One day, I stayed up late at night with my host brother, Bubakar, (actually, my Goreejo, that is, my agemate? contemporary? something like that.) He's a tailor, he's awesome, we hang out and drink tea all the time and have a good time. So since I've gotten there, I've always admired the pants my little brother wears. They're made of long stript of fabric, maybe 8 or 10 different patterns on each leg. Then one night, we (as in 15 or so people, the family) were watching a super low budget (like, handheld camera lowbudget) Pula Futa sitcom show on TV (set in Guinea, my family constantly reminded me, because everything is beautiful and wonderful there.) The main character had the same type of pants, and the shirt. I said I liked his clothes, and my brother said "Well alright already, let's just make you some!" So I sat in his tailor shop, he found scraps from all different projects he had done over the past long while, and he started at it with his foot-pumped sewing machine. Then, about 15 minutes in, the power went out. The lights turn off, it got super dark, and everything in the town kinda stopped. The power goes out all the time, however. So when I told Bubakar that we should go sit with the family, who was out cooking by the fire. He looked at me like I was crazy: "how will you wear these pants then??" Then he took out his cellphone, turned on its flashlight, held it in his mouth, and kept at it with the sewing machine as if nothing had happened. So I ended up holding the phone over the machine as he sewed for 3 or 4 hours, me speaking my broken Pula Futa, trying to fill it in with my French, and him at work, with occasional tea breaks. Now, I have a patchwork shirt and pants, a total Guinean Senegalias outfit, which I'll be saving for Tubaski, the upcoming gigantic Muslium holiday, which will coincidentally be my 4th day on site. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eid_al-Adha)
So most days, me and the 3 other Pula Futa volunteers in my homestay town have langauge class all day. But the day before our big language exam, we got the day off. So me and two other volunteers, Jubal and Ilana, who'll be close to me in actual site as well, went on a little adventure. Ilana's host dad, Ibrahim, took us for a walk, ostensibly to get hit shirt ironed, in another town, about an hour or so walk. Not too sure about that. But it was a great chance to get out of our sandy little town and see around the area, We walked down a path, asll of us working together tp try to make normal/good sentences in Pula Futa and talk with Ibraham, a tigi tigi (real) Pula Futa. We asked what every plant was, where every road led, everything that could be asked with 10 words or less and knowledge of only a couple hundred words anyway. We got to the little town, where we were greeted as heroes, perhaps the first white people to step there in who knows how long. Kids chased all around us, asking where we're from, pulling out chairs from their houses and bringing them to the road for us to sit in and just getting really excited that such strange and exotic people were in their town. We walked around, got a tour of the town, then a tour of an amazing mango orchard, where we relaxed after the long walk and shared a couple mangoes. Then we saw the entire sky was rapidly turning black. The rains, the first one we had seen at our homestay (you would not believe how dry it is there, everything is beachsand,) started fast. So we went to Ilana's dad's cousins house (everyone has a cousin everywhere) and had an amazing lunch. We all got around a giant bowl, had a huge amount of rice and fish, as the rain (which quickly died down to a sprinkle) came down around the outdoor patio-thing area. While we were eating the man of the house asked us if we had seen Lac Rose yet, a local apparently pink rose, which we had all seen signs for. We said no, so he immediately offered to take us there on his donkey cart after lunch.How could we say no? First, Ibrahim said we needed to say hi to his other cousin, who had apparently also invited us for lunch. We said hi to them, and they demanded we have lunch with them, we looked so hungry. We were all stuffed (eating a lot means you enjoy your host's company and appreciate their generosity here, so any random meal with someone leads to some serious stuffing.) But they wouldn't take no for an answer, so we sat down and has another bowl of rice and fish. We joked afterwards, trying to say "I had lunch two times" in Pulaar. We all hopped on right the donkey cart after and had a surprisingly smooth ride to a kind of dirty and salt-filled lake. It was wonderful. We walked home, passing through tiny 30, 50 person towns, greeting everyone, stopping for tea here and there, and just walking around peanut fields, baobab trees, and vague paths.
