After our outings today and a trip this afternoon to the Women’s Garden here in Ouelessebougou we headed back home to Bamako. This Ouelessebougou Alliance from Utah will stay for a full 2 weeks, visiting more villages and doing more good. We’ll meet up with them again at the end. Our thanks to Judy Hut, Director and Friend.
Home Sweet Home!
Before leaving Fajiabougou, we stopped to see their proud little clinic. A former Peace Corps worker helped raise the money for this clinic several years ago. The family and friends of that volunteer continue to help with a bit of support from time to time.
The matron (above) is young and she manages several rooms in the clinic for treating patients and this maternity. There are two rooms are where the babies are born and the mothers recover. The birthing room was occupied– a new mother was on a mat on the floor with her newborn, nursing, and this is the recovery room:
This may be where the matron stays at this clinic:
Here are some industrious young men making grass mats in Fadjiaboubou. Imagine living where if you wanted it, you had to make it or grow it yourself. Perpetual camping for your entire life. Oh, how I admire these hard-working people!
Here are a couple of video clips I took of them working:
Here are some of the ways these mats are used:
Word travels quickly between villages. By the time we distributed Days for Girls kits in Banakoni, the women in Fadjiaboubou had gathered and we waiting for our arrival. It was so fun to pull up into this crowd of excited women and girls.
We divided them into two groups again, and Teningnini and Mariam taught about menstruation and how to use the kits, then traded places. They also teach an element of self defense and how to keep yourself safe.
Later this week we’ll be training Anounou, our Field Director, how to teach the program for me called “Men Who Know.” This instruction is given to the men and boys who always feel gypped when the women get special attention!
Young Mariam and Tenin, our sewing specialists. They have been sewing for 4 or 5 months now, after the last 2 girls graduated and received their own sewing machines. These girls are beautiful and they are happy to be learning a new marketable skill. These girls and older Mariam made all the kits we distributed today and 100s more.
The excitement in the classrooms grew as the kits were handed to each, individually.
Bouba, another Alliance helper was distributing mosquito nets while we met with the women.
Honestly, it just doesn’t get much better than this!
The village elders sat nearby, enjoying the happy women and the children playing behind them. It was a good day in Fadjiabougou.
The heels:
This is the school bathroom:
They also had a great cotton harvest here:
Farewell, friends, until next time!
Our plan for today was to visit 2 villages– Bamakoni and Fadjiabougou–to distribute Days for Girls kits made by our Ouelessebougou Enterprise. These two villages have about a half mile between them. We were excited to visit and teach the women and girls.
Days for Girls is a wonderful international organization that was started by Celeste Mergens in 2008. We help make and distribute sustainable feminine hygiene kits to girls who would otherwise have to miss school during their monthly periods.
I brought our first 1,700 kits to Mali in 2013, and we’ve been distributing them and now making them here ever since. This one is a game changer for me. If we can keep the girls in school, we change the future of the country. An educated mother will see to it that her children are educated. A Days for Girls kit can do more for a girl than anything we might give her. It gives her hope and dignity and opportunity.
Today Teningnini and Mariam taught 2 classes–one of older women (those who had born children) and one of younger. They looked the same to me. Teningnini taught about what happens in our bodies when we menstruate and why. Mariam taught the girls how to actually use and care for the kits.
After that, the girls were all smiles, and so were we!
You may wonder what the girls use before they have these kits. Imagine you are camping and you forgot to bring supplies. What would you use? Rags? Corn husks? Tree bark? Sand wrapped in a cloth? Cow dung? Some girls try to stop the flow by inserting smooth stones or even corn cobs. Anything to stay in school.
There was a tragedy a few months ago in Kenya. My dear LDS Days for Girls leader in Bomet posted this news on facebook, reported here: http://dfgeugene.blogspot.com/2019/09/heartbreak-in-kenya.html
Just weeks before, Anita had visited our Days for Girls sewing center in Orem and we loaded her up with a van full of supplies to take back to her village, Bomet. Gratefully, Anita was right there to help the students and faculty work through the suicide of this young girl who had started her period in class at school, and was shamed.
We can stop this from happening, girl by girl, school by school, village by village.
The girls and ladies hugged us and cheered with us as they received their kits. Each kit contains 2 shields (a piece that snaps around their underwear to hold the flannel pads in place), 8 pads or liners, underwear, a washcloth, a small bar of soap and 2 Ziploc bags to use for soaking soiled pads and keeping the clean ones clean. All of this is in a colorful beautiful drawstring bag. The shields and liners are made of stain hiding dark or busy prints that can be hung to dry without embarrassment. These kits easily last 3-4 years or more.
I’ll never forget a distribution we did here last year in a rural Malian village where a lady came up to me after our class and said, “How did the women in your village know exactly what the women in our village needed??” What a beautiful gift this is!
We had a bit of time afterward to wander through this village and visit with the women here before going to the next village, Fadjiobougou, to share the same gift with the girls there.
Bamakoni is the village where a family named a newborn son John Lewis several years ago. When we returned the next year to visit, little John had died. We continue to visit this family every time we come to Bamakoni.
