village Sunday

I spend all day last Sunday in the village.  I left home at 7:20am and didn't get back home until around 6:30pm.  I went with them to church, you can see it in the picture above.  The newer cement church building is just a 5 minute walk from their house.  There was lots of singing.  I had my Bambara song book with me, so I could sing along to the songs that were  in there.  There were also special songs presented by a women's group, a children's group, and the youth choir group.  Those special songs are always as much about the dancing as the singing.  Visitors were made to stand up and introduce themselves, so I had to do that in Bambara but they don't expect you to say much.  The pastor preached a message in Bambara that I understood the general idea of, but didn't catch most of the details.  I remember a time that I couldn't understand some of the details in French, and I can now, so I think of that to encourage me in my Bambara learning.

After church the older daughters in the family started to cook lunch, so we ate quite late.  It was rice with peanut sauce - my favorite!  I was given my own plate and a spoon, but you can see the boys gathered around a big bowl of food eating with their (right) hands.
I spent the whole afternoon sitting in the shade and listening and chatting.  Several different visitors came by to greet the family.  Sunday is the only day that the dad doesn't go to his gardens to work, but after church he went to the next town over to check on a friend who had just had surgery, so he wasn't home most of the time.  The mom was there to chat with me, and you can see in the picture that she kept her hands busy, too.  She was unbraiding Zaena's hair.  The old braids were pretty tiny, so this took a long time.
When it was around 5pm and I said I was thinking about heading home, I was offered a ride on the back of a visiting friend's motorcycle from the village to the edge of Bamako, a trip of about 40 minutes.  Knowing that there is a lot of traffic on Sunday evening, and that traffic heading into Bamako can be scary to face on a motorcycle, I declined and took the Sotrama (a public minibus.)  The family sent me off with a bag of mangoes, fruit from their trees.  Oh, and a sunburned back and neck.  Even though I was in the shade under trees all day, the top of my back that my Malian top left exposed had turned a deep red.  By the time I got home my face and chest were looking pink too, but the next morning it had all changed to normal colors again.