It briefly occurred to me that I wasn’t the only creature that had recently been welcomed into this household and fed an unreasonable amount of food, and my predecessor in that act is now bite-sized and delicious.

And of course, I almost certainly ate balls. Let me take a step back here. Rams, goats, sheep, ibexes, the whole family has enormous man-danglers. The only thing more impressive than the sheer mass of their ammo-pouches is the fact that goats have such incredible balance even despite swinging a pair of bowling pins. And not the dinky New England skinny pins, either, the real bulbous Lebowski pins. The scrotapotamus is clearly held to be very important, as it goes through the priority lane in the butchering process. The three-step guide is quite literally:

1.       Kill the ram

2.       Detach Tom & Jerry

3.       Skin and butcher the ram

Now, how do I know I’ve eaten caddysack? I present the balance of evidence. The ram had a pair of Hufflepuffs when I got to the house. When I left, there were only ribs and a few other bones left. No scrota. I ate a considerable portion of every platter brought to the table, including the ones with liver and trachea and heart and chunks of unidentifiable offal. So I can only imagine that Athos and Porthos were detached from Aramis, cut up, and served according to the recipe in the latest issue of Bon Appetit. And honesty, if I couldn't taste the difference, is it really worse than eating any other meat? My greatest regret is that I will never again win a game of never have I ever.

Si quelqu'un veut un mouton, c'est la preuve qu'il en existe un. - Le Petit Prince

It’s less like a religious atmosphere and more like Thanksgiving. People leave Bamako to hang out with their families in the country, everybody gets the day off work (at least the 30% of the population who are formally employed), and you stuff your face with more food than you could possibly ever want to eat. The differences are twofold. First, it seems odd, in a land of scarcity, to eat to such excess. Every family buys a ram or two or five, eats what they can, and hopes to share the rest. Of course, most people with whom they could share are also trying to crawl out from their glut of meat, so are hardly in need on more. Almost nobody has access to refrigeration so much of the meat invariably goes bad. Speaking in strict economic terms, it is the consummate irrational act. But they do it because there are some things that strict economic rationale doesn’t, and perhaps shouldn’t have a bearing on. Money works well for goods and services that are in the domain of free and uncoerced exchange. In this case, it is not traded not for goods and services per se, but for symbolic sacrifice, piety and family bonding, which, along with health, safety and dignity, can’t be fairly withheld, and therefore cannot be freely transacted, therefore they are not really valid candidates for strict monetary valuation.

That brings me to the second reason: the Malian understanding of family, which is altogether more elegant and 300% more absurd than any counterpart I’ve ever seen. As I’ve mentioned before, family is everything. Your bloodlines carry a lot of information about you, like it or not, and many families have the kind of deeply intertwined histories that can only come after centuries or millennia of coexisting in the dimly-lit territory between harmony and competition. No matter how long you’re in Mali, you can only meet about two hundred different people. There are about a dozen last names to choose from, and maybe ten first names for each gender. Meaning that as an Adama Traore, I would meet one or two other Adama Traores pretty much every day.

Combine the paucity of names with the long intertwined family history, and the result is profoundly odd. As a Traore, my relationship to most other clans is preordained, based on 900 years of cohabitation, conflict, slave-taking, historical dynasties. We get along well with the Diarras, but put one of us in a room with the Diallos and the insults fly. “Haha, Traore, that’s no good, your people are my slaves”. I cannot stress enough how weird it is that this is a totally normal way to follow an introduction and a handshake in a professional environment. “Without our help, your family would starve” or “You are a bean-eater” is the appropriate “How-do-you-do” response, both parties beaming all the while. This cockamamie social structure is actually, it has been theorized, the glue that holds Mali’s multiethnic, resource-strapped society together, preventing it from becoming a Yugoslavia or Rwanda, or even a Nigeria. Rather ignore hundreds of years of conflict, and in a setting where it is impossible to mandate that everyone is only Malian - otherwise anethnic – as was done in Rwanda after the genocide. Violent family feuds become jovial Family Feud, and would-be ethnic tensions are aired as hilarious dirty laundry. I think it’s safe to say that nobody ever went to war with someone they were trading fart-jokes with.

This is what impresses me most about Mali, and what development economists and human rights lawyers could not have devised and cannot appreciate. There are millennia of history and cultural precedent that shape the most trivial of human interactions.  These oddities saturate life here, and can never really be intelligible to an outsider. They certainly seem ludicrous, but if something so benign and vernacular as fart-jokes have kept the peace while our continents, for all our professional diplomacy, spent the last century trying to annihilate each other in trenches and airplanes and submarines and damn near succeeded, from what vantage point do we deign to know how to bring order to a place we don’t understand?

I hope this doesn’t come across as a rallying cry for some cheap apologetic moral relativism – it is patronizing to people everywhere to pretend that they don’t have the capacity to be assholes just as well as we can. But culture is important, and not as an afterthought. Moreover, culture is not amenable to the minimalism of scientific method. You can’t take out one cultural practice and look at it in a vacuum, or graft it onto another set of practices onto a different set of symbols to see how it fares. A cultural act must be examined through the culture that performs and authorizes it, with its meanings speaking back to the underlying moral requirement of a secure and dignified life that all of us can understand.

Integrity Theatre

It began with the best intentions - a free lunch. We would bring our HIV-patients in to the clinic to give them food and talk about vaccines and the importance of vaccine research. It would be cheap, uncomplicated, and executed within 48 hours. All we had to do was get the go-ahead from the council.

How's About A British Jig and Reel

Three days later, the head of the health council chokes back the words “per diem”, settling instead on  “transport costs" to be paid for all 70 attendees, a list comprised of community leaders, imams and NGO representatives, most of whom have cars or motorcycles and don’t have to pay for transport. We cajole and we push, but they are immovable. We dig our heels in everywhere we can, and are bowled over by  accusations of cultural chauvinism. This is the council president, a public servant and sworn advocate of health for all, beaming at me as he puts the money into his friends’ pockets. We left meeting after meeting frustrated, outmaneuvered and impotent, but at least it's not just us. Another organization works with some of the same people, and after the organization provided food food a special occasion, their doctors expected to be fed at each meeting. The costs add up, and providing stew at the monthly meetings would preclude the enrolment of an additional 100 children in a life-saving program. “But you mustn’t make such comparisons” they said. But you must. There is only so much money, either it pays for one thing or it pays for another.

Our costs continued to climb as we changed to a “more respectable venue”, added imams and leaders from other sectors of the city, and improved the quality of the paper invitations. This was our infuriating Big Dig, and as we reached our allotted budget, we had to cut out our target audience, the HIV patients. A simple lunch for our vulnerable patients became a complicated conference for the village leaders, without a single one of our patients in attendance. In order to acquire community legitimacy, we had to throw ourselves into the diplomatic spin cycle, and it sucked. Worse, despite our insistence that we are not setting a precedent to follow, we are. Any conference we hold must now include croissants and per diems, or it will fail before it starts.

Corruption wears many hats, some more benign than others, each inscribed in a social, economic and historical context. It's neither ubiquitously nor exclusively African. Transparency International recently released their Corruption Perceptions Index, and found that while many African countries still struggle, Botswana is ranked 33^rd alongside Portugal, while Mauritius is tied with South Korea. Eight African countries are less corrupt than Italy, and Mali (not one of those eight) is on par with Argentina. If strong,  honest institutions were sufficient to make a wealthy country, Ghana and Botswana would on par with the recent class of entrants into European Union, not beggar-nations asking for alms and debt forgiveness. 

