Back to the Lap of Luxury. Temporarily.

July 21, 2010 at 9:57 pm (Uncategorized)

Home stay. The real deal. The hardest nine weeks of service. Before leaving Tubaniso I simply refused to believe how tough it would be. The ups and downs have been incredible. We’re back and Dove camp for a couple of days of rest and recuperation, so I’m feeling newsy.

Two weeks of approximately eight hours of language a day. But for me? Not Bambara, the language of the capital and the language of my homestay village and the language of most of Mali, but Bomu. Which is only spoken by one family here. And of which I’m the only student. A minority language of the south. Tonal, I’m increasingly finding out. Because ye means to buy and ye means to have sex. You see my problem.

So, these weeks have had their moments of difficulty and isolation, but there are great adventures as well. My family is wonderful, even if they refuse to speak slowly to me. Bomu speakers are usually Christians and animists in a primarily Muslim country. Sort of fascinating to experience. I think it might just mean that my host father only has one wife and they cache alcohol for the non-Muslims in the village, but that all makes my life infinitely more interesting. Like the tiny little old man drinking his gin, trying to explain to me in French why I’m like a mango tree. Not some other kind of tree. Mango.

So, host father, a doctor, host mother, host brother, sister, and baby brother. And host tanti, who has no teeth so I can’t understand a word she says. So I mostly make jokes about our yaale, our common husband. Don’t know where he is. Hope he has teeth.

I live in a hut in the family compound. Hot as hell and not enough room to swing a cat, but it’s my own and the sound of the rain on the tin roof is bliss. Although that could be because I know it will cool things off. The compound is rectangular with two longer buildings where the parents and children sleep, a cooking hut, the hut I think had the alcohol, my hut, and the neg’ins. Oh the neg’ins. Don’t get me started.

My food experience has been fairly good (I’m not the one eating to and mayonnaise all the time). But after two years if I never see another peanut or grain of rice again it will be too soon. For the moment, though, the bread, fresh peanut paste and coffee every morning looks pretty good. And I’m trying to figure out what goes in the zaga zaga zio besides sweet potato leaves and something red. And questionable eat that gets pushed towards someone else. I’ve been to the market. I’ve seen the meat. Hence I don’t touch it. Any day someone comes from Tubaniso with bananas is a small gift from heaven.

My days have taken on a rhythm both easy and extraordinarily tiring. Wake up to the sounds of Tanti sweeping the compounds, dying donkeys, and calls to prayer, bucket baths and breakfast, and walking to school, trying to remember me greetings in Bambara. Attempting to make it to the creek without any children seeing me. Four hours of language lessons outside with my teacher, a large chalkboard, and a char. Kids coming in to get water from the pump and sharing my tree with a small herd of sheep and the occasional donkey. Back home for lunch, sitting under the hangar watching the comings and goings, praying it’s not to day. Making friends with Mama chicken and chick. And back to school for more language or environment training. The environment sessions are the most enjoyable days. We’ve planted our garden – beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, onions, eggplant, lettuce, created a pepiniere, built the fence and compost pile, started a tree nursery with shea, meringa, jatropha, learned seed harvesting for cucumbers, mango, shea, melon, zaba, and transplanted into the garden.

A run or a bike ride after class, sometimes to the next town over for some sort of something that’s legitimately cold at the bar, which looks like a larder beer garden with thatched huts and white walls and green bushes. If you squint a little bit you might be able to pretend that the ocean is on the other side of the wall and I’m trying to get a tan. In the shade.

Home for dinner with the family. And the waifs and strays who come in. Sitting for the evening in these wooden recliners that are both the most and least comfortable chars I’ve ever sat in. A darkening sky above and heat lightening in the distance. Listening for any hint of thunder that might promise rain. More bucket baths and studying by lamplight. Palling into bed exhausted to fall prey to my meflaquin dreams.