Washing clothes in the river and other Mali Local Custom Tips

Everywhere at the rivers in the country is a lot of activity like washing clothes, washing dishes...

At this picture you see women washing clothes in the Kankélaba River, in the deep south near the border with Cote d'Ivoire.

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Life at the Niger River: In the towns and villages along the River Niger you see always a lot of activities at the riverside.

If you sit for a while at the riverbank, you will see boats, pinasses, leaving and coming.

Also you will see the everyday life as the gathering of the women, doing the laundry.

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In a nice village south of Bougouni, where we had to fetch water at the local pump, we were invited to look around in the small village.

So we could have a close look at this very practical open air kitchen ..... and the sleeping dog.

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In the villages near Bougouni in the deep south we saw these nice round granaries.

This are the buildings, where the villagers store their grains, high above the ground to protect their food against animals like mice.

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Everyhwere in West Africa you see women pounding grain, fufu and other food stuff.

Mostly two women do the job together, very fast in an energetic rhytm...

I'm always fascinated to see this, because I'm not really able to do this, even after some practising I did in Ghana.

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At Ben's Bar in Bankas, the African women liked it, to plait not only their own, but also our European hairs.

There are many different African styles for plaiting the hairs with different names. My Ghanaian friends have tried to explain me about it.

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Most of the rural people in the Sahel regions of Mali like in the Region of Kayes are pasturalists. On the dry and dusty plains we saw rather regularly boys and men with smaller and bigger herds of cows.

So we saw this large herd of wide -horned cows at the northern edge of Kayes, but most of the times we saw herds, suddenly appearing in the middle of nowhere, not knowing where they came from or where they were going to.

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Everywhere in the towns of Mali you can buy snacks along the street. In the Centre Comercial of Kayes we saw the stall of this lady, preparing fishballs. We could follow the whole proces of pounding, making balls and frying, while we had to wait for something.

The lady was selling small breads with fishballs. It must have tasted delicious for sure, but we were not interested in the fishballs early morning.

Because we didn't see any bakery, shop or stall around selling bread, we asked her about the possibility of buying only the breads. So we bought a big part of her stock of breads for our two days journey to the next town. The result was, that we have eaten our bread with a light taste of fish those two days.

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