Donors have a long history paying lip service to good governance, and a much-touted recent trend towards transparency is debatable. During the cold war, good governance was irrelevant and even counter-productive to the interests of donor countries, who were playing states against each other to establish and hold spheres of influence through no-strings-attached military aid, used as often as not to quash the popular will. Foreign aid happily bankrolled Mobutu, Amin, Zenawi and continues to fortify jagoffs like Paul Biya.

           
 Working For The Clampdown

There are some indications that this is changing, at least in countries that don’t have oil or aren’t strategically important in the war on terror. Governments tried, if feebly, to put pressure on Kenya after the 2007-2008 election debacle, in which both sides tried to steal the election. When the fallout became church-burningly violent, the expedient compromise was to double the number of cabinet seats and allow  both sides to steal equally. When gains accrue to politicians and losses are paid by citizens, the enforcers of ethics are stuck between a principled stand and the pragmatics of keeping people alive. USAID and other aid organization mention “good governance” and “civil society” in their grant outlines, but their primary stated roles are to enrich and empower, and you have to do the best you can with what you have. International organizations such as the Global Fund seem to have either more leverage or more drive, and have recently forced governments to prosecute embezzlers. Just a few months ago, they suspended their activity in Mali because of widespread grift that allowed millions of dollars to be pocketed by well-positioned officials and check-forgers. Officials are quick to hit back with the number of children that may die if left untreated.

     

Corruption can be broadly broken up into two types, though they are not always neatly separable. They are the skim, whereby the privileged parties take a little off the top in exchange for their voice of support, and the scam, in which the holders of power take the money and fail to furnish the service. We were forced to contend with the skim, an inefficient and frustrating custom that requires us to monetarily acknowledge the goodwill of each attendee. They are not crooks, in fact the conference revealed that many are in fact very sympathetic, wise people who simply do not share my opinion on the conflict between the provision of services to the poor and the cost of doing business.

 The conference, for all its inflated costs, turned out to be a great success. We explained our HPV and HIV programs to sixty of the most influential people in Sikoro, and nobody fell asleep. Some people even turned their cell phones off. In the Q&A period, we had imams come to us with earnest questions about vaccines and whether they affect fertility (No) and how many children a woman can have after being vaccinated for HPV (see above). One of the many opinions contributed with what I thought was excessive bellowing and accusatory finger-pointing was actually a man who didn’t believe in AIDS until this conference - he was expressing his conversion. They discussed amongst themselves, and decided that in matters of sexually-transmitted disease such as HPV and HIV, a current or future vaccine must not replace concerted societal investment in children to encourage safe and intelligent behaviour. The white-bearded village chief rose at the end of the conference and closed with a soft-spoken benediction: “I am not a learned man, I am not knowledgeable enough in science to know what is good or bad about this. We must do everything we can to keep our children safe, and we trust you, GAIA, to only bring the vaccine if it is good for our people.” The level of goodwill was astounding. People voiced their uncertainties  because they wanted answers, not because they wanted to spread cockamamie theories or because they had an axe to grind. Having followed the rhetoric building up to recent elections, I’m unaccustomed to the sound of the soft pause that follows an earnest question. If you’ve ever been in a sauna in January and run outside for the exhilaration of that split-second kiss of sweat, skin, steam and frost as you plunge into a snowdrift, then huddle back in the piney warmth of the sauna (if you haven’t, do it), that's a bit like what this felt like. 

Still, 500 dollars is a lot to put 60 people under a tarp for the morning, even a morning of productive discourse. Of course it would have been better if the same results could have been obtained without shelling out three hundred dollars for attendance fees. We could put more people on treatment, and buy more malarial medications. But this is the cost of high-level awareness campaigns, and if it works, it works. We have to pick our battles, and we may have to pay our allies as well. 

King Solomon, He Never Lived Round Here

On the other side of the fence, there is the scam, whereby money is pocketed and diverted to the Swiss banks and private palaces of those least in need. This is generally practiced on a much larger scale than the skim, but that need not be so. The critical difference between the skim and the scam, is that in  the latter, the service is not rendered. Rather than the grift serving the service, the service is only ornamental, only useful insofar as it allows more theft. This is the domain of the worst of the kleptocrats, the Mobutus and Mugabes, demonstrated perhaps most starkly by the Central African Republic’s strongman Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who spent 25% of his nation’s annual revenue on his own Napoleoonic coronation simply to prove that Black Africa, like France, can produce emperors. This is the corruption that keeps highways and ports from being built, pharmacies from being stocked, and school bookshelves empty.

A few evenings ago I caught up with Adrienne, a student on exchange in Bamako who happens to be from Providence. In between commiserating about wintry mix and extolling the virtues of Nice Slice, we discussed her recent travels around the country: she told stories of the majesty of Djenne, the rocky beauty of Dogon country and the barely-passable roads in between, all resigned to the same conclusion that the Malian government scarcely operates outside Bamako, and has little connection to its people. While the official language is French, it is the language of the educated – the rest of the country sings in Bambara. The absence of infrastructure, the unwillingness to furnish government services in a language accessible to the majority of the population, and the cars and clothes bought by the elites to differentiate themselves from the masses are all poignant expressions of the notion that Mali is a country of saints ruled by shitheads. The state apparatus seems to serve, more than anything, as an concentrator of money and aggregator of shitheads.

It's tempting to lionize the poor just because they are poor, to attribute to them some sort of quaint innocence or the moral fiber of the last unbribed souls. Any thinking person knows that's no more accurate than its opposite argument, the Malthusian drek that would have you think that the poor are morally bankrupt, and do nothing but breed and waste resources. Yet I traipse almost nightly through  the kind of conditions that breed crimes of desperation, and I have seldom felt safer. The necessary caveat is that as a man, I’m not subjected to the harassment that foreign women deal with, but even so, I’ve hardly heard of violent crime or property crime here.  In Nairobi a few years ago, I was caught out after dark, and people on the street were visibly distraught over the risks I was taking by walking a few blocks. One approached me and said what they were all thinking: “Are you out of your mind? Get in the next cab you see. In the meantime, pick up the biggest rock you can accurately throw”. That was Nairobi. This is Bamako, where shopkeepers sleep at the register, knowing their goods are safe.

Daddy Was a Bankrobber But He Never Hurt Nobody

As Adrienne and I shared a cab home, I pointed out a symbol of national pride: A large red maple leaf painted across the gate to the Canadian Embassy. I always get a little . Directly in front of the Embassy was a police checkpoint. This is not unusual, if you’re pulled over after 11 pm curfew,  you just show your passport, and on you go. “The one time I brought my real passport,” laughs Adrienne as she shows it to the cop. I only have my photocopy, which is usually ok. As a backup I also have my driver’s license, just in case. I hand him the photocopy, and he screws his face up. He doesn’t like it. It’s not notarized. The license gets a little more play, and is taken to the supervising sergeant, who comes to the car to flatly dismiss its validity. “I couldn’t take my Malian license and use it as an identity card in Canada, could I? Get out of the car”.

                    He was a tall, bald man in his late twenties, with eyeballs and biceps both bulging, hands gesticulating wildly before expertly stopping mere millimeters from my face. We meandered through about fifteen minutes of fruitless argument; I insisted that all my papers were in order, and he announced that they weren’t, waving his walkie-talkie in my face  and interrupting me with ever-decreasing patience and ever increasing volume. He made every bug-eyed effort to intimidate me, and it was starting to work. At the next clearing of silence, I said something to the effect of “sorry for the misunderstanding, I’ll go clear this up on Monday first thing in the morning, and I appreciate you letting me go.” He said something to the effect of “fuck that shit.” He pointed to his right. “Monte”. This literally means “climb” but in the context of a vehicle, means “get in”. The vehicle in question was a shoddy black pickup, the tailgate stenciled with the word“Police”. Welded onto the flatbed was a thin, crookedly-wrought iron bench. He continued, “sit there. Tu va passer la nuit avec nous”. You’re spending the night in a cell.

