Taking flight

by Mary Mackay
The Guardian, February 2, 2007

There’s a little bit of Mermaid, P.E.I., sports spirit flying high in Mali, West Africa.

An off-hand fun game of Frisbee by Engineers Without Borders’ volunteer Michael Gallant led to the creation of Mali’s first ultimate Frisbee association, which is co-named after Gallant’s home community of Mermaid.

“I brought it because it’s a fun game. It’s very easy and simple. I brought it along thinking maybe some day we’ll throw a Frisbee around and get some exercise, that sort of thing,” says Gallant, who recently wrapped up his posting with Engineers Without Borders (EWB) Canada in Mali after 10 months in this culturally diverse, land-locked West African country.

An engineering graduate from the University of New Brunswick (UNB), Gallant and a friend started the university’s EWB chapter in 2004.

“We started the chapter with the idea that we’d blow the students’ minds. At some point a lot of the students we were talking to were just thinking about making money and jobs and things and we thought that there was more to life than just working,” he says

“The idea was to give students a venue to speak about things rather than just buying televisions and things.”

A work placement overseas was the natural next step. After intensive training in Toronto, Gallant flew to Mali in early 2006. He was in Sévaré, a village of 10,000 or a city of 100,000, depending on whom you ask, working with the National Co-ordination of the Multifunctional Platform (MFP) project.

MFP’s main goal is to alleviate rural women’s poverty by developing energy-producing micro-enterprises that women’s associations will own and operate.

A platform is just that — a small diesel engine mounted on a chassis to which a variety of equipment can be attached, such as grinding mills, battery chargers, vegetable or nut presses, welding machines and carpentry tools. It can also support a mini-grid for the lighting of 150 to 200 electric bulbs or electric pumps for a small water distribution network or irrigation system.

It’s basically a rural access-to-energy program, says Gallant, who was charged with finding a better training strategy for the village committees in charge of the generator energy systems.

Later he helped revamp the preventative maintenance systems for the diesel engines for the MFP’s generator-operated energy systems.

At his new place of EWB work, Gallant was immediately introduced to the regular social start to the day — shaking hands with all the employees for the requisite morning greeting.

“If you don’t shake hands with everyone at the office when you arrive, you don’t exist at work that day,” an MFP worker told Gallant one day.

While work dominated much of his time in West Africa, he did manage to squeeze in a few other adventures.

One was a paddling trip down the Niger River with fellow Canadian EWB volunteer Tom Owen, whose mission was to share his discoveries of how people use technology to better their lives in rural Mali.

“The highlight was really when we stayed in a (small, rural) village and learned how to be a potter. That was what he was essentially doing — stopping in villages and learning about people who were in the villages and what they did for their (livelihood),” Gallant says.

For his pottery lesson, Gallant got down and dirty, from fingertips to toes.

“You use your feet to mix your clay with water . . . ,” he says, smiling.

“And they basically put a little bit of peanut oil on the ground and put this clay bowl and spun it around with their feet (and then used their hands) to make pottery.”

Being a curious sort, Gallant undertook a livelihood analysis of the people within four kilometres of where he was based to find out basically what they did for a living.

He came up with an interesting pictorial of Mali life.

“What strikes me most is the huge number of businesses relying on an opportunity, like tire repairers and informal gas stations,” Gallant wrote in his blog.

“For instance, the tire repairers rely on the fact that a tire will blow in their section of the street.

“There is no open competition, there are no sales, etc., just a reliance on the ‘will of God’ that there will be customers today.”

Then came the day Gallant broke out the Ultimate Frisbee.

A neighbour, Seko Sangaré, who works with the Mali air force and organizes local sports was super smitten with this soaring plastic disc.

“When we started playing this game his just absolutely fell in love with it. He asked me right way if he could borrow the Frisbee so he could learn how to throw better,” Gallant says.

Sangaré was eager to learn more, especially the rules of the organized game.

Soon more and more people were turning out for their games. In the end, they taught about 40 or 50 kids, ages 10-15 how to play.

They also organized the first of two Malian ultimate Frisbee tournaments with prizes, such as hats and funky, futuristic pens from the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists from New Brunswick.

Sangaré and Gallant formed a sports association that would be responsible for ultimate Frisbee in the area: the Association Sportive Baya & Mermaid.

“We named it so it would be representative of both our home communities — his being . . . Baya Mali and mine being Mermaid, P.E.I.,” Gallant says.

In the beginning months, some things were difficult to see on a daily basis, such as the living conditions that many Malian people had to contend with.

But then one day, Gallant’s westernized view of the world around him dissipated. He could clearly see the life that the people around him were leading.

“I began to see the underlying courage and rich lives that my friends and neighbours led,” he wrote in his blog.

“The problem is, yes, people here are materially poor. But they smile, laugh, play and enjoy themselves more than I’ve seen any materially wealthy person (do) in my lifetime.”