A Guide to Malinke Signs and Sounds

During pre-service training I did a post about my reflections on learning an African language, but since being at site, I've come to appreciate how much of Malinke expression is not found in the words themselves, but in subtle (or not) noises and gestures.  It's pretty fascinating to me that, not only are gestures and sounds different, but that they often exist for concepts that American culture apparently does not see a need to create a gesture for.

In the following videos, my Malinke family will walk you through sounds and gestures that I've picked up on (and since making the videos, I have thought of a lot more, such as the gestures for farming, work, and "you lied!").  We had a blast making these videos, and I hope you have a similar experience watching them!

Let's start with the basics.  "Come here" is similar, except with the hand flipped over.  This is sometimes confusing when you wave at kids and do the floppy hand wave--they think you want to come over to them.  Moussa will show you.

The following sound, demonstrated by Fily, is definitely my least favorite, used to get people's attention from far away.  I didn't usually respond to it because it sounds rude, but then I was trying hard to get someone's attention and was surprised by how effective it is with very little output.

The following series of videos will focus on reactive noises:

Sadio doesn't find what her conversation partner has just said to be of value:

Sambaly (rapper name Xhaki Blow) is mildly surprised....

Dande is quite displeased with what she just heard...

Ibrahima is quite surprised...

And then there is an expression of shock, as shown by Diounkounda (although it is often much higher pitched than this).

Someone has asked Sambou a question that he does not know the answer to...

Ansoumani is agreeing to what he has been asked to do (perhaps too reluctantly to express with actual words.)

Moving on to other signs and symbols, Sora wants to know: "What happened?"

What Sambou is saying with his voice is that he is coming back tomorrow.  With his hands, he is specifying that he is coming in the morning.  (Because the morning is when you wash your face).  

When we filmed this, Diounkounda said it meant that you didn't want to see the person you were talking to.  But then I saw it in action the next day, when the person was telling me something that I knew was a lie and wanted me to play along.

If you see or hear the following when in Malinke-land, watch out.  It means that you're doing something that probably isn't a very good idea, but that the person doesn't want to come right out and say it.

Sadio: It is the same.  Boulandy: It is not the same.

This is one of my favorites. The first word that children often learn is "Mban", which means, "I refuse".  It is accompanied by the following motion, demonstrated enthusiastically by Kounadi and Alamuta. 

The opposite of "I refuse" is "I accept", as seen here with a demonstration by Ansoumani.

I'm going to let readers guess the meaning of this one.  It means what you think it does, and Alamuta, in her terrible twos, has started doing this if anyone tells her to do anything.

If someone offers you a blessing and you do not respond correctly, you get chastized, so watch Dande and Sadio show you how it's done.

Blessings and Merry Christmas from Senegal (amina), where the women are strong (seriously, they spend a good proportion of their time carrying water and pounding things), the men (especially the Peace Corps Volunteers) are good looking, and the children, especially in my family, are cuter than average.

  

The Price of Gold

The landscape of south-eastern Senegal, both geographic and social, has changed drastically in the past ten years as a gold rush has brought an influx of people, money, and health and social issues to the area.  Since arriving in my site in May, I have noticed a tendency of many conversations and interactions to turn to the subject of gold, and to that of the djouras. 

When land was opened up for leasing to Western mining companies in the early 2000s and the mining explorations proved successful, the eyes of would-be gold miners across West Africa turned to Senegal.  Things really got going as the price of gold rose, turning what were once tiny unknown villages into boomtowns next to djouras, illegal small-scale mining sites.  Sambrambougou, the most well-known of these villages, has become a sprawling shanty town, where Africa meets the Wild West.  Gold mining has brought amazing economic opportunities for a largely agricultural population and infrastructure that benefits many but is accompanied by social phenomena typical of gold rushes throughout history. Bandits on motorcycles hold up passing cars on the barely passable road leading in and out, trafficked Nigerian prostitutes roam the dusty streets, bamboo shacks serve as motorcycle dealerships where lucky miners can blow their fortune.  Open consumption of alcohol defies norms of rural life in this Muslim country.  And mercury is released into the atmosphere at a rate one thousand times the safety threshold set by OSHA.

Small-scale artisanal gold mining has become the world’s largest emitter of mercury, posing health dangers on a global level.  At the local level, however, these health dangers are intensely magnified.  The local practices for the processing of gold are demonstrated in the following photos, courtesy of David Puhl and Martin Van den Berghe.

After the ore is dug from a well-like hole, the rock is pounded into small pieces and then milled to create a fine stone powder.  

The miners then use a gravity table, to separate heavier metals, including gold, from the lighter silica. 

