Beach and more training

written Wednesday, 8 August 2007

 

 

This month I am back in Thies for more training, but before coming here I went to the beach for a few days for a little relaxing time with the other volunteers.   Unfortunately, during the rainy season apparently the ocean gets really rough, so it was too dangerous to do much more than get my feet wet.  And I felt really anxious and antsy the whole weekend for no reason, which I am blaming on my malaria medicine.  So it didn't turn out to be a very relaxing weekend, but it was still fun.

 

Now back in Thies I am really happy to see my old host family again.  It was a bit of a shock seeing the 2 year old girl again - she is so much bigger than the 2 year olds in my village.   I hadn't realized I was getting used to children being underweight and malnourished.

 

I have started learning Pulafuuta this week, which is a dialect of Pulaar and is spoken by the majority of people in my village.   The Pulaar people are nomadic herders and can be found in just about every country in Africa, so if I continue to work in Africa after Peace Corps it might come in handy.  But aside from practicality, it is a very pretty and funny language (the way some of the words are pronounced sounds like they have a hiccup in the middle of them), and I am having fun learning it.   And I can't wait to go back to my village at the end of the month and impress my villagers with my new skills.