Mud stoves and mango groves

Hi everyone!

TL;DR: We are fine, we love Mali, and we're going to see our permanent site next week! Hooray! Oh and we love you all too!

So, for the last several weeks we have been learning Bambara at our homestay sites about an hour away from Bamako, where we don't have internet. Sorry for the dead blog! It will be like this until January though--definitely off and on. Cass and I are in different villages, but we are only about 2k away from each other, so we bike over and hang out at each other's houses. It's pretty fun! The last bike ride we took together was in the mango groves at sunrise in Cass's village. Personally I don't think it gets any better than that.

A bit into homestay

Hey guys! We know it's been a while since you heard from us and it's because we've been incredibly busy with training and learning and living with our host family. Homestay has been great so far and usually consists of about 6 hours of language training a day with a few breaks in between for food and sanity with the rest of the day spent walking or biking around the area greeting people or trying to use our new language skills with our host family. Which is to say that there's a lot of laughing at various faux pas that we commit on a daily basis.