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.

an African story starring Turtle

I love a good folk tale.  Today during my Bambara lesson my language tutor told me this one, and I understood enough of the story to make sense of it. (yay! I am making progress!) So here is my retelling of a traditional African story:

Many of the forest animals were friends.  Turtle learned that two of his good bird friends would be having their wedding up in the sky.  Turtle really wanted to go to the wedding, but since he didn’t have wings it seemed impossible to get up there.  One of his bird friends got the other birds together and they all agreed to each give one of their feathers to Turtle.  Turtle gathered all of the feathers together, and then he was able to fly up to the bird wedding in the sky. 
The festivities took place over several days.  When the birds and Turtle arrived, they were asked their names by the host.  Turtle said that his name was “You All.”  The host cooked some good food and gave it to the guests saying “Here is some food for you all to eat.”  Turtle said “Did you hear that? The food is for me!”  And he ate all of the food without sharing.  This happened again and again in the same way for the next few meals.  The birds were very angry with Turtle, and they each decided to take back the feather that they had given.  Turtle was left with no feathers, so he could not fly back home. 
When the wedding was finished and the birds were ready to go back to the forest, Turtle pleaded with them, “Will you please give a message to my wife?  Tell her to take everything soft out of the house, like our mattress, couch, and pillows, and pile it all together in our yard.”  Turtle was planning to jump down from the sky and he wanted a soft place to land.  But the birds were still angry, so the message they said to Turtle’s wife was, “Turtle wants you to put all of the sharp and hard things together in a pile in the yard.” 
So Mrs. Turtle took the cooking pots, knives, and metal tools and piled them up in the yard.  Turtle jumped down from the sky and his shell shattered into pieces when he hit the pile.  Mrs. Turtle picked up the pieces of Turtle’s shell and brought them to the cobbler who sewed the pieces back together.  And this is why a turtle’s shell looks the way it does.

make friends, get bonus fruit

Hot season in Mali is intense.  We have temperatures over 100 degrees every day for a couple months.  Soaring temperatures with no air conditioning and frequent power cuts is brutal.  Thankfully there is an immediate reward for this suffering: Mangoes!  I don’t know why mango season coincideswith hot season, but I’m glad that it does!

Mangoes can be found for sale everywhere for 10 to 25 cents each.  Or you can get them for free if you have a mango tree in your yard or if you have a friend who does.  There are many different kinds of mangoes and I have learned the names of a few of my favorite varieties so that I can be sure to buy the really good ones.  A really good mango is huge and perfectly ripe so as to be juicy but not squishy and it is sweet like candy but somehow healthy because it is fruit.

If you take a trip on the road, there are many places to stop along the way where there will be long lines of ladies selling piles and piles of mangoes.  I am looking forward to one day getting a chest freezer so that we can cut and freeze mangoes and keep having them throughout the year.  For now, I just eat as many as I can handle during mango season.

There is a paved road near the house I am staying at and in the evening there are ladies with tables on the sides of the road.  Some of the ladies have vegetable tables with lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions.  And some of the ladies have fruit tables with mangoes, bananas, and possibly some oranges and imported apples. 
I have made friends with one of the fruit sellers.  In Mali you have to greet before you do anything else.  It would be ok just to do a basic quick greeting and then get to business.  But since I wasn’t in a hurry and there were no other customers waiting, I started chatting with the fruit lady.  She doesn’t speak any French, so it was good practice for my Bambara.  I learned that her name is Aissata and she is of the Dogon ethnic group.  I can’t really remember what all we chatted about, but she was a nice lady and we talked for a few minutes before I asked about the prices of fruit.  I chose a pile of 4 premium mangoes  for $1 and I picked 4 not quite ripe ones at 10 cents each from the back of the table.   Aissata put the mangoes I chose into a plastic bag.  Then she looked at me to make sure I was paying attention and she grabbed one more of the 10 cent mangoes to add to my bag as a present.  Then she went a step further (and ensured my repeat business) and put a free banana into my bag as well.  I have gone a few times since then to buy fruit from her.

Here is what $1.40 worth of mangoes looks like.  They are in these basins so I can soak them in bleach water.  The greenish ones will ripen in a day or two on the counter.  The ripe ones go in the fridge.

now we're cooking with gas!

Of course the gas ran out the day after my husband left on his trip. 

Stoves run on a bottle of gas here, similar to a gas barbeque grill.  Having an electric stove wouldn’t really work out too well because the power cuts pretty often and because the price for electricity is high.  A bottle of gas costs $20 or so to refill.  Mine usually lasts for about 6 weeks.
While I’m in Bamako to teach English I’ve been staying at the house of some friends who are away.  They left a note saying that when the gas runs out there’s a spare bottle in the storage room out back.
 
