baby dedication in the village

We just spent a gorgeous Sunday in my favorite village, an hour or so (depending on the condition of the roads) from where we live.  We traveled in a vehicle with 6 others to attend and celebrate the baby dedication for a friend.  

This little herder boy and his cows wandered past our party.

I was very amused by the fun decorations in the church, which I was told came in shoeboxes.  I think the balloons are actually water balloons, and the blue ball in the middle is a beach ball.  The white balls are paper lanterns, and seem like they'd be too big to fit in a shoebox, so not sure about those.  They put these bendy flowers on the pulpit, that was the cutest touch I thought!  Yes, a pastor preached with those smiley flowers there!

Above is most of our group with the friend.  JP and a friend brought their guitars and we shared 2 upbeat songs.

This is what it looked like.  There were a lot of visitors from out of town (out of village?) and many  village folks showed up for the event.  

 Here is the chorale with some drums and other fun noisy instruments, and the kids sitting on a mat on the floor.

base salon project, before and after

I have just completed a project of giving a face lift to the salon at our mission base.  Salon as in living room, not a place to style hair.  The salon is an oddly shaped kind of circle room, maybe the building is an octagon? It's kind of an all purpose room at the base, but very often we have our Tuesday night worship meetings there.  When I lived on the base back in 2009, the salon was our living room; if we wanted to hang out indoors but not in our dorm bedrooms, it was in the salon.  As you can see from the before pics, the salon really needed some TLC and especially a new paint job.
Every time I was in there before I was distracted by the need for new paint and by several places that the cement wall was crumbling around the bottom.  I thought "this should get redone, someone should redo this" and then one day I realized "I should make it my project to redo this."
We used some money we had set aside for special projects.  It took up quite a bit of time but wasn't all that expensive really, the price for labor is low here.

The first thing to be done was to replace the old florescent wand light bulbs and fixtures with modern small spiral low energy bulbs.  I guess you can't see that in any of the pictures, but they're there.  There were 7 lights on the ceiling of the salon, plus one in a smaller attached room and one in the bathroom on this ground floor of this building.  So that was 2 appointments with the electrician.  The first for him to come and see and make a list of what he needed to buy and the second to come back and install.  I got to sit and watch the exciting work. (that was sarcastic, it was not exciting to watch.)

The next step was to get a mason to come and tap and scrape around the bottom of the wall and patch it up with new cement.  Then I pulled out nails and screws and patched the rest of the wall with plaster.  The painter came and spent a whole day scrubbing and cleaning the walls.  While he did the walls I did inside of the window ledges that were caked with dried mud (accumulated dust having mixed with rain) and dead bugs and lizard poo.  Then the painter spent a few days painting.  I washed all the windows, and these louvered windows are a pain to clean.  I also painted all the bottom edge by the floor with a brush to help the work go faster; the painter used the ladder up high and I sat on the floor and scooted around.

Here is the painter in action.  He did some painting in our house last year.  He does good work, and with only 1 hand!  He lost the other one in a hunting gun accident.

 The paint comes in a big bucket and it is white and really thick.  Water and colorant has to be added to it.  There aren't strips of color samples to choose from (unless you go to one certain place in Bamako and pay way more money for paint) so you mix it yourself and hope for the best.  When the paint started going on I thought it looked like mustard, but it dries much lighter and it ended up being a cheerful sunny yellow color.  Don't the walls look so much nicer!  The salon has a whole new feeling to it, I find it much more relaxing and nice to be in there.

The bathroom needed some a minor tune up from the plumber, so that was another appointment. The final thing in the project was to scrape and paint some of the metal doors and trim for the salon. This is the screen door, the screen had to be removed and replaced in order for the door to be painted, so the metal worker took care of the screen.  In all, there were 8 people involved in getting this project done.

I enjoyed making this project happen.  A few people expressed surprise that I (a woman) was the one directing the work and even doing a bit of it myself.  For example, one worker came to the base and didn't seem ready to have me show him the work to be done, he asked where my husband was a couple times!  I like disturbing people's stereotypes.

house help and tortillas in Mali, with recipe

A young woman named Nyagali comes to our house 3 mornings a week to help with cleaning, laundry, food shopping, and cooking.  Everything seems to take more time and effort here, so I could either expend huge amounts of my time and energy to keep our home functioning, or we can do as is expected of missionaries here and hire someone to help.  I am so thankful to have the help!

Nyagali is great at preparing the food after she brings it from the market. (though I still go to market myself fairly often)  All of the vegetables and fruits need to be soaked in bleach water and cleaned before going in the fridge.  Eggs also need a good soak and scrub because they come filthy straight from the coop.  There are few conveniences here, so Nyagali also does things like sifting sand and pebbles out of the dry beans and rice we buy.  If we want whole wheat flour or corn flour she buys the grains, washes and dries them, and carries them to a mill to be ground.  I also enjoy not having to wash dishes the days she is here.  It is rainy season now, so the dust is not as intense, but during the rest of the year the dust here is something that you really can't understand unless you've experienced it.  I am thankful not to have to be the one to wash our tile floors by hand three times per week (three times per week seems to be the minimum needed to not walk around in a layer of dust.)  All of this help allows me to focus on the work that I am here to do.  

Nyagali can make several different meals for us.  JP especially enjoys eating some African dishes that she can cook that I don't attempt to cook.  

But I kept hearing from others about how their house helpers can cook some pretty exciting things.  I have tried to make tortillas before, and while they turned out edible, they couldn't be described as good.  So I heard that our friends' house helper was a tortilla making expert and I talked with him to see if he could come to teach Nyagali how it's done.

 Jude and Nyagali are both from the ethnic group called Bobo.  While they were working in the kitchen they were chattering away in the Bomu language and I couldn't understand anything.  So I'm not sure what was said but the end result was a beautiful stack of delicious tortillas.
I'm hoping to get Jude back here soon for a lesson on bagels!
(it made me smile to see him wearing my Minnesota apron!)

Here's the recipe for tortillas:

TORTILLAS           makes about 10

3 cups flour
1/4 cup shortening (margarine or crisco)
1/2 t. salt
1/2 t. baking powder
Mix these together well, then add:
1/2 to 3/4 cup water
Knead the dough a bit, then separate into about 10 sort of golf ball sized balls.
Roll each ball out on a floured surface into a big round circle.
Place each tortilla in a pan over low heat and turn them over so each side gets a bit golden.
These can be kept in the freezer, so you can make a bunch at a time.
Hint:  You can roll out a bunch of them before heating the pan.  Layer them between waxed paper (we used big ziplock bags) before cooking.