Ahem, no. I have yet to go to prison and I don’t want to start now, in this place, especially without a badass story behind me to provide the necessary prison cred.

Also incarcerated for inadequately stamped paperwork

I Needed Money 'Cause I Had None

                  The sergeant and I continued our tête-a-tête for another fifteen minutes, and he became increasingly bellicose. Very few Malians have qualms about vocal volume, and he was not one of the few. He actually seemed to enjoy yelling in 80% French, 10% Bambara and 10% sputum, and as a result I understood less and less. There is nothing so frustrating to an asshole cop as a stern lecture bouncing off the bewildered, vacant face of its target and echoing off into eternity. The gist was clear though -  this was a classic shakedown. They’re the police, and it’s 3am on the side of the road, so they’re very much in charge. They’ll do this to anybody, holding you on a trumped-up non-offence until you buy your release, but for toubabu, who are expected to be holding cash, the price can be outrageous. I might have been willing to buy my freedom, but it was one of my last days here, and the only money I had left was the dollar in my pocket that had been earmarked for the cab driver. So I argued. The usual stuff, like, “No, I’m not getting on that deathtrap”, “I did nothing wrong”, and “My identity is fairly easily obtained and confirmed as legitimate by these two documents here, which I have repeatedly presented to you. My embassy is right behind you and can verify this.”  His response: “Monte, or I will make you monte par force”, he spewed. As much as I didn’t want to monte¸I really didn’t want to be monted par force.

By this point, Adrienne was out of the cab, arguing on my behalf in much better French and maybe even some Bambara. Unfazed, the sergeant took to yelling at her and threatening her with jail as well. So that move didn’t work. He motioned to his deputy, and as he reached out his arm to grab me, I took a wee risk. I counted on this shakedown to be a non-violent one, essentially a very inconvenient bluff. So I called it. As he put his arm on mine, I slipped his grip and stepped back, relieved that his billy club stayed home. A crack in the armor, a realization that they’re not willing kick my ass in public. I made my way towards the embassy, again relieved that the deputy wasn’t directly grabbing me but trying simply to head me off. I got around him and, frantically, told the Embassy guards I had to get in. Je suis un citoyen Canadien." “Umm, there’s nobody here. We’re the night guards.” They were wearing the same brown uniforms that a lot of the private guards stationed in front of houses and office buildings wear. “This is an emergency, I’m being harassed by the police”. “We can’t do anything, and nobody’s here except the receptionist, another Malian” “Huh? The recep- nevermind. So I can’t come in? This is bad,” I observed, before sagely adding, “Fuck”.

As a second guard approached, and the first became a little more decisive and hands-on, I was out of options. Herded by the guards, I made my way to front of the truck, away from the flatbed. The two men already sitting on the bench looked exasperated, maybe just annoyed that they had been caught and were going to a holding cell, maybe pissed that I was delaying their transit and keeping them on uncomfortable benches. Totally out of ideas, I stalled some more. Now offering money I didn’t have, now zig-zagging away from this tightening net of annoyed cops, now deliberately fudging the grammar in my bribe offer so that it would be appealing but unintelligible, anything to buy enough time to think of something better than a cell, which I imagine is at least ankle-deep in shit and piss, and is by design an excellent place to get tuberculosis, cholera and a hepatitis or two. As I stammered at the deputies, I caught a glimpse of the sergeant -  he had been approached by one of the brown-uniformed guards from the Embassy. I went back to arguing with the subordinates, and almost didn’t notice that they had suddenly backed off. The sergeant came over and spoke softly and vacantly, like a professional athlete forced to account for past indiscretions. I hardly caught a fraction of it.  “I’m young, like you,” he said. He was letting me go.

And After All This, Won't You Give Me A Smile?

Somebody at the Embassy saved my ass in such a profound and literal way that I've decided to retire the phrase from my vocabulary. Had this checkpoint been anywhere else but that fifty-foot stretch outside the embassy, I would have been screwed. Then again, had this been any other checkpoint,  a license and photocopy of my passport would have sufficed and we’d have driven on. It is the arbitrariness of governance, as much as bad governance, that drives distrust and disdain of the state and its employees. Without an embassy behind them, the two men on the truck presumably spent the night in a cell. The sergeant will go on collecting bribes and splitting them among his deputies, at the expense of justice and of the well-being of his compatriots. 


I was complicit in paying out bribes this week, and I’m not proud. I helped establish our acceptance of a practice that slows down and gums up the machinery, and as a result it will cost more to pull off the next information session. We have reached the opinion leaders, and changed the minds of important people, and hopefully that makes it worthwhile, hopefully we can justify our complicity in excluding the HIV-positive patients with the fact that vaccine trials are now welcome in Sikoro. Maybe the optimism of the day will reach them. And the Health council president is right, we don’t understand the culture. Maybe the per diems really need to be paid. On the other hand, I managed to withstand one bribe, even if it was as much a result of my lack of means as the content of my character. Still I take great pleasure in the fact that I didn’t have to pay that expectorating anus of a police officer to abide by the law he swears to uphold. I got home, took a rare well-deserved 4am shot, and went to bed and slept. Not particularly restfully, but much better than I might have slept.

Baobab Blobs and Bla Bla Bar Burgers

               Malian food is, for the most part, fairly simple. For a square meal, a starchy paste and a leafy sauce will usually suffice. However, Malians are very much aware of the awesomeness of snacks, which are much more varied and exciting than a home-cooked meal. I am never more than fifty feet away from someone selling peanuts, bananas (fresh or deep-fried), beans, or any deep-fried potato puffs. These roadside banana stands and snack bars are deliciously mixed and matched, although most Malians prefer to eat plainly at home. Every market stall sells eggplants, but I have never come across any evidence that indicates that anyone eats them. Food, in a country where there is not enough to go around, even as the majority of the population are either farmers or food vendors, is a complicated subject, and it's been a month’s struggle to try put it into some sort of dimly intelligible perspective. Here goes.

Yes, the picture was taken before I ate this fancy feast. And it was delicious

                There is a restaurant on the Catalan coast, about two hours from Barcelona, that will put an atomizer in your mouth and dose your tongue with  a vaporized martini. It will be followed up with a few dozen other courses that systematically deconstruct the culinary world into its constituent possibilities and recombine them as they see fit. They serve up things like Parmigiano-Reggiano foam, a mercurial dessert that disappears as it touches the tongue, leaving no trace of substance, only taste. Called El Bulli, it is restaurant powered by both a kitchen that is more like a lab, and its ever-advancing forays into the unexplored have ossified it as the best restaurant in the world, according to, well, everybody. Sadly, neither you nor I will never eat there. Even if it weren’t closing after the 2011 season, in order to get one of the 8000 spots available each year, you have to enter a lottery along with two million others and hope for the best.  This success was powered by the molecular gastronomy movement that began in the 80s, the first time people began seeing food as a valid scientific enterprise that turned a soufflé into a product of physics and biochemistry rather than procedure and rote.

