As soon as I stepped off the plane into the night air, I remembered something about Bamako that I’d managed to forget: the smell. Part fuel, part exhaust fumes, part garbage, part smoke. It’s salty, acidic, ammoniac, smoggy; it’s inescapable. I feared I would never get used to it, but this morning I was sitting in the front room with all the windows open, and I didn’t notice it so much.

Our house is much like the other expatriate houses I’ve seen in Bamako. It’s one level of high-ceilinged boxy rooms, bare-walled and plain, with tiled floors. The large front room serves as dining room, living room, and office. The master bedroom also faces front, and three smaller rooms face the back, where our property adjoins our landlord’s.

Like many of the hotels we have stayed at in May, our shower has no curtain. We just do our best not to spray the entire bathroom when we wash. We also have a bidet, which I have eyed curiously, but haven’t the faintest idea how to use, if I even dared try.

Our kitchen was apparently custom-made for E. As for me, the counters come nearly to my shoulders and the lowest shelves are barely within reach. When I want tea in the morning, I feel around the cupboard over the sink for the cigarette lighter. Then I open the cabinet below the sink and loosen the nozzle on the huge gas canister. I turn on the burner and try to light the flame without singing my hand. When the water has boiled, I undo everything, and tighten up the gas again.

Breakfast has changed more than any other meal. In Washington, I ate cereal with milk every weekday, and E. cooked us pancakes on weekends. In Bamako, cereal costs up to $10 a box, maple syrup $50 a bottle, and baking powder is nowhere to be found. A woman down the road makes bagels to order. We bought half a dozen plain ones on Saturday but something about them tastes wrong, too much yeast or a different kind of flour. We can’t bring ourselves to finish the bag. Instead, this morning I had bread and jam, and a small, green, tasty banana.

Soon we will furnish the front porch with bamboo chairs and tables so we can dine outside. At night, it’s often more pleasant outdoors than indoors, since we haven’t thatched our roof yet. A layer of long grasses shading the roof will keep the house a few degrees cooler.

We live, like many NGO employees, in the Hippodrome neighborhood. (USAID and Embassy employees typically live on the other side of the river in Badalabougou.) I can’t walk to E.'s office, as I could when we were living at the Grande Hotel in May. But now we can walk to the Broadway Café for ice cream, or to the Bla Bla Bar for brochettes de capitaine (grilled white fish from the Niger River), fried plaintains, and a grande bottle or two of Castel beer. Because most Malians are Muslim, they don’t drink alcohol, but they are not so strict that they won’t sell brew and sell beer to anyone else.

This attitude seems to be indicative of Mali’s religious atmosphere: devout, yet tolerant. It was a female Peace Corps volunteer who so succinctly expressed her delight at being in Mali after two years in much stricter Mauritania: “I can wear pants, and drink beer!”