"You can't take your home with you"

My two weeks in Bamako has been spent catching up with all the other Americans about our Villages as well as, well, just plain being Americans together and doing something as simple as wearing pants every day. As a result, I've neglected posting due to time and uncertainty about what to talk about. But since I just posted pictures of my mud house, my "home", I talk a little about the Malian conception of home.

I grew up being exposed to this idea known as 'southern hospitatlity': anyone who has lived in the South knows what I'm talking about. Southern hospitality is this general warmth you get talking to people, that you will be invited to someone's home, given dinner, and encouraged to take seconds. You head South, and people don't honk at you in traffic quite as much, the cashier at the supermarket chats with you a bit rather than scanning you through, and people aren't in so much of a hurry, because who can't stop for a minute and talk about your second counsin? Spend a day in Maryland then spend a day in Virginia, or go even further South and you'll know what southern hospitality is.

Now take this "southern hospitality" and multiply it by about 100, and you'll begin to come close to what Malian hospitality is, or in Bambara, jatigiya. In Mali, you can travel anywhere, be stranded without food, shelter, and not be able to speak the local language, walk into a village, somehow communicate these needs, and you will be given a host family, water to drink, food to eat, and a place to sleep. And no one will ever ask you for money. And this is quite something considering these are the third poorest people in the world. I live off the paved road where every year I'm told, Americans bike from Senegal to South Africa. Americans can do this by virtue of stopping in villages along the way to rest, because every single village gives them food to eat and a place to spend the night. The biggest difference in Mali is that the Malians won't ask you for money.

One of my language tutor's friends came over, another teacher, and they explained the root of this hospitality: "In Europe, in America, it is always reason first. In Africa, in Mali specifically, it is always the sentiment first. When you go someplace, you can't take your home, your family, with you--so we must open up ours, we must give you food, drink, a bed, and a family, no less."

I bike to neighboring villages about once a week; the first people I greet, the woman of the house, always goes and gets me a drink of water. Once, when I was returning to my village, it was getting dark very quickly, and I stopped drinking tea and stated I had to be going soon if I didn't want to be biking in darkness. The women then said, "what? you don't want to stay for dinner? to spend the night?" I had only told one person in the village I was coming that day, yet in a whim, she was prepared to give me a room in her house to spend the night and food to eat, having only just met me 3 hours earlier. Even when you leave, someone accompanies you to the road, and some of my better friends I visit often will walk with me for 100 meters or so to 'get me on the road.'

This vague feeling of jatigiya is something that does not exist in the Western World. I've posted some of the pictures of the inside of my home: it has a small front room, and a larger back room, two chairs, a stool, and a table to hold my stove and water filter. But to a Malian, this isn't close to what a home is--home to a Malian not really a physical thing--my home is the people within the four or so villages I eat with, that feeling of arriving in a village, and being met at that first house with a cup full of water.

The very few pictures I have taken...

My front door, shoes, trunk, and map of West Africa.











Water filter, stove.
















Chairs, mat, books.














Door to my back room.















The jakumaden I acquired, in order to take care of the mice.