Finding a New Home in Mali
by Ashley Shult, Trek & Program Coordinator
July 2008
The California Trek for Knowledge team - high school students, teachers and buildOn staff - traveled this summer to Kongolikoro, Mali, in western Africa for two weeks to help build a school and participate in a once-in-a-lifetime cultural exchange.
As we pulled up to Kongolikoro, our new village home for the next two weeks, hundreds of villagers were lined up waving the Malian flag and already beginning to beat their drums and sing their welcome. The 20 members of the California Trek team were ushered under a shady shelter and the welcome ceremony commenced and the village representative announced “You have left your home, and you are now at home. Feel at ease.”
As the students stood to introduce themselves in Bambara, the local language, they each stumbled awkwardly over their new Malian names and looked for familiarity in a foreign world.
Over the next two weeks, the group worked hot days on the worksite to help build a primary school needed by the village. The new school would replace the old and crumbled mud and thatch school down the dirt road. Every day, American students and villagers together shoveled out the dirt for the foundation and mixed cement to make bricks, taking a break now and then to play in the rain when it became too wet to work.
When they weren’t on the work site, students had the opportunity to learn about the Malian culture by sitting with the midwife, learning to make shea butter, and by speaking with the village Chief and his Elders. They also played a soccer game, had their fortunes told by the village medicine man, learned to pound millet and weave baskets, and most of all, to dance to the beat of the Malian drums.
By the final night, the women of Kongolikoro threw us a goodbye party. It was incredible to watch the transformation in this particular group of students. They danced until their dirt-stained clothes were soaked in sweat, they cheered each other on, belting out their Malian names, and they embraced their new Malian friends around them, hugging and holding hands.
Under the stars on a warm Malian evening, these kids became part of the community of Kongolikoro, barely resembling the nervous foreigners that shyly arrived two weeks earlier. They had left their homes, and they were at home. They were at ease.