Generally, quite well.  We have our hiccups.  But pretty well.

See, for both good and bad, we put our kids through the ringer.  They were all born in different countries, have never lived anywhere for more than three years (and that with long summers spent elsewhere), and have been to multiple schools.  They have to leave friends behind and—probably worse—make new friends over and over again.   Mercedes is the only one who has shown obvious difficulty with leaving friends behind, but I anticipate that changing when we leave Mali in 2011, since Reeve will be eight and Cian six. 

Wait….that’s all bad, right?  Where’s the good I mentioned?

The good is that our girls are supremely flexible.  They go with the flow and adjust quickly.  They are not terribly upset when we leave somewhere, and they get really excited about new places.   When we have odd schedules or a lot of change, they deal with it really well, and that’s a damned good trait to have when growing up.   We were in Kansas without Melissa for a few weeks this summer, staying with my mom, and I stuck the girls in summer camps.  Cian literally had a different camp every week.  This would be upsetting for many kids, but she adapted like a champ.

Ultimately, they’ll very likely end up with the same sort of wanderlust that infects their mother, since she grew up doing the same thing.  I, on the other hand, never got on airplane until I was seventeen; all three of mine were on an airplane by 9 months at the absolute outside, and their passports are things of beauty.   The point is that they adjust faster than I do, and it will probably only become more pronounced with time.  They, I think, like this moving life, and they certainly reap the benefits in terms of experiences and perspective on the world. 

Which isn’t to say that they don’t have difficulties.  The younger two are particularly prone to struggle.  Cian, always a child on the precipice of grumpiness, has been considerably more tricky than usual.  She’s only four, and so she doesn’t articulate it well, but her stress at adjusting to a new home/country/school plays out in her behavior at home.  She picks fights, and can go from happy to ANGRY in about 2 seconds.  Reeve is adjusting more slowly to school.  Every morning I have to deal with her yelling “I hate school!  It’s too easy!  I don’t want to go!” and then I have to drag her to the car.  She comes home happy and chatty about the day, but this is how she acts out.  She wants to be home most of the time still.

Mercedes is basically great, though.  The one thing that she does really well compared to her sisters is make friends fast.  Reeve and Cian hang back, observe the scene, play alone, cautiously approach people over days or weeks or months, and then end up fully engaged in the social scene.  But even so, they play independently better than Mercedes ever has or will.  Mercedes jumps in, meets people, and can talk about who they are and why she likes them in a matter of days or less.   This makes it harder for her to leave a post—and, as I said, this is going to be harder than the others because she’ll be ten when we leave—but easier for her to arrive.  (Ten!  How the hell do your kids get to be ten years old.  Jesus!)

Small things help the kids adjust—things that they get really excited about.  For instance, we have a swimming pool.   We knew that before we came here, so the girls had nonstop community ed swimming lessons all of last year, and now all three are excellent swimmers.  So they’re in the pool all the time.  And we have a nice big yard, which helps a lot because there is—as near as I can tell—nowhere in Bamako at all to take kids.    So we have to make our own fun. But the kids remember Ethiopia well enough to know what to expect on that front. 

It’s not always an easy life, and occasionally I wonder why we do it to them and to ourselves.  But those occasions are rare, because I see three girls, eight, six, and four, who have been to more countries than many (most, even) of my adult friends and family.  Three children who can talk in an educated manner about the differences between East Africa and West Africa.  Three children who are seeing the world and enjoying it.  Who have friends all over that world.  And that makes it all seem pretty darned fine.

Mali Blog--Traffic

One of the things I’ve noticed here is that when talking to people about how they like Bamako, and Mali in general, one of the first things they bring up is the driving.  Pretty much like clockwork.  Everyone has different things to comment on—the restaurants, the stores, the climate, the housing, whatever.  But without fail, the driving is issue one.

There are two things going on that make driving here borderline nightmarish.  First, congestion.  There are just too many cars for the infrastructure here, period.  Melissa took two hours to get home from work the other day—on a free-flowing traffic day that’s a ten minute commute, tops.  Now, that was highly atypical, thankfully, but it won’t be the last time that it happens.  Part of the issue is that Bamako sprawls over both sides of the Niger river, and there are only two bridges that cross the river.  So the bridges are major choke points in all directions.  The Old Bridge (as distinct from The New Bridge) only has one lane in each direction, making things worse.  It isn’t always really bad, but it’s often really bad.  I’m never totally sure how long it’s going to take me to get from place to place.  And everything but the main roads is hideous to drive on—some streets are so potholed that you wouldn’t believe it.  Doesn’t help the congestion.

The second thing is the way people drive—crazily.  I commented in a previous post about the motos, and I can’t emphasize enough how incredibly incompetent and annoying they are.  Just no sense at all.  The most annoying thing they do, I believe, is to pass you on the left while you are turning left.  But it’s really a three-way tie for last given that they also pass on the right while you’re turning right and pull in front of you right before slowing way down.    Anyway, it’s really bad. 