One of my favorite things here is the creativity of the people who make things like toys and games, especially the children who play with what they can find in the streets. We see little wire cars, lots of bike tires rolled with sticks, and parts and pieces of things fashioned into something entirely different that will occupy a child for hours. Here is a wonderful checker board being put to good use!
Happy New Year!! I took this photo this week in Bamako, after seeing boys in the street going car to car selling these New Year’s balloons in the slow moving traffic. The balloons popped up around the neighborhoods this week, a happy way of welcoming the new year!
We rang out the old and rang in the new in Ouelessebougou, listening to roosters and donkeys and prayer calls and people partying well into the wee hours of the morning. It finally quieted down when the 4:00 a.m. prayer calls began. What a great place to be to start this new year!
We had a special pancake breakfast with the Ouelessebougou team, including bananas from this local vendor:
This evening we stopped at this local store to buy some rice for our dinner. Here you can see many of the local foods and grains.
Below are my journal notes from a visit I had this New Year’s Eve from an old friend in Ouelessebougou. I’ll call him Ousmane. We sat in the dark at the compound under the mango tree for an hour or two, until he had to get back to his family. He answered many of my questions about family life in a family compound:
Ousmane came by the compound to visit. He was born in 1975, so he’s 44 now. I remember visiting with him years ago when he told me he had decided to take a 2nd wife. She’s now had 4 children. One 2 year-old boy drowned in a well. His other wife has had 6 children.
He came by at about 9:00 and stayed about an hour or more visiting with me. No one else knew him. He told me all about their family compound. They live right in Ouelessebougou. There are about 40 family members living in a compound about the size of our Alliance compound. Center open area, rooms on the 3 sides. His father has 2 wives and his 2 brothers each have 2 wives. They are all living together. His wives have side by side rooms. He takes turns sleeping in their rooms. There are 8 women. They get along pretty well. Sometimes there are jealousies. He said he tells his wives not to fight–it will get them no where.
Each wife takes a turn cooking. They do 2 nights in a row. When it’s their turn to cook, they cook for the entire family and they wash all the pots. They don’t use dishes, so they don’t have to worry about individual dishes. They eat by hand from community pans and pots.
For breakfast they have porridge. Usually corn mush, sweetened with sugar. If it’s thinner, they use spoons. Sometimes they have rice or millet porridge, but usually corn. For lunch they have rice with sauce. The sauce is usually onion and tomato based. Sometimes they use a little meat to season the sauce. For dinner they have millet, pounded and cooked into a sticky starchy paste, also served with sauce. Occasionally they have some meat. A kilo of meat costs quite a bit. I can’t remember what he told me. A dollar or two. Enough meat for that many people is too expensive, so they don’t have it often. Meat is used more for flavoring the sauces.
They have the same menu every day. At night the millet is salted, in the morning it’s sweet. Sometimes they have milk with their porridge in the morning. I asked where they get the milk. He said, “they know where to go to find it.” Sometimes from the Fulani herders who have the cows. Sometimes there are women who sell it. Sometimes you can buy powdered milk that some use in coffee. They don’t often have milk. These compounds have no refrigerators or stoves. Everything is cooked over a fire.
Ousmane said that not all the men in the family have jobs now, so they help each other–that’s what families do and that’s why they all live together. Their family has some farm land south of Ouelessebougou. They grow corn, and rice in the rainy season. I asked if it’s enough to supply them all year. He laughed and said no–there are way too many mouths to feed. The men who don’t have jobs work the farm to help provide food.
Ousmane helps to feed many of the people in the compound because he has a pretty good job driving buses. He has 3 large buses now, and they take people from Ouelessebougou to a town north 460 km (4 hours) and then the bus returns the next day. One of his buses is in the shop now getting repaired. He has another driver for the other bus. His buses hold 51 people. He has to have at least 20 in the bus to cover the expense of gas. Sometimes, in the rainy season, there are fewer traveling. The bus fare is fairly cheap, but to turn a profit he needs to fill the bus. It was fun to learn more about his family life here. It’s not an easy life.
Here is our Ouelessebougou compound where we sit under the mango trees:
This morning these beautiful ladies came by with bananas for sale. We had them with our breakfast. Delicious! The water here at the compound isn’t running, but Anounou had a good supply saved for us. Hopefully this will get everyone through the week.
Today we traveled to the village of Bassa where the Ouelsessebougou Alliance partnered with LDS Charities to help provide a school garden with a well and a solar pump. Today the village was gathering to celebrate the completion of the project.
The drive to Bassa took about 40 minutes, much of it on dirt roads. At one point we got stuck behind a donkey cart. There wasn’t room to get around it, so we enjoyed the bumpy road and the scenery around us. It’s dry here, and dusty. The crops have been harvested. Now we will wait for the rainy season.
As we came into the village of Bassa, the first thing I noticed was the cotton harvest. We hear they had a very good harvest this year. It’s fun to see the white mounds waiting to be taken to the cotton gin in town.
Here are some harvested corn fields. Every bit of the work here is done by hand.
