The people we meet...

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It’s hard to believe, but we’ve been in our house for nearly two weeks now. Now that we have a toilet seat (key!) we are in pretty good shape. Nora just started at Save the Children yesterday, so I’m adjusting to being on my own during the day. Unfortunately, some of the few friends that we made here are not too reliable about coming over to visit in spite of their persistent texting, so my plot to pester them with questions about wording my Bamana questionnaires has yet to bear fruit. Consequently, I’ve been dragging a chair outside of our gate to sit with the collective of mostly young kids, adolescents, and “guardians” who linger outside of our entryway day in and day out. Just being there I’m at least able to gain some exposure to the language.

In the meantime, I’ve been making my daily outings for food (such is the luxury of having no refrigerator). That also gives me some opportunity to use the language a bit. I don’t know if it’s my weak command of the language or my smiling delivery, but that always is good for amusing whomever I see.

In the past week we met Sara, a Peace Corps volunteer who helped us out with a lot of advice before we arrived here. She is utterly hilarious, and her comfort in being direct with the Malians is pretty useful, if not amusing/shocking. Just the other day she rescued me from paying $20 too much for a cell phone here, when Musa, the guardian next door all too eagerly talked me into letting him get a cell phone for me for. If not for his initial failure to purchase a new phone for me as we had previously agreed (he probably would have made a profit of $35 on the beat-up used phone he brought back), I would have had no leverage to demand that he bring my money back. Fortunately, Sara showed up for the remaining encounters with a couple of other characters who were resistant to bring back the money. After a couple of heated exchanges and 5 hours of waiting(!), I had my money back thanks in no small part to her unwillingness to back down.

During all of that waiting, I met Ak (presumably short for Akbar), our Quebecois neighbor. Canadian Ak has been working at a school for the deaf down the road for the past four months, and after another eight months of that, he’s headed to Cote d’Ivoire. Anyway, he was able to give me the scoop on where to get a cheap new phone. He also told me about his favorite places to chill in town. It seems that he’s more into the club scene than the traditional music scene (I must admit that I felt a silent pang of something or other when he wrote off the local non-popular music as entertainment for 50-year olds). He also told me that he takes every opportunity to get out of Bamako, a sentiment that I’ve heard from a few ex-pats—I guess the throngs of people, endless noise, and ridiculous pollution gets to you.

We’ve also met the occasional English-speaking transplant. For instance, David latched onto Nora and me one day as we were walking to the bakery. He’s from Zambia, and is finishing up high school even though he’s 24. We also met Mamadou, who spent 3 years in New York as a Taxi driver, and another guy whose name I’m forgetting, who is a barber from Ghana. What’s funny is that they’ll call up and go through a litany of greetings in English as if they were speaking Bamana: “How are you? How’s things going? So everything’s OK?” We have yet to have such a phone conversation that has taken any purpose beyond that.

We also met a few people in the ridiculousness that is the Artisans’ market. Nora and I had gone there last weekend just to look around. We were followed around by the same couple of guys, who were intent on selling us something, for nearly the entire 45 minutes that we were there. Just to give you a sense of the inflated prices that they cited, although we had committed to not buying anything, Nora had shown interest in some little item. Without any desire to buy it, the owner told her the price was $20. She told him it was too much, and as we walked away, he badgered her to tell him a price that she would pay. Just to get him off our back, she said $2. He ended up selling it to her for precisely that amount.

We quickly retreated to the smaller, tamer market that was closer to our house, where one could navigate amongst the vendors without the constant press of people pushing past. While there, we picked up some fabric to have some clothes made. That night, we headed to the tailor’s shop that sits at the end of our block. Because it was just one full day before the end of Ramadan, all of the tailors were working like mad to fill all of the orders for new clothes. In fact, they seemed to be so busy that they couldn’t bring themselves to offer us a decent price for clothing. Fortunately, there was another tailor just up the street in the other direction. He gladly gave us good prices ($4/shirt, $8/comple), so we sifted through all of the magazines until we found what we wanted. He even told us that he’d have the clothes ready by the end of the following day, in time for the fête.

As it so happened, Nora’s birthday fell on the fête this year. A medical student and member of Rotaract invited us over to her house for the feast. Although she lived with her entire family, we ended up dining with just her. Nevertheless, she was good company, and the food that she prepared was quite good. After we hung out with her for a while, she offered to drive us home. On the way, we stopped at two of her relatives’ houses to drop off some food that we had prepared. Although we stopped in for just five minutes at each of their houses, I had a chance to show off a little Bamana, much to their delight. That was probably the best part of the day.

That night, we went to a concert in the big outdoor stadium to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Although it was scheduled to start at 9, nothing really happened until 10. By then, there were probably a couple of thousand mostly high school-age people filling the stands, giving the whole affair the feel of a high school football gamed (especially considering that most of the kids there had money and therefore dressed like American kids). The DJ had been playing a few of the popular favorites, and intermittently, a very loud MC had introduced a few people on stage who offered no entertainment other than some inspired dancing. There were a couple of them who were clearly pretty talented, although it was hard to keep a straight face after watching them gallivant around the field as if astride a pair of horses. Around 10:30, another fellow took the stage decked out in a tight black costume. Apparently he was a Senegalese pop star, but he mostly shouted over a recording of his pop tunes, so I was oblivious to this fact until later. At one point though, we were witness to an excruciating 5 minutes in which he wrestled off his tight black pants under which he had an even tighter pair of yellow pants. The tapered legs would not slide over his silver boots, which ultimately required the cooperation of a roadie to get off. By the time that we left at 11:15 so that Nora could get a good night’s sleep before her first day of work, none of the musicians that we had hoped to see had taken the stage. Maybe next time.

Finally, I’m including a short video of a ridiculous rainstorm that we had last night. Our yard and patio quickly filled up with a several inches of water to the point that our kitchen began to flood. Unfortunately, that meant that our guardian, who’s taken up residence in our garage (without our consultation on the matter) was bailing water out of there for the better part of the evening. I guess one could do worse with a free place to stay.

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Comments

[Joanne]

Incredible experiences!
Thanks for sharing, especially the video JAPW