My family was the best part of being in Mali. If my experience there changed my life it was because of my interaction with them. My host parents' wisdom and perspective taught me as much as four years of college: they are amazing individuals. My host mom and dad are kind and generous and funny and well-educated: my dad works for the UN Development Program and had just completed a study examining the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of foreign aid in Mali. My mom is the deputy to one of the directors of USAID. Dante and I had great conversations about development, Malian politics, the interaction of Islam and animism; I learned more from him than I did from our professors. He’s probably the most brilliant man I know, and on top of that he’s honest. While he has aspirations to be a minister (and "wouldn’t mind" bein g prime minister) he has so far refused to play the political game, sticking to his principles. His cousin Madou stayed with us while I was there; he’s the right hand man of the ex-minister of Energy, and not quite so upright a citizen.

I don't know all the details, but there was talk of "missing" electricity generators, graft, and a new Toyota LandCruiser in our driveway. When the newspapers began investigating him, he told me the articles were written by his enemies and that he hadn’t really done anything wrong. I wanted to believe him: he’s a fun guy, had played professional soccer in Europe, lived in Paris half the year, and was working his way up the political ladder by greasing hands and making friends. He would come home for dinner and would talk to Dante in Bambara about politics and party gossip — if I had only been able to understand them I would have learned a lot about the inner workings of the Malian government, but I guess that was the point: to keep me in the dark.

My host mother’s family was Senegalese: her last name was N’Diaye, a variation of Diarra. Women keep their last names when they marry, although their children take the father’s last name. Because she worked at USAID, however, she went by Rokia Dante. When I arrived she had just started a diet, something I thought I would never see in Mali. She had been told to avoid oil, which is the main ingredient in most of the rice and sauce dishes that she prepared for Dante, the kids, and myself.

As I lost weight adapting to the water and food, she got increasingly concerned about her own body. We always had enough to eat, but there wasn't a lot of variety. Breakfast was always a piece of baguette, Ovaltine, and sometimes butter and honey. At lunch I would get rice and sauce at a one-room restaurant for a quarter; dinner at home was bashi (couscous) with baobab leaf sauce, often with fish or chicken or beef. Sometimes we would get or fries and beef. We often had salad -— lettuce, tomatoes, onions, carrots, and there was always papaya, watermelon, bananas or oranges for dessert. I once brought home a pineapple for my family but they said the folic acid kept them awake at night, and made me eat the whole thing. 

Other families saw less variety in the food: tô is the national dish of sorts; a congealed blob of fine-grained couscous, cooked in baobab leaves till it turns green, eaten with two sauces, one watery tomato; the other slimy green, the consistency of saliva. Aicha hated tô, so we never had it while I was around. The last night at home, however, Rokia made it, just for me to try. "It would be a shame to send you back to America not having eaten to," she said. Fortunately, that afternoon we had gone out to Lafiabougou to visit Dante's sister, and I had pointed out the West African Fried Chicken joint that I had seen advertised. We went inside. It was clean, resembled KFC, and we got a 10 piece bag (no buckets) for dinner. Other than WAFC, fast food was nonexistent in Mali: there were cafes run by Lebanese immigrants, and while you could get a hamburger there, McDonalds was (thankfully) no where to be found. Malian fast food was either the rice and sauce lunch places, or the dry-rub barbeque joints, where you could pick up a quarter goat cut into bite size pieces, wrapped in brown paper, and take it home.