                Food science is new to the home kitchen but is in some ways is all growed up, having spent most of its life in the service of industry. Before we got all post-modern and individualistic about our gelées, James Kraft discovered a way to process cheese so it didn’t need refrigeration,  which, combined with the need for such a product created by the First World War, set Kraft on its way to becoming the food behemoth it is today. In our Industrial and efficient Interstate-powered heyday Foods needed science in order to be standardized, created on an assembly line, preserved, stored and shipped across the continent. Chemists figured out how to make mayo that won’t split, milk that won’t spoil and sugar pellets from heaven that melt in your mouth but not in your hand.

The yellow one is played by Richard Feynman

             Before food was science,  it was ritual.  As scribes like Escoffier codified oral traditions, the ceremonial, languid simmer of a Bolognese, the secret caves that made the best brie, and the proper way to brew a lager all left the realm of a specialized cadre and became common cultural currency. As important as preparation was, the practice of eating was no less ritualistic. Food was, and in many places still is, not the focus of a meal but just an excuse to bring family and friends together. Bread was not broken for its own sake, it was only to bring like-minded people together to discuss common goals and good works. The contents of a communal pot, like baseball games and karaoke nights, are hardly worthwhile in and of themselves, but provide a good reason for people to come together and rib each other. You gathered around a fire to decompress after a hard day of eking out a living, to gird yourself and your family against the next day, and to be happy for the food, not because it is sublime, but because it is sufficient.

Of course, subtly interwoven into this slow transition from tradition to modernity was global commerce and an important few centuries of politics. The discovery of America, it is said, was the single most important thing to happen to food, ever. Cows and pigs went from Europe to Mexico and became carnitas, while various New World products fertilized a staggering array of global cuisines. Tomatoes and eggplants left Peru appeared for the first time in Italy and France, potatoes took became ubiquitous in Ireland, peanuts were sent from Paraguay to Africa and Southeast Asia, and hot peppers became staples in India and China.  Food, as it turns out, is not a terrible way to trace the movements of people, money and ideas across time and space.

A typical Malian home-cooked meal falls very much into the category of the traditional category, not nearly as much a taste sensation as a joint venture in the prolongation of life and strengthening of community bonds. The food that is available in most of Mali is whatever you can grow, or whatever you’re willing to pay dearly for someone to bring across the Sahara for you. Italy’s cuisine flourished as its cities became trading hubs and Renaissance metropolises, Mali’s towns and villages have remained more or less isolated, and its foods have remained simple. However, the meal I sat down to eat  would be explained just as well by the way it is served as by the food it provides. In that sense, I have yet to participate in a typical Malian meal, because I do not really exist within a Malian family, and the family-community continuum is everything. I have, however, attended as a visitor, and nominally taken part in the goings-on. Both Lauren and I were given Malian names, lifted directly from other members of the family who immediately came to mind. I was named, Adama Traore, after the guy who was on his way home from work. Lauren was named, following some dispute, after Adama’s wife, Fatima Sidibe.

 The food is served in a large metal bowl, all members of the family cluster around on the floor and reach into the bowl with only their right hands, because the left hand, in any Muslim country, is a sinister asswipe. Hands scoop food into mouths, and people talk about their day and about the Joneses. The rabbit-eared TV, if the family has one and if power stays on for 10 minutes at a time, is showing the soccer game, but shockingly, people are indifferent. They eat with their backs to the TV – truly, this is a strange land. Fatima-Lauren and I were lucky enough to have rice with yassa, an onion stew with tasty chunks of meat in it, a rare treat brought to us by Maimuna's splurging. There are a few other options, like rice instead of toh, peanut sauce or fish paste instead of leaf sauce. More often, the bowl is filled with  toh¸ a millet or corn-based goop. It is usually covered in “leaf sauce”, a green glaze that comes from a nameless leaf that some people say is baobab, but is almost certainly not. 

 It's nice to happily discuss the focus on the immaterial, the family unit rather than the taste sensation, but this is as much the product of a communal culture as of poverty, where the decadence of new recipes, odd ingredients and long-simmered adventures are distracting, costly and absurd in a setting where primary purpose of a meal is socializing and the secondary purpose is not starving. Of course, not all Africans live on the precipice of starvation, some are in fact quite rich, easily able to afford an American Hamburger, a pizza, or a Malian lamb stew. However, the home-cooked meals in rich households are conducted essentially the same way, the major differences being the volume and frequency of meat.

One of the things that piqued my curiosity before embarking on this trip was exactly what the food would be like. Whether the great Malian empire that controlled Saharan trade would provide food infused with dates, cardamom and sumac. Whether the French colonists had impressed upon their subjects their own culinary dogma.  Like Moroccan food, but different, and a secret. I would never be so bold as to expect a country full of ripening cheeses and kalamata tapenades on every slice of bread, but a country that ate stews with aromatic Saharan spices and used of hands as cutlery, married with the exacting methodology of French haute cuisine, that would surely be a country after my own heart. I set my hopes high and me expectations somewhat lower, and prepared for the trip delighting at the possibilities, how they would fold so wonderfully into my bobble-headed liberal view of the unending bounties of cultural exchange. In that light, the homecooked dinner is a little dispiriting - The fusion of Saharan and French didn’t really ever seem to take root. Sure the onion sauce had a bay leaf in it, but it was still very much on one side of the tracks.

Out on the busy streets, the dynamic avenues of exchange, things are different. If you buy your food on the street corner, you're probably not sitting down to eat it with your family, so the communal focus disappears. At the same time, competition for your francs creates an atmosphere that tends to push product evolution. As a result, some of the street vendors have come up with fascinating meal ideas. I recently discovered the local dame of street food, a woman serving no less than 6 different meals on just a benchtop with a charcoal burner and a wok, all served with a chunk of fresh, bakery-warm baguette. In addition to the fried fish, fried bananas, oeuf surprise (a scotch egg, Malian style) and salad, she has a delightful beef dish, the highlight of which is the sauce. I don’t know exactly what was in it, but I know that the quantity of oil she added should automatically qualify her for US citizenship. The oil was in a yellow jerry-can, which means she buys it in 20 liter increments. She unscrews the lid and adds few generous glugs to my food and a few more directly into my vena cava, and off I go, contented.

At the many other street vendors, you can get a number of little compromises between French and Malian food.  The fresh fruit and vegetables sold at every market stall are straight out of a Parisian kitchen.  Onions, celery, carrots, eggplant, tomatoes and green peppers, some of them turning up in the beef stew. Yogurt is popular, though sold as dege, a mixture of equal parts yogurt and millet, served in a plastic Coke bottle. At a low-rent restaurant, you can order a  Capitane cooked en papillote.

              I am far from qualified to pass judgment on the value in this case cultural insulation on the one hand or the tendency towards cosmopolitanism on the other. If Malian food can be loosely taken to represent culture, it runs on parallel tracks. The social substrate  incorporates new ideas only very slowly, maintaining tradition, not for its own sake, but because the traditions are where social bonds are formed and strengthened. The economic arenas of life encourage a more creative and simultaneously more destructive approach, where bit by bit, new ideas are created, nurtured, and  finally recast as local. Of course, this takes time, just as it took time for America to take pizza as its own, and for England to assimilate curry. For two centuries after its introduction to Italy was the tomato was little more than a curio, a pretty plant, but thought to be poisonous.There are ingredients here - eggplants, celery, ginger - that speak to the possibility of deconstructing and reconstructing our foods as we see fit, but those ingredients seem to habitually find their way into the same tried and true dishes. And it shouldn't be surprising. El Bulli is not the norm, it is avante-garde, transgressive, not to mention insolvent. The sudden creation of wholesale newness is the exception, rather than the rule - If I want cultural symbiosis, I have to either wait for it, go out and make it for myself, spread the word, and hope it catches on with the locals. Malian food, and with it, Malian culture, is changing in the spaces opened by commerce and competition, but the changes will only last so long as they are accepted by the families dipping their hands into a metal bowl of toh. Mali is producing its own food, and its own culture, out of the jumble of possible options presented by the flux of the world and co-opted by its own past. It is impossible to know where the old guard will bend to new tastes and where it will stand firm. We cannot know which new marriages will work, what ideas will stick, and what tastes will catch on and become symbolic of the time and place. I have a few pet hopes though. A few blocks away from where we live there is a French café that sells chocolate croissants, pain au chocolat. Just a few steps past the café, there is a Malian woman with a pot full of palm oil, frying bananas.  

