Making Malians Do It Themselves

Sometimes I am convinced that my main job here is not to make things better but encourage Malians to change themselves. What I mean is this: there is usually a group of people in the village- generally professionals such as health staff, teachers, politicians- who have some kind of knowledge. Sometimes, what they need is someone else to encourage them to transmit that knowledge, and sometimes the materials as well. For example, one of the things I regularly try to do is give weekly health talks to the women's association meetings. Normally the health staff is busy or forgets to come help me, but at this last meeting both the midwife and the vaccination guy came, which was a good thing because I had chosen to talk about birth spacing and birth control. Well, I always have a planned speech, but my partners in health kind of took over half-way through. And the thing is this: they know the advantages of spacing pregnancies as well as I do, as well as how birth control works. And on top of that, they have the language and cultural sensitivity to transmit that information. So its not that I'm here to tell anyone some groundbreaking new information, I just have to convince people to share that info with the general public. At times that is what frustrates me here: there seems to be two groups of people, the ones that are educated and the ones who aren't. And they aren't trying to meet in the middle. The ones with the knowledge are usually dismissive of the general public (most often with the women) and argue that they're not trying or that they don't care, like getting their children vaccinated or studying hard to pass school, and the population has so many other matters on their mind, and things to do, that they often don't see the importance in such things. So it feels in Mali that there is a conflicting desire for change and yet cynacism of that change. I guess not unlike the rest of the world.