Homestay Family

Here I am, back again to tell you all about my homestay family.

Peace Corps puts trainees with host families to facilitate our integration into Malian life, and to help immerse us in the language.

As I think I’ve already mentioned, myself and two other female trainees were stationed in a small 400 person village not far from Bamako. Our days consisted mostly of language and technical training, with some time left over to socialize with each other and our families.

As is to be expected, the beginning was a bit rough. Both our bodies and our minds were doing their best to process our new surroundings, our new foods and meds, and a whole new language. The first week was the hardest because our stomachs rejected lots of the foods we ate, and our thermostats were thrown for a loop because of the new climate we’d just been dropped into (for more on the climate, see below). Our days were divided into about 6-7 hours of classes, and the rest for free time. Since our village was so small, we spent a lot of time hanging out with our families, which helped our language skills. Despite our limited language, we grew really close to our families, and it was really hard to leave last Sunday morning. I’ve had my fair share of host families in the past, and I’d almost go so far as to say that I had the most fun with this group of people ever. They really and truly welcomed us into their family as one of them.

Malians love to joke, and to make up for a lack of other things to say (mainly because we couldn’t say them, or understand when they were being said to us), we repeated the same jokes over and over again. My host father and my friend’s host father would not only make fun of each other, but they involved the two of us in the game, as well. The jokes started out because the two men would make fun of each other for not working. But then they started telling each other that we, the Americans, couldn’t do x, y, or z activity (like washing clothes, pounding millet, etc…), and then we just all started calling each other crazy. It was really great because it gave us a constant thing to talk about: how any one of us at any moment couldn’t do anything.

We also played a ton of UNO in my family. I first broke out a deck of regular playing cards, and we taught them to play go fish. But then, as you can imagine, that got boring pretty quickly, so we turned to UNO. We must have played at least 3-4 games a day for a week straight. They LOVED it and would constantly ask for it. And again, because it only required a standard, repetitious set of vocabulary, we were able to play it as many times as we wanted because we didn’t necessarily have many other things to talk about.

But at the same time, we had some great conversations. My Bambara really did improve, as did my family’s ability to tailor their speech to my needs. They knew the set of vocab I’d learned and would mush it together to form sentences that I could actually understand. They were really great about it! They would try, and try and try again to explain something I didn’t understand.

We had conversations about the stars, and how when Americans look into the sky, we see shapes and pictures. Malians do not do this. In the course of two months, we probably pointed to every object in our compound and even some in the village and determined whether it existed in America. It’s funny because we have most everything, it’s just in a different form in the US. The most interesting “is x in America” question I got was about my shadow. My family and I were sitting in their house one night and my kerosene lamp cast a big shadow on the wall. I started making shadow puppets on the wall, and they asked me if we had shadows in America.

On the last day, I went out with my two host brothers, 12 and 15, to see their fields and gardens that they’d been planting the entire time we were there. Somehow, my gregarious 12 year old brother ended up with my camera in his hand and, after figuring out how it worked, proceeded to document almost everything we saw on our little walk. I let him hold onto it, and when we got back into town, asked him to come into someone’s compound with me. It was great because he wasn’t bashful about taking close up pictures of people I didn’t really know, and thus would have been too shy to take a photo of. And they almost seemed more relaxed when he snapped the shot.


It's hard to do my family justice in a few paragraphs, so I'm not going to go on much further. My host father told me at our goodbye party in village that our presence in village had given him a purpose again -- he said he used to wander around town, but then we came, and he started coming home more often to hang out. And after "talking" to my American parents on the phone (he greeted them briefly in Bambara), he also told me that when they came to visit, he wanted to come to the airport with me to meet them. Our families are coming for dinner tonight, and we're all really excited for the bad jokes to continue. They really did welcome us in as their family, and did a wonderful job showing us how to live in Mali!

Seasons in Mali:
There are really only two seasons in Mali: dry season and rainy season. We arrived at the beginning of rainy season, so it’s been raining for the past few months, which keeps the heat to a tolerable level. According to a weather.com search I did yesterday, it’s supposed to be in the high 80’s to low 90’s this week. And that’s actually starting to be pretty comfortable. That doesn’t mean it’s not humid, though. Yuck. And so now the rainy season is coming to a close, and we’re expecting a mini hot season starting sooner than later. And then we have a cold season that runs roughly from October to Feb/March, if I understand it correctly. And then comes the brutal heat that lasts from March/April - late May. My friends and I will be strategically planning our vacations to the beach during this season.