Mom and Dad come to Mali

i thought three weeks would be too long, but it turns out my parents are really really fun!

mom and dad didn't have the best welcome. as their plane landed an ENORMOUS storm blew in preventing them from actually getting off the plane, so while i stood in the rain and waited they sat on the airplane. after what felt like ages they finally came through customs with their huge heavy bags full of gifts for emily!

we made it back to the hotel and promptly activated the air conditioning. this is a recurring theme in our experience in mali. arrive, turn on AC, lay down. not much else to do in mali.

we spent a couple of days in Bamako eating American food and going to museums and other fun things. Mom and dad also got to meet the boyfriend which turned out to be great.

we headed off to kayes on public transport, which is a rather nice charter bus, at 5 am. when we arrived in kayes we discovered that the water and electricity at my house had been cut off due to my landlord having no more than peanuts for brains. my parents checked in at the hotel across the street, turned on the AC and laid down. :) we spent a few days relaxing in kayes waiting for my electricity and water to come back then we planned a trip out to my village. i had talked with my supervisor in advance to arrange a party that we would pay for that would include dancing, singing and eating. the night before we made all of the preparations then ate some yummy tigadegena (peanut butter sauce and rice) and fought off locusts, then headed to bed for a restless sleep in my sweltering mud hut.

The next day started out with me realizing my gas stove was out of gas so we ate some bananas and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast. Then we headed over to the CSCOM to watch everyone prepare for the party. When they have big celebrations they use this huge cauldron for cooking. The women pushed the cauldron over to the center with a wheelbarrow then started filling it with the freshly cut veggies (Malian eggplants, onions, green peppers, tomatoes, sweet potatoes and lots of spices), rice and sheep meat. They heat this all together over an open fire for an hour or two then they scoop everything out and separate it evenly over several large eating bowls. Before the rice was ready they brought us a bowl of meat, which turned out to be liver! We struggled through eating a bite or two a piece then thanked them and said we wanted to save room for zamé. Once they separate all the food out they send bowls of food to the village chief, the mayor, the ASACO president (board of directors for the health center), the women’s association and the people at the health center. Then we all got to sit down and eat up. Zamé is one of my three favorite Malian foods (actually it’s a Senegalese dish), the other two I like are rice with sauce, but it depends entirely on who makes them. Obviously these are nothing like the To and slime of homestay. Kayes area Malians have better taste in food than Bamako Malians.

After we ate we sat as the guests of honor in a very large circle and watched the drummers and the cora players perform, then we watched the women sing and dance. Malians LOVE to dance, and when they dance they have this aura about them that makes them look sort of divine. Soninke women, in my opinion, are the best dancers of any of the ethnic groups in Mali, and I have yet to be swayed in a different direction. After the dancing we watched them argue over the price we should pay them. The guests of honor always “tip” the performers and the singer wasn’t too happy with her cut. Mostly the arguing is just a show, but my parents were a little thrown off by all the yelling. After all this we groggily dragged ourselves back to my house and gathered our things. We went up to the road to wait for our taxi then headed back to Kayes as the sun was setting.

We arrived in Kayes just in time for tacos and a drunk Eileen and then crashed to sleep. We had to get up early to get on the bus for Bamako at 4 am. In Bamako we were tired so we ate early and went to bed early. The next morning we took public transport to Segou. We met Nicole there and had lunch with her then spent the afternoon relaxing. We started discussing how we would travel around up in Dogon country and Djenne and decided to hire a driver and guide for the trip. We spent the day relaxing at the Djoliba (the hotel in Segou that mom and dad LOVED) and shopping around town. We went to Ndomo which is the artisana where they make bogolan (mud cloth). There is a museum in the back and shop where you can buy stuff. The also show you how they make the dye and dye all the cloth and then how the paint the mud onto it. It was pretty fascinating. The next morning our guide picked us up at the hotel and we headed off to Mopti. We stopped off in San to go to the bathroom and briefly greet the girls in San, and then we went on our way. The hotel we stayed at was fabulous. It had a rooftop restaurant, a swimming pool, and AIR CONDITIONING. You can also stay there and pitch a tent on the roof. The next morning we headed off for some walking through town. We went to a big mud mosque and through the old city part of Mopti. We ended up at this restaurant that had taken huge slabs of salt and hung them on the wall and put light bulbs behind them to make some ambient lighting. It was pretty cool. We ate guinea foul for lunch at had some beers while we relaxed. Later we found our way back to the hotel and spent the early part of the afternoon relaxing. Our guide seemed to be missing a screw or two because I specifically told him to stop taking us to artisan markets and then there we were at a second market that day. After that we had a soda then got into a boat to cross the harbor (mom did it!). The next morning we packed up to go to Dogon. We arrived first in a village called Songha. The tour took us to the top of some small cliffs where the young men come every three years to do their initiation for circumcision. On the way back down our guide took us through yet another set of artisans and then we were happily on our way. In almost every dogon village there is a campement (little hotel, usually made of mud) where you can stay. In this particular village there was the nicest one I’d ever seen, and the nicest one I’d see the whole trip. It was built of stone and had solar panels and running water. Apparently it was built by some Dutch or German NGO but is now run by the village.

