It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas... sike!

It’s been a while since my last post, so I’ll start with Thanksgiving. While it was hard not being with family, I didn’t spend it alone! All of the Sikasso volunteers got together to have a feast of turkey, pumpkin and apple pies, mashed potatoes, and roasted veggies. So it turned out to be a pretty typical Thanksgiving meal. The weekend after Thanksgiving, some of us went to nearby waterfalls outside of Sikasso. They were beautiful – there were three different sets of waterfalls, each with a nice swimming hole. We camped out next to one set and were able to hike up to the other two. It was so nice to go camping, swimming and hiking!
Christmas is my favorite time of year, so these last few weeks have been hard, as I knew they would be. However, I began listening to Christmas music the minute I got back to site after Thanksgiving, and have been listening to it pretty much non-stop ever since. To keep myself entertained after dinner one night, I came home and danced to the entire Nutcracker Suite by myself! And people sent me decorations so my house now contains a mini tree, wreath, angels and bows!
I continue to walk around town and greet on the mornings that I don’t do baby weighings. I fee like most people know me by now. I went to the onion fields on Friday for a little over an hour and helped women pull water and plant the onions, which take about three months to grow. It’s actually been cool enough several mornings that I have to wear my long-sleeved hoodie – I love it! As I mentioned in my last blog, since its cold season now, a lot of Malians complain all day about how cold it is. I always mention how hot I am, and say that it’s snowing in parts of America. Some people have seen snow on TV and some have no idea what it is. Cotton-pickin’ time is still here, so I can look outside my house occasionally and see big piles of what from a far looks like snow! So I guess I can say I am having a somewhat White Christmas!
This past week I only did one baby-weighing and so spent the rest of the week making Christmas cards, doing basic chores, and feeling completely useless. I’m still not quite used to the slow pace of life with no set schedule of things. And while my Bambara is improving, there are still a lot of frustrations. A lady told me the other day, “Kadia (the old volunteer) could speak and understand Bambara a lot. You can’t really”. I just have to remind people that she was here for two years and eventually I’ll be able to. On Wednesday, I went to market town; getting ready to go back to site, I was the one person on the whole bachee sitting directly under the blazing sun. And two people commented on how much I was sweating – Malians just love to tell things straight up!
Overall I really enjoy baby weighings. We went to a town last week where 140 babies came! Luckily there were women there to help, so all I did was record the info and offer advice. And I had about fifteen shots of the very sugary Malian tea so I was pretty hyper. I’m definitely getting my biking in (which is good since I’ve been a total slacker lately when it comes to running!). I went to a village 12 km away a few weeks ago, but on the way thought I’d missed a turn and ended up backtracking for about ten minutes. I had been right all along as it turned out, so I had to turn back around and eventually found the town. It’s nice to get to know people from surrounding areas, and I love babies! They are (most) so cute.
World AIDS day was December 1st, and one of the Sikasso volunteers put together an Awareness Day on the 2nd. Several volunteers came to help. There was a basketball tournament, free AIDS testing, and a couple of info booths. Another gal and I sat at one booth and had people play a little game on ways of HIV transmission. At first we gave away condoms for the participants, but then about fifty kids showed up wanting to play, even though they didn’t know what they were doing (they just wanted the free condoms to blow up as balloons). So we stopped giving out prizes, but there were still a decent number of people who came by and seemed genuinely interested. In Mali, the AIDS rate is very low compared to the rest of Africa; below two percent. However, it is still a problem and from what I’ve seen in my village, a lot of people either do not really understand it, or do not want to talk about it.
Last Tuesday night was exciting. I heard drums and so at dinner asked my Homologue what was going on. She said it was the funeral ceremony for an elderly Animist woman. I wanted to go watch, so her son and two girls who live at her house went with me (one of the girls is about sixteen years old and insisted on holding my hand the entire time, since at twenty-two years old, clearly I am incapable of walking by myself and not getting lost!). Basically there was a big group of people in a circle, with men dancing in the middle. There were about four younger guys wearing white skirts and no shirts, a couple of guys holding burning sticks, and a main guy with a big mask, who served as the fetish. The circle moved its way across a section of town. The men with the fire would charge towards the outskirts of the circle every so often, causing the spectators to scream and disperse (oddly enough the men with fire had the exact same effect with the villagers as I do with many children when I’m simply walking!). Eventually they reached the end of the line and everyone went home. It was pretty neat though and I definitely look forward to seeing and learning more about different ceremonies. Tabaski is this Thursday so everyone in my site will be very dressed up and have feasts (most people will kill a sheep for the occasion). I attended a Protestant Church here in Sikasso yesterday which was fun, although I couldn’t understand most of it. There was a lot of singing; some of the songs came from hymnals so I was allowed to participate. Even those to which I couldn’t sing along were still fun to listen to though. It was a worship service pretty much exactly the same as those in the US, only in Bambara not English, with a different style of music.
Everyone have a wonderful Holiday season!