Opening Night

At the beginning of May, when I was in between projects (as my blogs say doing a lot of mango eating and hair braiding) I began to get impatient with my villagers. Why doesn’t anyone want to do anything? At the same time, I began to get annoyed by the group of kids always at my door. Don’t they have anything better to do than to hang out here 24/7?
And then it clicked. If you can’t beat them, join them. And if no one else is listening besides these kids- run with it. The idea struck me when my boys were looking through this comic book on malaria I had got during one of our field trips in Mid-service training. It was about two students, top of their class. One took really good care of her health and slept under a treated mosquito net. The other did not, ended up getting malaria, missing a lot of school and falling behind. With the help of my language tutor, I translated the story into a Bambara script, and then gathered all the neighborhood kids under my hanger one afternoon. “We’re doing a play.”
The first few days were a blast. I read them the story and had perfect attention, smiles, and excited applause. We then did auditions, and got a big laugh out of each of the little boys pretending to be attached by mosquitos in the middle of the night.
But after rehearsals got underway, I realized that this was going to be a lot harder than I thought. I remember how stressed I would be trying to choregraph a dance number at the Harley Summer Theater camp with 30 middle schoolers. This was even harder. The first rehearsal there were at least three fist fights, and Shaka got into an argument with a passing woman that completely disrupted the whole rehearsal. I had no choice. I kicked him out of the play. “Fine,” he said after he was the one who helped bring it all together in the first place, “I don’t want to be in it anyway.” Some of the older kids (10, 11, 12 year olds) were really truly interested, and dedicated. But they were outnumbered by crying 6 year olds who just didn’t understand why you can’t run on stage and say your one line at any old point. And that first rehearsal, my friends, is a day I will never forget. It is the day I realized how much untreated ADHD there is in Malian children. Cesalo, leave the bike alone. Cesalo, leave the bike alone. Cesalo! I know that he doesn’t want to cause trouble but he seriously cannot, CANNOT keep his hands to himself.
But its either this or more sitting under the mango tree. Let’s hope it gets somewhere.
Two weeks later…
We’ve had our rehearsals. They are at no scheduled time per se, just when all the kids round each other up. The boys cleared out an area under a shady mango tree and hung a large three meter piece of plastic that I had bought at the market as our curtain. Taped to this plastic was decorated letters that spelled “SUMAYA” (Bambara for “Malaria”) colored by the children. Gabriel, our doctor, had a special white coat borrowed from the CSCOM, and the youngest kids had plastic-bag wings strapped on their backs to portray the devious mosquitoes. I had no idea if these kids would be able to keep themselves under control for the whole 15 minutes, but we were going to give it a shot. The original date of the play got switched. (The legitimate excuse- it rained. But really, 15 minutes before the show, all of my kids were out working in the fields so I doubt it would have happened anyway). When I finally gathered them all the next afternoon, we had no audience (even though I had spread the word as much as possible). “Go around the village and get people!” I shouted. This was so unorganized. Even the star of our show, the young Aicha, didn’t bother to tell me she’d be out of town today, and left me to put in an understudy. I noticed that the sense of a performance being an end goal didn’t really have much meaning to them. On the day of the show I had kids show up that I’ve never seen before in my life claiming that they were in the show. “Who are you?” “I’m one of the mosquitoes!” “No you’re not, I’m sorry, you’ve never even been to a rehearsal. Go sit in the audience.”
The kids finally rounded up about 25 villagers, mostly teenagers who came to laugh at their younger brothers and sisters. If the concept of a theater was foreign to my actors, it was even more so to the audience. When I’ve seen Malians watch TV at the CSCOM or in Dio, it’s the funniest thing ever. They comment on EVERYTHING. Especially Irene: “Oh! Did you see that? The kid is crying!” Here in Dombila’s children’s theater, it wasn’t any different. The Malians would laugh at the top of their lungs at everything, and when somebody messed up their line or enterance, they would vocally let that person know. Little kids would be running all over the place, and kids behind the black curtain would continuously run out to watch or intervene from the sides. It was pure chaos. But you know what? It was a blast. The audience loved it. The kids loved it. The joking cousin bean jokes were spoken loud and clear by little kids that were previously too embarrassed to do any sort of public speaking. And when the doctor came out in his white coat to explain the 8 sandwhich-board type malaria pervention signs worn by all of our little mosquitoes standing in a line, all was silent. The message was heard. And though we won’t be going to Broadway anytime soon, probably not even to Dio, we’re working on a spot on Dombila’s health radio show and maybe a second performance (after the performance kids came back to my house- are we doing the play today? Um… it’s over, we already did it!). The play was in the middle of a malaria prevention week in Dombila, where I went around to 5 different villages doing malaria talks and mosquito-net treatment demonstrations. For the most part, I had great attendance. So even if you are sitting under a mango tree braiding hair all day, it doesn’t mean you’re not going to ever get up. You just need a reason to do so. So that’s our job, finding those reasons.