However, it’s not just the motos.   It’s kill or be killed.  Deathrace 2000 stuff.  Or, given that we’re in Mali, Deathrace 1900.  No one lets you in.  Taxis cut anyone off, anytime.  I’ve never seen such selfish driving. 

In Ethiopia, the drivers were relatively incompetent, to be certain.  But they demonstrated this incompetence (mostly) by wandering from lane to lane, slowing randomly, stopping altogether in the driving lane.  And the pedestrians were almost comically inept; I know at least ten people who have hit pedestrians with their cars in Ethiopia.  In Dubai, there were zero pedestrians and the drivers generally followed rules, though you had to watch out for the Lamborghini driving 160 miles an hour in the next lane.  So everywhere we’ve been is challenging one way or another.  So far, though, the congestion makes Malian driving the worst.  I’ll get used to it, but it’s going to take a little time. 

One of the primary issues that I have to deal with as we move from place to place is the wild variation in the sort of things that are available in stores.  Every time we move there is a fairly lengthy period of adjustment, of investigation and discovery.  There are, inevitably, a few moments of happiness (“Wow!  The stores carry Sriracha here!” or “Jesus, these are some great oranges!”).  There are also some moments of aggravation and disappointment (“Damn it, no mushrooms,” or “All this wine is shitty.”).  It’s a process, and it takes work and patience.

There has been a great deal of variability from country to country.  Excluding Dubai, which had absolutely everything and then some other things that you’ve never heard of, we’ve had to make do or take advantage of this and that.  We’ve gotten good at working with mail order, though that’s zero help as it relates to fruits, vegetables, meat, or dairy products. 

Here in Bamako, I’m still figuring out what’s available and what’s decent quality and what’s not.   There are really only a couple of stores in the city, so there’s not much time needed to explore.   Generally, the stores have random things.  Good pasta selection, good meat selection except almost no chicken, expensive cheese, terrible jam, bad wine, good liquor, hideous beer, frozen escargot. One thing I haven’t dealt with since Tunis, however, is that the fruit and vegetable stands are not in the same place as the grocery stores.  The stores carry expensive imported fruits, but when I say expensive I mean REALLY expensive. 

The basics of produce are sold at roadside stands; they dot the city and it’s going to take some time to figure out which is good and which is bad and when each is the case.  For instance, Melissa arrived here before the girls and I, and she’d basically shopped only at one stand, because she was eating alone and eating out a lot and not really bothering basically.  Anyway, we went there on day two, and it sucked sucked sucked.  It was distressing to me how low quality everything was—wilted greens, soft potatoes, sour-and-occasionally-rotten oranges, etc.  I was pretty down about it.  However, further investigation has revealed that there are many other stands around, and some of them are pretty decent.  Not Whole Foods (though the tangerines are incredible) but not too bad.

Americans take availability of produce for granted; we’ve lost our sense of seasonal variation.  Those of us who are regular farmer’s marketeers know that most things have better and worse seasons, but in the US you can pretty much always get what you want on the fruit and vegetable front if you’re willing to pay for it or accept a slightly lower standard of quality.  (I’ll write more about this soon—I’ve become obsessive about food literature after a recent introduction to Michael Pollan’s books.)  Not an issue in the developing world.  Things change dramatically here, though of course we’re still new enough that I don’t really know what’s coming. 

But seasonal variation is already clear:  when we arrived, the mangoes were awesome.  One week later?  Totally gone.   This is apparently the worst season for produce.  I can now get these vegetables:  lettuce, potatoes,  a weird kind of spinach, carrots, zucchini, tomatoes, green beans, eggplant, cucumbers, and a few herbs.  Fruits:  bananas, papaya, apples, oranges, tangerines, pineapple.  Quality is generally pretty good, though vegetables generally tend to deteriorate rapidly when left on a streetside stand for long, so nothing is sure.

Variability and uncertainty does create a need for creativity and flexibility in cooking.  Dinner party menus, for instance, can’t really be set in stone until the day I actually shop.  Nasty surprises can happen, when I plan to make this or that for dinner and that item just isn’t there, period.  It’s a bad deal, very frustrating.  Not so much because of the variability itself—that’s more in line with how agriculture should work.  It’s frustrating because the supply chain and quality control are both pretty dicey in the third world.

I still have a lot to learn about getting by around here on the shopping front.  One positive is that every return to the US results in squeals of glee upon entering Whole Foods or Safeway or whatever.  But I'm still in the slightly-shellshocked, "how can I deal with these products/fruits/vegetables for two years?" phase.  It takes some time.  I'll get there, and will be a better cook for it.