But most days aren't quite this kind of adventure. Most are long, arduous language lessons which start at 6:30am ish when I wake up (the mosque rings for first prayer call around 5:30 and it's hard to sleep more after that) and don't end till 11 or 12 when my family lets me stop drinking tea and just go to bed. Pula Futa, as a Fula language, is very very diferent in almost every way from Romance or Germanic languages. Pulaar is verb-based, so virtually all sentences are only pronouns, nouns, and verbs, and adjectives and adverbs and others hardly exist. Even a lot of nouns are just forms of verbs. So "I am happy" is "I <to be happy.>" "I haven't seen you in a long time!" is "I <to have been a long time> <to have not seen> < possessive you.> It's easy with small sentences, it gets super complicated with more verbs and tense. And the tenses aren't traditional past/present/future. Present and future tense are the same, and past really means started in the past but continuing now, so you always say "I thought..." and never "I think." Finally, verbs are divided into ugol, egol, and agol, meaning action, reflexive, and reciprocal. But "to weed (a field)" is reflexive, and statements of emotion are always in past reflexive, and who know's what an action word anyway-- apparently "to be" is an action in Pulaar. Oh, and very few prepositions, most of the time you change the verb root (but not the ending, so its a chance in the middle of the verb, that is, not a suffix or a prefix but an "infix.") So "I ate with my family" is "I <to eat, with "id" added to say to do something with> <family> <mine.>" And there's a solid 15 infixes know so far. And everything is a verb, so even "I'm happy," "I'm sad," "I am curious," "We need to go fast, night is coming" or whatever are all verbs to be conjugated. It's totally new, I love it, and man, is it hard. But it's great. It makes my mind think in totally different ways (two different sets of numbers for people and things,) is exceedingly difficult (I still find it much easier to write down a sentence and then attempt to say it,) but that all makes it completely worth it.
So, finally, after all of us volunteers finished a seemingly endless 2 week homestay, we returned to the training center, and were walked out to the giant map of Senegal painted on the basket ball court. All 55 of us were blindfolded and taken 1 by 1 to stand on our approximate site placement. We all took off our blindfolds and saw where we'll be, for 2 years, once training ends in 4ish more weeks. We had been in suspense since we got here, so it was a pretty intense experience. So! I'll be in the state of Kedougou, in a town called Chiange / Thiange. It's a town of about 500, about 35k from the state capital, about 6K from any paved road, and about 5K from the border with Guinea. My town is 100% Pula Futa, most of whom are probably Guinean immigrants. Talking to volunteers, Kedougou sounds amazing and like the best place in all of Senegal. It's got lush forests, avocados, monkeys, waterfalls, peanut sauce always on the menu, lots of bikeable terrain, and a great set of volunteers already there. There was a volunteer at my site ten years ago, and several community gardens were started, so I'll be jumping back in to work with local farmers to increase food security. 10 years is a long time, so it'll be interesting to see what traces of see of past volunteers are there, and to see how people react to a new volunteer after so long. 4K from me is Kyle, another Pula Futa volunteer starting now, and two other volunteers are about 30K west of me. My good friend Frank, a Jaxonke speaker, will be about 80K east, almost on the border with Mali. Needless to say, this will be a different Senegal than on the coast, or north of the Gambia, or inland, more surrounded by other Senegalese towns. Rather, my site will be very Guinean, with not as much Wolof (the more "national" language) spoken. It should be amazing. I don't know a whole lot, but I'll be visiting Monday, going with a current volunteer to Kedagou city, then biking to my site, spending a night there and meeting my host family, with whom I'll be living with (though in my own hut) for two years. Not much else to say! Can't wait! Next update with pictures of my site-to-be!
Bottom right hand corner!
PS. Next homestay, I'm cooking American style spaghetti with my family. Spaghetti here is cooked in oil and salt, then served on sandwiches. I'm looking forward to eating spaghetti with 15 people out of one gigantic bowl, some people eating with spoons, others with their hands. Can't wait!
