I usually wake up around 6am to the sounds of either our family pig screeching for dear life, or to my mother sweeping the house or screaming at the kids. By then I’m usually covered in my own sweat and musky from a night perspiring and swatting flies from under my holey mosquito net. Language class starts at 8 so I’m off to Cail’s house by 7:45. On my morning walk I greet hello to the community pig. I’m not sure which family she belongs to, but she lives outside my family’s compound and has made quite a smelly, disease-infested home for herself there. I then swat flies for the entire day in French class (with a break après midi [afternoon] in which I go home to eat lunch with my family). At 6pm I head home and play soccer with the kids for a few hours before dinner. Our family sits in the courtyard on broken plastic chairs and wooden benches and gathers around the tiny family TV for the Senegalese news then for a round of Brazilian soap operas dubbed in African French. Some nights I make attaaya for my family (Senegalese tea boiled to a pulp and made with a mountain of sugar), which can take me an hour since I have to fan the charcoal that sits in a bowl, under the tiny metal tea pot, until the water boils. We have dinner around 9pm (watery bean sauce or fish sauce over couscous). Nearly all of my time outside of class is spent with my family--most nights we just lay on a mat in the middle of the compound and talk. The only time I spend in my room is the 7 hours I "sleep" (lay there sweating).
I take a bucket bath and try to cool off before bed but the sweat quickly replaces the water I dry from my body. I usually go to bed hungry. I’m perpetually hungry.
But let’s rewind this a bit since you’re probably asking yourself quite a few questions.
I live at alone at a wonderful homestay family who only speaks Serrer (regional language) and sometimes French. Like many Senegalese families, our home is more like a compound than a house and I share it with what seems like 10 other adults and 30 children all of whom I assume is my family. Since I don’t have the language skills to ask them whom exactly all these people are, I just smile and call everyone my brother, sister, uncle and aunt.
Everyday I have 8 hours of French class and during that time I fill my mind with a mélange of phrases, verbs, and vocab words once buried deep in areas of my brain I thought I would never use again. The Peace Corps technique to language learning is a unique one, and a crash course—to put it mildly. We are taught in French and we start speaking first…and figure out what we’re actually saying after. We live with families who speak no English so the learning process doesn’t end after class is over. It’s sink or swim. As you can imagine, I’ve gotten quite nifty at gestures.
Although our training group is over 50 people, we are separated into tiny language groups, and then sent to live in our homestay villages where we spend nearly 24 hours a day practicing our languages and 10 hours a day with our group members. As you can imagine, I’ve gotten quite close to Cail and Katherine since they’re my only English speaking outlet. Ever.