Village visits and our New Year's holiday

Fancy outfits and fancy dancing on New Year's Eve.

During the recent holiday break we spent 10 days in Koutiala.  For 3 ½ of the days we were attending a staff retreat for our mission.  We only see some of the people in our group, those who live far away, once or twice a year, so it was really nice to have everyone all together for a few days.  It ended with a big New Year’s Eve party full of food, singing, and dancing. 

The best part for me was that we spent 2 days in villages doing outreach with Centre Esther.  I love going to villages! 
On December 27^th we went to Finzankoro, the village I spent 3 weeks in last March trying to work on my Bambara language.  This was really my favorite village visit ever because I was going back to where I had been, where I knew people and they knew me.  I was excited to see the family I had stayed with.  Can it really have been 9 months since I stayed with them?  The 2 boys who were 6 months old back in March are now 15 months old and walking around.  They both had completely forgotten me and didn’t want the white lady to hold them. 
It took about an hour to get there on a very rough and dusty dirt road.  You can’t expect to ever go more than about 30mph on a road like this, and sometimes much slower as you are swerving around whatever needs to be avoided.  There were 6 of us crammed into a small Toyota pickup, so I was glad that it only took about an hour to get there.  

Playing a game with kids in a village.

Eliane did a health teaching in the village church.

We started by singing some songs and then I went off with the kids while the adults stayed in the shelter to hear a health teaching and presentation.  Everyone from the village’s church was there as well as plenty of people who don’t attend the church.  The village chief was even there with his counsel!
We distributed lots of clothes and some toys and JP did cleaning and bandaging of wounds and we prayed for healing for sick people.   Then we got to eat a nice lunch of rice with sauce.  After lunch everyone sits around to chat and rest and the young men boil up Malian tea and offer little shot glasses of the syrupy drink to whoever is interested.  Finally about an hour before sunset we asked for the road.  When you visit someone you have to ask for the road, you can’t leave until they say its there.  We wanted to get back before dark, this time of year that’s around 6:30pm.
It was a really nice day, and our other village outreach - January 3rd in Ngolonianaso, was similar.

 So we were at the retreat for 3 ½ days, 2 days of the 10 were traveling to and from Bamako, 2 days were in villages, so that leaves 2 ½ days I haven’t mentioned.  I had hoped to spend that time going around to visit friends and do some fun stuff during our trip, but unfortunately I spent almost all of that free time in bed with a fever and some kind of nasty cold/flu.  The weather was terribly cold for Mali, even for it being cold season.  It dipped down into the 50’s every night!  With no heating in the house that’s quite chilly and I think that it contributed to me getting sick.  Now, 2 weeks later, I am much better but still coughing a bit.

Jean-Patrick cleaning and bandaging wounds.

This girl got a dress and some new sandals, I think she is happy inside but just not used to smiling for the camera!

Want a chicken?

Before getting out of a village we had visited we pulled over so that the ladies could buy some charcoal (the prices for some things are cheaper in villages than in town.)  This young man was passing by and stopped.  It was pretty strange, but he said that he noticed me and appreciated that I would come to his village, and would I like a chicken? 
Who wouldn't like to have a chicken?
But, really?  I get a chicken from a stranger just because I am white and I happened to be in his village?  Yep.  He also called his mother over to come and meet me. 
The chicken kind of matched my outfit, which was also given to me by a young African fellow (the fabric for the outfit was given to me, I sewed it into clothes myself.)  That was a bit less weird though, a friend who was staying with us for a few weeks gave the fabric to me as a gift.  Have you ever gotten a cool present from a stranger?

LOST DOG

My Three Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad, No Good Days… and the best possible outcome.

Ridiculous.  This is how Teddy was sleeping.

He likes his Christmas present from my mom.

