Still waiting

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It's been about a week and a half since we found out that we cannot go back to Guinea, and since then it's been chaos trying to process all of us going home or transferring. I applied for transfers and temporary assignments, but there really was not much available. I'm hoping to find out by Wednesday.

In the meantime I've been trying to find things to do so I don't go crazy. One day a lady who's husband works for the Embassy had us over to watch the Grammys. They lived in a beautiful house with a pool and made us great food, drinks, and desserts. I had real coffee for the first time in seven months and I can't stop thinking about it.

Another day I took a bike ride with Geoffrey and Curtis. We rode through some dry little mud villages that remind me of the ruins at Pompeii. The villages are interspersed with orchards and farms on flat, dusty land. Beyond that there are long, rocky mesas. We biked up to the mesas, put our bikes on our shoulders, and hiked up a steep trail to the top of the cliff. The top of the mesa was flat, there was even some farmland up there, and you could see a long way over all of the little villages. We biked along the edge of the cliff for a while before crossing some fields and descending on the other side of the mesa into another village. It seems that not as many foreigners find their way to that village, as the local children were especially curious about us (which reminded me of Guinea). We followed a road that brought us back around the mesa to our refugee camp, Tubaniso.

One evening the volunteers organized a barbeque, meaning they bought a sheep, killed it, cleaned it, and roasted it over a fire in a barrel. Tasty chunks of tough mutton were passed around to all of the volunteers.

Another night a popular Guinean musical group, Les Espoirs de Corinthe, came to Tubaniso to play for us. The cafeteria was turned into a concert hall and everyone danced and had a great time.

One day we planted trees all over Tubaniso. Another day we went to a nearby villages and built mud stoves for a few families. Cooking technology here involves three rocks and some sticks. You balance your pot of rice on the three rocks and burn sticks underneath it. Especially here in Mali there are very few trees and I don't know how they get firewood. In places where there are trees deforestation is a big problem. So the idea of a mud stove is to build walls around the three-rock cooking fire to trap heat. This way you use a lot less firewood and things cook faster. The walls are made of a mixture of dirt, clay, and cow dung.

Other days I've been going to the pool at the old Marine Corps compound, going out to dinner, going to the market, or checking out the nightlife in Bamako. At Tubaniso someone set up a slackline and I've been playing on that a little. Otherwise I've been entertained by crappy French TV and rediscovering Facebook.

Tonight we're having another barbeque, this time with actual meat bought from a store. It will be by the pool in town and should be fun.

Well as soon as I know anything more about where I'm going I'll let you know. Until then I will continue trying not to loose my mind.

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Comments

[anonymous]

ooooo, fun times.