Young Girls

So I finally saw the young girls playing. I was happy to see that because girls get the brunt end of the stick here. They work SOOOO hard. The work distribution is so uneven here. Men work like during the harvest season pretty hard, but other than that, there's not a lot of work available (apparently), so many Malian men just sit around and hang out and watch what's going on around them. But the women! They are drawing water all day, and washing clothes and pots, and cooking, which takes forever. All of these things take forever, cause there's no running water and you have to build fires to cook. It's really unjust. AND to make matters even more annoying, the men barely even chase the girls. So a lot of male-female interaction goes on at night lol, but apparently, it's the girls who chase after the boys! They go over to the boys houses at night. Jade has found this to be really annoying, cause guys keep asking to chat with her, but they always want her to come over to their houses. But it's so dark and scary at night AND Jade is like wth, you invited me, so you should be coming over, AND i'm a girl! We tried to ask two of her male friends about this, and they pretty much just said that it's looked upon poorly for a male to come over a female's house, but a female can go over to a male's house without a problem. I dunno if that's true or if they were just making up crap to cover up the fact that they are just too scared/cowardly to go to girl's homes. The jury is still out on this one... But I just can't believe that the women have to work so hard all day long, and then they are the ones who have to pursue the men! The least the men could do after sitting around all day long is pursue their own women! ughhhh

So back to the young girls...The young girls are in training to be good wives, so they do a lot of this work. But today, they had a chance to play :). They have a string game where they wrap the string around someone's legs or waist and fold it so there's an opening into which they jump. Then one girl will swing her legs high to jump in and out of the string while singing a rhyme. We brought out a rope to twirl for jump-roping cause it's kinda similar, and they knew right away what to do! They were quite bad at jump-roping but they had fun anyway. Different game, same concept :). I was really glad to see one girl, Bateau, play. She is worked the hardest around here. Jade told me that she is awarded extra food for her hard work. She gets to eat the leftovers each night. I did notice that she is actually substantially bigger than the other girls, so I guess that's what you get to have for the back-breaking work that's required of you.