The gravity table carpet is then washed in a basin and silt is released; this silt is then mixed with mercury. Gold and mercury bind together to form an amalgam that separates from the rest of the silt. 

The mercury is then burned off, leaving the gold, which is sold to a gold buyer and oftentimes exported to Mali.  

The burned-off mercury gas, meanwhile, is inhaled by both miners and other community members and also settles on the ground and in the water, creating more pathways for human exposure.

Long-term exposure to methyl mercury can cause issues with fetal and child development, both mentally and physically.  Mercury attacks the nerves, thus damaging sight, sensation, hearing, and coordination.  The lungs, kidneys, and GI tract are also vulnerable, particularly in children and pregnant women. 

Children playing near a gravity table and pile of tailings which likely contain mercury.

Soon after Patrick and I installed in our site, a Peace Corps Response Volunteer who had served in our site came back to work specifically on this issue, having designed an educational program that received funding from the US Department of State.  His timeframe was limited, and as brand new volunteers, we found ourselves in a whirlwind of managing what, by Peace Corps standards, is a very big project. 

Our teammate and neighbor, Martin, demonstrates to community  health workers how to use a retort, to which they gave the Malinke name "sannijannilango", (literal translation: gold burning thing).

The project, which has come to be known in Peace Corps Senegal as “The Mercury Project”, has a goal of reducing the potential harm of mercury in gold mining communities through both formal and informal education about the dangers of mercury and the introduction of retorts.   Retorts are an appropriate technology that can be produced here in the region of Kedougou that recaptures the mercury vapor during burning.  This greatly reduces the exposure to methyl mercury and provides an economic benefit as well.  Mercury is expensive (and illegal) to buy, so the potential for its reuse is a great incentive to use this technology and benefit the community’s health in the process.  

Because of the transient nature of the population in the mining communities, two baseline surveys that assess the community’s knowledge and behaviors surrounding mercury will be conducted for the project.  The first survey was completed in August 2012, at the height of the rainy season when many part time miners were farming in their home villages, and the second survey will be conducted in the height of the cold, dry mining season, just prior to the full-scale implementation of the educational project.  Following the baseline survey, our team implemented a pilot educational project, in three villages, and we are very encouraged by the preliminary results.

Our initial baseline found that 64% of the population in the mining villages handles mercury and that 64% of these handlers actually burn mercury.  (Practically all gold in Senegal that is artisanally mined uses mercury in its processing, however, so these figures are indicative of the percent of community members actually engaged in gold processing rather than the percentage of gold processing using mercury.)  96% of burning is done using an open bowl, allowing all of the vapors to be released.  31.5% of burning takes place inside a hut, which is the most dangerous practice.  (Another 46.5% of burning occurs in the courtyards of domestic compounds.)  81.9% burn in the presence of others.  This high prevalence of what the United Nations Environmental Program deems “worst practices” exists even though 90.3% of respondents said that they thought that mercury was dangerous.  This may indicate a desire to protect oneself and one’s community if the means of doing so become available. 

Our educational project is designed to train one Community Health Worker (CHW) from each village on the dangers of mercury and the use of retorts as well as other harm-reductive practices.  The CHW in turn chooses peer educators from the village who are trained on these same subjects and how to conduct informal education.  During the three week program, the CHW gives three health talks and acts as a team leader for the peer educators, who are each given retorts and instructed to have at least one conversation about mercury or retorts each day of the program and to act as a steward of the retorts, making them freely available for use by community members.  

This video shows community health workers role playing an educational exchange regarding mercury and retorts.  They were getting into it and taking on different roles, trying to make it more difficult for the person playing the health worker.  In this clip, one is deaf and one is a woman.  It's a good chance to hear what Malinke sounds like!

During the evaluation meeting for the pilot project, the peer educators reported that they had in fact  typically conducted a higher number of informal exchanges each day than what was requested of them, and some had used their retort with community members up to ten times each day.  Throughout the three week program, 199 community members were reached through health talks by the Community Health Workers, 4133 informal educational interactions were initiated by peer-to-peer educators, and retorts provided by our project were used 756 times to burn amalgam.  The biggest reported challenge was that the retorts did not cool off fast enough to be able to open the crucible and remove the gold in time to prevent a queue forming; this was a problem because the large numbers of people who had come to use the retort did not want to wait.  (If that’s the biggest issue with our program, I’ll take it!) Health workers recounted several anecdotes of behavior change surrounding the use of mercury, as a result of both the economic and health benefits of the retort technology.  The positivity of this meeting showed great promise for the full scale project, which will take place in January and February in eight mining villages. 

