Do you know "Toto?"

I've spoken of him in my email updates, but not on my blog...so let me quickly introduce you to one of our best friends, "Brian." He's also our back-translator for Stories. We call him Brian because one day we were driving around in the truck and he saw one of our cassette tapes with Brian Adams on it. And all of a sudden he breaks out with, "Look into my eyes....and you will seeee...whaat you mean toooo meeeee...." Before we knew it, we were belting out Brian Adams' chart-topping Robin Hood soundtrack hit, "Everything I Do." So that's Brian.

Brian's family has a farm on the outskirts of town, so we told him we'd like to go visit. He told us to be at his house at 8 am one Sunday morning. We arrived and he sat us down to eat breakfast while he got things ready for the day's outing. He was running around with a backpack, putting things in it. He went into a room and yelled at me, "Niame', do you all eat chocolate?!" I said that Magou and I do, but Sokona can't. He looked a little distraught and said, "Oh no, I don't have American peanut butter." Turns out he was preparing chocolate sandwiches for a snack. So we stopped by our house on the way out and picked up some American peanut butter for Sokona. And the chocolate was homemade. And delicious.

When we got to the farm, we noticed that there were some tiny little baby goats. Super tiny. The chickens were bigger than them. So we went over and picked them up and carried them around. Noticing that we were enjoying the animals, Brian says, "Do you know 'Toto?'" I say, "Like the little dog??" He says, "YES! Like the little dog. We have a lot of those. Do you want to see them?" Well of course we do, Brian. So we venture out to a little field where we see a small penned-off area. I'm expecting to see a bunch of yelpy little dogs in there, but instead we see a bunch of huge turtles. I think to myself, "Oh, looky there...they have turtles too. Well, where are all the dogs?" It took me a few minutes to realize that "toto" is Malian English for "turtle." The turtles were great fun, though. One was so big that even with Brian standing on it, it could still walk around!

We spent the rest of the day walking around the farm, stopping to inspect different plants and what-not. We stopped by the well to pull up water for the sheep. Brian was pretty impressed with our well skills. Every so often Brian would lead us in a song. He showed us the different types of mango trees. He had us taste different fruits that we'd never seen before...it was a great field trip. Then he took us down to a creek. We tried to catch tadpoles and minnows. He's an artist, so he got some mud from the creek and sculpted a cow out of it. Then he gave us some mud and helped us make some animals too. I made a toto.

There's another story from this day...but it's slightly inappropriate, so I'll tell you when it's not on the world wide web.

Pictures from the day:

Baby goats.

Brian on a toto.

Weird orange koosh ball flowers than hung from a tree.

Catching tadpoles.

Dogon Country

One of the guys that works here with another people group had 5 more guys join him as volunteers for the semester. They call themselves Cinco de Mali...so the original guy started calling himself The Big Tamale...and we three girls are now known as The Chimichangas. It's ridiculous, I know.

So after the guys had a week of training, Nafi took us all up to Dogon Country to do things like climb mountains, scale cliffs, and look at 1000's of years old human bones in caves. It looks a lot like the Grand Canyon, but the Dogon people build their houses into the side of these cliffs. So you'd be standing down in the canyon looking up, and at first you didn't really notice it, but when you looked closely, you'd see an entire village carved into the side of a cliff. I don't care who you are, that's pretty cool. You should really Google some images. So we climbed up and down those cliffs, visiting the people and taking lots of pictures.

One of the places we stayed had a pond next to it with dozens of crocodiles. We were pretty fascinated by them. Everybody was just standing there watching them when on the other side of the pond, Sarah and some of the boys started freaking out. Apparently this baby crocodile was just floating there, minding its own business, when one of the giant ones came up behind it and chomped down. I'm not gonna lie, at first I just figured that it was the mama trying to get its baby away from all the human folk. But sure enough, about 10 minutes later, the giant crocodile emerged from the water with the baby in its mouth and just started chowing down. The translator said that it is bad news for the goats and sheep when the crocodiles resort to eating their own young.

We also hiked up a cliff to these "Telem graves." Again, you should Google it. It was one of the more tricky hiking maneuvers we had to do, but once we got up there it was worth it. There were all of these carved out areas in the cliff and then the people had built little rooms. Dead bodies would be lifted up on a pulley and left in these graves. There were human bones all over the place and our guide said they were thousands of years old. It was pretty crazy. And kind of crunchy.

Here are some pictures:

Kind of blurry, but here's a room of bones.

Cliff houses.

Crocodiles!

Nafi & the Chimichangas.

It's Always Sunny in Mali

In February we had the opportunity to travel to another area of the country for a Sunny festival. We left on Valentine's Day for an 8ish hour drive...a good part of it being on a pretty bad road. So we packed up our freshly baked heart-shaped sugar cookies and newly created all-love-song playlist and loaded up in the truck. I was getting over strep at the time, but that didn't stop us from singing so loud to our awesome playlist that we were all pretty hoarse by the time we arrived.

The first day was a parade at the soccer stadium. Seating in the shade was limited so we all split up. I sat next to this little old man. There were hunters in the para

de and every so often they would shoot off a gun for no real reason at all. Every single time I would jump halfway out of my seat and the little old man would laugh and say, "Hahaha...you're scared!!!" Every. Time. He also thought I spoke French (since I'm white) so he kept translating the Sunny speeches into French for me. I didn't correct him, I kind of liked the attention.

We got to meet a TON of Sunny people from several different countries so we learned a little bit about other dialects. It was pretty cool. We also got to meet some different people who work with other organizations. Some of them are even not from America, so we got to brush up on our British accents. Always a good time.

Here's a couple of pics from the parade: