First Term Review - Culture (by Thom)

I don't think this is a topic I can adequately cover in just a few words here but we have learned a lot about culture during our first term in Mali. In many ways things are similar to the US: the people love children, they work and play (a lot of soccer), and they enjoy sitting around and talking about things like cell phone plans. However, we learned a lot of differences too. Sometimes we learned this the awkward way.
When I took my first bush trip to work on my video project last fall I wanted to give a gift to say thanks to the missionary in Djenne. I made the mistake of directly giving him the envelope. What I should have done was give the envelope to the eldest person who would have accepted the gift and then passed it along to the missionary. Fortunately they were understanding of my cultural faux pas.
Culturally, Malians don't spend much time in their homes. Instead they spend most of their time in their courtyards. They sit around and talk or watch TV, or both. They eat there and during hot season they sleep outside, too. This is something that we always feel strange about since we do live inside our house. I suspect our guards think we're very strange people.
One more thing: Greetings are so, so important. This is something that strikes most Westerners as very strange but it is very important to greet people. This often starts with a salutation like "Good morning/afternoon/evening/night" and then asks about the person's sleep or day, their spouse, children, house, work, village, village chief, etc. After the arriving person goes through the greetings the other person reciprocates. Even if things are not well you are always expected to answer "No problems". After the greetings are finished you can answer truthfully. This sounds pointless to most Americans but it is such an important aspect of West African life that it is the first thing new missionaries must learn.
There are many other cultural fine-points that we've experienced. We'll try to touch on some of those in future posts.