meat

I don't eat any four-legged creatures, so I wasn't interested in buying meat (though my husband did wind up getting some for himself) but I thought that I would snap a few photos of this event.
The meat is placed on something, I think its an old rice sack, on the ground. You say how much you want to buy, there is a set price per kilogram, and they hack a chunk off the carcass with a machete. Then they hook the meat on the scale and slide the weight over to make the scale balance. They will either trim a bit off or add a bit to get it to balance.

trees wearing shirts

Seeing papaya trees wearing shirts makes me laugh. I think its supposed to make the fruit get ripe faster. Maybe they were just cold? I'm not sure, but I like it.
The first time I saw a clothed tree I though that someone had just gotten hot and decided to hang thier shirt there for a bit. But I have since seen lots of them- usually papaya or banana trees, that have been dressed.

extreme dust

Here's a sattelite image from just a bit west of us, you can see how massive the cloud of dust is - covering West Africa and out on to the ocean.

As if we didn't already get enough dust blowing around and into my house making my shelves needing to be dusted and my floors needing to be cleaned almost constantly, we have just experienced a dust "storm". The dust blows down because of the yearly Harmattan winds off the Sahara desert, just north of us. We are used to it being dusty this time of year, but this week was extreme. The dust blocked out the sun giving the sky an erie other-worldly glow. It looked like there was a thick fog everywhere, visability was very low. Even in my house I felt like my eyes were blurry as I couldn't clearly see across the room - this dust is so fine it just hovers in the air (and eventually comes to rest in a filthy layer on every surface.)
Airports had to cancel flights here in Mali and in neighboring countries. Because of the sun being blocked and the wind coming from the north we had some very chilly weather along with the dust. It was so bad that it was referred to as a "public health risk" in an aritcle I read. I have a friend who had to spend a couple days in the hospital hooked up to oxygen because the dust storm caused her to have some severe problems with asthma.

Here we are, all ready to travel through the dust a mile or two on the motorcycle. This was the day that the dust started really settling, I don't have any photos that show how dusty the air was. My sunglasses were not for the sun since it wasn't bright, they were just to protect my eyes from the dust. JP is wearing a sleeping eye mask (they give these out on long flights sometimes) to cover his nose and mouth. We see a lot of people wearing these like this driving on motorcycles, even when its only mildly dusty. Kind of silly and kind of resourceful.

a betty crocker moment

Last Saturday we enjoyed eating our first homemade roast chicken. JP went to the place off the side of the road that has cages of live birds and he bought a hen. The sellers killed and plucked it there, and JP chose to leave the feet and head behind - there is the option to take those home too since some people think that those are good eatin'. At home I asked Nyagali to pull out the inside parts that shouldn't be there when we cook the chicken. Some of those pieces were cooked next to the chicken and enjoyed by JP and Nyagali, and the others (such as the intestines) were boiled in a pot and fed to the puppy. I felt like a real cook as I stuffed the bird with onions, garlic, and some herbs and tied its feet together as my recipe instructed.
Even though it turned out really well I don't think we'll be making this too often. It is kind of an expensive meal for us, and for just a little more money we can buy an already cooked rotisserie chicken in town and not go through the time and effort of doing it ourselves. (plus when the weather is hot its yucky to have the oven fired up that long, we can practically do a sauna in the kitchen then!)

Here is Nyagali holding the skinny bird and wondering why I like to take pictures of things like this.Thats the whole thing cut into pieces just before we ate it, not really much meat - I would guess it would take 3 of these chickens to equal the amount of meat of one average roast chicken in the states.
Just to the left of the black plastic spoon you can see the chicken's neck, and at top right are some cooked inside parts, not exactly sure what all. I gladly leave those pieces for JP.

keeping house

A lot of things take a lot more work and time here in Mali than in the states. Without the modern conveniences of a clothes washing machine, dishwasher, or vacuum cleaner, it takes quite a bit more effort to keep things clean and tidy around here. Plus its usually sweaty hot and we have sand-dust constantly blowing into the house, which makes for really dirty clothes and floors that need to be washed all the time.
For a long time we had help just one morning a week. A nice lady named Fanta is our clothes washer. I washed my clothes (and towels and sheets) for several months myself when I first moved to Africa, and that was enough. When I washed my clothes myself I wound up with a sore back, raw hands, and only semi-clean clothes. Not an enjoyable way to spend several hours. I am so thankful for the lady who does our washing now. I'm glad I don't have to do it! I can save that time and energy to do more interesting things.

