(Mis) Adventures in Eating

By popular request, I'm blogging about fish heads this week instead of my mandate. Ask and ye shall receive:

As I've alluded to before, one of the most important aspects of my work in international cooperation in Mali is "intercultural learning" which is centered around living with an adoptive Malian family. For me, it has proved to be at times the most and least enjoyable aspect of my life as an international stagiaire.

Although the families we are placed are slightly better off than the average Malian family, the conditions there are a far cry from the air-conditioned houses with pools that ex-pats can afford. In short, living with a family provides a first hand glimpse into the every day realities of many Malians. Still, the situation is somewhat artificial, since interns get their own room and bed which is already different than the situation for most Malians who share rooms and beds, if they have a bed at all.

Not all interns have had the same experience as me, but I did have a hard time transitioning from living independently in Canada where my only obligations to others were to feed my cat and to be considerate to my roommates, to being part of a family in a société collective (as opposed to individuelle like home, thanks pre-departure intercultural sensitivity training!) where decisions are meant to be made and actions undertaken with everyone else in mind.

The living conditions in my first family were intolerable to me, and I know that I wouldn't have been able to do 5 months living in a dark, dirty store room with a door that didn't shut all the way. Still, the family spoke French really well, there were cute kids and babies to play with and they cooked me a big plate of eggs for breakfast every morning, so there was good and bad in that situation. Having to change families meant that I had been in Mali for almost a month and still didn't feel "settled", which definitely affected my productivity. 

My next and current family were much better equipped to host an international worker, but I still had issues having my daily needs met, specifically a good breakfast. They seem to be an afterthought here, and most time and effort is dedicated to supper where the portions are enormous. Usually, the family eats so late that by the time they bring me my pot, I've "pushed through" my earlier hunger and don't have much of an appetite anymore. I tried unsuccessfully to explain that a big breakfast before work was more important to me than a huge supper right before bed. Eventually, they started saving a portion of the day's lunch and served it to me warmed up the next morning. This was not my favourite thing, but it more or less worked until the maid brought me cold faroké. I took one bite and vommed before breakfast and then snapped and told my family and my boss no more, I'm buying my own breakfasts *Shut it down!*So it only took 3.5 months, but finally I've been given an extra 50 cents a day to buy my own breakfasts. 50 cents gets me one croissant or pain au chocolate, 2 slices of laughing cow cheese, or 3 hard boiled eggs and a stick of bread. It more or less works.

As for my room, it's a good size and a nice place to retreat to. If I didn't have my room, I would probably go crazy. That being said, the room is still a big change in its own right. There is no screen on the window so mosquitoes have been a problem the whole time and it faces the court yard, so it's noisy and pretty much everyone can see what I'm doing in there at any given time. The lack of privacy bothered me at first, but now I don't care except for when I'm changing. Also, it's stifling hot in my room since its position in the house means it's hard to get any kind of a cross-wind going. The plus side of this is that now the glacier showers don't bother me...I even look forward to them. Finally, there was no problem adapting to the people in my family, because they're just lovely. As with any relationship, it took me a while to trust them, but when I did I realised that they were good friends and great fun.

Evidently, I've adopted the "meh, Africa" shrug coping mechanism where you shrug off things that might otherwise bother you because the other option is not being in Africa, which would be worse. 

Before anyone accuses me of going native though, I must admit that for me, the food has been one of the hardest things to get used to. Mali is known for having some of the worst food in the region. For example, I once heard a Sénégalais proudly announce that they don't have the somehow sloppy yet gelatinous, blackish/green blob food called thon there. As with everything, I did a lot of shoulder shrugging to accept having someone else cook for me and never the things I wanted, and I've spent much time here fantasizing about what the first thing is I'll cook for myself when I get home. I keep craving borscht with a healthy dollop of sour cream which probably means I'm deficient in something found in those two things...or that there has been some latent, as of yet undiscovered Russian incursion into my lineage.

All meals are prepared outside and usually eaten by hand communally,(although separated by gender) out of a big bowl, but my family gives me my own pot with a lid and a spoon, which is good, because I'm not hardcore and I don't really like eating with my hand, especially if I've had to wash with just the kettle. 

