This supermarche is where we do most of our grocery shopping here in Badalabougou, Bamako. Shopreate is a great store, always filled with our neighbors and lots of interesting people. It’s about a 5 minute walk from our apartment, so we usually go about once a week to pick up the few things we need. There are lots of foreigners who shop here. I wish I knew what brings them to Bamako.
Here are a few of the things we can find here. These are dry goods like seasonings, oats and milled grains.
Herbs and spices:
The pasta aisle:
Condiments:
Canned goods:
Today I found the snack aisle was filled with Pringles. Every week things change here, depending on what comes in. If you see something you need or like, you buy it. It may not come around again for awhile.
Peanuts are a favorite snack here. I find the packaging in recycled bottles interesting.
Things I’ve been thrilled to find here include imported butter and cheese, yogurts, ground beef and other meats, fresh baguettes, and some baking goods. We are getting along just fine.
Today one of our good members, Josue Togo, took us to visit a girls’ orphanage here in Bamako. Stepping into this place was like stepping into an Oasis! After winding our way through many dirty crooked streets, we pulled up to this compound and Josue invited us in. What we found was delightful.
This is one of many orphanages here in Bamako. Josue works with many NGOs to help find funding for this and other humanitarian endeavors. These orphanages survive because of generous donations from individuals and organizations who notice and care.
This orphanage has 60 beautiful young women. Many have been the victims of abuse. This is their safe haven. The courtyard of the compound is filled with beautiful gardens the girls look after.
Mariam Dembele Togo is the director of this beautiful orphanage. She is lovely.
The girls sleep 4 to a room in bunks with mosquito nets. They each have a desk and a chair and a locker for their clothes.
Malian drinking fountains!
It was lunch time and the girls were busy eating.
This is the kitchen and the helpers who help prepare the meals for the girls:
These are the bathrooms:
Here’s where the girls fill their buckets for bathing in the bathrooms:
Laundry drying. There was way more on the ground than on the clotheslines.
Our purpose for meeting with Josue and visiting the orphanage today was to learn more about humanitarian opportunities we might want to become involved with. We are here to love and serve in any way we can. Josue had lots of good ideas and he is well connected in this community. We are grateful to have good members like Josue.
This afternoon the Elders came for a special District Meeting here with us. John prepared lists of every member in each of our groups and we went, one by one, introducing them to these Elders, who are relatively new here. Oh, how we love these members and pray for those who we haven’t seen in awhile. They’ll be back. They know what we teach is true. They know this is the Church of Jesus Christ. Some of them we need to go find.
We were able to get our hands on an excellent map of Bamako last week. This will help us so much in our work.
We had dinner together after our meeting. I introduced the Elders to an American meal–sort of Philly Cheese Steak sandwiches (without the cheese), chips and carrot sticks. It was a huge success. I cooked about 3 lbs of ground beef, seasoned with red, green and yellow peppers, onions and some steak seasoning, and served it with fresh baguettes. It was delicious. Elder Kouakou said, “Soeur Lewis, I could eat this every single day!” We had zucchini bread for dessert. Another new favorite for them.
I don’t think there was a bit of room left under their belts when they left! What great young men! We love being here with them.
I find this very interesting. Not many roads here are paved, so during the dry season they blow away and during the rainy season they wash away. Most streets and roads are filled with ruts and potholes and you always have to watch where you step or where your taxi swerves.
When the ruts and holes are serious enough, someone comes along with a load of what I’ll call “road base” for lack of another name–it’s just big bad stuff that comes from who knows where–junk piles? constructions sites? garbage heaps? These truck loads are dumped in the roads to fill the holes. The idea is that people will drive over it enough to break it down into something that will fill the holes and not wash away.
Here’s how it looks after a fresh dump-load. Notice the toilet is here too! Our taxi driver didn’t see a large irrigation stand pipe at the end of this dumped pile, and he accidentally drove over it, which high-centered the back tires. We had to get out and help lift the car off. I’m curious to see this street again in a few month’s time.
Francois is one of our early members of the church here in Bamako. He traveled to Accra to be baptized in 2016 after learning about the gospel from friends here in Bamako. He’s a favorite translator for the expeditions who come to Mali, being fluent in Bambara, French and English.
Francois Director of the Mady Sissoko English Academy in Bamako. This school started last fall semester with a group of high school and college-aged students. Many of them are basketball players at local high schools who have been involved with groups that have come to Mali to promote their sport. Mady Sissoko is a Malian high school player who went to Utah to play high school basketball. He’s in his senior year now at Wasatch Academy. Mady has been recruited to play for Michigan State.
Before and after school, students who want to learn to speak English come to this school where Francois helps them learn from an online curriculum. They do their work on individual laptops and have classroom discussions to practice conversation skills.
Students were just starting to arrive as we were leaving. They were happy for this chance to learn a valuable new skill.
Good things are happening here in Bamako. We have good members around us doing good things. Francois is fantastic.
Here are a few more interesting things to look at depicting every-day life in Bamako. I think this place is fascinating, everywhere I look I learn something new about surviving in a hard place.
A local coffee shop:
A fan is a man’s best friend:
Fulani herder’s hats and African items for sale by a large hotel:
Perhaps one of the most common sights here–a motorcycle repair shop:
A hardware store:
Dried fish for sale under a red umbrella:
More dried fish for sale:
Watching her wares:
Mudcloth for sale:
Ripe plantain:
A thatch-roofed fruit and vegetable stand:
Yams for sale, already cooked:
Women with popos stopping to watch a street painter:
Feed for animals:
Floor tiles, a squatter toilet and fans:
A very typical busy street:
More dead cars than mechanics here:
Young boy on a horse:
A supplier of pallets:
A local sheep market:
All of this was seen in about a 20 minute period as we drove through town. I love this place!