Today at lunch time I wanted to bake some fish so I lit the oven and popped the pan of fish in.  After 15 minutes I went to open the oven door to check on the fish and I could feel that the stove was only slightly warm and I saw that the fish was still raw.  The gas had run out shortly after I had lit the oven.  Ugh.
So I unscrewed the empty gas bottle from the hose connected to the stove.  Then I thought hard about where the key for the outside storage room might be.  I finally found a bowl of keys by the house’s main door and had to try a half dozen keys before one would go into and turn in the lock on the storage room door.
I found the full bottle in the storage room.  It was thickly coated with dust and webby stuff.  I got the bottle out the door and then brought some water over to rinse it off.  The distance between there and the stove in the kitchen might be 60 feet, but I had to carry the bottle in in 3 segments.  Those things are ridiculously heavy.  I got the bottle to the kitchen and attached the hose to it.  By now I was quite sweaty as the temperature is still 100 or more during the day and it has become very humid as it is raining about once a week.  Soon we will be in rainy season and it will rain every day and the temps will cool off a little bit. 
Now I just needed to turn the knob on top of the gas bottle to open the gas flow and relight the oven to cook the fish.  The knob on top of the bottle wouldn’t budge.  I tried using a towel to get a better grip on it.  I went into the office and dug in some drawers and found some tools.  There was a hammer but no kind of pliers.  I tried banging on the ridges of the knob in the direction to get it to open.  That didn’t work, but it got me much sweatier for the effort.  I don’t know exactly how long everything took me up to this point, but it was a long time.  I finally gave up because I needed to get ready to go teach at school.  I put the pan of fish in the fridge and ate some toast.

After school I came home and the night guard was there.  Most international workers employ guards to, well, guard their house.  The guard will usually water plants and sweep the yard too.  We have never employed a guard, but it is normal for most expats to have them.  Anyway, the guard was there and so I asked him if he could help me with the gas bottle in the kitchen.  Bernard came in and put his big man hands to work but he couldn’t get the knob to budge either.  I felt much less wimpy in that moment.  He left to ask the shopkeeper a couple doors down for a tool to use.  He came back with a not-completely-appropriate-for-the-job pliers type tool.  That didn’t work.  He went back to talk to the shopkeeper.  He came back and asked me if there was a hammer.  I gave it to him.  Several minutes later using the inappropriate pliers and the hammer together, Bernard got the knob to twist.  And I got to eat fish at 9pm.

on ATMs and friendly Malians

When I'm in America there are things I miss about Mali.  When I'm in Mali there are things I miss about America.

Last week (I'm staying at my friends' house in Bamako) I needed to go to an ATM and withdraw money.  In America it is usually pretty easy, even boring, to find an ATM and withdraw money.  It would be fairly rare I think, in America, to get to an ATM and find that it was not working.  Certainly if the first ATM wasn't working you could easily find a second one that would be working.  In Mali simple things like getting money from an ATM can become a time-consuming friend-making adventure.

First I decided to walk about 10 minutes out to the main road because it is lined with businesses and I thought maybe there is a bank with an ATM somewhere out there that I don't know about.  In my long, loose, flowy skirt I walked until I did find a bank, but this bank didn't have an ATM.  I started to walk the other direction on the main road, and suddenly the wind started blowing.  I wished I hadn't worn such a loose flowy skirt.  I tried to keep going while trying to keep my skirt from blowing up and showing too much leg, but the wind was picking up clouds of dust and it seemed like it was going to start raining.  A man at a tailor shop saw me through the window and opened the door to tell me to please come inside.  I went in and he found a chair and asked me to sit.  I chatted with him about the tailoring business and we watched dust and plastic bags flying around in the wind.  It did start raining.  I waited a while, but the rain continued.  Although the tailor would have been glad for me to sit in his shop all afternoon, I felt like we had run out of easy conversation, and I wanted to get home.
I walked a couple blocks to a gas service station.  There were a lot of people waiting under the hangar there, so I decided to wait with them a few minutes and see if the rain would stop.  The shop owner saw me (I don't blend into a crowd too well) and insisted that I come inside the shop and sit on the bench he had there.  He was very friendly and asked me a lot of questions, like what is my phone number and could he come visit me at the house.  I decided to continue on my way even though it was still raining.  I walked to the house as people under hangars and awnings stared at the white lady walking in the rain.  I smiled back and said hello.
My first attempt was unsuccessful.  There is not an ATM in the neighborhood I am staying in, at least not within walking distance.

