We arrived in the village to what can best be described as chaos. Pretty much all of the people in the place and the surrounding compounds had assembled in Keur Sadaro's small market square. Kids and adults were shouting at everyone and everything, and the chatter was immense. I'm pretty sure that the little kids in the school tried to sing a song for us, but I couldn't hear more than one word in twenty, and I didn't even understand that one word. Later, we were claimed by different families, and walked to our houses. None of us were allowed to carry any baggage.
I shared a compound with Amanda (Drew '10), Justin (Lick '11), Annika (Lick '11), and Sydney (Lick '10) that was maybe a kilometer away from the main village. Yes, it was one big happy family, I know, I know. We were all given Wolof names (I was Bara Chow), and were named after one of our brothers or sisters --usually the cutest one.
The kids in the village are by far the best part of the experience. There are three defined groups of them: the 3-5 year old kids, the 6-10 year old kids, and the 11+ kids, but usually, I can't get any more accurate than that in telling their ages. Nobody cries, though, which is really nice.
I think the reason for that is because the moms are too harassed to respond to crying children, unless it's really bad. For example, my "siblings" were running around one day, pretending to be goats. One of the boys fell, tripped by another. After three wails (more for form's sake than anything else), he noticed nobody was rushing to his help, and simply picked himself up and ran off.
The kids are also obsessed with teaching me Wolof and French. I think it's really helpful, because I could tell that my Wolof has expanded since the first day in the village. They were especially persistent in teaching me my body parts, and always in a certain order. Also, the fact that French verbs sound almost exactly like Spanish verbs.
The older kids were as much ruled by hormones as teens are in America. But they don't even bother asking people out; they just go and propose to us. Apparently all the girls have gotten marraige proposals so far. Most of them were jokes, but some people were serious. The female villagers are more sly, though. One cornered me in my room after she brought me an egg sandwich for dinner (which was amazing, I must say). We were sitting on my bed, and was asking about my life in America. Later, she asked "Do you have...wife?" I denied it. Then she asked if I had a fiance. Realizing what she was hinting at, I said yes really quickly. Later, when we were going through my yearbook, She saw a picture of me and Clare W. dancing in the play, she pointed at it and decided that that was my fiance. I didn't try to argue; it was a ready made excuse.
However, the kids were really annoying when we were trying to get work done. They were trying to be helpful, you can't deny that. But there is such a thing as being too helpful. I was in gardening, which invariably included digging lots of holes. However, kids would snatch shovels out of our hands and dig themselves, or trample other plants while they were planting new ones. The chaos grew worse when Mr. Cusin chose to award the hardworking kids with soccer shoes. He was immediately mobbed, with everyone claiming he worked the entire day. Needless to say, all the plants were trampled, too.
Besides the actual work, though, the village is great. The living conditions are way better than what I expected. My room is about the size of my room at home. It consists of a large armoir (or however you spell that), a dresser, and a mattress that doesn't look too infested by bedbugs. For someone who was expecting a natty blanket on a dirt floor of a grass hut, it wasn't too bad.
The food is also really good, for the most part. It usually consists of rice, a few carrots, sometimes onions, and a meat of some kind. There also seems to be enough of it. I was expecting only to get a tiny parcel of rice and meat, but instead, I eat about as much as I do at home. While crunching down bones gets a little tedious, the food is amazingly delicious.
However, I have had way too much mangoes. I'm pretty sure that my family's occupation is mango farmers, so mangoes make up a large part of the diet. I end up eating about five mangoes a day. For someone who doesn't like mangoes that much to begin with, now I am sick to death of them.
The village is a definate experience, I must say. Some parts are amazing, some parts are horrible, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to come out of this trip a new person. At least, someone who will never take a bottle of cold water for granted again.
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