Breakfasts are sparse, if they happen at all. Lunches for my family are always rice and sauce, but way too much of it and I get a food baby every time I eat anything with rice in this country. I buy my own lunch most days since I'm at work which means a huge portion of my budget has gone to Le Relax and Burger-Time. Snacks are purchased from nice ladies on the side of the road and suppers are by far the best and worst, depending on the night, allow me to explain:

Suppers in my family are usually some kind of starch (eg: potatoes, beans, sweet potatoes, and cassava root or pasta) with one or two chunks of sheep meat or a piece of fish and a sauce, typically a little too heavy on the palm oil and salt, but tasty enough. Other times, it's a grain (eg: couscous, fonio, thon, attieké) with the same accompaniment as the starch. Rarely, I get salad, nems, meat and peas. For the most part, I eat fairly well compared to other stagiaires, so I don't go out for supper too often. There is however, one problem and that is what has come to be my least favourite thing in the world: fish heads
 

The first fish head I got was some slimy bottom feeder served with rice for lunch after I'd been with the family for only about a month. I lifted the lid, looked inside, closed the lid and momentarily pondered packing my bags and getting on the next flight out. My maman was sitting right beside me, so I did my best work on the thing and tried to sneakily put the lid back on and steal away. She opened the pot and remarked that I had barely eaten the thing, then picked it up and sucked all the skin off of it and dug out all the organs including the eyes. Her tenacity impressed me, but imagining myself doing it made my guts turn.

Prior to that, I had done my best to eat all that she put in front of me, but I just couldn't do it this time, and was hoping that she would interpret my not eating the fish head as a sign that I didn't like it. 

It didn't work, and much to my chagrin, I was given many more fish heads. I did my best to eat them, despite being put off, especially once I had a Malian tell me that giving some one a fish head was a sign of respect usually reserved for the male head of the family. This made me feel uncomfortable, since I already get to skip the eating order hierarchy by being pasty and I didn't want to seem like I was eschewing some sign of cultural respect.

Nevertheless, I suspect he might have been pulling my leg, because the other day one of the kids brought me a pot with a fish tail on potatoes but my mom called her back. She swapped my pot for hers saying that she didn't like the head....

Food in Pictures:

The kitchen

The stove

Breakfast: 

Céréal, usually made with corn, rice or millet and eaten with these big, plastic spoons.
This also doubles as dinner on Sunday.

Lunch/Somtimes my Breakfast: 

Faroké (sp?) dark green sauce made with shea butter and ground seeds, usually palatable but has the texture of sand and will break you if ingested cold.

Every Sunday lunch feast: riz au gras, or Sénégalais rice cooked in oil with fish and veg.

Lunch en brousse=fish and spaghetti.

Ubiquitous sauce arachide, or peanut sauce

Poulet yassa from a street stall, that's a chicken's spinal column in the foreground

Poulet yassa from a nice sit-down place in Djenné. Notice the lack of spinal column.

Fish and Chips, Dogon style.

What's for Dinner?

Beef+deep fried plantains+onions=not bad.

Thon, or tion? Pronounced like "toe" is the bane of most stagiaire's existence.
More common en brousse, and my family hates it anyway, so I wasn't subjected to it that often.
This kind with vegetables wasn't so bad, but I couldn't eat the kind with fish.

One time after couscous, I got a second supper of beets and beans.
Any kind of insoluble fibre makes T very happy.

Tasty sweet potatoes and cassava, one of my favs.

First supper back from Dogon was my fav: nems on salad :)

Fish Heads for Supper: A Cautionary Tale
(go on, click the link. You'll enjoy it)

Fish head on deep fried plantains and onions. This is a "capitaine"
or "nile perch". Tasty enough when not in head form, but I
did the best I could.

Dear real family, next time you try to say I'm a princess, remember this image.

Fish head on salad with a side of bread....wtf?! *shrug*.

This kind of creepy bottom feeder  which was served on rice was the first kind of fish head I received, but I didn't take a pic then. This one was served with red sauce and bread.  I didn't even try to eat this one, this picture broke my camera and I dreamt about fish heads that night...only 2 more weeks.

Finally, after yet another unfortunate and still ongoing digestive episode last week, I refused the last fish head I was offered. I guess there is an upside to being sick.

Culture Shock Explained: A Photographic Essay

I have just returned to Bamako and work after a blissful mid-mandate break in Djenné and Pays Dogon*, where I ate "cliff bread" and technicolour jam, survived a zombie beggar apocalypse, navigated a city made entirely of mud, trekked along the Falaise de Bandiagara for 4 days and drank tea, shopped and slept on rooftops under the starriest of starry night skies.

*(Pics soon, they take forever to upload to the blog but are pretty much impossible to upload to Facebook unless I do it one and a time, which I won't because I have marriage proposals to collect very important things to do.)

