So, I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus from the blogging world as a lot has been going on in Bamako. So much, in fact, that I want to devote entire blog posts to some of the specific events that have taken place in the past month. I hope to write a post chronicling my long, frustrating, and finally rewarding journey to find an apartment, one about my impressions of the police here in Mali (there was a week earlier this month during which I had three run ins with the police…), and another about some of the varied and neat things my friends are doing with their time in Bamako (because they’re all doing pretty cool stuff!!). Doubtless, the entries about apartment searching and police encounters will be laced with descriptions of the frustration I have experienced and the ridiculousness of some of the protocol here in Mali. But tonight all of that seems somewhat insignificant given some of the events of the past week.
I spent my evening thinking about life and death issues… things that go way beyond being stood up for appointments or led on and let down by the internet company (some of the things that have really gotten me down in the past week or so). My dinner plans tonight were cancelled because my good friend, Bodil, found out that the seven year old son of her best Malian friend, Koti, had died earlier that day. Bodil has been coming to Mali for several years to do research and has spent almost 2 years (in bits and pieces) living in San, a village north and east of Bamako studying Bogolon mud cloth production. Koti is a Bogolon artist and the two became good friends in a place where it is often hard to for white women to break into female circles because of language barriers and cultural differences (I often find I relate more to men here because they are more generally the independent, freer thinking sex in Mali). Koti has been in Bamako for the past six months trying to make money because things in San’s Bogolon world are a bit tight. So, not unusually, her son has been living with an aunt back in San while his mother is gone for a while.
Tomorrow, the two friends will get on an early morning bus and make the long journey to San. But tonight thoughts weren’t on that trip, but rather the gravity of the situation and the greater issues it represents in a country like Mali. It is never easy when a child dies. But here, it is not the rare occurrence that it is in Europe or the states. Here, three hundred children die every day- half of them never reach their first birthday and the rest don’t make it to age five. Koti’s son made it past both of these milestones, but he died after an apparently sudden illness. (7 of 10 children who die do so at home without having the opportunity to get care at a health facility) The details of his sickness and death are unclear at this time, but it appears that he became ill suddenly and his health deteriorated so quickly that his mother did not even receive a phone call about his sickness until it was too late. I imagine that, like many children here, the boy was probably sick for some time with a “standard” respiratory infection, and some other infection took advantage of his suppressed immune system.
Bodil and I spent several hours discussing the injustice that occurs when a child dies. She described to me how she initially found the young child a bit bothersome and annoying as small children often are, but that in recent visits she realized he was really growing into a beautiful, kind boy. We shed tears together as we discussed the multitude of reasons that children here have such a hard road to hoe. In a sad coincidence, a good mutual friend had also lost a young Malian friend earlier in the week, also in San. She wrote a moving account on her blog that I think will express some of the thoughts and emotions that I can't here. I found myself remembering a specific passage in her book, “Dancing Skeletons,” in which anthropologist Katherine Dettwyler reflects on death in Mali. She spends several pages recounting interviews in which women describe to her their childbearing histories- number of pregnancies, miscarriages, births, and often subsequent deaths. Her research assistant explains that, “death is a fact of life here in Mali…. Every person has experienced the death of numerous relatives, friends, and neighbors… No on escapes. You never really get used to it, exactly, but you come to accept it, and even expect it. A woman expects that some of her children will die. Why should he be any differend than her grandmother, her mother, her aunts, her sisters, her friends? You can’t let the death of a child destroy your life. You have to laugh. Otherwise you’d have to cry” (Dettwyler 157).
Though I have been told that crying is not appropriate in cases of death here, women do cry. Dettwyler describes women crying over lost children after twenty or thirty years. Bodil returned from San reporting that she and her friend Koti had spent a great deal of time crying and grieving together. I know that just reading these passages out loud to Bodil and talking with her the night she found out about Koti’s son were enough to make me come unhinged.
I have become interested in the phenomenon of childbirth in great part because it is a universal phenomenon that is approached in a multitude of ways throughout the world. Similarly, the interpretation of death shares similarities and exhibits differences throughout different cultures. But I feel comfortable enough making the following generalization based on recent experiences and observations- in almost all cultures and in most situations, birth brings feelings of excitement, happiness, and wonder at a new life entering the world, while universally, death entails at least some sliver of sadness and sobering finality. Even when Christians rejoice that a soul goes to heaven or Buddhists prepare for reincarnation, I believe that there is a sense of loss involved when a death occurs.
*Note- I started writing this post on Jan. 26th, and finished it today- Feb. 17th
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