Looking back - Mali

Almost exactly 7 years ago I was getting ready to leave Mali after spending 6 months working in the capital and in a small village. I had mixed feelings about leaving – aware that Mali wasn’t and would never be home, but still conscious of what I was leaving behind.

I wrote: ‘Mali has come to feel more familiar than Canada – and yet I still notice things, like the men building bricks in the heat of the sun, the women balancing huge loads on their heads, the young girl sweeping the street in the early morning. But these things don’t feel strange – rather beautiful. I love all the activity here, know that I’ll miss that people live so closely together in Mali. On the bus yesterday I was sitting between 3 men, each of whom I was pressed against. In Canada that would have been so strange; we would have felt so aware of touching each other. Here it is not even noticed.’

I reflected on how I had changed, what I had learned. I called it the ‘patience of Africa’ – the ability to wait passively, to not stress about what needed to be done or where I needed to be. I have tried to so hard to hold on to that in these years I’ve been back in Canada. In my diary, I wrote about being unfazed when our bus had to stop for 5 hours in some small village because some U-shaped piece behind the rear wheel had to be replaced. ‘It was so hot that the water in my plastic water bottle was tea-temperature. I went and bought a tea bag and some sugar and made tea to the amusement of the Malians sitting around me. It was my own proof of how hot it was. And yet, despite the heat, waiting 5 hours really didn’t bother me that much – I didn’t really need to be anywhere else.’

Sometimes when my life gets overly busy and I find myself stressing about 15 minutes, I try to recall the mentality of patience in Africa, allowing time to pass without the need to count and measure each minute, and I regret our hurried lives.