Hi all. Sorry it's been so long between posts; a lot of stuff has happened in the last month and a bit, and I've kept pushing it back until now! Hopefully this will be the last time I miss so many updates!
So, briefly, a recap: on New Year's Eve I went out to a hotel and saw the legendary and ultra-cool Amadou & Mariam, one of my favorite bands in the world. The concert was basically everything I wanted; they played all their old, lesser-known-outside-of-Mali songs, didn't stop until 3 in the morning, blessed all of us for the New Year in 4 different languages and hey, there were fireworks, too! My buddy Krista, another 2011/12 Mali Fulbrighter, and her boyfriend Paul went with me, and Krista snapped this awesome picture.
 |
| Amadou & Mariam at 2 o'clock in the morning in their designer French sunglasses. |
Unfortunately, the year didn't start with quite the bang I'd hoped it would. In early January, my father came to visit me here in Bamako, but immediately fell ill and had to be rushed to a clinic the day after he arrived! He turned out to have been bleeding internally for days, albeit so slowly he just felt tired. The doctors quickly diagnosed this (it helped that he had turned white as a sheet) and figured he had a stomach ulcer. It was in fact a benign stomach tumor, which everyone (myself, my parents, and the American and Malian doctors) felt would be best dealt with in America. Long story short, after one very, very scary night spent telephoning all over Bamako for blood, we managed to get some the following morning at the Malian National Blood Bank. The blood bank, it turns out, lacks the resources to keep blood on hand for emergencies. Instead, relatives and friends of whoever needs the blood come in the morning, have their blood drawn, and can pick it up in the afternoon after it has been tested. That being so, I was desperate to find 4(!) donors who could provide Dad with the 4(!) liters of blood he needed transfused.
I was overwhelmed with support. My friend Krista immediately volunteered, as did either 4 or 5 US Embassy staff with the same blood type as my father. Throughout the night, I spoke with various Embassy personnel on a succession of cell phones (I had to make one frantic 3-in-the-morning run outside to buy one off a passerby when my battery died), and by morning, there was a convoy of people shuttled over from the Embassy to the blood bank, the doctors there had been briefed on the situation, my father was moved to the best clinic in Mali, right next to the Embassy, and from there, everything moved more-or-less smoothly. The Ambassador herself gave a liter of blood making my father, in her words, at least partly "ambassadorial." There's an endless number of jokes about politics and blood to be made ("Body Politic?" "Bleeding for one's constituency?") but I'll forgo those here in favor of simply saying "thanks." By that evening, we had gotten as much blood into my father as we had time for, and got him onto an Air France flight back to the States, where he was checked into our local hospital, operated upon, and is currently recuperating at home with no long-term side effects.
...I have mixed feelings about patriotism in general, and American patriotism specifically. A country, particularly such a vast one as America, is composed of so many disparate groups of people, and acts in so many disparate ways, that it's hard for me to support it 100% of the time. There are things I like about America (our immigrant culture, the 4th of July, our higher educational system, our amazing, permanently vibrant music scene) and others I don't (much of our domestic and international politics, consumerism, horrible public transport). That said, I was extremely moved by the outpouring of support from the American community in Mali, not just emotionally, but physically; it's hard to get more basic than giving blood. I realize that this is the sort of thing that Embassies do in general, and all of the Embassy personnel I spoke with seemed surprised that I was so grateful, but dealing with the potential slow death of a parent in front of one's own eyes tends to bring out such emotions. In plain words, the immediate, competent support the Embassy gave may very well have saved my father's life.
I have never been so proud to be an American.
Right! That's the sappy bit; on to the normal stuff. Compared with all of that, the rest of January seemed somewhat boring, for which I was exceedingly grateful. I've been continuing to take kora lessons with Toumani Kouyaté perhaps two out of every three days. The kora is such a complex instrument (the most complex I've ever attempted, at least in the "finger-work") that it's taking me a long time to break through to the next level of comprehension. Normally the process takes years, as with any instrument, but I'm in a hurry, so I'm trying to artificially speed things up by playing all the time.
To that end, I decided I needed a kora with which to practice during the days when I didn't have a lesson. My teacher helped me find a decent one that wasn't too expensive, and I took delivery of it about a week ago. Admittedly, we did have to leave it in the sun for a few days to completely dry the skin head, and tuning 21 brand new nylon strings took us three days, as they constantly stretch and need to be retuned. However, that's all finished now, and the kora is sitting in my bedroom waiting to be broken in (I'll post some pictures next week). My kora teacher is also in the process of making me a professional kora, identical to his own, but for various reasons that's taking a while.
I've also had a good number of sessions with one of my two primary n'goni teachers, Kélémonson Diabaté. Sadly, his father passed away in January, so we had to stop our lessons for a few weeks while he was back in his hometown dealing with the burial, but we've started back up again. Kélémonson's father, Cémogo, was a very well-known n'goni player during his day, and an influential teacher in Kita, one of Mali's biggest centers of griot music. I've been learning about all of this, as well as a lot of Kita and griot history in general, from Kélémonson during the past few weeks. I initially had mixed feelings about all the history. After all, I came to Mali to learn to play music practically. However, all of my teachers are quite sure that the historical (and sometimes mystical) aspects of the griot's art (known as jeliya) are every bit as important as the actual technical playing of an instrument. One way or another, everything's getting recorded at pretty decent quality, so even if all of this information isn't interesting, relevant, or comprehensible at this point, it might be in the future to me, or someone else.
Regular updates will start up again on Monday; I'm heading out today for Ségou tomorrow to attend the Festival sur le Niger, so I'll be out of email contact. Expect a field report of the festival when I get back!