The next day I decided to take a taxi across town.  There is a western style grocery store that I could buy a few items at and I remembered that there is a bank with an ATM next door.  The ATM did not work.  The guard sitting outside of the ATM booth said I could just cross the street (a busy road with 4 lanes of traffic) and find an ATM down the road.  I walked to the edge of the road and hesitated.  A man that works for the store as a parking guard saw me.  He came up and said he would cross the street with me.  It wasn't a question, he already decided.  So the nice man ran across the street with me and then he ran back to his work.  Across from the grocery store is the veterinary office with the vet that gave our dog his yearly rabies shot when we lived in Bamako.  He was standing at the door of the office, so I had to go up to greet him for several minutes before I could continue on my way.  I need to read a book on improving memory or something because the vet greeted me with "Eliza!" (the name I go by with Malians) and I have no idea what his name is.  Bad Eliza. :(

I got to the bank with another non-working ATM.  I think that the problem is mostly that they are out of money.  Another bank was down the road a bit further.  At that ATM (my 3rd of the day) I was again disappointed.  A guard at that place told me I should walk down the road a bit more (even further away from the grocery store where I started) because there is another bank that direction.  As I walked, a man pulled up beside me on his motorscooter and asked if I wanted a ride.  I said no thanks.  He asked for my number.  I smiled and said "no, sorry."  I kind of think its funny when I get asked for my number when I am a sweaty mess in 100+ degree weather.  Mostly the men are not creepy, they're just wanting to see how I'll respond.  I guess I must not look as gross as I feel with sweat dripping off my face.  

When I got to the bank there were 3 men sitting outside; one dressed as a guard and two of his buddies.  They were boiling up some Malian tea.  They greeted me and offered me some tea.  I answered with "maybe after."  I went in the ATM booth (4th of the day, 5th bank I tried since the day before) and was relieved to finally get some cash!  From now on I'm just going to go to this ATM first!  When I came out (with the money secured in a cash belt under my clothes) the men called me over to have tea and sit in a chair they had waiting for me.  I sat and chatted but I declined the tea, not because I didn't want to drink something strangers offered or because I didn't want to drink out of the same little unwashed shot glass that everyone else would drink out of, but because it was already the afternoon and the tea is very strong.  I told them I wanted to sleep that night so I would pass on the tea.  After learning everyone's names, places of origins, and ethnicity, and being shown the traditional musical instrument that one of the men had (like a harp-guitar) I thanked them, wished them a good evening, and left to walk back to the grocery store.

The two sides of that whole experience are so inescapably Malian.  Things don't work at all or as easily and quickly as I think they should; a simple task can gobble up a lot of time and effort.  And, people will go out of their way to help and be friendly and show hospitality - even to strangers.  People are more important that any task at hand.  I can get frustrated or I can keep smiling and marvel at these generous, good-natured people.  I never made 5 or 6 new friends when I went to get money from an ATM in America.  Now, if I could only remember their names...

we're home! and we're hot!

We were so excited to get home yesterday afternoon.  As soon as we got to the outskirts of town and started recognizing buildings we couldn’t stop smiling.  When the gate to our house was opened our dog barked at us for a few seconds but quickly changed to doing a happy dog dance when he realized who we were.  The people staying in our house welcomed us with a clean, dust-free bedroom (which, only a day later is already coated in a good layer of dry-season dust) and one of my favorite meals: Atchike and fish.
As I write this it is Saturday evening at 6pm.  It is over 100 outside, and over 90 in the house.  I just looked at the weather forecast for the week, and the daily highs for the week ahead are between 104-109 degrees, and the overnight lows are down to 80-82 degrees.  It stays hotter than 80 inside though because the brick walls absorb the heat of the day and keep us baking inside at night.  Thankfully we have an air conditioner unit in our bedroom, so we can use it at night to sleep.  Because it is expensive to run, we usually only use it when we just couldn’t sleep otherwise, but that is the case right now!  It was 97 degrees in our bedroom before we turned on the A/C to sleep last night.  The A/C cooled it down by 11 degrees so we could sleep.  I am not sure how we can find 86 degrees to be a comfortable temperature for sleep when we’ve been sleeping in 65-70 degrees for the last 6 months.
Maybe it’s because we are pretty exhausted in dealing with jetlag and the heat and the whole adjustment of being back here.

I’ve been trying to get the suitcases unpacked, but I am unpacking them just to tuck a lot of the stuff away into storage for the next 2 months.  And then I need to repack a new suitcase!  I will be home for a week and then I’ll spend the rest of May and all of June in Bamako teaching at the English school that I taught at when we lived in Bamako.  The school really needed more teachers as several teachers are just leaving on their furloughs.  There are some short term people coming at the end of June who will take over the classes that I’ll start teaching.  There is also a house for me to live in very close to the English school.  It is empty for May and June since my colleagues are traveling.  Our house and our dog are being taken care of by a lovely family and they need to stay until the end of the school year at the end of June.  So a lot of details worked out great for me to be able to go teach English now just as we’ve returned to Mali!  Jean-Patrick will see me in Bamako before and after a trip that he will make to Senegal to see medical clinics there.  So we have a couple more months of unsettledness, but I am enjoying the adventure.