So, we bought a television.

Don’t worry, Dad! I still read more books in a month than the average American does in a year. But I’ve discovered something funny: When one has nothing but free time to read -- and trust me, for the first few months here, when I had no job, no car, no friends, no French, I had nothing but free time -- one gets just a teensy-weensy bit bored with reading.

Isn’t that a terrible thing to say? I should apologize to my books, or my college professors. But I’m not going to take it back and let me reiterate, in case I didn’t make it clear already: When I got sick of reading, it was because I had literally nothing else to do. I woke up and started reading. I read right through breakfast and lunch, because someone else did our shopping, fixed our meals, and cleaned up afterwards. I kept reading until my husband came home from work, at which point I would pounce on him like a deranged rabid animal, practically foaming at them mouth with desperation to talk to someone. (Someone besides myself.) Sometimes, just to spice things up, we would play Scrabble or cribbage or backgammon after dinner. But more often than not, we’d just … read. The only times I had to stop were when I was sleeping or showering.

At some point we realized that a) there was a DVD club not far from our house and b) we could watch DVDs on our laptop computers. That was exciting for a little while, but it didn’t take long for us to see the handful of movies in their collection that we hadn’t seen already and wanted to see. Next, we watched movies that we had seen already but wanted to see again. Then we found ourselves watching movies that we hadn’t seen already but never really wanted to see, just to have something to watch. We dreaded the day we’d have to start renting cheesy French policiers.

Just in the nick of time, I got a job at the commissary. Part of the commissary is a video club with about a thousand movies. I could stand in the center of the room for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, just slowly turning and admiring walls full from floor to ceiling with movies. (I could, but of course, I never would, since I get paid by the hour and that would be a waste of your valuable taxpayer dollars. Ahem.) Did I mention that the commissary rents VCRs?

One thing led to another, and my husband withdrew a brick of bills from Bamako’s sole automatic teller machine, and one day last week, after lunch at a new Chinese restaurant, we drove to the Electronic District. No one actually calls it that, but like shops tend to cluster, so I think of them as mini-districts: The Bamboo Furniture District, the Toilet Bowl District, the Wooden Pallets and Crates for Carrying Live Chickens District.

My husband brought home the new TV, and I brought home a VCR, and we gorged ourselves on movies, glorious movies! After all, the stations weren’t much to look at. We only receive one, ORTM, a.k.a. the All-Soccer-All-The-Time channel. But the electrician is coming today to install our special antenna, and then we’ll get CNN and TV-5 and the next time Mr. Gaddafi comes to town, we’ll be watching him wave from the back of his convertible (flanked by his statuesque female bodyguards) on our 21-inch multi-system Sharp television.