On Friday morning I stepped out the door of our apartment at 6:30am with my sneakers laced up and the dog’s leash in my hand.  I had dragged myself out of bed early to go for a run with the dog.  Usually when I get up early like this I can hear Teddy’s excited whine noises coming from outside as soon as I’ve turned on a light in the house.  If he could form words out of those noises I think he would be saying “yippee, you’re up! hurry, hurry, I’m waiting for you, lets go run!”  So on Friday morning when I stepped out the door and still didn’t hear Teddy I thought it strange.  I wondered if maybe he was up on the roof of the apartment building.  I know he goes up there often as evidenced by the many piles of dog poo I discovered when I went up to take pictures last week.  So I called for him, but no response.  I called again.  Then I walked around the building.  No Teddy. 
“Jean-Patrick!  Teddy’s not here!”  I shout-whispered into the bedroom window.  I went to the gate door to see if Teddy was in the street.  He wasn’t. 
I went out into the street shouting for my dog and I did a 10 minute jog looping the immediate area calling and scanning for him as I went.  I was expecting him to come bounding around a corner at any second.  I went back home to let JP know I hadn’t found him yet.  This wasn’t normal.  JP talked to the night guard who prowls around our building and the neighboring one all night.  He said he had seen the dog for sure at 5am but wasn’t sure after that.  Someone must have left the gate door unlatched and the dog got out and went for an adventure. 
I did a longer search on foot, and JP went out on the motorcycle to call and look before he had to leave for school.  We didn’t find Teddy but we were hoping that he would show up at home at any moment.
By that afternoon I was in tears, and my heartache continued for 3 long days.
If you are not a dog lover you might not understand this very well.  Let me try to explain. 
Teddy is not just some animal to me, he is my buddy.  He keeps me company when I am home alone, and he serves as my personal security service by barking if anyone comes near the door.  If I come back to the house after being away, even for a short time, Teddy reacts like a kid on Christmas morning.  You can’t help but feel happier when you get that kind of welcome home.  He is my running partner and motivater.  It’s a lot easier to get up and go at 5:30 or 6am if I know that he is waiting for me, super enthusiastic to go running.  And I think theres something about caring for another being – giving him food and washing him, ect, that adds to feelings of mutual affection.  I know that he needs me, and I need him, too.  Anyway, bottom line is that I love my dog.  And to know that he was gone was overwhelming.
Where we lived before it might not have been so scary.  But we live in the city now.  Three sides of our neighborhood are edged by highway type roads with masses of rushing traffic.  The fourth side is the river.  After he’d been gone a few hours I knew that he must have either gone too far away and couldn’t find his way home, or he had been hurt (or killed) and couldn’t get himself home.  For three days I kept imagining him with broken legs, huddled on the ground somewhere, starving to death.  I went out searching for him, looking everywhere but also scanning the trash piles and open sewer canals to see if there might be a furry mass there.  It was unbearably sad for me, and I was surprised at how much Jean-Patrick was affected as well.  When an insensitive friend asked “oh well… will you get a new dog?”  JP replied with “I don’t want a new dog, I want Teddy.” 
I think the hardest part was just not knowing.  If we knew he was dead we could have closure and stop wondering and waiting and hoping for him to come home. 
Saturday morning I worked on making a LOST DOG poster and JP took it to the photocopy shop.  I glued over 20 of them onto cement electric poles at busy corners of the neighborhood.  I wanted to know that we had done all we could do. 
Someone called on Sunday morning saying they thought they saw Teddy the night before.  (That’s not really very helpful, is it?)  JP went to meet them and of course Teddy wasn’t around.  I doubt that it had been our dog because it wasn’t that far from the house and I know he could find his way home from there.  Also, there are all sorts of dogs roaming the streets all the time here, and they all look pretty similar.
Throughout the three awful days we did a lot of praying.  Pretty much every night as a habit when we do bedtime prayers we ask God to protect us and our animals and our house.  But this was different.  I prayed many desperate prayers with tears asking God to please not let Teddy suffer, and if he was still alive to please send angels to guide him home.  JP and I had discussions about why God allows bad things to happen, and about how we know that God is still Good no matter what, and that it wouldn’t be too hard a miracle to bring Teddy back to us.  My hope was running out though. 
On Sunday night I picked up Teddy’s cushion, where he always lounges around in the house, and I hid it under our bed.  I didn’t want to look at it anymore. 
At 2:45am on Monday morning I woke up hearing dog whining sounds and I jumped up and shouted out the window, “Is it Teddy?!”  The guard replied that it was Teddy, so we hurried to open the door.  The guard said that 2 young guys brought the dog (at 2:45am?!) to the gate and said he’d been with them for the last 2 days.  The guard had been spreading the word about the dog being missing and they said they knew where to bring him back to without needing to call the phone number on the posters.  (sounds a bit sketchy to me, I mean really, 2:45am?!  And then the next evening they came by to ask for money… sounds like a dog-napping kind of.)  Anyway, Teddy was thankfully not hurt and seemed to have been fed.  He was filthy and stinky, as though he had played in the open sewers and then slept in puddles of sheep pee.  I gave him an extreme bath and took care of that.  I don’t understand it all but I’m just so glad he got home, really an answer to our prayers, and I think a miracle.

-----So this story happened and was written just before Christmas.  The rest of the story is that last week, just 3 weeks after going missing for the first time, Teddy ran away again!  He followed the neighbor kid out the gate at 6am (according to the guard) and took off.  This time he showed up on his own at 5am after being gone 2 whole days.  Again he was unhurt, and this time not even dirty.  He threw up hair and bones all morning and was fine after a long sleep.  Clearly we cannot let him be outside anymore unless he is chained up.

