One Week Anniversary

I have been in Mali for one full week! I'm really happy that I'm closer to going home. This week should go quickly because we are leaving on THursday to travel. I doubt traveling will be a real vacation though. We will be camping, and who knows how we will find food on the route. It's not like there are McDonalds or anything lol. The land is very "bush" unless you're right in a town, and even in those, you can only really get street food. We'll see how this goes...

So...breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is the craziest thing ever here. For one, girls can show their breasts when they are just starting to develop, when you're an old saggy woman, or if you are a breastfeeding woman. It's interesting cause you can't show your knees here...but you can go around topless if you like lol. So anyway, we rode the soutreman (rinky-dink shoddy make-shift taxi-vans) into Bamako today. Every woman who got on was breastfeeding CONSTANTLY. They just pop out a breast and the babies latch on and grab at them voraciously. And then they stop. 5 minutes later, they pop them out again and the babies latch on ravenously. I'm like, didn't you JUST eat!! I feel like American babies eat politely lol and aren't grabbing and tearing at their mother's breast, but I'm not sure cause now that I think about it, I can't recall really it that up-close and personal in the states. Women usually use a shawl or something to cover that. I swear, this one lady who rode for about 45-60 minutes with her, fed her baby at least 10 times. Seriously, it's mind-blowing. And it's just so public! I'm like goodness, couldn't you feed your baby in the privacy of your own home? Or have a shawl? But I guess that's not practical. But it's like they waited until they got into this 20-person packed van made for 7 people to start feeding their babies. It's wild. And multiply that by like at least 7-10 because every woman around our age, pratically, has a baby. But then, we realized that the mother's milk probably doesn't have as much nuntrients, cause like I said, the food is pretty nutrient-deprived. Just rice and bread.