Be My Lover

written Sept. 26, 2010
Someone in my village has La Bouche's Be My Lover on a CD or a casette and they have played it pretty much everysingle night and several times during the day for the past week. Be My Lover just so happens to be one of my all-time favorite songs from the 90s, although I'm afraid that this random villager may be changing reversing that. I really hope they tire of it soon because I really don't want to hate that song.
Today I decided I would try and integrate myself into village life by doing something that women do here. I have previously avoided all other 'woman's work' because it's just too hard for me, and I'm also really lazy. For example, I have no desire to pound millet, no desire to go pick peanuts or peppers or whatever the in-season crop is, no desire to learn how to cook over a fire, and no to be able to pick up something scalding hot with my bare hands. Although today I figured I'd help with the corn processing because it seemed easy enough. All I had to do was pick the kernels off of whatever you call the thing that the kernels are attached to, you know the long cylindrical thing in the middle of corn, the part you don't eat. So anyway the corn had been dried so the kernels were very hard and somewhat difficult to get off, but once you get 2 or 3 off the rest come off pretty easy with multiple flicks of your thumb, or so I thought. Turns out those easy flicks of my thumb were destroying my skin. After about 10 ears of corn I looked down to see a GIGANTIC red, bulbous blister in the middle of my thumb. Apparently my dainty hands can't handle the work of Malian woman. It was kind of as if my body was like 'I told you so... there's a reason I didn't want you to do any of those things.'
Yesterday my homologue told me about a pretty common belief held by Malian villagers who have very little experience with foreigners. He said that they believe that white people, and in Mali I fall under this category I guess because I come from America even though there are Malians with lighter skin than me, can see the devil/demons. He said that there is a good chance that if I were to go walking with him, and we came upon a sacred place that someone would most likely shout out to him that he should watch out because I can see the devil and I will bring it to him, and thus kill him or terrorize him, I don't really know what Malian devils do to people once they are summoned. So my homologue and I proceeded to laugh at the thought of that, but then his laughter ceased and he looked me in the eyes and very seriously asked me 'You can't see the devil, right?' and to that I was like 'What?? No, of course not!'