What's In A Day? (by Thom)

(I could have titled this journal entry "Ask the McMurray's" also, but that seemed like a very long title!)

A question we've been asked recently by a few different people is, "What is a typical day for you in Mali?" It's a good question, but maybe not a fair one. I've never met anyone who does the exact same thing every day, and life in Africa is anything but predictable. However, I hope I can paint a decent picture here of what Amanda and I do on a regular basis.
Mali, and Africa in general I think, is a country of early-risers. This isn't me, though, so we tend to get up about 7:45 am. I try to be at the mission headquarters’ office about 8:30. This is only true on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We have language class on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and that starts at 9:30, meaning we have to leave by 9. On the days I’m in the office in the morning, I tend to meet with the mission director and our courier first thing. We have an official devotional/prayer meeting on Mondays, but we usually have ‘unofficial’ meetings the other days. We use the time to plan what to do for the day and week. My role as bookkeeper fits in well with what I see as my overall mission in Mali: to help support the church-planting and medical missionaries as best I can so they can do what they do best with less burden. During the last 5 days of a month and the first 10 days of the month, I’m busy preparing and finalizing the financial statements for the mission. It involves a lot of typing, emailing, and telephone calls. I also spend a fair amount of time staring blankly into my computer screen! The rest of the month involves a lot of organizational stuff like filing, improving report forms, paying bills, and such.
People here tend to break at lunch time longer than Americans. Normally they will take a two hour break. I haven’t learned to do this yet, and I don’t like stopping what I’m doing for a long time, so I usually only break for an hour or less. Then it’s back to the office. I’m there every week day during the afternoon, unless something comes up to call me out of the office. Usually there is something to do, and people stop by the office a lot. This is how I met Pastor Christophe.
Evenings tend to be a relaxing time, but lately more and more projects and opportunities have presented themselves. I created a DVD this year of footage I shot in France, the US, and Mali and received a strongly positive response to it. I’ve had multiple requests from other missionaries here to do something for them to show in the states when they go on home assignment. I’ve spent a lot of evenings lately working on improving my video editing abilities and seeing what I can do with my limited resources. It’s nice to have this creative outlet after spending the day looking at numbers! Unfortunately, inspiration seems to strike in the middle of the night, and I’ve found myself waking up at 2 or 2:30 am to write down ideas. I like the idea of producing short informational videos about the mission in Mali, and it again fits in well with what I see as my purpose here.
As Amanda wrote about last time, her life has been getting busier as well. She has been ministering to Precious in addition to working on her Bambara language abilities.
I’m not sure how interesting this all was, but I wanted to point out that our life here isn’t that different from life in America. There are differences, no doubt, but maybe knowing even the similarities will help you better understand our missionary lives and better know how to pray for us.