Upon my return which included a 10 hour, sweltering hot, overcrowded and fishy-smelling overnight bus ride, I looked forward to catching up on some zzzz's before starting work again. Truth be told, during my first night back I realised that I slept better outside on a mattress on a roof than I do in my own bed.

The weather is getting hotter and my bed is woefully uncomfortable. So at about 2am after hours of tossing and turning in the creakiest of beds with its wooden slats digging into my shoulder blades, I dismantled my bed in the dark and re-acquainted myself with the floor, cranked the fan and finally knocked out for a few short hours of much, much needed rest.

You see, in Mali a mattress on the floor is more comfortable than a bed, and instead of winter giving way to spring, the "hot season" is now transitioning to the "very hot" season, so I had beads of sweat trickling down my forehead while I sat idly behind a desk when my boss welcomed me back at work and remarked that the heat had returned.

My boss then informed me that I am to head out en brusque brousse again to identify microcredit superstar ladies and put them in charge of the funds in their wee villages. So after being back in Bamako for not even 4 days, and back at work for only 2 days, I've had 2 projects to wrap up before taking off tomorrow on yet another probably ill-fated, backcountry roadtrip where I'm sure to be exposed to all sorts of exhilarating(?!) things.

This got me to thinking about how incredibly different, absolutely everything is here and how I definitely still has the culture shock.

There are supposedly several stages to this affliction, but everyone experiences it differently, so I've dubbed the phases after my own experiences.

The first stage is the "Honeymoon Stage" where ZOMG everything is shiny and new and wonderful!!!

The next is what I like to call the "Mission Creep" (heyo, a little IS humour) where general loneliness, disenchantment and occasional despair creep up on you and make for long days and even longer, sleepless nights. Since I had such a rough introduction to Mali, I think that these two phases occurred concurrently for me rather than consecutively. This meant that my highs were exceptionally high and my lows were devastatingly low...or that I was more manic than Morrissey.

Now I am in the third phase, called "Resignation" where you let go of perpetually longing for things at home, learn to appreciate some of the things here (like beans! I really like it when my mom makes me beans!) and take one of 3 paths with the third being preferable:

1) "Go Native": wear the same brightly coloured, busy patterned outfit head to toe, enjoy the taste of palm oil, think nothing of the trou, find the most convoluted way to do something then do it, etc. This to me is the easier option.

2) Ex-pat Escapism: hang with other toubabs at over-priced toubab joints doing only toubab things.

3) Hybridize and Compartmentalize:  To me, the former is where you learn to love new things in your new home, while not losing yourself in the place. The latter is where you bring what you already know you love (ie: hiking, running, live music) to your new home and learn to appreciate the differences. This option requires constant effort, evaluation and a robust sense of humour, but on my good days, seems to serve me well.

Moreover, having for the most part acquiesced to the wretched taste of palm oil, the trou (although a trou in Djenné broke me, I finally met one I couldn't use) and people's at times perplexing priorities, I can now look back and chuckle at some of the things that I have had to adapt to in a short amount of time. So, over dinner  my Pays Dogon travel buddies and I drafted a list of blog-worthy, dichotomic, photographic comparaisons for your kind perusal:

Culture Shock Explained in Visual Pairings

Column A: Canada               Column B: Mali

Household Items: 

Of the non-glacial variety.                This also can be a dishwasher and a washing machine.

                                                       The 4:00 am call to prayer comes early.  

         

                                                                      Naa douminiké!

Time

 

Pets 

Yes that's a cat on a towel.                      These guys double as dinner          

Trash Disposal

          Where should I toss this?        You know what, here's good.

Multitasking

                                                     Walking down Bamako's main drag carrying twins and balancing a 20 litre bucket on her head.                                                    

Decency

Fidelity

 

High Fidelity: aka loyalty, Cusak style.                            Draper style.

Bathroom

 

                                         I'll leave you to figure the kettle out for yourself.

Family Time and the Continental Divide

This is a marriage sack according to a Google image search.
I always imagined something more ominous looking.

I set this blog up with the intention of writing about the work that I'm doing in Mali, but I feel like this particular aspect (re: project development/grant writing...aka office work with occasional excursions into the country) of "international cooperation" (I'm translating that from French....international solidarity in English?) is probably pretty boring to anyone else but me. It's even boring for me sometimes. For example, last week I worked on a "cadre logique" for a project, do you want me to tell you what a "cadre logique" is? Didn't think so.

