Ça fait deux jours!

That is African French colloquial for “It’s been a while!” (though I don’t know why, since it literally means “That makes 2 days”)
Let’s see…what’s new? I just had an in-service training, which did have some boring moments but was overall surprisingly interesting. I am excited to go back and use what I learned (and the new “supplies” I got…including LOTS of condoms and model reproductive organs on which to use them!)
And, of course, it is always fun to see other volunteers. I am pretty sure a secret requirement to join the Peace Corps is that you have to be a RIDICULOUS dancer. I fit right in…
We are actually just ridiculous in general. We speak in Franglais all the time (with a little local lang thrown in) and often don’t even know/remember how to say things in English or sometimes we don’t even know how to say things in French. (Like Jii Tige. It means the person who guards/runs/takes money at the public water pump. But tige really has no direct translation. It can mean manager or caretaker or person-in-charge-of or…I don’t know. I can’t explain it. You just need to know it in context) I’m sure we confuse locals all the time. We are CLEARLY foreigners (nasaras or tubabus, depending on what region we’re in) but we speak local languages and we act like we have never seen a real building or electricity or televisions or toilets or eaten anything besides rice and sauce in our lives. VERY villagois (villager) but VERY foreign at the same time. Confusing.
Because no one can understand us (most of the time…) we talk as loud as we want about pretty inappropriate things in public. Anything from how annoying the person right next to us is to bodily functions of any kind (when your bodily functions are this weird, you can’t help but share them with others who can relate) are frequent topics of conversations and on the rare occasion someone near us speaks English BigBig (here, thanks to the direct translation from local languages to French and then to the little bit of English they learn, people say they speak English “small-small”) we are rather embarrassed. Also, we all are concerned about what will happen when we are back in the U.S. and basically everyone speaks English and knows what we are saying…I’ll know my true friends when I return because they’ll be the ones who will go out in public with me.