Things I do to make my mother worry

Sophie buying quite hot bread

At the artisans market
I have adopted recently the rather bad habit of sitting outside at night to working on my computer. This being winter in Mali (which doesn't mean it is necessarily cool, today it hit 90 degrees F, but that every so often a monsoon rain comes through) there are a lot of mosquitoes, which means I have a lot of mosquito bites. Now if I were a sensible person I would go inside and so avoid risking getting Malaria from these mosquitoes. Yet it is so beautiful outside and mosquitoes are apart of life here. It is as if, as Julie said this afternoon: we finally feel settled here. Now entering our fourth week in Mali, life has taken on a certain ebb and flow that we have become accustomed to.

That is not to say that we have completely gotten in the grove. Sunday night, we noticed that something was being set up at the 'hidden football field' just up the road. I initially thought it was a wedding of someone quite important (Sunday=day of marriages, and there are a lot of marriages!). So Julie and I ventured over to check it out in tang tops and jeans. We start walking up the street and soon Julie says to me: "Lauren we need to turn back. All the women are veiled here." Now though Mali is 90% Muslim, most women walk around without wearing a veil. We run back home, throw some tiny scarves onto our head (I am a little out of practice with tying a veil and my scarf was too thin, so the bun of my hair was sticking out, talk about awkward) and venture out again.

As it turns out, Sunday was the celebration of the day that Mohamed ascended into the sky. Julie and I join the crowd that is amassing toward the stadium. There are street vendors of prayer beads, prayer rugs and verses from the Koran. We file forward, toward the woman's entrance (men and women had separate entrances and also separate places to pray within the stadium). At the threshold I hesitate for a moment, thinking what am I getting myself into. Several women, as if seeing my fear, beckoning us foreword, saying 'you are welcome' in Bambara.

We enter. The football field is already full of people who must have been sitting there for hours. The men are so far away I can hardly see them (I was a little too shaken up to start a feminist tirade about how there is no such thing as 'separate but equal'). Julie and I sit down at the back, trying to be as discrete as possible. I am hyper-aware of the fact that my hair is showing in the back and that my scarf does not really count as a veil. The women around us seemed quite frankly to be accepting of the two semi-veiled white girls who just sat down, one laid out a rug for us to sit on.

Then the service began. At first I thought this was something similar to an Easter Sunday Mass, something that happened in every cartier of Bamako. It was only later I was told that we were hearing the head Prophet of Mali speak: Idira. The sermon was long, I mean I haven't sat through church service recently, but this could not help but remind me of a puritanical sermon that goes on the whole day. We came in at about 10pm and left around 1am, at which point the service was still going strong. Later, we were told that the service probably went to about 3am. The head preacher would speak a line or phrase (in Bambara, so I couldn’t understand) and a second speak would cry back. It almost put me in a trance, the two voices, and the dirt field full of sitting people.

Typically, I try to avoid talking about religion with Malians. People seem not to care if you a Christian or Muslim or what not, as long as you are something: which poses problems for me, the agnostic. Tonton (the doctor at the CSCOM) asked me the other day if I was Catholic. I should have said yes, just to play it off, but instead I stutter and said, "no I'm Christian" (which is in itself a lie). Tonton looked at me and said "Just like that, just Christian?" I felt like I was looking respect in his eyes. "You should try Islam," he said, "it is a very good religion."

My mother will probably cry in anguish when she reads that.

Perhaps there are some things that I can never understand or become a part of in Mali. Last week, Julie and I had a long discussion with one of our peer-educators about excision (aka. female circumcision). I have never actually had someone sit down with me and argue for the benefits of female circumcision. It is so strange because I respect him so much and his opinion and yet I disagree so strongly with him so strongly. I can't even say that 'we agree to disagree,' that female circumcision is an important part of culture and society in Mali. I just wanted to look him in the eye and say "Can't you see that you’re wrong! Can't you see what you believe is hurting and subjugating to women!" But you can't just do that, so we debated, and he felt just as strongly as I did, but in the opposite direction.

Disagree to disagree then, on this.