Women's Work

My Malian sisters work hard. They start at 5:30am and break around 1:00pm, then they start up again around 4:00/5:00pm until 10/11:00 at night. In the morning, I wake up to women washing dishes and clothes, preparing breakfast, starting on lunch and tending to the men and children. Food preparation takes a really long time and you can't store leftovers, so everyday the same process is repeated. For example, a common meal is rice and sauce. First of all, the rice is not stored in packages. It is stored in a burlap bag, straight from the fields, and you take out what you need and place it in a bowl, so that you can hand-pick out the shaft of the rice. The water that you use for boiling is drawn from a well, if you don't have a pump. if you don't have a gas stove, you have to get firewood or charcoal and light it with dry grass or petroli and a match. Then you have to fan the stove to get the water boiling. Then you have to prepare the sauce. And all of this is done outside, in the elements with the scorching sun, the flies, the chickens and dirt and then they wash the dishes. And doing laundry here sucks to the infinite! The fact that there is no faucet here is my never ending nightmare. I already hate doing laundry in general, but Mali takes my hate to another level. However, when the women are not working, they sit underneath the shade and chat while drinking frozen drinks, take naps and play a game similar to "Sorry!" This is what my sisters do on a typical day. It's not all work and no play, but the work can be harsh.