Family Life

When I got back from Mali, I fell into a bit of a funk, brought on by a combination of things…though I think mostly just that, now that I’ve been here for a month, the novelty of things here has begun to wear off. Of course, the fact that I have been spending all my waking hours at the office, severely limiting my ability to make friends here or explore the town, hasn’t helped much either. I keep reminding myself that I only have one more month here, so even if some things are hard it’s not like I’ll have to deal with them for long. Still, this week I’ve tried to do little things to make life here a little easier, including finding myself some staple foods that I’ve been craving, doing yoga in the mornings, and spending a bit more time with my host family in the evenings even though I get home late and am usually pretty tired. My host brother, Papis, makes tea in the evening and drinks it out of shot glasses, which I thought was pretty amusing until I tried the tea and realized how strong it is…I can’t imagine drinking a whole glass of it, though it is really good. Their cousin came over on Wednesday and made his own kind of tea, and it was even stronger and tasted suspiciously like tobacco. In addition to drinking tea with my family, I’ve been watching a lot of soccer with them and expanding my French vocabulary to include terms like off-sides, yellow and red card, score, goal keeper etc. Also, Mohammed, my littlest host brother, has started showing his affinity for American rap music and has taken to rapping for me in what he claims is English (and then making fun of me when I can’t understand him. I’m still not sure if it’s my limited knowledge of American rap music or his interpretation of the songs and highly accented English that is preventing me from understanding, but the song I’ve been able to understand so far is when he sang “go charmagne, it’s your birthday, gonna party like its your birthday” – which was hilarious. )