I hope you are all ready for Halloween and the upcoming holiday season, I know I am.
Thanks so much for the letters and packages, it’s so nice to come into san and have letters to read, it’s really easy at site to feel a bit disconnected from the…world.
I’m absolutely falling in love with my site and some of the kids especially have already worked their ways into my heart. While days certainly can creep by, the weeks since I last came to san have absolutely flown by.
I led a short meeting the other day because my community had established the problems they faced to improve their animal raising and one of theirs one a lack of water. So I asked why they didn’t fix their pump and the next day my homologue came back to me with a committee they had formed…unfortunately I can’t really help much until after IST but it’s awesome that I’ve got such a motivated village to work with. Other good news, I’ve really started to develop a good relationship with the school director so I hope I can work with him. He wants me to paint a world map and a map of mali in the schools.
Apparently a dog just had a litter of puppies and both my homologue and my host family have taken on new puppies so that has filled my life with a sort of happiness that only puppies can bring and I have to admit, they are so cute. They offered to give me one and you will all be proud to know that I turned it down. I want to travel with the burden of having a dog plus, can you imagine the tears when I’d have to leave it. So, now I have the best of both worlds because I’ve got puppies everywhere and not the responsibility of taking care of one of them.
I helped my host sister the other day with her English homework which was really awesome because she had a lot of fun and has come to me with questions not even related to school work. All the young girls in village want to braid my hair so after a few days of taking out my braids I’m swarmed. Young kids especially still stare and often poke me…too make sure I’m real I think. It’s also really funny to great people I don’t know in bambara and watch their faces contort as they process the fact that I can speak, or try to speak, their language.
It’s harvest season right now which means my days are absolutely filled with helping the women work. It’s mostly peanuts that they’re harvesting right now so I pick the peanuts from about 9am until 4pm… it makes for long days but they go by fast always having something to do and the women love it! Pretty much everyday about 40 women go to a different house and work all day making big bowls of porridge or toh (both make me gag thus I go home for lunch to eat) but it’s pretty cool to see the strong ties of the community. The men are gone from about dawn until dust at the fields working so everyone is generally exhausted at night which is great for me because now they don’t look at me quite so strange when I go to bed at 9pm.
I’ve started running in the mornings (they find this very entertaining too) so I’m up around 5:30am and belive it or not, it’s almost brisk, for about 5 minutes until I’m sweaty, but I’ve found some gorgeous trails to run on. There are some huge trees that I’ve come to love and use as land marks, if you’ve seen the lion king and can imagine the big tree that rafiki lives in you can imagine the magnitude of these trees. It’s gorgeous to run and it’s such a nice escape to be out in my own without having to think about work or bambara or life as a volunteer.
Love,
Cait
