We leave for Ayorou tomorrow!!! We are so excited! We will start our literacy classes next week. This week we will be getting to know some of the people we will be teaching and other people in the village. The only sad thing about moving to the village is leaving behind our friends here and our family that we’ve been with for the past month. L We left our family Saturday and it was really hard. We plan on visiting them every time we come into town though, so we are really looking forward to that!
Our language learning has gone really well, but now we are not so sure about going out and talking to people on our own! We can speak pretty well and our teacher did very well in teaching us how to think of Zarma words to use instead of trying to directly translate from English to Zarma. The difficult part is understanding everything people say. Most people talk a lot faster than what we can hear right now. If there is a word we don’t know, that one word can totally change the meaning of the sentence which makes it hard to give them the right response. We may think they said one thing when they actually said something totally different! Because our people speak a different dialect of Zarma, one thing we’ll encounter in the village is different pronunciation of certain words. Our supervisor was telling us that the words we learned that start with an “f” will start with an “h”. Like “foy” (sauce) will be “hoy”. We’ll have to be paying a lot of attention and we’ll probably end up playing the “sounds like” game… Learning a new language is so fun, but it also fries your brain at the same time! Lol What’s crazy is the capacity little kids have to learn multiple languages. There have been quite a few times when Crystal and I have said something in English and one of the kids around us would repeat it exactly! And it could be a big word that is very different from any word they have, but they still caught on to it! We have a hard time repeating some small words in Zarma!
Last Sunday we went to the museum with our sister and her fiancé. It’s more like a small zoo and museum mixed. There was a building with tools and artifacts from the villages that were used centuries ago and a lot of them are still used today, they just look a little different and have some modifications. They have lions, hippos, alligators, monkeys, hyenas, a different kind of owl that I’ve never seen before, and all kinds of African animals. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hyena before, unless I saw some at a zoo when I was really little. I was excited to see the hyenas, but disappointed because they were sleeping so I couldn’t hear if they actually do laugh or not. ;) The hippos were huge! Then we found out that the hippos around our village are actually bigger! Yikes… They also had 2 huge crocs. There were steps that led down to their cage, but the gate at the top of the steps was locked. However, you could easily jump over the gate and go down the steps to get a closer look at them, but Crystal and our big sister wouldn’t let me… Lol I still got some good pics of them though. ;) I promise I won’t get eaten by a croc or a hippo while I’m out here; but I can’t promise I won’t try to tame a zebra though… ;)
The language barrier here can be frustrating, but most of the time it’s just funny! The other night we showed our brother how to make the awkward turtle hand motion. When he finally got it all figured out and we explained with a mixture of Zarma and English what it meant, I said to Crystal, “We can write a 12-step book on teaching Africans the awkward turtle.” He wanted to know what I said, and I thought, “Oh, man! How are we gonna explain the 12-step thing to him?” So we tried, but in the end he thought we were saying that the turtle took 12 steps! We laughed so hard and he laughed ‘cause he thought we were just being weird (which we were Lol). After that it was time for the family to talk to JC, so we were spared from having to try to explain it better.
I really love the kids! The little boy who kept coming into our compound and calling us “anasara” finally started talking to us. Over this last week we got to kinda play with him, so that was fun. He has a LOT of energy! I think he’s around 4 or 5, so you can imagine what I mean when I say he’s got a lot of energy… ;) One of his friends would follow him into the compound and just smile real big at us! So cute! There was a little girl that would come in because she wanted me to make faces at her so she could copy me. The first evening she came by I made faces at her for about 10 minutes before she decided to leave and go get some more of her friends. While she was gone, one of the uncles of our family said that we were the first white people the girl had seen and she wanted us to be her friends. When she came back with a group of other kids, she came over to shake my hand, but was unsure about it. She grabbed the tips of my fingers then let go really fast and jumped back! Then after the other kids shook our hands she came back and shook my hand then went over and shook Crystal’s. They still like to holler “anasara” at us and want us to call them “boro bi”. The adults get a kick out of us calling the kids “boro bi” and will say to the kids something like, “Hey, there’s the anasara!” And they’ll point to the kids and call them “boro bi” too. What’s really funny is when we call the kids anasara. They look at their skin and then look at us and say, “Ay si anasara! Ni ga anasara! (I’m not anasara! You’re anasara!)” and giggle.
The daughter of some friends of the family stayed with us the last 2 weeks we were in our homestay. She’s 4 and adorable! Toward the end of the first week she finally decided she would talk to us, then after that she wouldn’t leave us alone! Lol She likes to give hugs and kisses, but she also likes to pull hair… Luckily our Zarma is enough to tell kids “no” when we need to ;) She was a lot of fun, and she would sing and clap all the time. She helped out our homestay mom cook and clean and it seemed like her favorite thing to do was pounding the seasonings and leaves for the sauces. Hmmm, a little kid that likes to pound things… imagine that! Lol At least here when they’re pounding it’s actually helping! Haha She wasn’t happy with us when we left Saturday; I don’t think she understood that we really didn’t live there. L We kept telling her over the past couple weeks, “Ay ga ba ni” (I love you). So the last few days we were there she would ask, “Ni ga ba ay?” (You love me?) And we would say, “O’O (yes), ay ga ba ni”. We miss her. We can’t wait to meet the kids in Ayorou!
We met a couple guys the other day that wanted to marry us… I have a hard time not laughing at people when I think they’re being silly, so unfortunately for my “suitor”, I laughed at him a lot. I wasn’t laughing to be rude, and I don’t think he ever caught on as to why I was laughing. I think he thought I didn’t understand what he was getting at, but I did understand. So when they came back a couple days later, we stayed in our room the whole time they were visiting. We pretended to be napping. It was pathetic, but it was funny. Just another adventure! Lol We stayed in our room til our older brother came home from work and told us they were gone. He asked us why we were still in our room (since rest time had been over for awhile…) and when we told him why, his eyebrows shot up and he started laughing. He told his parents why we stayed in there and they laughed and said it was ok to come out ‘cause they were gone. They teased us a lot about it, but it’s all good. It’s not like we haven’t met silly guys before…. ;)
We were so excited to get our first care package last week! We had been saying a few nights earlier that we really wanted double-stuff oreo cookies. In the package were 3 packages of not just oreos, but double-stuff oreos! When we ate them we were in heaven! They tasted so good! ;) Ask and you will receive! ;)
I’m experiencing my first time of ever feeling homesick. It hasn’t been bad, but when I have time to stop and think about what everyone is doing and what’s going on back home, I really want to be a part of what’s going on. At the same time though, I’m so happy and grateful to be here. I’ve always been one to want everyone I know to be in one place together, and that’s what I’m experiencing now; I just want everyone back home to be here and meet everyone I’ve met here and then we can all be together and share in this as one ginormous family! One day… ;)
We are so excited to finally be moving to the village and settling into our house! Everything we’ve been preparing for will finally start to come about! We’ve been planning for this for so long, and it’s finally coming! I’m excited, but don’t know what all to expect. All I can expect are great and wonderful things to happen. I can’t wait to see what has been prepared for us and who is waiting when we get there. I should have plenty of things to post in my next blog. Probably quite a bit of cultural “oops’” and what-not. Since we’re staring our first week of literacy training next week, I’m sure we’ll have plenty of stories as we will be working through the kinks and discovering what works and doesn’t work. I keep thinking of that Indiana Jones scene in The Last Crusades when he crosses the bridge that doesn't seem to really be there. Not until he takes that first step does he see the bridge that's already built for him...
Yall take care, and again, thank you all for your support and your continued support while we are over here! Yall are the best!