There is however, one aspect of international cooperation that has proven immensely entertaining to me at least, and that's "intercultural learning". At the epicentre of  intercultural learning is the time I spend with my adoptive Malian family.

But how can International Cooperation Jam It?
It appears that my family's "introductory offer" of spoiling me has expired. Moreover, I have reason to believe that I was never actually as spoiled as my colleague told me I was. In fact, I believe that he is the only one in my "grin" (clique, I'm told) being spoiled and the only princess around would be him since he gets everything that I want without having to fight for it like I have.

Usually I am thrilled to be living with a Malian family: laughing and cheering with them as baby Lamine took his first steps, seeing what they see, and sometimes I'm even happy to eat what they eat, but occasionally I feel like international cooperation can jam it, because it's just too awkward to put a grown woman, especially one with a robust independence streak, in such a situation. This sentiment grew particularly worse after my meeting other fellow PSIJ  interns who only had to put in a few weeks of time with a family and now live in some ex-pat palace with a pool...just down the street from yours truly.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?
My "mi-stage" (mid-mandate) break is just around the corner, so I now have to decide if I will spend the rest of my time in Mali with my family, or if I should venture out on my own. On the one hand, I am getting a "real deal" experience as an adoptive Malienne, on the other hand, I am also experiencing certain minor indignities that I know other ex-pats don't have to suffer.

Occasional pangs of jealousy about how other ex-pats live aside, my family is great and I like them, make no mistake. My maman is always teasing me and I find it hilarious. My little sister is my night-club partner in crime and the little kids are fun to have around so long as they don't go snooping in my room, remove my leather sandals and destroy them. I'm even starting to figure out what Papou, my mentally handicapped older brother's hand gestures and noises mean. It turns out that he has a wicked sense of humour, and an insatiable appetite for women apparently. He loves to ask everyone for money, but if you show him your empty pocket he says "Wari a ta!" (money's all gone!) and then mimics praying to Allah for more money.

He also loves to claim women that he sees on tv as one of his three wives. He's not being greedy, since technically he's allowed four. Sometimes he tells me that I'm going to be one of his three wives, and I tell him that he's only allowed one and then he replies "Ooooh wari a ta!". Not too sure what to make of that, but everyone laughs so I'm assuming it's all in good fun. Only very rarely does the Larium get the best of me and I worry that the family is secretly preparing the marriage sack and Papou is really trying to warn me.

 Operation Feed the T:
All anti-malarial-induced paranoia aside, certain everyday family going-ons have made the first half of my time here a little difficult. For example, getting a proper breakfast has been an uphill battle that still is raging despite me bringing it up with first my maman, then my boss, then the Canadian partners, then my maman again and then my local boss again. The short version is that I am not supposed to pay for my living expenses while "outre-mer" (overseas, that's one of my all time fav french words! And a hilarious misunderstanding...I'll explain later) so the family is given a very reasonable by Malian standards stipend to feed and lodge me since voluntarily taking on an extra mouth to feed here would prove too difficult for most families.

Nevertheless, they started out by just giving me a slice of bread (which costs approx only $0.25 and is the tiniest fraction of what they're paid daily) and a cup of coffee in the morning. At first I said nothing, got ravenously hungry by 9:30 and then had to go out and buy second breakfast with my own coin. Then I started hearing about what the 5 five other interns that came over with me were getting for breakfasts and decided that I should get the same, so I told my mom to give me more food in the morning, even if it means getting less for supper. She in turn bought me some jam and started saving some of what she made the family for lunch so that I could have a snack after work. I decided that I would rather take it warmed up in the morning, even if that means eating really, wierd stuff like fish heads on rice for breakfast than have a heavy "snack" two hours before a heavy supper. We had more or less a good thing going there, but then the maid drama happened...

OMG maid drama:
I have to explain showers in order to explain why mornings are so difficult here.

Showers are typically out of a bucket since very few people will have a stand up shower in their home. My family is ballin' by Malian standards because they have a stand up shower in the bathroom, but only glacially cold water flows from the tap since outside of swanky hotels, no one here has hot water.

The family well, aka 2 tickets to the gun show.

In the evening after a run, I love me a glacier shower, but in the early morning, my acclimatised (really!) self finds it too impossibly cold (semi-desert climate don't judge!) to shower.

Getting warm water for a shower is a complicated task though. It involves either hoisting water up from a well that's several metres underground, which is incredibly hard on the biceps and explains why every maid here is ripped. Or, it comes from the tap outside, which is taken apart every night (because people will come in the yard and steal water? I really don't know), so I would have to wake my maman up to get the key for it.

