Host Family

My host family here is great. My host mom is 70 and she is a widow. She has 10 sons and 5 daughters, which apparently is a medium sized family here. Some of them live in the states and Canada, and one of them went to school in Pittsburg (shout out to Max if you’re reading this). They are all my age or older. I think about 4 or 5 of the sons live in the house now, and 5 or 6 of the daughters. Two of them have 3 kids each, the youngest of which is 2 and the oldest is probably 9 or 10. The kids are easy to get along with. I gave them a deck of cards and they spent hours playing with them, though I had trouble teaching them go fish. For the oldest one everything is “too” something. My dogs are too cute, my clothes are too pretty, and even my “smartphone” is too beautiful. They also have an obsession with my floss and my electric toothbrush.

My older siblings were hard to get to know at first, but now I’m interacting with them pretty well. I walked with one of my sisters, Yacine, to the beach the other day and was pretty pleased with my French; I managed to hold a conversation for about 20 minutes straight. Both of us share an interest in motorcycles but parents who think they are too dangerous.

My other siblings are really nice too. One of them helped me with my Wolof homework (the native Senegalese language that I am learning). We have a deal that I will teach him English if he teaches me Wolof. Wolof is not too difficult grammatically but the pronunciation is really hard. Also instead of conjugating verbs they conjugate pronouns, which will take some getting used to. Right now we’ve only learned “survival Wolof” which teaches us how to hold basic conversations with people, how to bargain with taxi drivers, and how to say things like “I’m tired” or “I’m hungry” I haven’t had to use it much because almost everyone I’ve talked to so far speaks French, but I’m sure it will come in handy.

One of my siblings will ask me if I’m cold every time I see her. For some reason if I am not wearing socks she is especially concerned; even if I’m wearing a tank top she’ll point to my feet and ask if I’m cold. My host mom is also quite concerned with my body temperature. She always says things like “I closed your windows because it’s very cold outside” or “you have a fan but you don’t need that in the winter” even though temperature averages about 70 degrees.