The Craziest Shit I Have Ever Fucking Seen and The Circle of Life in Seven Seconds

Saturday is a good day to go to the market, but every other day of the week is better. On Saturday, too many vendors’ stalls are closed, and a larger than usual number of people are shopping. Decreased supply and increased demand, if I remember correctly, this makes prices go up. It means the congestion around the active stalls is outrageous, and the ability to drive a hard bargain is absolutely lost. So the weekday is the time to check out the local open-air market.

 There are about 30 stalls elbowing up against each other selling grains, sugars, veggies, a few canned goods and some dried mysterious foodstuffs. The prices are rigid, the same across all stalls. This market turns out to be the best way to keep my belly well-stocked with all the things a growing boy needs, especially if that growing boy is part venus flytrap. The egg vendors are found at the dividing line where the market itself stops and the outdoor chicken area begins. After my shopping is done, going through the chicken section allows me to slough a minute off my commute, the only thing I have to do to is, well, walk through the Malian chicken processing plant. From the egg-vendor,  it’s about 30 feet long and 15 feet wide, and ends after the cluster of barrels, where the women are sitting on inverted buckets beside the alleyway. It also happens to depict in a vivid and unforgiving montage, the entire life, death and processing of chicken in Mali.

             

          
                 I leave the egg-vendor and the shady edge of the market and make for the sunlit gauntlet, I ease out of the way of a passing woman and bump against the chicken cages. Wood and wire cages alive with the clucking and flapping of an unreasonable number of chickens. A man is almost constantly going back and forth between the cages and the barrels. He opens a cage, picks up a chicken, brings it near the barrel and, dangling it by the head, saws through its neck with a machete that he doesn't bother to clean between uses. The first barrel, a broken affair rusted down to maybe eighteen inches in height, is blackened with soot, browned with rust and reddened with blood – he throws the chicken into this ruddy arena where it runs and flaps out its last headless steps around the collapsed form of the chicken from 30 seconds ago. The second barrel is suspended over a charcoal fire and filled with water. Someone else is has been holding another headless chicken in the boiling water for a few seconds and now pulls it out – this makes it easier to pluck. He gives it to the group of women seated on buckets, who start to pluck the body while simultaneously cutting it apart. As they pluck and cut it into wings breasts and legs, they lay them out in their proper places on tarps, in sections of dozens of other wings, breasts and legs. Nobody makes the futile effort to flap away the innumerable flies. The whole effort appears casual, well-rehearsed. It is thirteen steps and seven seconds from the egg vendor out through the sunlight and into the alley, and it is impossible not to see all of this.

This means war

Saturday was one of few true days off, so it was not a market day. Instead, it seemed like a good idea to go see as much interesting stuff as possible in one fell swoop. The downtown market section, next to the Grand Mosque, will do nicely It’s highlighted by the Marché Artisanal, where jewelers and tailors make earrings and necklaces for tourists, and locals shop for food and religious apparel. The market spills out of the iron gates that are supposed to contain it, the three encroaching rows of stalls pinching one of the city center’s busier streets, where cars keep driving and motorcyclists keep motorcycling at inadvisable speeds. This makes it very precarious indeed to try to step around a group of people haggling over the price some basic foodstuff. Everybody dies sometime, but I would rather my obituary a) hold off a while, b) be written by President Taylor Swift, and c) not include the phrase "sidestepped a disagreement over the going price of salt."

Malians do not like Candid Camera, and they will yell at you if you try to photograph things. Even the most innocuous attempts to document  a sack of green powder signaled an opportunity for the Malian ladies, already excellent and prolific yellers, to yell a little more than they otherwise would have. They shouted  things that could have been poisonous invectives, directions to Carnegie Hall, or the opening lines to Chaucer’s “Middlemarch”.  It didn't really matter what, only that they were yelling. The sheer windspeed they generated was overpowering, so there are not many photos. Sucks for the blog. Suck it, posterity.

At the Artisanal Market, like any good tourist trinket shop, you get to see the jewelers working over their charcoal stove, hammering, sawing, and polishing some pretty excellent pieces of silver. And like any good public gathering, it had some challenging individuals. One Malian female that could have been anywhere from 14 to 30, followed Lauren and me around for a good ten minutes, with pleading  “Mon ami, mon ami”, and pinching me just above the elbow.  I avoided looking down, at  all-too-common bundle of baby clothes and brown skin clutched to her  breast.  She wanted spare change, but the only thing I had was the equivalent of 2 cents. After entirely too much following, with her pointing to her mouth, then the bundle then extending a palm, as i tried not to face up to one of my less proud moments. I turned and looked at her, ready to confront. And stopped, realizing something about this was way off. She was staring right through me. Her whole body language was amiss – she was too… interested. I think she was snarling. I looked down at the baby and realized it was no baby, she was trying to breastfeed a doll. The kind of teddy-bear/doll with a creepy enough smile that you would pay never to see it again. I madly fished out the 2 cent coin and gave it to her, and she let out a scream and ran away.

 It is often wrongly assumed that mental illness is a struggle in the developed world alone, a disease of the rich. People don’t have time for depression if they have to struggle to find food, right? Nope. Food insecurity and the stress of poverty raises the risk of depression, schizophrenia, mania, you name it. Increased air pollution, water pollution, childhood parasite infections and a host of other environmental factors impair cognitive development and lead to mental disability. Mental illness is a far more serious problem in the developing world, but the means to diagnose and treat it lag far behind the developed world, mental health programs in countries like Mali, if they exist at all, are even more resource-strapped than their malaria-fighting, HIV-treating counterparts. The ill are thought to be possessed by evil spirits, and are cast out of their homes and left to fend for their decreasingly lucid selves. Other, slightly more enlightened people will dismiss the idea of evil spirits, but will equally dismiss the notion of illness,  with etiology and symptoms and most importantly, treatment. They will settle on a middle road “She’s crazy”, they’ll say, with a thumping  finality.

                It is only as a result of a of my insufficient writing skill that the transition from the tragedy of mental illness to the closing vignette pivots solely on the word “crazy”. Let me unequivocal: mental illness is a problem, it is illness, not just something that’s dismissible as odd, aberrant, “crazy”, or “retarded”.  And then there is this. On a completely different level, without any common thread whatsoever, there is the following unfathomably crazy shit.

