T atta Traoré, age 10, helps her mother every day washing the dishes, helping her mother take care of the younger children and babies, and doing other odd jobs. She wants to make bracelets with her mom to sell at the market. Tatta lives with a family of seven in the downstairs portion of the house we are renting. The day I met her she was wearing a simple red and white dress. She seemed like a nice girl and she smiled a lot. Her favorite foods are macaroni, (who would have thought macaroni in Djenné!) pasta, chicken, and rice with a sauce called Fakoye. Her family owns a small parcel of farmland three kilometers south of Jenne. Tatta works on the farm mostly during harvest time, after the rainy season. They grow rice on the farm. She gets an allowance, about 100 or 50 francs a day (10-20 cents).

In case you are wondering about her schooling she does go to school and is enjoying it. Many girls in Mali don't go to school. I asked Tatta what she wanted to be when she grows up. After thinking about it, she smiled and said she wants to be a housewife. When Tatta wants to have fun, she just pops down to her Uncle's compound and plays with her playmates. They sing together and clap hands. You might think "Wow! How could she have fun singing and clapping hands?" Well, the only answer that I can think of (and this is a very good reason) is that Africans are very resourceful. They can have hours of fun playing with one spaghetti wrapper, and you know why? Many don't have toys to play with so they become imaginative and are able to play around with ordinary things. I have seen many of the children in the village running alongside a bicycle tire or metal wheel as they push it with a stick.

Djenaba Traoré, age 15, is a relative of Tatta. She does not live in our rented house but she lives with her parents in another section of town called Kanafia. When I talked with her she was wearing a beautiful African multi-colored dress. She is always wearing African traditional clothes. Djenaba is Yama's niece. That is how she was hired by Dani to help Yama cook for us. She does a lot of jobs in the compound, including sweeping the courtyard of the compound, fetching water (she carries about 10 full 5-gallon buckets of water upstairs to us on her head every day!), helping with the children, and doing the dishes. She cooks some of the food and her work usually lasts all day. She earns $1 a day for all this hard work! Djenaba says that unlike Tatta she does make plastic bracelets in her spare time. She enjoys making the bracelets, which are woven in many colors, like our friendship bracelets. She does not go to school. It is common that very few girls of her age get a chance to go to school. In the class I visited twice there were 28 girls and 41 boys for a total of 69. Like Tatta she too wants to be a housewife. She helps her parents farm and works on the farm mostly at harvest time. Djenaba only has one brother and is not the oldest one in the family. When Djenaba wants to have fun she hops down to the place where Hadja stays. Hadja is the wife of Yama's youngest brother. The games she plays are the kind that involves singing, jumping, and clapping hands.

One interesting thing about my conversation with Djenaba was that she couldn't answer a question about her favorite possession. It was as if she didn't know what I meant. Is it possible that she had no possessions? Or that things are not valuable to her in the same way that they are to us? I think she understood the question, but just didn't know how to answer. Since most of kids in America know what possession they value most, I thought that her inability to answer the question was interesting.