A bit into homestay

Hey guys! We know it's been a while since you heard from us and it's because we've been incredibly busy with training and learning and living with our host family. Homestay has been great so far and usually consists of about 6 hours of language training a day with a few breaks in between for food and sanity with the rest of the day spent walking or biking around the area greeting people or trying to use our new language skills with our host family. Which is to say that there's a lot of laughing at various faux pas that we commit on a daily basis.



My own homestay is a bit hectic. I'm living with the chief of a small, mainly agricultural village where most homes have no electricity or running water in most homes. We get our water from pumps or wells in the community and carry them with buckets to wash, cook, or filter into drinking water. It's quite en brouse (French for "in the bush" which is to say that you won't find many of the amenities that you'd normally find in America). The chief's house is always bustling, though, with children running around playing and screaming, adult women doing dishes or cooking, and men guiding donkey carts back home filled with rice so that they can lay them out on flat surfaces to dry.

My work will likely be scattered across a few areas. I'll be working with a women's group trying to help with techniques related to rice cultivation, basic vegetable gardening, and fruit preservation. What does that entail? Well, some of it just involves providing a different perspective on how to do things and presenting it in a way that "sticks" with the audience. I really have no idea just yet what my day-to-day will be, but my impression is that I'm going to help the group experiment with different breeds of rice in different conditions to see what gives good yield. Sounds easy, right? Well, with enough people backing the initiative, sure it would be. But the challenge here is helping get enough people on board and behind the project so that we're all tracking it properly and everyone is educated about the results and getting the feedback they need to stick with it. Therein lies the challenge and what I'll be spending most of my time trying to accomplish.

Anyway, that's about all I have for the moment. It's getting late here and we have to get up early tomorrow morning to do laundry. We'll be leaving for our site visit on Monday morning (early-early) where we'll get a first glimpse of our new home for the next two years. Carolyn will provide a few more tidbits of her own in a bit.