Homestay, Part Un

Hello All!

I apologize in advance for the length of this entry. A lot has happened. Happy reading, inshallah.

I am back from my first week at homestay, and I am alive and well. I will do my best to cover the bases, but it's a bit overwhelming. Also, don't hate me- I don't have pictures of it yet. I felt that getting there, not speaking the language and being completely lost, then just pulling out my camera and starting to snap pictures of everyone without being able to explain myself might not be such a good idea. So be sure that I will be taking pictures when I go back and will have fun things to share with all of you.

The first night there was.... interesting. Ok it sucked. But it sucks for everyone. My language class consists of me and three other people, and they loaded us and our LCF (language and culture instructor) and all our stuff into a sept place- which is basically just a semi-broken down station wagon that works as the main source of public transportation in Senegal- and drove the half hour to Ker Madaro. I was dropped off first. I am actually living with the chief of the village and his family, which consists of about 25 loud, spirited Africans who were all excited to see me. They pulled up the house, where my welcoming party was waiting, and then said goodbye and they will see me at 9am the next morning. I was led around to see the bathroom, a very lovely squat toilet and separate stall for bucket baths, and my room. The room is just a plain cement walled room with a bed in it and a window. I have a key to it, though the lock is pretty fidgety, and I put my stuff down and was led over to a cement foyer where I was offered a chair, and all 20 or so kids sat down on a mat in front of me staring up at me as if I was a teacher and they were my new class. I think they were expecting a speech or something, not realizing that I spoke little more than “How are you? I am fine” and how to tell them my name. They promptly named me Fatuu after my mother in the village and went around the room telling me all of their names. Clearly confused, they suggested I write them down by writing on an invisible piece of paper in the air, so I went to go grab my notebook, and it stayed by my side almost every minute the entire week afterwards.

Most of the rest of the night followed suit. I walked around following people and not able to say anything to anybody or have any idea what was going on. We have electricity there, so we watched tv for a little while at one point, and flipped back and forth between French and Wolof channels while 15 kids sat on the floor around the bed and I sat there while my brother pointed to things in the room or body parts and named them while I wrote them down in the notebook. Water in the compound is taken from a hose that they use to fill one of 2 large drums that they have with some old tin coffee cans in them that are used for filling kettles, buckets for bucket baths or just drinking out of. I awkwardly set up and filled my water filter from it and moved it into my room where people wouldn’t stare at me for using this strange plastic contraption to drink. Dinner was about as typical Senegalese as it gets- we sat on the ground (I actually had a small 6-inch high bamboo stool because I am an honored guest) around the communal bowl while eating the national dish-ceebujen- with our hands. Yes, they did use soap and water to wash up first. No, that doesn’t really make it less awkward the first time around. We sat around on the mats outside the house for a little while, and soon afterwards, I tried to signal that I was tired and just went back to my room. It is extremely hot because there is really no good ventilation in my room, but I was so tired that I pretty much just passed out after a quick “what the hell did I get myself into” to Tim. I later found out that everyone in the stage had the same or relatively similar experience as me. It comes with the whole Peace Corps package.

That’s not to say the whole week went that way.

The next day, I was awkwardly told to grab my notebook and led to my LCFs homestay at 8 the next morning, where I found Lisa, another woman in the group, sitting and struggling to figure out what was going on as well. We discussed how we both ate the strange rice and smoked fish dish that is the lifeblood of most Senegalese and were told led to class at 8 am. Spencer and Peter, the other two people in the group, arrived, as well as Aissatu, my LCF, and we pretty much just stared blankly at each other as we tried to figure out what had just happened. After a debrief, we had a chance to discuss our experiences and figure out good ways to deal with it some more. We had language class sitting under a mango tree in the yard, and went back to our homes for lunch and rest time at 1. The second day wasn’t a hell of a lot easier, but it’s amazing how much you can start to bond with someone with just using facial expressions and laughing about stupid stuff. Nabuu, one teenage girl, helped me immensely by showing me what I need to do and helping me with language practice over time. The little kids are all super willing to help, but have no concept of speaking slowly or what it is like to speak to someone and have them not understand you.

Bucket baths aren’t all that bad either. They consist of a bucket of water and a smaller bucket that you use to scoop up the water and pour it over yourself, then try to lather up and rinse off as best you can. When you’ve been sitting around and sweating all day, any sort of cool water is much appreciated. It’s no shower, but you feel somewhat clean afterwards for about 10 minutes or so until you start sweating again and go sit on the ground.

The next few days were better. I started to learn a bit of a schedule, and I figured out that to get away from the ceebujen, you can go to a boutique and buy some small, chocolate filled cookies and pineapple juice. They also have mangoes there, since it is primarily a farming village. Believe it or not, I actually started to learn the language a little bit. I certainly do not speak it by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s amazing how you can hear a word a couple of times and eventually start to pick it out in a conversation. Wolof is completely different than anything you’ve ever heard too. As I was writing this blog entry, I told Brendan back home that “wolof is weird- like it has the article at the end of a word rather than the beginning, doesn't have verb conjugations but has pronoun conjugations depending on the context, and conjugations of pronouns to make things negative too. and the written language is a combination between french accents, english characters and phonetic symbols.”

Also, my mom at site had a baby yesterday! She was born yesterday at about 6 am, and I saw her when I came home from class for the morning when she was only a few hours old. I have never seen a baby that young before. This also means that I will be attending the baptism coming up, which occurs 8 days after the birth. It’ll be fun.

That seems to sum it up to me. Missing probably tons of other unimportant-but-probably-still-interesting details, that brings me to today. It is AMAZING coming back to some semblance of American civilization that is known as the Peace Corps training center. We have salad, and showers, and toilets… the things one takes for granted. Today was fantastic- we got to speak English, walk around the market in Thies, and I did laundry and now have tons of clean clothes which smell lovely. I did take more pics of the training center today- I’ll try to post those tomorrow. In the market, I finally got my adapter!! And I bought fabric and had a tailor make me a pagne, which is an African ankle-length wrap skirt that I will wear to the baptism. I was pretty proud of myself that after a week at homestay, I was able to have small, basic conversations with people in the market. I certainly am nowhere near fluent and can’t get much past the basic greetings, but a few key words go a long way. It does a lot for your confidence doing something like conducting a transaction in a language you only learned that you needed to know a week ago.

Right now this is getting long so I will probably just leave it be for a little while. Stay tuned for another quick update and some pictures before I go back on Wednesday for a 2 week stay back there. Don’t forget to text me!! (free from google.)

Love all of you,

Emily