Once the water is collected, you then have to use wood, straw and charcoal to start a fire then fan it continuously for a spell to keep it going. Once warm enough (which can take upwards of 30 mins), you pour the hot water out of the cauldron and into a bucket and then mix it with the glacier water to get it to a temperature that you don't mind pouring all over yourself. So in short, it's a big, effin' hassle, but I never said anything was easy in Mali.

Nevertheless, I got warm water with the first family and the other family members get it  for their bucket showers later on in the morning or in the evening, so I figured I could ask the maid for "ji kalan" in the "sogoma", and M (I never got her name, just the first letter) happily obliged. I could have my warm bucket shower early in the morning, then my re-heated yesterday's lunch would be there for me to eat and I could get to work on time. 

Then my maman inexplicably fired M and everything went pear-shaped. Paye, the other maid who was hilarious and my best Bambara teacher to date would warm up my food, but not my water. My maman and her kids don't get up early enough to warm up my water for me, so I asked that they show me how to do it myself, but their solution was for me to wake up the new maid, which made me uncomfortable.

I  tried reverting back to glacier showers but it's getting progressively "colder" here and I'm getting wimpier acclimatised, so the water was just too icy. I said something to my maman and hot water reappeared, but later and later in the morning. I ended up having to choose between not showering, so going to work with unwashed sunscreen-and-obscenely-concentrated-DEET-saturated hair, showering under a mountain stream, or waiting for warm water to shower but then being embarrassingly late for work considering that out of all my coworkers, I live the closest to my office. Basically, every morning became an awkward exercise in decision-making for my most indecisive-self.

Then Paye left, which for me meant a raincloud formed over my house in Hippodrome for a while, and also meant that I was back to getting only a slice of bread for breakfast. Cranky from my morning hypoglycemia and worried that this would become a trend I brought it up with the bossman who told me to bring it up with my maman who assured me that she would keep giving me yesterday's lunch. To me this is already somewhat of a compromise, because I know other ex-pats would not tolerate what is being given to me as breakfast. Seriously, I met one Québécoise who complained that a bar we went to was too "Malian." Um....I thought we were in Mali. Anyway, try getting her to choke back fish heads on rice in the morning is all I'm sayin'.
 
Then Djemogo showed up who I traumatised with my pasty pallor then made friends with, but then who started crying all the time until she was sent back en brusque brousse. I knew there was never any point asking her for water.

Then it was Alamatou who warmed my water for me one morning and then announced that she too was leaving. This family is hard on maids, and I feel like only once was it my fault.

Again, I tried hinting to my maman that things needed to happen sooner so that I could be on time for my "important meetings" and again she told me that she would not wake up early enough to do it for me, but refused to show me how to do it myself. My intercultural sensitivity training that I took before I left suggests that for them, it's embarrassing to see a guest do something like that herself, but for me it's embarrassing to be unwashed and so late for work.

So between the maid drama, the weird breakfasts, and the family's need to sleep in on weekdays, it's been really hard to get into a good routine. As an addict to wanderlust who frequently uproots herself, I have learned that establishing a routine where I do a few things the same every day is comforting and helps me adapt. So far, I've got my nighttime routine down pat, my exercise regime more or less solidified but I am almost halfway through my mandate and this has not happened yet for my mornings and in all honesty, I'm getting kind of tired of facing the daily shower-breakfast-work-on-time-gamble. I have been debating for well over a month leaving or staying.

They Could Make this Easier on Me:

Lamine in a toque...could you quit this face?

Nevertheless, in the spirit of a conflicted spirit, I have become closer with my little sister who is just lovely, and my maman took me on an adventure last week that was truly amazing. This means making the decision to stay or leave is particularly difficult.

Sometimes I think Mali is less of a place that you visit, and more of an experience. I don't find it as breathtakingly beautiful as I do Costa Rica or the Rockies  for example. Moreover, seeing all the garbage in the city and the children with obvious signs of malnutrition in the villages is exceedingly difficult, but the little pockets of beauty in this country have crept under my skin slowly, and despite every hang up, I find myself consistently in awe and the trip with my maman last week was no exception. 

She asked me before the new year to get one day off in mid-January because she wanted to take me to a village "derrière Ouelessébougou". I asked mon patron and he said it was all good because it was part of the intercultural learning aspect of the internship that gets western donor agencies all excited.