Bassa is one of my favorite villages. They are industrious here. They have good farms and some gardens. They make pottery and they have a sissel industry. Because of the holiday, the women weren’t making pottery and the sissel harvest is over now. Maybe next time I can show you how that’s done.
Our friends here gave us a warm welcome.
These are ovens where they roast the shea nuts.
Here is a corn grinder used by the village.
Beautiful children.
A donkey corral with feed on top.
When you go into a village, the first thing you do is pay a visit to the village chief and elders. They welcomed us and thanked us for coming. And they presented our Alliance leaders with a gift of 3 chickens.
It’s always interesting and helpful to hear their main concerns and worries and we work together to try to find ways to help. Today we were here to celebrate the completion of the garden. They were grateful.
The village chief, Anounou, our Ouelessebougou Alliance director, and John:
I looked in on the kitchen as we left the chief’s compound (you can see some of the Bassa women’s pottery here:
Mudbrick construction, woven grass mats:
From the chief’s compound, we walked over by the Koranic school by the mosque for the celebration.
The villagers were gathering to celebrate with us. They brought chairs from everyone’s compounds and lined us up for the program of song and dance (and of course, speeches!).
The dancing began!
And we joined in!
Then we all walked over to the garden by the public school. The Ouelessebougou Alliance and LDS Charities partnered to provide this beautiful garden spot where children will learn farming and gardening skills. Right now the land is fallow, after a corn crop here was harvested. Now with water, they will be able to use the land more productively and teach the children.
The garden gate:
This is a large piece of land that is hard and dry now. I can’t wait to see it after the rainy season when it’s planted and starts producing! The entire garden is fenced in to keep the animals out. Right now, the animals are enjoying the cornstalks.
The solar panel for the well:
The solar pump:
Hoses will be hooked up to the pump to send the water to the furrows. Today everyone important took a drink!
These villagers and these children’s lives will change for good because of this well.
Djiba Soumaoro (right) is one of our Alliance stars. He is from Ouelessebougou and he recently graduated from Notre Dame. He came with the expedition and will return to Ouelessebougou in July to work on site.
Very happy village elders.
Finally the children got at turn!
The garden:
Then the celebrations continued!
There was more dancing and singing and drumming. This is a grand day of celebrating for this wonderful village!
This woman is the village matron. I first met her in 2012. I had a life-altering experience that day. You can read about it here: https://annlaemmlenlewis.com/2012/12/04/love-went-out-of-me/ .
It neared lunch time. The women had prepared food. We were given a huge headpan of white rice and a big pot of chicken in a peanut sauce with a few vegetables in one of the class rooms. First they brought in hand washing stations. These are colorful plastic buckets with a lid that has indentations for a plastic tea pot of water for washing and for the soap. There are holes in the lid to catch the water from the tea pot, when you soap your hands. This can be used again later. Everyone washed their hands, then the feasting began.
Our staff–Anounou, Teningnini and Boubou ate the local food out of a common big platter tray–rice with the chicken in sauce spooned over it.
Then the village elders came in and they took a large platter for themselves. What was left was loaded onto a platter and taken outside the classroom for a bunch of men out there who inhaled it. They eat every bit, bones and all.
Then the celebrations continued. All of the women (including all who had worked hard to prepare the food) were sitting under the mango trees over by the school waiting for the celebration to continue. They were not offered a bite. Only the men ate. I told the women we Loved their food and next time, when they come to Our place, we will feed THEM. They cackled at the thought of that.
More speeches. Elder Lewis thanked the village on behalf of LDS Charities, for their partnership with us and he encouraged them to use the garden to teach the children well.
Grateful village elders:
As part of the celebration, the Ouelessebougou Alliance brought a nice supply of corn–12 huge bags–to distribute among the “Internally Displaced Persons” who have found refuge in the village of Bassa. These refugee families are fleeing from the unrest in northern Mali and many have been welcomed here in Bassa by these wonderful villagers. They are sharing their land and their food. The Alliance wanted to help with that effort. We met with several of the refugee families and they are grateful to be here.
What a great day we had here in Bassa! This is a progressive village, industrious and kind. It’s always a joy to be here with them. We look forward to visiting again when the garden is planted and producing.
Corn, millet and rice are three of the staple foods in Mali. The corn (maize) crops are planted in May and the harvest begins in September. Here are a few pictures I took in November of another year that show the corn drying.
The corn is either pounded into meal by hand (mortar and pestle) or taken to a village grinding machine. This woman is drying her meal in the sun.
Here is how the corn is cooked and made into porridge for eating. If it’s served in the morning, it’s often sweetened. If it’s served mid-day or evening it might be salted.
These children are enjoying their corn porridge for lunch!
Millet is one of the staples of life here in Mali. It grows in fields that look like corn stalks, but you can see in the picture below that it’s a grain. Millet is harvested, dried, and then the seeds are separated from the plant.
Women pound the millet (like we would crack wheat) to be used in their porridges and hot cereal, which is often eaten three times a day. It’s made into a stiff thick paste which is rolled in the hand and dipped in a sauce.
Washing the millet:
Mother and daughter pounding millet:
Our Cote d’Ivoire Abidjan East and Bamako, Mali Mission 