more insights from my first week

i've just been chatting online (gchat!) with marisa and typed what could arguably be the most ridiculous sentence to come out of my finger tips: "mmm i've got to concentration on my blog right now."
marisa responds: "i think your english is getting worse from those foreign keyboards, dear."

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i spoke earlier about my love for tea and how visiting people's homes includes often the offering of tea, normally taken 3 times as is custom (from what i've heard it's custom in many muslim cultures). i had the impression that much of what i had been drinking was some special mint tea leaf grown locally. that would be partially true. also brewed is a chinese tea that comes in little boxes with chinese, arabic and french written on them. for fun, at my dance teacher's home i picked up one of these boxes from the ground (because trash is often just thrown on the ground/dirt here, to be burned later) and made an origami crane from it. i gave it to mba and told her it was for good luck. bonne chance. mba has some mild form of pneumonia, but she continues to dance and work. her son, who can't be more than 2 yrs old, has a rash on his back. a friend is getting her medication and he should be in town soon.

sadly, i encounter flies more often than i do tea and mba. it's rainy season and they are everywhere, except indoors (usually). they like to land on things, especially people and food. i think i saw one try to suck on my arm sweat from dance class before i swatted him/her away. wait, do flies have genders?

i spotted my first american yesterday. well, "spotted" isn't really the right word, because we had arranged to meet for lunch. it was so wonderful to see and talk to another non-african, to have a conversation in english, which i'm slowly forgetting as marisa pointed out. after talking with her, i feel it's best not to try and do any research this summer, but dance, learn languages, use my french, work with children at a couple different NGOs, and of course, explore, live and continue building the friendships that have begun to blossom already. i also bumped in two brown students at the restaurant who are working with the mali health organizing project in sikoroni, which is a quartier near where i am in doumanzana. anyways, we are planning on getting dinner and perhaps going out to a club sometime...yippee.

i'm starting to see how it's good in mali to be friends with the musicians. being "with" the drummers at a ceremony, we were feed and well taken care of. i'm certain my white(ish) skin also gave us better treatment - like how i was offered tea in the middle of the ceremony but no one else was - but it is true that good musicians have perks at the places they work. like our friend papice. he plays the djembe and the guitar at an outdoor concert venue ibrahim has taken me to 3 times now, and papice gets drinks free of charge, seats up front, the works. the first night we were there he pointed out ibrahim to the singer and on the next song the guy began to sing praises of members of ibrahim's family who have being doing good for other malians. we're going to see papice again tonight. for the wonderful live music. and the free drinks. non-alc.

the american who i met for lunch has been frequenting the country since 2004 and thus has learned a lot about malian society and the language. she tells me that between different families in mali there is this practice of teasing cousins in which, due to histories of one family/ethnic group enslaving another and other histories of not-so-happy exchanges between them, two families who have had bad relations in the past will often tease each other. depending on the relationship, or the history of a certain family, this may include saying, "you are my slave" or "go call the horses" or "you eat beans". from what she tells me, this practice is a way of forging bonds between groups whose histories may try to dictate otherwise. she said that the family i'm staying with, coulibaly, is the little cousin of everyone, meaning the coulibalys have joking relationships all malians. i'll have to ask at the house to confirm.

over and out,
djene