Anounou took us to one of his favorite shopping destinations this afternoon– The One Thousand and One Wonders Supermarket. When we got there at about 1:00 it was closed (prayer time), so we waited about 20 minutes for the doors to open again.
It was fun to wander through a new store. This was sort of a variety warehouse store with household things, a bit of food, appliances and I think they had furniture upstairs. It was a large place. We got a few things–cleaning supplies, hand soap, toilet paper and napkins.
John found Turkish chocolate that was only 900 cfa for 3 bars and he was happy. It seemed that most of the imported goods were from Turkey and the middle east instead of Europe, so it was cheaper. Lots of Arabic on the packaging.
In was interesting to see a whole row of prayer rugs.
There was a whole section of men’s shoes and sandals.
There were lots of cleaning supplies and bug sprays. We are on a quest to find a mosquito spray that works at night so we can get some sleep.
This is the next spray we will try. It was recommended to us by a neighbor.
It was just fun and interesting to be in a new place and to see what they had. I enjoy looking at the kitchen wares–the pots and pans and cooking utensils. It gives me a good idea of how they do things. Plastics are very cheap. Probably from China. I found a dishpan sized plastic bowl for soaking my vegetables for 33 cents and 2 dipping cups for our water buckets, here and in Abidjan, all very cheap. There are lots of plastic containers and buckets for water and hand washing stations with the pot on top.
Women here use very standard cooking pots that stack on top of each other in graduated sizes. Most of these are used on cooking fires. There were communal platters for eating and some kitchen appliances and utensils. All very interesting to see.
I love a good store outing. It helps me learn more about the culture here and what happens in every day life.
Anounou is our Malian brother. We’ve worked together for a long time. He’s been to our Utah home, but today we got to visit his Malian home place and meet some of his family. Anounou’s father had 4 wives and 22 children. They are a close-knit family and they love and help each other.
Today Anounou took us to see where he grew up as a boy, here in the old part of Bamako. We met 2 of his brothers and 2 of his brother’s wives. They also felt like family to us. There was a peaceful feeling here in their 2 compounds. Friendships deepen when you get to visit the home places of those you love.
Anounou’s neighbor came out to meet us. Look at her beautiful henna hands!
This morning our friend, Anounou took us to visit Pascal, the woodcarver in his shop here in the old part of Bamako. It was amazing to see where these good men work on the Nativities and carvings they are making for us and for so many of our friends. In the picture above, the shop is where the break in the roof is, open on the top and on two sides. That’s were the chunks of wood turn into works of art.
As we approached, we found Pascal and 4 other men carving things we ordered a few weeks ago. They were seated on low chairs or slabs of wood on the dirt floor, with their work on their laps. There were no power tools, no lights, no fans, no floor, no inventory. They only work when they get orders and they have no shop to display their work so they can get more orders.
The families in our mission have already ordered more than 50 Nativities! That’s more work than these men have had in several years! They were ecstatic when I came today with more orders. Between them, these fathers have 22 children. What a blessing this will be to their families. They are so grateful to all who have placed orders. They love their work and they work hard, as you will see.
This is Pascal, who manages this shop. I’ve known him for many years now. Every year when we’ve come to Mali, we’ve ordered carvings from him for our annual Ouelessebougou Dinner Auction. Each year we’ve ordered 2 or 3 Nativities, a Noah’s Ark with animals, and some things like bowls, trays, or serving spoons. He also does very beautiful carvings of African women working or of animals.
Today he was working on an animal for one of the Nativity sets. He told me every carver knows how to make every piece for every Nativity set. They didn’t have samples sitting in front of them to copy, they just know how to work the wood and turn it into something beautiful.
Pascal carries his inventory in this leather sack and in his back pack. He pulled out the little bit of inventory they had on hand.
This man is making the Mary and Joseph with baby Jesus in the African hut. He copied one I found in the markets near Abidjan. Pascal said it takes one carver 4 days to make this piece. This Nativity sells for $25. That’s about $6 a day divided by 8 hours = about $.75 an hour.
This next carver is making the marionette Nativity. The arms on these pieces move.
This man is making the arm pieces.
The wood they use is Teak. One of the older men here today had brought this wood to them. He was resting now.
Here is the tool box. Every single bit is done by hand.
Even things like bowls are carved by hand, not turned.
Here is Pascal’s price list for each piece they make:
What an interesting visit! I love watching how things are made and I love the feeling of my appreciation increasing because of that. The work these men do will be treasured by me and by many others.
We love our Sunday meetings here. They are simple and good. Yesterday the missionaries and members here cleaned the church and this morning we set up the chairs and John prepared for the sacrament. We use bottled water and a baguette. Symbols of such an incredible gift to us–the opportunity to change and repent and renew our covenants with Heavenly Father.
We had about 20 attending today. Elder Gbedevi, one of our new Elders shared his testimony and we heard talks from Valerie and Biggo.
Here is our Sunday School Class taught by Elder Ikpeti:
After church today John taught a special Temple Seminar Class for our members who are learning about and preparing to attend the temple one day. It was a wonderful discussion about why we have temples and how we can be preparing to go there. Abram Cosby was able to share his experience of receiving his own endowment last month when he was home on leave. We talked about important things. I love these good members who are learning more about the covenant path.
Elder Brown and Elder Kouakou attended church in N’Gomi this morning.
Our Cote d’Ivoire Abidjan East and Bamako, Mali Mission 