It's been a year

It's been a while since I updated this ol' blog (man, has it really been two months?) and I wish I had an interesting reason why. If anything, I guess I can chalk it up to really settling into a routine here in Bamako. A few weeks ago I celebrated my one year anniversary of moving here from Kinshasa and what seemed new and fascinating at the time has now become pretty ordinary over the past few months. Unbearable heat, friendly Malians, misadventures with the French language, the ever-present dust... it all seems like part of the routine now. That said, in the next few weeks I'm going to try to get some entries on here that show a bit more of what day to day life is like around here.

Over the past few months, I've been working a bit from home and also getting called in to sub at the American school a few times a month. I've taught math, science, English, geography, and even Spanish and French. For those two language classes, I was pretty much responsible for putting in a DVD and pressing play, since my French is nowhere near the level it would need to be for me to teach a class and I've all but forgotten most of the Spanish I've learned.

I've still been mountain biking on the weekends. Last Saturday's ride was canceled due to rain which is very unseasonable in April. We're into the hot season and while mango showers are not uncommon here in Mali, it poured on Friday night and Saturday morning. The weather here has been pretty strange all year, from an almost non-existent cool season to the early onset of the hot season, and then a genuine it's-raining-cats-and-dogs thunderstorm last weekend.

A few weeks before that I went on a ride with my friend Tim. We attempted to find a connecting trail between two routes we already know just outside Bamako. When we left around 8am, the temperature was already in the mid 80s. The ride was only supposed to be around 18 miles and things started off normally, but we soon found ourselves pushing our bikes up the side of a rocky hill with no clear trail before us. Fortunately, a couple Malian guys were pushing a motorcycle up the same hill so we followed them. Tim speaks a bit of Bambara, the local language, and he asked them if they were headed towards the road to Kati. This is the road that would take us back to Bamako. I think they misunderstood us because instead of taking us to the road to Kati, they led us all the way to the village of Kati itself. Kati was the complete opposite direction of the way we wanted to go. This added another 10 miles onto our ride.

The guys who led us out of our way were really nice and had a lot of questions about us. Malians are pretty interested in what expats are doing in their country, and our Camelbaks are pretty fascinating as well. En route with our new Malian friends, we stopped in a village so one of them could greet his sister. While waiting around during his visit, we saw this kid who was playing with a dead mouse. The people in the village didn't seem to think to much of it, so I'm not sure if it's something this kid does on a regular basis or else it's a stand-in for a regular plush toy.

I've also started playing ultimate frisbee again with a few people on Sunday mornings. It's good to play again, although we have to play in the street since lush fields of grass are almost nonexistent in Bamako. We have to pause for automotive, pedestrian, and animal traffic and avoid the open sewers that run alongside the road. Thank goodness it's dry season and there's nothing in them right now. We can only manage about an hour or so of play until the heat and the sun get to be too much.

Oh, and I completed my one hundred push ups challenge in mid-March. I'm glad I did it, and especially glad I finished it before the hot season really got going. I'm taking a sabbatical from push ups for the foreseeable future.