A Bana!!

Hey!!

So, I will be leaving Mali on Saturday, but we are all moving out of our host families' houses and into a hotel tomorrow morning, and I probably won't make it back to a cyber until I am back in the US. I will be spending another week in Paris, arriving in NC on May 25, and then heading back to Kenyon on June 2, where I will be spending my summer doing research. I will probably do a real final post when I am back in the US and better able to reflect/when it hits me that it is really over, but, for now, I just want to say thank you to everyone! The emails, facebook messages and phone calls are really what helped me to survive a really hard (though, I think, also incredibly rewarding) semester. If it weren't for you all, I don't think I could have made it through typhoid, language barriers, the constant barrage of being called "Tubabou" (Bambara for French/white person) and marriage proposals, and living in a host family that consists of 4 children under the age of 12.

So, until I can sort out my thoughts/feelings enough to do a real post/ see and talk to a lot of you in real life, thanks for everything, or, in Bambara

I NI CE KOSEBE!!!

We only have about a week and a half left in Mali! I finished writing up my ISP yesterday (the final topic ended up being the intersections between public health and reproductive rights discourses in the case of Family Planning), and got it bound today. Now, I have to do a presentation on it Weds, and then I am done with work until August! We have our final party with our host families on Saturday (we are supposed to cook American food for them, but I'm not sure how that will work, because I have yet to see a regular stove or oven in Mali), then we move out the following Weds. I will take Thursday to travel to the village, Sanankoroba to say goodbye to my host family there, and to give them my Malian cell phone (they don't have one, and it was the one thing my tiny host father asked for). Then I have a week in Paris before returning to NC for a week, and then to Ohio for the summer. I will take the time to do a more thorough final blog post later next week, it is hard to believe the semester is almost over!!