Darwin and Disease

I'm going to start off with a quick update on what I've been up to as far as work and adventure goes:

Ramadan ended a few weeks ago which was neat to be a part of.  My host family killed a cow, and gave me a large chunk of pretty good quality meat, meaning there were no shards of bones or pieces of guts attached.  I made a really rocking pot roast, and shared it with my host family.  The party itself was much like a sort of family oriented party might be in the states.  People just kind of sat around and relaxed and chatted, divided by different age groups.  Adolescents hung out with adolescents, adults with adults, and kids with kids.  Also, apparently it is a tradition to give small amounts of money to children who walk around and greet you.  I caught on to this eventually but was really annoyed the first few times I was asked for money.  And A LOT of kids asked me for money because I am white, and therefore have tons and tons of money.  All in all, it was pretty fun, and I was glad my village could stop starving itself (more than it already has to), and go back to not being quite so grumpy and tired.

I've been working on getting a project going to build some well tops in my village to try to keep the well water a little cleaner, so I've been making a lot of trips to Sikasso to get prices for various things like metal, and talking to welders to explain what I need and figuring out how much it will cost.  Then I had to okay everything with the village and fill out all the funding paperwork, which I submitted yesterday so hopefully that will all go through and I will have the money by the time I get back from Ghana.

GHANA!!!  Next week I head out on a long (40+ hour) bus ride to Ghana to run my first marathon.  I'm looking forward to the trip, though the race is still sounding very daunting.  My training has been going pretty well though in the last few weeks I've developed some really unfortunate blisters on the bottom of my feet.  My pace is going okay, but the long runs are HARD, which means the race is going to be hard as well.  Ah well, it will be a good experience.

It's still raining quite a bit though the last few weeks have been hot!!! The short way into my site is now completely flooded which actually makes for a pretty entertaining bike ride when I can't see the terrain, but only occasionally as it also makes you and your stuff very wet and muddy.  So, usually I go the long way these days.  I also had an exciting car ride into Sikasso with the mayor one rainy day.  I was coming in with him to do some work, and so he gave me a ride in his old Mercedes.  Someone built those cars well.  It had just rained a whole bunch so even the long way into Sikasso was a river, and we were in the two wheel drive sedan.  The mayor did a good job, and only conked the bottom of the car a few times on the numerous huge rocks in the road.  Then we got out to the "main" road and there was some pretty major flooding across it.  The mayor got out and briefly looked at it, and then decided to go for it.  I was thinking that it is generally not a good idea to cross floods (or so I was taught in silly American Driver's Ed).  Sure enough we get about half way through, and the water is really deep especially for this little car, and the current picks the car up and starts to transport us off the road.  We hit a sand bar and the mayor gunned it and we made it out just before we were deposited in the rice pattis.  It was an exciting moment.

Now onto the title of the piece, and once again these observations may be fairly obvious, but I just think it's interesting and therefore it's going on the blog.  In America, and the western world we have figured out how to live beyond Darwin, (for the most part).  All sorts of useless traits get passed on because we have the technology and medicine to enable such things.  I certainly appreciate this stuff when I get sick, but it definitely isn't here.  If a mentally handicapped kid is born, a lot of times it dies.  I've noticed the physically handicapped do a little better.  A lot of times the Muslim "church?" takes them and they can become Imams or do other sort of work.  Also their social values allow for a slightly more classic form of the idea of "only the strongest survive," at least when it comes to marriage.  In the wild the largest and strongest male will typically have some sort of "brood" or herd of females and have offspring by multiple females.  In much the same way the men here are allowed to take to up to four wives, but not just any man can take more than one wife.  Each successive wife costs more and more than the previous one(s), (by cost I mean you have to show that you have means to support more than one wife).  So you have to be sort of wealthy, and at least in village the only way to get wealthy is through farming, and the only way to get wealthy through farming is by having more fields than the next guy which means you have to be bigger and stronger than the next guy.  And if you are big and strong, then according to Darwin your kids should have a good chance a being big and strong, and your kids help you in the fields.  And the more kids you have the more fields you can take care of, and the more fields you have the more wives you have, and then you can have more kids which pass your big strong traits along more than the next guy's.  Or at least this is my perception of the way things work.  In cities people get money in other ways like by having a business, but at least in the bush people seem to be more in tune with "natural" processes.

Also in the western world we get to have what I've decided to call "luxury diseases."  I'm not denying that these are very real, horrible, and legitimate diseases, but they really don't exist here.  These are diseases like depression and anorexia as well as many others in this vein.  If someone here is too depressed to get out of bed for a week, their field dies, and then they die.  But also, they don't exist here because the community mind-set is not conducive to it.  There is no unhealthy relationship to food in the way that the western world has it at least, and depression isn't really possible because you are never alone here.  Your friends and family are always coming in and out of your house or coming over to drink tea, so you'd probably be snapped out of any funk you get into pretty quick.  But if not, yer dead.  We get to have these diseases because we have so much food that people develop an unhealthy relationship with it, and we have such big houses that we can shut out our friends and family with a nice walled in yard and gated community so no one can barge in and get you out of your depressed funk that you have the money to medicate yourself out of as well as the money to order in some of the copious amounts of food that you are afraid of and so will later throw up using some other medication.  Wow, I guess that sounds a little bitter and anti-western, and I guess it is, but I'm just trying to point out the differences in cultures by using extreme examples.  Despite all these issues I still love my western life-style.  Yes, there are problems with it, and I try to live in what I consider a reasonable way, but I'm not trying to give it up anytime soon.  I guess I'll leave it on that fairly unsummed up and bi-polar note.