The Village

The countdown has begun. We leave Mali in 6 short days. There is much to do. We have gained great respect for Malians during our time here. We have found them to be a welcoming people who enjoy relationship, laughter and a good party! As we prepare to leave, I realize that I still have not posted about one of my most meaningful experiences here – my overnight stay in a village. I started writing about it, but never finished the post. Since I can't sleep tonight – hopefully I will finish and get it published! It will probably be long – it was 36 hours of completely new information for my brain and body. I will try to filter out what was most significant. Here goes:

I offer my up-front apology for the pictures which will so obviously be missing from this post. I didn't take any. There was so much to take in, and I was so appreciative for everyone in the villages I visited allowing me into their lives for a couple of days. I would have felt like I was intruding if I had been snapping away with the camera. I really don't know that they would have felt like I was intruding, but I would have. If you don't like it, either stop reading, or come get me! J (Author's note: Chris gave me a very hard time about this. However, she later went to the village for an afternoon, armed with her camera. She returned with exactly ZERO pictures and told me she understood how I felt. We will work on graciously asking permission and getting you some photos.)

We LIVE in a large capital city. Much is different here from our life in America, but lots of things are quite similar. We don't feel as though we have really gone through much culture shock so far. I am not sure when that will come or what it will look like. However, the village was drastically different from life anywhere I have ever lived – Bamako, Wake Forest, Pikesville, Reisterstown – or any place I have even visited. I question whether my words will do it justice – pictures probably would have helped! I went to the village with a new friend, Daouda, who is doing church planting among the Bambara people here in Mali. He and his wife have been working in the villages around Bamako for several years. There are some relatively new believers in the villages we went to visit. Daouda relates very well to the Malians, and his Bambara is great. Everything I understood was due to him!

There was much that was good about my time in the village. The best part was simply being with the people. They welcomed me (us) wholeheartedly. I was treated as an honored guest at all times. This meant that I had the best chair, I was given a chicken (alive at first, later cooked as part of our dinner), and that I was generally the center of attention. My inability to speak their language made their job more difficult, but they were extremely gracious nonetheless. Don't get me wrong, I brought a lot to them as well – tremendous laughter! Men and women, boys and girls all enjoyed my attempts to parrot back their greetings. I wasn't even trying to give the proper response – I never knew what it should have been. I simply offered the same greeting that was given to me. Lack of language was definitely a challenge. Although I knew it was futile, I think my brain kept trying to understand what my ears were hearing.

No doubt the biggest challenge for me was the food. I have never claimed a strong stomach. I can vividly remember my first (and last) raw oyster. It went down, but didn't stay there for more than a second or two. So Daouda prepared me on the ride out for what to expect. He told me people usually struggle with the food or the latrine, or both. The latrine was fine – I didn't have to use it much while I was out there anyway. Food was a different story. The graciousness of the people meant that they were quick to offer me something to eat – an offer I could not refuse, culturally. We took a gift of rice to the village where we slept, so dinner was rice and sauce. But two times before that and once the following day, I had tow. I don't like tow. Not in a box, not with a fox, not in the rain, nor on a train. I have tried it, and I do not like it, Sam I am! Tow is similar to cream of wheat (once it has thickened enough to hold in your hand), but is made from either millet or corn that has been freshly pounded. It has no sugar. If you are like me before this experience, you aren't sure what millet is. Two words – bird seed. Malians eat tow from a large common bowl, using their right hand to reach in and scoop some out from directly in front of them. Before eating it, they dip the tow in the sauce in another bowl – usually green and somewhat slimy. I had green sauce with a bonus – brown fish sauce mixed in! I suppose this is the place to tell you that this stomach struggles with fish in America on a good day. Not all fish, just fish that tastes, well, fishy. I prayed much during every meal, and even prayed the second day that I would not be offered lunch. God chose to answer that one otherwise, but he definitely helped me with each meal. I did not enjoy any of it, but I ate enough to be gracious and everything stayed down. (My friend Daouda told me that he has eaten some crazy stuff in his years of service and that his prayer is "God, I will get it down if you keep it down.") Daouda also told me the next day on the ride home that he was worried about me during our first meal – that he has never seen anyone turn so red while eating!

The food being a challenge for me caused me another challenge – I was forced to face the fact that I was so ungrateful for the food that was available. I even had the choice to eat little. Let's face it – I could have missed all meals for two days and this body would have found some excess energy stored up! Sure, it was new to me and quite different from what I know, but I could not shake the feeling that my ingratitude meant that I believed I deserved better food than this. Yet these people eat tow day in and day out, and they are grateful for it. They know that if they aren't eating tow, they probably won't be eating at all. This still is not all resolved internally, even weeks after the experience. I have heard good things and am therefore excited about the food in Senegal, but that just perpetuates my lack of gratitude for the tow. Not sure what to do with that.

Sleeping out under the stars was great. I was on a thin mattress on a cot, in a light blanket/sleeping bag, with sheets on the mattress and another thin throw blanket on top. I slept in my jeans and sweatshirt, and was still a little chilly! (I was offered the opportunity to sleep inside – they would have preferred it, but the air inside the mud brick building did not move at all, and I probably would have been so hot that I would not have been able to sleep.) I covered my head a little bit – to protect me from the chill, the mosquitoes (that really were not there since rainy season had passed), and the brilliant light of the stars and moon. The sky was really beautiful without any lights to compete. I was woken numerous times throughout the night by the noise of animals – some tied up, some roaming around my bed – but each time fell back asleep and felt adequately rested come morning.

Day two offered more of the same: laughter at (and with) me, sitting under a tree drinking tea, more preferential treatment for me, and more tow for lunch. It took a long time for us to leave – much longer than we had planned. In much (if not all) of Africa, the guest must ask for and be granted "the road" prior to leaving. It took a while for us to be given the road at our last village, and Daouda knows many people in surrounding villages, so we had to stop and greet quite a few who were out when we were passing – to not do so would have been rude – quite a cultural shift from life in the states! We had several more offers for tow, but evening was approaching so we did have to get on the road to be home before dark. And the four dollar can of Pringles in the car was calling us!

I realize this is a long post with little detail of the ministry that took place on our trip. While Daouda did tell a story from God's Word to the men of the village who were interested, most of it was relationship building so that there would be a trusted foundation on which to build in the future. The work is very slow, but it needs to be for it to be genuine. More about that in the future, if you are interested. There were many more experiences, all different, most positive. If it had not happened before, the village made me realize – WOW, I live in Africa. With that, we have great peace we are exactly where he wants us to be at this point in time.