Notes on Everyday Life

The apartment now has pretty much all of the basics (if you don't look in the living room which is completely bare, but sitting outside is much nicer anyway). We will finally putting up some pictures soon so you can see what it looks like. Cleaning the apartment is quite the operation, dust gets in more quickly and in larger quantities than seems possible so we are constantly in need of sweeping with our hand brooms. Mopping is an even larger task, but even if we sweep every day, which doesn't always happen, we have to mop at least the porch once a week or so. All of this is compounded by the bane of our existence, “coupures d'eau” (water outages) which have occurred everyday for almost a week. We joke that this is the work of our nemesis/apartment manager Mr. Touré, but it is actually a regular feature of the EDM (Énergie du Mali) water grid. We've also had one power outage, but that was short-lived and less annoying. To prepare for the coupures we always keep the bucket in our bathroom full and have recently obtained our very own “bidon,” one of the large oil jugs (we have been assured it was thoroughly cleaned) for extra water storage.

Otherwise, we both fasted for Yom Kippur last Saturday (Neal decided that since we're telling everyone he's Jewish anyway he might as well give it a shot). It was quite challenging going without water for a whole day in high 90 degree temperatures, but we pretty much followed our friends' Ramadan model of sleeping a lot and moving very little. We went to Amandine (another transit adventure) to break fast and happened upon a bunch of the SIT girls so we got a little bit of extra toubab time, which was nice. We committed the annual mistake of eating/drinking way too much and still managing to have over-ordered, but it was a nice evening. We joked it would be quite ironic if the first thing that made us sick in Mali was pizza, but we survived our stomachaches without major incident.

Our day-to-day life continues pretty much the same, we work at home in the morning, eat lunch either with the host family or at Caravane (affectionately known to Fanta as the terrorist establishment), spend the afternoon napping and hanging out with the grin having tea, have dinner and give English lessons at the host family's and then drink more tea. The ever changing cast of characters at the grin makes things interesting, as does the constantly shifting tone of conversation. Yesterday Neal was back here napping and I was with the grin when suddenly things started to get very heated. People were standing up and shaking fists in each-other's faces. Our friend Sheik often gets heated in this way while recounting what he did yesterday, but even normally calm Robert was getting into it, so I was curious. The conversation was all in Bambara so I had to ask Robert what was going on. He explained that there had been an incident where 5 cadets had died during an army training and that 24 officers had been dismissed for their role. Half the grin (Robert's side) felt that this was completely reasonable because 5 deaths was excessive and murder must be punished. The other half (Sheik's side) felt that the officers had only been dismissed because one of the dead soldiers was Senegalese, and that this was unreasonable because it had been an accident, if at least one person doesn't die it isn't a good training, and 24 dismissed officers could easily form a rebellion. Once my interest registered, both camps began trying to recruit me. I often forget how tall the grin is on average but between Robert who is easily at least 6'3”, Sheik who is built like a linebacker, and Voldo who is tiny but gesticulates with the best of them, I was suddenly quite overwhelmed. I left to go deliver a snack to Neal and when I came back the conversation was still going, but had calmed down quite a bit. While I generally think no one should be dying during army trainings and thus sided with Robert on this one, I had to admit that the concern over a small group of well trained soldiers pissed at the government was worth considering.

Basically, we learn something new (or about a hundred things) every day and eagerly await the arrival of cold season. One other note, when I passed the big vacant areas by Rte de l'Aéroport yesterday I saw a couple small herds of sheep....Tabaski is on its way! (More on that later).