I've been back from vacation about a month now and it seems like kind of a lot has hapened! I'll try to give you the highlights...

The new stage has arrived! One of the big things every new stage does is demystification, which is when the new Peace Corps trainees go out to second year volunteers' sites for a couple days. It's the first opporutnity trainees have to see what a volunteer's daily life is like, and it's a pretty memorable experience. I had a blast on my demyst, so I decided I wanted to host a new trainee. I wasn't sure if I would get one, since I live so far away, but Peace Corps sent one trainee all the way out to my town! We had a good time, and it made me realize how much I've learned in the past year, so I'm glad I got to host somebody.

The other big thing that's been going on is Ramadan. Ramadan kinda really sucks. It's a month of fasting. It affects everything! Nobody (no muslims) can drink anything or eat anything from the time the sun rises til the sun sets. Nothing! I could handle not eating, but it's crazy not to drink anything, especially when it's so freaking hot! It's so unhealthy and everybody is (understandably) miserable and tired all the time. And it's really great that everyday they complain about having headaches and ask me for meds all the time. Uhhh I can't imagine why! Maybe, just maybe, the reason your head hurts it has to do with the fact that you're not drinking any water and are starving yourself half to death. So ridiculous. What's more ridiculous is that some people actually think it's good for their health! A couple nights ago this guy told me that fasting was really good for you. He's all "during the other months of the year I can't sleep, but during Ramadan I sleep perfectly well!" You idiot, of course you can sleep, you don't have any energy to do anything else cuz you're not eating or drinking at all! Well, there you have my little rant on Ramadan. I could keep going but I'll spare you, and leave you with some Random Africa Moments.

Random Africa Moments:

So I don’t know if these will be particularly funny to you, but they were definitely moments that made me realize I’m not in Kansas anymore. They all happen to involve my host mom, too.

1) It took me a while to realize this, but people here don’t really use our calendar. I don’t know why I thought they would. Anyway, I think I’ve mentioned before that the Senegalese call white people ‘toubabs.’ A few nights ago, my host mom says to me “Hey Aissata, no foti balde lewru toubab?,” which literally translated means, “how many days toubab month?” I thought she was asking how many days were in a month, so I told her 30 or 31. She laughed and told me I didn’t understand, which is true, I didn’t really know what she was getting at. I thought she wanted to know how many days were in a month…turns out she wanted to know the date (Senegalese people get paid at the end of every ‘toubab’ month, so if they have a relative working out of town the relative will send money at the end of the month, which is pretty much the only reason people here care about the date). Either way, she calls our system of dates “toubab months,” which I thought was funny. I mean, when you hear somebody say “today is September 29,” you might think “OK. Cool. A couple more days until October. I wonder if there’s any good football games on this weekend. Halloween is soon!” That’s what my thought process used to be like. Now I’m just going to think “September 29^th. Hmm. Ninth month of the toubab. 29^th day of the ninth month of toubab. Close to the end of the toubab month. Tenth month of toubab starts soon. Money comes soon. Hooray for the end of toubab month. I can buy even MORE rice. AWESOME. ”

2) During demyst, I was sitting outside with my host family and my demyster (the new Peace Corps trainee who came to visit), whose name is Kasha McGuffis. My host mom comes up and asks my demyster what her last name was, so Kasha replies, “McGuffis.” My mom grunts, “huhh???” so Kasha repeats it again, and this time my mom goes “Huh? Nescafe?!?” Close lady, close. I think the best part was that everybody absolutely burst out laughing, because ‘Nescafe’ is obviously not even close to ‘McGuffis,’ but that’s just what came to my host mom’s mind. She laughed at herself, too, and it still makes me chuckle to think about her saying "Nescafe" in an attempt to say "McGuffis." That's probably how my Pulaar sounds to them...

3) I don’t think I’ve really talked about all the animals too much yet….but there’s a lot of them. Lots of goats and cows. They all go out to the fields in the morning, and come back in the late afternoon. Frequently the goats run around the front of my family’s compound, where they’re not supposed to be. It’s not a huge deal, somebody just has to shoe them away, but sometimes they’re kind of obnoxious. They climb up on everything and try to eat everything. One afternoon I was sitting in my room and I hear my mom making all kinds of noise trying to shoe off the goats. I could tell she was in the middle of doing her prayer beads, because she doesn’t talk when she’s doing them, she only makes grunt-like noises. It’s funny to hear her grunt her way through a conversation, but it’s even funnier when she’s mad and can only express herself through grunts.

So on this particular afternoon I could hear my host mom’s angry grunts and I hear the scurrying sound of multiple goat hooves. I got up and looked out the door just in time to see my mom pick up a goat that was on a stick bed (low table-like thing used to sleep/sit on) and just totally chuck it on the ground! There was a huge thud, and a reactionary ‘baaaa.’ Hilarious! It was one of those jaw-to-the-floor followed by a surge of insuppressible laughter moments. It kinda looked like a scene from a movie when some chick is mad at her boyfriend and she picks up a pile of his clothes and then chucks them on the floor in anger…only this was a fairly sizeable animal picked up by a praying, grunting, old Senegalese woman. And to complete the moment, the goat landed on its back and couldn’t get up, so my mom gives it a couple of good kicks to help it up. So funny. I wonder what the goat was thinking. He was probably just praying to make it to the end of the toubab month when my mom will be in a better mood.