I assumed it was for some family thing, like a wedding or baptism or even a funeral so I dressed in my best imported duds, which are always woefully too casual for this crew, and waited for word that our driver was here. He didn't show, so maman asked me to call my "taximan" and friend who tried to help us find a driver, but that didn't work, so I retreated to my room expecting a quiet reading day when around 1pm the original driver finally showed up, since no road trip in Mali is without its hangups, and set out for Kiban. I packed extra water, a sweater and a flashlight having learned my lesson from my other ill-fated roadtrips, but I forgot my camera. Sad face.

We headed out of Bamako along a road that I hadn't traveled on yet which made me momentarly worry that if we weren't going "derrière Ouelessébougou", where were we going?! Would a marriage sack be involved?!

Nevertheless, we arrived surprisingly uneventfully in Kiban around 3pm and were greeted by a slew of curious onlookers, and a few screaming children. Toubabu are scary, I get it.

I took my sandals off and carried them (I learned my lesson) as we walked through the first part of the house where a bunch of men were praying, through a corridor where there a creepy albino sheep was tied up and women were preparing food and then into the second part of the house where even more women were praying and eating. I greeted as many of them as I could in Bambara which of course, made them laugh at me and then we ate couscous and some part of a cow, but I don't care to know what part, out of a giant bowl.

I asked my maman whose house we were at and she said it was "one of her father's". She then explained that we were going to take a drive to see a baobab where her "father" spent seven years, seven weeks and seven days inside the tree until God made a hole so he could get out. In that moment, I learned not to take Malians so literally, and that this was a religious celebration of sorts. As we exited the house, 20 old ladies were out front singing in unison and each in every one shook my maman's and my hands while still keeping a tune.

From there, we slalomed through the countryside on a bush "road" (re: two tracks in the dirt) in a car that I'm sure is older than me for over 40 minutes and ended up in a clearing with a giant baobab in the middle. Another family was gathered under it and some of them were in it!

Soon after, the first group of people left the baobab and my maman and four others climbed into the tree while the people outside of it chucked sticks at the fruit to knock them down. I took mental photos (sorry) and ate baobab fruit for the first time. In the Malian brusque brousse, the sky is endless. The only experience that I think comes even remotely close is standing on the open prairie, but there you would hear birds chirping and grass rustling. Where I stood last week was so silent that it felt like time had stopped, only to be interrupted by the sound of a baobab fruit crashing to the ground.

Think big sky like this, but only bigger.

When my maman was finished praying, we headed back to the house in Kaban which I learned was actually a madrassa, and the 60+ people that I saw there were "students" of the Koran, aka TALIBAN!! But not that Taliban, so it's ok. By now it was getting dark and traveling after sundown can result in being stopped by unsavoury police officers wanting a bribe (although this hasn't happened to me yet), so we quickly said our goodbyes and as we were leaving, the leader of the madrassa came and started praying for my maman who I was standing next to. A crowd formed around us and for a moment I was frozen between 40+ men, women and mostly children all deeply involved in prayer.

He then issued us a few blessings and told me me to come back soon because I was his wife. That means I now have 10 (yeah double digits!) Malian suitors.


In short, the whole afternoon had been somewhat of an otherworldly experience of the sort that is impossible to engineer as a tourist on my own. I need the family to drive me deep into the bush to watch people pray inside a tree.

Alas, a new maid named Gogo (that means that there are 3 Gogos in the house) now lives with us and has been warming up yesterday's lunch (today it was "farquay" (sp?), a gritty, salty, spruce green sauce made out of pounded seeds that comes from the north fittingly, because it has the texture of sand) and warm water for me in almost a perfectly timely matter. I get to work reasonably well-fed and washed only 10-20 minutes late.

I also asked my maman to show me how to start a fire in the stove if Gogo leaves and she finally agreed that she would, but I think we're all hoping that Gogo stays.

I've been working on this post for 2 weeks now (hence it's impressive length...as in I'm impressed that you're still reading!), and I think that I can finally say with a degree of certainty, that I will stay with the family.

I will inshallah have other chances to work and/or live abroad, but I won't have another chance to live with this colourful cast of characters. This is my house in Hippodrome one-off, and now that we've more-or-less-at-least-temporarily got mornings figured out, I think I can do my work and live the good life in Bamako for the rest of my time here.

Next week you can check me away from comms (that's for you Sheri), as I plan on heading north to trek for 3 days through Dogon Country and sleep under the stars on rooftop campements in cliffside villages.

When I get back, I wish to post some pics of my hopefully epic journey, as well as of my family who have worked their way deep into the sub-cockles of my heart, though not that it's hard to do... a little food usually does the trick.