Badalabougou

We were really blessed to be able to move into a nice apartment in a good neighborhood.  A friend who worked with our group lived here but moved away, so that’s how we found it. 
The neighborhood of Badalabougou is very centrally located in Bamako.  The city is divided by the Niger River, which is just a 5 minute walk away from the house.  The north side of the city has the downtown area and JP’s school is up there too.  We live just south of the river between the Martyr’s Bridge and the New Bridge.  There is one more bridge in the city and it’s newer than the New Bridge, but they didn’t want to change the New Bridge’s name, so the newest bridge is called the Third Bridge.  Not very creative, but better than calling it the Newer Bridge I guess.
The names of the neighborhoods here are all quite a mouthful.  But if you know a bit of Bambara (or ask someone to explain) you can often disect the names and make some sense of them.  Badalabougou is broken down to ba-da-la-bougou, which means “river-mouth-place-neighborhood.” 

I took a few pictures from our side of the river.  In this one you can see the Martyr's Bridge.

before + after: bedroom built in

Here are the before and after photos of a project I did in the main bedroom of our new apartment.  It is unusual to have any built in cupboards or closets in houses here at all, so its a nice bonus to have this closet.  However, I really wasn't a fan of the diamondy design.  I got some fabric and covered the small doors and the center panel.  To be more specific, I covered pieces of cardboard in fabric and staple gunned them on.  What do you think?

new apartment

Here is what our apartment looks like from the outside front. 
The building has 4 units, we are one of 2 on the bottom and there are two upstairs.  Across a wall from us there is an identical building.  The apartment is a bit smaller than the house we lived in before, but still plenty of room (maybe except the kitchen, which is more of a "kitchenette").  The biggest thing to adjust to is the yard and the whole privacy factor.  At the house we had a big yard and it was surrounded by a high cement wall.  Here there are bricked pathways around the building and any of the building's other residents or visitors could pass by a few feet away from my windows at any time. Curtains aren't just decorative here!

 

This picture is taken from the roof of our building and is what part of our street looks like.  There are a lot of sheep and goats in our street, here you just see a few sheep, but if you were to go down a bit further there is a herd of about 25 goats hanging out in the street.  Our dog Teddy now makes an effort to avoid them as he was head-butted by a protective mama the other day.
The street here is also filled with small children and quite a bit of debris.  There is a lot of construction going on and within the neighborhood the roads are unpaved and very rough. 

Moving (or TRYING to move!)

Sheesh!  I haven’t written on my blog for quite some time!  Well, we’ve been REALLY busy lately with packing and trying to move, then finally actually moving, and then unpacking and settling in.  These things take time and energy.    
So heres my story of what moving was like: (Oh the stress!)

We knew we were going to move but didn’t know when.  Jean-Patrick was registered for school, but the school hadn’t given a start date for the school year.  Kids’ schools usually start right at the beginning of October and run to the end of June.  But universities are often a month or more later than that, and this year seemed really unsure because the school year had been messed up a bit last year because of the coup d’etat and all that.  So I was actually hoping that JP’s school wouldn’t start until January so that we could go to Chad to visit his family for Christmas as planned.  We didn’t want to move until we knew the school would be in fact starting soon.  I had a women’s retreat in Bamako the last weekend of October (which was fabulous… maybe I should write a post on that, too) and so of course it was just a few days before I was going be leaving for a long weekend that we got word that JP needed to go to his school.  He went all the way to Bamako and to the school to find out that school actually was starting in 2 weeks time.  JP was going to hurry back home and work on getting the packing started while I did my weekend trip to Bamako.  But this was all happening during the time of the Tabaski Muslim holiday, and it wound up that there were no places available on any bus – tickets had been reserved long in advance for the days surrounding the holiday.  So JP was stranded in Bamako for like 5 days more than he planned to be.  We called someone to feed our dog and cat and we got to see each other in the city!  We also got the papers signed and deposit paid on the apartment we would be moving in to.  It would be ours as of November 1^st.  We went back on Sunday Oct 28^th to Koutiala thinking we would work real hard to get things all packed up super quickly and then move at the end of the week.  JP’s school would be starting on Monday, November 5^th, so we needed to be moved before that!

