More Photos From Africa

It's nice to be feeling better and I am finally feeling a little caught up on school work. Just in time to write up my project for Mali. We present in a little over a week and I have a lot to do. Amy and I got our acceptance letters to Montpellier on Saturday! I am pretty excited to have someone to travel with the whole year that I know I'll get along with just great and wants to travel in the same style I do. Cheap and easy, and as much as we can. We are even looking into going back to visit all our Malian friends in January (they'll all be back home) and going to the music festival just outside of Timbuktu in the desert.

Here are some more photos of the trip, next post I'll try and put some up of out trip to the Dogon country and I'm going to work on putting more pictures on my picasso site right now.


We stopped to talk to some of the village men on our way back from watering the garden in the morning. These men pretty much just hang out in this little hut all day, drinking tea and talking. I got the feeling that life was pretty easy for the Malian men, at least the ones with wives. However it was the dry season and I think many of them spend a good deal of time in the fields once it starts raining.


This was dinner and it's a millet mush called tô (pronounced "toe"). You dipped it with you hands in the green sauce on the right. The sauce was a mix of onions, okra and peppers. Not my favorite meal ever, but I couldn't be rude and not eat it. It was hot and we never got sick even though Florence said we'd die if we ate in the village.


I tried to help the women with their chores in the afternoon and here I am sifting millet. I tried to pound like the women on the left are doing, but I really wasn't good at that. They thought it was pretty funny how bad I was at everything, I got pretty good at the sifting though and did it for quite a while.


Here we are in the Sanambélé doing our 'research'. Florence is currently giving the villagers a lecture on using mosquito nets, except Florence doesn't speak French as well as she thinks she does and kept saying "musketeers" not "mosquito nets", they sound somewhat similar in French. This meeting made it really clear to me for the first time that nothing is being done in the Village and this is a waste of the USDA's money. It was really sad to realize that these villages whom Florence has been working with for the past seven years have never seen any good come out of these meetings and were now patiently sitting there while Florence yelled at them for not using mosquito nets. It didn't seem to matter to her that they were a too poor to buy them and that it was too expensive to replace them every six months. Plus they all had malaria already anyway.


We're in the court yard of the American International School in Bamako. These kids are pretty lucky, this school was really nice. All you have to be is the child of a U.S. diplomat or really rich... There were lots of really cool trees in Mali though and I really liked this one.


This is Denise hanging out in the village. She is a social studies teacher at Belgrade Middle School. She gets to go on grants all over the world and develop teaching plans for the Montana State School System. Lucky lady and she was really awesome to travel with as well. Denise had some pretty bad-ass stories from climbing in South America in the eighties and we always enjoyed hanging around the dinner table trading adventure stories. Apparently she started a bush fire in Chile and got held up several times at gun point, and her crazy ex-husband actually tackled one of these guys. I really enjoyed her company on the trip and it's cool to know someone new in Bozeman. We might even come into her class at the end of the year and do a presentation for her.


When we went to the village, we would usually bring the children bread. They would be so excited and I think it's more than most of them had eaten in days. You can tell just by looking at the kids, like this little girl, how malnourished they are.