Part I

Hey folks. Long time no talk. I think from now on you can just assume that I apologize for not having updated my blog in a while, instead of me apologizing and making excuses every time. Deal? Cool beans.

I will say one thing, though. One of the reasons I don’t get around to writing that often is that I try to put some thought into my entries, and sometimes I have to wait a bit to be inspired. Well, just a few minutes ago I received an inspirational text from Bryn, one of my best Peace Corps friends, and closest neighbor from my stage (she’s only about 200k away!). Anyway, her text mentioned that the new stage is gathering today in Atlanta, which is where they will have a few days orientation and then depart to the motherland of good ‘ol Ahhfreekah!! Obviously I’ve known that the one-year mark was approaching, but for some reason knowing that the next group of volunteers is officially on their way makes it seem real. So that, my friends, was my inspiration to opening up my computer and writing a blog entry.

And now this is the paragraph where I say something profound. And this is the part where you have to insert your own profound thoughts, cuz now that I’m here I don’t have any.

As I’ve been sitting here trying to decide what to write, I decided I would have a celebratory Fun Dip…you know, the candy that has a stick of pretty much pure sugar that you use to dip into more sugar? It didn’t have the desired affect. It didn’t elicit any profound or even remotely intelligent thoughts. My tongue is just a little more raw than it was before. Sigh.

I guess the reason I’m having a hard time putting words to my thoughts is that my thoughts are seemingly contradictory and probably don’t make much sense. Recently, I’ve been amazed at how comfortable I’ve gotten living here. I’ve also realized that at times I’ve almost resisted getting comfortable, for fear of….I don’t really know…getting too comfortable maybe? Preferring Senegal over America? Losing a sense of what’s “normal?” Losing western ways? Or just becoming straight up weird and crazy?

A few weeks ago I took a vacation and went back to the States (more details on the trip to follow). I think what made me realize my resistance to getting too comfortable in Senegal was my relief to still feel normal and at home in America. I was really afraid that I would be totally freaked out by...everything. Freaked out by America, the fast pace, white people everywhere, the cleanliness, speaking English, freezing in an air-conditioned house, grass, trees. I was afraid my stomach would be freaked out by not eating oily rice for nearly every meal, which I guess was a pretty legitimate concern! I’m sure you will all be relieved to know that neither my stomach nor I as a whole was freaked out by America. My stomach welcomed the balanced diet and I definitely appreciate everything America has to offer even more now. But being in America and talking about Senegal and trying to explain it to people made me appreciate Senegal, the culture and my experience here more, too. The culture in Senegal is just really cool! Really different, and sometimes really frustrating, but still really cool. It’s not the kind of culture that jumps out in your face, like ridiculously scary piercings and tribal war songs and dances and clicking languages that sometimes stereotypically define Africa. It’s the kind of culture that you can only learn by living and experiencing daily life here. Being in America made me realize how much I’ve learned in a year, and how much more comfortable I’ve grown to be here, how normal it is for me to go about my daily life here.

And then, the vacation was over. As always it was hard to say bye to family and friends, but the transition back to Senegal was pretty easy, too. I’ve come to the conclusion that America is what it is and Senegal is what it is. I don’t need to overanalyze my being in one place over the other. Instead of counting down days until I leave hoping that I’ll make it and still want to be here in a few months, I have more of the attitude that I only have a year left, and I want to enjoy it and make the most out of it. I think that’s good, right? I can do my thing and just be :)

Now the contradictory part. As I said I’m comfortable in Senegal, it’s been a great experience, and I feel at home and normal here. However, when I got the text about the new group of volunteers coming to Senegal, I thought, “WHAT A BUNCH OF CRAZY PEOPLE!! They’re voluntarily coming to Africa for two years! Why? They have no idea what they’re getting themselves into! I wonder if they’re feeling the same way I did this time last year?!?” And then all of the sudden I understood why so many people thought I was crazy for wanting to do this, and how they didn’t really understand why I did want to do it.

Maybe it does make sense. Now that I know what’s gone into this past year and I realize how different American culture is from Senegalese culture, I see that it might seem strange to intentionally take yourself out of your element and be plopped down in another, completely different world. It’s really great though most of the time! I promise!

So now you know the inner workings of my mind. Not quite sure why I’m putting this on a public website.

Next topic: America!! I went home in August for a short vacation, and it was fabulous. I was home for less than two weeks, and I was pretty busy most of the time! I got to have a couple dinners with family and friends, which were great, and week of it was spent at the beach on the Outer Banks, North Carolina. I had several friends from college and high school fly in from various locations to spend some time with me and my family at the beach….it was so great! Thank you to everybody who came, it meant so much to see you guys :) Everybody helped me celebrate my 23rd birthday while we were at the beach, too. The week at the beach went by pretty quickly, and after only one more day in Richmond I was back at the airport, heading back to Senegal.

So Im back now, and I feel like a lot is happening! Im planning on coming back to internet after lunch, so I will hopefully write Part II very soon and fill you in!