Language Immersion :)

10 Decembre 2010
Happy Winter everyone! I hope that ya'll are doing well and getting into the holiday spirit. Christmas is approaching so quickly ahh where did this 2010 year go? For the past two weeks, I have been outside of Maradi, staying in the bush village of Ouban Djada. Myself, five other trainees and two language teachers have been staying there for Language Immersion. The goal of immersion was to expose us to Hausa as many hours of the day as humanly possible. Every day except for Sunday consisted of the following schedule: class in the morning from 8:00-12:30 (with a 30-minute breaky break in the middle) and activities in the afternoon. We were each given a Language Immersion Booklet with specific activities that we had to do in the village. Some of these afternoon activities included: visiting the local store (shago) and finding the names of prices of 10 different goods, talking to local gardeners about what crops they are planting and how the winter (sanyi) season is going, visiting the local health center (gidan likita) and asking questions about their services provided, going to the school and asking the director about the classes and students, and the activities went on and on. The only activity we weren't able to do was visiting the market (kasuwa), because Ouban Djada is such a small village that it doesn't have a market. It gets dark around 6:30 every evening so our nightly fun after dinner consisted of reading (thankfully we were allowed to read novels in English), listening to music and going to sleep early.
The gals in the group (four of us) stayed in the magori's (town mayor) concession in a home that a past Peace Corps volunteer stayed. It is clear that no volunteers or anyone else has lived in the home since then. Lots of cockroaches in the latrine. Lots of wildlife in the house: spiders, frogs and a mouse family. The four boys stay down the street in the tailor's concession. Our group was broken up into two classes, so in the mornings, Yaa and I had class in the tailor's concession while the others were here in the magori's concession. Language has been getting better day by day, it is still difficult for me to decipher when people speak quickly to me in Hausa. But I'm working on those auditory skills.
Although class has been long and the activities at times daunting and frustrating due to the language barrier, there have been quite a few personal highlights over the past two weeks. These are:
-Morning running. The sun (rana) rises around 7:00, but I get up around 6:30 and run out of the village. There are no paved areas in this town, just sand, so I run down the sand road outside of the magori's house. Fields surround the village on all sides but the sand path continues through the fields until the next village I'm assuming. That could be miles and miles away though. It is so beautiful to run in the morning, though, especially as the sun is rising. Over Ouban Djada in the morning, the sun just looks like a large red balloon floating above the land (kasa). No one else is on the sand roadway andit is still cool at this time of day. I have found that running puts me in a great mood for the rest of the day. I hope that whatever village I go to on January first will have a nice sand path for me to run.
-Watermelon=kankana and guess what? It's watermelon season right now in Niger! I have never tasted a better fruit. We were doing an afternoon activity in the garden (garka) and one of the gardeners picked up a watermelon, split it right there, and shared it with us. I'm pretty sure that was as close to heaven as I've ever come. The taste is so sweet and so natural. I kept some of the seeds so that I can plant watermelon at my site. I bought another watermelon in the village and people have been giving them to us, so for the last few days we have had watermelon with dinner.
-Getting water from the well. Two days ago, Yaa, Alison Gr and I were walking around town and we came upon one of the two wells. There are a few "pumpo" stations where people pay to get their water, but at the well, the women haul water up from gosh-knows how many feet down. They haul the water up in what looks like a bag of rubber attached to a rope. They throw the rubber container over the side and somehow move the bag around for it to collect water. Then they haul it on up. Sooooo we're walking past the well and admiring these women (it's always women, I feel like they do all the work all the time) and how strong they are, and a guy walking by asks if we can pull water. I'm like "I can get water" in Hausa, he's like "no you can't". Welllll I showed him and I pulled water all the way up the well. It was hard but I did it :) and now when I walk down the street random people yell out to me, calling me the girl who pulled the water up from the well.
People in this village are really nice and I can see why as a volunteer I definetly want to be in a bush village. Even after two weeks, people have become familar and we know many names of people in town. The magori told us that 2,500 people live in this village. I'm not sure how accurate that number is, it's most likely a few more, but I think that this is the ideal size for my post. It's a small enough village that I could become friends with many people and feel like I'm having an impact on their lives, but not so small that an outsider (like myself) coming in would cause a change in the village dynamic.
Now, we are headed back to Hamdy hamdy for a few more weeks of culture, language and health-training lessons. We will have another language exam when we get back to see how much our language improved during immersion (I still have studying to do before then, let's hope I moved up on the scale). Next Friday we have a big day: site announcement. We will all go to Niamey and find out where our site will be for the next two years. I anticipate it will be an emotional time. I think one of our 41 volunteers is coming back to Ouban Djada :) That's all for now, love ya and leave ya, Ali

Hausa vocabulary from this blog for Berlin Elementary School kiddos:
store - shago
winter - sanyi (also means cold)
health center - gidan likita (home of the doctor)
kasuwa - market
magori - mayor
rana - sun
kasa - land
watermelon - kankana
garka - garden

kankana

sunrise in ouban djada

zara son kankana: alison loves watermelon

sand street in ouban djada