The Moments of Doubt

Did you say butter on my bread? Yes, please. Mornings in my home stay seem to be the most active. At around 5 o'clock the call for prayer begins with a man singing Arabic through the local loud speaker. The fan is on and blowing warm air through my mosquito net as I lay there in my sweat. For a few moments I try to close my eyes to go back to sleep, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. So, in most cases I decided to get up and begin my day. My host mother, Satu, is the first on in the compound to begin her day. I can hear her collecting water from the robine into plastic containers to sell around the corner of our house. There are number of ways that my family finds a way to earn some money and this is one of them. The other is the moono in the morning. You can see children in the morning carrying around plastic bowls, they take these bowls to homes that sell this hot cereal. This hot cereal is made out of millet and made by hand. My mother starts making it late at night at around 10pm and she places the millet in a large bowl and moves it with her hand making small little balls by dampening the millet powder a little at a time. I sometimes find my mother falling asleep while she makes her millet. My host father works on a farm near by and for the moment I don't think that he is doing anything. This brings me to the next thing, women here work extremely hard here. My siblings here are always doing something, from sweeping in the morning to cooking lunch and dinner to making and selling soap they are busy with something. The men are required to go out and bring in the money but sometimes you find them not doing anything at all. These are some of the gender roles that you will find her. Women pride themselves when they can fetch the water for the mans bath or make them dinner. Yet, at times it can be too much. A friend of mine had a sister in-law that was working so hard while that she was pregnant she fell sick and her baby had died. Deaths here have been very frequent since I have been here actually. I have heard of a few other deaths from my fellow peace corps friends. The amount of deaths that I have heard of here has totaled to be the same amount of deaths that I have heard in my life time in the states. To the Senegalese people death is a very common thing and in America you don't hear about it too often. More on a lighter note there had been babies born and people getting married, I still have yet to experience these but there still time. More on the experience in the home stay, what more can I say??? There is just so much. To shorten this I love my family, they inspire me because they are such strong women and they help me make it through the days. It has been quite the experience so far and this is still only the beginning. We still have yet to go to our sites and meet our new families that we will be staying with for the next two years. We had the announcement actually this past Monday.
All the volunteers were gathered in the evening and brought to the basketball court in the PC Center. The basketball court has a map of Senegal on it and for placement what they do is blindfold all the volunteers and take them to there sites on the map. They count to three and at the same time we all take our blindfolds off too see where we were placed on the map. I have video of this by the way. I hope some of it gets on the website. Anyhow...I come to find that I am standing in the region of Tambacunda. You can find this city in the East/Southern part of Senegal near the end of the Gambian boarder. I was placed there with four other people in my group. There are three Mandinkas, one Serer and one Wolof speaker. Everyone was very surprised to finally find out where our sites were and guess what! I am here right now! We had a wonderful welcome party of the PCV that are here now. Tomorrow I get to see my site! So, I will have to keep you posted!

Getting started

So, finally getting this blog together. This is my first post and there is too much to say so how about I sum it up. The first two weeks have been learning about the culture, language, about other Peace Corps Volunteers and what we are going to be expecting in the next few months. We just had our first week at our first host families homes and this experience is unique to each one of us. For myself I very much enjoy my family. They are well known in my town. When I first arrived each volunteer is named by the family. I was named after my grandmother "Bambi Camera". I was told that my grandmother is a very important person in the community because people go to her for advice and help. So, when I say my name to someone in the village they say "Oh, Bambi Camara!" Because everyone knows who she is. My mother is a very busy women considering that she has 10 children, at least that is the information that I got when I was trying to do my family tree. My father is a very humble man who likes to laugh a lot. He tries to help me with my language but...hmmm it gets kind of confusing as to what he is trying to explain to me. I have two aunts that also live in the compound. One is married to the chief of the village. He just actually stayed with us the past week. Talk about high expectations.
Oh, haha by the way I am learning one of the seven languages that volunteers learn called Mandinka. It It has almost all of the letters of the alphabet except for z and x. They have this funny looking n with a tail on it which makes a "ing" sound. Learning the language has been the most difficult because our level of the language to begin with in our home stay was pretty much nothing. This past week we were able to a least make a sentence. Hahaha can you imagine trying to go through a whole day with someone not really knowing what they are trying to say to you??? Call it interesting, exciting, frustrating and challenging. Anyhow, I know things will become easier one the language comes and I can't wait! But for now Fo naato! I have language class right now! Miss everyone!