In which Baba gets coiffed.

Our friend Job seemed pleased to inform me this afternoon that "Baba est devenu un vrai malien" (Baba has become a real Malian). I'm not entirely clear on all the criteria, but apparently getting an African-style haircut was the last on the list.

My hair had in fact become rather long. The children in Sarah's host family seemed rather impressed, occasionally tugging at the ends and asking innocently, "where does your weave attach?!" However, the temperature here has not dropped below 90 in like a bazillion days and so it was time to cut it all off.

Our friend Robert, who is working with us on the education project, owns and runs a small barber shop called "R. Kelly Coiffure," named after his favorite singer, the honorable R. Kelly. (Sarah has tried to explain to him that R. Kelly is in fact a terrible person, but alas you cannot argue with R&B.) I'm not sure if this is a pan-african phenomenon, but there are "coiffure" shacks literally every two or three blocks in Bamako. Robert seems to run quite a popular one, as most evenings there is a line for his services. Unfortunately this often disrupts the timeliness of our tea drinking, but ah well c'est la vie.

Speaking of tea, I've been practicing the whole tea-making process recently. I still struggle to produce adequate "mousse" (or bubbles), but on the whole I'm soliciting fewer laughs than before. This last time I was even allowed to finish without one of our friends taking over momentarily, afraid that the tea was too hot for my fingers. Toubabs (white people) apparently have the reputation of being exceedingly fragile...

Anyways, my hair is now much shorter, and it is pleasantly cooler -- partially due to the hair cut, and partially due to a small rain shower this afternoon. We're still battling water outages, and I got a small intestinal bug this past week, but on the whole we are doing quite splendidly. As Austin would say, this is clutch!

 

As an aside, I may have come up with an excellent Fermi problem to estimate the male population of Bamako. Because literally every man here has the same shaved-head haircut, you could probably get a decent count based on the number of coiffure shacks, their average daily business, and the average time between needing a haircut.