House Hunting (by Amanda)

As I mentioned earlier, we’ve been asked to move so the mission can turn our house into a Guest House. I wasn’t looking forward to the process, though. I thought that house hunting would be tedious and boring, but what a surprise! Let me take you with me on my adventures from my first trip. First I went over to the Roedding’s house because they are going to be our right hand couple in finding our house. Gordon and Cheryl have been in Mali for a good, long time and know their way around. We piled into the car and started. We didn’t go look for a realtor here and we didn’t look in the newspaper or in a magazine; instead we went look at chalkboards. To help you understand, there are these chalkboards set up on the sides of the street for information on buying and renting houses. The houses listed are usually in the quarter of the city that you find the chalkboard. At that chalkboard there usually is a guy who knows where the houses are and can show them to you. He gets into the car and takes you around to see the houses that you are interested in.

What fun it is here to look at houses! The architecture is so different for each one. The halls in many of the houses are like navigating through a maze and many houses have kitchens outside. I am happy to say that most houses have bathtubs so no worries there! Some have nice yards; some have no yards. Some have roof access and some don’t, but you will not find hardly any with the same outward appearance and definitely not the same inward appearance. I have seen some real great houses and some not so great houses. I am going out again today to look at one or two and have seen some that could be ‘the one house’ for us. I ask that you pray for us that God would close and open doors so we would know where God wants us.

Just for fun, here is a brief description of the one of the worst houses that we saw. It was quite bizarre: it had one bedroom, one bathroom which was off the living room/dining room, the kitchen was on the other side of the courtyard (outside) and that was it. The doors on the house were mustard yellow and the house was a reddish pink. The worst house, though, we did not even enter. The wall around the house was not in good condition the house itself had widows with screens falling apart. It had a fake brick façade that looked terrible and the front screen door was falling off its hinge. We decided that it had more work than it was worth taking the time for!