Today is Senegal's Independence Day and I have the day off from class, so I am currently sitting in a cafe with free wi-fi where I just ate a crepe with icecream. Yeah my life is sweet. The training staff let us stay at the center last night rather than at our homestays, so I have had some time to hang out with the other trainees and decompress a little bit. I typed up another entry but apparently only saved it to my usb key and not my harddrive so I will try to summerize it the best I can.
Two weeks ago I moved into my homestay, I am living with a family in a town about 20k out of Thies. My family consists of my mother and father, an aunt, two brothers who are in their late 20s, a sister who I believe is younger than me and then two more brothers who are about and 13. There are more people in the family who live in other parts of the country as well. My brothers speak french which is nice since they are able to help translate for me, since my parents only speak Pulaar. Our house is pretty nice, it has two buildings with bedrooms in them, but most of our time is spent outside in the courtyard area. there's electricity and a faucet in the compound for water and we have a tv that we watch outside at night under the stars.

Week three in Senegal is almost over and I have found myself in a nice routine. i've begun to accept my language shortcomings and have settled into my home stay. Its hard to think of what to say since my daily life now seems almost monotonous now, so I am going to take a cope out and just explain what a typical day in training is like.

6:30: I wake up, get dressed, brush my teeth and head out to the main road to wait for the Peace Corps land cruiser to pick me and the other volunteers in my town up.

7:30 Arrive at the training center in Thies were I shower and eat my breakfast of baguettes and nescafe.

8:15 Class begins. We tend to have language classes in the morning, so this means that I stumble through pulaar with the five other people in my class while trying to wake up

10:15 Coffee break

10:45 more class, usually another language class, more stumbling attempts to speak pulaar. I now know how to conjugate to classes of verbs in the past tense but am still waiting to learn the present tense.

12:30 lunch, we eat family style around large bowels with spoons, at some point soon we are only going to be allowed to speak the language we are learning during lunch which will mean more stumbling through pulaar and lots of awkward silences.

2:15 first afternoon class, this tends to be anything from health, safety cross cultural or tech. We started our tree nurseries in my EE tech class the other day, I am supposed to keep 80% of it alive, I will let you know how that turns out.

4ish tea break

4:15 second afternoon class which tends to be another tech or cross cultural but sometimes they through another language class at us. Those days are not fun.

5:30 the land cruiser takes me home

6:30 arrive home, greet the family and attempt to study some pulaar before it gets too dark.

7:30 "Au Cour du Peche" a brazillian soap opera dubbed into french, otherwise known as my favorite part of my night

8:15 dinner time. We eat around a large bowel, some with spoons and others with their right hand. I prefer a spoon. Dinner tends to be rice and either fish or beans, its pretty tast\y. I sit next to my father who spends most of dinner telling me to eat more. I try to oblige his urgings the best I can, but dinner usually ends with me repeating mi haarii, mi haarri (I'm full) my most used Pulaar phrase.
After dinner Malick my younger brother makes attaya. Attaya is a type of tea that is served in shot glasses and consists of three rounds, with each round getting progressively sweeter. The whole process takes a while so I tend to only stay up through the second round.

9:30 bed time!