Today, I left my home-stay village for the last time. I passed my Language Proficiency Exam, and my practical demonstration of all of the technical things I have learned in training. I said goodbye to my host family (although I’ll get to see two of them at Swearing-In), packed up all of my things, had a dance party in the street, and cried a lot.
I knew that I would become a different person by the end of my service, but I was unprepared for the growth I would see during PST in myself and in my fellow volunteers. We learned an incredible amount of Bambara, and about Malian culture. But more importantly, we learned how to adapt here, to take the intimidating things with humor and determination. We learned which aspects of ourselves we were willing to compromise for the sake of integration, and which we were not. We figured out how to rely on each other, and when it was important for us to rely on ourselves. We are ready, I hope, to be volunteers.
I also noticed growth in someone that really surprised me. My host sister, Mariam. Mariam did everything for me: she cooked my meals, she carried my water, she quizzed me on Bambara, helped me answer questions the rest of my family asked me, did yoga every night with me, and kept my spirits high. Unlike most of the other host families in my village, my family had never hosted a PCT before. That meant some things were more difficult (for instance, they didn’t have a list of meals they knew Americans would like to eat), but I got a lot of other positives out of it.
Mariam had to stop going to school last year, because in Mali, women are expected to run the household, and education is not an important part of that. That means that many girls stop school in their early teens (Mariam at age 14), and are expected to get married and start a family. There are so many issues that I won’t even try to dive into here about child brides and the structure of Malian home life. The point I am trying to get at, is that after spending a few months living with Mariam’s family, she told me she’s decided she doesn’t want to be like her sister, or like her friends, she wants to be like me. She wants to wait to get married until she is done with college, and has lived in another country. She wants to learn English, travel, and maybe not ever have children. All of this is in complete opposition to the way she has been raised. And I would not judge her one little bit, if she wanted the same life as her sister and friends, but I am so proud of her for thinking on her own and chasing her dreams.
I know I am not past the frustration that comes with being a Peace Corps Volunteer, but I also hope that I am just at the beginning of feeling these kinds of connections and differences I am making. Right now, I am really feeling like I am living the words of the great man who created this program: John F. Kennedy. “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.” I am really hoping this idea of women’s empowerment lives on in my host sister.