Amiina! Amen!

I went to church this morning. Babcia (my grandma) would be proud of me. A friend here in Sikasso goes to the one Catholic church here every week, and convinced me to join her today.

We got there at about 7:45 for the mass that started at 8. As we were walking into the church, my friend warned me that women sit on the left, and men on the right. In mosques here (and I suppose, all over the world), men sit in front, with the women praying behind, but I never thought that the genders would separate in church, too. But they did. So we entered the big concrete building and found a spot to sit at the end of a row of rigid wooden benches so close to one another that I wondered how other people were going to climb in. My friend also warned me that when other women came and wanted a seat, they would unceremoniously clamber over us in order to get to their seats in the middle of the row. I'm not sure if it's especially polite to do this is Mali, but it happens all the time.

We had a few minutes to sit and chat, and look around the place before mass started, and I took the time to note the differences between this African church and other Western ones I'd seen. First and foremost, it was a pretty plain building. The walls were concrete, and while the ceiling was high, it was still tin. There were, however, some rather artistic details that surprised me. For example, the windows along the sides of the church were stained glass jalacy windows. Anyone who's been to my house in the US knows that the jalacy window salesman made it to both Mt Lebanon, and now apparently, to Sikasso, Mali. They're the slatted windows that have individual panels that open up in unison. I think I'm probably doing a bad job of describing them, but maybe you know what I'm talking about? In any event, these windows ran from floor to ceiling and each panel was a different color, and about every third one was topped by a simple stick figure rendition of the stations of the cross, all labeled with a Roman numeral at the top. As for the altar, there was a simple altar and lecturn, both adequate, and nicely adorned in green striped Bazin cloth, one of the richest fabrics available here in Mali . Three huge stained glass windows framed the altar from behind: the one on the left was a simple cross, the one in the middle was a round depiction of a black Mary and Jesus, and the one on the right was a typical farming scene from a Malian village. The tabernacle sat on a plain table off to the right, and was made from a dark metal and shaped like the typical grain storage hut that's pictured below in another post.

The mass was conducted almost entirely in Bambara, with a few snippets of French, meaning that I understood very little. The music was provided by a small choir, and was all in Bambara. as well. It was great, though, because they didn't sing the traditional church songs we're familiar with in the States. I'm not entirely too sure what exactly they were singing, but I do know that it was infused with Malian rhythms and had a characteristically West African feel to it. But my favorite, and most Malian moment of all was communion. Instead of orderly ushering to go recieve the Eucharist, everyone just decides when they want to go, and they get up and start forward. It sounds more chaotic than it really was, because though they don't go up in any order that I could discern, they do form lines in the isles once they're up. But it was just funny, because all along I'd been expecting to wait my turn while those in front of me got up and walked forward, but that didn't happen, because folks from the back started forward before I even really knew what was happenning. Another surprise was that several times during the service, the priest blessed the crowd with greetings that make reference to Ala, the Muslim god. These blessings are extremely common occurrences in daily life, and there's a blessing for almost every situation, but it was weird to hear a reference to another god in church. I started to wonder where the lines between culture and religion are drawn here, and I think they might be a bit fuzzier than I'd imagined. Church let out with a recessional hymn, and everyone filed out into the yard, and stood around socializing for a while before heading into town for Sunday's big market.