After this we were taken into Bandiagara, which is the town in the center of Dogon. It’s kind of the hub for going to all of the surrounding villages. We stayed in a very nice hotel here. We dropped our stuff off then got into the car for another excursion. This one took us down below the escarpment. If you have ever been to Joseph, Oregon and driven there from Spokane, and you’ve also been to Dogon country in Mali, you’d agree that they are very very similar. We arrived in a village called Teli, and this is when our guide really lost points; he said we would sit for a few hours (it was noon) and wait to go hiking until 2 when it was cooler (what?!). Turns out that earlier when we told him we wanted to eat food made in the village he had become confused by the fact that we bought bread and assumed we were not eating in the village (he did not ASK us, he just assumed with his fabulous Malian intuition). After sitting in a loft for 2 hours our guide appears and is surprised that we haven’t eaten. I was livid because we had also been sitting for 2 hours with NOTHING to do because you don’t pay a guy that much money per day to disappear and to sit and look up at big rocks all day. We didn’t bring books or cards to play with because we were not told that we’d be sitting doing nothing for the better part of the day and we didn’t know we were supposed to be eating the food we brought for a snack. At 2, after finally eating our ‘snack’, our guide decided that, now that it was actually hotter, we should go hike, so mom and I walked to a nearby waterfall and watched some kids swim, and dad hiked up the hill. Altogether it took 20 minutes then we were back in the car going to another village and yet ANOTHER artisan market. Another hour and a half drive back to Bandiagara and we were sitting doing nothing again at the hotel. At least this time we had all of our things. We also got to meet up with Ryan Shaw, one of my favorite volunteer friends and have some drinks while we waited for another volunteer friend to arrive.

The next morning we headed off for another day of being dropped off and doing nothing for two hours. This particular village, called Indelou, overlooked the escarpment, it was pretty fabulous and windy, and so much cooler than the day before. We also knew to bring books and I was very clear to him that we were going to eat and that if he thought otherwise that he should pipe up. Indelou is notable because it’s an animist village where there are lot of fetish areas where people do divination and other rituals. We walked through the village and he showed us which areas were off limits to us and then he took us to another artisan. Wonderful. Then we sat and looked out over the escarpment and ate lunch. Overpriced cous cous and chicken. We ran into the Peace Corps country director from Burkina Faso and then chatted with a dutch couple for a while. Both were hiking through the escarpment, which made me really jealous. (this is what I’m going to do with the sisters!) Then we got in the car and arrived back home for another afternoon of doing nothing. We were more tired this day though, so we went to bed early and prepared for the next morning. I had talked with another volunteer Beth, who lived in Sevare and worked in Mopti, and arranged to meet her in Sevare and go to her work in Mopti. She works at the Fistula center. This is a place where women stay after they’ve had surgery for obstetric fistula. Her project was to get the women to make some money to improve the facility and their daily lives. Beth showed us around then we hopped in the car and headed to Djenne.

When we arrived in Djenne we were able to rest a while before heading out on the town. The hotel we stayed at the Djenne Djenno was adorable. The Swiss woman who owns it used to be an interior designer in the UK. She had the place built out of mud and designed like the mud mosques in Mali. The inside was really cute too. After we rested we trudged our way into Djenne, easily the ugliest grossest city in Mali. Again we were taken to another artisan store then we arrived at the Grand Mosque which is apparently one of the new seven wonders of the world. It is the worlds largest mud structure! It was cool, but Djenne was gross and we wanted to get out of there and back to our cute hotel. Djenne has open sewers on every road, but the roads are really narrow and it’s hard to navigate, so you are almost stepping in sewer water anywhere you go. It smells and it’s gray everywhere because every building is made of mud. It’s bizarre, to say the least. Needless to say, we were glad to be back at the hotel. The next morning we drove back to Segou and ended our tour, rather happily. We stayed another night in Segou, watching the sun set at the Esplanade restaurant and eating delicious Italian food.

Another hot bus ride back to Bamako and we were done with our big travels. The afternoon we went to the Peace Corps bureau and greeted then went back to the hotel to rest until dinner. The next morning we headed out to the Peace Corps training center so my parents could get a look at where it all begins. I helped out with a training session. We went back into Bamako and ended up going around almost the entire city which was cool for my parents, but a little exhausting. They also got some quality time with my APCD, Claudine who was more than hospitable to them.

We had dinner that night with Nicole at Beijing 2 then went to bed kind of early. I had to get some work done at the bureau then I met up with them at the hotel. The next day they were leaving in the evening, but I had to present at the training center. So they stayed at the hotel and packed and I came and met them for lunch at the restaurant near the bureau. We sort of hung around all day until it was time for them to go. They got a ride to the airport with Amy because she had bought her ticket through a travel agency (she was on their same flight to France), and so they road in the travel agency’s van to airport. I gave big hugs and let mom hug me longer than normal while she teared up they pulled out and headed home!