Home Stay

Hey yall!
Last week we did the portion of training called Home Stay. During home stay you live with a family in a community similar to the community you will eventually live in. The day we were supposed to leave for home stay all our “host moms” came to NAKS to pick us up. My mom is a sweet little old. It was awkward meeting her at first since I still don’t know much of the language but we were able to make small conversation. Everyone boarded the buses and we went to a Sunday market to buy food for the week. My mom grabbed my hand when we got there and off we went in search of chicken. The meat portion of the market is just gross but I’m embracing the differences of Suriname. It’s an open air market with no refrigeration and the meat is butchered and bagged on tables right in front of you. There are flies flying around and it smells BAD! My mom picked out a huge bag of chopped up chicken, bought it and put it in her little cooler she brought with her. She grabbed my hand again and it was time to pick out veggies for the week. I told her I loved veggies so she bought me all kinds. I have since learned my lesson and there are a few veggies here that I do NOT like. Sopropo is a lumpy looking cucumber that is super bitter. It’s nasty. Unfortunately she bought a lot of that so I ate that a lot this week. My favorite veggie so far here is Kosubanti – Long Beans. It’s a SUPER long green bean that is absolutely delicious. After shopping at the market it was time to head to our Home Stay sites. I was one of the last people to get dropped off the bus. My village has one big street that all the houses are situated around. We walked down a path to our little house and I immediately got super nervous. It’s nerve-racking to live with strangers but add to that a different culture and limited language communication and you have one heck of an awkward situation. My mom showed me to my room and I put away all my stuff. My mom went to change her clothes so I sat down to talk with my little sister – Shayna. I called her Shayna because I can’t pronounce her real name. By the end of the week I could though! Anyway, my little sister is 12 years old and is really good at speaking English so that made me feel much more comfortable. Shayna decided we needed to go on a walk through the community so that’s what we did. We met up with the other trainees and their host siblings along our walk and checked out the village we would all be living in for the next week. I’ll put up pictures!
Eventually it was time to head back to the house for dinner. In their culture here you have to wash before you eat so you wash SEVERAL times a day. We got back from our walk around the village and my mom met me at the door to tell me to go wash then I would eat dinner. As I was washing in the wash house behind the house I realized that I really should have practiced bucket bathing because it was terribly frustrating. I got soap in my eyes and in my ears! Then there were bugs and geckos chilling in the wash house with me so that made me want to wash faster and just made the situation worse. I had a small bucket, a kuyaa – a bowl made from a thing that’s similar to a gourd, and the water came from a spigot in the wall. I splished and splashed and eventually I was all clean! I went to the kitchen where my mom had already fixed me my meal. I ate fish soup and cassava bread that first night. Cassava bread is a super hard flat bread that you break into pieces then dip in broth to eat. The soup was super yummy but the part of the fish she served me was the face so I didn’t eat much of it. It was looking at me the whole time! Yuck! After dinner I watched Bring It On with my little sister because she loves watching movies. So by now you can probably gather that the house I was staying at had electricity and running water. It was pretty sweet. Other trainees in different areas were not so fortunate. I had a flushing toilet out behind my house but most trainees had latrines. Once the movie was over I went to bed. All cuddled up in my bed under a mosquito net, I tried to go to sleep. I didn’t fall asleep until 3am. I had one of those nights where I couldn’t stop thinking and freaking out about whatever animal just made my pee pot scoot across the floor! I could hear things in my room but not see them. I chose not to look since nothing could be done. Side note – you pee in a pee pot at night in your room then empty it out in the morning.
The next morning started bright and early thanks to the FREAKING ROOSTERS!!!!!!!!!! Those are the most obnoxious animals ever. Luckily I needed to get up anyway. I woke up and ran to the bathroom then swept the house then washed then ate breakfast all before 7am! Yea! My host mom went to work so I spent my first full day hanging out with my host dad. He is super quiet but eventually he started talking to me more. It was cool to just sit with him on the porch and chat all day. The other trainees and I decided to go exploring in our new village so we went on a long walk through the community. It was great since we all got a chance to practice the language, mainly the greeting. You greet everyone in this culture and not just a “Hey!” when you see them. You either ask them how they woke if it’s morning or how their day is if its afternoon. Then you have a short conversation about where you are going and where you came from. Here’s a taste:
Me: I de no? (greeting for afternoon)
Villager: Ai u de. (response)
Me: Unfa I de? (how’s your day)
Villager: Mi de bunu. I seei tu? (My day is good. And you?)
Me: Me de bunu. Mi nango. (My day is good. I’m going.)

So you do this conversation a whole lot with the people you see but it’s a great way for people to get used to you being in their village.

I learned a lot this past week and I had a blast. I basically just chilled out with my family and helped out when I could. My dad played a lot of “What’s this” with me. So he would point to a chair and ask me what it was so I would respond with the right word in Saramaccan. We ran out of stuff to talk about so that’s when he would just start asking me what everything was. My mom showed me how to cook chicken, sopropo (yuck), lalu (okra), kosubanti, bamie (noodles), and rice. She seemed to have a fun time laughing at me and the way I acted. I got really excited when I understood what she was saying and she thought it was hilarious. My sister tried to braid my hair multiple times but my hair just won’t braid. She said it was too slippery. For fun we would walk down to the river to swim, I wouldn’t swim because my parents told me not to but the kids would. The river was gorgeous! It was the first time we really saw the river we kept hearing about. While everyone was swimming I washed my clothes in the river. A little girl watched me wash my clothes and she definitely had a face on her that said she disapproved of the way I was washing them.

Some of the other highlights from the week include seeing a monkey jump from one tree to the next, seeing a HUGE iguana chilling at the top of a tree, seeing an Anaconda eat a bird, realizing I know more of the language than I thought, quietly washing dishes with my mom, my mom bringing me popsicles, watching movies with my little sister (piki sisa), talking with little old ladies in the village, going grocery shopping with my mom in the city, figuring out how to pee in a chamber pot, getting the hang of bucket bathing, going to the Suriname River dam, having conversations with women that are not wearing anything to cover their boobs (in the interior women hardly cover their chest so old saggy boobs are everywhere!), learning more about sewing from my host mom, watching her sew a traditional koosu (sarong type skirt that women wear), washing with HOT water (my mom brought me hot water and it was amazing! It was the first hot water I’ve had in over a month!), I sprained my ankle after falling – not exactly a highlight but definitely something I’ll remember, and comparing home stay stories with other trainees.

The day we left Home Stay we had to have more safety training so it was time for life vest training! All 23 of us hopped on a long boat and went out the middle of the river and jumped into the water. We had to prove that we could swim with a life vest on in the event that a boat should flip. It was a super hard swim thanks to the stinking life vest and a super strong current in the middle of the river. We all did it though! Yea! Funny thing was that the part of the river we were swimming in was the same spot where I saw the Anaconda the day before.  But luckily we didn’t see any snakes or piranhas while swimming. After swimming we drove back to NAKS in Lelydorp. I miss my little family and I’m looking forward to going back there in a few weeks. We are at NAKS for two days then we head out to visit a current volunteer’s site then we go visit our future site! I find out where my site will be in 2 days!!!!! I can’t wait!