It is incredible that we’ve only been here in Mali for 9 days! Our life in Crestone feels so far away as we walk the muddy streets past fields of corn and lettuce. It’s rainy season and we live just a couple hundred feet from the Niger River so the streets and fields are full of puddles and ponds that could float a canoe. Frogs croak while yellow, red and orange birds perch on green branches as we stomp by in our newly purchased black rubber boots.
This is how we get to school every morning – wading through puddles, dodging the mud and the deepest channels. This morning it was raining hard so we called for a school van to pick Jade and I up. Thomas walked early and Kailou came later, with jeans wet to his knees. Kids don’t start school until Tuesday, so they’ve been staying home to read, do math worksheets, play on the computer and eat lunch prepared by Fatime, our cook. Today they wanted to come to get new books from the library and try to help out in classroom prep. Thomas and I have been in lots of teacher trainings and meetings but today was mostly time for getting classrooms and curriculum ready.
Last weekend the Director took the new staff and a few veterans out for a Sunday evening boat ride on the Niger. It was a beautiful way to see the city! The boat was a long wooden pirogue with bench seats, a grass roof and a motor in the back. We passed by women washing clothes, men feeding animals or building houses, children playing… all a colorful parade of village and city life. There are also many elegant villas along the river – homes to embassy staff and other elites.
My favorite activity so far was African dance class after work on Wednesday. Two of the teachers are very committed to dance and have their Malian male teacher and a group of drummers come to the school for class on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We danced outside on a school patio overlooking the lush, green grounds and the Niger River. The drummers, with Thomas as apprentice, had perfect beat playing perfectly timed traditional songs. Our dance teacher, Lassi, is a very tall, exquisitely fit Malian man with high cheek bones and short dreadlocks. He led us in a series of traditional dances that the group had already learned then started to teach us a new one.
I kept up with the simpler steps but got lost on the complex ones. I worked up a sweat and had a constant smile on my face – with the rich beat, the lush river, the beautiful moves and gorgeous teacher, I fell like crying from the preciousness of it.
But that ecstasy has been balanced with an upset stomach today and the slow pace of settling in at home. Along with the schoolwork, setting up house feels overwhelming. We have a huge house – four bedrooms and four bathrooms! It’s made of cement blocks that are plastered over with an adobe-colored finish on the outside and white-washed walls on the inside.
We have a small courtyard surrounding the whole house – it’s tiled and has shrubs on the edges and two medium Mango trees on one side. We have round-the-clock guard service, provided by the school, so there is always a uniformed guard with a bright smile that opens the gate for us or let’s us know when a school van is here to pick us up.
Inside we have tall ceilings with fans and air conditioners in every room. The windows and doors all have a maroon-colored metal trellis outside of the glass windows and doors. Everything locks and there is a different key for every single door, inside and out, so the keys mostly stay in the locks. The inside doors are all a deep solid wood with their own deadlock bolts with keys in every door. Much more fancy and secure than we seem to need! The floors are a cool, mottled white tile. The house is not tight – doors and windows have gaps and the screens don’t fit very well – so we get some leaking rain as well as geckos, lizards, ants, flies and mosquitoes to keep us company and to taunt the cats.
Bathrooms are where things are a bit different. The showers don’t have curtains or delineated stalls – so in our main upstairs bath the drain is in the middle of the bathroom and the whole floor fills with water turning the entire bathroom including sink and toilet into the shower stall. They put a bathtub into the master bathroom which is nice but they had to remove the toilet for it to fit… so that’s a different kind of ¾ bath.
Our House:
Jade has her own bedroom with attached bath on the first floor. Then Kailou has an upstairs bedroom next to the hall bathroom that turns into a shower stall. We have a large fourth bedroom that has no furniture right now. That one will become our master bedroom when we get some furniture for it. Then the current master can become a spare room for guests. There are also several verandas, including one that is screened in with doors leading from the master bedroom and the hall. That has become my favorite morning yoga spot, but will be nice with some furniture too – if we can get the leaky rood fixed.
Teaching Fatime to make green smoothies:
The stairway continues all the way to the third story, which is the roof. It is tiled and has views of the city, river and nearby escarpments. It would be great with some plants, patio furniture and a cabana, maybe a full-on garden – definitely a down-the-road project. Right now we have sparse furnishings and nothing for décor in the house itself. Tomorrow we are heading out with a friend to shop in the markets and at an expatriate garage sale. We hope to get some lamps, desks, bookshelves, and other furniture. Some of our lights are fluorescent and our friend knows a nice shop to get coverings for them.
There are a lot of little things we need that will come in our crate when it gets here. We thought it arrived before us, but turns out we have no idea where it is or when it will get here. The school itself has been waiting on four crates since April and they are finally here in town although not at the school yet. We can’t really count on ours getting here for some time it seems. It would be nice to know where it is but no one can tell us! All we can do is wait and of course we’ll get very good at that in Africa!
Besides settling in, we look forward to getting out more - to visit villages, go rock climbing, check out the night life and see more of the city. We have a forest not far from home and when our bikes get here we can bike along the river to get to it. We have a lot of great friends to get to know better too – our colleagues from school include folks from Ireland, England, Germany, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Ghana, Senegal, and of course, Mali and the U.S. They are all very friendly and passionate about their jobs. More on the school and the people later!
Some photos of our boat trip along the broad Niger River and trips around town:
