On the Home Stretch

Well it looks like I'm really leaving this time. I've made it to London, and any thoughts of running back to Mali are no match for my depleted finances, so I should be back on American soil sometime this evening.

Leaving the village was traumatic; we spent hours waiting for the Peace Corps vehicle to come and pick me and my scant belongings up, and then all of the sudden it was there, and the next thing I know my homologue is trying to force me in the truck so that I don't see him crying. Crying is not something you do here, so Malians do all sorts of funny things to prevent it. Like getting really angry and yelling at you when you start, or running into the house and hiding, or just not showing up at all when someone departs. Of course I was crying, so Binta was scolding me, while the chief, Hassimi, ran into his house, and most of my neighbors were nowhere to be found. I insisted on saying goodbye to Hassimi, so it was a small production extracting him and trying to say something meaningful while I'm overwhelmed with emotion and people are trying to drag him away. I don't think I got much more than "thank you" out to anyone during that whole ordeal. Christopher said that the goodbye was sweet - but already I am not remembering it clearly, and I know that I did not get to thank the village like I wanted.

One of the most ridiculous parts of the whole thing was that everyone gave me money - and there was no way I could refuse it. They also gave me a couple of bushels of peanuts, which I explained to Sumba were not going to pass airport security, so we pondered what to do with them. I suggested donating them to the women's association, but everyone felt that was a horrible idea (because the entire village gave them to me, so it wouldn't be fair if I then turned around and gave them to a select few), so Sumba said that he would buy them off of me. So all told, the village gave me about $12. Those sweet, silly Dogons. I felt that I should do something meaningful with it, seeing as how that sum of money in millet would feed a family for at least a month. It is a significant amount of cash in Mandoli. So upon arrival in Sevare that night, I took Christopher and two other volunteers out to dinner and then got us all good and drunk. If they weren't practicing Muslims, I think that the villagers would have thought that it was money well spent. I like to think that my habitually inebriated chief would have given us the thumbs up, at least. So I spent my ride down to Bamako sad, exhausted, confused, and very hung over. But after leaving all of this behind, not sure if I will ever come back here again, I think that I would have felt hung over regardless.