"I'm not settlin, for anything less than everything"

July 19, 2009
After four days at homestay, I am feeling more and more like Mali is home. The routine helps, as does the little bit of language I've learned. We have language class eight hours a day - very intense! Some days we have environment training as well, and we have a practice garden at one of the other PCT's houses in our village. The garden is coming along very well for the moment. We made five raised beds to plant veggies in, and one pallpaniere (which I'm not spelling correctly, but it's like a nursery for our lettuce and cabbage). So that's exciting, hopefully it will work out and the chickens won't eat everything. We start our tree nursery on Tuesday, which I'm WAY excited about - that's what I'll be doing for the next two years! Yeah reforestation! :)

Communication is getting a bit better - my family is so funny. Every night, a guy comes over who speaks French. And every night, he says I should learn both Bambara and Fulfulde. "It's easy!" he says, but it's not at all. Relearning French, learning Fulfulde, and Bambara on top of that? Nope, too much. So I tell him that my brain is too small to learn both at the same time, and he dies laughing every time. It's like our nightly ritual - he checks to make sure that my brain hasn't grown, and then laughs his head off when I tell him it has not. Pretty funny.

My host sister, Sali, is pretty much the cutest kid ever though. She's probably a little less than a year old, and just learning how to walk. So everyday we walk around the concession together until she gets tired, and then we sit and I talk to her in English about my day. I've started singing her Sugarland songs too, which her mom is greatly amused by. Settlin is her absolute fave - she always starts giggling during the chorus, and it's adorable. I probably sing it at least ten times a day. We have a dance and everything to go with it. The kids here are so great, and we've been having fun coloring and looking at pictures together. I showed them a picture of the White House, and said "Barack Obama lives here" - and they love Barack Obama here - and they were floored. That huge house is Obama's? Crazy!! I couldn't communicate that every president lives there, but they understood the general concept. Language success!