wa and her friends walk along the roadside with their long colorful skirts flowing and backs slightly arched. The road is a tight and windy strip of faded asphalt, surrounded on either side by red dirt, riddled in some parts by non biodegradable fragments of plastic bags, and dotted with bushy mango trees. In this part of the town of Kati, which can be reached after some
15 miles of hills north of Bamako, the low brick houses are all surrounded by courtyards, enclosed by walls and fencing, from which children distracted by playing or errands glance, if something interesting appears along the road.
Awa lives in one of these houses, poor though at the eye less desolate than the small huts with iron sheet roofs that, one on top of the other, crowd the roadside a few
miles outside Bamako in the hills. The young African woman and her friends have made an investment for the future: with 8,000 CFA francs
($13.00) they have enrolled in the professional school of the Immaculate Queen of Peace missionary sisters to learn dressmaking and embroidery.
Awa hopes to become good enough, at the end of the three-year course, to deserve the support of the missionary sisters that may give her a sowing machine to open a small atelier. But what she likes most about the school is being in class, behind the desks grouped together with Fatoumata, Mariam, Aissata and the others, speaking openly about anything that comes to mind while sewing a long jamjam skirt.
In the rural areas women rarely have the courage to speak out; and even at the school it takes weeks before they feel comfortable enough to free that nature of communication that elsewhere is normally repressed by men. Aissata likes making purses from
colorful materials; Sister Carmen told her that in Italy – where the Italian friends of the missionaries sell them – women buy them at prices that in Mali correspond to half of an average salary. With that money, and earnings from a small boutique that the missionary sisters opened in Kati, the school pays for the material and embroidery thread for the courses.
Awa hopes to become good enough, at the end of the three-year course, to deserve the support of the missionary sisters that may give her a sowing machine to open a small atelier
Fatoumata instead paid the 20,000 CFA francs for material for a year of the course; her family lives on a side road of the main street of Kita, where there are two-story houses with arched balustrade windows and stores have electric signboards. Fatoumata will be able to keep the money made from her work; it could be useful to her when Sister Carmen and Sister Miriam give her a diploma at the end of the professional course, despite not having finished middle school.
Mariam instead thinks of her fiancée and that in a few months she will be married. She confided with Sister Marie Jeanne, who is only a few years older than her and last December took her vows. Soon she will have children and maybe her husband will want her to only take care of the home and family… and Mariam wonders if she will have to leave the school. The young nun warns her that her courtyard could become her entire world; wouldn’t it be better to learn a profession rather than be at the service of some wealthy
neighbor?
The windows of the classroom look onto the mango trees… with their green bushy foliage and unripe fruits like earrings.
(From MISNA)