We spent long days packing as well as tying up all the loose ends that go along with leaving jobs or ministries and friends and a house, lots of accounts to be settled and responsibilities to hand over.  I was really hoping we could move on Thursday the 1^st.  By Tuesday night it was clear that we wouldn’t be ready in time, so we made a plan for Saturday.  JP called people and met with people and did all he could do to try to find a truck to move our things.  One truck that was lined up fell through on Saturday morning, and so another possibility (previously rejected because of high cost) was reconsidered.  The truck boss came to the house to see our things that needed to be moved.  At this point we were totally ready to go, everything packed up and just waiting.  The truck boss looked at our stuff to judge how much space it would take up in his truck and struck a deal with us saying that the truck would be filled 50/50 with bags of millet and our things, thus sharing the cost as well.  Then he said it was too bad we waited so long, he could have had our stuff on the road that night, but now we’d have to wait until Monday.  Obviously this was a problem since JP needed to be at school in Bamako (7 hours away) on Monday morning. 
JP left for Bamako and I stayed to wait for the truck.  On Sunday an announcement was made asking people to show up to our house on Monday evening to help load the truck.  On Monday evening, just before the truck was supposed to show up (around 7pm- after the sun has set and so its not as hot)  I had 15 helpers waiting with me at the house.  And then a messenger came to let me know the truck was not coming and I should send the helpers home.  But don’t worry, the truck will come soon, any time really, they are still just working on finding bags of millet to fill up half the truck. 
The next time (I can’t remember which day it was anymore) I had 6 helpers waiting with me when the truck was supposed to come.  And again it didn’t come and I had to send the helpers home.  They said it would be Friday evening, November 9^th (as in a whole week after we had really wanted to move, and all this time our apartment is paid for and sitting empty!)  Friday evening I was thinking that if the truck didn’t come this time I might have some kind of breakdown.  Oh, also, on Wednesday my friend who was moving into our old house did finally move into the house.  So I was still living there with all of our belongings taking up the whole living room and saying “sorry, I know you want me to move all this stuff and me and my pets out of what is now your house, and I’m trying, but what can I really do?”
Friday night at 7:30 the truck finally arrived!  I was so relieved!  This time there were only 2 helpers (that’s what happens when you cry wolf I guess.)  But the truck boss was there and had 2 helpers, and then there’s me, so 6 people total.  It took us 1 ½ hours to get it loaded up. I was not so impressed with the way our stuff was put in the truck – it was all layed down up on top of piles of bags of millet. Not quite what I had in mind.  I figured we’d find a lot of broken things in unpacking.  And a lot of our furniture was beat up, but not one broken dish even, so it could have been worse.  We’ll definitely do the whole moving thing differently next time though!

They said they’d drive all night and get to Bamako very early Saturday morning where JP would direct them to the apartment and help get it all unloaded.  I was to go in a friend’s car on Saturday with the dog and cat and be getting into Bamako in the afternoon.  I was really looking forward to arriving at my new apartment that would be filled will all our boxed up belongings.

On Saturday morning when the friend came with the car to get me and the pets, I had put the cat in a lidded basket and bungeed the top on.  I had asked around but couldn’t find a cat carrier box to borrow.  The basket idea seemed like a good one until I was just about to place it in the car and the cat flipped the lid open and rocketed out of the basket and zoomed off to hide.  He wasn’t too impressed with the basket idea I guess.  He would not come out from hiding, so I had to leave for Bamako with out him, but finally (4 weeks later) he will be getting a ride here this next weekend (in a taped up cardboard box with breathing holes.) The dog seemed to enjoy the car ride, his first one ever, and he stayed calm the whole time. 

Saturday afternoon I was getting in to Bamako and I called JP to see if our stuff was all moved in.  Surprise, surprise, the truck hadn’t arrived yet.  So I had to go wait with him at the mission base.  JP had been staying there because it would be hard to live in a completely empty apartment – no stove, no fridge, no bed, etc.  I kept thinking the truck people would call at any moment, but they didn’t.  When JP tried to call them there was no network coverage, meaning they were somewhere out in the sticks, out of the city still. 
I went to sleep very frustrated on Saturday night, and to be honest I was just a bit wondering if maybe the truck people decided it would be better profit if they just sold all our stuff.  Sunday morning went by and finally around 2 on Sunday afternoon the truck people called and JP went to direct them to the apartment.
When the truck got near our apartment they found that the roads in our neighborhood were not designed for a big freight truck, so they had to park some ways away.  JP had to hunt down a smaller truck.  Then he and his buddies unloaded our things from the big truck onto the smaller truck which drove over to the apartment and then they unloaded from the smaller truck into the apartment.  This took them 4 hours (remember it was only 1 ½ hours to load!)  I waited in comfort, and boredom, at the base during this time. 
JP came back to the base to have dinner and get me and Teddy the dog, and we got to the apartment just after 9pm.  We dug through our stuff and found the bed mattress and sheets to put on it and got that arranged and called it a night.  The next morning JP left early for school and I started the process of unpacking - another adventure altogether, but thankfully this time it was on my schedule.