I AM alive I swear!!!

Wow. I am here and it is so different! Before I let you read the rest of this I want to tell all of you how much I miss you!! I also wish that I could communicate with y’all more but using my cellphone to call is very expensive and there are a few internet cafes but I was in a small village named Siby that is about an hour outside of Bamako that we were at for several days and then we went directly to our families, so I really haven’t had anytime to find an internet café much less the time to sit and talk to even one person for a decent amount of time! On a slightly related note… Being the good Episcopalian that I am I, of course I brought my Book of Common Prayer!! It has been a great help in reminding me that everything will be okay, I am here for a reason, and no matter how difficult things are now, they will get better!
I have a completely different name here that my host family and the professors in my program use. It is Aichata Karabenta. So I am having a little bit of an identity crisis because no one calls me Natalie, they ask what my American name is but of course they are going to use the Malian name.
Things that are crazy different:
~The bathroom- area- place, I can’t describe it so here is a picture:

You have to remember to bring in a kettle full of water when you use the bathroom, or a pail of water when you want to take a bath. I have forgotten both several times… yeah they just kind of looked at me and then went and talked about me, which is fine, because I would totally do the same thing with someone who was staying in America.
!WARNING GRAPHIC Bathroom CONTENT AHEAD!
So Pooping in this type of facility is very difficult and no one is going to show you how, so you get to figure it out for yourself… now my body is so not used to squatting and pooping. Even when camping we have a seat, so I am in a strange place using strange facilities, eating food, albeit good, that I am not used to… It has been difficult to poop… UNTIL the first morning I was determined to poop, so I went into that strange smelling place got myself into position… and I won’t go into that much detail but I was unsuccessful at first until mid-try I notice two copper antennae sticking out of a drainage hole across the room… yes my old enemy the Cockroach was waiting for me in Africa! It never fully appeared, but the thought was enough to… you guessed it scare the shit out of me! Just thought I would share that with y’all!!
!END GRAPHIC BATHROOM CONTENT!
~You eat with your hands here, which is easy when you sit on the floor, but when you are put in a chair for whatever reason, things get difficult, and it is hard to know when you are really full because you are bending over to eat the rice and sauce from the communal bowl… I am okay with the communal bowl, it’s like eating Chinese food, and the food is really good! But my hands are TOTALLY not cut out for eating with because you need to be able to wipe the rice off of the back of your fingers and my thumb does not reach that far over! So I end up licking the rice of the back of my hands because I don’t want to use two hands because then I would have two dirty hands.
~There is no air conditioning. I realized that it is about the same temperature here as in a Texas summer… but we have air conditioning. You know that saying that Texans invented the air condition? They should have been good Christians and shipped that over here!!! Anyway the wind helps A LOT, though at night the house gets VERY warm, and they noticed this the first night I was here when I was getting ready for bed, and they told me that the roof was a lot cooler, so I went up there and you get a nice view of Malian rooftops, y’all know how I love a good roof scene, so I was sitting up there and looking at the stars and the sunset, when Mimi the youngest of the main family here, brought me a chair to sit on and we talked. Then Kante’ the girl I share a room with brought up our bed and mosquito netting, and told me that we were going to sleep up there… IT WAS AMAZING!!!! I love sleeping on the roof!! K Whoever is reading this and we are together for a night and it is not raining or too humid we should set up some mosquito netting and SLEEP UNDER THE STARS!!!! Mosquito netting is better than tents! OMG the beach with mosquito netting Peeps et Fam lets do this!!
~Disciplining small children. There are these two ADORABLE children a boy, Bebo and a girl, Yaya. The boy is always getting into trouble, but not for breaking things or disappearing or spilling things. He gets in trouble for talking to me. Or even being too close and looking at me… it is very disconcerting. I think they consider it impolite or something like that. While they don’t hit him hard, they hit him a lot. But he is so cute he does not like to wear clothes here is a picture of him and his sister:

~There are so many flies here. But nobody seems to care… it freaks me out when they are crawling on the uncooked food, but then I realize that they will cooked the food because they have too for me.
~Public Service Announcements on the problems with Female Circumcision.

I love my family and the group. We had our first day of class and it went okay, my french is getting so much better!!!  I am going to try and play with the kids more because they are too cute to not. OH and btws Lady Gaga is very popular here along with Micheal Bolton.... and Barbie Girl.... they wanted me to translate Just Dance... I tried to tell them that she was drunk... it didn't quite translate.

My family is  really cool, but they don't let me do much except wash my own underwear.  So I read and write and talk to my family. That is all for now. Ask me questions and I will answer them.
~Thaddeus