Snapshots

Market day is Saturday. Each week, my village comes alive on Saturday: fresh fish come from the river in Djenne, clothes and nails and pots and calabash bowls and well bags all come from San, and kola nuts and cucumbers and carrots and peanut butter potatoes and rice and women selling spaghetti and hibiscus juice and donuts all arrive from all the surrounding villages. They come by donkey carts, by foot, by moto, or on mini buses piled so high with goods and people that they're twice their size and you're sure they'll tip. On my latest trip to the market, I wore pants. While buying soap, I was approached by an old man, who began yelling at me in French about the impropriety of a woman wearing pants in his country. Good thing I haven't worn jeans: the only time I've seen a woman wearing jeans was on a teenager. And she was the talk of the village for a week, after which the jeans were never seen again.

I was riding my bike home from the health clinic one day when I felt a car slow beside me. I turned to look at it to see a car filled with white tourists, all pointing at me, clearly terribly curious over what I could possibly be doing in a small village. One took out his camera and snapped a photo.

My phone was stolen off of my window ledge, leading to an inconclusive search for the thief via the footprints left in my compound. That was followed by an announcement every five minutes on the radio that my phone had been stolen, and that the thief would be killed if my phone was not returned. Yep, killed. As you can imagine, my phone was returned pretty darn quick. Three weeks later, I'm still getting asked about my phone, and not just by my villagers. I was on a bus from Djenne and a man, after learning my name, asked if my phone had been returned.

I had my first visit from home last week, Marika. We had a whirlwind trip of Mali with quite a few highlights. Including: a visit to my village during which we were treated like queens and given at least four dishes at every meal and singing a song in French on my village's radio station. Despite that we were laughing through the whole song and using my Nalgene water bottle as a drum, the radio director's phone was ringing off the hook with calls about the wild success of our performance. So if you've always dreamed of performing on the radio, you're always welcome here. Just an afternoon drinking tea in village. Would you like some tea with your mousse?

The biggest mud building in the world: Djenne's mud mosque.

Marika and I were in Bamako for a few days, where we spent quite a bit of time sampling the delicious street food the capital has to offer. One morning we were enjoying fried plantain and brochettes sandwiches. After stuffing the last bite into our mouths, we looked around for a place to throw our trash. [As a side note, Mali has not yet developed a trash disposal system. It doesn't help that everything in Mali comes in little plastic bags: your groceries, your vaccination card, your notebook, the donuts you bought for your snack. Malians love plastic. Which means that there's a whole lot of plastic piled up in the streets, floating in the wells, and worst of all perhaps, being burned. My village, for example, does sweep the streets of the market every week into many piles of plastic. Where to put them? Just burn them.] So when Marika and I didn't see a great place for our trash, I turned to the woman who had made our sandwiches and asked her if there was a receptacle for our trash. She nodded at me very seriously and held out her hand for my trash. I gave it to her, and just as seriously, she hurled it into the street in front of us.

Up next: A group of Americans make a visit to my village and we begin ameliorated porridge demonstrations at the clinic.