The Magic Gourd

It was a beautiful, sunny, sometimes windy day for our inaugural class. Thank you everyone for coming! We read The Magic Gourd by local author, Baba Wagué Diakité. Then the music of Mali drifted on the deck as we painted some "mud cloths" of our own design. Mud cloth or Bogolanfini (“Bo-ho-lahn-FEE-nee”) is made by the Bambara people of Mali. They dye fabric brown and black and paint lines, circles, zigzags, and oval shapes with a special mud. If you want to learn more about mud cloths you can check out this wonderful interactive web site from the Smithsonian Museum.

We also started filling in our passports this week! Come and join us next week!

a lesson in Bambara

By pure chance the book I chose for our exploration of Africa is by an award-winning author and artist Baba Wagué Diakité who happens to reside in Portland, OR! What a small world! I wrote him an e-mail and asked if he could help me out with some of the pronunciations of words in Bambara (the national language of Mali) and wonderfully, he got back to me right away. We just had a lively conversation over the phone this morning. Baba runs the Ko-Falen center where he promotes cultural, artistic, and educational exchanges between the people of the United States and Mali through art workshops, dance, music, and ceremony. Thank you Baba for your wonderful work!