After rolling out the full-scale educational project, our next steps as a team are to work to develop both the supply and demand of the retort technology in order to support a sustainable market-driven supply chain.  Additionally, we are hoping to engage volunteers in the Community Economic Development sector to work with miners to form associations that will legitimize miners’ work and help to regulate the activities in the mining sites, creating healthier communities and empowering them to really benefit from the economic opportunities available through mining.  Since nearly all of the health issues in Senegal are exacerbated in the mining areas, there is much work to be done here in Wild West Africa.  

Another thing we worked on while Chris Brown (real name), the Peace Corps  Response Volunteer was here, was a mural project done in cooperation with the local high school as part of what will eventually be a broader campaign to encourage students to stay in school rather than dropping out to mine.

"My future shines brighter than gold".  I had come up with that slogan for this mural project but hadn't pursued it since i have zero artistic ability.  And then Chris came for the mercury project and turned out to be a great artist as well!

We worked with school administration to design this part of the mural, which shows students faced with two choices: the mines or other career opportunities available through education.

Season for Hope, Reason for Hope

The following piece is an article that I wrote for the congregation of my parents' church (Christ the King Lutheran Church in Bozeman, Montana) in response to their generosity in funding a girls' scholarship program at the middle school in our site.  While it was written with a specific audience in mind, the sentiments and themes are general enough that I wanted to share it here.

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Although it’s hard to believe it here in Senegal, where the temperature is just starting to dip below 90 degrees for “cold season”, the season of Advent is indeed upon us.  It is a season of hope, of anticipation, of preparing the way.  In this special time of year, I would like to take the time to thank the people of Christ the King Lutheran Church and reflect on how your support for girls’ education in Senegal has become, for me, a practical demonstration of the spirit of Advent.

For those who don’t know me, my name is Annē Linn, and my parents, Ritt and Roxanne Hoblitt are members at CtK.  My husband Patrick and I are about nine months into our two years of service with the Peace Corps as health and education volunteers in Senegal, West Africa.   Early on in our time here, we became aware of a Peace Corps program known as the Michelle Sylvester Scholarship program, in which volunteers raise money to provide scholarships to nine middle school girls in their community.  Only 41% of girls in Senegal are literate, compared to 59% of boys. Middle school is a critical time, as only 18% of girls in Senegal start secondary school, compared to 24% of boys.   When we have had conversations with students about why this achievement gap exists, they offer up various theories: early marriage (the legal age in Senegal is 16, but that is not always respected),the expectation of girls to help out at home, preference given to boys if there are limited resources for school fees, parental fear that girls who go to school will have more time unsupervised and get into trouble (these fears are not unfounded—situations of poverty create power imbalances in relationships, and early pregnancy is a big issue).  With all of these issues making it difficult for girls to get educated, the scholarship program seemed a clear area for intervention in our community.

When I approached CtK about providing some funding for this program, the church agreed to fund it fully, for not the one year that was originally requested, but for both years of our Peace Corps service.  What a generous act, to meet this need two times over.  The book of Isaiah tells us “Make straight in the desert a highway for our God” (40:3), a command that is particularly apt in the Season of Advent, as we await the Christmas coming of our God to Earth.  In today’s world of vast inequalities between the developed and undeveloped world, where we are Christ’s hands and feet, I believe that it is through generosity such as CtK has expressed, that this highway is made.  (And in Senegal, it does happen to be in the desert.)  For, as Timothy Radcliffe expresses it, “Waiting for the coming of God is not then mere passivity.  We do not only wait with the poor, we share their struggle.  Also, we must find ways of talking which are hospitable to the lives of the poor.  We must evolve a consciousness, a way of seeing things, which does not shut them out.  We must be attentive to the experiences of the poor so that together we gestate a language in which their hopes may find expression.  Then indeed we may find words into which the Word of God may come and find a home.”

The word of God then, with its message of compassion for the poor, finds its home through your action. All the nine girls, who are selected by teachers and administration at the school based on academic performance and financial need, have their school fees paid by the scholarship, and three of the girls are selected by a Peace Corps committee to additionally receive school supplies and textbooks.  This selection is based on interviews, essays, and home visits by the volunteers.   Facilitating the scholarship program proved to be a great first project for us at our site in Saraya, a town of about 5,000 in the very southeast corner of Senegal.  It was a great gateway into working with the school, and we were able to meet some wonderful female students and their families, some of whom come from small surrounding villages and come to Saraya for the school year in order to pursue their education.  There is no electricity in these villages, and radio is the principal form of news and information, so it was very exciting for the families of our scholarship recipients to hear the recordings of the girls reading their essays on our weekly Peace Corps radio show. 