 Intermingled with the Marché Artisanal is the fetish market. This isn’t sexual fetish, just fetish. The odd objects of worship for your various animist ceremonies. Everything your shaman needs for his freaky Voodoo shit. The number of professed animists is small, as most Malians are practicing Muslims, but Islam in Mali -  especially in rural areas and especially at certain times of year -  is layered onto an animist tradition that it co-opted, rather than stomped out. The way Easter is celebrated in the West by hiding chocolate rabbit eggs in the bushes, some overtly Muslim holidays are celebrated with a totally incongruous animist ceremony that I can’t begin to understand, and will not try to explain. The photography ban applies even more stringently at the stalls that sold these bizarre trinkets, so you’ll have to be satisfied with a word picture of one of the good stalls, or a shitty picture of one of the less mind-boggling insane stalls I took by pretending to call somebody on my cameraphone, taking pictures of whatever my ear was aimed at, and lurking away.

The goatskins serve as a bed for everything. One one side a thick pad of snakeskins, on display like a book of fabric samples. In front, a host of bizarre  claws and horns, not always identifiable. Towards the middle, a bundle of animal spines in various length, but always truncated, never the full spine. some scattered teeth. Piles of dried fruit. Dried fruit bat, two feet across, he died with his mouth open. Dried chameleons, mounted on top of the vacant turtle shells. Now front and center, the Indiana Jones-level shit. Dried animal heads of all kinds. Goat's head, pig’s head - extra rare in a Muslim country.  An entire baby goat its skin leathered. A dozen or so dried monkey heads. Dried monkey heads.  It bears repeating. Real, hairy, dead monkeys, turned into dried monkey heads, sitting on a tabletop, casually staring off into space like they were all listening to MGMT.

Smoking The Polls

Many Malians sat with an ear to the radio for hours on Tuesday night, listening intently as the results came in for insight into the future of the outside world. Malians know a little something about what goes on outside their borders, they wanted to see if that sagging symbol of optimism, suffering from schisms between North and South, city and country, common and educated, could mend its fences and begin a new era of prosperity. Even as they are unsure of what the result might mean, the ever-optimistic bunch of Malians are simply happy that the elections were free, fair and peaceful, that the results are accepted by both sides without the need for violent revolution or civil war. Nobody knows quite yet whether the incumbent president Laurent Gbangbo will remain in power in Abidjan, or if the Northern challenger Alassane Outtara will take over. Of course there is no discounting the possibility that ex-president Henri Konan Bedie benefits from a late surge in the polls.

Don't Just Stand There, Buster, Move

I picked the book up off my face, realizing I must have fallen asleep around 9pm, and decided I probably wasn’t going out. Maybe one beer, and only if somebody calls me with a plan. It’s Halloween, after all, the king of Holidays, I should say I tried.

The party was across the river, at Jamie’s house, a bumbly man in his mid-thirties that works in some capacity for the US government. When I met him, it occurred to me that he looked exactly like Tony Hale, the man who rose to fame as Buster in the famous video series “Luchas des Hermanos”, whose meteoric success spawned a short-lived spinoff, Arrested Development. Jamie is the kind of guy who tries to make up for his inherent awkwardness by pouring out Patron Reposado and inviting you into his “hizzy”, beckoning with his big red Hulk-hand. Unbeknownst to him, the Universe had spent thirty years dressing him as Buster Bluth, and the only thing he can think to wear as a costume is a fake hand. Thanks, Universe.

About half the partygoers were in costume, from Greek goddesses to Malian taxis. I opted to be a bottle of the locally ubiquitous “Flag” beer, which drawing the logo on a towel and wrapping it around myself, and bundling up a t-shirt on my head in an attempt at a bottlecap that looked more like a chef’s turban. The party, full of various young USAID workers, Peace Corps volunteers and their government ilk, was a sleeve of red cups away from a down-home frat party. The afterparty, however, was another animal entirely.

Mali is a sober Muslim country, where long pants are all but mandatory for men, and women's skirts must always be below the knee. Exposed shoulders are risqué. As we entered the “Ibiza” nightclub, I half-expected to be met with a low-key cigar and guitar lounge, I immediately discovered a few things about Mali:

1. Malians don’t celebrate Halloween.

2. Boobies!

3. Malians Party Extremely Hard

There are still rules, of course. Traditional garb is frowned upon. Gucci and Diesel are ok, Ed Hardy stays outside. Ladies may draw on the exposed part of their breasts, but it can only be in UV ink, only to be seen under the blacklight. Men may only poke the cleavage-glyphs once, and only after the woman points them out to him. Glitter is still too slutty.

I wandered through a sea of skimpy dresses, lasers, smoke, and stripper poles, assuming the looks from various hotties were alluring looks of desire, rather than incredulous gawking at a a man that appears to be wearing not one, but two towels in a nightclub, until I found a very small group of similarly ridiculous-looking people. Jamie/Buster had since changed out of his costume into something that included a panama hat and matching pants that he insisted was not a Halloween getup. His dancing was a bit off-kilter, in my mind I chalked this up to his being asymmetrical or physically imbalanced. The five or ten costumed toubabu, in the middle of a sea of about two hundred locals, attempted to dance to the phenomenal mix of Afro-hop and American (and Canadian – Drake was a big hit) music, having a ball. The club was also outfitted with a few large TVs that played low-res music videos, but not videos that were at all connected to the song being played at the time. So I was often in a position when my eyes said “X-tina Aguilera” and my ears said “Sean-a-Paul”( my heart, as always, said “Ja Rule”). To make matters worse, the songs were often remixed with a complicated polyrhythmic West African drum track, with a three-count and two-count and a few other rhythms folded over each other, so you could conceivably dance to three or four different simultaneous rhythms, each of which was equally correct. The locals did not find this problematic, but the foreign spaz dressed as a beer had problems.

An ill-fated attempt at a bottlecap 

A man I vaguely recognized from the Jamie's party grabbed me and brought me and a few costumed revelers up the stairs and right into the VIP section. I eventually found out that many of the “miscellaneous US government workers”, Jamie included, were not actually with the Peace Corps, but with various War Corps, mostly the Army. This was awesome because:

- They’re highly paid. To the American taxpayers reading this, thank you for the Johnny Walker. How did you know I prefer Black Label?

- It turns out that real-life Buster Bluth is actually, in real life, in Army.

- The VIP gets visitors. These included a group of very popular Malian rappers, a large cohort of gorgeous women, and the DJ. 


An explanatory note on Mali’s rich musical tradition is helpful here. For hundreds or even thousands of years, jeli, also known as griots, were the professional musicians as well as historians of the Sahel. They would pass down stories through the generations – family histories, tales of intrigue and fame, lyric African equivalents of Homeric epics. Accompanied by the Kora, a wonderful plucky instrument that bears resemblance to the bowl-harp ancestors of the guitar, they were the keepers of culture. This musically saturated culture has spawned some truly great musicians – Ali Farka Touré is a legend. His son, Vieux Farka Touré, shreds blues guitar with a bit of a Stevie Ray Vaughn kick. There is also the incomparable Kora work of Toumani Diabeté, and the semi-Western folk of Amadou and Mariam (If you think you like Manu Chao, what you actually like is Amadou and Mariam). Exemplary by any other standard but here relegated to the middle of the top ten, Habib Koite and Selif Keita are phenomenal. I would strongly advise looking up any and all of these. That musical verve continues to this day, and it was present on Halloween, embodied by that modern-day jeli, the club DJ/MC. He came and visited us in the VIP area, at first as more of a hypeman, getting people to dance to the frenetic drum track. He was, in short, a crazy motherfucker, his tiger-stripe hairdye and general outfit not too far from Chris Tucker's poofy-haired diva MC in the Fifth Element.

