I had the ideal morning today. I had more time to do things since I needed to report to Ida's at ~10:30 ish for one-on-ones. I had ample time to do all my chores, practice counting with the babies (2-5 year olds), and actually enjoyed my breakfast without the fear of getting sand seasoned in it every time I opened the cover. It's called tiga sombi and I've been having it for the past couple of days. It's a really delicious rice porridge with pounded peanuts and a questionable amount of sugar but it's damn good. Anywho, I set up my space so that my suitcase became my table at the junction between my front and back door for maximum ventilation. You can tell how satisfied/excited I am with this arrangement with this in depth description. The mornings are so briskly refreshing before the sun demands the spotlight back and melts us all. When I was finally settled down, I went over notes and wrote a huge 22 line monologue with what baby Serehule / baby Hule I knew. I was pretty proud of my creation - I tried my best to incorporate a series of verbs/nouns/phrases that I knew. I tried catching Rohi/the Alkaloo's daughter before going to Ida's but she left for the rice fields already. Instead, I greeted the women in her compound and carried on.
Once I got to Ida's, I read her my spiel and I guess it was good because she was laughing/smiling/clapping and even her host sister who I see every day understood me! Obviously I made grammatical mistakes but Ida was really impressed and told me to keep on journaling...since she wanted me to get to advanced by next month -_______- I'll try my hardest but the request seems so daunting. My tactic is to use less of the workbook unless I want to learn vocabulary but my main focus is to master making snetences in the past/present/future. Ida complimented me and asked what Chinese people give to their kids to make their children so smart hahahaha. Probably verbal abuse and/or all the pressure in the world. JUST KIDDING, that only applies to me personally and not meant to generalize! She said all her past Asian students picked up language quickly. Who knows, maybe iet's because we're bilingual. I'm getting through Serehule through making stupid/funny word associations and sheer determination to memorize. Serehule is friggin hard but at least it's not Chinese... which is a jumble of 5000 characters of your worst nightmare. I got a few valuable moments exercise-studying on Ida's mat in her house before lunch came and today was domada, otherwise known as delicious peanut sauce with oil and vegetables with rolled up fried fish. We had a memorable conversation about when kids stop questioning and expressing themselves in The Gambia, politics in America, and marriage (or the dark side behind it).
Afterwards, Elizabeth and I went outside to study. A bit later, the PACA training crew came by again and we learned about needs assessment and the pair wise graph/voting. Bah2, one of the friendliest Gambians I know who reminds me of a penguin for some reason and a God of all things related to gardening, Peter the Driver (who is also short like Bah2), and my PCVL/RA Daniel went to our houses to teach us how to transplant/examine our gardens. I didn't do much learning, more like watching and reveling at their skill. Peter quickly fixed my bike chain in a matter of 2 seconds so I can ride my bike again! Bah2 examined my garden and said my nursery was good (eggplants) but it needs to be thinned. I can also peel away my cover for my nursery which is really just a plastic bag from Target. The real problem is is with the nocturnal termites which is apparently an endemic in Gambian soil throughout the country. I gave them water and peanuts before they left (which Bah2 thought was from America because I put them in my recycled pretzel bag...silly Bah2) and he told me he would give me his home made pesticide which involves garlic, onion, tobacco, and IDK what else. He did say that he loved my Serehule-group's compost pile! Good, that shit's hard to turn every weekend and gives me the creeps every night when I see suspicious holes like something is burrowing in it. I made them wash their hands before they left... because they are in a health volunteer's home and they just touched my compost pile! Come on, Bah2.
I then biked to Alicia's to grab a couple of things for her when we meet in training village tomorrow (Jenoi). It was an effort remembering exactly what to say and also explaining to them my battle scars from yesterday. They were all very nice though but only the adults could understand me so they would translate what I had to say to the kids by fast forwarding my sentences to 1,000 words a second... because that's how fast they speak. It was dark by the time I returned, had to pack all my stuff and found my last energy reserves to go out and teach the kids for about an hour. That's success to me. I'm transitioning into subtraction now and hopefully they won't forget by the time I'm back!
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