final stretch of homestay

August 20, 2010
So I'm back at Homestay now. I've been here since Tuesday (today is Friday), and I only have until next Saturday left. On the Sunday after next, we head back to Tubaniso for a week, and then we get sworn in as official Peace Corps Volunteers at the US Embassy. Anyway, the past couple of days at homestay have been alright. I definitely wish that I was back at my actual site though because it is so much nicer than my homestay village. In my homestay village I cant go anywhere without being called 'Tubaboo', which is perhaps the world's most annoying word especially when said in the sing-song voice that the children here love so much. I realized today that it would be impossible to sneak up on someone here because a child a mile away will see me coming and start shouting Tubaboo Tubaboo Tubaboo! and then whoever I was trying to sneak up on would be alerted.
I knew coming into Mali that it was probably going to be a little difficult for me to live in a predominately Muslim country, but I had no idea how incredibley difficult it would be. I'm not talking about Christians getting along with Muslims (it's actually super chill here, they could care less that I'm Christian and not Muslim), I'm talking about the extreme lack of sleep I'm getting because of the 4:30 am call to prayer. Also now that it is Ramadan, there is a 3:30 am call for everyone to wake up so that they can eat before the day of fasting begins. Unfortunately my house is like 500 ft from the Mosque so I always get woken up by the loudspeaker. It is almost impossible to fall back asleep once I've been woken up. The worse thing is that It's not just the loudspeaker that wakes me up, but also the chickens, donkeys, goats and dogs that love to make noise at all hours of the night. It's really unfortunate because I'm always so tired during the day which makes language lessons torturous. Oh well, I only have 1 week left here!!
So today I had a very interesting discussion with my host-dad, in French of course because my Bambara is horrible, about the moon. It all started by him asking me if we had a moon in America, and I said of course we do, and he was shocked by this and then said 'but not the same moon, right?' And I was like 'no, we have the same moon.' To that he was like 'no way! That moon is for Mali, you have a different moon in America, a smaller moon.' I couldn't stop laughing because he was completely serious. Between laughs I tried to explain that the whole world shared the same moon, and that there is only 1 moon and 1 sun. I also told him that we shared the same stars too. I'm pretty sure I wasn't able to convince him, and I'm pretty sure he thinks every country has their own moon, sun and stars, or none of those at all. My host-dad attended some school, so I wonder if the teach the solar system at all in school? I think I'll try and find that out.
So 2 days ago I discovered something that will make my next 2 years here a lot more bearable: Vache qui rit cheese!!! (we have it in the US too, except its called Laughing Cow Cheese). This cheese doesn't have to be refrigerated and is spreadable, so I eat it with the baguette that I get every morning, SO DELICIOUS. I ration one triangle of cheese per morning so that I have something to look forward to. Breakfast is now my favorite meal of the day because I get half a baguette with my vache qui rit triangle, a hard-boiled egg, and tea made with powdered milk and sugar. One thing that I find funny is that I'm obsessed with eggs here in Mali! This is weird because I hate eggs in the US. You could very rarely find me eating eggs, and the few times I did, I only ate them scrambled, and I especially hated hard boiled eggs. But in Mali I can't get enough of them! I think it may be because my body is protein deficient, so it craves any source of protein. Whatever the case is, I can eat eggs anyday, allday. I even hope to raise chickens at my site just so I can have eggs whenever I want.
August 28, 2010
I'm very hungry and I can't go back to sleep because the Mosque woke me up (it's 5:22 am) so I thought I'd write a blog post. Today is my last day at Homestay!!! I'm super incredibley excited because I was starting to get sick of this place. I can't wait to be sworn in as a legit volunteer and I can't wait to be back in Sikasso. I only now slightly feel like I'm going to miss Homestay because lastnight we had a sort of Thank-you gathering for all of the host families were we told them how greatful we were that they allowed us to stay in their homes and that they took such good care of us. I invited my host dad and his 2 wives to come to the gathering, but none of them showed up, instead they sent 2 of their daughters in their place (one of the daughters really gets on my nerves so I really was unhappy to see her their instead of my host-parents). At first I thought the reason that they didn't come was because they didn't care, and that they were just as ready for me to leave as I was. Turns out this wasn't true at all. After the gathering, when I got back home, I gave my host parents the gifts I wanted to give them at the gathering (a watch for my host dad, and bracelets for my host moms). They all seemed genuinely happy to receive them, but nothing can top my host dad's reaction when I handed him the watch. The man was choking back tears. It was so precious. I have never ever ever seen him that happy! He could just not believe that anything like that would ever happen. Now because of his reaction I feel kinda bad... and the reason being that it was just an $8 watch from Walmart, granted it looked pretty nice and is probably better than any watch he'd buy, but still. Anyway I was super touched by his reaction, and I now know that they aren't in a rush to get me out of here and that they will miss me, and knowing this makes me kind of sentimental too whereas before I was telling people that there was no way I was gonna miss homestay and that I couldn't wait to get out of here. I think my problem was that I associated all of Homestay with language class alone, which I hate, and not with how nice of a family I got and all the super nice things they did for me.
So anyway that brings me to my next little blurb: I'M DONE WITH LANGUAGE CLASS (*sort of)!!! Yesterday afternoon I took my End-of-Stage (oral) Language test. For this test we have to achieve a score of Intermediate-Mid in Bambara to be sworn in as volunteers. I was EXTREMELY nervous because my Bambara isn't the greatest, and I wasn't sure that I'd be able to achieve inter-mid. So anyway I took the test and I wasn't very happy with myself because I had memorized some pretty advanced sentences and I never got the chance to use them. I spent several hours after the test ragging on myself because of this. I later found out from my LCF (my Bambara teacher) that everyone in my homestay village passed!! I won't actually receive the results from my test until Monday, but I'm super relieved to hear that I passed (hopefully this turns out to be true).
Random tidbit for you guys: So turns out it's shockingly rude to ignore a phone call here. My homologue in Sikasso is now in the habit of calling me everyother day (mind you we can barely understand eachother because my bambara sucks and my french isn't that great either) to ask me how I'm doing and to tell me how happy he is that I'm doing well. This may sound "cute" to you, but it's not, it's actually annoying as hell. So anyway, a few afternoons ago I was getting my hair braided when my phone started ringing. I looked down to see who it was, and yep it was my homologue. I let out an exasperated sigh and pressed ignore. The lady who was braiding my hair and her husband, who was sitting near by, both let out these gasps of shock. That completely threw me off guard because I had the habit of ignoring phone calls quite a bit in the US (not as often as Jenn though). I tried to explain to them that I didn't want to talk to him, but they didn't seem to get it. I later explained the whole ignoring the phone call situation to my LCFS and I got the same shocked reaction from them too! My LCF, once he lost his shock, explained that in Mali you never ignore a phone call because if someone is willing to spend the little money the have on phone credit to talk to you than you shouls be polite enough to answer. So his explanation made total sense and actually made me feel really bad about ignoring my homologue's call. Lucky for me though he called back literally a minute after my LCFs explanation, so of course I answered the phone! Again it was just a call to see how I was doing, and it didn't even last more than a minute. I guess from now on I'm just going to have to put up with these minute-long annoyances.
*it's only sort of because I have to do some language tutoring for the first 3 months at site.