One month down....26 to go!

Hello!
I am still here and apologize to everyone for not keeping up with blogging. Internet is slow here at the Peace Corps training site and time is limited. It's hard having 70-some new best friends!

I've been living in my home stay village for the past three-or-so weeks now, and it's been going really well. I'd like to have some photos to show for it, but my camera isn't cooperating at the moment! Life is good in our teeny, tiny town of about 400 people. Everyone (and I mean everyone) knows who we are, and we know almost everyone! We've been spending most of the day in class, desperately trying to learn Bambara so we can communicate with our host families. My host father fortunately speaks peace meal French, so we get the big ideas across, but I need to speak Bambara to communicate with the 24 other people in my compound. Yes, I said 24. Immediately upon arriving into town, I had 25 new family members. Mali is a polygamous country and most rural people have lots and lost of children, which logically translates into huge families! So who exactly are these people? Well, there's my host family which consists of a father, two mothers, and lots and lots of kids (I think 10 in all). The oldest of that bunch is 15, and the youngest is a babe in arms. The other people in the compound are as follows: my host grandmother, her daughter-in-law (whose husband is gone, I think), and two other men and their wives. There aren't many adults, but there sure are lots of children. And the kids and I get along marvelously. I don't have much vocabulary, but that certainly doesn't mean there aren't things to do at home. Here's the quick run down of the ways I keep myself occupied:

I jump rope (over and over and over and over) with the kids with enough motor skills to keep up (and sometimes with those who jump and hope the rope will pass under them when they're up!), teach jumping jacks to the little kids who are too small to jump rope, do star jumps to those who aren't coordinated enough to get the hands and feet moving at the same time for jumping jacks (all the while saying the Bambara word for star -lolo- of course!), play Go Fish and War, play Go Fish again, and again, and again. I learned the body parts, counted, counted and learned the body parts again, and then jumped rope some more. They've laughed at me while I try to wash my clothes out of a bucket, they've watched and laughed as I've tried (successfully more often than not) to haul water out of the well, prepared my own bath water, brewed tea (almost a ritualistic tradition in Mali. And also something that takes up a lot of time, which is key when vocabulary is limited!). They've died laughing when I tried to pound grain with the women, and then laughed some more when they handed me a ho and told me to pull weeds in the farm fields. They've buckled over when I've almost wiped out (you should have seen the skid mark I left yesterday!) in the inch-thick mud in the compound after it rains. And they've whispered amongst themselves and then chuckled when my host father tells everyone who comes into the compound that this American loves peanut butter on her bread in the morning. Apparently, they only make peanut butter to use in sauce on their food; they never eat it on bread! They laugh when they find out that we have cows, donkeys, chickens, cats and dogs in America. They laugh when I repeat things like a broken record. They laugh when they point to someone and ask me their name and I smile sheepishly because I can't remember their name for the life of me (I'm getting better, though!). They laugh when I say yes (owo!), and when I vocalize an American uh-huh for "I GET IT!!!". They've started mimicking my "dum dum dum" noises I make when I'm trying to explain something with gestures because I don't have the words for it. And they laugh when I go to bed at 8:30 at night. Who is this un-married white girl who's come to Mali to work for two years with the vocabulary of a new born? Sometimes (more often than not) I wonder why they decided to host us in the first place! But slowly, slowly (doni, doni), I'm catching on and they're learning to interpret my gramatically garbled phrases and words. We start technical training in health soon, so hopefully I'll be able to start talking to them about something other than the time of day or what I just did, am doing at that moment, or am going to do in the near future. I'll keep you posted.
In other news, I go to my site this Saturday to see my new home for the next two years! I'll be living in the Sikasso region, which is in the southern part of the country. It's supposed to be great because of the year round availability of fruits and veggies! Hurray!

And my computer battery is dying, so I'm going to have to end this. Keep me updated on life in the US!!!