is a thought I often have here in Mali. At times I wish there was some way I could just automatically remember images and then transfer them to a hard-drive, like a computer, because it is impossible sometimes to know when you really want to take that picture. Like when my friends and I are crammed into a tiny little van with 10 Malians and countless pieces of luggage, curled into little balls (my poor friend, all 6'5" of him, also trying to make himself as small as possible). Or when this same friend and I go into town to get Christmas dinner, and pick up 5 very much alive guinea fowl, hang them from our handle bars, and bike the kilometer back to the house (thankfully, we did not have to kill them and cook them up ourselves). It is moments like these that I shake my head and think, "I really am in Mali. And how does one explain things like this to people back at home?" Because I've come to realize that the things we've come to take as granted or normal here in Mali would never happen back in the States, or Mexico. Anyone back at home would be furious to find larvae in their flour (we sifted them out) and despite the terrible alcohol many of us drank in college, no one went so far as to drink home-made palm wine out of a 20-liter plastic jug, much less on Christmas day. At the very least, it gives me a new appreciation for the small things I had forgotten to appreciate when I had them, while also making my new life all that more interesting.
Anyway, despite all of us volunteers being very aware that we were in the middle of the holiday season, far away from friends and family, we came to realize that we were all in it together. For me, Christmas was not nearly as painful as I thought it might be. True, I was cranky at the beginning of December, when realizing that I would not be at home this Christmas, but when the day finally came... it felt like any other day in Mali. There was no big tree with presents underneath, nobody wishing each other a Merry Christmas except for our small group of Americans in Manantali, no Christmas movies playing in the background. In a way, it was a greater relief that way, because no one was sad or crying, and we didn't sit around and mope. Instead, we cooked and shared stories and laughed at the craziness that is Mali and our new lives, and at least for me, I will remember it as the strangest Christmas I have every had.
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