After enough hype had been built, he began to freestyle sing, in perfect pitch an a wild, adventurous melody, a few verses in French and Bambara about some of the people in the VIP booth. Something about Big Zouma, the giant, as well as Zach the kid in the banana costume. He thoroughly rocked, and after each verse he was presented with a crisp 10 000 CFA (22 dollar) bill. He made 200 bucks in 20 minutes. And they say Africa lacks entrepreneurs.

At 3am, somebody found out that it was possible – and then decided that it was advisable - to buy as much Chivas Regal as possible. The bottle that arrived was comically large, a Stanley Cup of whiskey, at least a gallon. It came in its own pouring contraption, which itself was something like a half of a birdcage on a swivel that would allow a drunk person to maneuver half a metric ton of liquor. I suspect that’s the kind of bottle you lease, rather than buy, that you can leave in a cubby behind the bar and come back to periodically over the course of several months of heavy revelry.

As I walked home at 4:30 am down the familiar dusty moonscape of a road that brings me home, away from the disco balls and back in the land of goats and bats with two-foot wingspans, I was thrilled that this is a Muslim country. I shuddered at the memory of partying in New York until 5am on a Sunday Morning last summer, hauling my haggard self onto the hour-long subway ride up to 125th street, exiting the station to in the full judgment of daylight and rounding the corner to come face to face with a well-dressed family on their way to church. I was left to assume they felt obligated to say a brief prayer for the disheveled, wayward soul enslaved by earthly vice, and that prayer is not a burden I wish to put on any respectable family in Bamako this morning, so it was a relief that Sunday is not a day of worship, and at least one indignity would be spared.

This was a pretty spectacular Halloween. Perhaps not up to par with last year, when 7 of us dressed as 6 characters from Sesame Street (Snuffie, of course, was a two-person operation, outstandingly executed), but still wildly entertaining. But this was only a holiday for about a tenth of the people in that club, and only half of that number cared to dress up. For the rest, it was just a regular old Saturday. And then realized I owe an apology. I recently disparaged a good friend’s business instinct, saying that contrary to his suggestion, Malian society is too reserved for something so hedonistic as FourLoko, that caffeinated 11% ABV shitshow in a can, to be marketable. I have been wrong about many things in my life, but never, ever, ever so egregiously. I apologize to you sir, and I hope that you find great success selling a caffienated version of your eponymous lemony drink.

There Will Be Blood

I’m only here because it didn’t work. I’m happy to be here, but it’s uncomfortable to follow this joy back to its logical source. It’s all kinds of inappropriate to derive pleasure from the stumbling blocks of anybody’s project, even more so when that project is an HIV vaccine.

Spelunking With a Laser Pointer

Any vaccine we desighas to account for the incredible amount of variety in viral genetics as well as the multiplicity of human genetics. The latter has been long overlooked, but its implications are grave. Just as humans have genetically determined blood types that determine what kind of blood you can receive if you need a transfusion, humans have different serotypes or HLA types (Human Leukocyte Antigen, if you care), that are roughly the same phenomenon applied to your immune system. Whether a donated organ is accepted or rejected is dependent on a match in this serotype. In the context of infection or immunization, different serotypes respond to different antigens, so one person may respond to a particular part of a bacteria or virus, while someone else may respond to a completely different part. When designing what parts to include in a vaccine, we need to take into account not only that the vaccine needs to enable people to shoot at a moving target, but also that many people are shooting from different distances and vantage points. Therefore, we need to test our individual vaccine components many times, each time against people with different serotypes. We tested the B7 serotype in Providence, and we’re testing A2 in Bamako.

The person that has been running the experiment here in Bamako is Kotou Sangare, a Master's student at the University of Bamako. Kotou is, in every respect, a character. He looks like Marlo Stanfield and acts his opposite. Kotou is a man whose smile starts somewhere behind his eyes and radiates out across his face and out into the world. He walks around like he has “Sir Duke” playing in his head on a loop. He will often abstain from eating or drinking for twelve hours at a time to be closer to Allah, but he never mentions his faith unless pressed and has vehemently nixed the idea of ever sending his children to a Madrassa. He knows his way around the lab, he’s quick, thorough, patient and precise.

The impression that we were under as we prepared for this trip was that Kotou, for all his personable qualities, was the problem. He doesn’t know how to ELISpot tests, claimed the project manager. That would indeed be a problem, given that those tests comprise about 95% of our project. He can't manage his lab, it seemed. They had sent chemical reagents to Bamako, which had disappeared. He claimed to have followed protocol, but the cells died and the data were lost. It took him four months to even get started. That’s why the project stalled.

Lauren and I were sent to Bamako to confirm those suspicions and to pick up the slack. We have been sent here by the various business and academic tendrils controlled by Anne De Groot, a brilliant immunologist and intensely driven doctor, the brains behind this potential vaccine. Lauren works for Epivax, the biotech company Annie runs, and I work for the department she chairs at URI. The project is under the purview of GAIA vaccine foundation, and NGO of which she is the founder and scientific director. GAIA works at a clinic in Bamako providing HIV care and treatment, TB treatment and maternity ward support while building out the required infrastructure that will be necessary to do clinical trials of that the completed vaccine.

However, GAIA is short-staffed, and much of the project management has been shoved over to people at EpiVax, who do all sorts of other work and may or may not necessarily care about the vaccine project, which is unfunded and time-consuming. They are busy people who have had extra work thrust on them by their boss, so they are unlikely to go digging for any unlikely answers where Occam’s razor will do. Moreover, they don’t speak French, and Kotou’s English is mediocre, so communicating about obstacles would be a problem if they were even inclined to do so. Technical minds gravitate towards technical solution, and the conclusion reached in Providence was that what held these experiments back was in the lab, a single, smiling weak link.

The Best Laid Plans of Lab Mice Usually Involve Survival

Vaccine research requires expensive equipment, a steady supply of disposable tools and chemicals, refined technique, and an infrastructure that guarantees things like a steady supply of electricity and clean water. Mali is the fourth least developed country in the world. The conflicts here are obvious. Luckily, the lab we work in is the beneficiary of a multimillion dollar grant from the US government, which facilitated its pimpification, whereby the lab was taken away from the hard-working, noble researchers, worked on by a former rapper and his team of sassy and zany technicians, who installed multiple incubators, sterile hoods, centrifuges, and put plasma screen TVs in the gene sequencer.

It is a far cry better than the lab at the Bamako Med School - a typical lab in Bamako left to fend for itself - which has no reliable source of water, little gas and no chemicals from this century. Even with our advantages, it is difficult to run two-day experiments when you never know that there will be electricity available for the duration of the period. Not to mention the vulgarity of the amount of waste that goes on in a lab, compared to the pinching resourcefulness of poverty. Tubes that cost the equivalent of a family’s weekly income are used once and tossed. According to the doctrine of sterile technique, which dictates cleanliness in much the same way that Leviticus does - everything that could have possibly touched anything that was ever in the vicinity of any chemical at all is unclean and has to be thrown away. It’s not unreasonable, we are working with HIV-positive blood after all, but the island of sterility in our lab seems about as far from Bamako as you could possibly be.

We came here full of piss and vinegar and with two suitcases brimming with over a hundred pounds of equipment and reagents, to fix the problems in the lab. We spent a week ironing out supplies and fending off the demands of clinic politics, and still no results. We learned that Kotou knows exactly how to do ELISpots, but he was given inactivated chemicals and instructed to follow a dead-end protocol. It turns out that our hypothesized quick fixes failed to account for one thing. The limiting reactant here is HIV-positive blood from Sikoro, and we're not getting it. None of the HIV-positive patients come into the clinic to donate blood. The problem is not at the lab, but at the clinic.