In their essays, the girls were asked to respond to the following prompts: What are your plans for your future? What do you propose to do to support girls’ education in your community?  It took many of the girls a long time to get started—they had rarely, if ever, been asked about what they wanted to do with their futures, and students in the Senegalese education system are rarely asked to think creatively or critically.  However, once they got to writing, they expressed great dreams about becoming a midwife, a teacher, even a lawyer.  In response to the second prompt, they challenged their fellow female students to overcome the many challenges they face and to take charge of the future they have imagined.  As one girl put it, “I propose to the girls of our community to go to school because our future is found at school.  If we study until we succeed, in the future we can do all that we want and do many things without any one’s help.  I advise the girls of our community to not leave school.  Now, we, the girls, can do as many things as the boys.  Our place is not just at the home anymore.  If we want to help our families tomorrow, we must fight to succeed in the future.  Our families count on us, and we are their only hope.  So let’s work together to help our families.  Studying is not difficult.  If we want to succeed we will succeed.  We are tomorrow’s future.”

The winners of the competition were selected in July, and we held an event in their honor when school started in November, complete with a presentation from a wonderful female role model who works for Peace Corps on gender issues, a ceremony of honor, and a dj for dancing afterward.  Almost 100 students, teachers and family members came, and we were able to drive home the message that girls’ education is a reason for celebration, a reason for hope.  When we visited the girls’ families to invite them to the event, we were received with great joy, and pride in their daughters.  The recognition of their achievement will go beyond the present moment and encourage these families to continue to support their daughters in their educational endeavors.  When we stood up to leave one family compound, we were told to sit back down, that they wanted to bless us before we left.  They then proceeded to pour blessings out upon us, blessings that are in turn extended unto the people of Christ the King.

In his book Half the Sky about women in the developing world, journalist Nicholas Kristof asserts, “One especially cost-effective way to do that [increase learning once in school] is to offer small scholarships to girls who do well.  A study in Kenya by Michael Kremer, a Harvard economist, examined six different approaches to improving educational performance, from providing free textbooks to child sponsorship programs.  The approach that raised student test scores the most was to offer the top 15 percent of girls taking sixth-grade tests a $19 scholarship for seventh and eighth grade (and the glory of recognition at an assembly).  The scholarships were offered in randomly chosen schools, and girls did significantly better in those schools than in the control schools—and that was true even of less able girls who realistically had little chance of winning a scholarship.  Boys also performed better, apparently because they were pushed by the girls or didn’t want to endure the embarrassment of being left behind.”

What we are doing here, with the support of CtK, makes a difference.  A big one.  Girls’ education is correlated with many other aspects of development, in fact with all of the Millenium Development Goals.  It is a reason for hope.

I thank you again for your support, wish you a blessed Advent season, and leave you with this prayer:

Now is the time poised with renewed expectation

Of Emmanuel, God with us.

To know our time of proclaimed favor

We make again the pledge you ask:

“Share justly the good things I give you.

Reconcile with peace the rule of abuse.

Give courage to those who voice the words

Of lives that have been silenced.”

Send us to carry your good news

To those burdened with debt

Transform their chains into clasps of love,

Of prayer, concern, and then action.

Aware of your spirit always among us

We sustain your purpose with passions.

Increase our endeavor to do what you ask,

Of, “Where there are wrongs, they be righted.”

-Lala Winkley

One of the buildings at Lycee de Saraya, the middle school and high school in our town.  School officially started in the beginning of October, but no students or teacher arrived until after Tabaski in early November.  Now, as the peanut harvests draw to a close, more and more students are trickling in.


The nine scholarship winners selected by the teachers and administration.


Pat and Frank, our sitemate and collaborator on this project, hard at work making fancy celebration invitations for the girls and their families.

Site visit to invite scholarship winner Sokhna Keita and her family to the big celebration.  (It's hard to get people to smile in photos...they really were quite happy and offered many benedictions in our direction after this photo was taken.)


Introducing Awa Traore, Peace Corps' gender and development advocate for her talk at our Celebration of Girls' Education.

Awa leading a brainstorming session about why girls' leave school.  It was concluded that the biggest issue is  early teen pregnancy, and she talked to both boys and girls about how to take charge of their own lives and decisions rather than allowing poverty to decide for them.

The event was a hit.  There weren't enough seats in the classroom for Awa's talk, and people listened in from outside.


The textbooks we bought for our three scholarship competition winners.  These books turned out to be extremely expensive, and it dawned on us why no kids have their own books.  Students typically copy everything from the teachers' books down into notebooks to study from.


Presenting Kany Samoura with her backpack full of school supplies.


The girls and some of their family members proudly displaying their certificates declaring them scholarship recipients.  Certificates are a really big deal here.  Also in this photo are the mothers of two of the girls, who have very little education themselves.  While this scholarship is only for this year, it is our hope that it will impress on families the importance of educating their daughters and encourage them to continue to do so.