bazin

This is us in our new bazin outfits, the picture is from when we were at a celebration in Bamako.

Bazin is the special fabric of Mali. It is made white and can be dyed into all different colors. Its a lot more expensive that regular printed coton African fabric. It starts out really shiny and stiff, but that goes away after it gets washed. Its also really hot to wear because of all the starch in it. Some people really want it to be shiny and stiff though, and they starch it and then get people to hit it with wood to make it shiny, they actually bring thier clothes to a place where someone's job is to hit bazin with wood all day. I don’t quite understand how this works, why hitting the fabric with wood makes it shiny again, but somehow it does.

To get a new outfit, first you go pick out the fabric you want, you bargain for the price and buy it. Then you decide what style of outfit you want made. I drew a picture of what I had in mind. Then you take the fabric to a tailor and try to explain what you want him or her to make. Since these have embroidery we had to go to a shop that does both sewing and embroidery. At the shop you can decide on colors and styles for the embroidery, too. The tailor measures you and finally you can leave. A few days later you go back and what you get back is never quite what you imagined, but hopefully its close.

kids at school

Here’s a picture of some of the kids at school sitting on the steps right outside the classroom. We sing songs the first thing every morning, so that’s why they’re clapping. I know a lot of kid’s songs at this point. I’ve learned plenty of new vocabulary from the songs, too, along with them.
There are only 6 weeks left of the school year. We are practicing a special song for a big end-of-the-year party on the last day, June 30^th.

bagged water

This is a scene I came upon the other day when I turned a corner at market. I thought it was cool and something I’d never see back in the states. Maybe there it would be a bunch of boys making stockpiles of water ballons instead.

These ladies are making plastic bags of water to sell. In hot season we need to drink a lot of water here! This water is straight from the tap, so I can’t drink it. When I go on bus trips I can find sealed bags of water, they are blue and have printing on them, and that water is safe to drink, so I do get to have the experience of biting a hole in the corner and drinking out of a plastic bag. Have you ever drank your water that way? There are also big plastic bottles of water that can be found, but these are a lot more expensive and not as interesting.

garibouts

In the background you can see some of the people and the activity on the base from the Assembly General we had here at Eastertime. In the foreground are 4 garibout boys eating rice out of a big bowl. Garibouts are boys taken to live together by a Maribout, a Muslim teacher, to memorize the Koran and fund the Maribout with the money that they get from begging on the streets. They are given by their families at quite a young age and then they are treated worse than animals and sent out on the street everyday to beg for food and money. It is really a heartbreaking situation that I am faced with every time I leave the walls of the base, or in this case I didn’t even have to leave the base because the boys came to the gate to ask for food since they heard the noise of all the people that were here and they came to beg for leftovers. This is one of those things here that is hard to see and hard to think about, but I don’t ever want to become calloused to it.

the stadium

This is a picture from the stadium. The stadium is mostly used for soccer matches, but also for concerts and other events. Since its within walking distance from where I live at the base, I come here pretty often to walk and pray and have some peace and quiet. And for the grass. This is the only big patch of green grass that I know of here. I can take my flipflops off and feel the grass on my feet. I like to just take in the intense greenness of it too, it is such a bright contrast to all of the brown I see everywhere else around me.