1st Homestay

I’m back to Thies for 3 days! I’ll give a basic rundown of my daily life (at the home stay):

Wake up at 5am to the rooster crowing outside, lay in bed for 2 hours.

Get out of bed and shower above the toilet (which is not so much a toilet and more of a hole in the ground).

3 hours of class (for French which I feel like I speak at a pretty competent level)

Sit in the compound and eat lunch, back to class, back to the compound for dinner and watch TV, then go to bed, and start all over again. I can never sit in my room because it’s rude to not be outside with everyone. For the most part everyone speaks Seerer (the local language) and only speaks French to me. I do free like my French is improving and in 50 more days I’ll be pretty much fluent.

I live in a family compound made of 3 houses. I have a 10ft by 6ft cement room with a door and not much airflow. Class is in the compound next to mine under a mango tree. The first day all of the kids were scared of us but by the second day they LOVED us and followed us everywhere we went. At one point, I saw some girls squat around a tree and all pee. Another day I saw kids chewing on a wire (not hooked up to anything). I also got to go to church (it was a catholic village) which was really awesome. It was probably the coolest thing, the farthest from the Vatican I’ve ever seen. There was a drum and clapping and singing. Everyone was dressed in beautiful clothes, and EVERYONE stared when I went up to get communion (makes sense, I was the only white person in there). Overall things are going well, but I’m sure I’ll have more to update once I start remembering things from the past week.

Best,
KO