Transitions

What a whirlwind of a week.


The craziness ensued when, four hours before I was supposed to leave for the airport, I logged onto my email only to find a brief note from Air France informing me that my flight was canceled and that I wouldn’t leave until the next day. I spent the rest of the day fretting about whether the SIT office in Brattleboro would be able to contact my Academic Director in Bamako before my flight was due in. All ended up working out, however, and during my ten hour layover in Paris I got to go into the city and walk around for hours. It was extremely wonderful but disorienting especially because I hadn’t slept on my red-eye flight there, and even more disorienting for me to think that by that evening I would be in Africa.

When I landed in Bamako, I stepped off the plane and saw the tiny International Airport of Bamako. Getting my bags was… well, as a woman next to me said as we looked at the baggage claim, “Bievenue en Afrique” (Welcome to Africa). There were hoards of people surrounding the tiny conveyor belt. The heat was already sweltering, and the humidity... It took me thirty minutes to even get to the front of the pack to see if my bags had yet arrived, and another thirty minutes before I found them both. After I found them, however, it was smooth sailing – I found Harber, the French teacher, and he took me to the hotel where I got to meet two of the other girls and finally get some sleep.

The next morning we woke up bright and early and headed to Siby, a town about 45 minutes outside of Bamako. We stayed at a hotel with little huts that housed three girls each. While there we visited a women’s cooperative that produces shea butter and got to learn the complicated process. There was a Peace Corps volunteer in the town that oddly enough knows my dad since she went to Boston College! What a small world. We also had our first Bambara courses (more on that later). The group certainly bonded over the food that was served to us… half of us were vegetarians before coming here, so you can imagine our shock at the first dinner when we were each served a gigantic chicken leg with a little bit of rice. That will certainly take some time to get used to. While in Siby, we also went on a beautiful hike up to the some caves that are at the top of the cliffs surrounding the town and were all happy to be getting some exercise after all of the starch we’d been consuming.

After two nights in Siby, we headed back to Bamako to get picked up by our host families. I think I’ll save that story for another post!

All in all, things have been great here. Our teachers are extremely warm and helpful, which is making this transition infinitely easier. Of course many things are difficult – the language barrier, the food, the unfamiliarity – but I know that over time, those things will improve. For now, there's just a lot of not knowing what in the world is going on!