the biggest church

Last Monday we spent the day in Zamblala, a nearby village. The first thing we did when we arrived was to attend their church service - I guess there wasn't enough time on Sunday to celebrate Christmas enough, so they held a service on Monday morning as well. It was 3+ hours of mostly singing and dancing.
What is special about the church in Zamblala is that it is the biggest church in Mali. I think that there are usually around 700 people in attendance. The building is huge and really well built. Next year they will be celebrating their 75th anniversary. It is unusual to have a majority Christian village, and to have such a big church here, it is a country with over 90% Muslims after all. So it was a really cool experience for us to join them for a church service.

shoes

We spent the whole day after Christmas in a nearby village for the Centre. It was a great and full day.
I found many things notable, among which are these shoes. I think you can see why. Where can I get a pair of those for me?

i feel like chicken tonight

We are trying to raise chickens, but it hasn't been going that great. We now have 3 chickens left. We had 5 more that haven't made it. They all got sick, and 4 of them I found "sleeping on their sides" - thats what I thought when I found the first one dead, that it for some reason was sleeping on its side! No, it was just dead.
When a chicken is sick and then dies it has to be thrown out. But for some reason there is this idea that if a chicken is sick and you kill it before it dies on its own, its ok to eat. I think this is kind of gross.
I came home the other morning after my early Bambara lesson and noticed that one of the hens wasn't in the coop anymore. I peeked around the corner and saw JP and Martin - the boy who does some gardening for us- they were sitting at the little charcoal grill cooking up the missing hen. She had been sick, and rather than watch her also die, they decided it would be better to eat her now.
A few years ago I would have not been able to handle raising chickens. I certainly would have been upset to see that they were grilling up one of our hens, and I definately wouldn't have eaten any. But time and circumstances change a person I guess. So when JP invited me to pull up a chair and grab a wing or a drumstick, even though it had been a sick hen, I decided that I didn't want to let this rare chance to eat chicken pass me by. And it was delicious.

It is cold season right now and we are hoping that once it gets warmer again we can get more chickens and hatch some chicks and they will do better. For now we are getting a few eggs a week at least.

little mommy

I can remember when I was a little girl I always wanted to hold the baby if there was one around. "Please, can't I hold the baby, I'll be careful," I would beg. Occasionally the adults would sit me in a chair or on a couch and gently place the baby on my lap for a few minutes of supervised baby holding.
I often see kids, many younger than the girl in this photo (she is maybe 8), with baby brothers or sisters strapped to their backs. And it certainly isn't because they begged for this privelage. They don't have much choice in the matter; this is their work, their contribution, to take care of and carry around the baby is their duty. Here is another picture with this same little girl, now with me so that you can have a better idea of how small she is.
Instead of being sent to school she stays at home to help care for this baby and perhaps other younger siblings. She probably does lots of work everyday such as drawing and hauling water, lighting fires and cooking, sweeping the yard (yeah, as opposed to raking... many people here sweep their yard with a hand broom everyday, the yard is basically their living room), taking the grains to the mill, looking after grandparents, running errands, buying food at the market, ect. She doesn't have the opportunity to learn to read. She is given very little time for herself, very little time to play. When I stop to think about the differences in my childhood and that of a little girl like this one, I am so thankful for what I've had.

our new puppy

I'm so happy to have my new puppy!

Isn't he cute?
After 5 days of calling him "puppy" we finally came to an agreement on a name. (there were many names suggested and rejected between me and Jean-Patrick) His name is Teddy.

Our kitten hated the puppy for the first couple of days. The puppy was calm and didn't do anything to bother the kitten, but the kitten just looked at the puppy and started hissing and puffing its fur out. I think the kitten realized that the puppy wasn't going to try to hurt it, and he started to relax. This photo is the first night when they started to be friends. I was washing dishes and they both came to lay down at my feet. Sweet.

its beginning to look a bit like Christmas

For me, it doesn't look "a lot like Christmas" because there is no snow. We have overnight lows now down to about 60 degrees, daytime highs at 90. It is the coldest time of the year here, but its nothing like Minnesota where I grew up.
But we are getting ready and making it Christmasy at our house. Someone found us a tree at a sale and so we got that set up and put up the few other decorations that we have.

Here we are putting together our tree - we've had it in storage for months, so it was exciting to finally take it out of the trunks and see what it looks like.

kidnappings

There were 6 people kidnapped in Mali last month. They were all taken from far north of where I live. But these were the first ones kidnapped from in town, so it seems that Al-Qaeda is becoming even more of a threat.
The first 2 were Frenchmen taken in the night from their hotel room in Hombori on November 24th. On the 25th there were 4 men taken from a restaurant in Timbuktu: a German, a South African, a Swede, and a Dutchman. The German man refused to cooperate with the kidnappers to get in the truck and was shot and killed outside the restaurant.

I am glad that I had the chance to go to Timbuktu last year because it might be impossible for me as a white foreign person to go there from now on. It took around 20 hours of traveling last year for us to get to Timbuktu, so it seems far enough away that I feel safe where I am.

Here is an article about the kidnappings:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45437035/ns/world_news-europe/t/witness-european-killed-kidnapped-mali/

Here is a newer article regarding the arrests of suspects from the first kidnapping:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-16156458


Heres one that talks about the kidnappings hurting tourism:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-57343312-503543/timbuktu-al-qaeda-kidnappings-hurt-mali-tourism/
I found a couple points in this particularly interesting:

"The number of tourists visiting Timbuktu had drastically decreased in recent years. In 2006, 45,000 tourists visited the city, the number fell to 6,000 in 2009 to a meager 492 in the first quarter of 2011, according to statistics published by the Malian Press Agency in November."

It also says that with Mali being one of the 10 poorest countries in the world and not having much for natural resources, it has greatly depended on its tourism industry for revenue.

I pray that the hostages will be unharmed and soon released.

at our house

An interior shot: this is our big open livingroom/diningroom space (notice the chair and table in the foreground)

Our means of transportation: our motorcycle. Not in the picture is a fuzzy grey seat cover that we have on the seat now. (it resembles muppet fur) If the motorcycle is ever parked in the sun, even a couple minutes, you come back to find the seat too hot to sit on without the fuzzy seat cover.

Here are some girls that came to visit me sitting in our screen porch.

This is part of our yard. If you can make the photo bigger you can see a hammock (kind of in the middle of the photo). We have a lime tree and an orange tree (the 2 with skinny trunks) and there is a grapefruit tree blocked by the big tree trunk at left. The citrus trees need to be watered a lot, but then they make nice fruit. Our clothes lines are in this part of the yard, too.This is where we live! This is what you see when you come into our yard from the gate. You go in through the screen porch first, this is good to keep flies and mosquitoes out of the house.

The gate to our house. We use the single door to the left all the time. We wheel the motorcycle in and out of that. The big double gate doesn't get used too much since we don't have a car! Here is our gate again, but you can see our street here. The street in front of our house is very wide, its a busy one because it leads to a little market and a big school not too far away.