Coup and Cabin Feva. The only prescription is more cowbell.

Last week the lovely country of Mali experienced a coup d'etat.  The military decided it wanted to take over the government because they were annoyed that they were not receiving proper money or weapons to fight the Tuareg rebels in the north.  So they did.  What this means for me is that all of the volunteers in the immediate Sikasso regions were called into the stage house until further notice.  All of the volunteers in Mali were called into there respective regional capital stage houses with the exception of the volunteers in and around Bamako because Bamako has the potential to become dangerous quickly so the having volunteers holed there up would make little sense.  From Thursday to Tuesday (27th) the airport and borders were closed.  They are now open though there were protests at the airport today which caused a plane carrying many heads of state from surrounding countries to turn around.  The heads of state were coming in to talk with the new, illegal government of Mali about their options.

The coup seems rather poorly thought through.  It is almost as if they just wanted to make the point that they could take the government, but now that they have they seem unsure of what to do with it.  This coup really has little to no effect on my village because the government essentially does nothing for my village.  There are no roads, taxes, or other public services so who controls the country is of little consequence to my village.  As long as they can farm, they are fine, but we have been restricted to Sikasso in case they need to get us out of the country in a hurry I guess.  There is a lot of more in depth information online regarding this whole situation so I won't go into details, but instead will tell you what this means for me.

I have been in Sikasso since last Saturday couped (ha ha get it) up in the house with 25 other volunteers. Of course, I am doing well, but there is a decent amount tension floating about because this is a fairly stressful situation.  Right now, Peace Corps is taking a wait and see approach if things clear up quickly then we will be allowed to go back to our sites.  If things deteriorate we will be evacuated unlikely to return.  If things stay the same there is a good chance that we will evacuated as well no because of the danger necessarily but because our working relationship with the new government is uncertain and unknown.  Also, most aid organizations are pulling their funding in an effort to strong-arm the new government into restoring the constitution.  This means that the funding we have available for projects will be essentially depleted leaving us with doing only unfunded projects.  While this isn't the end of the world (I have done a few unfunded projects), it does definitely change my service.  My village and I were recently making good progress with USAID to fund a very large fishery project in my village, and I believe USAID has pulled almost all of its funding at this point.  Raising the money for this without USAID or other NGO support is fairly unrealistic so I'll be put back to square one if we stay with current situation.  Anyways, I'll try to people updated as best I can.

The most recent protests in Bamako were pro-coup protests with signs saying things like "Down with ATT" (the overthrown president), and "Down with the international community!"  I don't know how many of those people were under order from the current gov't but there were several thousand of them protesting.  That doesn't seem like a good sign, but my fingers are crossed.