Arriving in Douentza

Monday, June 9th

We pulled into Douentza somewhere around 4 AM, and I got off the bus and dryheaved for a few minutes. I felt like total hell. It was getting light when we got our baggage and made it back to Jeff’s house in town.

His house is nice, by Malian standards, or maybe average. Mud stucco walls surrounding a dirt courtyard, no flush toilet, a few concrete rooms inside, one even with air conditioning! Although the "AC Room for the Females on the Project" seems to actually be an office. Abbie and I did call dibbs on sleeping in it that morning. I took a bucket bath, the only shower available here, and slept for a few hours after having a cola to calm my stomach.

Woke up feeling much better. We had breakfast, then went and got some supplies in town. It’s not a big town, and feels like an overgrown village. Sand roads (there is so much dust and sand here), trash in the streets, mud brick houses, small shops, women selling spices on the ground until shacks, but it really has a nice feel to it. The people here are wonderful. You aren’t even really hassled or stared out that much, nothing like in India. You hear "toobob" all around, meaning "white person", but it’s not that big of an issue.

Abbie, who knows Fulfulde, was greeting people left and right, chatting, having a grand old time; I just went ahead with Jeff, who refuses to learn Fulfulde since he thinks that then he’ll be held to native standards of cultural understanding and just wants to be the crazy old white guy. Hey, to each his own.

I bought some spices so I can cook for myself, and we picked up some other goods as well, like kettles and water jugs.

Jeff has a woman cook food and bring it to us for our meals. We had rice with a sauce with cabbage and potatoes for lunch, which was quite good, though in this heat, you don’t have much of an appetite. In the afternoon, Jeff, Minkailou and I walked through the heat across town to where Ramata (TBD if that’s the right name), the high school Tommo-So speaking girl I will be working with, lived with her family. We met and arranged for her to come here the next morning so I could begin work with her. She seems nice but shy. I’m sure we’ll get to know each other in the coming months, though.

I got a cell phone yesterday, too! Call me! Though sometimes it can be hard to get a line into Mali, so be persistent. My number is:

223 524 7352

The 223 is the country code.

Dinner was chicken and fries (I don’t understand how there are so many fries). The meat is quite good, slaughtered probably immediately before being cooked, so way more fresh than anything in the US. I’m not used to just getting a hunk of bird, though, skin, bones, fresh, saucy. My former vegetarian self would be horrified by me ripping little pieces of meat off the bone with my fingers. After dinner, we had some mango slices. The mangoes here are the most delicious I have ever tasted. By comparison, mangoes are just really really bad in the US.