I finally gave up on trying to do everything else myself as well. There's a gal named Nyagali (that means joy in Bambara) who comes twice a week to help in the house. She cleans the floors and does some dusting, and she has made my life so much easier by her work in the kitchen. I send her to market and she comes back with food and then cooks up a nice African meal for lunch. She also saves me a lot of time by doing some food prep such as washing lettuce (it has to be soaked in bleach water), peeling carrots so they're ready to use, and sifting the bugs out of flour and bagging it up.

Here is Nyagali with a big bowl of "citrons" (like little lemony limes) from our tree. She squeezed them all and we still have bags of the juice in the freezer to make lemonade. Yum.

feeding the pets

Here is a photo of me with the disgusting concoction of petfood I make every few weeks. Its a bit blurry, but you get the idea of what a huge bowl of gross stuff I mix up.

If we are eating rice or pasta or to or something that the animals will eat, they get some of our leftovers. But we often have a big green salad at night for dinner, and they won't eat that. And I'm not going to share my breakfast bread with them. So I bag up this nasty petfood and stick the bags in the freezer so that there can always be a bit of something to give them.

There is no recipe, its just whatever I have on hand and think of that might be good to throw in. In general it consists of:

*boiled up dried fish
*rice
*old stale bread cut up
*old pasta or whatever needs to get cleared out of the fridge
*a really cheap spinach type leaf all cut up and cooked
*old grease or oil we saved from cooking meat
*corn porridge (this glues it all together)

The animals love this stuff, though I think I could cook cardboard with the dried fish and top it with old meat grease and they'd gobble it up too.

a ruff life

I am a big animal lover, so I am glad that we have a few at home now.
Well, I don't care that much about our chickens really, its not like I pet them or play with them. I just say good morning when I feed them, and I ask the hens why they are so lazy and tell them that they need to get to work laying eggs.
But I love having a puppy, and our cat... he's ok too I guess. (I'm definately a "dog person")

The idea of having a pet is kind of a foreign idea here. Animals are here to serve us, they have a job to do. Cats kill mice. Dogs guard the house. Although I do see some people bringing their dogs with them when they come into town with thier donkey carts, and there is this one nice lady who has a dog with short legs that she lets follow her to the schoolyard when she sells snacks to kids at break time. Ok, so let me try again - The idea of having a pet, as we think of a pet in the USA, is a foreign idea here.

Yeah, some people in the states just have a dog that stays outside and it isn't carried around in a purse or brought to the groomer or anything. But even the pet owner who just has an outside dog is spending some money on that dog - buying it "dogfood" and giving it a collar to wear I'm sure.
I lived in California for 3 years before coming to Africa, and I saw some extreme dog pampering there. Ok, I'll admit it, I myself did some extreme dog pampering there. I took my dog to the dog park several times a week, let him come on many errands with me, did obedience school, had his nails cut at the groomers, bought him several different collars (such cute designs!) and he even had a sweater to wear when it was cold out. Oh, and he slept on my bed (at the end of it.) Of course he ate a decent brand of dog food, bought in 40 pound sacks. And there were dog biscuits as a reward for doing a trick.

Everytime I step out of my gate I can see at least one dog roaming the street and scrounging for what ever food, or anything edible, it can find. Most dogs here are pretty skinny- they live off of whatever they can find, usually leftovers or spoiled food, and the rare bone to chew on. No crunchy kibble. People who struggle to feed their children certainly aren't going to spend money on food for a dog. The only dogfood I've seen here was in Bamako (7 hour bus ride away) at a nice store and was way too expensive, probably imported from France.
Some dogs have a collar made of rope. My puppy is currently wearing a piece of folded cotton fabric tied around his neck. When he stops growing I'll have my mom send a nice collar from the states.

So its been interesting trying to find our balance with our pets here. The dog and cat are both allowed in the house, but they spend a lot of time outside too. They sleep outside at night, or in the screen porch at least. I make my own batches of petfood for them. I'll have to post on that later.
Our kitty Charlie sleeping (yeah, on the couch) with obviously no cares in the world.