“Are we calling them?”

“Yes, we’re calling them. They schedule an appointment but don’t come.”

“Are we telling them why this study is important?”

“Of course. ”

“Are we telling them they will be compensated”

“Yes. 2000 CFA ($4.50)”

“Maybe the doctor is keeping the money?” A week of investigation reveals that he is not.

“Why don’t they come?

“They just can’t.”

“How do we fix it?”

“Education campaigns in schools and the village for a few months or years.”

HIV, Syphilis and Nuremburg

Our study critically depends on HIV-1 positive blood from otherwise healthy, non-pregnant patients who have been infected for more than a month but are not under treatment. We are expected to get this blood from the 100-200 HIV-positive patients in our catchment area, most of whom we diagnosed as HIV-positive when we tested them because during pregnancy. Our work serves to find patients that are almost universally ineligible for the study. When we find someone that by chance, or when we wait out a pregnancy and early childcare and ask the patient to come in to give blood, we have to compete with all of the other stresses and strains of a new HIV-positive mother. Taking care of the household, manning the stall in the market, cooking meals, and the other tribulations of life in Sikoro.

This brings us to the problem of medical ethics. This is an all-important part of research, borne of the need to prevent the atrocities of human subject research in Nazi concentration camps and the famous Tuskegee trials where men with syphilis were denied treatment and forced to die heinously as bacteria made their way into the brain and subjected it to a game of Worms Armageddon. Reports recently came to light of an even worse trial perpetrated by American researchers in Guatemala in the 1940s, whereby subjects were actively infected with syphilis. From a sociopathic data-seeking point of view, the researcher benefits from sick subjects. Obviously, to act on this is disgusting and inhuman and not only violates public trust in science, but violates the purpose that science serves. Ethical review boards are charged with litigating against the temptation to cut corners and exploit the grey areas that pop up in the complexity of real life. 

Modern research ethics abides by three main principles. First, the fate of each and every individual subject is unequivocally more important than all of the research. If the study concerns acquisition of disease, everything attempt must be made to prevent subjects from getting sick. In the case of an HIV incidence study, this means providing counseling on risk reduction, free condoms, and free testing to all subjects, which requires a larger number of subjects, increases the cost, necessarily reduces the broad applicability of the data, because it cannot represent those who were not study subjects and did not receive counseling, condoms, testing, etc. Second, there can be no undue coercion of any kind. You may not force subjects to participate or restrict their rights to end their participation at any time. Undue coercion includes things that might be seen as beneficial, such as providing preferential treatment or excessive payment that may cause the patients to participate for the sake of the money or status. Study remuneration is fair compensation for time and expenses, not payment for a service. Third, complete confidentiality must be maintained.

In our case, the first is not limiting, as there is no conflict between our research and the health of the patients. The third only complicates matters insofar as only Doctor Koné can contact the patients. We can’t, for instance, have our Peer Educators go visit a patient before the appointment to remind them of their appointment or escort them to the clinic. It is the complexities of the second criterion, the absence of any coercion, that hinders the study, insofar as it makes it economically near-impossible for poor Malians to participate. We can subsidize transport, but we can do nothing to cushion the opportunity cost of a day’s work as well as the extra expense of food, neither of which are trivial. In our ethical vigilance, we make sure that the donor gets a raw deal in order to make sure they are not giving blood for any but the most honourable reasons.

Blood is sacred in Malian society. I have already mentioned this, but it bears repeating. Blood is your very essence, and giving it up is a profound act. Blood drives are difficult, people give blood if and only if a neighbor or relative needs it, in which case the mother mobilizes the entire family to give blood at once. Giving blood because you have HIV and it would be useful to some Toubabus up on a hill is a different story, and entails opening yourself up to the full brunt of stigma.

So we have both willingly and unwillingly stacked the deck against our own success. The people that manage our project didn’t know this when they sent us out here, assuming that what could be done in Providence could just as easily be done in Bamako.

Stuck In A Rut

This is in some ways a typical story of NGO work in the developing world, especially technical work. Technocrats design the operation, and when it doesn’t go to plan, assume it is because of a paucity of technical knowledge on the other side. They don’t have the insight, experience, interest or time to ask the right questions, so they provide their own answers. The wholesale difference of life and business between Providence and Bamako. Science in general, and vaccine development especially, is implicitly built a modernistic conceit that assumes away any inconvenient human strata. If we develop the right vaccine, it was thought, we will defeat the disease. Period. Reality tells a different tale – Measles kills 300 000 children annually and is the leading cause of blindness, but we’ve had a vaccine for that for years. Whooping cough kills kids all the time. Polio still cripples people in India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria (Aside to India: You can have a space program or you can have polio. Not both). Measles in Niger does vastly more damage than HIV in America. These plagues are diseases for which we have had vaccines for half a century, but science as a whole considers the human application and implementation of its fruit to be an afterthought. Not coincidentally, science has a hard time believing that the human element may entail some cultural, social, and other non-technical problems that are not immediately surmountable. What we do in the lab is inseparable from what we do in the clinic, and what we do in the clinic is firmly embedded in how life works and doesn’t work in Sikoro.

We arrived in Bamako worried about what we would do when we ran out of reagents – what would we do about the 13th patient, for whom our calculations left only half a test-kit? In just over half the allotted time, we have received donations from three patients, and I was at the clinic to witness the most recent one. She looked, as most HIV patients do for most of their lives, strong and healthy, there was nothing about her that betrayed her status. Normally we need 5 test tubes (50 mL) of blood.  After two tubes, filled drip by tedious drip, and she started to swoon, then moan, and began to fade. The sight of her own blood leaving her body was too much. As soon as it was clear she was fainting, it was a mad rush to remove the needle, clear the bed, get her off the chair and onto the bed, and to free her from the tubing that bound her arm. The latter was my job, and is I reached up her arm, avoiding like the plague the inside of her elbow where the needle had been, wrestled with the surgical tubing that restrained her circulation, pulled it free and let her lie down as she let delirious groans escape her throat. And as I stood up, I saw Awa, just to my left, holding the last tube of blood at her hip, with the ruddy glint of the syringe tip still pointing up and vaguely in my direction. It must have been a foot away from me, and I know that even if I get stuck, proper treatment gives me a 99% chance of safety. But still I could have sworn that the needle was, or seemed like, millimeters away from my skin. It might as well have grazed the hairs on my forearm, I thought. And it was very nearly my turn to swoon and faint, as I contemplated the glinting possibility of a new biological condition, one that I would share with this woman and the others upon whose broad backs our study is built. It is a very odd feeling indeed to look at someone like that and think "your life is my worst-case scenario, and I have never come closer to it than just there", and then to realize that we need her to make sacrifices for us.

We whisked the blood off to the lab and performed a successful ELISpot test, with Kotou’s capable help. We are closer to completing our study, and therefore closer to an HIV vaccine, than we were that morning. Despite the problems and our inability to grasp them, we are pushing forward, largely on the strength and spirit of the weakest and sickest here.

As we left the clinic, we walked past the woman one more time. The last time I will ever see her, though she will continue to exist in my life as a data point. I looked at her and she returned a look, gaunt and deflated, incongruous with the proud black and gold Malian batik that wrapped her from head to calf. My muscles congealed and my throat thickened, as my relief at having a test subject was suddenly saturated with a feeling something like shame and a lot like inadequacy, knowing that while my Bambara is abysmal, that has nothing to do with why I can’t begin to know how to thank her.