and that's when i said "oh fuck yeah bananas!"

When i came home from the internet cafe before I went to the villageI talked a bit with Moctar and told him hos I was feeling with a slightly quivering chin and he gave me a reassuring smile. Then Ladji proceeding to come out, pop in the Paul Simon album Graceland, which makes me feel like my childhood and dancing and my dad. He z&ang beautifully the zulu parts, and I sang along with the English as he grinned at me.
So the village stay. Sanankoroba.
Just when you get used to life, eh? I stayed on a large compound with my friend Katie. So many sisters, brothers, babies, grandmothers, and donkeys... There was a mute and mostly deaf servant who told animated stories with his hands. The youngest son of the family Aruna was due to be married, or well, start his marriage ceremonies on Thursday. Family members kept arriving from Bamako or other villages, the children were multiplying by the second, it seemed like all the women were nursing some child. With the family we helped wash clothes, attempted to stir the to - pronounced toe- (a traditional Malien dish that is millet gooish cream of wheaty, gelatinous stuff with what we have come to call "booger sauce" or gumbo), held babies, clumsily tried out bambara phrases, and just plain observed. the women were dressed beautifully in so many colored pagnes, I started to feel overwhelmed with the amount of overwhelming beauty. I took so many pictures, trying to get as many candids as i could before they would run over to immediately see what it looked like. digital cameras ruin everything - i want to say, no, keep pulling the water out of the well with your stunning skin glistening with perspiration in the 105 degree sun! sweat makes photos look more epic somehow...
With the group we did several traditional arts, dying fabric after stampng wax designs, bogolon -or painting with muddish clay from the bottom of the Niger river. Walking along the road we'd purchase fried tasty treasrues, something like a savory funnel cake, pass by a soccer game that it seemed the whole village was attending, ran into camels.
We went to whats called an SOS village, an orphanage, where women over the age of 36 become mothers to children brought in from the streets. Comparitively immaculate lodgings furnished with fridges, ovens, lush trees lining the compounds. Like a little utopian oasis away from the poverty nearby. SOS has places all around the world, and here in Mali it seems to be doing very well. After seeing children on the street in bamako begging for money, and then actually goign to the orphanage where we can see that a program is really working, far better than foster families in the states, it's so impressive. I felt on the verge of tears all day.

All in all it was a wonderful week and my homesickness quickly slipped away. While I ate barely anything, as "to" was served to us every night, I did remember we had a bushel of bananas in our room. never been so ecstatic in my life about bananas. electricity went in and out, no running water, polygamy, to, and smiles and kindness and beauty and brilliant colors and falling in love with every child i see...